by Matthew Dunn
The detectives were looking at Marty. He was killing his career. Their respect for him was enormous.
Fleet stood and pointed at the chief of staff. “The difference between you and me is that I look after Penny. Always.”
He stormed out of the room.
A man entered a diner in Kansas. He was elegantly dressed, his beard trimmed, his voice that of a southern gentleman. He ordered a black coffee and took a seat in a booth. The waitress thought he was cute in a throwback kind of way. He noticed that but paid it no mind.
“Do you have a newspaper?” he asked her. “Preferably a national one.”
She said, “I can check.”
He smiled.
The waitress hesitated. There was something about the big guy. It wasn’t because he was handsome. Or built like he could tear apart the diner. It was his eyes. They looked so beguiling.
She brought him today’s copy of the Washington Post. He glanced at the front page. It said that Will Cochrane had been dragged out to sea a week earlier.
He gave the paper back to her and said, “Thank you.”
She said, “You in Kansas for a reason?”
“Yes.”
For some reason she couldn’t move. “Is it a good reason?”
He smiled. “I want to be here.”
She left him. Always this way, he thought.
He was nothing as grandiose as a lone wolf.
As Knox had articulated to NYPD, he was a dog. No masters. No one to love him anymore. Kicked out of their backyard to fend for himself and be who he really was.
A scavenging mutt.
A besmirched spy.
A man who cared for his friends.
A soldier.
A fighter.
An American.
Will Cochrane.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to my two brilliant mentors, David Highfill and Luigi Bonomi, and their second-to-none teams at William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers and LBA Literary Agency respectively.
About the Author
As an MI6 field officer, MATTHEW DUNN recruited and ran agents, coordinated and participated in special operations, and acted in deep-cover roles throughout the world. He operated in environments where, if captured, he would have been executed. Dunn was trained in all aspects of intelligence collection, deep-cover deployments, small arms, explosives, military unarmed combat, surveillance, and infiltration.
Medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers, but Dunn was the recipient of a rare personal commendation from the secretary of state for work he did on one mission, which was deemed so significant that it directly influenced the success of a major international incident.
During his time in MI6, Dunn conducted approximately seventy missions. All of them were successful. He currently lives in England, where he is at work on his next novel.
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Also by Matthew Dunn
The Spy House
Dark Spies
Slingshot
Sentinel
Spycatcher
Novellas
Spy Trade
Counterspy
Credits
Image on title page by Orhan Cam/Shutterstock. Cover design by Richard Yoo.
Cover photographs © Tanarch / Getty Images (Washington); © Andrea Fontanili / EyeEm / Getty Images (clouds).
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
a soldier’s revenge. Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Dunn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Image on title page spread by Orhan Cam/Shutterstock
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 978-0-06-242721-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-242719-9
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