Perfect killer

CHAPTER 6

From a shadowy perch hidden beyond the silvery, weathered boards of a derelict and graffiti-smeared lakeside cottage, the shooter focused on the drama playing out in the perfect circle of the scope's eyepiece. The reddish mist from the lawyer's head appeared as a silent cloud of dust and created the familiar calming satisfaction that ran warm in the shooter's veins.

The shooter paused to get the first real-life glimpse of the famed Dr. Bradford Stone, legendary Marine recon operative turned healer and scientist. He was such a big man-six foot five, 230 pounds-that he filled the scope's field of view and made it hard for the shooter not to take him out instead of the intended target. Before the first shot, the shooter had canvassed his face, looked into the deep green eyes and compassed the lines of his face and the arrow-straight part in his short, graying hair, and knew she could have taken him out in another split second, but her employer had other plans for him.

The dossier they had given her on Stone tracked him through every country in Southeast Asia and included fitness reports that described a friendly, congenial, wellmannered, ethical, and deeply moral man with an outstanding record of killing those who were enemies of his country.

Stone's lengthy and highly classified record of his service both as an active-duty Marine and a government contractor afterward showed an unusual proficiency for killing, whether at close range with bare hands, knife, garrote, or at the farthest distances as one of the best snipers ever to graduate Camp Pendleton.

Then one day, he filed a request to train as his unit's medical officer. After Stone's request was approved, he became a gifted healer who could staunch a bleeding wound with one hand and kill an attacker with the other. Killing became preventive medicine.

The dossier contained extensive psychological evaluations indicating that Stone still had no moral issues with killing in the service of his country or his own self defense, but that he had grown weary of dealing with his postbattle regrets of killing other humans. And that he was afraid that he'd stop having those regrets and begin to enjoy the process.

The shooter remembered a time when she had had to struggle with the personal nature of reaching out and touching her targets, seeing their faces and regretting the deaths as a necessity of war. But that regret ended with her own wounds. Now, killing brought her profound joy. Other soldiers killed to live, but she lived to kill.

"Bang," the shooter whispered faintly as the crosshairs of the Leupold scope tracked Stone and the dead lawyer as they rolled to the ground.

Then she heard the reports of a small-caliber weapon, a handgun from the sounds. She played the Leupold around the cemetery and quickly spotted a man with a shaved head firing in her general direction.

"Good-bye, motherfucker," the shooter said as she steadied her breathing and caressed the trigger like the lover it had become.