1

There is no end of me, Abner Brown had mocked minutes before he injected himself with the deadly overdose of insulin. I ve seen to that! There never will be.

I took those words then to be more of the braggadocio the diabolical Texas billionaire had been spouting ever since I dumped on his desk the files I said I would deliver the next day to the U.S. attorney. Files certain to put Abner behind bars for the rest of his life, or on death row if they helped prove that he had used interstate means to commission murders. Words I was glad to forget. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that he was insane.

But I am getting ahead of my story. My name is Jack Dana. I am a former Marine Corps Infantry officer and a graduate of its toughest combat schools. The Force Recon platoon I commanded was on patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, near Delaram, when a Taliban sniper got me. His bullet did serious damage to my pelvis. It took a good deal of time and surgeons skill to make me almost as good as new, although not good enough for active duty with Corps Infan-try. When Walter Reed Army Medical Center finally released me, I could have gone back to the fancy academic career on which I had embarked before 9/11 and before I decided to join the marines so as not to leave the fighting to poor saps who hadn t had my sort of privileged upbringing and didn t know any better. But while in the hospital, I began writing about what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been like, and what they had done to my men and me. Completing that book became my only goal. I did finish it, living in New York with my uncle Harry Dana, a prominent lawyer who was like a father to me. Closer to me than my real father. He was also the last living member of my family. My book turned out to be an immediate success; the advance I received, the royal-ties that followed, the sale of the movie rights, and the bonus to which I became entitled when the movie turned out to be a runaway hit all made me rich. The novels that followed were almost equally successful.

So without my having planned it, writing became my profession.

Once again, I m getting ahead of the story. Soon after my first book came out, while I was vacationing in Brazil on a fazenda without Internet or cell-phone connection, my uncle Harry was murdered. The murder, disguised as a suicide by hanging, was committed by a hit man called Slobo commis-sioned by Abner Brown, who had been Harry s principal client. The following day, the same hit man killed Harry s longtime secretary. He pushed her under a subway train. I avenged those murders, as well as the murder, months later, of Kerry Black, my uncle s favorite associate and later young partner, who had helped me get the goods on Brown, the file I gave to the U.S. attorney that led to Abner s ultimate defeat. We had fallen in love passionately, but she dumped me after I killed Slobo instead of only disabling that thug and turn-ing him over to the police. It was murder that Kerry told me I d committed, and not homicide in legitimate self-defense. Poor Kerry! Abner did not forget the role she played in help-ing me assemble the dossier laying bare his criminal affair. He had her murdered too, murder disguised this time as her hav-ing overdosed on a lethal mixture of drugs.

I was not able to kill Kerry s assassin. Abner had him murdered before I could find him. But once I knew that thug was dead, once I had seen Abner give himself that fatal injection, I stopped thinking about Abner and his crimes. I was tired. Tired of Abner and of the killing I d done to even the score with him and to stop his hit men, of whom he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, from killing me. Yes, the wounds I had suffered in the encounter with the last of that lot had healed, but even flesh wounds that require only minimal surger