NIGHTFALL: THE BROKEN SON-IN-LAW'S LAST WAR

Chapter 3: The Man Who Didn't Exist

The radio went silent. Then the woman laughed, low and soft.

"So the rumors were true," she said in Tarkovan. "The cook speaks our language."

"The cook speaks a lot of things," I said. "Leave now, and you leave alive."

"Brave words for a dead man."

The radio clicked off. I dropped it, and I started to hunt.

The kitchen came first. I didn't go through the main door, because that's where he'd be watching. I went through the pantry, the narrow way I used every morning to carry out Vivian's trash. The man crouched behind the steel counter with his rifle pointed at the wrong door, and he never heard me. When he went down, he took a rack of copper pots with him, and the crash echoed through the whole dark house.

Three left inside.

The noise brought the next two running down the main stairs. They came fast and sloppy, the way men do when they think they're chasing a scared cook. I waited in the shadow under the staircase, and I let them reach the bottom step.

It took four seconds, maybe five.

Colonel Delaney used to tell us that the dark doesn't belong to anyone; it only belongs to whoever is calmer inside it. He'd been dead for two and a half years, and I could still hear his voice.

When it was over, I stood in the dark hall with my back against the wall, breathing slowly, and the truth settled in my chest, heavy and certain.

This was still who I was.

For fifteen years, I belonged to Black Echo, an eight-man special operations unit so secret that most generals in Westria didn't know its name. We rescued hostages nobody heard were taken. We stopped bombs nobody knew were built. We fought in places that don't appear on any map you can buy. My call sign was Nightfall, and the men on the other side, the ones who lived long enough to talk, called me something else.

The God of War.

My official army record says I was a supply clerk and a cook. Somebody in an office far away typed those words to keep me safe, and two and a half years ago, after the night in Selvo that killed my unit, I was happy to become that man. A cook. A nobody. Someone with shaking hands who sat at the far end of the table.

Tonight, the nobody was gone.

One left inside.

I found him on the back terrace, crouched beside the low window of the wine cellar, his rifle pointed through the glass. From the other side of it, I heard Vivian sob.

Then I saw something that turned my whole body cold.

The second cellar window, at the far end of the wall, was hanging open. Someone had squeezed out through it from the inside, and she was standing in the rain ten steps behind him, her blue dress soaked, her hands over her mouth.

Natalie.

The man heard her and spun around, lifting his rifle toward her.

I reached him first. I grabbed his arm and bent it back against the elbow until it snapped with a sound like a broken branch. He screamed and dropped the rifle, and his free hand went for a knife on his belt. I didn't give him the chance. I put him down with the pistol I'd taken off the kitchen man, and then, without thinking, I dropped the empty magazine, slapped in a full one from the dead man's vest, and pulled back the slide.

Click.

Four seconds. Calm. Smooth. Like breathing.

When I looked up, Natalie was staring at me.

Not at the dead man. At me.

"I told you to stay inside," I said.

"I heard the shooting stop. I thought..." Her voice broke. "I thought you were dead, Adam. I thought I'd come out and find you dead."

"Get back to the window. Now."

She didn't move. Her brown eyes went from my hands to my face, slowly, as if she was meeting a stranger who had borrowed her husband's clothes.

"Who are you?" she whispered.

"Later," I said. "I promise you, later."

"Natalie!" Vivian's voice cried up through the cellar window, thin and terrified. "Natalie, come back in here this second!"

For once in her life, Natalie obeyed her mother without a word.

An engine roared past the garden wall.

I ran to the wall and vaulted it, and I saw a white van tearing away down Harbor Crest road, its back doors swinging. A figure stood in the open doorway with a rifle, tall and slim, a woman in a black mask. Our eyes met across the wet road.

I fired once. She jerked, grabbed her shoulder, and fell back into the van, and a man inside dragged her in and slammed the doors.

Then they were gone, two red tail lights shrinking into the rain.

Six dead inside. Two gone.

I stood on the wet road for a moment, rain running into my eyes. They would be back.

I walked back through the dark garden, my legs suddenly heavy. Natalie had climbed back through the cellar window. I could hear her voice below, telling the others to stay quiet.

I went back into the house and knelt beside the first man I'd killed under the table, and I searched his pockets the way I'd been trained to. A spare magazine. A Tarkovan cigarette lighter. A folded piece of paper.

I opened it and held it up to the gray light from the window.

It was a photo of me.

Not an old army photo. A new one, taken outside the cottage maybe a month ago, me carrying a bag of groceries. Under it, someone had typed my full name, my address on the Prescott estate, the times I usually walked to the bus stop, and the days I volunteered at the hospital.

At the bottom of the page was a tiny printed code, the kind I hadn't seen in years.

A file number from a Westrian government database.

My stomach turned over. Only a handful of people in my own country knew where Nightfall had gone. Only a handful had access to that file. These men hadn't found me by luck, and they hadn't found me by themselves.

Somebody I used to trust had sold me.

Far away, sirens began to rise over the rain, getting closer.

I folded the photo and slid it into my pocket. In a few minutes, the police would flood this house and start asking questions, and every question had a dangerous answer. If I told them who I was, the Bureau would bury me deeper than any enemy ever could. Black Echo didn't exist. Men who talked about it stopped existing too.

So I made my first hard choice.

I unlocked the cellar door, hung the old key back on its hook in the hall, and sat down on the floor with my back to the wall. I pulled my knees up to my chest and let my hands start shaking again.

Let them find the cook.

Let them never meet Nightfall.

But as the first blue lights flashed across the windows, one thought kept burning in my head, louder than the sirens. The woman in the van was still alive, somebody in my own government had put my life in her hands, and this time, they knew exactly where my family slept.