by Titan Books
CHAPTER 13
The mansion Clay Verris called home was one of many stately old houses that Savannah was famous for, although it wasn’t actually in the city itself but several miles away in the countryside, well off the beaten path followed by historic tours. It sat on several well-kept and heavily-surveilled acres of land and had its own lake just a few steps from the front door. The clear placid water reflected the place perfectly, so that from a certain distance, the house seemed to be sitting directly above its upside-down double. It was the kind of image many photographers found irresistible but the very few people allowed within Verris’s established perimeter knew better than to bring a camera.
In the twenty-three years Clay Verris had been in residence with his son, there had been very few intrusions. The security details stationed well away from the house had occasionally redirected hikers with broken compasses and, on one occasion, escorted someone claiming to be a herbalist off the property. But no one had ever come close to breaking into the house.
Nonetheless, Verris had put in an alarm system, just in case. The Gemini personnel he had tasked with the installation told him that it was a bit tricky to install something so high-tech without compromising the house’s historic character. Verris had told them this meant either the tech wasn’t high-tech enough or they didn’t know what they were doing; which was it?
The alarm system had gone in without a problem, and so had all the updates. Verris tested it from time to time and was satisfied that there was no way anyone could get into his home without being invited.
So when he woke just before dawn, he knew something was wrong. He was a man who slept soundly and well; thoroughly was the word he liked to use. His training and conditioning were also thorough, and as a result, he had an extremely heightened awareness, which was how he knew he had awakened because there was someone else in the house.
He lay very still, waiting for noises that might give some indication of how many hostiles he might have to deal with and where each of them was. Later he would determine how they had breached the perimeter and broken in without setting off the in-house alarm. The overnight security team would regret their negligence for the rest of their miserable lives, if not longer.
It seemed like an hour before he finally heard another sound, this time from his son’s bedroom. Verris tensed; was this some kind of drunken prank? There had been an incident before, but that had been in his office in the compound. At times, personnel got rowdy there but they wouldn’t dare break into his house, he was sure of that. If this was an outsider, though, a lot of heads were going to roll.
Without making a sound, Verris got up, put on his dressing gown and crept down the stairs. The light in Junior’s room was on and shouldn’t have been. His son was still out of the country; after his mission to take out Brogan had gone pear-shaped, Verris had told him to sit tight in a Colombian safe house and await new orders. He had issued that command personally and his son was nothing if not reliable and obedient.
Verris drew the pistol in the pocket of his dressing gown and, hugging the wall outside his son’s room, peeked around the open doorway.
The man sitting on the bed was the spitting image of Henry Brogan as he had been at the age of twenty-five, and he was alternating between tweezers and a pair of angled metal tongs to pick shrapnel out of his side, dropping the fragments on a monogrammed towel.
It was a tedious, awkward process, complicated by the attendant bleeding. Every time he removed one of the larger pieces, a little more blood would dribble down his side—not so much that he was in danger of losing consciousness, just enough to make a messy job that much messier.
Verris was rarely taken by surprise but he really hadn’t seen this coming. The only thing more surprising would have been finding Henry Brogan himself sitting on the bed with him. Now that would have been a sight and Verris almost wished he could see it. But it would never happen. The physical resemblance was only skin deep; past that, Junior was Verris’s son clear through to the bone.
He slipped the gun back into his pocket and stepped into the open doorway. The man on the bed looked up at him, then went back to what he was doing.
“I told you to stay in Colombia and await orders,” Verris said.
Junior looked up at him again. “I wanted to talk to you.”
His son’s voice was just a little too loud to be acceptable. The kid knew it, too, Verris thought, gazing at him sternly. Junior stared back, tongs in hand, refusing to admit he was in the wrong. All sons did this from time to time, even the best and most dutiful of them. It was how they tested the structure they’d been given. They needed to see if it held. A good father made sure his son knew that it would, that it was one of the few things in life he could count on never to fail him.
Junior could push pretty hard sometimes. It took almost half a minute before he finally dropped his gaze.
“Sorry,” he said.
When Verris didn’t respond, Junior looked up at him again, his expression turning wary.
Verris was staring through him now and Junior knew that meant he’d crossed a little too far over the line. He tried to go back to picking shrapnel out of his side but he couldn’t get a good hold on anything. The bleeding had increased.
Verris turned on his heel and went to his study. The retina scanner was a bit slow to unlock the door but he was in no hurry. He got his first-aid kit out of a cabinet behind his desk and gave it a full ten-count before going back to his son’s bedroom.
Junior’s expression was relieved if still a bit apprehensive when he reappeared. Verris shoved everything Junior had been using off the bed and had him lie down on his uninjured side while he finished removing the shrapnel for him. Boys will be boys, Verris thought as he soaked up the excess blood with cotton batting. No matter how old they got, they had to learn some lessons more than once. With any luck, this one would sink in hard enough to leave a mark as a permanent reminder. Verris loved his son but there were moments when Junior came uncomfortably close to genuine rebellion. That wasn’t supposed to happen… yet.
Verris adjusted the long-necked high-intensity reading lamp on the nightstand, then offered Junior a syringe of lidocaine. Junior shook his head. He was facing away so Verris allowed himself a fleeting smile of approval. At least Junior had never had to relearn the lesson about overcoming pain. In truth, Verris had never known anyone else who was as adept at conquering their own physical discomfort.
But that didn’t mean Verris wanted to prolong it. Enduring pain put unwanted stress on even the healthiest person, not just physically but mentally as well. He worked as quickly and as gently as he could, dropping each fragment in an empty compartment of the first-aid kit so Junior could hear it and know it was out.
It wasn’t the first time Verris had pulled shrapnel out of a soldier, and he’d done so under much worse conditions—but there were more fragments than he’d realized, many of them tiny. He couldn’t risk leaving any behind—sepsis was no joke. He’d seen guys keel over with crazy-high fevers, bodies shutting down because some ham-handed medic had done a half-assed patch job. The men and women under Verris’s command died in combat like the warriors they were, not flat on their backs in delirium from massive organ failure.
He disinfected Junior’s wounds again before he started suturing. Just as he finished closing the first laceration and was about to go onto the next, Junior suddenly said, “He’s… very good.”
Verris didn’t have to ask who he was. “The best,” he replied. “That’s why I sent you.”
“He knew every move of mine before I made it,” Junior went on. “I’d have him, right there—then when I pulled the trigger, he was gone. Like a ghost.”
“Did you happen to get a look at his face?” Verris asked, finishing with another laceration.
“Not really,” Junior said. “I saw him up the stairs in the abandoned building, through a dirty mirror.”
“Thought you were on the roof,” Verris said sharply.
&nb
sp; Junior sighed. “I was but he got a line on me. Had to jump down.”
“What do we always drill?” Verris asked him, his voice brisk. “Hold the high ground, put his back to the wall and—”
“Don’t let him off,” Junior finished in unison with him. “The whole thing was weird. Wiggy.”
“How?” Verris asked as he started on the last wound in need of suturing.
“Like I was watching it all, but—” his son hesitated. “But I wasn’t actually there. Who is he?”
Junior being a little spooked wasn’t the only thing Verris found worrisome. He had trained his son to stay squarely in the moment, to focus on the immediate situation, but the way Junior was talking, it sounded like he was distancing himself instead. This was no good; Verris knew he had to nip that in the bud before Junior developed any seriously bad habits, like over-thinking, or wondering about the nature of his existence.
“Junior, the thing you’re struggling with—that strangeness—it’s fear.” Verris tied off the last suture and sat him up so he could look directly into his eyes. “Don’t hate it. Lean into it. Embrace it. Learn from it. Then overcome it.”
Junior nodded, looking sheepish.
“You’re right on the threshold of perfection, son.” Verris held up his thumb and forefinger with the thinnest sliver of a gap between them. “This close.” Pause. “You hungry?”
“Yes, sir.” Junior nodded again, this time with enthusiasm.
“Bowl of cereal sound good?” Verris asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Junior.
Verris saw his gaze move to the framed photo on the nightstand. It was the two of them, taken on one of their hunting trips when Junior had been eight or nine and they’d shared a less complicated existence.
He smiled at his son and took him into the kitchen.
* * *
The blown-up bus lay on its side, burn marks obscuring most of the large curved script that ran the length of it below the shattered windows. From where he stood in the roped-off observation area, Junior didn’t have to see the words clearly to know they said City Transportation Company. He’d been fluent in Arabic, both Modern Standard and Egyptian, for over half his life.
The scene in front of him was equally familiar: civilian ‘casualties’ lay motionless on the ground around the bus, dropped by ‘insurgents’ who had taken up positions behind it and picked them off as they crawled out of the wreckage. There were no live rounds, of course—they were all armed with tasers. Some of the civilians had been desperate enough to try for one of the low buildings that served as a village or neighborhood or installation or whatever the war games scenario called for. A few of them had made it but without weapons; they were pretty much sitting ducks. Eventually the insurgents would come out from behind the bus and advance on the village, ‘killing’ anyone they found.
In any case, the insurgents were in for a fight. As an observer, Junior had access to all the feeds for the exercise; his phone screen showed today’s designated good guys, an elite team of fighters coming in on the other side of the village, as yet undetected by the insurgents. Their uniforms were Libyan Army but there was an extra patch on their sleeves that identified them as Gemini support troops.
He watched as the Gemini team secured the other half of the village before preparing to attack the insurgents. They’d save civilians if possible but the insurgents were the priority, not rescuing non-combatants, and judging by the size of the Gemini squad, the mission was no prisoners. So they probably wouldn’t be taking civilians with them, either.
Junior knew that in a combat situation, it wasn’t always possible to rescue every innocent soul caught in the crossfire, but he also knew deep down he would never be able to abandon someone he could help, even if he was ordered to. That seemed to go against every principle his father had raised him to live by.
Then again, so did disobeying a direct order, yet he had done exactly that when he had left Colombia to come home, and his father had let him get away with it. But he hadn’t been in a combat situation with a team. The only team combat he had ever seen was in exercises like this one.
He had certainly been in a lot of those, more than anyone else in Gemini. He had taken his lumps and dished some out as both a designated good guy and an insurgent, although never as a civilian. When he had asked Verris why, his father had told him it was because unlike everyone else, he had never been a civilian and never would be. Verris had made it sound like one more extraordinary achievement that proved Junior was elite even among the hand-picked elite that comprised Gemini personnel.
Why his father would be proud of him for that, however, was beyond Junior’s understanding. If he’d never been a civilian, it wasn’t by choice. It wasn’t that he wanted to be a civilian—he didn’t. Never to have been one, though—that was different from being career military. Junior thought it sounded more like he was missing a big chunk of the human experience and that didn’t make him elite. It made him a freak.
Which he probably was to all the other Gemini soldiers. For them, the Gemini compound was a specialized training ground. For him, the training ground was home. But if the exercise he was watching had been an actual mission and he had been part of the squad fighting real insurgents, they wouldn’t have spared even a second to think what a freak he was.
Still, he had a feeling his never having been a civilian showed in ways that he wasn’t aware of, that there was something about him other people felt was wiggy or off, even if they didn’t know what it was.
He turned his attention back to the exercise, where the elite team members were now engaging the insurgents and showing them what they thought of fighters who killed unarmed civilians. The uniformed team was going full-on, like it really was fighting insurgents and this wasn’t a training exercise where both sides were armed only with tasers.
Training had to be tough and a good part of that was so soldiers gained a level of conditioning to be able to withstand punishment—a punch, a beating, a cattle prod, even a stab wound or a gunshot—and not be too traumatized to get up again. But Junior thought these guys had bypassed tough and gone to unadorned brutality. There had to be a limit to how many times you could tase even the hardest hard-ass before doing serious damage. At the very least, it wasted juice.
The guys playing the insurgents gave as good as they got, all for the sake of keeping everyone’s training at peak. But this didn’t look like training. The so-called good guys seemed to be enjoying themselves too much. So were the guys playing the insurgents—some of them had apparently discovered their inner bad guys and were gleefully letting them out to play. One rather protracted fight gave Junior the definite impression a score was being settled and that was nothing short of unprofessional. Conduct unbecoming, for sure.
Junior looked around at the other personnel who weren’t part of the exercise. Generally, anyone not tapped for an exercise gave the field of action a wide berth. But more than a few soldiers had paused in the observation area to check things out, although they hadn’t stayed long, and if they’d thought the exercise was getting out of hand, they hadn’t said anything to him about it. But they probably wouldn’t have anyway. Everyone was polite to him but even those who were friendly kept their distance, never going out of their way to get to know him, like they didn’t know what to make of him. Like he was a freak.
In any case, Junior knew what his father would say if he shared his misgivings about what was going on in the current exercise. Verris would tell him to remember these guys were still learning. None of them came from his privileged background—they hadn’t grown up learning how to conduct themselves, how to channel their thoughts and emotions, how to conquer fear by first embracing it, how to focus their minds properly, how to achieve complete dedication to a mission without letting it become personal. And of course, none of them could manage physical pain as well as he could.
His father had told him many times he was especially proud of him for that. Physical pain was the biggest problem for a
soldier. Compartmentalizing was a skill and most people could learn how to do it if they were dedicated enough. But physical pain was something else altogether. Even the strongest soldiers could be worn down and defeated by pain.
That includes you, Junior, his father had said. You have a remarkable ability to keep pain from taking over your state of mind and affecting your judgment. But even you can’t do that indefinitely. Pain weakens the body, interferes with the mind, and eventually soldiers succumb. They can’t help it. They’re captured or killed, because they either make mistakes, or they simply don’t have the physical strength to defend themselves.
Can’t the lab just make better painkillers? he’d asked Verris. Stuff that won’t get you stoned, then wear off after four measly hours and make you an addict?
Easier said than done, his father had replied. I’ve spent a good part of my career trying to find ways to pain-proof the men and women under my command. Drugs don’t work the same for everyone and a lot of them create more problems than they solve, like addiction. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only real solution is endogenous—something within the soldier’s body, part of the physical organism.
Junior hadn’t been sure what that was supposed to mean but it had sounded weird and creepy and possibly dangerous. Maybe it was just because his father had referred to the human body as an organism. His father always talked like that but sometimes he sounded scary even to him.
Behind him, he heard the sound of soldiers suddenly snapping to attention; his father had arrived. Only people with Gemini training could salute audibly. Those who managed not to be completely intimidated spoke to him: Hello, sir. Good afternoon, sir. Good to see you, sir. His father let the pleasantries bounce off his impenetrable shell as he joined Junior in the observation area.
“Some new faces out there,” Junior said, nodding at the soldiers.
“Yep. They’ll be the first boots on the ground in Yemen.” His father spoke with undisguised pride.