“You’re what?” Saige demanded.
“I’m going to cut through it instead of underneath it,” I told her. “This little rectangle contains hair thin circuiting. If I only remove the chips beneath it again, it’s fairly easy to repair.”
“Then why didn’t you do that the first time, dumbass?” Cade snapped.
I blinked at him before reminding him, “Don’t remember doing it the first time, dumbass. Maybe I didn’t know about the circuits.”
“And then you’re going to go alligator hunting?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I answered. “Because once this port is destroyed, we’re escaping through those marshes. They can just as easily track me there as anywhere else, but unless Parker also developed some tracking device no one else has, there’s a pretty limited number of ways he’s following me. Given that he’s followed me to Africa, it has to rely on satellites somehow, right? It’s possible whatever Parker implanted in my head is what they’re tracking so we should be able to block it.”
“First of all,” Cade said, “you’re supposed to be letting me make all the decisions now. And secondly, how do you propose we block this signal? Get you a lead helmet?”
I snickered but given the military’s satellites were far more powerful than the ones they opened up for civilian use, I didn’t actually know what it would take to keep Parker from tracking me.
“I don’t think tin foil hats are the solution here,” Saige offered. “Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to see if Chris can scramble their signals? He seemed to know a lot about the way Drake’s programming worked, and it might buy us enough time to come up with a better plan than sporting a lead helmet and hoping it does something besides make Drake look ridiculous.”
“True,” Cade agreed. “He doesn’t need any help looking ridiculous.”
“And… I’m back to hating you again,” she said.
“Please don’t,” I begged. “I had an entire life stolen from me. I can’t tell if you’re serious or not, but you’re the only two people I can trust now.”
Saige grabbed my hand, and I stopped rambling as that now familiar warmth spread throughout my body. How could such an innocent touch completely undo me and turn everything upside down? Or maybe what really happened was her simple touch turned my upside down world around and set it on its feet for the first time. Maybe she made everything wrong in my life right.
“Drake,” she breathed, “when Cade found me in California and told me what happened to you, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to stand again. He literally picked me back up and forced me to accept that we could find you and save you. I don’t hate him at all. He’s saved me twice now. He’s my friend, and I trust him with my life. And more importantly, I trust him with yours.”
I smiled stupidly at our hands and wondered if I used to do that a lot. I seemed to smile stupidly a lot now. “Well, good because when he’s not shooting at me, he doesn’t seem so bad.”
“Hey,” Cade retorted. “I told you. If I were shooting at you, I wouldn’t have missed.”
“So who’s going to try to convince Chris to scramble the signal so we can escape into a marsh that had better not have alligators or snakes in it?” Saige asked.
“Um, I’m pretty sure there’s both,” I replied.
“Don’t worry,” Cade added. “You have two expert marksmen with you. If you come across anything about to eat you, we probably won’t miss.”
“Give me my own gun,” Saige demanded.
Cade laughed and stood up. “I’ll talk to Chris while Drake does his weird and admittedly kinda gross but also kinda cool arm surgery.”
“We have really different definitions of what’s cool,” I told him.
“I’m not sure I can watch this again,” Saige mumbled.
“You probably shouldn’t,” I agreed. “It might make me nervous, and I really don’t want to screw this up.”
Saige nodded and held onto my hand as we went back upstairs into the camp. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to kiss her, but I still had a hard time believing she would even let me. With no memories of our relationship, I didn’t even know how intimate we’d been. Had I actually made love to this woman? Had she really allowed me to be so close to her, to lie in bed next to her, to touch her and sleep beside her? Thinking about it made me both horny and a little terrified so I tried to remind myself I was about to cut my arm open to dig out the microchip and magnets that allowed Parker to invade my body.
It didn’t work.
Inside, Cade explained what I needed to do and Paul, who owned the camp and was allowing a few fugitives to hide out for a while, loaned me a sharp paring knife and a pair of tweezers. I took them into the bathroom while Cade continued to explain why we’d need to disrupt Parker’s ability to track me and they theorized possible ways to do it. I held my arm over the sink and pressed the tip of the blade to the black mark. A thin trickle of blood formed and I watched it for a moment as the skin broke and the blood rose to the surface.
I bled.
Like any man, I bled.
Parker could go to Hell.
I pulled the blade through the middle of the black and blue rectangle then picked up the tweezers. As I pulled the first magnet out, I noticed Cade in the doorway.
“Beats doing minor surgery in a moving car,” he said.
“I wish I could cut the entire mark off,” I admitted. “Pretty sure it wouldn’t be repairable then.”
“Stop surrendering to that asshole and you don’t have to worry about it,” he retorted.
I smiled at him then pulled another magnet out. “Can Chris scramble the signal?”
“Seems like it,” Cade replied. “He kinda needs to talk to you about something first.”
I thought that sounded awfully ominous, but I just nodded. The tip of the tweezers hit the microchip and I pulled it out carefully. The edges of the incision were already healing, forming a new thin scar above the old one. I put the chip on the bathroom counter next to the magnets then wrapped a towel around my arm. Cade picked up the tweezers and pinched the microchip between them.
“One day,” he said, “they’ll try to figure out how to do this to a man who was born a normal man. Imagine how much cheaper it would be to control someone they didn’t have to build.”
“They wouldn’t have the ability to heal so quickly or to be faster and stronger than most people,” I countered.
Cade dropped the chip back onto the counter and grabbed the soap dispenser, slamming it into the chip and shattering it. “You don’t think they can breed enhanced people? You can’t have kids because Parker didn’t want you to. They can just enter a new program into those chips so that their enhanced new race just creates more and more super soldiers for them. They’ll have a breeding program and a super-soldier program.”
“That… enters an entirely new level of fucked up,” I responded.
Cade nodded and finally looked away from the broken chip on the counter. “Yeah. Why do you think Chris wants to shut his father down so badly?”
I took a deep breath and pulled the towel from my arm. A small scar ran through the rectangle, a symbol of my resistance, of my insistence that I deserved a choice.
“They’ll fail, you know,” I told him. “They’ll always fail because as long as men like Parker create life, they’ll fail to control it. You can’t control something that understands what freedom is and knows he doesn’t have it.”
“I think we all got lucky with you, Drake,” Cade said. “He built the perfect soldier, but you don’t want to be one. You don’t want to hurt people and you won’t unless you have to. Imagine a world with hundreds or thousands of men and women like you but not all of them have the same sense of morality. Parker thinks his new army will save American lives, and there might be a chance of that, but the chance he’d create an army that knows it’s stronger and better than us exists, too. And what chance would we have then?”
I shook my head because I couldn’t even imagine
that world. “If he’s so worried about saving lives, he probably should have spent the last thirty years focusing on giving people everywhere a better world so they’d have fewer reasons to start shit with us in the first place.”
“See?” Cade responded, patting my shoulder. “You’re not always such an idiot.”
I snickered as Saige appeared in the doorway, her eyes immediately settling on the counter where the bloody paring knife, tweezers, and magnets lay before meeting mine. “Chris is ready to leave, but he’s insisting he needs to tell you something first. If his plan works, it could disrupt Parker’s entire program. If it doesn’t, we might get a day or two. It probably won’t take them long to figure out they’re following a diversion so we need to hurry.”
I tossed the towel on the counter and smiled at Cade. “You’re a sailor. I hope you can drive one of those boats outside.”
“Steer, Drake,” Cade corrected.
I waved him off as I stepped into the hallway. “Then get ready to steer us into those marshes so we can figure out how the hell we’re going to survive beyond forty-eight hours.”
Cade shrugged and murmured, “Simple. We’re going to kill Parker and destroy every file that’s documented his research for the past thirty years.”
“Well, good,” I retorted. “Because I thought this was going to be impossible.”
“It might be,” Saige agreed. “But we’ll die trying.”
Chris waited on the sofa in the living room, his hands clasped in front of him. He nodded toward the armchair opposite him so I sat down even though I wanted to jump from the porch and head into the marsh right now. He was claiming to help us now, but he was still Parker’s son. And his odd insistence that he talk to me before leaving didn’t bode well for our future.
“Drake, I… um… I sort of know more about the Project than I’ve let on,” Chris admitted. “My father… he’s a geneticist. He started The Genesis Project over three decades ago when I was just a kid. But by the time he was ready to have a complex program designed to make you perform like an ideal soldier, well, that’s where I came in.”
I blinked at him then gestured toward his uniform. “You’re not Navy.”
Chris blinked back at me. “No. I don’t mean I advised him on everything you would eventually know. We had an entire team for that. I mean I designed the program. That’s what my degrees are in, Drake. I’m a computer programmer. The Army put me through two good schools, and I’m a damn good programmer. At the time, my father convinced me his research, the Project, would save our men’s lives. That guys like you would protect our own out there. But after Virginia…”
Chris trailed off and studied his hands. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be angry at the man who had originally designed the program to control me, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to hate him the way I hated Parker. As I watched him, I found myself feeling sorry for him. Unlike his father, he’d realized they’d made a mistake and he wanted to do the right thing now.
“So what did you do?” Cade asked. “Parker has always known how to work these programs. In Mogadishu, he’s the one who redid the whole thing, isn’t he?”
Chris shrugged. “I wasn’t in Mogadishu. But my father helped with the original design. There isn’t an aspect of this Project that he hasn’t had a hand in. He could have made significant changes a few weeks ago, and if so, I might not be able to disable it.”
“Disable it?” I repeated.
Chris nodded. “Break it, basically. He’d have to redesign an entirely new program again. That takes time. Months probably.”
“Holy shit,” Saige whispered.
“So let me just get this straight,” Cade said. “Worst case, you buy us a couple of days by tampering with this program and making everyone think Drake is somewhere he’s not. Sending them on a wild goose chase. Best case, you could break this damn program and potentially end Parker’s hold over Drake forever.”
“Well,” Chris corrected, “only forever if he’s unable to get the funding to start over. And that’s a possibility given how much heat he’s already taken over Virginia.”
“Holy shit,” Cade whispered.
But I couldn’t even form those two simple words. I refused to allow myself to even hope it could be so simple. I just sat there on the chair, frozen in some state of disbelief and denial.
Chris stood up and promised he’d buy us as much time as he could then stepped onto his friend’s porch where he called back inside, “There’s a boat two docks down. I’m about to leave so wait thirty minutes then get the hell out of here.”
Cade offered us a crooked grin and said, “One former SEAL, one cyborg who doesn’t even remember us, and his girlfriend who sort of started this whole mess. I like our chances.”
Saige rolled her eyes and pushed him toward the door. “Walk, Daniels.”
She reached for my hand, breaking me out of my stupor.
“I still don’t understand how Saige could have started anything,” I said, even though I suspected he was only teasing her again.
“She didn’t,” Cade answered bitterly. “Ramirez told Parker about your relationship with her and most likely lied about some shit, too. We explained all this in the van.”
That name. For the third time, it made my skin feel cold yet hot at the same time as a burning pain spread throughout my chest. I couldn’t pull up a mental picture of him, but whoever this guy was, I wanted him dead. Cade must have guessed what I was thinking because he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Chris and Paul weren’t in earshot before telling me, “Don’t worry. That bastard’s going down with the Project, too.”
And I smiled as that burning pain in my chest faded because while I refused to accept Chris could win my freedom, I could easily accept what Cade was offering: It was the promise of revenge.
Chapter 11
The muddy water of the Calcasieu River occasionally breached the side of the shallow aluminum boat, spraying me with droplets of cool water. I wiped my arm off and shot Cade a “Slow the hell down” look so he twisted the handle on the outboard motor and sped up. I grabbed onto the side of the boat and flipped him off with my other hand. He just smiled in return.
We’d traveled about fifteen miles north when he finally slowed and turned into a narrow waterway Paul had described as a pull boat cutout. We were hoping to find an abandoned—or at least currently unoccupied—houseboat as it would give us easy access to the river and the marshy land behind it. If someone approached us from only one direction, we stood a shot of escape. If they came by water and land, we were screwed.
We didn’t have to search long.
A small houseboat floating on a pontoon deck remained tethered to the bank. Its chipped white paint and faded blue door made me think no one had stepped foot on its porch in years. As Cade pulled our boat alongside it and killed the engine, I studied the wooden planks then glanced at him. “Those boards look rotten. No way it’s going to hold the weight of three adults.”
Cade had already stood up. “It’ll be fine. You worry too much.”
“I’m willing to bet there are snakes and alligators living under this thing,” Saige said.
“Why are you complaining?” Cade retorted. “I gave you my sidearm.”
Saige squinted at his back as he tied the boat off then whispered, “If we get attacked by an angry mob of alligators, let’s use him as bait so we can escape.”
I snickered and nodded in complete smartass agreement. “Let’s see if he falls through those boards first. He may end up offering himself as bait, and we won’t even have to do any of the dirty work.”
Cade grabbed onto the railing, and I bit my lip as he pulled himself onto the small porch. He walked the length slowly then doubled back, stopping to twist the door handle.
“Locked,” he told us.
“So?” Saige responded. “Don’t tell me all your fancy SEAL training never prepared you to get into a locked, abandoned, and probably haunted houseboat.”
“I think I missed the ghost training,” Cade said. “Any chance Parker programmed you with that information, Drake?”
I pretended to think about it before shaking my head. “Nope, but fortunately, I do know how to pick a lock.”
I pulled myself onto the porch and turned around to offer my hand to Saige. She only looked at the water one last time before slipping her hand into mine. Now that we were all on the porch, I waited for the entire houseboat to sink, but it only bobbed on the surface of the water.
Cade gestured toward the lock and said, “It’s an old deadbolt. You’re not picking this one.”
“Ok, I’ll just go through a window.”
I pulled the screen off then tugged on the window beside me, but not surprisingly, it was also locked.
“Yeah, because they’d bother to lock the door but not the windows,” Cade snapped. “Dumbass.”
I just smiled and pulled harder until I heard the locks breaking off and the window slid open.
Saige shot Cade her own smartass look and said, “Now what names do you want to call him?” She grinned and added, “Dumbass.”
Even though I was honestly terrified of Parker finding me, I heard myself laughing anyway. I wondered again what I’d done in this life I couldn’t remember that had earned their loyalty: Cade’s unyielding friendship and Saige’s undying love. I couldn’t imagine I deserved either, and if I were no longer the man I used to be, how long would they stay by my side?
After crawling through the window, I unlocked the door to let them in. Cade flicked a light switch but no lights came on. It had probably been years since electricity flowed through this place. He pulled a flashlight out of his backpack and shined it into the corners of the single room, the beam finally lingering on an old, circular barbecue grill.
“Cool,” he said. “We can eat.”
“Um… we already knew that,” I responded. “We brought non-perishables.” I glanced at Saige and jerked a thumb toward Cade. “Are you sure he didn’t have his brain scrambled?”
Saige laughed as Cade flipped me off.
He dropped his backpack on the floor and headed toward the boat. “I’m going fishing. You two find anything that will burn.”
Genesis Revealed (The Genesis Project Book 2) Page 10