Avenger

Epilogue The loyalty

Kevin McBride walked down the hall and turned into the executive washroom. He felt drained. Days of travelling, worrying, not sleeping, had left him exhausted.

He stared at his tired face in the mirror above the hand basins and wondered at Devereaux's last Delphic remark. Would Project Peregrine have worked? Would the Saudi master terrorist have fallen for it? Would his acolytes have showed up in Peshawar in ten days? Would they have made the vital phone call for the listening NSA to intercept?

Too late now. Zilic would never travel again, save to a U. S. courtroom and thence to a maximum security jail. What was done was done.

He dunked his face a dozen times and stared at the man in the mirror. Fifty-six, going on fifty-seven. A thirty-year man, due to take his pension at the end of December.

In the spring, he and Molly would do what he had long promised. Their son and daughter were through college and making their own careers. He wanted his daughter and her husband to make him a grandchild whom he could spoil rotten.

While waiting, they would buy the big motor home he had promised Molly and go see the Rockies. He knew he had a rendezvous with some serious cutthroat trout up in Montana.

A much younger agent, a newly joined GS 12, came out of a cubicle and began to wash his hands two basins down. One of the team. They nodded and smiled. McBride took paper towels and dabbed his face dry.

"Kevin," said the youngster.

"Yep."

"Mind if I ask you a question?"

"Ask away."

"It's kind of personal."

"Then maybe I won't answer it."

"The tattoo on your left arm. The grinning rat with his pants down. What does it mean?"

McBride was still looking in the mirror, but he seemed to see two young GIs, rat-assed on beer and wine, laughing in the warm Saigon night, and a white Petromax lamp hissing, and a Chinese tattooist at work. Two young Americans who would part company but be bound by a bond that nothing could ever break. And he saw a slim file a few weeks earlier, which mentioned a tattoo of a grinning rat on the left forearm. And he heard the order to find the man and have him killed.

He slipped his watch back on his wrist and flipped his sleeve back down. He checked the day-date window. September 10, 2001.

"It's quite a story, son," said the Badger, "and it all happened long ago and far away."