He wanted to kill him as brutally as others had been killed.

He wanted to watch him bleed, hear him scream.

Simon Trent stilled his thoughts by sheer willpower. Revenge wouldn’t change any of it. No one lived because someone else died. He had to focus on what was real and on the danger they might face tonight.

He crouched near the fragile ruins where the land first began a long and leisurely sprawl toward the lake. He took a breath and then another. The hot Cambodian night closed around him. Ahead the vast expanse of Lake Tonle glistened as the moon slipped from behind a cloud and temporarily cleared the darkness. To his right, in the distance, he knew that the shadowed spires of Angkor Wat loomed and beckoned in the darkness as they had so many nights before. A cricket grated. Its rough-edged call was loud in the deceptive silence, where only the distant lapping of the lake reminded him of why they were here. And as much as he didn’t want to be here, as much as he was ready to hang it all up, he’d toughed out over a year in isolation for this moment. It was the most difficult assignment of his life, but he’d see it through and then it was over.

He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. It came away damp. The air was slightly dank and reminded him of how close they were to the shoreline. There was nothing but sunbronzed soil and patches of ground-hugging brush between here and there. He could see the area clearly in his mind as he remembered the last time he’d been here, in daylight, over a year ago. It didn’t seem like much time had passed since he’d last stood on this flat, slightly sloped patch of land that fronted the lake. He could visualize the dock about seventy-five feet away. And he could see what he didn’t want to, the tragedy that had begun here.