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WHEN JACK WAS shown into his room, the housekeeper was just finishing up, brisk and efficient as she went about her duties.

Petite, dark of hair, and sweet of face, she made fleeting eye contact with him before quickly dropping her eyelids and staring at the clunky white-as-white athletic shoes adorning her elfin feet. Her legs were like a ballerina’s, shapely and lengthy, toned and elegant, and moving airily. She wore a turquoise dress whose color matched the endless sea visible beyond the slider doors at her back. Faded by many washings, the dress was paired with a prim white collar laced about the rounded edges. The uniform made her seem prudish. She was anything but prudish. Her chest heaved with expectation. Despite her evident youth and her humble wariness, this unassuming island girl, her oval face dusted with a light sheen of perspiration, gave him a quick discerning glance before looking away. Cunning lay behind those eyes. Obedient as a child under his concentrated stare, she finished doing her small nitpicking tasks before curtseying and dashing from the room, the latch clicking whisper-quiet behind her. She left behind a distinctive fragrance of sweet femininity.

Jack stared at the sealed door without thought or feeling. Every door that sealed him inside a one-room enclosure of limited dimensions reduced him to a prisoner again. He closed the distance between himself and the door and threw it open just to make sure it wasn’t locked, an obsessive-compulsive behavior he was given to these days. The girl was gone and the corridor empty.

An express courier envelope had been waiting for him when he registered under the name John Fox. He opened it now. It contained important documents he would need later. He tucked it into his backpack.

He had begun to trust his instincts and to listen to his niggling suspicions. He had to. They were his custodians of the keep, standing guard against danger. Whether real or imagined, he heeded the warnings. He had become acutely alert to the dog whistles that sounded from time to time, and immediately dissected these transient moments with observation and deduction, thinking back to words said or not said, actions made or not made, even heeding the insubstantial sensations that came to him like the howling of a coyote on a cold winter’s night. He was used to analyzing facts and data. Now he was exercising a different part of his brain, the part that relied on feelings and emotions, the part he denied for most of his adult life. If a man’s mind cries wolf a hundred times and on the hundredth time, the wolf is real, then it’s worth getting out the bow and arrow and preparing for battle rather than dismissing the warning and thinking about what to eat for dinner.

He turned his attention to the ceiling and walls, searching for bugs, cameras, and wires, and detected nothing suspicious. The room was clean and tidy. The view from the windows enticing. The pool deck and distant shoreline beckoning.

He called the desk and spoke to the clerk, telling him there was a cockroach in the bathroom and the room would not do. He also wanted a suite. Fifteen minutes later he was shown into an upgraded room, one with a better ocean view, away from the pool, and including a ground-level veranda, perfect for quick egress but also subject to easier break-ins. It was a compromise but one worth taking. He checked out this room as he had the other, looking for surveillance devices, and again found nothing odd. Still, it felt safer. He went by his guts.

He gave into weariness, stretched out on the king-size bed, and stared at the ceiling, formulating plans.

He came to the Grand Caymans to pick up the money trail. Fifty million dollars had been stolen from four stateside brokerages, wired to the British-based Hertford’s bank in the name of John Jackson Finlay, and dispersed to several other offshore banks until nothing was left but the equivalent of a hundred thousand American dollars. He was here to put his hands on that money, but also to gather any information that might lead him to the conspirators who set him up for the fall.

If his theory was correct, four or five mercenaries united for a single operation and dispersed to the winds, each taking a cut of the fifty million and each planning to idle away the rest of their lives on wine, lovers, and song, something Jack would like to do, except for one thing. At any moment, he could be taken into custody, extradited back to the States, and locked away for the rest of his life for a crime he did not commit. If he could not exonerate himself, restore the honor of his family name, and return to the company of righteous men, he might as well take a bullet to the brain.

He had been accused of killing his one-time girlfriend. Milly was a silly girl most of the time but was silly no longer since she was buried in the family plot back in Pennsylvania. Like Jack, she came to Washington with high ambitions and lofty goals. By working for a secretive government agency as a security analyst, she had a bright future ahead of her. Now she had no future except the darkness of a grave.

In jail, Jack wrote a letter to her folks. It was a difficult letter to write. It tore out his guts. How can you explain to grieving parents that the corpse of their beloved daughter was found in your bed, but you were not the one to bring her there nor do you recollect anything of her demise? It was just as inconceivable to him as it would have been to them. He showed it to his criminal defense attorney and asked for his advice. Devlin advised him to tear it up and flush it down the toilet. “Better yet, give it to me, and I’ll flush it down the toilet, just to make sure you don’t hang yourself in court.”

He gave it to him. But the words he had written were indelibly etched in his mind. I once loved Milly, and though our love died, I would never hurt your daughter. I don’t know who killed her, but I’m going to find out who did. Words of solace. Words that would give them little comfort. Empty words.

Yet he was responsible for her death. He hadn’t killed her with the garrote that snuffed out her life. But he had gotten her killed by snooping around and asking too many questions. Seeking to expose covert operations carried on by the Homeland Intelligence Division in partnership with other government agencies, and believing he could beat them at their own game, he acted like a comic book hero, here to save the day. For HID and its partners, nothing was off limits, from wholesale data collection all the way to assassination, kidnapping, rendition, brainwashing, terrorism, torture, and foreign insurgencies. If only he had been more careful, if only he hadn’t treated it like a game, Milly would still be alive today. And he would be a free man without a target on his back.

Life imprisonment for a crime he did not commit wasn’t a choice. Unless he could gaze at the sky and watch the graceful soaring of a hawk and hear its stirring cries, he would wither to a shell of man and die from the inside out. The blood of his Apache ancestors cried out for vengeance. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and blood for blood. If Jack could not get retribution in this life, he would have to get it in the next. His soul wouldn’t rest until he did.

Determined to track down the black ops cell who targeted him and Milly, he set before him the idea of picking them off one by one. Of getting even. Of making them pay. The idea turned into a plan. The plan turned into action. It was either him or them. If he was going to emerge on the other side a whole man, he had to put aside his innate goodness, his honorable upbringing, and the inbred moral core that put him on the side of virtue. He had to turn himself into a ruthless killing machine.

It wasn’t all about vigilante justice, though. It was about bringing out the truth. And finding the one man or one woman who put out the order, and then making them pay.

The hotel room was closing in on him. He escaped through the patio door and raced down to the beach, a man on fire. The water was cool, the sun scorching, the breezes strong, and the waves pounding. He arose from the sea renewed and strolled along the shore, plotting and scheming, and dreaming of plunging the knife of revenge into the backs of his enemies.

Calculation has a logic to it much like the Pythagorean theorem, or Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the coding of software. Cunning, though, had nothing to do with logic. Jack had to win ... they had to lose. A simple equation that came down to outfoxing, outflanking, and outmaneuvering every one of the bastards who did this to him. Then taking them down one by one. And finally, preparing himself for anything, including the possibility of his own death. It would be a risk worth taking and sacrifice worth making.