Matthias lifted his hand and held it above her hair, which had been left down and been loosely curled. Passing his palm downward, as if he were stroking the silky lengths, he then dropped his arm…and disappeared into the store.

XOps wasn’t going to come after Mels: Part of what he’d built into the organization was a self-destruct protocol. If there was ever an information data dump to the press, everyone was going to scatter, disavow knowledge, and disappear into the populace of whatever country they wanted to settle in.

After all, killers who had their murders come to light were not incented to confess and take their sentencings like good little children. If they stuck together, stood strong, or—and this was the most important piece—retaliated for exposure, they risked being put away for life, or executed for capital crimes against humanity.

Besides, if they were of a mind to lash out at having had their lifestyle taken away, they’d target the whistle-blower, not the reporter.

Matthias’s gut told him it was going to be okay—and he’d never been wrong when he was this certain. Ever.

He did not leave the store.

Calling on his years of training and experience, he made himself look like he was just another schlub with a baseball cap pulled down low, a hoodie up to his neck, and a book in front of his face.

In fact, he was a professional assassin who left no footprints, no trace, no mark of his ever having been in the store.

He kept his eye on Mels.

Especially as she palmed that SanDisk.

Standing in the Military section, Mels grabbed the flashdrive, the hard plastic casing cutting into her palm. She hated the sound of his voice, and more than that, she utterly despised the way her body seemed to recognize him, even as her mind was all about the epithets.

“Screw you, Matthias. You can take this and—”

She wheeled around, half a mind to throw the thing in his face.

He was gone.

Jogging around the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, she looked down the aisle in front of her…the stacks to the left and the right…the people milling through the store.

“Goddamn you…”

Mels marched all over, searching the Fiction section; then the lower level by the magazines, and even further on to the checkout area. Matthias was nowhere to be seen, no matter where she went or what she looked at. Hell, for all she knew, he’d taken off through a staff-only door.

Hitting the exit, she stepped out into the pale sunlight and shielded her eyes, measuring the crowds.

When it came to you, and being with you, I always told the truth—that was real, the only real I’ve ever had.

Okay, right, the healthy thing to do was throw his little parting gift in the trash and walk away from the drama to focus on something that actually mattered—like what she was going to do with the rest of her life or wrapping up that article on the dead women.

For all she knew, he’d just downloaded a bunch of eighties ballads off iTunes.

Left with a whole lot of nothing doing at the mall, Mels strode back to the CCJ offices, pushed her way inside the newsroom, and stopped as the chaos enveloped her. So familiar, the sounds of phones ringing and voices muttering and feet hitting the concrete floor as people paced by their desks or went back and forth to the kitchen for more coffee.

She was going to miss this place…

Holy crap—she was actually going to leave.

The irrevocable decision settled onto her shoulders not as a weighty burden, but more like a grounding that felt right. And God, she hung on to the positive sensation because, at the moment, she really needed something that didn’t feel like an epic failure.

That run-in with Matthias had taken the wind out of her sure as if she’d been knocked in the chest.

Walking over to her desk, she sat in her chair and took a stab at writing her resignation letter. The wording came out stiff and formal, but like there was another option? After massaging the text around for a while, and redoing the beginning, she saved the thing without printing it out. There was stuff yet to wrap up here, and Dick was just the kind of prick to take her two weeks’ notice and shove it down her throat by telling her to leave right away.

Besides, it was probably better to know where she was going first. In this economy, no one just walked out of a job.

Easing back in her chair, she stared at her computer screen again.

Hard to say how long it was before she took the SanDisk out of her pocket. Could have been ten minutes. Fifty. An hour and a half.

Rolling it around in her palm, she eventually eased down on the white slide, and extended the silver metal plug-in.

Leaning forward, she went to put it into the USB port…and stopped just short of pushing it home.

Getting up, she put her purse on her shoulder and went across the aisle to Tony’s partition. “I’m taking off for the day—just on follow-up. If anyone’s looking for me, tell them to hit my cell?”

“You got it,” he said as his own desk phone rang. “Tony DiSanto—hey, yeah, I was waiting to hear back from you….”

As he waved at her and fell into his conversation, she remembered she still didn’t have a car.

Outside, it took some time to get a cab, and of course, four in the afternoon was close enough to rush hour so that her taxi got stuck in the congestion on the Northway. When she finally got home, her mom was out, and as she checked the calendar on the wall and found that it was bingo night, she wondered why she hadn’t noticed all the entries in the little boxes before. Bridge, Pilates, yoga, volunteering at the church, manning the help desk at St. Francis in the pediatrics department, lunches and dinners with the girls…

Glancing around the kitchen, at least she knew that after she left, her mother wasn’t going to be alone.

Mels grabbed a raspberry Snapple out of the fridge and went upstairs, the wooden steps creaking in the same way they always had. Up in her room, she closed the door and turned to her closet.

For some reason, she felt like she should get out her mismatched suitcases and start packing.

But instead of starting that job way prematurely, she looked over at her desk. Her old laptop was sitting on the same stretch of painted wood she’d done her homework on when she’d been in middle school and high school.

Going over, she sat down in the spindly chair and took out the SanDisk.

Before she plugged it in, she reached around the back of the laptop and disengaged the modem wire. Then she logged on and disabled Wi-Fi.

“I’ve got to be out of my mind.”

She shoved the flashdrive in and the AutoPlay pop-up appeared in the center of the screen. Out of the options for Removable Disk (E:) she chose “Open folder to view files.”

“What the…hell?”

The file directory was so big, she had to scroll down. Word documents. PDFs. Excel spreadsheets. The titles were alphanumeric codes that were clearly part of an organizational system, but they made no sense to her.

Picking one at random, she double-clicked, and frowned, pivoting into the screen.

The data appeared to be…dossiers of men, with their pictures, names, dates of birth, height, weight, eye and hair color, medical details, training certifications, and assignments—God, the assignments. Arranged by date, and with notes about countries and targets…and exterminations.

“Oh, my God…”

Shifting back to the directory, she opened another file, which seemed to detail sums of money, huge sums of money…and another, coded one about contacts in Washington, D.C., and the “favors” these individuals had asked…and still more about recruitment and training…

You want the story of a lifetime? You got it.

As the daylight dimmed and night came over Caldwell, she sat at her childhood desk and read everything.

Eventually, she returned to the dossiers, and this time, she took it slowly.

In a way, the men were all the same, their faces and ethnicities blending into one archetype of aggression and effectiveness. And if these assignments listed were true, she’d read about the deaths, some of which had been defined to the international public as “natural causes” or “accidents” or “counter-insurgent attacks.” Other targets she thought were still alive…but perhaps that was just a case of the worldwide news machine not yet catching up with reality?

Was it possible this was legit?

Sitting back, she took a drink from her now room-temperature Snapple, and tried on for size the concept that maybe, just maybe, this was real.

Okay, assuming it was, Matthias’s paranoia didn’t seem unjustified…and it would also explain why he’d been on the run the night she’d hit him with her car. Also might explain why the identity he’d had was someone else’s—and the reason that even with his amnesia, he’d had sensed that the house at the address on his driver’s license hadn’t been his own.

And maybe this was what was behind him killing that man down in the basement of the Marriott. If Matthias had been part of this organization—and this level of access seemed to suggest he most certainly was—then it made sense if he were on his way out of it that someone would be sent to kill him.

And he’d have to defend himself…

Going through the dossiers a third time, she noted that each one had a red, green, or orange check by the name—

Jim Heron was among the men. Which somehow wasn’t a surprise.

And he had an orange marking. Which, assuming the traffic-light connection was correct, meant he wasn’t alive, but he wasn’t dead either.

Interesting.

Continuing on through the listings, she gasped. About seven men down, she found a red-marked name with the notation, Caldwell, New York, RECLAIMED and the date of the night before last.

It was the dead guy. From the Marriott.

Who Matthias had shot.

And look…here was another. An orange mark by the name, last contact in Caldwell, New York, twenty-four hours ago.

What did she want to bet that he was a second man sent for Matthias?

Mels took another hit of the Snapple and grimaced at the sickly sweet taste. As her heart started to beat hard, she knew it wasn’t from the caffeine.

What if it had been real, she thought again. All of it…

Going back to the directory, she carefully reviewed the other files again and started to piece together the structure of the organization, including its recruiting strategy and the way its funds flow worked. There was nothing about where its headquarters were, or what kind of administrative support they had, or exactly how its “clients” knew to contact them.

Was this organization affiliated with the government? Was it private sector?

She grabbed a pen and scribbled some notes on a pad.

Given the identities of the targets that had been effectively eliminated, she was struck with a chilling sense that this shadow organization—which had no logo, no title even, on any of the documents—went very high up. Those who had been taken out were largely political figures overseas, suggesting an international agenda far too broad-based to be generated by a private citizen, a common-interest group, or even a large, multi-national corporation.

This was the business of a whole nation.

And with her knowledge of current events over the last three years, it was pretty clear that the exterminations forwarded America’s position across the globe.

Tapping her pen on the desk, she thought of other special ops groups, like the Navy SEALs, for example—or the Rangers. Those men were heroes, legitimate soldiers who functioned within rules of engagement.

This network of killers was completely outside of that.

The final spreadsheet was probably the most chilling one: a list of all the missions over the previous decade—and the dead, including a column for collateral damage.

Not a lot of that. Not much at all. And no women or children—at least, not that were listed.

Considering how this operation worked, she had a feeling the latter was not the result of any moral objection, but rather out of a directive to stay under the radar.

And again, for the men who had been killed…she knew ninety percent of the names, and they were evil…pure evil, the kind who slaughtered their own citizens or headed up brutal regimes or set in motion events of horrific proportions.

She imagined that the few she didn’t recognize were of the same ilk.

This group of exterminators had done good work in a bad way, she supposed: Hard to argue that their efforts weren’t justified, given the résumés of the targets.

It was like her father’s ethos on a global scale…

Mels returned once more to the dossiers.

Matthias was nowhere to be found in the pictures or the names.

But she had a chilling suspicion as to the why.

He was the basis of it all, the driver. Wasn’t he.

When it came to you, and being with you, I always told the truth—that was real, the only real I’ve ever had.