Nineteen minutes later
The true Shade, the mastermind of everything, snapped another instant photo of Patrick Bowers sitting beside his stepdaughter and then smiled.
Yes, Terry was in a coma.
Yes, Cassandra was in custody.
Yes, the device had been destroyed, but still Shade smiled. After all, no one except the daughter from his first rather ill-fated marriage knew about him, so no one would come after him. And his daughter would never give him up; after all, she knew he would pay her bail and help her escape, just like he’d done with Melice.
His camera spit out the photograph. He snapped another.
Then Shade, the one who’d shot the bottle out of Melice’s hand… the one who’d identified Agent Bowers’s voice on the phone… the one who’d stood still and invisible as his daughter stepped out of the shadows beside him to make Melice think she was Shade… the one who’d first introduced her to the compromised NSA agent, Terry Manoji… the one who’d told Terry to shoot Bowers at the base of the neck… the one who’d planned everything from the beginning, and so carefully coordinated the work of his two proteges, now he claimed a new enemy, set his sites on a new target: Special Agent Patrick Bowers.
Shade pulled the photo from the camera.
Click. Another picture.
He could have killed Bowers at any time. Yes of course. Even right now. But over the last four months, Terry had been very helpful filling him in on Bowers’s past, and Shade believed he had a better punishment than death for Agent Bowers: fear.
Make him live in fear.
As the last photo printed, he scrawled a note, “I’m still here.-
Shade.” Then he opened the envelope, slipped the note and the photos inside, and sealed it shut.
Yes. Let Bowers live in fear. And Shade already knew the best way to do that. Terry had told him the secret last month.
Let Bowers face his past. Let him face the mirror image of himself-Richard Devin Basque.
Shade double-checked the Denver address and dropped the letter into the mailbox beside the Mission Bay parking lot. It wouldn’t be difficult to get Basque declared “not guilty” at that fiasco of a trial in Chicago. Buy off a few jurors. Hardly a challenge at all.
Then he’d deliver Agent Bowers to Basque and let him do what he did best.
“Bring it on,” huh, Bowers?
All right. If you insist.
Then the ex-CIA assassin Sebastian Taylor smiled, lit a cigarette, and strolled through the cryptic moonlight to his car, thinking of fear.
The best punishment of all.