The Beginning: 1995
Two figures in military fatigues slipped into the alleyway, the San Francisco fog obscuring their movement as they made their way toward their target in the dark. The taller of the two men leaped atop a dumpster and hoisted himself onto the fire escape with practiced ease. Within minutes, his silhouette disappeared through a window on the second floor, which was his partner’s cue to follow.
The shorter man pulled a balaclava over his face before ascending, cursing under his breath until he reached the second-floor platform and made his way inside the apartment.
In the darkness, he could just make out the tall man’s silhouette at the end of the hall, motioning him forward. They stood together, motionless, as they listened for breathing from the bedrooms.
The two men crept forward into the master bedroom. The tall man slipped a roll of duct tape from the pocket of his fatigues and moved around to the far side of the bed. He paused briefly to study the sleeping woman and synchronize his actions with his partner. They exchanged looks, and then the tall man slapped his hand over the woman’s mouth.
The shorter man sprang onto the bed and tightened the quilt around her body, restricting her movement within a tight cocoon. A muffled scream and a moment of violent thrashing ensued before the tall man could secure the duct tape over her mouth, free her from the quilt, and tape her wrists and ankles.
The tall man hoisted the woman into a standing position, his breath pounding against her face. He hesitated to use brute force as he grabbed her slender frame, but when she wrenched sideways to escape his grip, his arms tightened around her torso, and he heard a cracking sound. He winced as she recoiled in pain, but this was no time to indulge in sympathy. A flush of rage washed over him at having been dragged into this job—he was a technical guy, used to mental wrangling, not some low-level street thug.
The shorter man stepped over to the walk-in closet and opened the door. Unexpectedly, a flood of light poured over the three of them, and the tall man found himself staring directly into his victim’s eyes. For a timeless instant, they stared at each other until he recovered his wits; then he spun her around and shoved her into the closet. She hit the wall with a thud before slumping backward into a helpless heap on the floor. The realization shot through his mind: she’d gotten a good, long look at his face.
“I told you to wear the goddamned hood, Jack!” the shorter man hissed.
Jack Barnett stared back at him in the half-light without responding.
The shorter man spat the order, “Go on. I’ll take care of this. Get over to the other room!”
Jack Barnett cursed under his breath as he stepped out of the bedroom. In the shadows of the hallway, he leaned back against the wall, his brow furrowed. He took several deep breaths as he waited for his body to stop trembling, then wiped the sweat from his eyes with a gloved hand. Being recognized was an unacceptable failure, even minutes before a kill; if something went wrong at the last moment, it risked exposure. He scowled at the bitter knowledge that his partner would never let him forget it.
The woman’s frightened groans pierced the darkness, shocking Jack into action. He headed toward the second bedroom and quietly opened the door. He had a job to do, and he wanted no part of what he feared his partner, Colin, might do in the other room—before or after the kill.
Colin Peterson looked down at the woman in the closet, her auburn hair wet from a flood of tears, her terrified green eyes staring up at him, pleading, asking him why. The primal smell of fear rose like perfume from every pore in her body. He took a moment to calm his adrenaline-fueled thoughts and focus.
He remained motionless above her, his icy blue eyes burning into hers through the eyeholes in his balaclava. Centered now, in total control, he watched and waited like a Zen master. A long moment stretched between them as she stared up at him, wide-eyed and motionless, and then he saw it—the understanding. She had stopped struggling and knew she was going to die; she had surrendered to her fate as if death had already come and only her corpse remained.
Colin closed his eyes and imagined the moment after death bleeding backwards through time and pouring over the living, an ethereal backwash from the afterlife offered as foreplay to their ultimate union of souls. They would traverse the cusp of life and death together, and after he drove her soul from her flesh, it would live on inside of him forever.
As he stared down at her pale face, a wave of déjà vu passed over him. There was something about that face, those eyes. What was it? Slowly, the memory rose from the deepest recesses of his mind. Eliza—the woman looked so much like his own Eliza!
He flashed back to the moment of Eliza’s death, those last seconds after the bullet ripped through her neck. Her piercing green eyes looked up at him, asking him why, before shifting up into the Montana Big Sky as if to ask God instead. His mind reeled as fleeting images flooded his brain, dredged up from a past that surfaced in sweat-drenched dreams he tried to keep at bay with frequent shots of Jack Daniel’s. His mind’s eye flashed to the crimson stream of blood pouring from Eliza’s body. He saw the split-second silhouette of a tall man standing in the barn doorway, holding a rifle, where the nightmare always ended.
Colin reached up angrily and smashed the overhead light so he couldn’t see that face in the dark—Eliza’s face. Then suddenly, as he stood alone with his prey, a wave of heat began flowing through his body like an erotic tsunami, and his fantasy of a perfect kill shrank into a demoralizing moment of shame. He paused to shake it off and regain control before looking back down at the motionless woman and proceeding with his mission. But when he pulled out his gun and lifted it to take aim, he realized he hadn’t attached the silencer. He spewed a string of profanities, his confidence shattered with this second, inexcusable failure…but at least Jack Barnett didn’t witness it.
Colin pressed the cold barrel against the woman’s temple and stood there, his hands now shaking, but even as he held his breath with his finger on the trigger, he couldn’t pull it. A gunshot was not part of the plan, and he had no intention of letting Jack find out about such a major error. What was he to do with this woman now that his virility had left him—a powerless Samson, fallen to this unexpected Delilah?
The raspy whisper of Jack Barnett calling from the other room startled him. He reacted instinctively, turning the gun around in his hand and bringing the butt down hard against her skull. He heard the crack of bone as she slumped, and he inhaled the rusty stench of blood. His heart pounding madly, he took a moment to justify the fact that he’d completed his contract despite whatever else had just happened. As he backed out of the closet, he closed the door behind him.
In the other bedroom, Jack Barnett was fulfilling his role in the pair’s covert mission: to honor a comrade’s deathbed request to retrieve his five-year-old twin daughters from his estranged wife and bring them home—with the added necessity of taking out the children’s mother in the process. It was a mission handed down from high up in the chain of command, which neither man dared to question or refuse.
Colin entered the hallway just as Jack emerged with a loaded quilt over his shoulders. Confused cries rose from within a pink cocoon, hanks of blond hair glowed from tangled bedding, and four little feet dangled from Jack’s arms in the sepia darkness.
Silently, the two men hoisted their cargo out the window and vanished into the night.
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