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Since so much of his face was covered, it was difficult to guess his age.  When he spoke his voice was unusually deep and contained the hint of an accent I was unable to place, though I thought it likely to be from somewhere in the Middle East.
     
    “I’ll stay here Mac, first watch tonight.  You sleep, gather your strength for tomorrow morning’s meeting.”
     
    Mac looked over at me and then back at the bearded man.
     
    “Afrim, did you just call me a tired old man?”
     
    The man whose name I now knew to be Afrim brought both his hands up shaking them from side to side in an apologetic gesture.
     
    “No-no-no Mac, I simply, I am here to assist you.  I will be the first watch so that you, your guest…so you may sleep and be well rested for tomorrow.  It may be…it may be the last night’s rest you get for awhile Mac.  Yes?”
     
    “Shit Afrim, no need to apologize.  I AM a tired old man.  A good night’s rest?  Thank you for the offer.  You got your gun on you?”
     
    “Oh yes – always.”
     
    “Ok then, me and my friend here are gonna go back to my office.  I’m going to send out the high alert communication.  You still want to do the interview?”
     
    I was shocked Mac was interested in continuing the interview so soon after what had just taken place following Carol Denny’s arrival, but nodded my head to him.
     
    “Yeah, absolutely.  If you have the time, you bet.”
     
    “Ok then, Afrim, the floor is yours.  You need anything, come get me.”
     
    And with that, as the daylight outside turned to darkness, I followed Mackenzie Walker back down to his office.  Mac’s steps were quick and confident, his posture suggesting a man with few worries even as he prepared for what Officer Denny warned was the now seemingly inevitable destruction of Dominatus, Alaska.
     
     
    III.
     
     
    The conversation with Mac had left off with my asking him the details of his arrest and conviction for deadly assault with a banned weapon – his MK-25 handgun.  Mac had said the actual conviction had nothing to do with his use of deadly force on that day, but rather had everything to do with what he knew, or what powerful figures within the emerging world government thought he knew, about the Benghazi Massacre of 2012. 
     
    Once again I turned my recording device on.
     
    “I had pulled into a station to gas up.  I was…was still doing a bit of contract work here and there to make ends meet, domestic stuff, but the jobs were drying up.  Nobody wanted me.  Like I said, there were four of us, and at that time it was down to just two – me and Benny.  Jack, Jay…they were already gone by then.  The walls were closing in.  I knew it, and figured my time was coming.”
     
    “Just like that, you were just waiting to be taken out?”
     
    Mac pointed back to the photo of himself and his three now deceased special ops comrades.
     
    “Each of them in their own way was as good as me, maybe better.  So if they were taken out, I didn’t harbor any thoughts I was going to end up any different.  I was ready to put up a fight, but if they wanted me gone, I figured there wasn’t much to be done about it.  We knew too much, and that kind of knowledge, little guys like me, we tend to go bye-bye.”
     
    “So what happened that day at the gas station, the day you killed that man?”
     
    Mac removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes before putting them back on, his stare returning to the wall of photos.
     
    “I pulled in, saw a large black man beating a woman.  Black woman.  He was beating the shit out of her too.  Closed fist.   Had her by the hair, screaming down at her.  I could see her mouth was all busted up, an eye that looked like it might be ready to pop out of her head.  Not a pretty sight.  I’d seen a lot worse, but not stateside.  That guy was going to kill her right there in the parking lot.  So I just did what comes natural in that situation…what I was trained to do.