Dark Market

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The dream woke Savage. He stared at the air con unit on the wall trying to remember. A woman's face, no body, a fall from height, a whisper in his ear.

'Why did you kill me?'

Just thinking of the voice made the hairs on his arms stand on end.

His eyes played over his room on base. Fresh carnage made it seem like the first time. It always did. Home for too long, he could leave everything behind in a moment. His only real needs cash, passport and a gun.

It also doubled as his office. In or out at any time of day or night, he didn't necessarily want anyone else knowing what he was up to. It had been used for interrogation, more than once. The echoes lingered.

A divider in the middle of the room kept his bunk and personal effects segregated. A bowl for washing in, some pictures on the walls. The colours in every picture: white on black with red somewhere in the background. The subject, always the same thing. The silhouette or shadow of a man seen from a distance. Different poses, positions and actions, but always the same faceless icon.

He didn't know why he liked it, somehow it just resonated.

On the other side was the office. Books and files on the wall, wide open desk, clean apart from computer screen and keyboard and the laptop plugged into them. Stacked paperwork, three folding chairs, lamp, an extra standing fan, for when the air-con packed in.

The dream had left him covered in icy sweat and upright on the bunk in the middle of the night, again. He waited a while longer for the guilty images to come.

Nothing happened. Beta-blockers, it seemed, worked.

If only he'd known about them years ago. Is that what woke him? The years gone by?

He padded over to the desk naked. The bag he'd taken from the dead journalist lay there. He pulled the blind and looked out over the rooftops. The cool night air tickled his skin, caressed aches and pains he hadn't noticed when he'd dragged Andre onto base.

He'd slammed into ex-Colonel Henry's meeting room and dropped the head on the desk with a cheery, 'Mission accomplished. One good man wounded, one scared man standing, permission to pass out, sir?' He'd fired off a mock salute and walked out again.

Henry, his mentor, would kick his arse. The other men around the table had been ex-military too, they liked authority, chain of command, all that.

Savage towed the line for years in his old life, did as he was told, been a good boy. And for what? Grief and heartache.

He'd had principles once.

Only six months after his arrival, a trophy video appeared on the company website. Bored operators with little experience shooting out civilian cars, killing Ahmed Bloggs to test their mettle, sometimes just for fun. The local police nearly started a minor war in retaliation.

Henry's hatchets came out. Savage one of them, Andre another. When they took the men's trigger fingers and gifted them to the local captain it never happened again. Not on this base.

Live by your principles Savage thought. Where the hell are they now?

He seized the journalist's bag, took out the journal and recorder, pressed 'play all files'.

The first recording was just the white noise of someone trying to figure out how to use the thing, followed by a woman's muffled voice.

He flipped open the journal. Every page thick with writing. Lots of different jobs. She'd been an immaculate reporter. Everything had a date, story name and location on it. The latest entry, July 14th, Press Con, 'Reconstruction Successes', US Army. Side interview: Abdul Dawood, Ministry of Information. Her clear soft voice came on the recording.