Page 1 of The Fourth Option
PROLOGUE
Quinault Indian Nation, Washington State, Pacific Coast
Present Day
THE PISTOL INChris Walker’s hand felt heavier than he remembered.
The 1911 was as familiar to him as the tendons that moved his fingers, an extension of training and instinct. But this evening, the steel felt colder. The grip, rougher.
Combat altered the senses. Elevated them. It sharpened sight, amplified sound, magnified scent; ancient survival mechanisms etched into the human genome. But that was the kinetic kind. In that type of fight, muscles moved before the mind caught up.
This was a different battle, one that required thought. And with that thought came the weight.
Sitting on the rear built-in sofa of his customized ’84 Volkswagen Westfalia Vanagon, parked on a bluff in the rain overlooking the rough waters of the Pacific, Walker pressed the cold steel of the 1911’s barrel to his temple.
This was the edge of the abyss, and Walker’s senses were in hyperdrive.
The round Navy Chelsea clock bolted above the bookshelf ticked with surgical precision. He had salvaged it during a wreck dive off Algeria with a few buddies from his first SEAL platoon and had it restored by a Swiss watchmaker who had once repaired timepieces for submariners. Now it clacked like a metronome. A steady drip from the cedar bough over the van’s roof snapped like a snare drum. Rain lashed the side windows in gusts, the hiss of cymbals in a storm-born symphony. Beneath it all, the ocean’s bass drum rolled, deep, patient, eternal.
If he weren’t about to end his life, Walker might have tapped his foot to it.
He had always felt alive when listening to the crashing waves, howling wind, and torrential rain of the Pacific Northwest, preferring it to the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan. He shifted the pistol fromthe side of his head and repositioned it under his chin. If he was going to take his life, it was going to be with a 1911 and not the Austrian-made Glock he had carried across continents, through wars, and into the shadows as a paramilitary officer in the CIA’s Ground Branch.
Afghanistan was where he had failed, and now it was time to join the friend he was responsible for putting in the grave. He imagined the bullet going through the roof of his mouth and tearing through his brain, perhaps embedding itself in the thin mattress of the pop-top. Walker wanted the shot to blend into the natural symphony, one more beat in time. He could hear it all now, the waves, the rain, the staccato drip from the cedar bough.
Thunder.
It didn’t roll in. It crashed, abrupt and graceless, like a mortar round landing too close. It shattered the rhythm, tore through the fragile harmony of the forest like shrapnel.
Then it passed.
Walker exhaled. He lowered the pistol to his lap, waiting for the rhythm to return.
It was important that he die in the proper rhythm.
A flip phone sat open on the table in front of him. He reached for it with his left hand, his thumb hovering over the power button, waiting for the right moment.
The wind rocked his home on wheels, the rain pounded harder. Walker looked up at the headliner of the old Vanagon, marveling at how the pop-top camper wasn’t leaking. Having served in tropical hellholes and frozen wastelands, crossed squalling seas and spiny mountain ridges, he had never heard precipitation like this.
Enough.
His thumb stabbed the phone’s power button. He closed his eyes and pressed the phone to his ear, waiting for it to find a signal.
Then came the bark, sharp, guttural, urgent.Paladin.
Walker opened his eyes. Thunder cracked again. Paladin, his Belgian Malinois, a veteran of countless explosive door breaches and firefights, was going berserk. The dog howled, snarled, and clawed at the door, defying all his training. He had never done that before.
Damn it.
Not only was the rhythm off now, but Walker couldn’t stop thinking of Paladin. It was bad enough to leave the dog outside, even if he was protected by the awning.
Fuck.
He swiveled the Vanagon’s compact table aside and got to his feet, leaving the open phone on the cushion, powered up, and placed the pistol on the cutting board that covered the sink in the port-side galley kitchen. He would calm Paladin, say one more goodbye, then make the call and finish what he started.
His beard hid an angular jaw. It was highlighted with hints of gold that differentiated it from his greasy blond hair. An ex-girlfriend and undergraduate creative writing major at NYU had once told him that his hair was the color of wheat and that his eyes reminded her of a cloudless summer afternoon. She had gone on to write poetry.
Walker wasn’t a tall man. People called him rangy because of his wiry build and the distant look in his eyes, the gaze that most said was a function of his former vocation, Navy SEAL turned CIA operator.
