“As you are all on my payroll and take orders from me, that makes all of you my men,” Bristow said, his voice not as commanding as it had been a moment earlier. But then he was a coward, always employing others to do his dirty work for him. If his options were to stay and fight with his men or abandon them and run, he’d run. His kind always did. It was precisely why Hancock had his own team here under the guise of having vetted and employed them for Bristow. Bristow had no knowledge of the fact that Hancock’s team had worked together for years and that their loyalty to one another ran deep. That they answered to Hancock and no other. Ever.
In a world where Hancock trusted none but a precious few, his trust was given to Titan, though it was no longer Titan. It wasn’t . . . anything. The very government who’d created them, faking their deaths and then raising them from the ashes like the phoenix, had given them new identities and they were to have no ties to the outside world. The mission was all that mattered. Not people. Not politics or the delicate dance of diplomacy.
The government had created . . . monsters. Killing machines without mercy or conscience, trained to carry out orders at all cost. The good of the many always outweighed the good of the few. And when Titan grew too powerful, when they began to question their orders, their objective and how it aided the greater good, when the missions seemed to grow too personal, too inconsequential for a group of Titan’s training and abilities, they’d been disbanded, branded traitors, loose cannons, murderers. Even terrorists. They’d been labeled the very thing they hunted and it still burned a hole in Hancock’s gut. After living so many years with no feelings, no emotions, turning them off at will and doing his job with cool efficiency, he learned true rage. Not since his foster mother, a woman who’d made Hancock feel that he had worth and had given him the first and only sense of family, had been murdered in retaliation for her husband’s mission, had Hancock felt anger and overwhelming rage. That mission had been personal. The only one. Big Eddie, the man who called him son, had come to him for help. Revenge. And even if Big Eddie hadn’t asked, Hancock would have hunted Caroline Sinclair’s murderer.
But things had changed since then. That was years ago, when Titan operated under the authority of the U.S. government, though only a select few even knew of Titan’s existence. They had much freedom then to ferret out those who were a threat to national security, to take out any threat at will. And then, their own government turned on them, thinking them expendable and easily disposed of.
Even now the hunters had become the hunted, and any number of classified military groups had orders to kill on sight. Having gained access to a shadowy CIA operative’s computer files, Hancock had learned a hell of a lot about the country he’d sworn his allegiance to.
No, not everyone charged with the defense of America and its people was evil and self-serving, betraying the citizens they were sworn to protect and defend. There were men and women who tirelessly took up the charge. But any one of those would kill Hancock on sight, thinking him a traitor to the principles they followed, lived, and would die for.
Titan had refused to die. They had evolved far beyond what their trainers in the beginning had taught them. And now, they not only fought to protect even those who’d betrayed them and countless innocent American lives but they had expanded their reach into a world filled with the same good and bad reflected in the U.S. government and military.
Innocence had no boundaries. No one nationality. One wasn’t good or bad simply because one was a certain nationality or held a different belief system. Innocents died every day simply because there was no one to fight for them. Not even their own governments. Titan couldn’t save the entire world, but they saved pieces of it. One piece at a time.