The light. She could use the light.
Snatching up the pen and the alcohol, she turned to the work light on the tripod that stood near the bed. Ever conscious of the minutes ticking away, she used the pen to chip off a small hole in the top corner of the rectangular pane of frosted glass covering the light bulb. Then she stripped out the inner workings of the pen until all she had left was the casing, which at that point became a hollow tube with a hole in each end. Using the casing as a funnel, she poured several ounces of alcohol into the light, then sealed the hole with a piece of surgical tape.
When the light was turned on, it should take only a couple of minutes for the bulb to heat up enough to ignite the alcohol.
Then—boom.
She had her distraction.
If Kemp didn’t seem inclined to turn on the light, she would complain that she couldn’t see.
She was returning the alcohol to the supply cart when the pen, which she had pocketed for possible use as a weapon as needed, fell out of the pocket of her loose black pants and rolled across the floor.
She ran after it. It came to rest against the wall with the photos. Bending down to scoop it up, she happened to glance at the pictures.
Four photos in a line: full face and profile infant, full face and profile adult.
Row after row of them.
Male and female, infants no more than a few weeks old, adults in possibly their midtwenties.
In the profile pictures, both infants and adults alike each had a number seemingly tattooed on his or her neck. The infant and adult photos displayed side by side had the same number, although the tattoo appeared much smaller in the adult. It seemed clear that the photos were of the same individual, first as a baby and then all grown up, and that the individuals had been marked shortly after birth with a number.
Who would do that? And why?
The numbers ran in order, from one to forty-eight.
Bianca was turning away even as her gaze skimmed the wall.
Until she saw something among the photos that stopped her cold.
Her own face.
24
She was in one of the photos.
Bianca stared, riveted.
It was her, all right. At least, the adult picture was. Her, with no makeup and her hair pulled back from her face and—here her hand rose to touch the scar beneath her jaw—the number 44 tattooed high up on the side of her neck.
Just below her jaw.
Where her scar was.
Bianca’s stomach went into free fall. She looked disbelievingly from the picture of the infant, round-faced and blue-eyed, with a cap of downy blond hair, the number 44 tattooed maybe an inch below her small ear, to the picture of herself with the same tattoo, shrunken and blurred by the passage of the intervening years.
Beneath her fingers, her scar felt puckered and hard.
What the hell?
Her mind bounced from some kind of psychological ploy getting ready to be tried on her, to a possible doppelgänger, to...to...God knew what.
She didn’t have time to think about it. Whatever this was, whatever it meant, she had a more urgent problem to deal with.
She had to get back in bed and get situated before anyone came.
She did, taping the IV needle down, pulling the blue blanket back over herself, inserting her hands and feet into the restraints. She practiced, just to be sure. Yes, she could get out of the shackles in a matter of seconds.
Then she lay there, waiting.
Her attention returned to the wall of pictures.
She looked at her own picture first. There were, she was relieved to see, some slight differences between her actual self and the photo. Her lips were fuller in real life than in the picture. Her eyes were a lighter, brighter shade of blue. Her cheeks were thinner, her cheekbones higher. And she definitely didn’t have the number 44 tattooed beneath her jaw.
Although she had the scar.
In that exact spot.
Her heart thumped.
Then she realized that what she was looking at wasn’t a real-life photo at all.
It was an age-progressed, computer-generated image. Extrapolated from the photo of the infant.
Was that baby her?
She’d never seen baby pictures of herself. If any had ever existed, they hadn’t survived her transition to Bianca St. Ives.
Her pulse pounded. Her mouth went dry. Her hands curled into fists.
She didn’t know what this was.
But she had a terrible feeling that it was something bad.
The snick of metal on metal warned her that her time was up.
She tensed, then forced herself to go all limp and boneless.
Kemp walked into the room. He immediately glanced her way and seemed to relax the tiniest little bit when he saw that she was still in the position in which he’d left her.
Watching him, she felt cold to her bone marrow.
He was closing the door when she heard it: the voice of a little girl crying out, “Mummy! Mummy, no! I don’t want to—”
The door settled into the jamb, cutting off the rest.
Marin. Bianca tensed all over again. Marin and Margery were here. And close. Given the building’s concrete construction, that was the only way she would have been able to hear Marin so clearly. The child had to have been out in the hallway, or else she and Margery were being kept in a room along this same corridor and the door to the room they were in had been open at the same time Kemp had entered.
Either way, their presence changed the situation, both simplifying and complicating it. She knew where they were, knew that they were alive and well, which was a tremendous relief. But escaping all by herself was going to be hard. Taking them with her would be infinitely harder.
She wanted to ask about them, but revealing her interest in their whereabouts would be a mistake, she knew. It would be too easy for Kemp to have them moved.
“I want to know where Thayer is,” Kemp said. Bianca had been so distracted by the discovery that her sister and stepmother were close by that she hadn’t noticed him moving until he was practically standing over her. One thick hand curled around the guardrail as he stopped beside the bed to look down at her.
There would be time to worry about getting to Marin and Margery later. For now, she had to focus on taking care of Kemp.
For starters, she wanted to make him think that she was prepared to cooperate with him.
Tell the truth—until you can’t. That was straight from How to Lie Convincingly 101, courtesy of her father.
“He’s dead.” She kept her voice small, submissive.
Kemp’s hand tightened on the rail. “You can drop the pretense. I’m not buying it.”
“It’s the truth.” If possible, her voice was even smaller than before. Her eyes slid, for no more than a fraction of a second, to the weapon in his shoulder holster. Could she free herself from the restraints, spring from the bed and grab it, perhaps administering a disabling chop or two along the way?
No. Not with an acceptable degree of certainty. He was looking right at her. He would see her coming in time to react. At some point he would move away, turn his back—or she would ask him to turn on the light. Either it was getting close to twilight or a storm was approaching. The light coming through the windows was taking on a purplish cast. Turning on the light would be a natural-sounding request.
Patience, grasshopper.
Kemp said, “You’ve lived with him all your life.”
Bianca had to work to keep her face impassive. Not exactly true, but close enough. What made him think that? Did that mean he knew that she was her father’s daughter?
He continued. “You know where he is.” He leaned over the bed, his face coming so close to hers that s
he would have shrunk back—or punched him in the nose—if she’d been capable of either. “Tell me.”
She made her eyes huge, her lips quiver. “Really. He’s dead.”
Kemp straightened as if she’d spat at him. His eyes went hard and cold. His mouth contorted. “Don’t lie to me. I can make you tell me the truth, but you won’t like how I do it.”
Bianca believed him. Her insides twisted. Her mouth went dry.
As much as she hated to face it, the fact was that in some deep, atavistic, primordial part of herself, she was deathly afraid of this man. She, who was never afraid of anything.
The intensity of her fear puzzled her. It made her angry. Quickly she lowered her lids so he wouldn’t see the emotions blazing from her eyes.
The intercom buzzed, drawing Kemp’s attention. He leaned across her to punch the button.
She had to suppress a shudder of revulsion at his nearness.
“Yes?” His tone as he spoke into the intercom was impatient.
“We have the test results, sir. They’re perfect. A score of one hundred percent.”
“Ah.” It was a sound of satisfaction. “Thank you.”
He straightened and looked down at Bianca. He seemed to be closely examining her features. Then he nudged her chin to one side with his knuckles.
He was looking at her scar.
The tiny hairs on the back of her neck shot upright.
She jerked her chin away from his hand.
The picture, the tattoo, the scar, his reaction—something was up. Something big. Something she didn’t want to know. She could feel it in her bones.
She hated being afraid. She refused to be afraid.
“What test results? And why is my picture on your wall?” Okay, that didn’t exactly sound like the frail feminine flower she’d been portraying. But she couldn’t help it. She had to take back that part of herself that never cowered away from anything—or anyone.
He gave a grunt that wasn’t quite amusement and glanced at the pictures.
“How much did Thayer tell you about the Nomad Project?”
She was feeling her way here, but she didn’t like the idea of admitting the truth: her father had never said one word about it. “Not a lot.”
“You’re part of it. You’re Nomad 44.”
Bianca thought of the number 44 tattoo on the picture that looked like her and on the corresponding infant and felt goose bumps ripple over her skin.
“What does that mean?”
“The Nomad Project was brilliant. Brilliant in concept, brilliant in execution. And it was—and is—badly needed. Human frailty is the biggest weakness on the battlefield, you know. If we could make soldiers stronger, more athletic, smarter, give them more stamina—well, that would give our armed forces a tremendous edge. Our scientists came up with a way to do it, got the funding, got the go-ahead and started the Nomad Project. Then somebody in DARPA blabbed to somebody on the National Research Council about it, and they got a burr up their ass about biomedical ethics and what would Congress think and killed it.”
Bianca didn’t like where this was going. She wet her lips. “Killed it?”
“The program. And the fruits of the program. Forty-seven out of forty-eight genetically enhanced test subjects ended up being destroyed. That’s one reason I’m finding you so interesting. You’re proof positive that what our scientists were doing was right on the money. The process worked.” He crossed to the wall and tapped her picture. “We checked your blood—not an anomaly anywhere. You’re flawless. Look at these pictures. You look exactly like you were supposed to. That’s how all these subjects would have turned out. What a waste.”
Bianca thought of the forty-eight pictures on the wall and felt cold sweat pop out around her hairline.
“Are you saying that all those people—” She broke off. What she suspected was so horrible she couldn’t put it into words. It was nothing less than mass murder.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You are the sole survivor of a program that was so far beyond top secret that the government doesn’t even have an acronym for how classified it was. Only a very small number of people still alive know anything about it. The staff here? They have no idea that it ever existed, much less that you are what’s left of it.” He shook his head. “All these years, and Thayer never told you. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Since he kept you with him when he ran, probably would have been a little bit awkward to tell you he’d originally been sent out to track you down and kill you.”
“My father was sent out to kill me?” She’d just spilled the beans about who she was, but she was so stunned she didn’t even care.
“Your father?” Kemp gave her a sharp look. “Is that what he told you? Mason Thayer isn’t your father. He is—well, was, back in the day—a deep-cover assassin who was deployed to track you and the woman who ran away with you down and kill you both. Only, he failed to do it. Oh, he said he completed the assignment, but he lied. He was actually hiding and protecting you and the woman. Sleeping with her, too, of course. So the agency had to send someone else to do the job.”
Bianca had a brief, terrible flashback to the night her mother died. The remembered pain and horror clutched at her heart.
“She wasn’t a job.” Her voice was fierce. “She was my mother.”
“No,” Kemp said. “She wasn’t. Not your biological mother, at any rate. She was no more than your gestational mother, a rented womb who answered an ad in her college paper and came to work for the Nomad Project in return for a nice salary and the promise of a full ride back at college when the job was done. If she hadn’t run away with you, you never would have known a thing about her. You and the other Nomads, had everything gone as planned, would have been sent to a special training facility and raised from infancy on as the supersoldiers you were meant to be.”
“Supersoldiers—” Bianca couldn’t finish. Mentally she was reeling. Her chest felt tight. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. The worst thing about it was, she didn’t disbelieve him. If she looked at her life through the prism of what he was telling her, it all made a hideous kind of sense.
Didn’t matter. She felt as if she were bleeding to death inside.
“The purpose of the Nomad Project was to make supersoldiers with the goal of giving us an invincible military. Like those of the other Nomads, your parents were selected from a bank of sperm and egg deposits donated by some of our finest military heroes. You were created in a test tube. Then Nomad Project scientists used what they called molecular scissors and cut and pasted in specific genetic modifications on our army’s wish list—enhanced strength, enhanced intelligence, enhanced stamina. Athleticism. Fighting ability. A gift for languages. The list was long, and I don’t remember most of it. But you’re the result.”
“No.” The idea was too horrifying. Bianca couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
“Yes. You should be proud. You’re a living example of exactly what our scientists set out to do. They succeeded.”
Whoopee. They succeeded—and she was what, Frankenstein? Or rather, the monster. She shuddered. Openly. Ordinarily she never showed weakness, but she was so overwhelmed she seemed to have lost all her self-protective instincts.
“Am I human?” She looked at him numbly.
“You’re entirely human.”
“What happened to the women? The other...gestational mothers?”
“When the project was terminated, they had to be terminated, too. It was unfortunate, but there was such an outcry at the time about human embryo experimentation that taking the chance that one of them would break their nondisclosure agreement and leak what they’d been involved with seemed entirely too risky.”
“Is that why you’re hunting my—” Oh, God, he wasn’t her father. She felt like she was teetering on the brink of this huge chasm that
had just opened up beneath her feet. “Thayer? Because he knows too much about your Nomad Project?”
“That’s why I’m hunting him, yes. Others want him for other reasons. I thought he’d show up here to retrieve his daughter. He hasn’t yet.”
It took Bianca a moment to realize he was talking about Marin, not her.
“Maybe that’s because he’s dead.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe he’s smart enough to know his family’s dead no matter what he does.” His expression changed. Bianca could almost see the calculations going on behind his eyes. She was engaging in calculations of her own. He’d said Marin and Margery were dead no matter what Thayer did. There was no longer any question: she was going to have to get them out. “I brought you here with the intention of forcing you to tell me where Thayer is and then killing you. Cleaning up an old mess, in a way. You’re living proof of an experiment that the powers that be want to forget ever happened. But now—I think we might be able to use you. Study you. Let you serve as a template for another, future Nomad Project. Maybe even put you in the field, once we’ve learned all we can from you.” He looked at her thoughtfully, as if she were a bug he’d been about to crush underfoot but was starting to find interesting. “It seems a shame to destroy what we spent so much time and effort to create. The truth about what you are could never be allowed to be known beyond our small circle, of course, at least not for many years, but if you work with us—”
He was interrupted by a crackle of static from the intercom.
“Sir? Mr. Groton has arrived.”
“Kemp? Where are you?” A man’s voice replaced the woman’s. Even over the intercom it sounded autocratic, like he was accustomed to being in charge.
Kemp stared at the intercom as if undecided for a moment, and Bianca got the impression that he was thinking hard. Then he leaned forward and pushed the button.
The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller Page 28