Ghosts of War by George Mann Page A

lights off and ushered the Ghost in quietly, trying to remain inconspicuous. Then he'd led the way to the dead man and the apartment, where, it seemed, the British spy had based all of his operations.
    The corpse was lying in the hallway, just behind the door. He'd clearly been there for a while—a day, at least—and if the pool of sticky blood beneath him wasn't testament enough to the damage that had been inflicted upon him, the butt of the penknife jutting out of his left eye socket was.
    The Ghost dropped to his haunches so he could take a closer look. The dead man had clearly been well built, and, judging by the thin white scar running along the line of his jaw, he hadn't been a stranger to violence. The man's left eye had putrefied and dribbled out of the socket, leaving a terrible, gaping hole, caked in blood around the handle of the knife. The knife itself was buried all the way to the hilt. The killer had struck with considerable force, driving the blade right through the eye and piercing the brain behind it, killing the man instantly.
    It wasn't a precision killing. Of that much the Ghost was sure. It looked more like the dead man had disturbed someone who'd panicked and used whatever weapon they had available. The dead man had been the one who'd fired the shots, it seemed—he had powder burns around his right wrist, and his corpse was still clutching the handgun.
    “Have you checked his pockets?” the Ghost asked Donovan, who was standing behind him, regarding the corpse through narrowed eyes.
    “Not personally,” Donovan replied, “although the men who found him said they were empty.”
    “Completely empty?” The Ghost dug into the man's jacket pockets. When he found nothing, he turned out the pockets of the man's pants, too. Donovan was right—they were completely devoid of any belongings.
    “Either he was a pro, a killer sent out to find our man, or the British agent stripped his pockets after he killed him.” Donovan stepped back to give the Ghost room to stand.
    “I suppose either is possible,” said the Ghost, but I'd wager he's a government agent. That would explain what he was doing here. He probably tracked the spy back here and tried to take him out.
    He glanced around, taking in the rest of the apartment. It was functional, to say the least. It didn't look as if anyone had actually lived here, but rather used it as a safe house, a place to hide away anything suspicious that might otherwise endanger his position. From what he knew about this spy, he'd managed to successfully infiltrate some impressive New York political circles, and that would have brought with it a high risk of exposure. He probably kept another apartment somewhere in the city, too.
    The Ghost walked through to the bedroom, where it was immediately clear there'd been a struggle. The bed was mussed up and there was a pockmark in the wall where a gunshot had blown away a fragment of plaster. On the floor by the side of the bed was a shotup holotube transmitter, still wired into a socket in the wall.
    “I left everything as we found it,” Donovan said, framed in the doorway, watching the Ghost as he paced back and forth, taking it all in. “Looks like the spy was trying to make a call when he was disturbed.”
    The Ghost nodded. “That adds more credence to my theory about the dead man,” he said. “If they were trying to get to him before he passed his information back to London, or wherever, they'd have had people trailing his every move. If the dead guy had picked up his trail and followed him here, found him in the middle of making a call…well, it seems like he soon put an end to that, possibly at the expense of his own life.”
    “How so?”
    “He spent two shots disabling the holotube transmitter. He must have missed the spy with his first shot, here, on the wall,” he pointed out the pockmark to Donovan, “but then took the time to put two shots in the machine before going after the spy himself, giving the