Free Blind Instinct by Fiona Brand Page B

the future had been clear: a prison sentence, followed by a cartel hit. No matter where the CIA locked him up, or how secret they tried to keep his location, Lopez would have found him.
    In a bizarre run of luck, Dennison had managed to escape custody and the hit. Weeks later, after scanning the Internet for news of his escape and the ensuing investigation, he had found, instead, his death notice.
    He had sat staring at the briefly worded statement, a piece of prose that utterly eliminated all the highs and lows of his life and distilled his existence down to two dates and a deceased wife, and wondered who had killed him off, and why.
    The answer had been simple. Marc Bayard, the intelligence executive running the Lopez and cabal investigations.
    Bayard was sending him a message. The door was open, and he wanted him to come in out of the cold.
    The terms were tempting. Dennison was officially dead, which meant the heat was off. The FBI wasn’t actively hunting him. Neither were the CIA, the NSA, Interpol and whatever other agency had been hunting his ass for the past twenty-four years. It was even possible that Lopez had bought into the death scenario.
    There would be incentives to sweeten the pot—no doubt amnesty for his crimes and the opportunity to live on American soil under a new identity on the Witness Security Program—so long as he testified.
    Another search had turned up the apparently unconnected fact that Agent Harris, one of the CIA agents who had been minding him, had beenshot and killed in the line of duty on the same day Dennison had “died.” The only conclusion he could draw, incredibly, was that the CIA agent he had left handcuffed and unconscious on the floor of the motel had been executed by Lopez’s people in his stead. And Bayard, the methodical bastard, had used the situation to extend him an amnesty.
    The implications had been huge. Harris had looked a little like Dennison, close enough to create uncertainty. If Lopez’s hit man had been working from a photograph, or he had simply been in a hurry, it was entirely possible that he thought he had killed the right mark. If no one in Lopez’s organization had found Harris’s death notice and tied it to the time of the hit, it was logical to assume that Lopez really did think he was dead.
    So…dead and free, for the moment. He didn’t fool himself that it would last. Bayard could revoke his “death” whenever it suited his purposes. In one smooth stroke he had offered Dennison a deal, a grace period and a threat.
    Life was good…but the clock was ticking.
    He tossed the cloth under the bar, grabbed a broom and began sweeping sand through the cracks in the scarred hardwood floor. A cockroachthe size of a small bird scuttled from beneath a table and made a run for the nearest piece of warped skirting board.
    Dennison didn’t bother to make a swipe at the insect. Live and let live, that was his motto, and it was a fact that cockroaches were a part of island life. No matter how many you killed, they kept on coming.
    A bit like Lopez and his limitless supply of hired guns.
    When the bar was swept and the trash emptied, he walked out back where Louis Jamais, his only permanent employee, was preparing bar snacks— a big pot of seafood gumbo, slabs of island baked bread and a rich, spicy chili that was Louis’s own recipe. Picking up the latest copy of an American tabloid he subscribed to for the express purpose of keeping up with the Lopez/cabal investigations, Dennison walked outside to enjoy a few minutes respite before they opened for the lunchtime crowd. Sitting on the back step, he flipped through pages.
    His gaze skimmed the lead stories without much interest, then snagged on a small special interest piece. His attention sharpened as he read. The focus of the story was an epitaph of BenFischer, the brother of Todd Fischer, and a rehash of the Nordika tragedy, with one exception. Ben Fischer