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accident, were finally hoping to find time to enjoy life a little for themselves.
    His hair was still mostly black, his skin the unmistakable shade of brown of a man who spent a lot of time on tanning beds. Apart from the crow's feet at the corners of his blue eyes, he had a well-structured face and a square jaw with prominent cheekbones which had certainly helped him win over the attention of the opposite sex when he was a much younger, more promiscuous individual before he had chosen to settle down and start a family of his own. People often asked him how, with such a stressful job, he managed to retain his looks. He would respond with a shrug and tell them he was just lucky. The truth was, he had learned some years ago that the key had been to distance himself from the human aspect of his chosen line of employment. It was much easier to make a decision to send a team in to clear a building that was full of hostages if the actual hostages were thought of as statistics rather than people. Most of the time, he got it right. Sometimes it went wrong. He learned he could live with that just as long as his actions meant the country was safe again. However when it went wrong, the consequences were harder to deal with. Despite how he knew his colleagues perceived him – they called him the director of death behind his back - he didn't like to see people die, it was just an unfortunate side effect of the responsibilities he had as director. The cold harsh truth was that every operation involving extreme acts of terrorism carried with it a certain risk to the lives of both innocent civilians and the teams sent in to deal with whatever issue they were facing. He knew it when he took the job, and it hadn't changed since. He had learned to accept that saving lives sometimes came with the cost of innocent deaths. Usually, he got it right.  Sometimes, a situation got so horribly out of control that even he, as detached as he had learned to be, had been affected.
    Just thinking about it brought images of the past swimming out of the darkness of his mind's eye like phantoms chipping away at the wall he had built around his conscience just as fast as he could add to the defences. One image took precedence, one which hadn't been easy to forget. It all started with a man, a Polish immigrant called Greg who, after coming home early to find his long-term girlfriend in bed with another man, threatened to kill them both. When his girlfriend laughed at him and told him he didn’t have the guts, Greg grabbed the illegally purchased shotgun from the trunk of his car and went straight to the elementary school where his son, Petr, was unaware that his father was about to make a life-changing decision. Greg entered the school, taking over sixty children hostage and barricading them and himself into the hall. Police were called, social media exploded, and before long, everybody was tuned into the ongoing siege at West Millburn Elementary School. Normally, such an incident would be a job for local authorities, however, Greg made one vital error. Frightened and realising he had gone too far, he grew desperate enough to do anything to stop the police from storming the school and shooting him dead. He sent one of the children out with a message to relay to the authorities, telling them that he had planted bombs all over the city which he would remotely detonate if anyone made a move against him. That statement, broadcast all over national, ensured that Marcus was notified. Anyone claiming to have planted explosives, no matter the motive, immediately became a threat to national security. Worse news for Greg was that his son, Petr, wasn’t even in school on the day his father had decided to go to the extreme level he had due to a sickness bug. Greg’s girlfriend, who had already made plans to take the day off work and spend the afternoon screwing the next door neighbour had shipped Petr off to spend the day with his grandmother. Without his son on hand and