by Titan Books
To Henry’s surprise, the guy didn’t make a sound as he looked down at the gash in his leg—no cry of pain, not so much as a gasp or a grunt; the injury could have been on someone else’s leg for all that it affected him. A chill ran down Henry’s spine, more intense than a mere goose walking over his grave. Who the hell had trained this guy, the Manchurian Candidate? The Terminator?
Junior took advantage of the attacker’s momentary lapse of attention to circle around behind him. Realizing what Junior was going to do, Henry pushed himself to a standing position and tried to keep the guy focused on himself while Junior vaulted the ruins of a shelf for a flying kick with both feet. But unbelievably, half a second before Junior would have hit him, the guy ducked. As Junior sailed over him, the guy’s leg shot out—his wounded leg—and kicked Junior hard in the lower back.
Henry shook his head slightly, unsure if he had really just seen that. Junior rolled over as the masked fighter came towards him, and somehow heaved himself into a backwards roll, barely escaping a driving punch to his crotch.
Oh, so it’s that kind of fight, Henry thought; as if there were any other kind. That slash to the thigh still wasn’t slowing the guy down. He’d also lost one of his knives, but Henry didn’t count on that giving him or Junior any sort of advantage. Junior sprang to his feet and immediately charged the guy with his tackling move. The guy raised one leg and instead of taking him down, Junior hit his knee face first.
Henry launched himself forward to slide again, this time baseball-style, intending to sweep the guy’s legs out from under him. But before Henry reached him, the guy flipped over his head, tumbling in midair in a way that somehow managed to be more casual than showy. He came down behind Henry and kicked his shoulder blade again.
For a few seconds, the world turned blinding white while the nerve in his upper back shrieked in a way that sounded a lot like a human voice. Shut the hell up, Henry ordered it and struggled to his feet. So much for paints, varnish, and weatherproofing, he thought; maybe he’d have better luck in power tools. If he could find them.
He pushed himself into a stumbling run. Up ahead, he saw a rack of circular saw blades. Let’s see if he can catch a Frisbee, Henry thought, as a nasty grin spread over his face.
Then something large and hard glanced off the top of his head and he was sprawling on the cement, scraping his palms and knees. What the fuck—
Henry twisted around to see the guy heaving another gallon of paint at him and rolled out of the way before it could smash his face in. And still the guy kept on coming at him, like killing Henry Brogan was the one and only thing he had been put on this earth to do.
Junior’s words came back to him: My orders are to kill you.
Did Clay Verris have a whole platoon of guys dedicated—no, programmed—to kill him? Then, as if things had to be even more absurd, he looked up and saw Danny almost directly above him on a mezzanine. He hadn’t even noticed there was an upstairs—and how the hell had she made it up there with her leg? Her face was shiny and paler than he’d ever seen. Was she crazy from blood loss? What the hell did she think she was doing?
As if on cue, she heaved a gas canister over the railing, straight at the killer. Just as it hit him, she fired. The canister exploded, engulfing the killer in flames.
That’s for Baron, you bastard, Henry thought as the sprinkler system went off.
But instead of falling down and dying like a normal assassin, the masked guy actually walked out of the flames, still hell-bent on killing anyone and everyone.
Henry’s jaw dropped and his heart went into overdrive as he looked around desperately. He was in an enormous hardware store and he had somehow managed to end up against the back wall, empty-handed and unable to get to any of a thousand things he could use as a weapon.
Yeah, it was definitely time to retire. Except it didn’t look like he was going to live long enough—
His gaze fell on a fire extinguisher. Oh, great—that would be a big help. Just not for him.
But the thing next to it might be.
Or it might not, but he pushed the thought aside. This was what he had—a moment ago, he’d had nothing. He grabbed it and flattened himself against the wall. The gas canister had been a good gambit, clever as hell, and if they’d been fighting any other killer, it would have worked. Henry decided he was going to find out why it hadn’t, even if it killed him.
Oh, God, that smell, that fucking smell; his stomach twisted like a corkscrew and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. He had reached his limit for that fucking smell; if the killer didn’t get him, he might puke himself to death.
No, he didn’t smell anything, he told himself as he stepped away from the wall and swung the fire axe as hard as he could, burying it in the killer’s chest.
The guy’s legs flew out from under him and he crashed to the floor on his back. Somehow Danny was downstairs again, gliding over to Henry on her stool just as Junior appeared. That fucking smell was even stronger, even though the man on the floor was no longer burning. He was struggling to breathe, but bizarrely there was no moaning, no crying. He wasn’t even writhing in pain.
The indoor rain shower petered out. Henry looked from him to Junior. “I’ll say this for your old man. He knows how to train a soldier.” He crouched down and pulled off the guy’s mask.
Everything stopped.
The guy on the floor gazed up at them, his expression dazed, like he was seeing something beyond his understanding. There were probably lots of things he didn’t understand, Henry thought; concepts and realities that a person had to grow into, situations that only someone with many years of experience could make sense of. This guy was just too young. Danny and Junior were kids to Henry but this guy was a real kid—he couldn’t have been any older than eighteen. Only it was himself, Henry Brogan, at eighteen. Or Junior at eighteen. Or both.
Henry had been sure Verris wouldn’t stop at one clone but it gave him no pleasure to be right. Junior looked like he’d just taken a hard blow to the head with a sledgehammer. It was one thing to know something in the abstract but quite another to see the proof lying on the floor with a fucking axe in his chest.
Welcome to my world, Junior, Henry said silently. It only gets weirder from here.
Suddenly, an intense protectiveness toward Junior and Danny swept over him, followed by guilt for failing to keep them safe. Henry wondered if this was how parents felt when they were driving their kids to the emergency room after they’d fallen down and broken their arms.
Or maybe it was more like what his mother had been feeling when she’d jumped into the Philadelphia municipal pool to save him from drowning.
She hadn’t seen his father every time she looked at him, Henry realized suddenly—he had. And his mother hadn’t been able to save him from his own wrong-headed thinking like she’d saved him from drowning. That had always been up to him, and it still was.
All of this passed through his mind in a heartbeat. A shrink might have called it a great breakthrough but he wasn’t in a shrink’s office, he was in a shot-up hardware store with two clones, one of whom had burned alive and was now dying with an axe in his chest, and an agent about to go into shock from a gunshot wound.
Damn, this had to be some kind of record for the most simultaneous crises during the first week of retirement.
Danny was bent over the dying clone looking at all his injuries in horrified incredulity. Ms. First Aid, Henry thought; even if she’d still had her burn bag with her, she wouldn’t have found anything in it to help him.
“Don’t you feel pain?” she asked the clone.
The dying clone looked from Danny to Henry with a puzzled frown, and then to Junior. Obviously Verris hadn’t let him in on the family secret. Henry wondered what Verris had called him—Junior 2.0? The Next Big Thing?
And what had he called himself?
Well, they would never know. The clone’s eyes fell closed and his breathing simply stopped. As if he’d died peacefully at home
in bed, not in the wreckage of a hardware store with burns all over his body and an axe in his chest.
For a long moment, they were all silent. He had to take care of them, Henry thought, looking at Danny and Junior’s shell-shocked faces. It was up to him to help them get through this and then put it behind them, although he had no idea how. Nowhere in any of his training, formal or informal, had there ever been anything about what to do when your clone tried to kill you but you killed him first.
“I don’t know why you’re so angry with me. You were the inspiration for all of this.”
* * *
Junior turned from the dead clone on the floor to see his dedicated, loving, present father ambling toward them in an easy, casual way. He looked like he had dropped in to pick up some tools for his latest project and he just happened to have a semi-automatic weapon with him.
“You okay, son?” Verris asked Junior.
Junior blinked at him. What the hell did Verris expect him to say to that—Sure, Dad, but I think I need a hug?
But Verris had already turned to Henry. “Know where I got the idea?” he said. “It was in Khafji.” Verris was actually smiling as he set his weapon down on a nearby shelf, one of the few that were still standing. “Watching you go house to house, wishing I had a whole division of soldiers as good as you, wondering if that could be possible. You should be flattered.”
Henry gave a single, humorless laugh. “You should be dead.”
Verris chuckled, as if Henry had said something witty. “You saw what I saw over there: friends being sent home in pine boxes or struggling with life-changing injuries. And the atrocities. Why should we accept that if there’s a better way?”
Keeping his eyes on Henry, he moved closer to Junior. “And look what we created.” He gestured at Junior, like a game-show host showing off the grand prize; it made Junior want to slap his face until his head fell off. “He’s got both of us in him. Don’t you think your country deserves a perfect version of you?”
“There is no perfect version of me,” Henry snapped. “Or him—” he nodded at Junior. “Or anybody.”
“No?” Verris looked down at the dead clone, his face sad. “He was on his way to Yemen—the perfect soldier for the job. Instead, thanks to you, his place will be taken by someone with parents. Someone who feels pain and fear—which we had edited out of this soldier—someone with just as many weaknesses as the terrorists we’re trying to kill. You’re going to tell me that’s better?”
Junior’s own words came back to him: You made a person out of another person.
Except a person had parents. A person felt pain and fear. If Verris had edited those things out of this soldier, what was left that made him a person?
“You’re talking about people, Clay,” Henry was saying. “Screwing with their humanity to make them into your idea of the perfect soldier.”
Verris nodded as if he thought Henry was finally getting it. “Why not? Think how many American families we could spare. Nobody’s son or daughter would ever have to die. Vets wouldn’t ever come home with PTSD and kill themselves. We could keep the whole world safe without any actual grief. So who would I be hurting?”
“You hurt him,” Henry said, gesturing at the dead man on the floor. “Like you hurt Junior. Like you hurt me. You can’t just use people and throw them away—suck them dry, take their humanity, leave them with nothing—”
“Henry…” Verris shook his head, looking disappointed that the source material for his magnificent clone project didn’t understand after all. “This is the most humane thing we’ve ever done.”
Junior had had enough. “How many more of me are running around out there?” he demanded.
“None.” Verris seemed surprised by the question. “There’s only one you, Junior.”
Junior and Henry looked at each other; he gave Henry a barely perceptible nod to let him know he wasn’t buying it and Henry did the same.
“He was just a weapon,” Verris made a dismissive gesture at the dead man. “You are my son—and I love you as much as any father ever loved any kid.”
Henry was right, Junior thought as he drew his Glock; Verris should be dead. “I didn’t have a father,” he told Verris. “Goodbye, Clay—”
Like that, Henry’s hand was on his, his touch gentle but strong, making him lower the gun. Junior stared at him in amazement. Henry shook his head.
“So what the hell do we do with him—turn him in?” Junior felt as if he were boiling with rage inside, on the verge of exploding. “You know they’re not going to try him and they sure won’t shut down his lab. We have to end this right now!”
“Look at me,” Henry said.
He didn’t want to, didn’t want to look at anything. The only thing he wanted to see was Clay Verris’s face when he pulled the trigger.
“Look at me.” Henry’s voice was calm, even tender, and Junior obeyed. “You pull that trigger and you’re going to break something inside of yourself that will never get fixed.”
Junior gazed into Henry’s eyes; they were so much like his own and yet Henry had seen so much more, knew so much more. He was only starting to understand how much he didn’t know. But one thing he knew for certain: Henry had never lied to him. Clay Verris, however, had lied about everything, even about who he really was.
“Don’t,” Henry said. “Let it go. Give it to me.”
Henry’s hand was still pressing down on his, steadily but gently, not trying to overpower him but to show him, help him. All the resistance drained out of Junior and he lowered the gun.
“You don’t want those ghosts,” Henry said as he took the Glock from him. “Trust me.”
Then he turned to Verris and shot him.
Verris dropped with a neat hole just above his eyebrows and a much larger, messier wound in the back of his head, where the bullet had exited with most of his brains and half his skull.
Junior gaped at Henry, wide-eyed, unable to move or speak.
But speaking wasn’t necessary. Henry jerked a thumb at the back door. Junior nodded and they carried Danny out between them.
CHAPTER 20
Standing at the Copper Ground counter, Janet Lassiter was beyond pissed off and on the fast track to meltdown.
Every day there was another crisis she had to deal with, another five-alarm fire the agency and/or Clay Fucking Verris expected her to put out with nothing more than a squirt gun and half a pail of sand—and more often than not, the squirt gun was loaded with gasoline and the sand was actually gunpowder.
Yet somehow she always figured out how to pull it all together and keep the whole goddam shit-show ticking right along when she could have called in sick. Or suddenly decided to take all sixty-four weeks of vacation time she had built up. She could have even quit outright, walked away and never looked back. Talk about AMF! That would do it for the whole sorry bunch of them, Gemini included. But no, she kept coming in every day without fail. Good old dependable Janet Lassiter, lifeguard at the covert intelligence swimming pool, where there was no shallow end and everyone was always in over their heads.
And did anyone appreciate it? Did they hell. The whole time she’d been in this job, the closest thing she’d ever gotten to a thank you was—well, she couldn’t remember any more. The job had eaten her life and rewarded her with constipation, gingivitis, and high blood pressure, not to mention the never-ending joys of working in a boys’ club, with Clay Verris as the head boy.
So with all she had to put up with, was a goddam latte every morning really too much to ask? Ten minutes she’d been waiting for her soy latte—ten minutes, which put her behind schedule. She’d already paid but it wouldn’t ruin her if she just walked out and went somewhere else. The stupid barista would probably call her name three times, then drink it herself.
But dammit she didn’t want to go somewhere else. Copper Ground was a goddam hipster hangout but she didn’t mind too much because the coffee was actually good, they never ran out of soy milk, and, most importantly, t
he place was closer and more convenient to her office than any other coffee shop. But this was the third day in a row they’d kept her waiting so long she was running late.
When she’d complained, they’d said they were working shorthanded, very sorry for the inconvenience. The inconvenience? They had no idea what inconvenience really was. Dammit, this was coffee. She needed coffee to help her face another day full of things that everyone said couldn’t get worse actually getting worse. What the hell was so goddam hard about making a cup of goddam coffee? It wasn’t goddam rocket science. Hell, it wasn’t even government admin.
“Hey!” she said finally as the barista got started on yet another order that wasn’t hers.
“Yes?” The woman looked up with a perfect corporate smile.
“My coffee?”
“Coming right up!” the barista said with perfect corporate cheer as she handed a cup to someone else. Again.
“Yeah? When?” Lassiter demanded.
The barista’s corporate smile faltered slightly. “Just a few folks ahead of you, then I’ll be happy to—”
“Jesus,” Lassiter turned away, fuming. This was hopeless, she thought; if she had to wait, she might as well do it sitting down. She took a step toward her usual table, then froze.
Some woman—some bitch was sitting in her chair, at her window, looking at her lousy view of downtown Savannah. All the morning regulars knew that was her place. Who the hell did this bitch think she was?
Then she turned around and Lassiter found out.
“Surprise—I survived.” Agent Zakarewski gave her the thousand-watt smile of someone who didn’t suffer from gingivitis, constipation or high blood pressure. “Sorry.”
* * *
In Del Patterson’s opinion, the best thing about DC bars was how perceptive the bartenders were. They knew when you didn’t want to talk about the game or complain about your kids or your ex or the job (which he couldn’t even admit to having). They just served you drinks, made sure you didn’t run dry, and let you go to hell in your own way. Going to hell was a very lengthy process and DC bartenders knew better than to interrupt you while you were building up momentum.