She sat on the couch while he opened the bottle of red. The path that led Louie to his current profession was unusual, but he doubted no more unusual than the road taken by his colleagues. One did not simply wake up one morning and decide to become a paid assassin. His father had come from old money that had been derived from old connections and knowing how to curry favor among France's often changing ruling groups. The Goulds were professional diplomats who could trace their service all the way back to the coup d'йtat by Louis Napoleon in 1851. Five generations of Gould men had attended L'Йcole Polytechnique, France's premier technical university that specialized in preparing young French citizens for a life of civil service or military duty. With three daughters and only one boy, all his parents' hopes of continuing the tradition were on young Louie's shoulders and, indeed, he looked forward to following in his father's footsteps.

More than half of Louie's youth had been spent overseas while his father rose through the ranks of the French Foreign Service. There had been postings in French Guiana, New York, London, Berlin, and Washington, DC, where his father served as France's ambassador to the United States of America. It was a life filled with excitement and privilege. Louie enjoyed every minute of it, embracing the language and culture where-ever the family went. He himself could think of nothing he'd rather do than become a career diplomat.

That was right up to the point where he learned of his father's rampant infidelity. At seventeen he lashed out at the man he had spent an entire life idolizing. When Louie found out about his father's inability to stay faithful to his mother, he surreptitiously applied for and received a scholarship to L'Йcole Speciale Militaire, or as it was more commonly known, Saint Cyr. The institution was France's equivalent of West Point. On the surface it may not have seemed much of a protest, but the Goulds had a long history of contempt for the French Army. Professional diplomats to the core, they believed most, if not all, of France's great failures of the last two centuries to be the fault of the Army.

When his father found out he nearly lost his mind, but with his youngest child now legally of age, there was nothing he could do. After Louie left for Saint Cyr, things worsened between his mother and father. The secret out of the bag, his father became more brazen in his philandering, and his mother, a proud and deeply religious woman, retreated within the walls of the family's estate in the South of France. During his final year at Saint Cyr, Louie's mother took her life, and the heart and soul of the entire family was ripped from them. Devastated, Louie blamed it all on his father and decided to never speak to the man again.

She held her glass while he poured. "Did they try to follow you?"

"No."

She frowned. "What took you so long?"

"Just being careful." He poured his own glass and sat next to her on the tattered sofa.

"Herr Abel…did he wet himself when he discovered you in his room?"

"He was calmer than I would have expected." Louie held up his glass. "To what just might be our last job."

She wasn't sure she liked the sound of this, and did not raise her glass right away. She stared at him with her piercing eyes. He prodded her by extending his glass farther and after a moment she relented.

They had met when Claudia Morrell was just eighteen. He was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant in the French Foreign Legion when he'd laid eyes on her in the village of Aubagne. He fell for her almost immediately, and over a two-month period their romance intensified. Then one day in early July he was called in to see his commanding officer. It turned out Claudia was the daughter of a certain Colonel Morrell, a highly decorated Legionnaire. The colonel had just returned from a six-month deployment in Bosnia and had been promoted to brigadier general. It appeared that the general was rather upset that someone new under his command was attempting to deflower his precious daughter.

Gould's transfer to the island of Corsica and the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment set a record for expedited paperwork. He was literally gone that very morning on the first transport out, with nothing more than a rucksack and a change of uniform to his name. There had been no chance to say good-bye to Claudia. The transfer was bittersweet. The bitter part was leaving the lovely Claudia. The sweet part was getting a transfer to the Foreign Parachute Regiment-the elite of the French Foreign Legion.

Once he arrived on Corsica, there was little time to feel sorry for himself. Word had been passed down from on high that this particular Legionnaire was to be worked to the bone. For months on end he rappelled down cliffs, shot everything in the Legion's arsenal, went on grueling hikes in the hot summer sun wearing a fifty-pound pack, jumped out of planes, and swam for miles in the Bay of Calvi. The paratroopers bought into Nietzsche's creed-what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. He looked back on it now and knew that the time he spent with the paratroopers had turned him into the man that he was today.

Several months into his banishment on Corsica, he found out that the general's decision to have him abruptly transferred had come back to bite him in the ass. His very beautiful, but very stubborn daughter was making him suffer for his insensitivity to her emotions. She wrote to Louie under a pseudonym, and explained that she had moved to Paris and was refusing to speak to her "dictator of a father." On the rare occasion that he received a leave of more than two days Louie began visiting her.

Gould, however, had found a home with the paratroopers, and as much as he missed Claudia, there was no abandoning this elite band of warriors. Over the next four years he traveled the globe, going from one hot spot to the next honing his skills and discovering that he was exceptionally good at killing other men. He and Claudia remained in contact, but as she entered university life they began to drift apart. Her new friends, a bunch of socialists, had great disdain for the military and he, like all soldiers, found it very difficult to be around people who had no concept of the sacrifice made by a professional soldier. He was not asking for gratitude, but he was not about to tolerate outright contempt.

So after one long weekend in Paris that involved far too much drinking and not enough sex, all hell broke loose. The signs that her deep love for him was beginning to wane were clear. Her appearance had changed, and she'd gotten involved with a particularly rabid clique of antiestablishment types. The male leader of this tribe was hell bent on inserting his pompous ass between Claudia and Louie every chance he got.

The last straw was when he draped his arm around Claudia, and with a glass of wine and clove cigarette in the other hand, asked Louie, "Is it true that homosexuality runs rampant amongst you Legionnaires?"

He probably would not have let the comment pass, but when Claudia began laughing, that sealed the deal. The punch wasn't too vicious, nothing more really than a snap of the fist, but it was well placed. It broke the twit's nose and sent a deluge of blood cascading over his upper lip and past his blabbering mouth. It could have ended there. He had nothing more to say to Claudia. Just being in her presence now disgusted him. He was turning to leave, and then some fool jumped on his back. Like most bar brawls, what happened next was a little confusing, but it didn't change the end result. Elbows snapped, fingers were bent in directions they weren't meant to go, and noses were flattened and bloodied. Louie ended up in jail and five of Claudia's male friends ended up in the emergency room.

In the aftermath, she told him she never wanted to see him again. He asked her if that was a promise. That set her loose on a diatribe against the French Foreign Legion. He listened passively, and when she was done he calmly told her he wished that someday she could put aside her pettiness and recognize the fact that her father loved her. It would be years before their paths crossed again, and it would not be under the best of circumstances.