Nominee — The Shadowboxer Files action adventure thriller

CHAPTER ONE

The phone trilled on the nightstand. 3:00 A.M.

Brill rolled over and scooped it up without seeing who it was. There was only two people who had this number and only one who called him this early in the morning.

“I thought you would be running,” said Carver.

His deep melodious voice sounded like it belonged on a radio or television announcer, his South African accent muted but clipped after many years in his adopted country.

“Another hour,” Brill answered.

He had planned to do heat training today, eighteen to twenty four miles that put him under the noon sun at the hardest part of the run when the willpower was sapped and the sweat stopped running. This was the way he tested his body over and over again, working on that part of the mind that begged him to stop, begged him to quit and sharpened the senses of his bulletproof will.

Carver knew he wasn’t an early morning runner, so it was a constant joke between them. Brill wondered if his business partner ever slept, since the man ignored all propriety of time boundaries.

“We’ve been hired,” he said.

Brill sat up on the edge of his bed and rubbed his eyes. The room was lit by ambient light leaking in through the double paned windows casting the room in an unearthly glow.

Normally he wouldn’t be this visible through unshaded windows. As an assassin he had completed many assignments from great distance hitting targets through windows.

The first shot would shatter the glass, the next shot would finish the contract.

But he had double paned windows that were tinted with reflective material. He could see out and no one else could see in.

It allowed him to look out over the back of the property with a clear field of view, and anyone trying to look inside might as well be looking in a mirror.

“What’s the job?” he asked and wondered if he would be able to train.

“Have you been following the election?”

Carver didn’t bother to ask if he watched television. That particular habit, Brill never picked up…