Andrew Britton - The American

Vanderveen was visibly disappointed. “Let’s try it this way,” he said. “Do you remember the first time you ever saw her?”

Ryan knew what the man was doing, but he couldn’t help what happened next. The image appeared in his mind before he could stop it: Katie, legs curled up beneath her, hair shimmering golden brown in the sun, a pretty smile and inviting blue eyes, sitting on the grass in Orono.

Vanderveen’s gaze had become even more focused. When he saw Kealey’s eyes cloud over, remembering, he smiled again and said, “That’s it. Hold that thought…”

Ryan snapped back in time to catch the last part of the sentence. “…and watch this.”

Then, with a single, powerful thrust of his arm, Vanderveen pushed all 4? inches of the blade into the right side of Katie’s neck.

Before he could fully grasp what had just happened, Ryan heard an anguished scream and, not recognizing it as his own, broke forward across the wooden floor, completely focused on taking the other man’s life. He was oblivious to Katie’s reaction.

Her eyes opened wide and her lips parted, but no sound emerged. She tried to pull away from her captor as her legs went out from under her. Then she crashed forward against the side of the table, her right hand coming up to feel for the source of so much searing pain.

Suddenly she found herself on the floor, kicking out frantically, trying to find some air through the choking sensation of blood in her throat. She had sudden sparks of insight, brief bouts of lucidity that brought her the terrible truth. She tried to push it away, but the facts were fighting through… She had been hurt, seriously hurt, and the nearest hospital was 20 miles away, and she couldn’t breathe, and Ryan wasn’t looking, didn’t see how bad it was, and she couldn’t breathe…

Kealey and Vanderveen were struggling for control of the gun that had materialized out of nowhere. Wrestling for control of life and death, one driven by rage and despair, the other by a hatred born of many years — a visceral evil that was the sum of many parts, traceable back to no single point in time.

The. 40 roared once, then came sliding across the polished wooden floor, pulling through a thin trickle of blood before coming to rest beneath the refrigerator. Vanderveen made a quick decision as Ryan went for the gun, getting to his feet and throwing his full weight at the back door once, then twice before the lock broke and he burst out into the storm, just as two rounds splintered the door frame where his head had been a second earlier.

Passing the door, Ryan glanced quickly to make sure that the other man wasn’t lying prone in the mud, ready to spring back up and into the kitchen. He saw a distant figure merge with the dark, then disappear through the sheets of rain.

With the door open, the sound of the storm was deafening as he went to Katie and kneeled, pulling her close. Her shoulders were over his thighs, the back of her head resting in the crook of his right arm. As he held her, he felt her left hand reaching out to find his, the long fingers gripping tight to squeeze out the pain.

Ryan didn’t try to remove the knife; it only would have hurt her more and made the bleeding worse. Her lips parted as she tried to speak, and when she turned her head toward him, a thin trickle of blood ran down the side of her mouth. Although she couldn’t make any words, he knew that she was in agony because she was still kicking weakly and the tears had not stopped building.

Worse yet, her luminous blue eyes were losing some of their animation, and when he put his face close to hers, he couldn’t feel her warm breath on his skin.

“Katie.” He wasn’t sure if she could still hear him, and it was hard to tell because her face was blurred by his own tears. “Don’t go, Katie. Stay here. God, just… stay with me. Please…”

It was all he could say. He wanted to tell her he loved her, that he was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come.

Instead, he held her close and rocked her back and forth, refusing to believe that he would not hear her laughter, her voice, or see her beautiful smile ever again. And still rocking, as gently as he could, until the light finally left her eyes altogether, and she died in his arms a few moments later.

Vanderveen was tearing along the path through the woods, disoriented and full of adrenaline. Despite the fact that he had not slept in almost three days, he had never felt more alive. For the first time in seven years, he was actually glad that Kealey had survived the bullet in Syria. It was so much more fitting for it to end here, and now, perhaps, Kealey might understand something of his own pain…

The pine and oak trees were all around him, the pines still full and green, the oaks nothing more than towering, writhing arms of tremulous wood. He was already soaked to the skin, freezing cold, and the roar of the ocean was like a living thing. He had his bearings now, heading forward to the great dark expanse of the Atlantic, feet pounding in the mud as he raced, unknowingly, toward the edge of the towering cliffs.

Kealey emerged from the back of the house at a dead sprint with Vanderveen’s gun in his hand, moving fast toward the water. He was numbed by what had just happened. It couldn’t last, though, and cutting through the emptiness was the inescapable truth: that he was responsible for all of it. By putting the hunt for William Vanderveen ahead of Katie, he had killed her just as surely as if he had stabbed her himself, and he couldn’t get the image out of his mind: Katie, kicking and writhing on the floor, trying to cry out through the blood that was filling her throat, the hideous gurgle that had emerged instead. God, no. No!

Vanderveen spun around when he heard what might have been, carrying high over the howling wind, a scream of agony and bottomless pain. The sound brought a smile to his face. Kealey was coming.

The path had ended in a wide clearing, several solitary fence posts standing guard on the perimeter. The mud was churning around his feet as though attempting to swallow him whole, but far more terrifying was the precipitous drop that ended the world just 10 feet in front of him. The sky above was in constant motion, twisting black clouds lit bright by sheets of lightning, the thunder pounding hard just seconds later with enough force to make the ground shake. The wind was icy cold and constant, bringing silver streaks of rain in from over the tortuous swells of the ocean.

He tried to think. Kealey had his gun, and he was without a weapon. He had to get out of the clearing immediately.

Directly behind him, where the path turned into the underbrush, Vanderveen heard the unmistakable sound of splashing feet.

Kealey turned the corner and stepped into the empty clearing. He was buffeted hard by the wind, which didn’t seem to be going in any one direction, but the USP Compact was up and steady in front of him. He had dropped the magazine on the self-loading pistol on the way out of the house to see that it contained four bullets. That meant that Vanderveen had not reloaded after his bloody escape from F Street, as only three rounds had been fired inside the house. There was one in the chamber, though, so he actually had five Federal 155 grain Hydra-Shok rounds with which to kill the man, and he planned to use every last one of them.

He wasn’t sure if that would be enough. In the recessed lighting of the kitchen, Vanderveen had seemed almost inhuman. Part of it was his appearance. It had been Ryan’s first close look at the man in almost eight years, and he clearly hadn’t lost a step in that period of time. If anything, he looked even stronger and leaner than he had during his time as one of the most capable soldiers in the U.S. Special Forces community.

More than that, though, was the fact that Vanderveen appeared to be driven by something far more powerful than his natural physical strength. It was the way his eyes burned with that strange light that others, not knowing better, might have mistaken for ambition, religious fervor, greed, or any other kind of overpowering emotion.