​How Much is Owed to the Dead?

​The Hollow Man     |     The Hollow Man Series, International Espionage​

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How much is owed to the dead?

The question tumbled through my brain as I stood in the dimly lit room. My gaze slowly pulled away from the lifeless body sprawled on the cold floor. The decay of death mixed with the bite of gunpowder still lingered in the air. The two smells together were like no other; so familiar in my dreams, yet impossible to describe to anyone who had never been closer than twenty meters to the day-old dead.

Silence enveloped the room, except for the steady hum of a flickering overhead fluorescent light. I picked up the Walther P38 next to the body, the weight of it a familiar comfort. I had seen too many bodies, so many lives extinguished in the shadows of terrorism. But this one was different. This one cut to the soul, striking at the core of existence.

The fallen friend lying here was Bobby; a classmate, a colleague, a confidante. We had traversed the treacherous paths of covert operations together, navigating a world of secrets and deception. We had laughed, we had fought, and we had saved each other's lives more times than either of us knew.

I counted seventeen bullet holes. My eyes narrowed as I surveyed the scene, my mind racing to piece together the fragments of this grim Picasso painting. Bobby was no ordinary casualty of point and counterpoint. He had stumbled upon something that had exploded in his face and there was no do-over. We flew under the radar of east-west détente, down where the shadows complicated the lines between light and dark, right and wrong, truth and lie. That’s where we searched for those who would be martyrs in a limited universe of want to, need to, and had to do.

I had warned him. I preached exit plans and always having one. I told him it was time for us to head home. I said it was somebody else’s problem now. But he had needed to return to Chicago with a win to tell all the homies there; stubborn, hard-headed. For all his grifting and living on the fringe, Bobby possessed an unyielding conviction to do what was right. And now here he was, looking up at me through the lightless vacuum of death’s long, quiet night.

Bobby was no longer laying there. What I saw now was a simple browned cocoon that had burst open to free the soul’s flight. A mixture of anger and sorrow flared like adrenaline inside me. My heart pounded with fierce determination to make them pay, but I knew that wasn’t right. They would pay for exposing both sides against the middle, for every action and thought that caused harm to innocence. It was time to hunt.​