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Scenario:
You meet a couple Army-dropout twin brothers from Tennessee at a bar they’re too young to be in. You get to talking over a few pints, and they express their frustrated desire for adventure and danger. You see something in them. Strength, potential, brains. Especially the quiet twin. He’s a bloody genius. Calculating as fuck for his young age. The talker is sharp, creative, and just reckless enough. They wanna get out and see the world. And you’re drunk. You take them under your wing, and you put them through the same selection process that once made you a Special Forces operator. Months later, you figure it’s time to give the boys a reward, so you head toward your cabin in the Appalachians for a relaxing weekend with no one around for miles. No TV, no news, a break from the headlines about whether the president has or has not had sexual relations with that woman. It’s a perfect day. Sky’s blue, summer’s almost here, roadside flowers are in bloom, the mountains surround you like majestic guardians, and you roll down your window to hear the forest sounds, to hear the gravel crunch under the tires of your truck. But then you see something just off the side of the road. Smoke?
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I slowed to a stop and furrowed my brow. “Wait here, boys.” I got out of the truck and glanced around me. If someone had thrown a cigarette out here…
As I got closer, it looked like a small flare or something that just puffed out white smoke.
I squatted down in front of it. No smell. There was a note.
Where there’s smoke, Emerson George Payne…
I shot straight up and felt the tiny hairs rise on my arms and neck. Birds chirping, insects buzzing—I didn’t hear any branches breaking or the underbrush rustling. Was someone watching? If they were, they’d been perched someplace for a while. Possibly.
Determining that the smoke wasn’t gonna cause a fire, I made my way back to the truck and tore up the dirt road. Get out of whoever’s line of sight. It had to be a prank, right? I knew too many guys who could be behind something like this, and at least half a dozen of them had been to my cabin.
“Somethin’ wrong?” Reese asked from the backseat.
“I’m ninety percent sure it’s not.” I drove around the next bend, where the climb began.
“And the other ten?” he pressed.
“Do you need your brother to extrapolate for you, Reese?”
He sucked his teeth and shut his mouth.
Kids.
Sometimes they acted much older than their twenty years.
Not always.
A flash of neon orange caught my eye, and I slowed down once more. Okay, something was up. Who knew I was coming here this weekend? My sister, my brother. And Robin, but she didn’t know the location.
“Is that a note on the tree?” Reese wondered.
“I’m about to find out. Stay here.” I jumped out of the truck, keeping an eye on my surroundings, and made quick work of crossing the road and trailing down into the ditch where I could reach the piece of paper. Where was the nearest copy place? This was printed.
Emerson George Payne. Father, American diplomat. Mother, schoolteacher from London. Eldest brother passed away in 1985, older sister sister lives in Pittsburgh, younger brother enlisted four years after you.
I clenched my jaw and crumpled the note in my hand. Make that seventy-five percent sure nothing was wrong.
Not many had that much information on me—for a fucking reason. Before I’d joined the Army, I’d taken my mum’s surname to distance myself from my old man’s history, part of which was public record. At that point, I’d already had my sights set on the SAS. I’d wanted a new identity.
Returning to the truck once more, I told the boys we were on foot from here on out. Just to err on the safe side. If someone was feeding me information about myself, they wanted my attention. It was highly unlikely I’d be taken out from the road, in other words, but if we had someone waiting for us at the cabin, I didn’t want them to see us coming.
“Leave your bags for now and listen to me carefully.”
While the boys disappeared into the forested mountainside, I stayed on the left side of the dirt road, some ten feet into the woods, where I could still see in case there were additional messages.
I found the second one a couple minutes later.
Emerson George Payne. 6’5”, 220 lbs, 40 years old, brown hair, blue eyes. Noticeable markings: 4-inch scar on your neck after an encounter with a broken bottle, poorly healed gunshot wound on left-side ribcage. Quick question. How do you identify an SAS operator? By the tattoos he doesn’t have and the intel he doesn’t share.
Who was this motherfucker?
