The Edge

Devine broke the man’s grip on the knife and it clattered to the floor. He then slapped the man’s right ear with such force, the eardrum burst. The man seized up, presenting his face directly to Devine, who used a palm strike on his nose, hitting him once and then again with the cup of his hand, releasing all the kinetic energy from his brawny arm, shoulder, broad back, and thrust hip. This streamlined attack delivered massive torque that propelled the nose’s brittlely sharp cartilage straight into Alpha’s soft brain tissue. He dropped to the floor face first. Just to be certain, Devine reached down and broke the man’s neck in the exact way the U.S. Army had taught him.

Devine dragged both dead men and their weapons into the toilet, turned off the water, retrieved his phone, and wedged the shot-riddled door shut.

Fighting wasn’t just knowing certain techniques, although that was important; it was mostly an evolved state of mind. Without that, enhanced hand-to-hand combat skills meant squat because you would be too cowed to employ them. And the very concept of self-defense was a losing proposition, pretty much conceding the field and making you a victim in waiting. You didn’t defend, you attacked. You didn’t stop someone from hurting or killing you. You hurt or you killed. Them.

Rubbing his bruised jaw and gingerly touching his cut arm, which he instinctively knew wasn’t that serious, he reentered the train car to see Charlie staring at him.

“What happened?” she exclaimed, her eyes agog. “What was that noise?”

All right, thought Devine, this is where the rubber meets the road.

As he walked toward her Devine glanced for a moment in the train window, which reflected the interior because they were still in the Simplon Tunnel for at least another few minutes. He saw what he needed to see.

He shrugged. “Two guys. Real mess in the toilet. Going to be quite a cleanup.”

“My goodness. Is there anything I can do?”

Her neck muscles were now relaxed, he noted, pupils normal, breathing the same. She was a cut above the deceased goons back there.

Devine stopped next to her, looked down at the drawing, and said, “Yeah, you could explain why you’ve been sitting here for over two hours working away and you haven’t added a damn thing to your sketch.”

She half rose and swung the long-bladed knife up from her lap, but Devine had already seen the weapon in the window reflection. He didn’t waste any time on a defensive block. He simply clocked her in the jaw, lifting her far smaller body off the floor and knocking her against the wall. She slumped down into unconsciousness from the force of his blow and her collision with the wall. Devine momentarily pondered whether to finish the job. But she was young and might repent of her evil ways. He took the knife, slid her ballcap down, draped her hair around her slender shoulders, and propped her up against her seat as though she were merely napping.

He grabbed his gear bag and walked into the dining car, and then through the second-class carriages until he reached the last car, where he slipped her knife into a trash receptacle. The train cleared the tunnel, and when it slowed and stopped at Stresa, the last station before Milan, Devine got off. The text he had sent earlier paid dividends when the black sedan picked him up. The driver would take Devine the rest of the way to Milan. There he would catch a flight back to the United States, where another mission surely awaited.

As he glanced back at the train, Devine wondered whether he had made a mistake in allowing the woman to live.

The answer wouldn’t be long in coming.

Chapter 2

Sitting in a tacky office in a 1960s-era strip mall in Annandale, Virginia, Emerson Campbell was not a happy man.

He was a retired Army two-star and, like Travis Devine, Ranger tabbed and scrolled, meaning he had graduated from Ranger School and then been accepted into the elite Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, the Army’s most prestigious and demanding special ops force. His gunmetal-gray, closely cropped hair and weathered, grim features spoke of a lifetime of discipline and heightened professionalism. And, perhaps most tellingly, all the shit he had seen fighting on behalf of his country through a number of wars and also under-the-radar operations the public would never know about.

Devine sat on the other side of the desk and took in the man who, several months before, had recruited him to serve in the Office of Special Projects under the massive bureaucratic dome of Homeland Security.

Special Projects, thought Devine. It sounds like we plan office parties and cotillions.

“It’s a shitshow, Devine. The Italian and Swiss governments have filed official complaints. Two dead guys in a shot-up train toilet between their countries. Not a good optic.”

“It’s a better optic than one dead guy, meaning me. IDs on the corpses?”