The rain in New York doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the filth wetter. I stood under the awning of a bodega on Flatbush Avenue and watched it sheet down the street, turning the neon signs into smeared watercolors of red and blue. Three days without sleep. Three days since Sammy died. Three days since I realized I had been a lab rat in a war I never knew I was fighting.

Sammy was a fat guy. That was the first thing you noticed. The second thing was that he was scared. Not the normal kind of scared—scared like a man who had seen the bottom of something and couldn't climb out. He hired me to watch his apartment for a week. Five hundred dollars a day. I took the job because five hundred a day is five hundred a day in Brooklyn, and I had been sitting on an empty bottle of Jameson and counting the dents in my ceiling.

On the third night, I heard something. Not a sound—a feeling. The kind of feeling you get in Vietnam when the jungle goes quiet and you know something is moving through the trees. I looked through the peephole. Nothing. I opened the door. Nothing. I closed the door and sat on the couch and drank half a bottle of whiskey and told myself I was being paranoid.

When I came back the next morning, Sammy was dead. Slumped over his kitchen table, a knife wound in his neck so clean it looked like it had been done by a machine. The room was a mess—drawers pulled out, papers scattered, but nothing was missing. Not his TV, not his stereo, not the fifty bucks I knew he kept in a coffee can under the sink. Whoever did this wasn't looking for money. They were looking for something else. Or they were sending a message.

I found the safe behind a loose panel in the closet. Sammy was smarter than he looked. Inside were photographs—seven men in suits, sitting around a table. PharmaCore executives, according to the names written on the back. And in the center of the table, smiling at the camera with eyes like polished stone, was Dr. Richard Voss.

My blood went cold. I knew that face. I had seen it in a tent in the Central Highlands, watching Voss mix something in a syringe while I lay on a cot and tried not to think about the mortar rounds hitting the compound two hundred meters away.

The fourth day, I drove through Brooklyn with no destination. The rain had stopped but the streets were still wet, and the city looked like a photograph left out in the rain—colors bleeding, edges soft, reality dissolving. I ended up at a bar in Bushwick that I had been to a hundred times before. The kind of place where the bartender knows your name and doesn't ask questions.

"Jack," he said. "You look like hell."

"Thanks, Mike."

I ordered a whiskey. He poured it. I drank it. I ordered another.

The door opened and a woman came in. She was wearing a trench coat and carrying a leather satchel, and she had the kind of face that said she had never trusted anyone and probably never would. She saw me, hesitated, then walked over.

"Murphy," she said. "I heard about Sammy."

"Kowalski. You hear a lot."

"I'm a reporter. Hearing things is my job." She sat down without asking. "Vera Kowalski. New York Daily. I've been looking for someone to talk to about PharmaCore for six months. Sammy was my source."

I looked at her. "Your source is dead."

"Your client is dead. Same difference." She pulled a notebook from her bag. "Sammy told me something before he died. Something about PharmaCore's drug trials. Something about soldiers."

I put down my glass. "What kind of soldiers?"

"Vietnam veterans. Specifically, guys who were treated at field hospitals in the Central Highlands. Guys who were exposed to experimental compounds."

The bar seemed to get quieter. The bartender was polishing a glass. A couple in the corner was arguing in low voices. Everything else faded.

"Who told you that?" I said.

"Sammy. And I'm guessing you know more than you're saying."

I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because she was right, and the truth was a live wire and I was standing in a puddle.

In Vietnam, Voss had come to our compound every week. He was civilian contractor—Department of Defense, though nobody knew exactly for what. He'd bring cases full of equipment, set up in the medical tent, and ask to speak with certain patients. I was one of those patients. Or rather, I was one of the medics who administered the treatments. I thought it was antibiotics. I thought it was something to help the men recover from wounds and infection.

I was wrong.

Vera watched me carefully. "Jack. Whatever they gave you, whatever they did to you—it doesn't define you. But you need to know what it was. You need to know the truth."

The truth. I had spent three years trying to forget the truth. Now it was sitting across from me in a bar in Bushwick, wearing a trench coat and a expression that was equal parts pity and determination.

"What do you want, Vera?" I said.

"I want the story. And I want you to help me get it."

I laughed. It was not a funny laugh. It was the kind of laugh that comes from a place where humor and despair have become indistinguishable. "You want me to help you take down PharmaCore. A company that has politicians in its pocket and lawyers on speed dial. And you think a drunk ex-medick and a reporter can do something about it?"

"I think," Vera said, "that you're the only person who was actually inside their operation. And I think that whatever they gave you—it made you something special. Something they don't want loose."

She was not wrong. That was the worst part.

I finished my whiskey. Stood up. "Meet me tomorrow. 8 AM. My apartment. Bring everything you have on PharmaCore."

She nodded. "And Jack? Watch your back."

I walked out into the night. The rain had started again. I didn't have an umbrella. I didn't care.

By the time I reached my apartment, I was soaked to the bone. I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and froze.

Someone had been in my apartment.

Not ransacked—searched. Carefully. Methodically. Like someone who knew exactly what they were looking for. And then I saw it. On my table. A syringe. Full of clear liquid.

PharmaCore's calling card.

I picked it up carefully. The label had been removed, but I knew what was inside. I would know anywhere—the smell was the same as in Vietnam. The same smell that had been running through my veins for three years, masquerading as courage, masquerading as strength.

I walked to the mirror in the hallway and looked at myself. The man staring back was thirty-five years old, with gray in his beard and shadows under his eyes and a body that carried the invisible scars of a war nobody else knew I had fought.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

The man in the mirror didn't answer. He never did.