Demon Accords 05.5: Executable Read Online Free PDF Page B

black skin stood on a roof.  Three stories above the ground, he was watching another man through expensive binoculars while holding a parabolic mike in his spare hand.  His target—who was in his early twenties and was very fit, with sandy hair and hazel eyes—was sipping a latte at an outdoor table in front of a Boston coffee shop. Playing a hunch, the watcher had been tailing his quarry for three days.  Another hunch told him his patience was about to pay off, as Mr. Latte reached into a pocket to grab his phone.
    “Chete ,” the latte guy answered.  The sound was crisp and clear even ninety-seven yards away as the hunter listened through top-end headphones.
    “Agent Machete, you are activated.  Details follow by text.  You’ll proceed to Castlebury, Vermont and investigate a Sarah Williams, recently registered at Castlebury High School. This is only a sneak and peek.  Copy?”
    “Copy Central,” he replied, ending the call.
    Agent Machete turned and headed for his vehicle, a visible sense of excitement about him.  In his eagerness , he never noticed the man on the roof .
    The watcher knew a great deal about Machete, like the fact that he had been recruited right off the battlefields of Afghanistan, an advanced graduate of the U.S. Army’s school of killing and mayhem.  He had been a squad leader in a light infantry unit that had drawn more than its share of dangerous building clearing assignments.  The last mission had sent his unit in support of a group of special operators whose only uniform emblems had been crossed black swords over the letters A.I.R.
    The building was thought to contain a high -ranking Taliban officer.  It did—along with three times as many fighters as intelligence had counted on.  Machete, whose birth name was Kevin, had demonstrated a ferocious appetite for combat in the fight that followed.  The same fight killed off his entire squad.
    After the battle, wounded in both body and mind, he had been approached by a man in a black suit, representing an elite organization focused on protecting the U.S.A.  He fit their profile : a young, skilled soldier who lacked much in the way of family or friends back in the States.  Would he want to truly be of service to his country?  Hell, yeah!
    He died that day, at least on paper.  His birth name was gone, engraved on a headstone in Arlington Cemetery.  The funeral was apparently very impressive; not that he would know, as he had been whisked into a covert training program that drew its roots from the CIA’s famous Farm facility.
    The watcher, also a young man, knew all t his because Machete was a special project of his.  
    Oddly enough, he had much in common with Machete.  He , too, had been a soldier in Afghanistan; a Ranger, assigned to a mixed force unit that spent months deep in the rugged mountains tracking the Taliban.  He, too, had been recruited by a man in a black suit while he lay in the hospital.  But unlike Machete, Michael West got to keep his own name and identity.  His recruiter, who had identified himself as Nathan Stewart, had asked him two hours’ worth of questions about his uncanny ability to find the quarry his unit had hunted.  Time and again, Mike had been ridiculously successful at picking the right direction, village, cave, or hidey hole to find his man.  He was so crazy good at it that the team’s handle for him was Witch Hunter.
    Director Stewart had explained that Michael’s talent wasn’t luck or even intuition, but another gift that most of the human race didn’t have.  Mike had been skeptical, right up until one of Stewart’s assistants had somehow moved an entire tray of food off the table in front of him and over to her own place setting… without touching it.  Several more demonstrations followed, one of which left him hovering six inches off the ground before he was willing to listen, although he pointed out that his missing left foot made him less than a whole man.  Director