For a long time, his research was what got him through the days - when his wife was resting, and her slow, unrelenting illness preyed on his mind, with the what ifs and possible drugs to try. Some people with ALS were able to live with it for decades. His Anne had less than four years. Raging against destiny in rest moments (why her? Why not me?) and her doctors when they would not try harder, when they would dismiss his findings (unpredictable side effects, possible disabilities, no proof of effectiveness) and instead be told to do his best for his wife - as if he wasn't already, in using what skills he had.
As if he hadn't learned all the exercises so she didn't have to go to the hospital for the basic physio exercises - a way for them to have more time together. Time that kept slipping through his hands, at the same time short (too short compared to what it should be) and too long in seeing her suffer at his side, losing more and more of her independence, of what made her laugh and cry and live.
At those times, he changed direction in his research. It was a side quest, nothing more than a palate cleanser before being submerged again in his search for better studies, alternative medicine and methods - a hope, even if slight of something better than the prognosis science gave Anne.
The ghosts, as they were known in the espionage/military circles, were rather choosy for mercenaries, never taking a job from the same handler twice, never helping in coups or terrorism acts, preferring rescue and attack missions where the morality was clear cut, accepting no help from other groups or even backup from their employers. In a world more and more dominated by cameras, there were no records of their faces caught on video. And for all the work they do (sometimes interspaced by years, sometimes one after the other), not one of the other handlers James has talked with can remember the last time they failed - the only situation something like that happened, the employer had misled the team about the nature of the job, from a rescue to a kidnapping. Two week later, the target was left in a more secure position than the one they had been in, and the respective handler was later found dead, files wiped clean, cameras destroyed. Nothing that could be used to trace them. Ghosts.
As his wife condition deteriorated, he had to give up all research on her condition (on a cure) - the moments were too precious for him to be glued to his computer now. He spent hours reading to Anne, her Jane Austen collection, starting with Sense and Sensibility during the nights, Poe in the rays of morning at home, then later on the books she always wished to read but didn't have the time, now he read to her every day, until she died in the hospital.
The time after was blurry. He couldn't go back to work, didn't want to go back. But his talents lay in research, in finding the the points that matched in a whirlwind of information, restoring connections wiped away by design or buried under luck and chance. So it becomes his obsession - finding a drug or treatment for ALS. It also soothes him - a part of ritual, reinforcing his memories of Anne, imagining she would be in their room when he stopped. As a result of this, he also had a small file on the ghosts, grouping together all the information and gossip he could get on them.
Some of it was proven - namely the email used and the member who served as the first contact and screened the missions the group took or rejected. A man who called himself Booker. The alias seemed to be a relic - from the oldest retired handler to the most recent employer, always the same nickname was mentioned. The different periods of time they were active (from the earliest memories, starting from 1950) to current actions indicated that they were not the original group. It was a common held belief in the mercenary community that the current incarnation of the ghosts was composed either of descendants or apprentices/protegee of the original group. There was no other plausible explanation, specially when he went backwards and found documentation through his ex-colleagues of activity that fit to a T their modus operandi (the requirements, the way payment was sent, missions which were accepted or rejected), but years before any of the present group could have been born.
At least, there wasn't until he started piecing together similarities. Everyone he talked with about them gave similar descriptions for the contact with Booker (was it the name of the position? Perhaps the name of the first person who assumed the role) - a man with a sliver of accent that seemed to be French, who drank while finalizing the details of the job. There weren't photos of the previous Booker(s?), but he had a breakthrough with an acquaintance - a MI6 retiree that had taken up drawing as a hobby, doing landscapes and portraits, including one of the Booker of his generation.
His face was exactly the same of the man he had contacted five years ago. Different beard and hair, but the facial structure was the same, as was the coloring. Family resemblance couldn't account for the fact the portrait seemed to be of the same man he himself had seen, 50 years later. The mystery only deepened when he utilized a face recognition program after modelling the portrait.
He thought he could find other examples, lay to rest the impossible connection between past portrait and his own memories. Instead, as he searches historical archives the connection grows stronger - handsome features unchanged while styles of clothes shift with time - the earliest picture found in the last years of 18th century, the latest his own memory. Other patterns repeat - Booker's companions - not always three, but the same profiles repeated over and over for more than two hundred years - if there weren't paintings registering the earlier years he would have thought they cloned themselves.
When he searched for the other three, he stared. Their stories didn't go back just a hundred years - but millennia. The two men were mostly found in paintings of the Renaissance before modern times, with hints of earlier appearances, normally together. There were records of the woman (Andromache?) as early as Antique Greece, with statues, and as he delved deeper, entire stories and pages of epithets attached to her.
He sits with that information, staring at the photo, comparing, wondering if such a thing was even possible… But it would make sense - the mercenaries' paranoia, the way they avoided help from outsiders, relying only on themselves, how they always won, even against numerically superior enemies in entrenched positions and how they never took repeat jobs - because people would notice (didn't age, didn't die, like a pinned down butterfly).
He had to walk away then. Because according to his research there was a woman walking around the Earth that was at least three millennia old, but his own Anne wasn't afforded more than measly forty years.
Going to the gym, working his muscles until tiredness settled in, and even then it wasn't enough to silence his mind. Standing in front of it all again (now spread through two laptops, a pile of books on Renaissance art and more scribblings than he could count), he looked for more information, a definitive proof of when and where the four of them acted - the what echoing in his mind (immortal).
His dreams were full of blood, art and the salty taste of sea spray in his lips.