Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Everything else fades away.
All that exists is you, your target, and the sound of your breathing. In and out. In and out.
I love it.
Because there is no past and no future. No before and no after. You’re present.
You’re in the moment, entirely. Whatever is going to happen next hasn’t yet, and so it doesn’t matter. And whatever has preceded this instant is over now and is of very little importance. No regrets, no hopes, no desires, no emotions.
You are simply… there. All alone, holding a forged-steel, fully suppressed, subsonic instrument of death, waiting patiently to fuck someone’s day up real, real bad.
And that’s it. That’s all there is.
At least, that’s normally how it works.
Here, today, on the roof of this squat, unremarkable, five-story brick building (which could be a bank or a doctor’s office or a bread factory for all I know) in Belfast, I am not as “here” as I might look. I’m somewhere else.
I’m still on a building, holding a sniper rifle, ready to pull the trigger, but it’s not this building, this rifle, or this trigger. It’s a different version of all these things. Someplace else, sometime ago.
Months? Years? Centuries? I have no idea. And I don’t really care. Time has started to get muddy and unimportant to me lately. I want to get back to now. Whenever that is. I want to get back to the me I was. The me who was there, present, in the moment, and not preoccupied with things that don’t matter.
That all seems to have gotten shattered when I was thrown off that roof that night.
Which isn’t really surprising. What’s more surprising is that it’s the only thing that seems to have gotten shattered.
I’m probably lucky to still be alive. We all are.
I suppose it should make me feel unsettled that I still don’t know exactly what happened. I do, in the abstract, but there are a lot of holes that remain unfilled.
Who threw me? Was it Lars himself? Was it someone he hired? Was it no one at all and everything that’s happened since is just a big goddamn coincidence? Even though I know enough to know that coincidences like that don’t just happen?
Why was I thrown? Was it to draw Alec out of the shadows? Probably. That part seems pretty clear. I was used as a chess piece. Not a pawn. I’ll never be someone’s pawn. But maybe I was a sacrificed bishop or knight. Maybe I was even a queen. Pretty shitty way to treat a queen, but it happens.
Why did I hold back so much of what I thought, felt, and believed from Alec and, especially, Danny? When we were on that boat, sailing to find Alec, I had plenty of opportunities to tell him about the gaps in my memory, the filled places in my memory, about Eliza and the kid, Andra, and… and all of it.
And speaking of the kid…
Are we going to find her? Are we going to get her back? Alive? And, if we do, what the fuck happens then? Do we all just retreat to our separate corners and pretend none of what has happened has happened? Do Alec, Danny, and I go on like it was before everything and live some kind of criminally ménage-ass love story, leaving Eliza and Andra and the whole Watson family to… do whatever the fuck they do?
We’re not here in Belfast about to rain down an ungodly torrent of hellfire and anguish onto Brasil Lynch’s uncle Declan’s place because we owe the Watsons anything. (Although technically we do. About two hundred fifty grand, give or take. But that’s between Danny and Russell. I’ve got enough problems.)
We’re here because Andra is Alec’s daughter.
We’re here because Andra is a van den Berg, whether any of us likes it or not. She carries his blood. His DNA. And she is the last one.
Alec’s parents are dead. His brother is dead. And Alec feels responsible for all of it. Because he is.
If he had never stolen the diamond from his father that set our odyssey in motion, none of this would be happening. Russians never would have murdered his parents; he wouldn’t have been the sole responsible party for Lars (which he did a shitty job at being); Lars’ feelings of betrayal wouldn’t have driven him to betray Alec; Danny, Alec, and I may never have been on the run the way we were; Alec wouldn’t have met Eliza; he wouldn’t have fucked Eliza; he wouldn’t have gotten Eliza pregnant; my feelings of betrayal wouldn’t have driven me to betray Alec along with Lars; I wouldn’t have gotten thrown off a goddamn roof; and… and… and…
Thousands of years ago a butterfly flapped its wings and now Christine Keene is up on a rooftop in Belfast about to start shooting people.