Evil must be obliterated.
I learned those words at my father’s knee. I was taught to use them in prayer and in worship, but I never found them particularly useful in the day-to-day world. At least not until now.
Certainly, I have seen evil. Ever since childhood, I have known it for what it was, but what can a child do against utter darkness?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
To successfully strike out against evil requires an adult’s ability to plan. It requires an adult understanding of the world as it is, and it requires an adult’s craving for a different world, one that makes sense.
Like most things in this flawed and nonsensical world, it requires cold, hard cash.
Still, I have done it. I acquired the cash. I formulated the plan. I implemented the plan, manipulating a doomed man into believing that he was going to take down the freaking IRS with a wholly inadequate bomb. I successfully implemented every step of my plan, even to the point of wandering around underground.
All along, I pretended to get my orders from some unnamed commander. Lonnie never bothered to hide the fact that he thought I was stupid, when he was the most demonstrably stupid person in his own life. And now, at the end, he came close to killing innocent people because he failed to follow through on the single task I gave him to do. Now I am burdened with cleaning up the mess he left behind and making certain that no clues remain to lead the FBI to me or to the innocents I must protect.
Despite these concerns, I must pause for a moment and allow myself some self-praise. I have obliterated the evil that has shadowed my entire life.
And yet there is still evil. I sit, even now, with a newspaper draped across my lap like an apron, and its pages are drenched with evil. The faces of refugees, some of them children and all of them hungry, look out of its pages. Wounded civilians limp across those pages. Beside them are wounded soldiers with very young faces who deserve to be at home with their families. I see photos of mass murderers, corrupt government officials, petty thieves, and I don’t know how to obliterate them all. I have only ever known how to obliterate the one evil man, and I have done it. I have nothing left but emptiness.
Now what?