Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization

by Gavin G. Smith

  None of this stopped her from giving Ray the coin, however. A double betrayal. A betrayal of Ray and a betrayal of her past, of the fraternity that she had found in the navy, something that she had never before experienced and certainly wasn’t present here as one of Harting’s toys.

  * * *

  Then her final part in the lie. The others, Dalton, Eric and Harting, liked to pretend that all this was some psychometrically designed scenario but that was bullshit. It was adolescent cruelty writ large, the thrill of power that came from playing with someone else’s life, and she had allowed herself to become part of it. Once again, however, she found herself sitting at a table in the break room. She was toying with a shot glass, looking forward to the mezcal. It helped a little.

  “Keep going, keep going...” She wasn’t sure how long she had been repeating those two words quietly to herself. She felt like the little fish in the Disney film that she had loved as a kid. The film that had provided some calm and happiness as she was shunted from foster home to foster home. She knew she wouldn’t be able to do this many more times. Something would snap. Then they’d kill her. There was just too much at stake.

  “Is this where you go?” Bloodshot asked from the doorway.

  KT closed her eyes. She almost told him, there and then. She had jumped from helicopters into burning seas to rescue downed aviators, she hadn’t hesitated to try and aid the refugees in Syria even though she’d known about the nerve agents. She was no coward but... I’m sorry, Ray.

  Then she painted a smile on her face and looked up at him.

  * * *

  In the ops center Harting was watching the CCTV feed from the break room very carefully. Looking for any deviation from the script. He could see KT wrestling with her duties. It would be frustrating to replace her but he was worried that she would have to go, and soon.

  “Do you think I could get some kind of RST tech installed on my body?” Eric asked him.

  “Why? Is there a specific part of your body that needs augmentation?” Harting replied, though he wasn’t paying that much attention. Eric was as much an irritation as he was a competent tech.

  There was no immediate reply.

  “No,” Eric finally said.

  Harting faintly wondered why Sarah, one of the other techs, was trying to stifle a laugh.

  “Maybe I just like drinking alone,” KT said on the monitor screen.

  * * *

  “What’s your drink?” KT asked Bloodshot and then watched him think about the question for a few moments, even though she knew the answer. Even though she could speak his lines for him.

  “I don’t know,” he told her.

  “Alright, well, only one way to find out.” She had to force the false enthusiasm into her words.

  * * *

  She poured out the two sets of shots. Bourbon, vodka, scotch, brandy, tequila and even some of Harting’s gin for Bloodshot, and mezcal, all the way, for herself.

  “Arriba, abajo, al centro...” she said toasting him.

  “¡Y pa’ dentro!” Bloodshot finished.

  KT stopped, stared. Tried not to make too much of it, willed Harting not to have noticed, but she couldn’t stop herself from smiling the slightest of smiles.

  “You looked it up,” she said.

  He winked at her and she slid the first of his shots over to him before picking up one of her own. Steeling herself for what she knew must inevitably come.

  “To finding out what you truly love,” he said. It was another deviation from the script. That was it. This was enough. It sounded like he was starting to remember, and really remember beyond his programmed memories.

  “Listen, there’s something I need to—” she started.

  Then the song came on. The simple bass line, the kick drum, the snare and high hat, then finally the guitar.

  Start a conversation and you can’t even finish it... She had a moment to think before Bloodshot seized up. She knew his false memories would be hitting him like a series of hammer blows now. She watched him stagger back as though he’d taken a shotgun blast to his center mass. Hitting the table behind, breaking it, again. There was a reason they played this out late at night, when all the staff had gone home, and there were only the robots working the microfactory’s production line next door to act as silent witnesses.

  “Hey. You don’t have to do this,” she told him.

  He stopped. He was actually listening to her. She moved to him, looking him straight in the eyes, wanting him to really get this.

  “You hear me?” She was practically pleading with him. “You can choose another way.”

  Just for a moment there was hope. Just for a moment he looked unsure, but then what were her words, someone he’d subjectively only just met, residual memories notwithstanding, compared to the memories of a murdered wife? The pull of revenge was too much, which was the reason that Harting and his cronies had designed it this way.

  “I’m sorry... I wasn’t forgotten,” he told her, saying the pre-programmed lines. “I know why I’m alone.”

  Then he pushed past her, again, and walked out, again.

  “No, you don’t,” she told the empty room.

  CHAPTER 24

  Harting was standing by his computer terminal in the ops center rolling his head round to loosen his neck and stretching his jaw muscles. He was putting off thinking about what he was going to have to do with KT. The connection she had with Bloodshot had been useful once. Now it was clear that she was unable to handle the situation in a professional manner. It was a shame, she’d been a useful asset, but ultimately she was proving too squeamish for the work. He would give her one more chance, and if she didn’t shape up, then...

  Tibbs and Dalton stood ready by the door to the ops center, both of them watching the central screens as Bloodshot strode across the underground parking lot a little under eighty levels beneath them.

  “Alright,” Harting said to himself, then he triggered the mic and injected some “desperation” into his voice. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “Doc. Where...?” Bloodshot started.

  “You’ve got a billion wireless microprocessors in your brain.” Harting was never sure if it amused or depressed him that Bloodshot couldn’t work out the cause and effect here. “Come back.”

  “No. I got unfinished business,” Bloodshot told him, as he always did.

  “Oh my god, this guy is such a relentless dick,” Dalton muttered before turning to Harting. “Why don’t you just put the tech in me?”

  Harting couldn’t believe it. He slammed the microphone’s mute button. The rest of the room went very quiet as the techs found something, anything else to concentrate on. Harting swung around to face Dalton.

  “It’s because he’s relentless!” Harting spat. “Because these are suicide missions. Because we all know how you got the way you are. You certainly weren’t running toward anything. But if you’re not satisfied with the gifts I’ve given you, you can gladly return what’s mine and crawl the hell out of my lab.”

  Harting turned back to the monitor, trying to control his anger. Wondering why none of his people were capable of just doing their job without bitching and moaning. Dalton seemed fundamentally unable to understand that he was not the operator that Garrison was. Given proper motivation Bloodshot couldn’t care less about self-preservation. The same could not be said for Dalton.

  Harting was vaguely aware of Dalton snapping, “What are you looking at?” at Eric and the tech hunching down low over his keyboard.

  “Both of you have somewhere to be,” Harting told Dalton and Tibbs and they left the ops center. The doctor took a moment to center himself, to calm down. Other people are so exasperating, he thought, still, on with the charade. He unmuted the microphone.

  “We are your only business, the only people you know.”

  Harting was aware of a couple of the techs glancing his way. Perhaps he was overacting a little. It certainly wasn’t his best performance.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 25

  Harting was looking at the doctored mug shot of Nick Baris over Eric’s shoulder. It was the image that they had fed into Bloodshot’s false memories. They always used the same basic template, the tourist in the hotel, and tried to change only the bare minimum. Mainly face and body type. Faux Baris and faux Axe and all the rest still all liked “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads, and Harting had to admit the song had grown on him as well, despite what he’d said to Eric.

  Bloodshot was somewhere over the Indian Ocean in the “stolen” Gulfstream. Eric tapped away at his keyboard, enlarging the satellite feed that provided an aerial view of Baris’s imposing country estate in the Hawequa Mountains east of Cape Town in South Africa. The estate had once been a winery served by the local vineyards that surrounded the Hawequa Mountain Region. Now, however, with the high walls, armed patrols and increased security, it looked less like a grand house and more like a fortified compound. It was also clear that Baris didn’t give a shit about South Africa’s stringent anti-mercenary laws. Harting was interested to see how Bloodshot was going to handle this. It was far and away his most challenging target yet. Harting wanted Baris; it would improve his standing to his masters and Baris was a cockroach that needed to be stepped on hard, but if the worst came to the worst he was already drawing up plans for Bloodshot’s successor, a better, more efficient, more obedient platform for his microscopic weapons, and Harlan Dalton was not going to be that platform no matter what he thought.

  “Surveillance tracked Baris here two days ago,” Eric told him, breaking the doctor’s reverie. “Hasn’t left since.”

  “Security?” Harting asked.

  “Eighteen men in rotating shifts,” Eric told him.

  They were similar numbers to those that Bloodshot had dealt with before, but in Budapest Bloodshot had the element of surprise, and Axe was a fool. Here he would be expected and Baris was anything but a fool.

  “And our man’s found...?” Harting asked.

  “Exactly what we want him to.” Eric sounded ever so slightly pleased with himself. He had provided Baris’s location and as much of his security precautions as seemed realistic with the false data trail he had fed the nanites.

  “Let me know when he’s on the final approach,” Harting told the tech. Eric nodded and Harting left the ops room.

  It’s her last chance, Harting decided. He was thinking about KT’s disobedience. There was a distinct possibility he would lose Bloodshot today. If at all possible he didn’t want to lose another investment as well.

  * * *

  KT’s bunkroom was as spartan as the rest of the Chainsaw personnel’s rooms. They weren’t encouraged to personalize them. She suspected that Harting didn’t want to remind them of what they’d lost. The world they’d effectively left behind. Tibbs and Dalton had embraced this. They had bought into some kind of warrior monk bullshit. To KT it just felt like a cell.

  She was lying on her bunk staring at the ceiling when the door to her bunkroom slid open. She was neither surprised nor happy to see Harting standing in the doorway. She wondered if this was it. Had she finally pushed him too far? She had to resist the urge to touch the breathing apparatus on her neck. The part of her that belonged to them.

  “Is quiet time over, Dad?” she asked. She could see him suppressing his irritation as he came into the room. She knew she was acting like a surly teenager, and the part of her that was still interested in self-preservation was screaming at her to stop but she was well beyond acting in her own self-interest right now. She knew that she couldn’t do this for too much longer and still be her. Not while they played with Ray’s mind. Not while the bodies piled up and she was conscious that their blood was on her hands as well. She was also conscious that she was the only one who really seemed to give a shit about any of it.

  All this to give Ray a little bit of self-determination, she wondered. Whatever connection she felt to him, she mostly knew him from his files. After all, the only time she saw him he was on a loop and they just repeated themselves over and over again.

  Is he really worth getting yourself killed over? she wondered. And the big problem was she didn’t know because he was never allowed to be himself.

  Harting was just standing over by the wall watching her.

  “You can’t do anything for him,” he told her. It appeared that he had decided to take a conciliatory rather than confrontational approach this time. At least it suggested that he wasn’t going to kill her, which was nice. “You understand that, right?”

  That was the thing, she wasn’t sure she did understand that. In the navy she had trained to be part of a team but every part of her training as a rescue swimmer had told her that yes, she could help, could make a difference, and she had. She had made a difference to the aviators she’d helped pick out of the ocean, for the Syrian refugees that had managed to get out before the worst of the nerve agent took effect. She could do something for Garrison. If she had the courage.

  “He’s fighting against your programming,” KT told him.

  That gave him pause, just for a moment, though if he couldn’t see it then he was fooling himself, she thought.

  “Okay, even if that were true, he wouldn’t be fighting to get out, he’d be fighting to stay in,” he told her, rolling his eyes. “It’s why he joined the military, why he kept reenlisting. He needs the sense of purpose.”

  That’s not how that shit works, you Jody asshole, she thought, borrowing a term the marines liked to use. She was staring up at him, trying to decide if she had ever believed in RST. This was the insidiousness of it all. On paper it looked and sounded good: next-generation prosthetics and implants for wounded veterans. Get them back in the game, whether that game be military or civilian life. Give those who had sacrificed in service to their country a second chance. Instead, what they got was surgical slavery and turned into Harting and his mysterious masters’ rather tawdry hit squad.

  “Just remind me why we do it this way,” she said, more for something to say than anything else. She was watching Harting quite closely. She was pretty sure he was deciding whether or not he had to kill her.

  “You sound like him now.”

  She could see him losing patience with her. She knew what happened to those who crossed him. Perhaps she would be the next person to murder Gina Garrison in Bloodshot’s head. Gender-flip the role. Make her out to be the kind of person who would do that to another helpless woman.

  “Then talk to me like I’m him,” she told him. “Tell me when it’s over. When he can stop. When all of us can stop.” It was just words though. Axe, Baris and the rest were not good people but there was no justification for what they were doing.

  Harting seemed to be giving the question some thought, however, glancing around her empty, undecorated, soulless, monastic cell of a room.

  “You know why,” he finally said quietly. “You know who pays our bills. And you know what’s out there. He’s our best shot – not at winning the next war, but surviving it.”

  She went cold. She had seen enough to know what he was referring to, though she still wasn’t sure she bought all the hidden masters/big threat bullshit. Whether it was real or not, KT was sure of one thing: Harting believed it, which meant he would act accordingly. She also knew it was Harting’s last-ditch go-to when he needed recalcitrant, surgically indentured servants to toe the line. When the carrot wasn’t working it was the biggest stick before a kill order. She understood this, and he knew she did.

  She nodded. It was written all over Harting’s face. He was sure that she was capitulating. That more than anything else helped her make up her mind.

  “Come on. Show’s about to start,” he told her.

  “Not interested.”

  “Yes you are,” he said on his way out of her room. So sure of himself.

  Yes I am, just not for the reasons that you think, she decided. She would play along, for a little bit longer anyway. Bide her time. Look for an opportunity. Then she’d go swimming in burnin
g waters again.

  CHAPTER 26

  Harting was not usually this tense when Bloodshot was off the leash. They had satellite coverage, Eric had even hacked Baris’s internal security and they had access to the CCTV feeds from inside the compound, and even inside the house itself. They would be able to track Bloodshot all the way. Even allowing for this there was just something about this op that was making Harting uncomfortable.

  He watched Bloodshot moving like a predatory cat toward the two armed security guards standing at the thick reinforced gate to the compound that contained Baris’s old colonial-style mansion. The guards were sharing a cigarette, as yet unaware of Bloodshot’s presence, though he seemed to be doing little to conceal himself.

  Harting glanced over at KT but she was giving nothing away, arms folded, watching the monitor. The doctor leaned down and pressed the transmit stud on the microphone.

  “What’s your plan to get in?” he asked. He knew it wasn’t tactically sound to distract an operator during infiltration but Harting didn’t like Bloodshot’s approach. He could feel KT’s eyes on him.

  “They’re gonna walk me in the front door.” Bloodshot’s voice came back loud and clear over the ops center’s loudspeakers. Despite the rage he was supposed to be feeling, Bloodshot sounded easy, even laconic.

  Harting returned his attention to the main monitor, watching the satellite feed.

  “Private property,” one of the guards told Bloodshot. If the guard was surprised to see someone all the way out here, then he wasn’t showing it. The other guard was shifting, ready to move, to bring his weapon to bear if need be.