Jane tossed her briefcase onto the small couch as she listened to the story about the Unknown Warfare troupe with growing interest while taking several sips from her steaming coffee cup. In between, she peered out the office window. "So there's a unit made up of psychopaths who then really clean up after the enemy?" she asked, setting her coffee mug down gingerly on her desk. "And our killer, the Draftsman, was off the radar for years because he was messing around in this unit?"

Williams took a long look at the Chief and raised his eyebrows briefly. "That's our guess, Chief. We want to get some information on that."

Jane looked at him for a long moment and furrowed her brows thoughtfully. "Not so dumb, the Unknown Warfare thing," she opined, "prisons empty, scum out of the country, enemies dead. Pretty pragmatic."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Jane took a deep breath and sat down at her desk. "So what do you want to do now?"

Elizabeth looked at the profiler and then at her mother. "Williams' nephew works for the CIA. Through him, we might find out if the killer - whoever he may be - is registered somewhere in Boston. We have the DNA, but unfortunately, we don't have any personal data. And we can't find the guy's car either."

"Well," Jane said, taking a long look at the profiler, "who you know! Aren't you going to stay here with the BPD?"

Williams smiled stoutly.

Elizabeth cleared her throat. "We just have to be a little careful about that," she added. "We can't let the demand go too far at the CIA; otherwise, they might deliberately feed us false information to keep it under wraps."

"Or they might not provide us with any info at all," Williams added.

Jane took a deep breath and nodded slowly. "I get it, it's not any difference between the FBI and the BPD, and it's even in the Bible: ignorance is bliss."

Katherine, leaning against the closed office door with her arms crossed, furrowed her brows. "The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life."

Jane looked at Elizabeth and Williams. "Okay, let's do this. Ask the nephew at the CIA for all I care. Carefully, you guys are going to do this."

Elizabeth hadn't expected so little resistance and looked at her mother in surprise. "And Bell?"

"Bell?" asked Jane, getting up again from her desk chair, taking off her jacket, and hanging it on the rack. "You want to make an official request that BPD be allowed to bring the CIA into the investigation? I'm sorry, but by the time that goes through, the killer will have moved on to his next trouble spot and thus be long gone. Apart from that, the answer will be no. You might also request the Vatican to be allowed to celebrate a Black Mass in St. Peter's Basilica."

Williams took a long look at the Chief and raised his right brow. "Wonderful. The short official channel. I'll call my nephew, he should be in the office now."

One by one, they left Jane's office.

xxx

Lance Williams looked from the CIA headquarters to the green hills over which the first hint of autumn lay. Late summer in New England was beautiful and melancholy at the same time. The trees stretched their golden crowns into the sky as if they were still enjoying summer but already anticipating the cold breezes of winter. The East Coast of the United States was captivating with its incredible, picturesque landscapes. At the same time, most of the institutions of the world power were united here: CIA, NSA, FBI, and the seat of government in Washington DC. Here were the elite universities Harvard and Princeton; here was Boston, the largest city in New England and one of the cultural centers of the USA; and here was New York, the capital of capitalism and the largest city in the USA.

Lance Williams worked in the Global Risks Department, which dealt with uncontrolled nuclear weapons, terrorism, Islamist fundamentalism, support for military operations macroeconomics, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, and China. The topics were as numerous as the trouble spots that flared up with increasing frequency worldwide because, like the Hydra, the mystical monster from ancient Greece, two heads grew back when one was cut off.

In front of Lance Williams was a report on the current international security situation, which could have looked better. This year, Lance had to admit, the situation was more threatening than ever.

The United States is very good, he thought, at breeding its own Frankenstein monsters to make life difficult for them later.

For example, the United States supported the mujahideen so they could fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan. This country's wealth of raw materials had led to numerous wars that had torn this rugged mountain and desert nation apart. Even the Nazis had targeted Afghanistan for its raw materials in the middle of the previous century and had invested large sums of money there for mining.

And then Tora Bora, the notorious fortress. Built deep into the mountain with American help to help the mujahideen fight the Russians. The successful Americans eventually had to fight their cave system - a labyrinth they had constructed themselves. Another Frankenstein monster. Lance didn't even like to think about how many elite troops were worn out from the storming of Tora Bora, and he probably reflected that it would have been better to think about using a tactical nuclear bomb.

The second Rambo movie was still dedicated to the brave people of Afghanistan. Then the mujahideen had become the Taliban, who had opened camps to train suicide bombers, which later included those fanatics who had flown the airplanes into the World Trade towers. The war that Americans were so fond of outsourcing had come home to roost.

Then there was Iraq, with the Shiite and Sunni extremists that Saddam Hussein had held together with an iron fist. Until the Americans defeated Iraq and ended Saddam's rule, they had only won a battle, not the war. Even General von Clausewitz knew that the question of victory came was as crucial as the question of victory itself. In the vacuum left by Saddam, new splinter groups had emerged. One of these groups had once belonged to al-Qaida until al-Qaida was no longer radical enough for it, so it morphed into an even more dangerous, even more militant group of extremists who first gave themselves the name ISIS - Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - and later adopted the name IS, Islamic State, to reflect the global flavor of their operations. They were fast; they were targeted. They had weapons they had stolen from the Iraqi state and that Iraq had once received from the Americans for its war against Iran, so Uncle Sam was once again, as so often, more or less fighting against himself.

And most importantly, the Islamic State had money from oil sales - oil that they sold for knock-down prices to dubious mediators who made sure the oil got to the big corporations with fake invoices, export licenses, and certificates so that millions and millions of car drivers in the Western world - including the American car drivers - ended up supporting the Islamic State's expansion with their wallets at the gas stations. The world was sick and perverted. It was, and it remained so. As far as that went, nothing changed, except perhaps it became more confusing. Lance let his eyes wander over the gorgeous landscape, then looked back at the report, which also discussed Sudan. He, Lance, had been in Sudan, which had become an international staging area for terrorists; South Sudan's independence had not changed that. A wealthy Saudi man of a good family had funded Islamist terrorists from there several years ago. CIA agents had watched from Khartoum as the wealthy Saudi built an international network before going to Afghanistan, from where he piloted planes into the Twin Towers. From 9/11 to May 2, 2011, it took a full ten years for the CIA to find and kill Osama Bin Laden finally. The order to the counterterrorism force of Green Berets who penetrated Pakistani airspace and shot bin Laden in the hidden house near Abbottabad had been brief: Bring us bin Laden's head on a silver platter. It didn't turn out to be a silver platter, but the execution was broadcast live to the White House. The higher you were in the hierarchy, the more exquisite the material you saw. The hick in Iowa watched the football game live on Sunday, and the President of the United States watched the execution of Osama Bin Laden live. In the process, the Agency made many mistakes. George Tenet, who had become the eighteenth director of the CIA in July 1997 and who was later charged with supporting the war on terror as an intelligence operation, had a bad image problem: He was constantly asked how it could happen that terrorists brought down two skyscrapers in the middle of New York, and no one had heard about it beforehand. There were even accusations that the CIA had carried out the attacks to give the U.S. a reason to strike in the Middle East. There was no other way to explain why such a powerful secret service hadn't got wind of a plan like 9/11. The reasons for the failure, however, didn't lie only in the sloppy analysis of the events leading up to 9/11. The reasons lay deeper. Most capable CIA employees were old and gray or dead and buried, and now the CIA couldn't find good people. But the Agency needed exceptional people to solve outstanding problems. Sometimes, however, people were rejected simply because they didn't speak English well enough. "This can't be true!" Tenet had raged at the time. "I have thousands who speak fluent English, but no one who speaks fucking Korean!" That had changed somewhat. Cult series like Homeland had made the CIA cool again. Even ordinary citizens still wondered how an intelligence agency that was so well funded could overlook essential things. Six hundred billion dollars was the Pentagon's annual budget; a little less than ten percent of that went to the CIA. Fifty billion dollars annually. But money alone wasn't the deciding factor, for will was stronger than money. The will, for example, to cut off a journalist's head on camera. You didn't need much for that, not a lot of money. Just a knife and a smartphone. And the will to do it to spread panic. Today, forces like the Islamic State demonstrate that with frightening clarity. When he took office, Bill Clinton had told George W. Bush, "Bin Laden is the greatest danger to you." Bush swore he had never heard that phrase.

Lance Williams was jolted out of his thoughts when his cell phone rang. He looked at the display. He shrugged, taking the call.

"Good morning, Lance," said the voice on the other end of the line.

Lance's eyebrows drew together in surprise. "Ted? Is that you?" he recognized his uncle's deep voice instantly.

"Yes, this is Ted. Uncle Ted."

"Are you in Massachusetts?"

"I'm in Boston, yes. With the BPD."

"And what are you doing there?"

"Can you talk without being disturbed?"

"One moment." Lance got up from his chair and closed his office door. "Okay, shoot."

"Remember that summer of blood in Los Angeles and New York? That's when we had that study on serial killers at the FBI Academy. And you were there at Quantico at that time."

"Yes. It was fascinating."

"I thought so, too. Afterward, we hunted down this Angel of Death. You know, the guy who cut his victims' hearts out."

"I can remember that. Pretty primitive and archaic, the whole thing," Lance said with a frown.

"And now we've come full circle," Williams said mysteriously. "Because the killer from back then has resurfaced. In Boston. And he's ripping his victims' hearts out of their chests again." Williams explained the connection to his nephew, then asked, "Could this be related to Unknown Warfare? What do you think?"

Lance was silent for a while. "What I'm about to confide in you," he said, looking out the window into the distance, "you never heard from me, all right?"

"I haven't heard a word you've said," Williams said, winking even though his nephew couldn't see him.

"Shortly after 9/11, there was a change in direction due to a top-secret directive that Bush and Cheney pushed through that allowed suspects to be hunted down, detained, tortured, and killed in the war on terror. Camps were opened. In Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, but also Thailand and Poland. The main thing was that it wasn't on American soil."

"Are you getting at the interrogations and the torture? The waterboarding and so forth?" asked Williams, seeming to age years at the exact moment.

"Right," Lance said tersely.

"How about secret special forces operating in war zones as part of that? The Iceman story is true, isn't it?"

Lance snorted. "We've been under pressure," he said. "With so many private mercenary armies, we also needed our unit to show our successes. The private companies were poaching people inside the CIA. Even in the CIA's damn cafeteria, they were sticking job offers on the bulletin board, usually at twice the salary of a normal agent in the Agency. It didn't go on like that. So we came up with something, working with the FBI and some clinics in a top-secret operation."

"The Iceman?" the profiler probed.

"If that's what you want to call him." Lance tried not to say too much but still gave his uncle information he could about justify sharing.

"Unknown Warfare?" Ted Williams didn't let up.

"Yes. That's what it was called at the time. It sounded sufficiently defuse. Nobody knew what it was supposed to be, which was the intention. After all, we have people on the payroll who stand up to the private mercenary forces. And the enemies of the West even more so." Lance paused, then changed the subject. "This killer, you guys, were chasing back in the day ... what's he doing in Boston now?"

"He kills men. Physically very strong men and he gets a kick out of that."

"And how can I help you?"

"I'm about to send you the DNA profile of this killer," his uncle replied. "Could you check to see if the DNA profile matches any person or unit?"

Lance frowned deeply. "So you have the DNA but no personnel data?"

"That's right."

"Didn't you find anything in the FBI?"

"Nothing at all. It's like this man is off the grid. And as long as all we have is DNA, we're not getting anywhere."

"Was there nothing then, either?"

"No. Just the DNA, too. We didn't know who he was even after his last murder in New York, and we thought he'd been arrested at the time."

"Which he wasn't," Lance commented.

"Which he still isn't. Otherwise, he wouldn't keep murdering and leaving DNA at crime scenes."

"Pretty careless."

"He can afford to be if there are no files on him. Nowhere." Lance heard his uncle going over notes. "It's a little like --"

"Like he's always passing through," Lance finished his uncle's sentence. "Back to his unit?"

"Who knows. So," Williams concluded the conversation, "I'll send you the DNA profile, and you look it up if it doesn't give you any trouble. Maybe there's a file that only the CIA has."

Lance took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay. I'll see what I can do."

After thirty, Ted Williams' laptop announced that he had received an e-mail. He opened the message and felt as if he had seen a ghost.