AGENT SMYTHE: Hold on, I can hear something. Boost the signal.

[Static, followed by the sound of gag-muffled speech and heavy, panicked breathing]

FAUSTINO: I am going to kill you, my friend. It grieves me, as it often does, but I must not allow my feelings to influence my judgement. I would speak with you now, though, because it is my great hope that you understand my decision. I cannot ask you to agree with it, but I hope you will understand it.”

[Inarticulate gagged speech]

FAUSTINO: You see, I have invested too much of my family’s life and livelihood in my business to allow any threat, no matter how vague or remote, to endure. If I could talk to myself as a younger man, knowing what I do now, perhaps I would urge him to take a different path with his life. But I am in too deeply; the web that I have spun traps me as surely as any prey. Not just myself; it it were myself only, as an old man, perhaps I could not need to take such steps.

[Sharp metallic sound, perhaps a handgun being loaded or cocked]

AGENT DYLE: Should we do anything?

AGENT SMYTHE: We can’t, not without exposing the wire.

FAUSTINO: But it is also my family: my daughters, their children. Many of them have been shielded from the nature of what I do, but to risk destroying them, if not by prosecution then by the public…it is too much to ask of a man whose family is all that remains to him. I won’t–I can’t–let that happen. Like the sin eaters of old, I have gathered all the wickedness of my family into myself, and I will add to that burden to protect them.

[Frantic muffled speech]

FAUSTINO: I’m sorry to ramble on, but that is also the lot of an old man. I hope now that you understand. Perhaps, when you meet the Almighty, you can tell him what I said. I certainly will be in no position to do so when the violent retirement of my kind claims me.

[Suppressed gunshot; static]

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