by Titan Books
Danny stared at him wide-eyed and he knew she was wondering why he was stopping her after she had finally managed to shoot him.
Junior Hitman seemed even more astonished. “I’m not you!” he shouted suddenly, his face contorting with rage and pain. “You hear me, old man? I’m not you!” He rolled off the ledge into the water.
Danny quickly boosted herself up out of the water next to Henry while he peered through the gloom, listening for the sound of the kid coming up for air. For a long time, he heard nothing and he wondered if the gunshot had weakened Junior so much that he had drowned. There was something terribly perverse about that.
Finally he heard the small splash of someone breaking the surface somewhere far away. He looked at Danny, who nodded; she’d heard it, too. This pool, or whatever it was, was a hell of a lot larger than he’d thought. And it wasn’t stagnant, which meant it had to let out somewhere.
“You think he’s gone?” Henry said after a bit. His chest was tight and every muscle in his neck felt sore; it hurt even just to swallow.
“I think so,” Danny replied.
“Where did you hit him?”
“In the shoulder.” Danny’s voice was calm and even.
“Then he’ll recover,” Henry said, staring at the water. He half-expected some new menace to suddenly surge up out of it. Just when you thought you were safe from your clone in the catacombs. Damn, he really was loopy from lack of oxygen.
Danny moved his hand to his neck. “Keep pressure on that and wait here,” she said as she got to her feet. “I’m going to see if we can get out of the cistern without having to climb back up to the catacombs.”
“This is a cistern?” Henry said, horrified.
“Well, it ain’t an indoor swimming pool,” Danny said with a grim little chuckle. “Once I find a way out, I can call Baron to come get us.”
Henry was flabbergasted. “You’ve got a waterproof phone?”
“No. I’ve got a regular phone in a waterproof case,” she said over her shoulder as she disappeared into the shadows, leaving Henry to wonder how the hell she’d slipped that past Junior.
* * *
Baron had been waiting almost twenty minutes in a back alley outside a disused service entrance to the catacombs before Henry and Danny appeared. Henry had one arm slung across her shoulders, leaning on her like a wounded soldier. That was curious enough but what made it genuinely strange was the fact that they were both wet. He couldn’t wait to hear that story.
“It’s not often you see a guy get his ass kicked on two continents back to back. Hop in!” He opened the passenger-side doors. Henry sprawled across the back seat while Danny took shotgun. Baron closed the door for Henry, then hurried around the front of the car to hop into the driver’s seat. “Where to?”
For some reason, Danny found that funny; Henry didn’t. “Georgia,” he said wearily. “It’s where Verris is.”
* * *
This time, they were flying away from the oncoming day, chasing the night into the west while the clock ran backwards. Baron wasn’t singing, which Danny actually missed, while Henry resisted her attempts at first aid.
He didn’t have a whole lot of new injuries but she was concerned about the laceration on his neck. It wasn’t especially deep but it had been made with the jagged end of a very old, very dirty bone in a cistern and there was a high risk of infection. Henry had finally let her sterilize the wound and put a bandage on it. But every time she tried to check for inflammation, he waved her off.
“Advil?” she offered, showing him the bottle.
He shrugged. She gave him two; he held up four fingers so she gave him two more. The rule of thumb in the field was, doubling the dose of an over-the-counter medication made it prescription-strength. But another rule of thumb said this was only a stopgap and you were supposed to get out of the field ASAP. Danny didn’t know whose thumbs the rules were based on but she was pretty sure they weren’t Henry’s. He tossed back the four pills and chased them with whiskey. Well, at least alcohol was a disinfectant, she thought, and maybe its depressant properties would put him to sleep.
“Try to get some rest,” Danny said.
Henry didn’t answer. She hesitated, then decided to take her own advice in the seat behind him.
CHAPTER 18
Clay Verris was in his office watching feeds from several different pre-dawn exercises when the guard on the ground floor called to inform him Junior was on his way up with blood in his eye. She also advised the commander that his son had sustained a GSW in his left shoulder, although it didn’t seem to be serious.
Verris thanked the guard and made a mental note to leave a plus sign on the performance sheet in her file. He didn’t like being disturbed while he was monitoring exercises unless it was important. A less perceptive guard would have figured there was no point in interrupting him to tell him he was going to be interrupted; fortunately, this one knew Junior always took priority.
Junior had been very much on his mind since this second debacle with Henry Brogan. Verris had known full well that Brogan wouldn’t be easy to eliminate. But he’d been surprised when the kid had called him from Cartagena to report the target had gotten away.
Then again, it had been a rushed assignment. Brogan had to be neutralized as soon as possible and there hadn’t been much time for the kid to study up on him, watch footage, get acquainted with his moves. Not that Verris had really wanted Junior to get a close enough look at Henry to recognize him at that point—not until he was ready to know the truth about who he was.
Originally, Verris had planned to lay it all out for him on his twenty-first birthday. But when it had arrived, he was still so damned young. It wasn’t education and training that he lacked, Verris realized, it was seasoning.
Education had been important in Verris’s family. His father had always said that training without education produced a waste of good man flesh (women included). During Verris’s time in the Marine Corps, he’d seen how true that was. The problem, however, was not so much with the man flesh involved as it was with those in command. Most of them regarded soldiers as something to be supplied and replenished, one more military consumable: cannon fodder. Talk about a waste of good man flesh! They should have been producing warriors, not fresh meat for slaughterhouses like Vietnam or Iraq.
Long ago, Verris had come to the conclusion that just as war and other conflicts had many facets, so, too, were there different kinds of warriors. Junior was the warrior Henry Brogan could have been if he’d had the right education and guidance, while the guys he’d been watching tonight were another kind altogether. When they hit the ground in Yemen, the whole world was going to sit up and take notice, especially the US. They were going to see that Gemini warriors were the new and improved future of military man flesh, women included; women especially.
He would never have been able to accomplish this in the Corps, no matter how high he rose in rank. If he had stayed in the Marines, they only would have held him back. So he had quit and started Gemini. He had thought for sure that Henry would want to be part of it—the private sector had so much more to offer, starting with better pay. But Henry had chosen to stick with government work and let the DIA recruit him. He’d always had a thing about serving his country. He was committed to it and Verris hadn’t realized how strong that commitment was; Henry had never acted like a flag-waving robot.
It didn’t make any sense until Verris considered that this was what happened when kids grew up without a father. They had to put something in that empty space and for Henry, it was his country. Admirable? Maybe, but it meant that Henry would never be able to achieve his full potential. All things considered, he’d done pretty well, overcoming his deprived background and making something of himself.
Still, Verris couldn’t help thinking how much more Henry could have accomplished if he’d had the care and guidance of a father. Verris had promised himself that if he ever became a father himself, he would be right there in his kid’s life,
24/7.
As time passed, Verris had seen he wasn’t going to have a conventional nuclear family. If he wanted to be a father, he would have to adopt. That was all right with him but there seemed to be a shortage of newborns and adoption agencies tended to favor two-parent families, not single ex-military men who couldn’t talk about what they did for a living because it was classified.
Then he had gotten wind of Dormov’s work and right away he’d known this was how he could make his fondest dream a reality—he could give Henry Brogan a do-over. He could raise him right, make him into the warrior he should have been. He could train him to grow into his strengths unhindered by the psychological damage of a childhood and adolescence living in poverty without a father.
Henry Brogan 2.0—all of the shine, none of the whine.
The road hadn’t been completely smooth. But Junior was fast becoming the warrior Henry would never be; the kid was going to achieve the perfection that Henry had never had a chance at.
Verris had wanted so much to tell Junior that but the kid simply wasn’t ready yet. Junior was educated, he was trained, he was a warrior. The problem was, there was still too much of the adolescent in him.
Gemini’s psychologists told him he had to be patient. Every person matured at a different rate, and in general the male of the species usually lagged behind the female. Verris was just going to have to watch and wait, they said, play it by ear.
So he’d done that but Junior still wasn’t ready at twenty-three and Verris was damned if he knew what was wrong. There shouldn’t have been anything holding him back. Finally Verris realized the solution had been right in front of him all along: Henry Brogan.
Junior would never come into his own as long as Henry Brogan was alive.
It was so obvious, he should have seen it right away, Verris thought. But it wasn’t just that Henry had to die—Junior had to be the one to kill him. Then Junior would be able to take his rightful place in the world as who and what he was.
Then he would be perfect.
Henry Brogan was broken and flawed. Junior was the new, improved version, and best of all, he was Verris’s son. Verris would continue to make sure Junior knew he had a father every moment of every day. That would make sure he stayed perfect.
* * *
Another soldier would have stopped at the infirmary to have his gunshot wound checked out and clean up a little before he reported in, but not Junior. Junior would know Verris had already been informed of his failure to accomplish his mission for the second time. He wouldn’t wait to account for himself.
He didn’t knock, either, to Verris’s annoyance. Verris blanked and muted the feeds. He’d been watching the exercises long enough that he had a pretty good idea of how they were all going to go. If anything blew up that wasn’t supposed to, he’d hear it.
But Jesus, the guard in the lobby had been right—Junior was very much the worse for wear. He looked as if he’d gone swimming with all his clothes on, then slept in them while they dried.
Verris waited for Junior to say something but his son just stood in front of his desk giving him a hard stare. Finally, he leaned back in his chair. “Tell me something,” he said, looking directly into those glaring eyes. “Why is it so hard for you to kill this ma—”
“Do you know how much I hate Big Hammock park, Pop?” Junior demanded.
Alarm bells went off in Verris’s mind. It was never a good sign when Junior started a conversation with something he hated. The bizarre juxtaposition of his birthday with his second failure to accomplish his mission meant he had let himself be distracted by irrelevant shit. Verris was tempted to give him a sharp, hard slap in the face, like hitting a radio with a loose connection. But a good father never struck his son in the head, not off the training field.
Maybe this was a childish attempt to divert attention from his failure, or even to deny his own responsibility: I failed to kill Henry Brogan because you’ve been forcing me to go to Big Hammock park on my birthday.
Junior should have been a little too old for that one but you could never tell with young people. Whatever was going on with him, Verris knew he would have to take it step by step and see where it led.
“Come again?” Clay said, careful to keep his tone neutral.
“Every year since I was twelve, we shoot turkeys there on my birthday. I always hated it—I mean, I was an orphan, right? How did we even know when my birthday was? But you never seemed to notice so we just kept going there.”
At least he hadn’t gone soft about turkeys, Verris thought. He had raised Junior with the idea that those who couldn’t kill what they ate were too weak to fight for their own lives or anyone else’s. But the kid still wasn’t making sense and if he didn’t start soon, he’d have to call in PsyOps.
Aloud, Verris said, “Fine. Next year we’ll try Chuck E. Cheese.”
“Yeah?” Junior tilted his head to one side. “Who’s ‘we’—you, me, and the lab guys who made me?”
Verris kept all expression off his face although he felt like he’d been punched between the eyes. “Oh.”
He had known that despite all his efforts to shield Junior from the truth, there was a possibility he might find out that very thing he wasn’t ready to know. But Verris had always thought that if such a thing happened, it would be here at the Gemini compound, where he would be able to manage his son’s reaction to some degree (and also know whose big mouth to staple shut).
Over the years, Verris had supervised Junior’s life as well as he could, restricting his contact with other personnel. That had worked pretty well throughout Junior’s childhood and his teen years, when even the best kids could become rebellious and uncooperative. It wasn’t so easy to do that with an adult, however, even one conditioned to follow orders and not ask too many irrelevant questions. The other soldiers tended to keep their distance from the CO’s son, which helped to minimize the amount of rumor, gossip, and general scuttlebutt that came Junior’s way.
This wasn’t always easy on the kid. Sometimes Verris caught him looking longingly at a group of soldiers going off for a drink together after an exercise. Whenever that happened, he would draw Junior’s attention away with something more suited to his intellectual and physical skills and abilities, and pretty soon the kid seemed to forget all about trivial shit like drinking buddies. Protecting him until he was ready to know the truth was more important than anything else.
From time to time, though, Verris had wondered if he should have told Junior everything as soon as he was old enough to grasp the basic biology. Maybe if he had grown up with the knowledge, it would have normalized everything and there would have been that much less to agonize about later.
Or maybe Junior would simply have found another reason for an existential crisis. Kids were good at that.
And it was all moot because his son was still standing in front of his desk, glaring at him, waiting for him to explain himself.
“I, uh, I always believed you’d be happier not knowing,” Verris said finally.
“Happy?!” Junior gave a short harsh laugh. “The only time I’m happy is when I’m flat on my belly about to squeeze a trigger. ”
The alarm bells in Verris’s mind were louder this time. He had heard those words before but not from Junior and he was damned sure it wasn’t a coincidence. This was worse than he’d realized. Not only had Junior failed to kill Henry Brogan again, but somehow Henry had found out about Dormov’s program and used the information to get into Junior’s head. Verris wasn’t sure what was more disturbing—Henry’s finding out about the program or his having cornered Junior long enough to tell him about it. And how the hell he could have found out in the first place—
Budapest. That Russian rat Yuri, friend to Jack Willis.
Dammit, Verris thought; if he had called in an airstrike on Willis’s yacht while he and Brogan had still been hugging it out like teenage girls, this whole thing could have been avoided. He would never have had to tell Junior he was a clone and this
rite of passage wouldn’t be necessary.
No.
That would have been easier but there was something else to consider: the symmetry of Junior supplanting Henry by punching his ticket. That was so beautiful, so elegant, so perfect. And Brogan deserved nothing less. The arrogance of that self-righteous prick, putting on that hitman-witha-heart-of-gold act, refusing to come work with him at Gemini, as if he was actually better than his old CO. As if he was too good for Gemini.
Brogan must have been livid when he found out who Junior was. He had said no to Verris and Verris had gotten him anyway. Not only that, he’d raised Junior to work there, actually bred him for it. If anyone was too good for something it was Junior. He was too good for the DIA or any other crappy government agency.
“I mean, this wasn’t some mistake.” Junior planted both fists on his desk and leaned forward. “It’s not like you got somebody pregnant and then had to man up and raise me. No, you made a decision. You had a scientist make a person out of another person.”
“No, that’s not what—”
“That’s exactly what happened.” He straightened up and looked down at himself, putting his hands on his chest and midsection with the fingers splayed, as if he were trying to feel how substantial he really was. “And why, of all the shooters in the world, did you have to send me after him?”
“Because he’s your darkness,” Verris replied. “You had to walk through it on your own.”
Junior gave him a hard look. “Maybe you’re my darkness.”
Christ, Verris thought as a knot started to form in his stomach.
“That lie you always told me, about my ‘parents’ leaving me at a fire station. I believed it. Do you know how that made me feel?”
“That was a necessary lie,” Verris said.
“None of this was necessary! You chose to do all of this to me!” Junior paused, looking lost and sad. “Can’t you see how not okay I am?”