Page 601 of Lodestar

I enlisted, never realizing I was signing my fucking soul away to the people who orchestrated worse acts of violence against the public than Hitler or Mussolini could ever come up with.

Anyway, I didn’t send this to salvage my conscience. I’m already fucked when I meet Peter at his pearly gates. What I wanted to tell you was a story.

You ask any Jorgmundgander operative and they’ll tell you that training includes learning of anecdotes about past missions that went awry or variants on that—they’re shaped like exercises but they’re warnings.

So, one day during training, when I’m starting to realize what I signed up for, they talked about this ex-operative who ‘tried’ to stop a sanctioned bombing that, allegedly, was supposed to trigger political strife between an African nation and the West.

The ex-operative failed, of course, and the bombing went ahead and people died as, and I quote, people are wont to do.

I never thought much of it afterward. There were more stories, worse than that, and I started my time as an operative for them, getting kills under my belt and days knocked off my sentence. I’d sold my soul to the fucking devil, but it was helpingme work with the ECD, coordinate attacks on the English and the Sparrows and such, so I carried on.

A death was a day knocked off my sentence; sometimes a kill was important enough to earn myself a week.

Deaths became time served and that was my one focus.

I always knew why I’d been approached, not just because of my skills, but because the US has nevernothad an interest in liberating Ireland.

Just like they remained puppeteers in the nations who were in England’s empire that wanted independence. It’s all been a key part of destabilizing Britain’s imperial rule.

As we stand, I’m not sure who was supposed to benefit. Maybe no one. Maybe everyone. Maybe just the Sparrows and these godforsaken Brothers.

After decades of war, we’re no further along than we were in the forties, so only time will tell who’s the winner here.

As far as I can see, we’re all just goddamn losers in a game no one asked us to play.

Anyway, one day, I’m waiting to kill this diplomat, and the Jorgmundgander official assigned to my task force got drunk and put on the radio.

It was a nighttime special fornoxxiousfans, of which he was one. The drunker he got, the more loose his tongue became, and he started bragging about how he’d fucked Gerry Sullivan’s wife back when she worked with the snakes.

I dismissed it as nonsense at first—the talk of someone who’d downed too many beers. But we’d been staking out this particular embassy for forty-seven hours, waiting for this diplomat, so I peppered him with questions, my partner did too, both of us wanting to see how far he’d take the bullshit.

Casey Sullivan, he shared, hadn’t always been called that.

She’d been Galena back when he knew her.

There’d been rumors she was related to someone in the top ranks, but nepotism hadn’t played a role in her recruitment—she’d been one of the best with a kill record almost as good as mine.

Then, the Lockerbie bombing happened.

The agent claimed ‘Galena’ had spent years trying to stop it. When she realized there was still a green light on the bombing, she ran to America, he said. Started using an old handle and took up with the CIA. Got with Gerry fucking Sullivan. Married him. Had a kid.

He even said that he was sure a tip-off to the authorities about the threat came from her.

His story was ludicrous.

Goddamn insane, but I was bored.

Then, the following day, that agent died.

Suddenly, his story didn’t seem so ludicrous.

I wasn’t so bored.

A couple of weeks later, I’m staring down the barrel of a gun and Casey Sullivan’s in my sights.

You can take this however you want. You can believe it or you don’t have to. At first, I didn’t. But then, Faraday died of ‘natural causes,’ a guy who popped vitamins and worked out religiously, who got drunk on two bottles of beer and ate bags of iceberg goddamn lettuce as a snack. Heart attack, they said when I asked.

Heart. Attack.

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