(Authors Note-- This is a one part story, so if you're wondering about the length, I decided against breaking it up into chapters. All you action-types will find that I don't waste much time jumping into the heat of things. Also, this story is dedicated to all the men and women who have surrendered their lives in a silent underground war.)

The Road to Redemption

Rain splattered against the black Honda’s windshield. The headlights of oncoming traffic flooded the interior of the driver’s seat and lit up the rugged features of the driver. His dark hair in disarray and his unshaven face made obvious the fact that he had not just awoken to enjoy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. His hazel eyes gazed out intently through the rain, vacant and glazed over. He’d shed his tears for a week. He’d suffered through the pain and loss of logic thoughts. Now only a hardened shell remained. Just a shadow of the man he used to be, a mirror of the warm husband he once was.

Sofia…

The word echoed through his mind, a broken record player to match his broken soul. Traffic became lighter and less hectic as he turned off onto a lonesome exit. Two minutes later, after a series of further maneuverings off to side streets, he found himself on a single road leading into a sleepy town in Fort Meade, Maryland. In this town, within close proximity to Washington D.C, was the Headquarters of the National Security Agency.

He’d made this trip countless times in the past decade. After all, he’d been working for the bastards for eight years. How many times had he strolled in through the glass doors? How many times had he sat quietly in the briefing room on the eighth floor and scribbled notes for his next field assignment? How many times had he signed those godforsaken contracts stating that if he died during a mission, his death would be covered up to divert attention from the United States?

Sofia…

Bill was waiting at the first security post. The burly black man squinted through the downpour. After taking note of the familiar car and its driver, he smiled and waved. Three seconds later, the barrier was up and the car moved on.

The same thing happened at the second outpost. Murray passed him by with a grin and a thumbs-up, hollering after him that they should visit the new bar in town tonight, McHollahans.

A sad thought swept through the man’s mind. None of them know.

How could they? Harvey had buried the secrets a minute after aborting the mission, hadn’t he? The cold-blooded bastard had made sure that there were no links leading back to the NSA. The United States couldn’t be implicated in the disaster. The NSA’s field agents were nothing more than mythical ghosts, capable of being erased from history by the press of a single button.

He parked his car in his reserved spot at the very base of the towering complex. The parking lot was only a quarter full, considering it was Christmas Eve. That wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was that they would be here tonight. And they would be. They never slept. They were the three men who ran the most powerful facility in the world.

Director Sean “Eagle-Eyes” Dunson was the chief of all sectors of intelligence.

Director Dan McGurvy was responsible for matters of security.

Director Samuel Harvey was the head honcho of the NSA, the master designer, God of cloak-and-dagger.

The engine of the Honda groaned and fell silent. Removing the keys, the passenger bent over to the bottom of the adjacent seat and pulled out a black duffel bag. After slipping into his favorite trench coat, a gift from Sofia’s travels to London, he swung the bag over his shoulder and stepped out into the rain.

The gentle waters did nothing to rinse his conscience or cleanse his soul. God had always existed for him, bestowing him with a strong sense of morals, of right from wrong, of good from bad. Sofia had died innocently at the hands of three evil men. Now it was their turn to meet the Creator. He would deliver them.

He walked briskly through the downpour, undisturbed by the soaking rain or the wind which ripped and twisted his coat around him. Through the wide entrance he passed. His footsteps echoed across the marble hall of the empty lobby.

(Sofia, you’re the only person in the world who can steal my breath away. I love you more than life itself. Will you marry me?)

(Oh, Damon, I’m yours forever.)

A youngguard sat on a stool next to a metal detector. Seeing the approaching visitor, he sprang to his feet and said, “ Mr. Leveron? Quite a night to see you out and about.”

“ I’m in kind of a hurry tonight, John,” Damon answered with a false smile. “My wife’s very sick and in the hospital. If you don’t mind, I need to get up to my office and back out as fast as possible.”

John nodded with a worried expression. “ Of course, Mr. Leveron. You go right on around. Sofia’s ill? Please give her my regards. I wish her the best.”

Looking sincere, Damon stepped right around the advanced metal detector and continued onwards. He had always liked John, a good man. The guard was thirty-four years old, certainly not a minor, yet he always referred to Damon as “Mr. Leveron.” It wasn’t because of Damon’s forty-five years as much as it was out of plain respect. A pity that the repercussions of tonight would cost John his job.

Damon whisked through the interior lobby, past the desk where Shelly the secretary gossiped on the phone, past the coffee corner where two men holding steaming cups discussed the latest breakthrough in antiviral technology, past the televisions echoing meaningless commentary from CNN.

His own keycard would no longer work on the door, he knew. Luckily, he had had a friend in security who had lent him another card.

The bulletproof doors to the interior of the complex opened quietly. He stormed down the carpeted hallway to the bathrooms on the right.

They were empty. He entered the furthest stall, locked the door, and unzipped his bag. Digging under a pair of old jeans, he extracted two .45 Caliber Mark 23s, reliable H&K guns, plus two clips of ammunition. His fingers deftly snapped in the clips and then gingerly hid the guns in the interior pockets of his trench coat.

It occurred to him that he’d forgotten the silencers at home. It didn’t matter really. If he was quick and did not dally, he could accomplish his mission tonight.

His hardened fingers touched something soft and tattered in the coat’s left pocket. Carefully, he pulled it out.

Sofia’s beautiful face was grinning up at him from the picture. Written in dark pen in the bottom corner were her lasting words: I’ll love you always, Damon.

He fought back the tears and tucked the photo safely into his breast pocket. With a deep sigh, he rose and exited the bathroom.

The main hallway had only three scientists meandering about. None stopped to talk to him as he made his way to the elevators. Seconds later he was inside one of the lifts.

After registering electronically, he punched in his buddy’s private access code into a keypad, followed by his destination. The elevator then hummed to life and ascended swiftly to the ninth floor. He drew his guns and lowered them against his side.

The doors wheeled open to reveal an abandoned hall. He bounded forward to the far end and wheeled around the corner. In the distance, an office door was closed, but lamp light spilled out through the fogged window. A plate reading Sean Dunson, Director of Intelligence, was engraved into the door.

Dunson was the man responsible for engineering the operation which had led Sofia to her death. He was the man who’d decided that the only way to deal with the nuclear terror of North Korea was to assassinate its brutal leader, Kim Jong-Il. He was the man who had pressed the “Abort” button in a mad panic when Sofia had radioed in that they’d killed one of Jong-Il’s look-alikes by accident. He was the man who’d called off the rescue choppers. He was the man who’d left her to die!

Damon tried the knob and found it unlocked. He swung open the door and stepped inside the plush interiors of the Intelligence Chief’s office.

“ I told you that I didn’t want to be- Jesus Christ! Damon!” Sean’s sharp eyes widened in shock from behind their wire-framed glasses. “ How the hell did you get in here? Your files were erased from our computers!”

Damon raised his right gun and said somberly, “ Not important. Your time has come.”

“ Wait! Wait!” Sean stuttered, his eyes wildly trained onto the gun. He stumbled back against the cherry-oak walls of his office. “ Please! Let’s talk about this. What do you want? What options do I have?”

Damon’s voice was as cold as ice. “ The same options you gave Sofia.”

Thunder filled the air as the gun flashed four times. Sean slammed against the wall and collapsed to the floor, leaving a streak of dark red on the paneling.

Several screams echoed from somewhere outside. Damon walked back into the hallway in time to see a dozen or so employees huddled in small group and glancing around in terror. A woman spotted him and, letting out a bloodcurdling shriek, raced towards the elevators. The upper levels of the building had no stairwell, so as to prevent any infiltration from below, but the elevators moved quickly. The metal doors swung open and the group stampeded inside, screaming and cowering away from his approaching form. Just before he could reach the entrance, the doors clambered tightly shut, and the lift disappeared downwards.

He summoned another car, silently watching the digital numbers over the other elevator dwindle down to One, the main floor. He pictured the lift’s doors opening, the frenzied riders pouring out, the guards rushing over, a sentry slamming the emergency button…

Sure enough, a deafening alarm shattered the eerie silence of the empty office.

“ Please evacuate the premise immediately,” a robotic female voice said over the loudspeakers. The message repeated again and again periodically in-between the clamorous throb of the alarm.

An empty elevator opened before him, and he stepped inside. Next stop, twelfth floor. Director of Security Dan McGarvy.

McGarvy was a fat, gung-ho cowboy who hated the fact that his heavyset waist had prevented him from entering the field years ago. The heartless bastard had waved Sofia’s contract in Damon’s face a week ago, when they’d first broken the news to him of her death. Killing Dunson had slightly scratched Damon’s conscience, but he’d have no problem eliminating McGarvy.

The twelfth floor, like the ninth, was practically empty. Whoever had been in the vicinity had long since fled on one of the building’s eight elevators.

Damon walked to one of the large windows beside the lifts and gazed out. The rain had mysteriously stopped, and the clouds of the late afternoon were beginning to part. The reddish-orange rays of the setting sun broke through the veil and illuminated the parking lot below, where streams of scientists and employees flooded out of the building. Already the flashing lights of police cars could be seen quickly approaching.

There wasn’t much time.

Damon hurried across the hallway and jogged past a group of offices. His target was located a spacious room in the center of the twelfth floor, as McGarvy’s motto was to be “in the middle of things.” McGarvy often said, in reference to deceased field agents, that only fools die. He claimed that their deaths were his fault for having recruited them in the first place.

Only fools die…Damon thought angrily. Sofia had been the most brilliant woman he’d ever met. She’d been filled with passion and ambition, a will to live and a hunger for life. All she’d ever wanted was to serve her country. She’d been willing to die for Old Glory, and McGarvy had taken her up on the offer.

The fat man’s gravelly voice could be heard from the distance through his open door. He was shouting on the phone with someone, loud enough to be heard over the blaring alarm.

“ How many did you send up? What! Why only four? List’n to me, this bastard may try to gun down Harvey. I want the Director locked-down in his office until I give the clear, do you understand me, boy! We’ll shoot the livin’ hell out of whoever this asshole is, but until then, you make sure the Harvey’s guarded like the President, ya got me? Goddamnit, I said-”

McGarvy wheeled around in time to see Damon in the doorway with a gun raised. The burly man didn’t even flinch in surprise. His thick hand came soaring up from below the desk with a Desert Eagle, his finger wrapped around the trigger.

Damon beat him to it. The Mark 23 roared twice like a beast. Bursts of blood exploded from McGarvy’s white shirt as the Security Chief shook from the impact. The Chief’s face was scrunched into a painful grimace, yet he struggled to level his gun. Damon fired three more times, the acrid smell of gunpowder filling the air. McGarvey crashed into a filing cabinet and fell to the floor like a towering monument, the Desert Eagle firing crazily in his hand.

At last he lay still in a growing pool of red blood. Damon stood over the body and spat at it, muttering, “ Only fools die.”

Now he was running. There was no time. Police and SWAT would be pouring into the building in minutes, and he still had one last task, one final objective before his mission was complete.

Quickly he dashed into the waiting elevator, which he had jammed open with a chair. He entered a long series of numbers into the keypad in order to access the top floor, Samuel Harvey’s domain. It was an access code that very few men knew. Because of his former status in the NSA, Damon knew the digits by heart.

The lift began ascending. He thought about his next target, the most corrupt bastard in the building. Harvey accepted bribes from private corporations and foreign agencies everyday. He was married, yet he had numerous affairs, including the time when Damon walked in on the man entangled with his personal secretary. Worst of all, though, Harvey had stood by, indifferently, and issued the final command for the mission abort. Harvey’s word was law in the NSA. The only way Sofia would have been abandoned to die was if he had personally ordered the choppers off.

I’m almost there, Sofia. We’ll be together soon, Damon thought grimly. He slid a fresh clip of ammunition into both of his guns and waited for the doors to open.

When they did, all hell broke loose.

The world seemed to freeze for a split second as he first saw the four shapes pointing unmistakable objects at him. They were standing uncertainly on the carpeted steps leading up to Harvey’s huge office doors.

Then there was a series of cannon-like bangs and air hissed all around Damon. Something seared his cheek, and another grazed his calf.

He chambered both guns and fired twice at the foremost guards. One caught a bullet directly in the throat and went down spraying red. Beside him, his companion muffled a cry and collapsed holding a bloody arm.

At the same time, a bolt of agony ripped through Damon’s left thigh. It was accompanied by a blinding strike of pain into his right shoulder, as if an enraged bull had just rammed one of its huge horns through him. He gasped and slammed back against the wall of the elevator, forcing his arms to take aim again.

Now it was just spray-and-pray. Chips and fragments of wood paneling exploded around him as he exchanged shots with the remaining two men. A shrill voice cried out and the left-most guard seemed to have been knocked to the ground by a sledge hammer. In a flurry of motions, the last gunman seemed to crumple head-over-heels.

Another bullet had smashed into Damon’s gut. Again, he thudded backwards against the wall. This time, his legs refused to support him. All the air rushed out of his lungs as he tumbled down into a seated position.

Silence.

“ Oh God, Sofia!” his voice was breaking, trembling with exhaustion and pain.

Ahead of him, the four guards lay in bloody heaps on the ground, sprawled out across the stairs. He saw the familiar face of John, the young man from downstairs, who was moaning and holding his bloody fingers over a gaping wound in his bicep. Thankfully it was nothing of mortal danger. A few stitches and two week’s rest would have the man back on his feet and ready for action.

Not so for me, Damon thought. Already his vision was spinning. I’m sorry John, I really am. Sorry for all of this. Sorry for your friends. Goddamn that man. That man with the reptilian smile. How much more innocent blood will he have on his head?

Who knew? After all of this was over, Harvey would go on doing what he loved to do. He’d smoke a cigar quietly while eager young recruits scribbled their names onto their death warrants, and then he’d send them off to every forsaken corner of the globe in the name of Democracy. And each and every time, he’d wash his hands clean and turn to the next problem. No graves, no funerals, no grieving parents. The fallen soldiers became nothing more than an anonymous star tacked to the “Wall of Honor” downstairs. A hundred years from now, after a full generation would pass, who would remember what people like Sofia Leveron had died for?

In Damon’s warped perception, the door to Harvey’s office seemed to be atop a mountain. A determined thought ran through his head: I’ve got to finish this. Please God, give me the strength. Please, let me kill this monster before I see my Sofia again. He doesn’t deserve to live. I’ve got to finish this.

He was walking now, staggering up the stairs to his goal. A moment later, his trembling fingers wrapped around the massive handle. It took all of his strength to pull the thing open.

Harvey was sitting in his computer chair, glass of whiskey in hand, gazing out an enormous window at the gorgeous sunset in the west. Rays of crimson red highlighted the fiery skies. The scene was like a frozen tableau.

“ I suppose I deserve this,” Harvey said quietly, not turning around.

“ Yes, yes you do,” Damon gasped. “ You do because of Sofia. You took her life, Sam.”

“ And now you’ve come to take mine,” the Director replied.

The world swayed in Damon’s eyes. He dizzily moved closer to the chair, saying, “ What comes around goes around. You didn’t even give her a fair chance!”

“ Fair?” Harvey’s voice raised a notch angrily. “ You want to speak to me about fair? Tell me, Damon, is it fair that I have to bare the guilt of their deaths every day of my life? Is it fair that I hear them screaming and see them dying in the darkest hours of the night? Goddamnit, is it fair that I have to be the one who carries this burden in silence to my grave? I can’t tell anyone about them. Not my wife, not my mother, not my friends. But I try and not complain. I wake up each day and get dressed and drive down here and listen as Sean rattles off a list of newly-deceased young men and women. And I cry, and I drink.”

“ You deserve every damn nightmare you’ve ever had. It’s nothing more than punishment for those you’ve left to die,” Damon growled.

“ They signed the contracts. They knew the risk,” the Director said flatly. “And so did Sofia.”

All the hairs sprang up on the back of Damon’s neck. His bloody began to boil, and he nearly choked with rage, “ The risk! You could have saved her! She called for help and you let her die! Her death was not the side effect of some risky venture. It was betrayal. Handed over by her own people! How can you just sit there and drink whiskey while some poor soul is being cut down by bullets right now?”

“ Nothing will change after I’m dead,” Harvey said coldly. “ The world will continue doing exactly what it’s been doing. Someone else will take my place, and eventually more will die. For their country, for their families, for patriotism. Nothing will change, Damon, that’s how this life works. We’re nothing but shadows, you and I. We survive in the darkness of our lives, but at the dawn of a new age, we vanish.”

“ Shadows we may be, but shadows do nothing except conceal the light. It’s time for the sun to shine through,” Damon whispered. A tear rolled down his cheek.

Harvey did not flinch when the cold barrel of the gun pressed against the back of his head. Nor did he utter a sound when a single blast blew away half his brain, proceeding onwards to shatter the window ahead. He remained sitting there, slumped in his office chair, facing out towards the sky.

Blackness shrouded the outside of Damon’s vision, threatening to overcome him and throw him into a sea of void. As he dropped to his knees in front of the destroyed window, his breath became short and labored.

We are shadows. It’s time for the sun to shine through.

His fingers carefully reached into his breast pocket and removed the picture of Sofia. It was tattered and bloody after the night’s encounters, but her face continued to shine through like with the brilliance of the sun. His sun.

I’m coming Sofia, he thought.

A breeze rustled in through the window and caressed his hair in exactly the same manner his lover once did. A magnificent blend of crimson and orange streaks fused together in the sky and cascaded over the horizon onto the glowering red sun. Stars became visible, twinkling and dancing in their heavenly palace.

The stars…

In his last moments, he looked up in wonder, trying to discern the blurry shape forming in his vision. At last, he saw her, and the light filled him.