If Noble Walker were still alive he might tactfully suggest that Donovan’s dead-eyed, camo-wearing granddaughter is a budding psychopath. But Mayor Walker is no longer around, and Donovan doesn’t have any friends left that are close enough to inform him that Alec, as he calls her, is not simply an adorable tomboy, and that perhaps the AK she requested of him, which he bought her gladly, is not an appropriate birthday gift for a ten-year old.
Donovan’s capacity for self-delusion is so great that it does not occur to him Alec’s delight in hunting and fishing with her dear grandpa, her tendency to disappear into the woods for weeks at a time, only to reappear in his yard wearing a bearskin, might not be, as his son Tyler claimed, because she is trying to earn a record amount of merit badges in the New Jersey Girl Scouts.
Donovan is beaming with pride when she enlists, when she sails through boot camp, quickly climbs up the ranks and becomes special forces. Normally his traditional values might lead him to question a young woman choosing to become a professional sniper, but he’s the one who taught her to shoot in the first place and she is clearly gifted, so he follows her career avidly. As her missions become more classified it becomes more difficult for him to get information on her, and eventually his contacts in the military can’t find any record of her at all. She manages to get encoded messages to him regularly, and Donovan is quite proud that his granddaughter is so thoughtful, unlike his friends’ lazy, self-centered, unpatriotic grandchildren.
When his health takes a turn, he doesn’t really wonder why Alec has the freedom and means to fly to his bedside from **location redacted** at a moment’s notice. He doesn’t understand that at this point Alecto Addams can do what she wants, as the head of the most accomplished paramilitary organization in the world, and that the US and most other world governments are afraid of her.
He dies peacefully, thinking her short cropped curly hair and deep ebony eyes are just so dear to him, and soothed to sleep by gun oil, tobacco and bourbon vanilla, the scent of his baby granddaughter.
Alecto holds Donovan’s hand as he dies and does not shed one tear, afterwards she smokes a cigar with her other grandfather and uncles, she nods at her father and mother, and then she takes a private jet back to her band of mercenaries and ruthlessly takes over a small but beautiful country in the south seas. After the coup, she renames it Donovania.
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