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Romano had shaken his head when I flipped the bills to the boy and joked. “You always paying it forward, man. Makes me look bad in comparison.”
I had shrugged. The way I saw it, karma had cashed in early.
I’d been judged and found lacking.
Now when I killed, a darkness pulsed inside me—a seething anger that felt so old, it was hard to remember it not being inside me.
I didn’t give charity to save me; I did it to keep me human.
I should have told the kid to move.
“Anything on the target?” I glanced at Romano crouching low to scan his tablet.
“Nothing. FBI are on the move though. If they get here, we’ll have to get out of Dodge.”
“I know,” I murmured. This team wasn’t supposed to exist.
Except times were-a-changing. Terrorism was changing.
Targets were changing.
We were fighting a new war.
The idea behind this covert unit was to be able to act around the bureaucracy that held back the other branches. Sometimes the best option was pure and simple assassination, and we could do that. There were always going to be problems with this—any info we gathered couldn’t easily be passed on directly to the FBI, or the ATF, or the NSA. Very few people knew the team existed, even fewer knew our names.
Plausible deniability.
Insurance for the government if anything went wrong.
When we’d signed on, we knew this, knew we signed away our right to any legal cover the CIA might normally provide. If we performed assassinations or other criminal acts, we had no legal standing on home soil.
Such a shit storm this could be. No one would excuse us, not even if we took out the terrorists. I didn’t fancy jail time.
In the distance, the unmistakable sound of a chopper beat down on us—FBI surveillance most likely, dressed up to look like traffic patrol.
Being watched took the option of using any drone. Not that a drone was the first choice with a bomb, too risky that the mark would see us coming.
“We’ll have to leave it to the cavalry.”
“Yeah. Guess so.” I adjusted the holster under my jacket, reassured by the familiar hard butt of my Taurus, but I didn’t otherwise move...my gut was still in the game.
To the left, a school bus turned the corner into the street. There was no stop here, besides it was already fully loaded with kids, I could see their faces.
And I knew, just knew.
“It’s him! Twenty yards right. Backpack.” Romano began to rise to his feet. “Long-sleeved brown shirt. Jeans. He’s shaved. No beard. Blue cap.” He threw the tablet in his backpack.
“Gloves?”
“Yeah. Gloves.” Romano joined me as I headed for the door. Without a further exchange of words, both of us had decided we were acting. We knew each other well, and what gloves meant.
Shooting this man was iffy. He could still blow the thing.Ifthere was a bomb.
We didn’t know.
The only certainty was when the terror was done.
My job was to weigh odds.
