First to Burn Read Online Free PDF

you when you provided a clamp, so she slipped lower in her seat as Jennifer marched to the drink bar.
    * * *
    Claiming a seat by the door usually improved John Draycott’s odds of a pleasant dinner, since none of the thugs currently working for Black and Swan wanted their backs exposed with every entrance or exit. A decade of Afghan operations had weeded the decent guys out of the organization, leaving men who increasingly resembled the manager of Bagram Airfield. Efficient and ruthless, to be sure, but not men with whom Draycott wanted to dine, so in addition to choosing a bad seat, he always read a book as a barrier to company.
    Tonight the printed page didn’t hold his gaze. Only forty years of clandestine training kept him from blatantly studying the soldier who sat across the mess hall with the Special Forces. He was the spitting image of another man, one Draycott had met in Mogadishu in 1968.
    Despite Draycott’s attention, America’s finest didn’t show a flicker of return interest. Soldiers barely glanced at civilians unless they were the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders or surrounded by a security detail. Since he had neither tits nor an entourage, merely extra chins and a comb-over, he chewed—and occasionally glanced at a certain table—unnoticed.
    Although his vision had degenerated along with his waistline, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t make out a name on the staff sergeant’s shirt. A professional never forgot the face responsible for a failure, and certainly not the face responsible for his first failure.
    While he cut his meat, he remembered Somalia. Beautiful place in ’68, when the station chief had sent him into the capital’s slums to find a Belgian gun for hire. His agency boss had wanted a photo that allegedly linked a local mercenary and a World Bank official. The days of simple photos and film negatives . He’d assumed he was on a haze-the-new-guy snipe hunt to acquire an envelope full of Asian porn or Monopoly money. Assumed, that is, until he’d returned from the jakes to find his Belgian and a stone-faced blond stranger pointing guns at each other. One breath later, all assumptions had died as his contact choked on a knife.
    The assassin had retrieved the blade, picked a bloody envelope from the dead man’s shirt pocket—indeed, there’d been a picture—and stalked out of the shack that doubled as a bar. And so on the first day of his first job, Draycott had vomited next to his first body. Four decades later, he appreciated the killer’s polite half salute as he’d exited. Opponents who understood limits had become less common over the years, and those with flair had evaporated with the Cold War. The man in Mogadishu had left him alive, and thus able to sit in a chow hall in Afghanistan, one donkey ride past the end of the Earth, and stare at the assassin’s identical twin.
    Except that was absurd. The soldier sitting across the mess had the same profile, but the sergeant couldn’t be a twin, or the same mercenary. Every joint in Draycott’s body attested to the years since 1968. Although Draycott knew three men who seemed eerily unaging, this soldier couldn’t be like them. He might be the son of the man from Mogadishu, but not the same man.
    With his steak finally cut to a width matching the oven fries, he set the knife across the top of his plate. His shoulders itched to fill in the blanks and connect this sergeant to the Mogadishu hit, but gathering information about a member of Special Forces could boomerang and impact cargo ops. The company pulled in two-point-five million euro per week, nicely north of three-point-three million dollars, tax-free. He earned one percent of gross as a combination secret shopper, help desk, quality control and security hotline. His thumbs-up or thumbs-down went to the Director. Therefore his decisions had to align as perfectly as the food on his plate. Because operations in Eastern Afghanistan were as orderly as the stacks gracing his dish