Cause for Alarm

6

Yosemite National Park , California , January 1999

John sat on an outcropping of rock, one hundred feet above the Merced River in Yosemite National Park. He breathed in the cold, crisp mountain air, letting it fill his lungs and rejuvenate his soul.

The beauty of this place called to him. The raw, undeniable power of it, of the river and the sequoias, the towering pines and flat blue sky. They hummed with life. They had been created by a force so much more powerful than anything man could hope to imitate.

John bent and scooped up a handful of rocks. They warmed in his hand, their smooth, hard surfaces a subtle symphony of color. Mankind preferred to destroy. Oh, the human animal made great noises about the things he created, but the fact was, human history had been built on war, on destruction and killing. Those were the things man had perfected over the course of civilization.

Nuclear power? He shook his head. What a joke. There was more power in these rocks than in the country's entire arsenal of weapons. When mankind succeeded in blowing himself into oblivion, the wilderness would still be here. In some form, it would live on.

John brought his binoculars to his eyes, training them on the lone figure fly-fishing at the river's edge. He watched as the man backhauled and fronthauled, watched as the fishing line floated and danced on the air, then spun far out into the river, the movement sheer poetry.

John smiled to himself. Clark Russell. Former comrade-in-arms. He had proved a hard man to get alone. But Russell, like all men, had a weakness. A place where he forgot safety to feed his desires. For some it was women, others drink or gambling. For Russell, it was fly-fishing.

John had never understood some men's fascination with fishing. What satisfaction was there to be had from hooking creatures by their mouths and pulling them from the water? He understood the enjoyment of quiet and solitude, of the communion with nature, even the satisfaction one might get from the repetitive motion of casting. But the other seemed unnecessarily cruel to him. Barbaric and pointless. He understand sport hunting no better.

He was a hunter, true. But of humans. This made sense. It completed the circle, kept order in the universe. Animals lived by instinct, not intent. They killed in order to survive. But humans destroyed for fun. They killed for pleasure. Or progress. Or out of arrogance.

Of all the living creatures on earth, only humans possessed an unending capacity for evil, for inflicting physical and spiritual pain. Theologians called that capacity sin; John called it a darkness of the soul.

The wind eased through the sequoias and lodgepole pines; they swayed, their trunks groaning. John closed his eyes, taking in the sounds, the music they created. He believed in the soul, though not in the afterlife. He believed in the power of creation, though not in God, in the presence of evil, though not in the devil.

He reopened his eyes. Clark had caught a fish. It struggled desperately against its captor, arcing out of the water, the sun catching on its silvery scales, creating a small but brilliant flash of light.

Perfect and brilliant light. Like his Julianna's.

John fisted his fingers. Julianna's soul had held no darkness. She had been clean and without sin, emanating a true white light. With his mind's eyes, he saw her as he had that first time. Standing beside her mother, gaze cast downward, her long curls pulled away from her face with barrettes shaped like teddy bears, the same bears embroidered on the smocking of her jumper. Then she had lifted her gaze and smiled at him, purity and innocence radiating from her like the sun.

Her purity had called to him. Her innocence had fed his soul. Both had touched a place deep inside him, one that had all but shriveled and died. One that had stopped responding to all but the majesty of nature.

She had been an angel sent to earth and to him.

He had loved her, and only her, from that first moment.

He had tried to protect her from the corrosive influence of others, from the ugliness of a world gone mad, an ugliness that would spoil her as surely as the worm spoils the fruit.

So she would know what he never had, he had cherished her, had nurtured her bright inner flame.

Once upon a time, he, too, had had the special light. But his had not been nurtured. It had been smothered, the darkness cultivated. He hadn't wanted that for his Julianna.

But her mother had seen fit to darken that soul. She had seen fit to frighten Julianna away, to introduce her to things she had been unaware of. Rage burgeoned inside him, icy cold and awesome.

Her mother and Clark Russell. Destroyers.

John lifted the binoculars once more. He scanned the river's edge in both directions, then the rocks and forest above, making certain he and Clark were alone.

It wasn't too late for Julianna. He knew it wasn't. He had to find her.

But first, Clark Russell would pay for his crime.

John stood and started down to the river. He picked his way effortlessly and nearly soundlessly over the rocks and through the dense underbrush. His breathing elevated, but only slightly; the oxygen fed and readied him, as did the adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream.

Killing wasn't personal. It shouldn't be. Get in, do the job as quickly, as impersonally as possible, and slip away. That was the way he had been trained; his ability to do just that had made him one of the Agency's most efficient specialists; it had earned him the code name Ice.

But this was different. John narrowed his eyes, closing the distance between himself and the other man, hatred burning in the pit of his gut. Clark had crossed the line; he had made this personal. A gunshot to the back of the head wasn't good enough; neither was the garrote or the blade.

No, John wanted him to know what was happening, who was killing him. And why. He wanted to look into Clark's eyes as the life faded from them.

The rush of the water masked the last of his approach. John disabled Clark with a sharp, edge-of-the-hand chop to the back of his neck. A bird screamed overhead. The man dropped to his knees, then onto his side. John delivered another blow, this one with his heel to the solar plexus, followed by one to his kidneys. Sprawled flat on his back, Clark looked up at him, conscious but completely immobilized.

"Hello, Clark." John smiled at the fear that crept into the man's eyes. The fear of death, the certainty of it. "You crossed the line. You put your nose in my business. That made it personal. Now you have to pay."

He brought his heel down again, but this time in a crushing blow to the man's larynx, finishing the job. It took little more than a nudge with the toe of his boot to tumble Clark's remains into the water.

John watched the body bobble on the water as it was swept downriver.