LITMIR.BIZ

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facility in California that the nerve damage was severe and permanent. He was lucky, they had informed him, to retain any function in the hand at all—function that could be improved through the exercises they prescribed. There was no reason, they had assured him, that he couldn’t go on to live a reasonably normal life.

      They were welcome, he thought, to go straight to hell.

      They had given him a ball to squeeze. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t gray. It wasn’t really anything. It was, in fact, the exact same color of the walls of his room, the same institutional not-quite-beige that some smug puke with multiple degrees in psychology had probably determined was the least offensive to the most number of people.

      Except that the residents of the San Diego rehab center weren’t people at all. Not anymore.

      They were treated with something that wasn’t kindness but never quite dipped into indifference. The staff members were mildly solicitous of his well-being and of the well-being of his fellow…inmates was the word that came to mind. The creaking and many-times-converted old house was an asylum, a sanitarium. It was a kind of holding tank, as he saw it, for people who were neither dead nor alive.

      Most of them had been, as he had, undercover operatives. Their departments and branches of service varied; at least one of the worst cases was a former Special Ops soldier who, somewhere in Afghanistan, had run afoul of the counterinsurgents he was training to fight the Taliban. They’d taken his tongue and his eyes, among other things. He sat slumped in a wheelchair on the front porch most days, indifferent to the sun on his scarred face.

      There were half a dozen others, although two or three were rarely in residence, spending time in and out of the hospital for continuing reconstructive surgeries. There was a woman everyone called Jane but whose real name was Karen. She had told him that much, from amid the bandages swathing her face and arms. From acid, poured over her as she sat strapped in a metal chair, in some godforsaken garage.

      Karen was with the Bureau and had worked a Mob case in Philadelphia. They had found her and taught her a permanent lesson. She spoke rarely, but seemed to find Troy easy enough to talk to.

      The smile was stillborn on his face. Of course he was a good listener. He never talked. He hadn’t spoken a word to any of them—not the staff, not the patients and not to his sister when she came to visit from Salt Lake City. Liz hadn’t known what to do with him, hadn’t known how to react to what he had become. She had fussed over him, had made small talk. Finally, she simply sat with him quietly and held his right hand as they looked out the second-floor window. She had told him he was welcome to come live with her and Paul.

      “Whenever you’re finally ready to come home,” was how she’d put it.

      Home. Now he did laugh. It was a miserable bark, a sardonic, bitter bleat that bore little resemblance to mirth. There was no home for him. There never would be again.

      He flexed the ball, over and over. The anger lent him strength. The cracks in the rubber skin touched. He flexed them further. The knuckles of his three remaining fingers were white. His fingertips were blue.

      They had made him watch. They had videotaped it. They played it for him, explaining to him in exquisite detail exactly why everything they were doing to his wife was his fault, was payback for his betrayal. It had to be a video, for by the time they showed it to him, it was far too late. They wanted nothing from him; they sought no information; they were interested only in making him suffer before he died. His last thoughts were to be of loss and impotence and astonishing shame.

      He hadn’t been there in person because it had happened while he was being beaten a hundred miles away, while his hand was being clenched in a shop vise at the back of the decrepit garage where…where…

      He stopped. It was happening again. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember their names. Couldn’t remember the men who had been working with him, who had been part of his undercover team. It was an ambitious operation with a large budget; he remembered that. He was given unprecedented free rein, the authorization to conduct his cover and to bend, judiciously, the laws as he saw fit. He had done his best to blend in. He had taken drugs. He had beaten other gang members, sometimes close to death. He had rutted with the whores the Twelfth Reich vermin kept around. He had lived his cover, had been one of them. Even now, he could mouth the words of their hate, read the lines of his script as if he truly despised all the “mud people” Hyde and his zombie acolytes so feared and loathed.

      They had given him literature to read, at first. It was mindless drivel, written by people who were barely literate themselves. One was a charming piece of claptrap, a novel about a man whose hobby was shooting interracial couples. Another was the book reportedly the inspiration for major terrorist bombings, complete with formulas for making explosives. Still another was one he recognized, an anarchy handbook long ago discredited even in anarchist circles as containing faulty information that would get the reader killed if he tried to reproduce what the book contained.

      Hyde’s idiot skinheads fancied themselves geniuses. Never had so many people had such a high opinion of themselves with so little justification. In their minds, it was everyone else who was stupid.

      It was easy to be among them, easier than it should have been. Like all deep-cover operatives, he had felt himself slipping away, felt himself starting to like the freedom. Even amid the dissolution, the depravity, the debauchery that was killing his soul and sucking the life from his eyes, God help him, he had enjoyed some of it.

      Now and again he would remember that. He would feel it in his stomach, like a sucker punch deep in his guts. When those times came he couldn’t escape the memories fast enough, couldn’t tamp them down hard enough, couldn’t displace them with thoughts of his home and his family and the wife he had betrayed and neglected for his job. He had taken hot shower after hot shower, trying to get the stink of their rat holes and their cigarettes off him. He had gone to doctors, hoping for reassurance, hoping for a rubber stamp on a test form somewhere that told him he was going to be okay, he wasn’t scarred forever, he wasn’t damaged goods.

      It was his weakness, he knew, that had eventually undone him. One of Hyde’s toadies had gotten curious and followed him. Once there, the skinhead had seen something, read something, found something out that exposed Troy for other than what he seemed. Troy never knew exactly what it was. A name on a clinic form, an incautious word on the phone to his wife…there was no way to know. He was distracted; he had thought his cover inviolable, had begun to think of himself, in unguarded moments, as one of Hyde’s street soldiers. He had gone to the clinic in…where was it? He couldn’t remember. Places, names, people, they swirled through his head like wisps of fog, evaporating when he tried to catch them. The doctors had told him it might be like that, especially concerning anything to do with the trauma. What trauma? Something had happened. He didn’t remember. It didn’t matter.

      He looked down at the rubber ball in his fingers. Sara. It had belonged to Sara. His daughter.

      Troy was up before he realized he was on his feet, ripping the mirror from the wall above the entertainment center, throwing it to the floor. It cracked when it landed, but he put his foot through it anyway, feeling the glass splinter under his shoe, relishing the sound of destruction. Still holding the ball, he drew the .40-caliber Glock from the holster clipped to his waistband and smashed the barrel into the television, sundering the flat screen. The telephone flew across the room when he hurled it. He kicked over the wooden chair next to the bed.

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