“The parking lot isn’t that far,” I whispered. “If we can get there, I’m pretty sure one of us can figure out how to steal a car.”
Cade grunted at me and retorted, “I was a SEAL. Of course I can figure out how to steal a car.” He squinted at the figure attempting to move from behind the pillar and added, “The problem is hidden snipers because as soon as we run or get in the car, they’ll shoot us.”
“That’s terribly reassuring, Cade,” Saige sniffled.
“Can’t you get your boyfriend to go all RoboCop on these assholes?” he asked her.
“Boyfriend?” I interrupted.
They both ignored me.
“I told you to stop calling him that,” she snapped. “And unlike RoboCop, he doesn’t exactly have a metal exoskeleton to keep him alive if those snipers get the orders to take him out as well.”
“True,” Cade conceded. “I have a feeling Parker’s influence over the military is waning. The fact that he’s even still employed after Virginia is a testament to the lunacy of the DOD’s priorities.”
Cade caught me staring at him and lifted a light brown eyebrow at me. “Still wondering why you haven’t killed me yet?”
“Sort of,” I admitted.
“To be honest, you wouldn’t be the first friend-turned-enemy that wanted to kill me.”
“Yeah, like Ramirez,” Saige mumbled bitterly.
For another inexplicable reason, that name made my entire body turn cold and my jaw instinctively clenched again. I had no mental image of his face, no sounds for his voice, no association with him whatsoever. And yet, I wanted that bastard dead. Not because I’d been ordered to kill him, but because I wanted him dead.
I would have asked Cade about this man, but the sniper at the Civic Center twirled around the pillar and fired at us. The bullet bit into the grass, so close that it sprayed us with clumps of dirt. Cade scoffed and squinted at the figure as he disappeared again. “Must be a Green Beret.”
“What?” I asked, perhaps too loudly, but it was almost impossible to tell because of the racket that still blared in my head.
“Sh!” he hissed. “What’s your plan to take this guy out?”
“Um, surrender?” I responded.
Cade snorted and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Why is that always your plan? That’s how we ended up here in the first place, dumbass.”
I just blinked at him again because I had no idea what he meant by that either.
“Stop expecting him to have all the answers,” Saige hissed. “Parker only wants him to follow orders, not figure out how to circumvent them.”
“Fine,” Cade sighed. “Although I’d really like to know why we don’t hear sirens yet. A man was just killed in broad daylight, and nobody called the cops?”
“I’m sure people did,” I told him. “But after you shot at me at your apartment and the cops showed up, I had to get Dr. Parker to call them off so I could get out of there. He apparently has influence even with the local police.”
“Stop calling him doctor,” Cade insisted.
“But he is a doctor,” I protested.
“He’s an asshole,” Cade replied as if that somehow negated his doctorate.
“If you two could shut up and just get us out of here, I’d appreciate it,” Saige snapped. “I’d rather not end up like poor Jake.”
A fleeting image of Saige lying on the ground with a bullet through her head made me grimace and my body tensed. “I’ll distract them,” I announced. Before either Cade or Saige could ask me questions, I stood up and fired at the column where the sniper hid. As I’d suspected, shots fired back from the motel across the street.
And one of those shots came awfully close to actually hitting me. My gamble that they’d want to bring me back to Dr. Parker alive might not pay off after all.
Cade kneeled on the ground and fired in the direction the shots had come from as I kept my focus on the sniper at the Civic Center. Even though he’d told me I always resorted to surrender and that’s how we found ourselves here in the first place, I simply couldn’t see any other way out of this for Saige. And I refused to let this woman die.
I slowly turned my hands so my palms faced the Civic Center and dropped my gun on the ground.
From behind me, Cade groaned, “Not again.”
But what else could we do? Dr. Parker’s directives had gone silent. Maybe he’d given up on his experiment and already considered me a total failure. Maybe I was. Twice now, I’d been ordered to kill Cade Daniels and hadn’t completed my mission. Cade carried a Beretta and I had only the Glock I’d once intended to kill him with in his apartment. We had nowhere to hide, no vantage point over the two snipers who were in easily defensible positions. And we had no way of knowing how many more had followed me here.
If we tried to fight back, if we tried to run, we’d be dead before Saige could even reach the parking lot.
“Drop your weapon, Cade,” I told him.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he hissed. “I’m only alive because I broke out of that hospital in Mogadishu before they scrambled your brain!”
The air caught in my lungs, but I lowered myself to the ground anyway, kneeling in a gesture of complete surrender. Cade groaned again but in my peripheral vision, I noticed him drop his pistol and put his heads behind his head. We each waited quietly for something to happen.
They didn’t keep us waiting long.
A van turned into the parking lot and several men jumped out, approaching us slowly with their rifles trained on our heads.
“Wait!” I called to them. They stopped, their bodies becoming rigid as if they were afraid of me. I wasn’t even armed anymore.
“I decided to take them in,” I lied. “A SEAL going rogue like this… don’t we owe it to your dead brothers to find out why?”
“Did Parker ok this?” one of the men who’d been approaching us asked.
“No,” I admitted. “But I’ve been thinking about it. The way humans’ minds work confuses me. I want to understand it.”
“You shot at Perkins,” the same guy pointed out.
“He shot at me,” I reminded him. “And besides, I missed. I assumed he was perfectly safe behind the column. Do you think he’d still be alive if I’d wanted him dead?”
Actually, I did want to kill him for endangering Saige’s life, but I didn’t tell this guy that even computer-controlled cyborgs had their limitations.
“What about the woman?” he asked. “Why is she still alive?”
“I only had orders to kill Cade Daniels,” I lied again.
The guy sighed and lowered his rifle, but his colleagues kept theirs on Cade and Saige. He eyed me suspiciously and asked, “Do you remember me?”
“No,” I answered truthfully. “You weren’t in Mogadishu or Mosul so why would I know you?”
He shrugged and gestured for the others to take Cade and Saige to the van then told me to rise from the ground so I listened. When he motioned for me to walk ahead of him, I obeyed that command as well. I was about to climb into the back of the van after Cade and Saige when he stopped me.
“You’ll sit up front,” he instructed.
I nodded in acknowledgment and sat in the passenger seat instead. Beads of sweat formed around my forehead because I had no way of knowing what they were doing to Saige back there thanks to the partition between us. And now that the orders from Dr. Parker had stopped, I remembered I’d come to this lake because I’d wanted answers from Cade, not because I wanted him dead.
The man who thought I should know him climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition.
“So what is your name?” I asked.
He glanced at me and almost smiled.
“Parker,” he answered. “Christian Parker.”
Chapter 9
Christian Parker brought us to the Chennault Airport, which appeared to have been rented by the Department of Defense. As far as I know, the airport hadn’t operated as an Air Force base
since the ‘60s, but it teemed with military personnel now. He didn’t speak to me the entire time. I strained to listen to any sounds from the back of the van, but I heard nothing.
As soon as Christian killed the engine, he jumped down from the van and ordered me out. I waited by the closed back doors, trying not to look nervous, but I was terrified they’d open those doors and I’d see Saige lying on the floor with her blood pooled around her.
I never had the chance to look inside though.
Dr. Parker called my name and by the tone of his voice, he was pissed.
“Twice now, Drake,” he barked. “Clearly, we still have bugs to work out.”
“No,” I protested. The thought of being reconnected to Dr. Parker’s computer via the port in my arm horrified me. He’d tested that port before we left Mogadishu, and it was incredibly painful. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that. “I went out there assuming Daniels would find me. I thought I could gauge if he had any useful information for us.”
“You thought?” Dr. Parker repeated. “You’re not supposed to think and initiate your own operations.”
“How could I not?” I shot back. “For over a month now, you’ve been doing nothing but telling me how dangerous Daniels is and how badly we need to rid ourselves of the threat he poses. Why wouldn’t I be a little obsessed with it now?”
Dr. Parker narrowed his eyes at me. I wasn’t fooling him. Between my lame cover story for going to the lake, Ethan’s refusal to use the remote in Mosul, and our lies that morning in Dr. Parker’s lab, he’d have to be an idiot to believe me.
And he certainly wasn’t an idiot.
My mouth kept talking though, as if possessed by some other deranged scientist’s program. “I just thought we could bring him in and question him first. How do you know they aren’t working for someone else?”
“They were,” Dr. Parker answered. “They were working for Jake Donaldson, and he’s most certainly dead.”
“But what if Donaldson was working for or with someone? If we kill all of our leads right off the bat, how will we find out before you’re attacked again?”
“Fine,” Dr. Parker relented, but he sounded like he was just trying to shut me up. He glanced at his son and told him, “Kill the girl. Question Daniels.”
I panicked. My mind completely blanked—even my own thoughts vanished. I spun around and punched the younger Parker and snatched the rifle from his hands. Several dozen rifles pointed back at me.
“I don’t want you to kill her,” I hissed.
“Damn it,” Dr. Parker sighed. “I shouldn’t have let you leave the lab this morning.”
Christian Parker picked himself up from the ground, and surprisingly, defended me.
“Sir,” he said. “Why don’t I talk to them both while you get Drake out of here? With all due respect, it may have been too early to put him in the field or let him out alone.”
Dr. Parker squinted at his son now but sighed again and gestured toward the rifle in my hands. “Give Chris his rifle back. We’ll go back to the lab, and I’ll check the program. Something is obviously still… off.”
My stomach turned, but I handed Chris his rifle and obediently followed Dr. Parker to his car. There was absolutely nothing I could say or do to get out of the torture of being reconnected to his computer, but worse, there was absolutely nothing I could say or do to save Saige and Cade. Surely, Dr. Parker would be contacting whomever Ethan’s commanding officer was and having him reassigned as well. I couldn’t even hope Cade’s friend would somehow rescue them.
As soon as we left the parking lot, Dr. Parker began lecturing me like a misbehaving child.
“How can I help you when you lie to me?”
“What was I lying to you about?” I asked, knowing how ridiculous I must sound but I would never admit he was right.
“What haven’t you lied to me about?” he retorted. “Mosul, reading Frankenstein on the plane…”
“What makes you think I didn’t?” I interrupted.
He glanced at me then shook his head. “Do you think you were on that plane alone? All I had to do was ask someone else. And I knew it was a mistake to have Ethan here. I tried to tell Borowitz but he insisted it would be fine. Next time, we’ll have someone sent out from Coronado.”
Next time. He’d scramble my brain, and next time, he’d keep anyone who even knew Cade Daniels away from me. I absentmindedly ran my fingers over the port in my arm and the small scar beneath the rectangle. My hand paused over the thin pink line of healed skin. He’d told me that the port didn’t work when I first woke up, and he’d had to replace it.
But perhaps I was the machine that didn’t work.
I’d wanted some sort of evidence about whom to trust and perhaps that confirmation had been a part of me all along. The scar on my thigh, the port that supposedly didn’t work, the reminders that I wasn’t the perfect machine Dr. Parker had been claiming.
Which meant that Cade and Ethan had been telling me the truth, and the proof I’d wanted had been with me the entire time.
The revelation startled me so much that I didn’t think through my actions. I just reached across the car and grabbed Dr. Parker’s head then slammed it into the steering wheel. An excruciating and debilitating pain shot through my head, and I let go of him as the car swerved into the shallow ditch on the side of the road. My seatbelt caught as the airbags deployed, and despite the pain still pulsing through my head and now, my chest, I pushed my car door open and tumbled outside.
Dr. Parker groaned—he was still alive, but I couldn’t force myself to climb back into the car and kill him. It seemed as physically impossible as taking off in flight. I scrambled to my feet and ran back toward the airport. How the hell was I supposed to save Cade and Saige? I was just one person or machine or some unnatural combination of the two, but whatever I might be, I was unarmed and alone.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter.
I’d only made it about a mile when the same van that had taken us from the lake to the airport pulled over beside me. The backdoor opened before it even came to a stop. I’d already decided I would run and hope they killed me, but this plan failed as well.
Because the man who appeared by the van’s backdoors wasn’t one of the soldiers from inside the hangar but Cade.
“Drake, what the hell?” he shouted. He shook his head and added, “It doesn’t matter. Hurry up. Get in.”
I blinked at him then instead of running into the field behind me, I ran to the back of the van and jumped in.
Saige sat on the floor of the van, and she quickly grabbed my arm and pulled me down next to her.
“Are you hurt?” she asked me.
I did hurt from crashing into the ditch, but I didn’t want to admit that to her so I told her no and asked her the same thing. The door slammed closed, and the van lurched forward. I couldn’t see who was driving because of the same partition that had prevented me from seeing Cade and Saige on the ride to the airport.
“We’re fine,” she promised. “Thanks to an unlikely ally.”
I raised an eyebrow at her, but Cade explained, “Who knew Parker had a son? Or that he thought his father’s research is as unethical as I always believed?”
“Chris helped you escape?” I asked.
Cade shrugged. “Who do you think is driving the van?”
I gaped at him because the whole situation seemed as unlikely as me crawling back into that car to kill Dr. Parker.
“Apparently,” Cade continued, “Chris has been trying to get the Project shut down for years. But the Department of Defense has invested billions into Parker’s research over the decades, and they’re the ones who aren’t as squeamish about letting a mad scientist play God.”
“Or Frankenstein,” I murmured to myself.
“Drake,” Cade sighed. “Still haven’t read it so I still don’t really get this reference. And no, you still can’t make me.”
I just kept staring at him so he told me to knock it off beca
use I was being weird and awkward again, and he’d worked his ass off to make me less weird and awkward over the years. He had no intention of starting over.
“How did you get out of the hangar?” I finally asked.
“He told the other guys he wanted to take us to a more secure location to interrogate us,” Saige answered. “As soon as we drove away, he pulled over and explained he’d had some reservations about the way the Project had been operating over the past few years, and he certainly didn’t agree with killing everyone you knew back in Virginia. Apparently, I was the big liability. When Ramirez told him you’d been keeping a secret from him, Parker realized he was no longer controlling you as well as he thought. And he worried I had the potential to control you myself.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“Drake,” she sighed. “Even if I could, I would never do that to you. I would never want to.”
“What about him?” I pointed to Cade. “Why did he want Cade murdered then?”
“He didn’t. Not until you sent me to Cade’s apartment the night Parker ordered you to kill me. Once Cade got involved in helping me escape, Parker had no choice.”
I bit my lip and took a few deep breaths as I attempted to wrap my thoughts around this past, this betrayal and the complete immorality of the man who had created me. I had resented him for my existence, but now, I hated him. I wanted him dead.
Thinking about it made that debilitating pain return and I moaned and buried my face in my hands. Saige murmured softly to me and ran her fingers through my hair, and it took several minutes before I could understand her. She was asking me what was wrong.
“How did you get away from Parker?” Cade asked. “I thought you couldn’t touch him?”
I didn’t pick up my head but just shook it as I kept it in my hands. I couldn’t speak yet.
“Oh,” Saige breathed. “That’s the problem. He must have imagined hurting Parker. It’s happened before, Drake. Just concentrate on a happy memory.”
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