Steven James - The Rook

Shade pulled the photo from the camera.

Click. Another picture.

He could have killed Bowers at any time. Yes of course. Even right now. But over the last four months, Terry had been very helpful filling him in on Bowers’s past, and Shade believed he had a better punishment than death for Agent Bowers: fear.

Make him live in fear.

As the last photo printed, he scrawled a note, “I’m still here.-

Shade.” Then he opened the envelope, slipped the note and the photos inside, and sealed it shut.

Yes. Let Bowers live in fear. And Shade already knew the best way to do that. Terry had told him the secret last month.

Let Bowers face his past. Let him face the mirror image of himself-Richard Devin Basque.

Shade double-checked the Denver address and dropped the letter into the mailbox beside the Mission Bay parking lot. It wouldn’t be difficult to get Basque declared “not guilty” at that fiasco of a trial in Chicago. Buy off a few jurors. Hardly a challenge at all.

Then he’d deliver Agent Bowers to Basque and let him do what he did best.

“Bring it on,” huh, Bowers?

All right. If you insist.

Then the ex-CIA assassin Sebastian Taylor smiled, lit a cigarette, and strolled through the cryptic moonlight to his car, thinking of fear.

The best punishment of all.