Albatross Read Free

agent back his and his partner’s gun and walked to where the other victims were. There were three. Maxwell was still bound to the chair but lying on his side, motionless. Burns was caught by surprise when he experienced regret that Maxwell was now dead. He knew it would take the authorities time to identify Maxwell because Burns had taken all of Maxwell’s identification cards and corresponding badges. The other two dead bodies, he didn’t need to know. Without even pausing to look at them, Burns continued walking through the living room to the kitchen and went downstairs to the basement. The lights were off. Burns couldn’t remember if he had left them off when he had brought David down. He hesitated. Burns then turned the lights on, and with his own weapon drawn, he descended quietly down the stairs. As he turned the corner, David sat in nearly the same position Burns had originally left him in hours prior. David looked out of place. As if a midforties man in a navy blue suit, matching tie, and a stark, white shirt sitting in the dark below a crime scene wasn’t odd enough, the fact that David was wearing dark sunglasses in the dark basement was unnerving.
    “I hate that you wait in the dark like that with your sunglasses on,” Burns said and smiled.
    “I have no need for light,” David responded.
    Calming voice as always , he thought. Because both men had interrogated Maxwell and the “stage was now set,” David stood up, moved the chair away from him, and handed Burns, his former client, his sunglasses. For whatever reason, Burns’s hand missed the glasses. Without showing annoyance, David bent over to feel for them as Burns struck the back of David’s head. David slumped downward toward the hard cement floor and would have smacked his face with force if he was not caught in time by Burns.
    “I’m sorry,” Burns said to his now unconscious friend. He really hated this part of the plan. Allowing David to be taken into custody wasn’t going to be any easier either.
    After years of dealing with counterintuitive feelings, conflicting thoughts, and diametrically opposing behaviors, Burns was getting used to his complex identity. He laid his former therapist on the floor and exited the basement through the bulkhead. He turned to the driveway and got behind the wheel of federal agents’ car after he retrieved a laptop from Maxwell’s car. As he started the car, he took out a cell phone. It was a cheap, prepaid cell phone and was very hard to trace. It was now 6:35 a.m., and it had been a fast fifteen minutes. Still, there were no sounds of first responders. He called 911 and reported that he thought he had heard men shouting and gunshots at the new Leveritt development. Almost on cue, he heard sirens as the operator informed him that help was on the way. Other residents must have heard the shots too. Burns hung up the phone and backed the FBI agents’ car out of the driveway, leaving the other two cars in their place. A half of a mile away at a traffic light, he rapidly started typing on a separate smart phone: “Black knight in place. White knight on the move. Alpha out.” This smart phone was paid through a cell phone company, which did make it possible to track. But in this case, that was all part of the plan.
    Even though Burns had meticulously planned the next several steps, any mission was vulnerable to errors, human or technological, second thoughts, and direct interventions from the government. While Burns felt confident in his own abilities, he was nervous about his team. They’re just civilians caught up in some serious shit, he thought. Burns found himself drifting off of the mission again. It was a common problem now. In the past, he had laser focus during an operation. Now he had worries about whether his friends were up for this major undertaking or not. He was especially worried about the woman he was positive he loved. Again, without his full memory of his past, the absence of the memory of