>MIDDLE-EAST
>AMMAN, JORDAN
>THREE DAYS PRIOR
>1340 HRS...///

	The young man was on his knees, behind him seven men obscured in dusty shemaghs. He was looking at the ground in front of him; looking totally disheveled, his body slumped forward and exhaustedly calm, near lifeless. He was broken. Behind them were the upraised canopies of Palestine Oaks, Mediterranean timbers, and a black Da’ish flag wavering in the wind. Jason knew the young man. His name was Anis al-Shamard. He was nineteen.

	The video had been posted early the same morning on a known Islamic State media account, though it was likely post dated and occurred a week or two before today. Jason knew what was coming next. The proclamations bitterly spat from the lead man behind Anis had stopped. Behind him the flash of a knife blade came over his shoulder and across his neck. 

	“Why don’t they fight?” asked Rich Weidman. The DEA Liaison was standing to Jason’s left in the dimly lit room of the compound, the glare of the monitors giving his apathy a glow. “I don't get why they never fight back.” 

	“By the time it's the real deal they usually go through a bunch of mock executions,” one of Jason's teammates answered. “They never know what's real or fake.”

	Anis’s head was pulled back but Jason could still see his brow scrunch up in pain and his lips mouth out gurgled words. The knives were always dull and the executor began to saw into Anis's neck, locking in the young man's agonizing expression as he began to remove Anis's head. Anis was nineteen. He had worked in Syria selling hot coals on the street. He had wanted to leave Jordan and live in France. 

	“I ain't going down like that,” Rich said. “Soon as I feel them cutting I'm fighting.”

	Jason had thought that way too once. He had told himself defiance until the bitter end, to always rage against the dying of the light. But he had never been where Anis had been. He had never been beaten and tortured and sodomized and at the imagined brink of death over and over again until living had become one fleeting moment into the next, like worthless terminal breaths. He had never been broken.  

	It was Jason that had convinced Anis to spy for his team. Anis had already lost his brother at the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, but when the Islamic State began their campaign of terror across the middle east Anis had lost his father and his only two sisters as well. It was all too easy for the DIA to recruit him. 
	
	“If I were in the same position you were in I'd do something,” Jason had told Anis in a crowded cafe in Amman, Jordan. “I'd get out of that refugee holding pen-”

	“Holding pen?” Anis had asked. 

	“What you stuff cattle into,” Jason had answered. “I'd get out of there and help kill whoever was responsible. To help stop them.”

	It seemed noble at the time, to spur a man into righteous danger, to handle him like an ideal on a leash. That was all anyone was to this cause anyway, Jason included. If I were in the same position, Jason would tell himself. Anis wasn’t the first Jason had seen fall. There was nothing noble in seeing Anis's head dangling in the dirt caked bloody hands of an amphetamine chemist cooking “go” pills for terrorists.
 
	The man shifted towards the camera with Anis's head, muttering repeatedly a phrase softly in Arabic. Something dark in the background caught Jason’s attention, something over the man's shoulder. It looked like the dark outline of people standing in the background shade of the Syrian forest. 

	“Do you see that?” Rich asked. 

	“See what?” a team member said. 
	
	“Dan, what's he saying over and over again?” Jason asked, focusing on the outlines in the background. There was a sudden depth to the grainy video, like Jason was sinking into the background, pulled into the warped timbers and goblet shaped spruces like coral in a sea of darkness, on the edge of nothing. Their stuffy room in Amman began to squeeze inward, suddenly smaller. 

	“Someone is in the background,” Rich answered. “Look—three guys in the shade. Pause it.”

	Dan Treston, their linguist, was shaking his head. “I don’t know, Jimmy,” he said to Jason. “Sounds like he’s murmuring ‘come and see’ over and over again.” Without Jason’s response Dan rewound the video and played it again.

	تعال وشاهد (Tueal washahid). Come and see, come and see.

	The room’s vosip phone erupted into life and Jason jerked away from his trance on the three figures in the background. Three figures Rich Weidman, Dan Treston, and two other people saw with Jason. He had to remind himself of that. They had seen it too. Three figures behind Anis al-Shamard’s killing. The phone continued its electronic wail. Jason bound for the phone as Rich was remarking about never hearing the landline ring before. Dan agreed, and the entire room went silent watching Jason.

	“Jason Jimenez, DIA Amman.”

	“Pack your shit, Jimenez. You’re headed stateside.” 

[hr]

>BLACKRIVER COUNTY
>WHITE TREE, WEST VIRGINIA
>UNITED STATES
>0605HRS...///

	The air was different here, but Jason didn’t think it clean. It was clear and brisk, but it filled his lungs with a cold, dead bite like a fog could settle inside him any moment.Through the cracked asphalt veins of roads slithering through the Appalachian green hills there clung what meant to be a city, but White Tree seemed another world to Jason. It was some fringe place hidden in some forgotten frontier, and he felt he was deep in the womb of the past in all of its mystery and savagery. It reminded him of the most run down towns hollowing out along the Texas highways in his youth, but unlike those soon to be ghost towns White Tree was filled with people as far as he could tell. 

	Jason had flown into Lewisburg right as his jet lag from Jordan to Washington, D.C. had set in and the ambien was wearing off. On the drive from Lewisburg to White Tree he felt like he was drifting forward more than approaching his next assignment, slipping away into the eerie beauty of rural West Virginia.The director that had called him in for this special assignment had little to say, leaving Jason with the suspicion his superior wasn’t exactly in the know. The agencies involved, and what little he was told about Clyde Baughman’s work, had Jason’s mind reeling—but he also felt like he was coming to something different, something that was meant to happen. 

	Now he was drifting ever deeper into the woods, feeling choked and lonely. The drive was beautiful but the more lucid he was becoming the more he ached to be fucked up, and perhaps more. The urge came on like an anxiety, something roiling and nagging in his stomach. There were some pain pills, a few gel tabs of LSD, and a laughably small dose of MDMA he had left stateside that he had now, and although any mix of them could get the job done Jason was worried he was hungry for something more. Now that he was back in the states old habits were bubbling up again, and he did his best to focus on the trees, on Baughman, and on whatever dark state op he had been selected for.

	Jason, driving a silver rental sudan via his personal fake alias, crested over the rise of the road as it peaked towards the safehouse. There were several cars parked on its closest side and Jason found a place of his own next to a roadster bike complete with a road worn stars and bars flag. Jason chuckled, pulling the flag’s corner to get a complete view of the confederate flag. It seemed out of character for the clandestine feel of the operation so far. An informant? Someone undercover? Only one way to find out, Jason thought, and quickly made his way to the cabin’s front doors.