Pre-publication copy. All rights reserved, August 2014.
Revelation
By Lynnie Purcell
Chapter 1
The man was very fat. Splotchy skin hung in useless rolls around his face and neck. His oval-shaped head was bent forward, but the folds of fatty skin under his chin kept his head from truly resting on his chest. Beads of sweat ran down the man’s face and neck. His hair was completely soaked by the moisture.
The chair the man was sitting in was very expensive, but its value had gone down considerably in the past ten minutes. Blood, which had mingled with the man’s sweat, dripped down onto the man’s lap and continued its sticky path onto the peach cushion. It might have been possible to get the blood out of the cushion, but there was no getting the stench of the sweat out of the fabric. The chair had definitely been ruined.
It turned Sterling’s stomach to be near him.
The windows of the room were closed, the drapes drawn and the door carefully locked. The sealed room made the air stuffy and repressive. There were no fans to blow the air around, and the air conditioning did not seem to be working against the profound heat that surrounded them. It brought the stench closer and made everything unbearable. But Sterling had more on his mind than stuffy air. He was working, and it was as good a distraction as he was going to get.
The fat man groaned and his hands started straining against the restraints that bound him to the chair. He was coming back to consciousness. It was the second time he had passed out. He was not a robust man, and did not handle pain well. It made having a conversation with him tiring.
Sterling looked over his shoulder at Ronan as the man stirred. He was preoccupied with searching through the documents on the fat man’s computer, but he shook his head grimly when Sterling looked at him. Sterling let out a long exhale, knowing he had no choice but to get close to the fat man again, and waited patiently for him to come all the way back to consciousness.
The man immediately started whimpering and begging for his life. He blearily looked up at Sterling and his voice reached new levels of high-pitched. The rolls on his neck moved grotesquely as the man pleaded. Sterling noticed a faint yellow sheen in his eyes. It was proof that the man was a drunkard as well as a murderer.
How the man had gotten into politics was anybody’s guess.
Sterling grabbed the man on the bony part of the chin and forced him to look up. “Let’s try again,” he said.
The fat man whimpered.
“Tell me everything about your illegal operations. I want to know who you pay off to get your motions passed, I want to know how you get the weapons to your buyers, and I want to know where you stash the money.”
“I c-c-c-can’t!” the fat man wailed. “They’ll kill me!”
“‘They’ are not in this room right now,” Sterling said in a calm voice that bellied his overwhelming disgust. “‘They’ can’t hurt you right now…I can.”
He despised this man. It wasn’t that he was a criminal. It was the fact that he was an old patron of the child slave trade. His government status and criminal friends had long protected him from punishment. There was no protection now. There was just Sterling’s wrath. The fat man was not the first to learn to fear it.
But he was proving himself stubborn. He was unwilling to give up his friends in the underground world of arms trafficking. He was more scared of those hardened criminals than he was of Sterling. Sterling would have to change his mind. There was no other choice. The mission depended on it.
Sterling pushed away the man’s sweaty chin and went to the mahogany table that held the computer. The table was pretty and expensive. It was the same desk where he kept pictures of his wife and children. Sterling inspected the contents on the table for a minute, sharing a grim smile with Ronan to increase the man’s dread, and picked up a letter opener. He turned to face the fat man again, holding the letter opener nonchalantly.
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Sterling said as the man eyed the letter opener fearfully. “I was trained to kill, but I was also trained to keep a person alive while they endure the maximum amount of pain possible. I can make you hurt to the point that you’ll beg me to let you die. I really don’t want to hurt you, though. It’s unnecessary and, frankly, quite messy. I just bought these shoes, and I don’t want to ruin them on account of you.”
Sterling gestured down to the fancy dress shoes he was wearing. They were part of a disguise that had gotten him into the fat man’s house via a party he had thrown earlier in the night. The man only had eyes for the knife in Sterling’s hand. He whimpered slightly and said nothing.
“You have five seconds to start talking. After that, well, you get the drift,” Sterling added.
The fat man whimpered again. His eyes flickered to Ronan, who looked bored as he scanned through the fat man’s computer, then to the door that was carefully locked.
“You’re thinking that your security team is coming for you,” Sterling said. “They aren’t. They’re taking a very long nap. By the time they wake up, we’ll be long gone and you’ll either be waiting for them with only a few cuts and bruises as proof of our encounter, or you’ll be dead.”
The fat man’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe Sterling. He was convinced that someone would help him; he was confident Sterling was not nearly as bad as he claimed. They usually were until Sterling got through with them.
Sterling smiled sweetly. “I suppose I’ll have to show you my training after all.”
He moved closer to the fat man, the letter opener held out in front of him. The fat man’s eyes bulged, and he twisted his hands hard against the restraints that bound him to the chair. He whimpered again, sounding exactly like a caught pig.
Sterling moved even closer. He was a foot from the man and moving closer. The stench of the man hit his nostrils like a tidal wave, but he maintained his grim advance. Sterling was only an inch from the man when he finally got the response he wanted.
“Wait! Wait!” the fat man said in a shrill voice. “I’ll tell you.”
Sterling touched the knife against the man’s face. He held it there as the man whimpered, then he smiled happily. “I knew he’d come around. Didn’t I tell you so?” Sterling asked Ronan.
“Mmm-hmm,” Ronan agreed.
“Talk,” Sterling commanded, backing away again so that he was as far from the stench as possible.
Stuttering, the man started telling him every evil thing he had ever done. There was no guilt in the telling, just fear that he would die if he didn’t speak. The fat man had more skeletons in his closest than Sterling had been told about in his briefing. He had his hand in most of the illegal dealings in the city. He was connected to three different gangs, the Russian and Italian mobs, even terrorists. There were some crimes that Sterling was surprised the man had managed to commit and others that downright disgusted him. The fat man was not afraid of details, and Sterling was treated to a lifetime of psychotic behavior he would have killed not to hear.
The fat man was confessing to drowning a man in his sink when Ronan caught Sterling’s attention. Ronan nodded seriously and Sterling felt a wave of relief. They had gotten what they needed. They could leave.
“Okay, well, I think that’s about all. We’ll be going now,” Sterling interrupted the man.
“You’re going to let me go?” the fat man asked incredulously.
“In a manner of speaking,” Sterling said.
“Wh-what does that mean?” the fat man asked, his eyes full of terror. He was beginning to understand that Sterling had no intention of letting him leave the room alive. He could see it from the hard way Sterling was suddenly looking at him.
“We were sent here to kill you and steal the weapons and money you have in your warehouse. We needed your voice to get inside. You remember the voice lock, right? That’s why I needed you to talk. Couldn’t fake it…couldn’t hack it.”
“What!?” the man squealed. “You can’t do this to me! I am a respected person in this community! I have friends! They’ll kill you! I’ll-”
“Don’t worry. It won’t hurt,” Sterling comforted him. “For long.”
Sterling moved back to the table as the man continued to threaten and warn him. Ronan pulled a long, narrow box out of his pocket and handed it to Sterling. Inside the box was a needle.
“This is wolfsbane,” Sterling told the fat man. “It’s a very old poison. Basically, you’ll have a heart attack and then choke to death. It’ll look very natural. No one will suspect a thing.”
The man started screaming. He called out for someone to help him. His squeals of terror mixed in with his calls for help. Sterling did not give him long to yell. He knelt down next to the man, pulled off the man’s shoe and sock, and took the top off the needle. Without pause, he injected the contents of the needle between the man’s toes.
The man struggled for a minute more, his incoherent squeals of terror filling the room with chaotic sound, then the drug took over. He started wheezing and his voice cut off. His face changed from splotchy red to a ruddy shade of purple. The purple quickly changed to blue. A minute after Sterling injected the man, he was dead.
Sterling put the man’s sock and shoe back on, and then carefully put the cover back on the needle. He turned and put it back in the case and handed it back to Ronan. Sterling was very grim. While the fat man had been the worst sort of person, Sterling never enjoyed taking a life. It was part of his duty, a means to protect people, but it was always with a heavy heart that he took a life. There was no glee or celebration.
“Did you get it?” Sterling asked, moving his hand to his pocket to turn off the recorder he had there.
Ronan held up a flash drive that contained all of the fat man’s files. The files were incredibly important. They were probably more important than keeping the weapons the fat man sold out of terrorists’ hands. They would help dismantle the man’s organization and do a lot of good in keeping bad people from hurting innocent ones.
Sterling looked around the room again. He had cracked the safe before the man had gotten into the room. He went to it and carefully emptied it of its contents. It was better that the police thought the man’s death was a robbery gone wrong. They did not need to tip off the authorities to the fact that there was an assassin in town. Sterling took it as a point of pride that he had never been chased out of a city.
When the safe was empty, Sterling carefully tucked some of the other valuables into a bag he had brought, overturned a few chairs, knocked decorations to the floor, and then stood in the middle of the room to inspect his handiwork. He noticed idly that the man’s stench had increased with his death, but they were almost free of him.
He nodded in approval and opened the window. Ronan was right behind him. Sterling put the bag over his shoulder and climbed through the opening. When his feet touched the ground, he took off running. He could hear Ronan behind him. Sterling was confident; they had already made their escape. The window was near a large hedge and larger stone fence that separated them from freedom. There was only a hundred feet between the window and the ledge. It was a burglar’s dream.
Though the bag was heavy, Sterling jumped up and grabbed the ledge easily. He was over and on the other side of the fence in a second’s time. Ronan hit the ground next to him and they very carefully stopped hurrying. The suburban streets were not busy so late at night, but hurrying away from any crime was a bad practice. There were enough people driving around and looking out their windows to remember them when the time came for the police to ask around.
The expensive houses quickly faded to businesses. On the corner of the block was a dark van. Ronan got in the driver’s seat with relief on his face. Sterling threw the bag of stolen valuables behind him in the van and carefully looked around the streets. There was no one out. He had the feeling that the people who had seen them wouldn’t remember them tomorrow.
The heat was overwhelming, though it was very late. It reminded him of home, of an island with no name, where the humidity was only matched in intensity by the rainstorms in typhoon season. He had not been home in three years. He found that he missed it in that moment, which surprised him. He had never thought he would miss the island. He had felt trapped there, suffocated by the rules and tradition. But now, he would have given anything to see the island again. He sighed, knowing that he was thinking of home because of his most recent assassination. Killing always made him morose.
Sterling rolled down his window and sucked in the deep humidity. Though it was heavy, and made his entire body feel wet, he was happy to breathe in something that was not the fat man’s stench. Sterling worried that the smell would never leave his nostrils.
“How long will it take us to get to the warehouse?” Sterling asked.
He knew that Ronan had clocked the drive several times. He knew distance, time, and had the schedule tightly locked away in his mind.
“Fifteen minutes,” Ronan said tensely. “Fifteen minutes to load up the gear and take care of the bad guys, and another forty to get to our contact.”
Sterling eyed Ronan carefully. Ronan was uptight, a stickler for rules and following protocol. Sterling didn’t mind. Ronan’s desire to go by the book had saved his life more than once. Ronan was the planner, the intelligence gatherer. Sterling was the man of action; he was the person who walked into danger and took risks. Ronan felt the pressure of a hands-on mission worse than Sterling did. He was not used to being out in the field; he was used to sitting in the van while Sterling followed through on the action end of the assassinations.
“It’ll be easy,” Sterling reassured him, pulling a laptop out from under the seat. He plugged the recorder he had used to steal the man’s voice into the USB port and waited for the data to download. “The hardest part is over.”
“Yeah, because getting into an armed warehouse will be easy,” Ronan muttered.
“Don’t worry so much,” Sterling said, running the file he had just uploaded into a software that could pick apart the fat man’s voice and form the password they had lifted through their surveillance.
“Someone has to,” Ronan replied.
“Worry about the things you can help,” Sterling said. “Not the ones you can’t.”
“That’s great advice…Come up with it yourself?” Ronan asked dryly.
Sterling grinned at him.
They were silent then. Both of them were wound up in anticipation over the next stage of the operation. Getting the guns and money was an even more direct action than jumping the fat man and his guards. There would be a fight. Sterling was confident he could handle it. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before.
The warehouses were surrounded by a large fence and protected by a local security company. Two guards walked the property, while a third sat inside, in the only part of the compound that had air conditioning. The chance to walk the fence was often a duty assigned to the loser of card games and bets. Sterling could see the sweat on the men’s uniforms as they made their rounds. He knew it was a miserable duty. It was about to get a lot worse.
The security guards were not Sterling’s largest problem. The real challenge was with the team that the fat man had hired to stand guard day and night around his warehouse. They were professionals. They were not washed-out police officers or late-night adrenaline junkies. They were trained killers. They would know how to handle the coming attack.
Sterling reached behind his seat and pulled out a shirt that was identical to the shirts the guards wore and a baseball cap. He buttoned the shirt quickly and placed the cap over his dark hair. He put a heavy belt around his waist and slid a pistol into the holster on his left side. To the casual observer, he looked exactly like the men who were patrolling the fence. Ronan pulled out a different laptop and numbers started scrolling over a black screen.
“Breaking into their system now,” Ronan said. “Send me that recording…”
Ronan started typing, working his way through the firewalls that protected the warehouse security system from hackers, and Sterling sent him the recording. When he was done with his message sending, Sterling tucked several more pistols into various hiding places on his body and brought a sense of calm around his mind. He knew that he would need the calm almost as much as the bullets in his weapons.
Also tucked into Sterling’s belt was a dart gun. He did not intend to kill the guards around the main fence. They were just doing their job; they did not deserve to die for it. The trained guards were a different situation. They were bought-and-paid-for criminals. It was kill or be killed with them.
“Okay, got it,” Ronan said. “Replacing their video feed now.”
Sterling saw ten different camera angles pop up on Ronan’s laptop out of the corner of his eye, but kept his focus on the warehouses in front of him. Ronan would tell him if there was something on the monitors worth viewing.
Ronan continued typing for another minute. “Got it,” he added. “Fat man’s voice is opening the front gate now.”
Sterling looked to his right and saw the gate swing open. He glanced to his left to make sure that both security guards were out of sight. The area was clear.
“Go,” Sterling said.
Ronan drove through the front gate as casually as he could manage. Sterling put the laptop Ronan had handed him on the floor and Ronan pulled to a stop behind a warehouse that was not nearly as guarded as the one they planned on robbing. Sterling was out of the van before Ronan had put the van in park. Ronan held on to the steering wheel as though he thought it would disappear as Sterling slipped around the edge of the building.
Sterling pulled the dart gun out and carefully hid it behind his leg as he walked. He kept his head lowered as he marched toward the small structure that housed the cameras and the lucky guard that got to sit inside. Sterling opened the door, his shoes squeaking slightly on the tile floor.
“Hey, tell Johnny that he-” the guard started to say.
Sterling shot him with the tranquillizer gun. The man’s hand went to the dart in his neck, then he toppled over soundlessly. Sterling did a quick survey of the monitors and spotted the other two guards. One of them was headed back to the booth. Sterling stepped to the right of the door, crouched below the glass, and put his back against the wall. He watched on the monitor as the man moved closer.
The guard opened the door, spotted his fallen friend, and rushed to help him. Sterling stepped out from around the door and shot the man in the back with the dart gun. The second man fell next to the first with a funny, confused grunt.
There was only one more guard left. Sterling watched him on the monitor for a second. The man was headed toward a row of warehouses on the opposite side of the lot. Sterling would have to hurry to catch him. He didn’t want to wait for the man to make his full round; the longer they waited, the more they risked discovery.
He hurried out of the guard house and used the buildings for cover as he ran toward the guard. He could feel his heart thumping heavily in his chest, but his mind was calm. He was taking his adrenaline and focusing it the way he had been taught. He was confident and cool. He knew what had to be done.
The guard was near a warehouse with a red, metal door when Sterling caught up to him. He was loitering as he smoked a cigarette. Sterling kept his head down and approached the guard from the man’s left. The guard noticed Sterling, jumped slightly, and then gave a little laugh.
“Damn it, you scared me!” he said, throwing away his cigarette.
Sterling raised his tranquillizer gun and shot the man in the shoulder. The man’s eyes crossed and he toppled to the ground. Sterling tucked the gun into his belt and pulled the man into the shadows of the warehouse.
Ronan jumped when Sterling reappeared at his window.
“The security guards are asleep. Time to go to work,” Sterling said.
Ronan nodded nervously and pulled away from the building. Sterling walked behind the van as Ronan carefully maneuvered it toward the warehouse at the far corner of the property.
“You can’t come back here!” a voice called as Ronan pulled up to the structure.
“Can you tell me where warehouse 5 is?” Ronan called back. “My buddy told me to meet him there.”
“I don’t care!” the voice called back. “Get out of here before I make you!”
“Keep your cool, man. Just trying to do a guy a favor…”
Sterling was already moving. He slipped around the van quietly and assessed the situation. He could see three men looking at the van with their hands on their guns. One of them was closer than the others; he was the one yelling at Ronan. The other guards were not in view. Sterling could see a video camera focused on Ronan.
He pulled his dart gun out again and took aim. He shot the closest man in the stomach. The man had reached for his pistol when he saw Sterling, but it was too late. Sterling then focused on the second guard. He shot his last dart at him. He toppled to the ground.
The third man pulled out his pistol and took aim at Sterling. There was a loud bang from the van and he fell. Ronan’s hand trembled as he lowered the smoking gun.
Sterling was still in motion. He moved past the fallen guards and saw that the gunshot had drawn the attention of the others. He had to move fast to prevent them from surrounding them. He pulled his pistol out and hugged the side of the warehouse. A guard stepped out from the door with his weapon raised. Sterling shot him twice in the chest. He fell, and Sterling moved forward again.
Another guard appeared at the corner of the building. Two more shots rang out from Sterling’s pistol. Sterling felt movement from behind him. He half turned and saw another man step around the other corner of the building. The guard raised his weapon, but Sterling was faster. Instinct guided him more than anything. He hit the pavement and shot the man in the forehead.
Then, there was the sharp sound of bullets hitting the pavement and van. The shooter was on top of the warehouse and firing down at Ronan. The man on the roof had assumed that Ronan was the one doing all the shooting. Sterling took several steps back from the wall of the warehouse and looked up. The man had an automatic weapon and didn’t seem to realize that Sterling was there. Sterling took careful aim and fired. The bullet landed in the man’s throat. He toppled over the edge of the building with a gurgled sigh.
All seven of the guards on the perimeter were down. There were just two more to kill. Then, they could load up their haul and leave town for good.
Sterling told Ronan he was going inside with a couple of gestures. He then signaled for Ronan to keep an eye on the exterior of the building. Ronan nodded tersely and hunkered down behind the wheel of the van.
Sterling opened the metal door a crack and was immediately greeted by gunfire. He stepped back behind the door and thought about his options. There was really only one available to him. He had to get inside. He couldn’t let them waste his time as they sent for reinforcements.
He took a deep breath and dove to the closest cover, a metal container with Arabic written across the sides. The bullets followed his path with the precision of trained men.
Before he hit the floor behind the container, he saw the two remaining guards. They were using the door of a small room for cover. The door was thick metal, reinforced for such a circumstance, but Sterling saw a way around them. The window next to the door was glass. It was a perfect way to make his presence felt without dying in the process. He rose up and shot the glass out, hoping it looked like a stray bullet. He heard one of the men snicker at his aim.
He ducked behind the container as the men shot at him again. He waited for them to duck behind the door to reload, then he popped up for a second time. Sterling ran toward them, his bullets ricocheting off the door as he kept them pinned down. He heard the click of both men reloading, but it was too late. He jumped over the broken glass, threw his empty pistol to the ground as it clicked alarmingly, and pulled out one of his spares. He shot four times – two bullets for each man.
Silence fell over the warehouse. Sterling let out a long exhale. The fighting was done. His job was over. He carefully picked up the pistol he had discarded and went to open the loading door of the warehouse.
Ronan drove the van inside and hopped out. He noticed Sterling’s handiwork with a roll of his eyes. “Good thing you didn’t hit the supplies of ammo or grenades with your hail of bullets.”
“I hit what I aim at,” Sterling replied loftily.
Ronan grinned mockingly and hurried to open the doors of the van. They spent the next five minutes loading up the boxes and emptying the warehouse of its illegal contents. When they had everything on their list, they left. The sounds of sirens let them know that their time was running out.
“I guess someone noticed after all,” Ronan muttered.
“Good thing they didn’t notice sooner,” Sterling replied. “You got the video from the warehouse cameras?”
“All scrubbed,” Ronan said.
“Good,” Sterling replied.
They drove through the gate without getting stopped by anyone. There was no one left to stop them. A minute later, the cops arrived. Sterling and Ronan had already made it to the highway.
They drove to the docks, which was forty minutes away. A man in his fifties, who had a nondescript face and not very much to say, guided them toward a shipping container. They parked the van inside, retrieved Ronan’s laptop, and left the security guard gear and pistols in the back. The man handed them a set of keys and a change of clothes, then he turned away without a word. Sterling took the keys and got into a car that was waiting for them.
They drove to their hotel feeling victorious, if not tired. The adrenaline rush had taken it out of both of them. No matter how many times Sterling found himself in mortal danger, he could never prevent himself from feeling the aftershock of extreme exhaustion. He always slept better after a mission.
Ronan talked very little on the way back to their hotel. He had his laptop open and was uploading the fat man’s files to a server set up for such drops. Other people, whose sole job was to inspect data, would look at what they had found on the fat man’s computer and decide what was important and what wasn’t. They were the people who directed Sterling and Ronan to their missions. Ronan called them information.
Sterling collapsed on his bed in the hotel without undressing. He was asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. He dreamed of the island and the cold water and soothing waterfalls that had been the only reprieve from the heat. It was perfection, marred by the painful past he had experienced there.
The next morning, Sterling awoke to the sound of Ronan typing on his keyboard. The clack of keys was almost as annoying as an alarm clock, though less likely to stop. Sterling looked over at the clock on the dresser and saw that it was a little past five in the morning.
“It’s my day off!” Sterling muttered into the pillow.
“Sorry,” Ronan said. “But I got an urgent text message this morning, and I’ve been getting instructions ever since.”
That got Sterling’s immediate attention. He pushed up on his stomach, so that he could look at Ronan and assess his expression. Ronan was very serious and focused. It was the expression he wore when there was a mission. Sterling rubbed at his eyes sleepily, but his mind was already alert.
“Another job…so soon?” Sterling asked.
While he typically liked to stay busy, there was always a lag between jobs. He usually had at least two days to recover from the action and make sure that no one had caught on to his trail. To have another job so soon usually meant there was an emergency.
“Apparently the information we got off the fat man’s computer had some juicy little tidbits. He wasn’t just a scoundrel…He was carrying around the heart of a blackmailer,” Ronan said. “He kept tabs on most of the crime in the city. The people in information don’t know how he got his hands on most of the things they discovered, but it’s turned out to be true so far. They had some of our people here check it out.”
Sterling didn’t care about explanations. He just cared about the reason Ronan was typing at lightning speed. “So? How does that concern us?”
“You’ve heard of Garrett Cage?” Ronan asked after a long pause.
Sterling’s eyes widened. Everyone on the island knew of Garrett Cage. He was what people had in mind when they coined the term infamous. He had been a criminal of the worst sort, but that wasn’t what made him such an enemy to the order of assassins.
Before he had gone into a life of crime, and had built a large empire out of other people’s blood, he had been part of Sterling’s order. He had been an assassin. Sterling would have called him brother had he not turned his back on all the tenants of the assassin creed. He had turned into a killer of innocents. He had once led the largest group of private assassins in the eastern United States, before he had caught a bullet in the brain.
“He’s dead,” Sterling said.
“Not according to the fat man’s computer,” Ronan said.
“That’s not possible. We would have known if he survived. Someone would have found him.”
“Not if he changed his identity and his face…” Ronan said. “Plastic surgery isn’t that hard to come by these days, particularly if you’re willing to pay a lot. And Cage had the money and means.”
“So he’s alive? There’s no doubt?” Sterling asked.
“Information thinks so,” Ronan said. “And they want us to find him.”
Sterling eyed Ronan in disbelief. “Us? That doesn’t sound right,” Sterling said. “Cage is…legendary.”
“They think that we’re best suited to catch him…because of our age. They think that Cage won’t suspect us. We won’t be as obvious as someone else.”
“What does our age have to do with anything?” Sterling asked irritably. He was as highly trained as people twice his age. He had worked hard to be the best, and it had paid off. Very few people could face Sterling in a fight and live.
“Because the fat man’s files indicate that Cage is affiliated with a high school. It’s where he’s hiding.”
That did make sense. At seventeen, no one suspected Sterling of half the things he was capable of doing. Cage would never think to suspect someone so young. Most assassins had five or six years on Sterling when they were let out into the world. But training would only matter if Sterling could find Cage first. He had the feeling that it would not be easy.
“Where is he?” Sterling asked.
“Here. In Houston,” Ronan said.