His thoughts bent between the mother who raised him and the whore who sold out her son for a top position at the CIA. He had a mission, and with the earliest of sun’s rising came a gorgeous cloud kissed sky. He was in the cradle of civilization, yet other than the majesty of sunrise and the peaceful surrender of night to day, these people were insufferable when it came to helping him. He snaked his leathered hand into his light cotton kameez to retrieve two strips of beef jerky which would sustain him until he foraged for additional sustenance. His high school’s JROTC training and early military enlistment had prepared him to live off the land. The CIA taught him to live off other people. Ben wasn’t really sure what they’d done to him, but after a steady diet of experimental psychotropic drugs, violence and Americana, he could only focus on what he was programmed to do—kill. He’d slept exactly forty-seven minutes. A bit groggy, he’d learned to operate on less rest. He could sleep once he died, he was told by his trainers.
