Saint Read Free Page A

Carl.”
    He looked at her without seeing her, swallowed his terror. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
    He grabbed both sides of the window, thrust his head out to scan the grounds, withdrew, shoved his right leg through the opening, and rolled onto the grass outside. When he came to his feet, he was facing south. How did he know it was south? He just did.
    He would go south and he would kill.

2
    C arl found the clothes in a small duffel bag behind a bush along the outside wall. He dressed quickly, pulled on a pair of cargo pants and black running shoes, and tied a red bandanna around his neck to hide the blood that had oozed from a cut at the base of his skull, roughly two inches behind his right ear. Odd to think that a single remote signal could take his life.
    Odd, not terrifying. Not even odd, actually. Interesting. Familiar.
    He snatched up the Makarov, shoved it behind his back, and set out at a fast jog. South.
    He was in a small compound, ten buildings in a small valley surrounded by a deciduous forest. Three of the buildings were concrete; the rest appeared to be made of wood. Most had small windows, perhaps eighteen inches square. Tin roofs. No landscaping, just bare dirt and grass. To the west, a shooting range stretched into the trees farther than he could see, well over three thousand yards.
    The day was hot, midafternoon. Quiet except for the chirping of a few birds and the rustle of a light breeze through the trees.
    On stilts, a single observation post with narrow, rectangular windows towered over the trees. There were eyes behind those windows, watching him.
    All of this he assimilated before realizing that he was taking in his surroundings in such a calculating, clinical manner. His wife lay on a bed with a shattered femur, his son was in some dark hole in one of these buildings, and Carl was running south, away from them in order to save them.
    Three miles would take fifteen minutes at a healthy jog for the fittest man. Was he fit? He’d run a hundred yards and felt only slightly winded. He was fit. As part of Special Forces, he would be.
    But why was he forced to rely on instinct and calculation instead of clear memory to determine even these simple facts?
    He brought his mind back to the task at hand. What were the consequences of entering a hotel and murdering a man and his wife? Death for the man and his wife. Orphaned children. A prison sentence for the killer.
    What were the consequences of allowing this man and his wife to live? Death for Kelly and Matthew.
    He was in a black hole from which there was no escape. But blackness was familiar territory to him, wasn’t it? A pang of sorrow stabbed him. There was something about blackness that made him want to cry.
    Carl ran faster now, weaving through the trees, pushing back the emotions that flogged him, and doing so quite easily. When the blackness encroached, he focused on a single pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, because only there, in the light, could he find the strength to hold the darkness at bay.
    He had no way to know with any certainty when the hour he’d been given would expire, but time was now irrelevant. He possessed limits and he would push himself to those limits. Any distraction caused by worry or fear would only interfere with his success.
    He crested a gentle hill outside the forest roughly fifteen minutes into the run. He pulled up behind a tree, panting. There was the town. Only one neighborhood in his line of sight contained multi-story buildings—the Andrassy would be there. After a quick scan of the country leading to the town, he angled for the buildings at a jog, slower now, senses keen.
    His shirttail hid the gun at his waist, but nothing else about him would be so easily hidden once he encountered people. Was Kelly right? Were they really in Hungary? He didn’t speak Hungarian but doubted he looked much different from any ordinary Hungarian. On the other