“Yes, but disguises can...”
“Well, disguises. You know how we feel about disguises.”
“Yes, but...”
“Mind you,” Arthur said gently, “we know it wasn’t your fault. Things simply didn’t work out the way we’d hoped they would, hmm?”
“That’s why I...”
“You mustn’t think your efforts weren’t...”
“But I really would like the opportunity to...”
“Yes, well...”
“... serve again, to do the job properly this time.”
“Well, that’s quite impossible,” Arthur said.
And suddenly there was a pistol in his hand.
Sonny blinked.
Arthur shrugged somewhat sorrowfully.
There was a silencer on the gun’s muzzle; this would be swift and soundless.
“Why?” Sonny asked. “Because I failed?”
“No, no,” Arthur said. “It would have been the same either way.”
“Either...?”
Sonny’s eyes narrowed in total understanding.
He sprang at once.
It was one thing to die in the service of God and country, but it was quite another to die the way he now realized the two women had died. Total anonymity, Arthur had told him. Claim no credit, expect no retaliation. If there were no surviving links to Scimitar...
He was not two feet from the muzzle of the pistol, his arm swinging in the backhanded deflecting swipe he’d been taught at Kufra — when Arthur fired. The first muffled shot took Sonny just below his nose, shattering the gum ridge and exploding from the back of his head. The second shot took him just above his Adam’s apple as he fell over backward, his head tilting upward, his throat exposed. Arthur fired two more bullets into his lifeless body where it lay on the floor before the windows streaming late afternoon sunlight.
He tucked the pistol into his waistband, and looked down at Sonny one last time.
“It is written on our foreheads,” he whispered.
And left.