The three bullet wounds were perfectly placed, forming a small, neat triangle around the man's heart. He had been lying still for just over a minute now, the faint smell of cordite in the air overwhelmed by a growing stench as every muscle in his body relaxed.

He wore an expression of rigid shock, which was normal. Even when you pointed the barrel at someone, told them why you were there, they still couldn't believe it when the slug ripped home. All their preconceived notions of dying among friends and relatives, wise and respected, in graceful old age were made false in an instant.

With wife and child?

Phillip Clausen was dead, but his killer lingered in the room, their gloved hands picking up a framed photograph from the desk which was quietly studied. There was a girl in the picture, seven, maybe eight years old, she wore a practised smile born of too many such portraits, an affectionate impatience at the man stood behind the camera.

The assassin tilted his head slightly, as though trying to form an opinion of the girl, and set the frame back down with a care which belied his profession. He had never really understood the concept of photographs, it was yet another facet of the normal world which he neither needed nor cared for; he had been created to never forget a single detail, face, or location, although sometimes he did wonder what it might be like to go chasing after a memory.

Sliding the Beretta 92SD back into its shoulder holster, he walked over to the corpse and squatted down. There were more photographs in the wallet; a middle-aged, chestnut haired woman with a kind smile and two more of the girl, they sat easily beside a wedge of dollar bills, several credit cards, and an old receipt for the gleaming Rolex watch clipped to Clausen's wrist.

Murderer.

The word held meaning but no emotion, even when he imagined it screaming from the mouths of the wife and child, of them cursing his existence, he felt nothing.

He knew what he was supposed to be experiencing, the others in his trade had often spoken of it, many times had he endured such confessions and catharsis without inviting them. That was in the beginning, of course, when they had assumed he was simply another contract killer, that he had shared, or, at least, understood some measure of what they were going through.

'….like someone had filled my veins with ice. I couldn't stop shaking, it must have been the adrenaline, I never suspected……I mean, I didn't think…..You see all that bullshit in the movies, one bullet, cold, clean, but it stays with you, you're connected to the person you killed in such a horrible…….intimate way.

'Like the worst kind of love' he had suggested, and the other man regarded him with a cold, frightened awe.

It didn't take long for the other workers to distance themselves, at first they were most eager to be around someone so apparently skilled in disposals, but that soon changed the more time they spent with him. He was too in control, the dozen different strip clubs they had visited; where alcohol flowed plentifully and the air was filled with a constant, thick haze of cigarette smoke, failed to excite or intoxicate him in any way.

The dancers somehow instinctively knew to stay away, although when they did attempt to arouse him, gyrating and grinding their half-naked bodies, constant failure to draw the desired response bristled each and every one of them.

He once overheard a dancer say to her friend that it was like 'trying to get a statue turned on', and couldn't argue with that assessment. His demeanour was not even pliant enough for the strippers to consider him a challenge, it was as though they finally sensed that it was impossible to tease the tight, immovable line of his lips into a smile, so all as one they ceased to try.

No doubt Professor Ort-Meyer had intended him to be that way, the most deadly human in existence, one troubled by neither conscience or emotion. After the death of Padre Vittorio he had returned to the Asylum, now derelict after his massacre there several years ago, and broke into Meyer's lab in the hope of finding some answers.

Predictably, other interested parties had stripped the place bare long ago, the only indications that anything ever occurred was congealed blood between the tiles – evidence which had stubbornly resisted a last minute cleanup. He stayed for a time, pulling up a battered office chair and silently contemplating, so still that occasionally rats would dart from shadow to shadow right in front of him.

He recalled his battle with the other clones, and most recently the unknown sniper which Agency had hired to kill him in St Petersburg, wondering at the perverse delight which they seemed to take in murder.

Was he a failed experiment rather than the perfect result? Why create an assassin who questions what he is, why allow him to live when you possess an army of sadistic warriors all too content in their roles?

Too many questions, no answers.

As usual, he returned to what he did best, the only thing he knew, only now his target was The Agency, those who had betrayed him and sentenced an innocent Priest to death.

Diana Burnwood.

They were running scared now, moving from location to location, doubling security and leaving a trail of false information to draw him away. Clausen was the third to die so far, a hunt which had led him to New York after eliminating section heads in Venice and Hamburg. The German had protected himself better than most, arranging a protective guard of Special Forces equipped with Spectra armour and impressive assault weaponry.

Half of them were taken out of the picture when he activated the building's Haylon extinguisher system, draining the oxygen from the air before many could secure their masks. The rest fought well, they were trained by the best, but ultimately even the best could snap if they witnessed a man who killed with the cold lethality of a machine.

The last guard begged for mercy, he was just doing his job, he didn't want to die, yet he could rest assured that when the knife slit his throat it was nothing personal.

Returning Clausen's wallet, the assassin ran his fingers over the dead man's eyes, closing them.

'I forgive you'.