James was not a patriot. Once, his loyalty had been to a state, and to the cabal of people who puppeted its inner parts. When that collapsed, his loyalty was to who held the strings.
Now he could choose a side, but didn't want one. He was a side to himself, and he chose his allies for his own reasons. He knew that there had been a cause he had felt enough to go to war, once. It obviously hadn't served him well, since he'd never really come out the other side of it.
If there was still something to fight for, this was the only way he knew how to proceed. He didn't worry about his soul. He didn't think about his soul at all.
"Russian," he informed Matt, as if that would help him understand it. He had already assimilated the concept that Matt could hear and sense things he shouldn't be able to, so the fact that he could hear the conversation of two women in another building was merely acknowledged.
He was still looking up at Matthew, whose face was turned meaninglessly to the windows that didn't mean anything to his senses, good or bad. At the gently asked question, his shoulders tightened. It was the only sign thus far that he felt anything about what Matthew had said.
"Not revenge," he said. "They're all dead." The ones that would be worth revenging on. Some of those from the last thirty years would experience a reckoning when he had his hands on them, but targets like the Dyatlovs were higher priority. "Not justice." He shifted on the floor, trying to line his eye up with the scope again. Had he lost her? No, they were still arguing. "Loose ends. Debts paid." His finger flickered against the trigger, but it wasn't time yet. He took a slow breath. He couldn't explain it. It was a mission objective - it shouldn't require explanation. "Things they did. I helped them."
There, that was the shot. It blossomed before his eye, good, healthy geometry and a murmur of rightness. He had, perhaps, ten seconds in which to take it.