The Edge

Chapter 27

Three guns to his one made it a quick end to a fight that never materialized. Devine was disarmed and pulled into an alley, where his hands were zip-tied behind him, and then he was taken to an SUV with blacked-out windows that was parked there. No hood was put over his head and he wasn’t blindfolded.

They aren’t worried about me knowing where I’m going because they know I won’t be coming back.

He studied the three men. One driving and one on either side of him. They hadn’t uttered a word; they had let their weapons and hand signals do the messaging.

He guessed two of the men’s ethnicity to be Middle Eastern, and the third was clearly Asian. This was business to them and they deployed the ideal skill set to get the job done. They were all around six feet, lean and wiry, without the big flashy muscles that most people believed signified great strength and fighting ability.

Nothing could be further from the truth, Devine knew. Being strong was great for one’s health and longevity, but he had seen six-foot-five dudes with six-packs and bulging biceps and quads taken down by short, skinny guys who understood precisely how to wreck a person without an ounce of remorse; that made them unpredictably dangerous and, crucially, a millisecond faster. And that was the whole ballgame when you were fighting for your life.

None of the men looked at him, not because they were afraid he could identify them but because they were probably bored. This was business, and the hard part — the abduction — had gone seamlessly. Now there was just the execution phase to come, which would be the easiest element of the job. Then it was on to the next assignment. They were as different from the Alpha and Bravo from the Geneva train as it was possible to be. That pair had relied on their guns. When that failed them, they were roadkill to anyone like Devine, who actually knew what they were doing.

The drive took them out of town, along the coast and due south, Devine gauged. After about twenty minutes they turned off the road, and the SUV trundled over a bumpy, unpaved street. Another turnoff there, and about five hundred feet later over crunching gravel they came to a stop.

Devine was bundled into a small wooden house that was closer to falling down than remaining standing. He could feel tendrils of cold air coming in through cracks in the exterior walls. He was hurried up a narrow, enclosed set of stairs, down a hall, and into a room that was bare except for a chair in the middle. He was pushed into the chair and duct-taped to it. With his hands still zip-tied behind him, he appeared to be securely immobilized.

He had swept the room doing a KIM recon, or Keep In Mind. You looked at as many different details as possible in a short amount of time, with the ability to recall them later, as needed. This told him there was one window where the curtains were flapping because the window was either open or the glass was missing. The floor was made of wooden planks. The only door was the one they had entered. The walls looked to be solid plaster. There was a nail sticking out of the plaster where a picture had probably hung. The chair was an ordinary wooden one, with spindly arms. It might have already been in the house, or they had bought it at some junk shop to use as his execution perch. It felt fragile under his 220 pounds.

Not much to work with, but he probably wasn’t going to have that option anyway. Looking at the men he was reminded of a Mark Twain quote one of his instructors at West Point had taught them: Of all the animals man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

He didn’t know if these men took any pleasure in their work, but he did know they took pleasure in the payment they would receive for ending his life.

He knew the hit rate for a moving target was less than 4 percent and the kill rate was under one in a hundred. Only he was stationary. He calculated the kill rate on him at damn near perfect.

When engaged in his ceiling staring process, Devine had sometimes gone through this scenario in his mind. No way out. The last full measure. The end. As it came to all of us, just not so violently. He already knew he was not going to beg for his life, because he refused to waste his last few remaining breaths on useless things.

He had almost died twice while in uniform, and once in civilian clothes. In each case, as his life seemed to trickle from him, Devine recalled being in the moment. He was certainly feeling the pain, and he was experiencing the sense of impending doom that anyone dying suddenly felt, because your brain was releasing all sorts of chemicals into your bloodstream to try to stave off the end of its existence, and yours. And, when all hope was gone, the brain would begin methodically shutting down all the body’s organs in an orderly procession, turning the lights out at the very end. This would normally take moments, not minutes.

Devine had felt all of those things, three times now, and, with that experience behind him reinforcing his psyche, he prepared for what he knew was coming.

What had Dr. Guillaume said? That Jenny’s death was instantaneous. That she was dead before her brain even realized it was over.

But that hadn’t really been the way it had gone down. Jenny had been staring at the shooter, her killer, much like Devine was now looking at the three hardened men in front of him. She knew what was coming. Your brain knew, which meant you knew, that the end of you was imminent. Devine wondered what she had thought about. Had she panicked, pleaded for her life? Sobbed uncontrollably?

No, he didn’t believe she had done any of those things. Everything she had done in her life up to that point spoke of a person in control. She would have stood there staring back at the person about to kill her, with a calm, even defiant detachment, maybe even daring them to pull the trigger before they wanted to. To assume, for one final time, the upper hand over someone, a measure of control, even if that person was going to be the instrument of her demise.

Devine stared back at the men with a calm detachment. He wasn’t going to give the fuckers the satisfaction that what they were about to do had rattled him in the least.

You go out like an Army Ranger, tabbed and scrolled.

But they did not pull their weapons and shoot him dead. They left him there.

He counted three sets of footsteps passing down the hall and then down the stairs.

They had made their first mistake tonight, after an otherwise flawlessly executed mission.

But to Devine’s mind it was a big one.

They had left him alone.

And alive.