Epilogue
Former Onyx Facility
Montana, United States
Several Months Later
Mia Hernandez sat in silence, her hands resting flat on the steel table in front of her.
The room was small and cold, its walls painted in white that caught the fluorescent light above.
There was nothing on the table. Nothing on the walls either.
There was just the buzz of the overhead lighting fixture and the sound of her own breathing.
She touched the scar on her cheek. She didn’t do it out of habit, but she did it to remind herself how close she’d come to dying that night. What was left of her original face had been taken apart and rebuilt, bone by bone and nerve by nerve. She thought the surgeons had done good work.
No. They did excellent work, she corrected herself.
Although the mirror showed her someone new and still unfamiliar, it was still the real her underneath.
She remembered the sound of the bullet, the flash, the world going black.
She remembered the smell of blood and smoke.
And she remembered Richard Anderson’s eyes right before he pulled the trigger.
He had bested her, so she respected him.
She meant him no harm. She wouldn’t seek revenge.
He’d only protected his family. Like any good man would do.
She should have died that night. But she didn’t. She remembered waking up in darkness, unable to speak. There had been tubes in her throat and pain coming from everywhere. Weeks had passed in fragments, until finally, Samantha Ranger had appeared.
“You’re very lucky,” she’d said to Mia. “But luck will only get you so far now.”
Ranger had paid the hospital bills. All of them. And then she’d shown Mia the file about the Fisherman’s death. Mia had trusted Mpassi. She had killed for him. But he had used her, lied to her.
Lied to us!
Because the Fisherman had also trusted Mpassi, and it had cost him his life. It had almost cost her hers.
In the end, Mpassi had left her to die.
Ranger hadn’t.
For the last several months, Mia had been training, sometimes day and night.
Her instructors—men and women who didn’t ask questions and who didn’t care about her past—taught her everything she needed to know to succeed in her new position.
At first, she’d believed it would be a repeat of the training she’d been through with Unit 777 in Egypt, but that thought didn’t last long.
The training regimen she’d just gone through ended up being exponentially more difficult than anything she’d ever done.
Still, she’d aced everything. When the instructors told her it was finally over, she didn’t smile. She didn’t feel triumphant. She wasn’t trying to prove anything. She just wanted purpose.
And now, it seemed it had arrived.
The door to the room opened, and Samantha Ranger stepped in. She held a small folder in her hand. She didn’t sit. “I heard you passed. Congratulations.”
Mia said nothing.
Ranger placed the folder on the table and slid it across. “Details of your first mission.”
Mia opened the file. Her eyes moved across the photo clipped at the top of the dossier. It was an older picture, but she recognized the man.
Charles Mpassi.
“He’s in Kinshasa,” Ranger said. “He’s under protection, but he’s not unreachable.”
Mia nodded once. “Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me,” Ranger replied. “I told you that if you made it through my program, I’d give you your shot at redemption. So, I’m only fulfilling my end of the deal.”
Ranger started to turn, then stopped and looked back. “One more thing.”
Mia met her eyes.
“Your new call sign,” Ranger said. “From this moment on . . . you’re Elias.”