Sleeper Code

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  She stepped back from her handiwork, mentally preparing herself for the next phase of the sanitation process. It was easier to think of what she was doing in cold, technical terms like sanitation. It sounded so much nicer than murder.

  Victoria Lovett’s left hip struck a stack of plastic storage boxes, and they tumbled over in her path. The white plastic lids came loose, spilling the contents onto the floor. The mess didn’t really matter—it would all be ashes in a matter of minutes—but she found herself bending down to pick it up anyway.

  Pictures. The containers had been filled with pictures.

  Squatting among other boxes filled with old clothes and holiday decorations, she found herself looking through the photographs.

  They were pictures of her neighbors, probably from not long after they were married. The couple looked pretty much the same: Marty had been thinner then, which was to be expected, and Ellen’s hair had been much darker, not as much gray. She should color it, Victoria casually thought before remembering that hair color wouldn’t matter much after she had completed her task here. Victoria dropped back into the reality of her mission with a bone-jarring thud.

  She was just about to leave the photographs where they had fallen and find her partner when her eyes caught sight of something. It was a photo of a young Ellen Arsenault in what appeared to be a hospital bed, holding a baby.

  Victoria pulled the photo from beneath a pile of others and stared at it. Ellen looked exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, her hair a mess, but there was a smile on her face as she held close the tiny bundle of life. Marty must have taken the picture, she imagined, turning it over. Written in a flowery hand, it said, Baby Meaghan … our daughter. Born 12/22/88.

  There were other photos beneath it: the proud parents with their baby girl, and then it struck her. None of them had been taken in a home; all the pictures had been taken in the hospital, and even though the parents were smiling, there was something in their eyes as they looked into the camera, something sad.

  She had never seen any sign of children at the Arsenaults’ home.

  Still sifting through the photos, Victoria came across newspaper clippings. They were death notices from two daily papers, one from the Hawthorne Gazette and the other from the Boston Globe. They were dated a few weeks after December 22.

  The realization struck her suddenly, shockingly: she had been through the house preparing for sanitization and had seen no evidence that this child had ever existed.

  It was strange—the Arsenaults’ attempt to forget what had obviously meant so much to them. But Victoria understood completely: she was about to do something very similar.

  She would have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested that it was possible for her to have a maternal instinct. Certainly she could pretend—which was exactly what she was supposed to be doing, acting to maintain a cover, solidifying the artificial memory implanted in the boy’s mind that she was in fact his mother.

  How had it ever come to be that she’d started to believe it as well? She knew it was all a fabrication—Tom wasn’t a child, he was a weapon of mass destruction capable of the most devastating acts of violence. But then why did carrying out her duty suddenly feel so difficult?

  Victoria recalled the first time she had seen the other personality activated. It had been a demonstration in the presence of their employer, Brandon Kavanagh, before their cover had been established. He’d explained the process to her with a certain amount of excitement—a microchip had been surgically implanted in the cerebral cortex of the child’s brain, and once stimulated by a satellite transmission, it would trigger a narcoleptic seizure and initiate the transfer of personas.

  It had been chilling to watch the little boy through the two-way glass who, though he had moments before shied away from the automatic pistol that had been placed before him by an attendant, now picked up the weapon, dismantling it and putting it back together in record time.

  Victoria still hadn’t quite figured out why Kavanagh had given the boy’s other personality a southern drawl. She imagined that he derived some kind of twisted amusement from it.

  She dropped the pictures and glared resentfully at the explosive device flashing on the gas pipe behind her. There had always been a possibility it would have to end this way, but a part of her had hoped it wouldn’t.

  Mason Lovett had to wonder if he had the skills to kill this boy.

  He leapt toward the startled youth, ready to make his knife strike as damaging as possible.

  Of course he’d heard the stories, how the Tyler Garrett side of the persona was the perfect weapon, how he had been programmed to kill with a cold, calculating efficiency. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

  None of that mattered at the moment. Mason had been in enough battles throughout his career to know that it usually came down to who was the most aggressive—who wanted to live the most. And he definitely did not want to die.

  Faced with a similar situation ten years or so ago, he would have put his money on the other guy. He’d been a wreck, a shell of the man he’d once been. He had done some things in his life—despicable things that he wasn’t proud of but could always justify in the name of survival. But he had reached a point when he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the blood-spattered faces of those who fallen before his own need for survival. The life of a mercenary was killing him, but it was all he had ever known. Then Brandon Kavanagh had called with an offer that at first horrified him—me as the guardian of child?—and then fascinated him. The innocence of a child masking the identity of a killer; it was disturbingly brilliant. Thus Mason Lovett had been born.

  Mason studied his opponent as he attacked—the way he stood, the look of fear in his eyes. This wasn’t a killing machine; it was a scared boy.

  It made what he had to do all the easier.

  He thrust the long blade toward Tom’s chest. This would be a killing strike, and he felt no remorse. This was what it always came down to: it was either you or them.

  Mason anticipated the sensation that was to follow his thrust, the vibration that would travel up through the metal of the blade, into the handle, and into his arm—the feeling of flesh pierced and the razor-sharp edge of a blade grazing across bone as the point of the weapon sought the pulsing muscular organ behind the rib cage that was the human heart. It was a sensation he had felt before and one that he was ready to feel again.

  Somehow the knife blade missed the boy’s heart—missed the boy altogether, actually. Tom had darted to one side at the last possible moment. Mason spun around to the right, slashing at where he imagined Tom to be. It was unusual for him not to hit his mark on the first try, and it proved how rusty he had become as babysitter to Kavanagh’s prized science project.

  His second attack missed as well, the knife blade gouging the wooden door frame and part of the wall.

  Mason spun again, knife poised, prepared to strike for a third and final time.

  Kavanagh had been very specific during the briefing at the start of the mission. If Tom ever realized his true purpose, the operation was to be aborted at once. The boy’s potential for mayhem was high, and he must never be given the opportunity to operate unchecked.

  And now, as Mason stared into the eyes of the boy who once believed him to be his father, he saw something that hadn’t been there before. He saw a cruelty reflected in Tom’s gaze. These were eyes no longer fooled by the illusions of the world.

  They were eyes that had seen beneath the mask.

  It was as if some kind of slow-mo button had been pushed inside his brain, the moment like still pictures taken in succession being slowly flipped to give the impression of movement.

  His father was trying to kill him.

  No. Not my father, Tom corrected himself, a handler, somebody who couldn’t give two shits about me. This is not my father.

  Tom watched in horror as his father—his handler—jumped at him, carving knife in hand. As long as he had known the man, Tom had never seen him move this quickl
y. Even the expression he wore was completely foreign. It was as if he was someone else entirely, a killer hiding inside his father’s body.

  They were acting, dumb ass. You had to believe they were your parents if the operation was going to work.

  The knife was closer now, aimed at Tom’s heart, and he still hadn’t decided what he was going to do, though the choices were simple. He could stand there and be stabbed through the chest, bringing an end to this whole nightmarish scenario, or he could move out of the way, live a little longer, and give Dad another chance at killing him.

  And then there’s the other option.

  Tom had pretty much had his fill of the strange presence he could feel sharing his body. He could have easily gone with choice number one just so all this would finally be over. Yeah, he’d be dead, but at least it would be done with.

  The blade was even closer now and Tom could see the details of the kitchen knife, nothing fancy, but definitely sharp. Do I really want to die?

  There is another choice, he was reminded. What had the guy back at the hotel in West Virginia—Tremain—what had he called it when the two sides came together?

  Unification.

  Tom watched the knife as it moved toward him with wicked precision. He imagined that he could hear the blade as it sliced through the air, sounding an awful lot like a jet fighter dropping down to zero in on its target.

  If unification was to happen, he was going to have to let down the barriers, let himself flow into the assassin and the assassin into him.

  We’d make one helluva team, he heard Tyler Garrett say.

  The knife blade glinted seductively as it crossed the point of no return. He’d be killed and then Mason would go about his business; no one would be the wiser.

  What a horrible shame, people would say, those poor families dying like that.

  Tom glanced across the room where Madison was; she gave him a pleading look.

  The image of a large plate glass window suddenly appeared inside his mind, a window separating a world of calm from a raging storm. Slowly the window began to open, the elemental fury outside the barrier pounding against the obstruction, desperate to enter. The glass trembled furiously and then exploded inward, incapable of holding back the might of the storm.

  Tom gasped, his insides flushed with liquid fire, and he knew—his body knew—what it was truly capable of.

  The blade was mere inches from its destination, and Tom willed himself from its path. He felt like he’d never felt before; it was what he imagined it would be like behind the wheel of a sports car, the engine revving powerfully beneath its hood.

  He felt good. Like he would never have an attack of narcolepsy again—like he would never need to sleep again.

  From the corner of his eye Tom saw his attacker’s reaction, body stopping its forward momentum into the upstairs hallway, pivoting around with the knife for another chance at ending his life.

  Tom jumped back farther into the room, the knife’s edge gouging the door frame and leaving a deep gash across the wallpaper.

  The handler spun around then, ready to follow through, but he paused as he stared at Tom, studying him, studying his eyes. “Where are your glasses?” he asked in that fatherly tone, making the boy’s flesh crawl. “You should learn to take better care of your things, Tom.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way,” Tom spat. “You don’t even know me anymore.”

  Mason feinted a lunge to the left but went right, and Tom saw his opportunity. He stepped in close, avoiding the knife blade again but directing a blow to Mason’s kidney, causing him to cry out as he doubled over in pain. Tom jumped back but not fast enough. The knife caught him on the upper arm, easily cutting across his T-shirt and the soft flesh beneath.

  He winced, his hand going to the gash in his arm, and he felt the flow of blood beneath his fingers.

  “First blood,” Mason growled, showing Tom the knife and how beads of his blood now dappled the steel.

  And Tom felt all the pain, rage, and fear that he was experiencing at the moment channeled through his body distilled into an inner power that made him oblivious to the situation at hand. There was only winning and losing, the victor and the vanquished.

  “Think of it as a present,” Tom snapped, lunging at the man who had hurt him in so many more ways than with just the slash of a knife.

  Mason jabbed with his weapon again, but Tom was ready, grabbing hold of his wrist and applying pressure, twisting it painfully to one side. Mason shrieked, and the knife fell from his hand to the floor.

  Weaponless, Mason lashed out. He kneed Tom’s side, following through with an elbow between the shoulder blades that nearly collapsed him.

  Tom grabbed hold of Mason’s shirt, pulling himself up and driving the crown of his head into the man’s chin. Mason stumbled backward in a daze, falling into a dresser, knocking over bottles of perfume before sliding to the floor as Tom leapt on top of him.

  Bloody memories of numerous fights surged into his consciousness. It had always looked so clean in the movies, like a choreographed dance number, a ballet of violence—graceful in a twisted sort of way, but in fact it was something altogether different. It was ugly, brutal, two individuals reduced to savagery.

  Tom didn’t remember ever having been here before, to this primal place, but his other half … it reveled in the freedom, the simplicity.

  The two struggled with each other, rolling around the bedroom floor, punching and clawing at each other. It had all come down to the most basic of needs.

  The need to survive.

  Mason planted a foot beneath Tom’s midsection and pushed away, hurling him backward across the room. He crashed back against the closet door, the force of the impact making his head spin. Giving his head a shake to clear away the static, he was ready to continue the fight. But Mason Lovett was already at him, having retrieved the knife from the floor, the glinting metal sweeping through the air on a course with his side.

  Tom’s mind raced, a million and one scenarios on how to survive this latest attack playing out in the blink of an eye.

  “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” Mason grunted.

  And the words froze Tom solid, because it wasn’t the voice of a government agent he heard then but the voice of the man who had raised him, comforted him when he was sick. This was the voice of the man Tom had thought loved him.

  The voice of a father.

  And it tore him up inside, doing more damage than any knife possibly could. The father he had known—the father whom he had cared for and who had loved him as a son was dead now, killed in the most bizarre of accidents.

  The blade grazed his side in a searing flash of pure agony, and he twisted away from its bite, throwing himself across the room to escape it. Spots of exploding color blossomed before his eyes as he attempted to get back to his feet.

  “It’s for your own good, Tom,” Mason continued, slightly out of breath, coming toward him to finish the job.

  Tom’s legs trembled as he anticipated the handler’s next attack. He could feel the warmth of blood leaking from the wound in his side, and he wondered how much punishment his body could take before it shut down.

  Madison sprang from the corner of the room, jumping on top of the bed and across Mason’s path, throwing her full weight against the knife-wielding man, knocking him back against the wall.

  “Get out, Tom!” she screamed, focusing her attention on relieving Mason of his weapon. “Get help!”

  Mason savagely backhanded her, and she fell to the floor in a broken heap.

  “Didn’t your father ever teach you not to hit girls?” Tom growled as he drove his fist into the man’s face, knocking his head back against the wall. Tom followed through with a second punch, putting everything he could into the blow.

  Mason’s body went limp as Tom punched him again and again. His knuckles were torn and bloody, but still he continued to rain blows down on the man, never giving him the opportunity to recover. All the w
hile Tyler Garrett was strangely silent, but Tom could sense he was there—could sense his influence with every bloody punch.

  The knife fell from Mason’s hand as Tom’s fist landed on him one final time, driving him to the floor. Tom stumbled back, suddenly dizzy and out of breath, staring down at the man whose face now looked like raw meat.

  Tom’s eyes dropped to the knife lying on the floor, and he went for it, grabbing it up and holding it tightly in his hand. He looked at his unconscious father—his enemy—struggling with the urge to end this conflict once and for all, to take the man’s life. And it was a battle he nearly lost to the bloodlust, but he was saved on hearing the soft sound of Madison’s moans.

  Suppressing his rage, Tom tossed the butcher knife, embedding the blade in the wall across the room where it could do no harm, and went to her.

  “Hey,” he said, helping her to rise. “Are you all right?”

  Her lip was swollen and bloody as she looked at him, carefully studying his face. “I could ask you the same thing,” she said, wincing as she attempted to smile.

  “I’m as good as can be expected,” he said, just as somebody seemed to tilt the room to one side and he stumbled. Madison grabbed hold of him, planting her feet to keep him standing.

  “Well, maybe not that good,” he mumbled, trying to remain upright.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, steering him toward the door. “My aunt and uncle are unconscious in their bedroom; we can—”

  Madison’s words abruptly stopped, her and Tom’s move to freedom cut short by the sight of Mason Lovett standing in the doorway.

  “You’re going nowhere,” the man slurred, swaying on his feet. He had retrieved his gun from the waistband of his pants and was pointing it at them. “None of us is going anywhere.”

  Mason’s face was a bloody mask, one of his eyes swollen shut.

  “I know you won’t use that in here,” Tom said, putting himself in front of Madison. “The gunfire will ignite the gas—you’ll be killed too.”