"A man can die but once."

Shakespeare, Henry IV Part II

7 years earlier...

Trials tried to crouch as low as he could behind the crate as bullets whistled over his head.

Shit, he thought, this is not how it was supposed to go.

This was only his second solo outing for the Ministry, and already it had gone to hell. He'd arrived at the warehouse somewhere near the German-Czech border the night before, scoped it out, and only seen the few low-threat night security guards he'd expected from his pre-op briefing.

Now, on the night he was meant to perform a simple easy-in-easy-out technical extraction, he found himself ducking behind package crates as a pistol cracked at him from somewhere ahead, directly in line with the exit.

Where this bastard had sprung from he would never know. There shouldn't have been anyone creeping around back here. The security guards spent their time clustered around a banged-up old TV in the guard shed outside, not worried about what they thought were inconsequential items inside the warehouse. He knew this from the reports he'd been given from observation crews the Ministry employed to perform the kind of inspections and evaluations its more "active" employees needed to do their job. Field agents rarely handled their own preparatory scouting - it kept the possibility of their faces being recognised to a minimum. Trials' job was the final step in a process that involved any number of people.

And now that process had all been for nothing, because where he'd expected to find only mouldy old documents he'd found a masked figure, dressed up as some kind of ninja or something. Clothed in tight black from head to toe, he'd been rummaging around in the very box Trials had come to appropriate himself. If Trials hadn't been so damned surprised at the presence of another person he could have clocked him on the back of the head and this would already be over, but instead his moment of hesitation had been enough to alert the other guy, who took a rolling dive and came up shooting.

Trials did not have a gun. It would have been hard enough to get one all the way from London, and he hadn't seen the need for one anyway. He punched the crate with the side of his fist, cursing himself for his stupidity. He'd only been accepted as a field agent in the past two months and now it looked like he was already dead.

A reprieve was granted as the hail of pistol bullets stopped and was replaced by the click of an empty ammo clip. It was barely audible, but enough to cause Trials to react without thinking. Taking this small window of opportunity, he dove out from behind cover and charged directly towards the source of the shooting. As he sprinted he saw the other man crouched slightly further left than he had judged, but managed to correct his momentum and rammed into the attacker, locking his forearm around the other man's neck and smashing him backwards into the floor. The man's head bounced of the hard floor with a crack.

Trials' vision blurred red with rage and fear, the adrenaline pumping through his veins as he took hold of the man's head with both hands and slammed it into the floor; once, twice... he lost count. Red ochre began seeping out of the cracked skull and splashing out onto the floor as Trials growled, gradually slowing the frequency of the slams until with one final, dismissive crack he stood up over the body, breathing heavily.

Trials stared down at the body between his feet as the red mist faded, his eyes tracing the trail of blood that seeped out and away from the body to pool in a slight depression in the floor, and turned and vomited. He grabbed the documents he had come for and ran into the night.

That was the first time Jacob Trials killed.