****

2 Days Prior…

Litha ground her footsteps to a halt and sighed. For not the first time she wanted to call Frank… if only to hear his voice and to tell Lina that Mommy loved her. Her eyes squeezed shut and she sighed softly.

"Hey… buck up Sinclair."

"Bite me Darrin." She looked over at her Academy-mate and partner. He'd been with her when her world sank to it's lowest and he'd seen her do things that had put the gray hairs on her head. He was her friend above all else.

"I can't believe they got you back for this one mission. I know of at least ten other Black Ops that could have done it."

"What's done is done. I hate being out of country," she growled as she cautiously peeked around the tree. It seemed that the State Department and possibly even the Commander in Chief himself felt their targets were a threat to the United States' war on drugs… so they took the back way out of it and had two Black Ops FBI Agents inserted into Colombia. It wasn't the first time either one had been there.

'Isn't murder a sin?' one of the 'men' in the chairs asked.

'Isn't letting little babies be born addicted to cocaine a sin?' Litha spat back. She sat in front of them at the table. This felt too much like the Senate Hearings she'd seen on CNN.

'Not a legal crime, no.' another one said.

'But you agree that it's a moral crime.'

'Are you suggesting that the end justify the means?'

Litha turned to the angel beside her and smirked. 'No. I'm saying that God is a hypocrite.'

'How so?' Said yet another one in the chairs. Suddenly they all appeared to look like angels. What sort of twisted joke was this?

'According to the Christian faith, and most of the other faiths out there, murder is a sin, a crime against faith.'

'Yes, it is so.'

'I don't need you to tell me that, thank you very much.' She waited for a moment, then continued. 'But, if a baby is stillborn because of the mother's drug addiction, is there no crime, no sin there?'

'You fail to make us understand.'

'I'm saying that yes - Murder is a Sin. But Murder to prevent even greater sins is not a crime.'

'You're a hypocrite as well then if you think that one murder is not the same as another in any form.'

Litha shrugged. 'It is what I do and who I am.'

'No. It is a job, not who you are.'

"Darrin."

"I hear you," he whispered back. The subvocal transmitter around his throat felt like a noose right now as he pressed the two buttons on either side of his trachea. "Do you see them?"

"I see two targets. There's supposed to be three. Where's the third one?"

"Not important right now. Take the shot."

"Where's the third one? Damn!" she hissed in her own subvocal. "I got the Ambassador and Guzman, where the fuck is Mendoza?"

"Take the shot Litha!"

Litha growled and resighted her two targets through the scope of her Remington 700 .223 sniper's assault rifle. Something wasn't right, she didn't feel right. Slowly and gently she squeezed the trigger. One fell and Litha racked another bullet into the chamber… The second fell in another instant… Behind the scope, Litha's eyes closed in regret. She knew the kind of damage the .223 bullets did. The entry wound was less than the size of a Number 2 pencil, but left a hole the size of a tennis ball. If the bullet didn't shatter on impact and cause internal damage with the shrapnel, or perhaps mushroom and scoop out an even larger diameter, then the sonic vibration of the bullet made the impact more intense, more painful… and the victim died of bleedout. She did this… And now they could go home… Right?

'That is where you are wrong. Killing is what I do, it's always been what I do.' Litha said flatly.

'But with Frank, you learned to give life, to let people live, to help them live.'

'What can I say? I did the unspeakable for an assassin.'

'And what is that?'

'I grew a heart.'

The Celestial Tribunal murmured to itself for a moment. 'Where was Mendoza?'

'In Chicago. We didn't know until we checked in with the operations director and he told us that Mendoza had left the country the day before.'

'Is that what had happened though?'

'You ask that like you don't already know the answers. No, it's not what had happened. Mendoza succeeded in turning one of the operatives in the mission. True, Darrin and I were supposed to be the only two there, but the CIA doesn't trust just two people. They have to send in a team of 20 to do the job of 2.'

'Then what happened?'

'We flew home after we were told that Mendoza was in the States. Mission had to be finished, right? Even if it means murder on US soil.'

'Is murder off US soil any different then on it?'

'Yes. And no.' Litha shrugged. Never before in her life had she ever apologized for what she'd done. Not even when she'd been called at 2 in the morning and told that Darrin and the ops leader was waiting for her. She remembered that night clearly - she took nothing, didn't change her clothing even. She simply took her keys, locked the front door and drove to the airstrip outside of Chicago. There was a change of clothing waiting for her, everything she needed. She could only assume that Frank would wake to find her and her car gone, nothing else missing - not even her purse - and become frantic. But, if the job only took a day or two… then what was the harm, right?

'Bastards.'

'Who?'

'The people who insisted on my skills instead of someone else's.'

'Why?'

Litha sighed. 'It's this simple. If you're an assassin for the CIA, it's kind of an unwritten law that you have no family, no ties, no one to miss you if you're killed in the line of duty. Once you 'break' that law and become part of someone else's reality, you lose your objectiveness, your value as an assassin.'

'And you?'

'I guess… I was an anomaly.'

'And that's bad?'

'It is for Frank and Lina.'

'Why?'

Litha's sigh turned to a growl. 'If you're going to ask me these questions over and over again when you all already know the answers, then this is going to take a really long time… and time is something I don't have much of. I would prefer to live. Isn't that why I'm here?'

'Who told you that Lilith?'

She turned to the angel beside her. 'Am I dead already?'

****