new levels. They were lessons Reece would never forget.
Reece glanced at his feet and moved them into a perfect neutral stance, his back foot just slightly off centerline, then adjusted his grip.
The shot begins and ends in your hand.
Going through his shot routine focused his mind and emptied it of thoughts that would interrupt the process and therefore disrupt the flight of the arrow. Reece’s time with the bow was not so much about hitting the target as it was about the discipline of the art. It was a meditative state where any outside influences and distractions ceased to exist. There was no murdered wife and child, no mission of vengeance, no brain tumor, no dead teammates; no past, no future, no betrayal. There was only the now; the flow of the process. The discipline. There was only the shot.
Reece raised his front shoulder, locking it forward and down for stability before slowly pulling the seventy-four pounds of PSE’s EVO NTN to full draw. He then anchored his drawing hand lightly against his cheek, his eye moving to the round peep sight, aligning his front pin in its center, the tip of his nose just barely touching the string. His sight pin was in a slow, effortless float on the kill zone as he eased his thumb to the trigger of the Nock2It release. This was a moment of solitude. The focus was bliss.
As with the many rifle shots he’d taken in training and combat, at his natural respiratory pause he executed, the tension from his back and shoulder naturally flowing through his arm to his thumb on the release, transferring the bow’s potential energy into kinetic energy and into the arrow as the cams returned the string to its neutral state.
Just before the shot broke, the elk target transformed into someone Reece had only seen in surveillance photos, a short man with a stainless steel watch. A man Reece was going to kill.
It was as if Reece’s bow had fired itself. He followed through just as he would with a rifle, the arrow rotating flawlessly, finding its mark almost half a football field away. He was in the zone. It was effortless, perfection. He repeated the process five more times before moving downrange to collect his arrows. This ritual had become part of his morning routine. This was his meditation. Now, with a clear mind, he would move forward and continue to recover. The scars on his head were not the only ones healing. The emotional strain and trauma of the past two years needed to heal as well. Reece knew those kinds of wounds have the tendency to fester and tear, and would be felt long after the incisions on his scalp were a distant memory.
CHAPTER 16
Saint Petersburg, Russia
IT SEEMED AS THOUGH the CIA had half of the nation on the payroll. Contract employees were making big money working overseas gigs. When the military drew down their footprint in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and Colombia, they filled the void with experienced special operators. Men who could train, equip, and lead local “indig” units against America’s enemies. Some did it for the money, some in the name of patriotism, and some because they simply couldn’t let go of the action. Whatever their motivation, they were invaluable tools in the fight and the government paid them accordingly.
He had reached the last financial institution on his list: Flathead Bank & Trust. The monotony of these searches had nearly lulled his mind into complacency, but now was not the time for that. He was running out of patience when he needed it most. The checking account in question was owned by HDI, LLC, which appeared to be a holding company with numerous accounts, many of which held significant amounts of money. The account in question received two direct deposits every month: one from the Agency and a second from the Department of Defense that appeared to be the appropriate monthly sum of a retirement payment for a prior-enlisted O-4 with twenty years of service. He worked with renewed focus.
What, or who, was HDI, though?
Grey found scans of closing documents on the website of the Flathead County treasurer in the name of HDI, Hastings Diversified Investments, signed by its president, a man named Jonathan Hastings. A web search of that name brought up numerous results, most of them associated with Hastings’s various landholdings. Jonathan Hastings was on the board of directors of the Montana Cattleman’s Association, the Montana Outfitters