Read Swords of Exodus [Dead Six 02] for Free Online Page B

so I could see it.
    “Do you know this man, Mr. Lorenzo?”
    I looked at the picture on the screen. My eyes narrowed. “Yeah . . . I know him.”
    Ling leaned forward. “One life for another. Your brother is an honorable man, Mr. Lorenzo. I want no harm to come to him. Right now, my people are doing everything they can to locate him. But your brother insisted that finding this man was more important than his own safety. Please. We need your help.”
    I glanced down at the image again. A young man, with a young face, but hard eyes. His hair had been shaved off, and his face was crisscrossed with scars. As a matter of fact, I’d given him one of those scars.
    Valentine.

    VALENTINE
    Location Unknown
    Date/Time Unknown

    You’re a natural-born killer, boy.
    Hawk had said that. I found myself thinking about his words and that day I first met him in Afghanistan. It had been a bad day but it changed me, set me on the path that I’d walked ever since . . . a long, winding, bloody path that ended with me in a small, windowless cell.
    Sitting against the wall, I stared blankly into space. Footsteps would occasionally echo from the hallway outside my door. Every so often an ancient industrial heater would come on, filling the hall with a dull roar while it ran and kicking up small clouds of dust from the vents. Fluorescent lights buzzed unendingly; they never turned them off. I didn’t know if it was night or day. I could sometimes hear voices from outside, but I was never directly spoken to while I was in this room. I wasn’t allowed to speak. If I made noise, they came in and sedated me, or worse. So I sat quietly, back to the wall, and lost myself in thought.
    I didn’t know where I was, exactly. It was cold, and there were thick pine forests in every direction. I had been outside a few times. It may have been on a mountaintop somewhere, or up in Alaska. I had no real way of keeping track of time. This had to be intentional. I didn’t know how many days, or weeks or months, I’d been in this place, but I grew increasingly certain that I would never leave. I knew that there was more snow on the ground the last time I’d been outside than there was the first time they’d let me out, so it was probably winter.
    Of course, they hadn’t let me out in a while, as part of my punishment for stabbing one of the guards in the knee with a pen.
    Despite ending up in prison, I didn’t regret knowing Hawk. The man was like a father to me, and I hadn’t even known I’d been lost before I met him. I joined the military because I just didn’t know what else to do with myself, volunteered for Afghanistan for the same reason.
    My time with Vanguard Strategic Services International was something of a blur now, even though my career had lasted nearly five years. The deployments were all different, but they were all the same, too. We fought for the people who could afford to pay us in wars the rest of the world generally didn’t care about. Others fought for duty, honor, and country. We fought because it was our job.
    I was good at it. It’s what I’m best at. A natural-born killer. Deep down, I’d always known. I killed my first man as a teenager. I grew up that day. I changed. And I knew I was different. I began to look at the people around me the way a wolf looks at a herd of deer.
    Somehow I held on. My teammates kept me sane. We went through a lot of bad days and a lot of good ones. We fought together, partied together, and mourned our dead together. I traveled all over the world, and was paid a lot of money for what I did.
    It all came crashing down in Mexico. Only three of us survived that mission, and our employer was forced out of business. My entire life was gone in the span of a couple of days.
    I tried. I tried to return home, to the US, and get a regular job. I tried to live my life as a respectable citizen. I did that for almost a year, and I was completely miserable. Restless, disconnected from the people around me.