The door to the room opened, and an older man in a shirt and tie entered, followed by a guard of some sort.
“Welcome to Centralia,” the older man said. It was Nichols. Again. Only it wasn’t the same Nichols that Habit had shot outside the house.
This Nichols was shorter, heavier, older. He had full lips and a bulbous nose, thinning gray hair combed to one side. His shirt stretched tight over his belly, and his necktie was too short.
“Nichols,” Peter said.
Nichols stopped about eight feet from Peter and motioned to the guard. “Unshackle him, Corporal. He’s not an animal.”
The guard approached Peter and unlocked the cuffs around his wrists and ankles.
“There,” Nichols said. “Now, let’s have a talk, shall we?” He paused as if waiting for Peter to respond, but Peter said nothing. “You know, Peter, you used to call me Mr. Nichols. You used to respect me.”
He then turned to the guard again. “Please get me a chair, will you?”
The guard left the room.
“You have questions, I know,” Nichols said, pacing with his hands behind his back. “And I have all the answers you need.”
The guard returned with another metal chair and set it on the floor facing Peter. “Thank you, Corporal.” Nichols sat in the chair and sighed. “There. Now, let’s talk. I have nothing to hide, and I think it’s time you know the truth. The full truth. No more secrets, no more mysterious memories.”
Peter couldn’t help his eyes twitching ever so slightly.
“Yes, I know about your memories,” Nichols said. “I don’t know the exact images you’ve been recalling, but you have been having memories, haven’t you? Strange ones. Memories with no source, no roots, floating out there like a ship in a dark sea with no compass.”
“Who am I, really?” Peter asked.
“You’re Peter Ryan. You were born in Indiana. Loogootee, Indiana. It’s near the Hoosier National Forest. Beautiful area.”
Peter remembered none of it. He had only fleeting memories of childhood, but none that included details and none involving a forest.
“Who is Jed Patrick?”
Nichols shifted in the chair and crossed his hands over his belly, narrowed his eyes. “Peter, it’s time you hear the whole truth. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Peter nodded. But how did he know he could trust Nichols’s version of the truth?
“Good,” Nichols said. “I’m tired of this secrecy. I’m getting too old for it.”
“I want to know where my wife and daughter are,” Peter said.
Nichols smiled. “We’ll get to that, but first we have to lay some groundwork. You joined the Army right out of high school, asked the recruiter what the most demanding thing to do in the Army was. He told you it was to become an Army Ranger. You signed up, and that’s just what you did. In fact, you became the best Ranger. Top of your class. And in the field you showed . . . skills. Valuable skills.”
“What kind of skills?”
“Well, for one, you were a dead shot. Every time. I don’t mean you were a good marksman. No, they come a dime a dozen in the military. Lots of farm boys out there good with guns. You were special. You simply didn’t miss. Regardless of distance or circumstances. Regardless of distractions. Hit the mark every time.”
Now it was Peter’s turn to shift in the chair. Nichols’s tale held no familiarity, but it certainly explained Peter’s comfort with a firearm.
“As you can imagine, skills like that are very valuable to the Army,” Nichols said, his smile turning smug. “You were a great asset. We trained you as a sniper and sent you to Afghanistan.”
Peter’s memories of combat surfaced again. Habit was his spotter.
“You remember, don’t you?”
Peter looked at Nichols. “Habit.”
“Yes, Lawrence Habit was your spotter. You and he trained together. You were quite the team.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, you were perfect. So much so that we wanted to broaden your skill set. And thus began the Centralia Project. We trained you to become the perfect soldier. The perfect weapon. You could do it all. Your natural instincts, your athleticism, your abilities—we enhanced them, perfected them, gave you everything you needed to be a pure killing machine. We poured a lot of resources into you, Peter, spent a lot of taxpayer money making you the model for our future work in Centralia. Imagine if every soldier we trained was a super soldier like you. Imagine what that would mean to our military dominance. We’d be leaner, meaner, more agile, stealthier. Fewer lives lost, more wars won.”
None of this made sense. “So what happened?”
“Simply? You failed. We didn’t know where the training went wrong. We pored over our techniques, the results, your performance. Everything was perfect, spot-on. But still you failed.”
The memory. The man by the pool. “I didn’t take the shot.”
Nichols nodded slowly. “You didn’t take it. Couldn’t.”
“His wife was there. And his daughter, the little girl.”
“He was enemy number one, Peter. A ruthless killer, a mastermind terrorist. That was the only look we’ve ever had at him. We had one chance and you couldn’t take the shot.”
Peter drilled Nichols. “His wife and daughter were there.”
“He’d killed hundreds of other men’s daughters. Thousands.”
“Why did Habit call me Patrick?”
“Jed Patrick was your code name. Jedi. You were that good. Were that good.”
“And I disappointed you, didn’t I?”
Nichols laughed, but it was anything but humorous. “You were so much more than a disappointment. You were the poster boy for the one glaring flaw in the Centralia Project.”
“And what was that?”
“Training soldiers. By the time we get them, they’re what? Eighteen, nineteen, sometimes older? Too old. Too much past. Too much baggage. Too much conscience.”
Peter stood and stepped behind the chair, gripped it with both hands. He wanted to throw it at Nichols, attack the man, break his neck. Nichols seemed to sense that too, the anger, the hurt, the frustration, the desire to inflict harm, but he remained calm, as if what he was telling Peter were no more important than revealing who won the last game between the Steelers and Ravens. But it would do no good to kill Nichols. Peter was locked in a concrete room located in the middle of a subterranean bunker. Where would he go? Besides, he’d killed enough.
“So why am I having memories of being a cop? And how did I become a lab researcher? And how did Amy Cantori know anything about this?”
Nichols stood and walked to the door. “Peter, take some time to let this digest. Get your emotions under control. I’ll be back later and we can talk some more.”
The door opened and he slipped through. And Peter was once again alone.
Sometime later Nichols returned and sat in the chair again. Peter couldn’t tell how much time had passed, but it must have been hours because his stomach was beginning to grumble.
“Are you ready to hear more?” Nichols said.
“Where’s Karen and Lilly?”
Nichols ignored his question. “When you failed, my colleagues wanted to discontinue you.”
“You mean kill me.”
Nichols smiled. “We prefer discontinue.”
“Of course.”
“That was protocol. It’s how we handled the other agents that didn’t . . . work out.”
“There were others?”
Nichols’s eyebrows lifted. “Of course. We were building an army unlike any the world had ever seen. Others came after you, Peter. But you were the best.”
“And you killed them?”
Again, the smile. “Discontinued them. But I convinced them to let you live. I had plans for you. I, unlike my colleagues, have a heart, and I hated to see such talented agents—soldiers—gone to waste. So I convinced them to let me experiment with you.”
An image of being underw
ater flashed through Peter’s mind, and the feeling of drowning, suffocating, was there too. “You tortured me.”
“No, no. Nothing barbaric like that. I wanted to put you back into society. Let you live a normal life again. But the information you had, the training you had, the missions you’d carried out—it was all very classified. We couldn’t trust you to sign a few forms and promise to keep your mouth shut. Time changes people. And besides, if you would have ever fallen into the hands of our enemies . . . well, they can be very persuasive. We couldn’t take any chances.”
“That’s why you killed the others?”
Nichols tightened his lips and breathed in deeply and noisily through his nose. “Discontinued. We couldn’t take any chances. But I had this idea, see. What if we could erase your memory? Scrub your mind clean and give you a new memory. A new identity. A new life. We could introduce you back into society as someone totally different and give you a second chance.”
Like a cauldron of oil over an open fire, anger boiled inside Peter. He clenched his fists and clamped his jaw.
“Easy now, Peter,” Nichols said. “You haven’t heard everything yet. There’s more to this story.”
“You brainwashed me.”
Nichols shrugged. “Call it what you like, but we prefer to call it scrubbing and imprinting. We scrub your mind of the old and imprint the new. Kind of like erasing the hard drive in a computer and reprogramming it with all brand-new information. But with you it was different. Your mind was extraordinarily strong. It’s what made you so unique, so valuable. We had to imprint three different realities to block out the original.”
Peter rubbed his temples in a futile attempt to ward off the ache that had settled there. Of course—that’s why he had different memories that didn’t coincide. They weren’t his; they were false memories, junk they’d gotten from some box off a shelf and fed him. It also explained the four rooms in his dream. He was a lab jockey in one, a cop in the other. He’d never searched the third room, and the fourth, the locked door, must be his original reality, who he really was.
“You’re figuring it out,” Nichols said. “I can see it in your eyes.” He sounded pleased. “That’s good. You deserve to know. The truth is liberating, isn’t it?”
“What about Amy Cantori? How does she fit into this?”
“Well, we couldn’t just drop you back into the world without a support network. You were a dangerous man, and we’d tinkered with your brain an awful lot. We weren’t sure how you’d get along, if it worked at all. Amy worked for the project . . . sort of. She was contracted by us to keep an eye on you.”
“So everything that happened between us was an act? It was all scripted?”
Nichols paused and stared at his hands for a long time. “Your relationship with Amy had gotten too close. It had to be changed. We needed to remove her.”
“You had her killed.”
“That, unfortunately, was not part of the initial plan.”
“But she never said anything.” Peter wasn’t going to mention Amy’s words at the very end, her warning. He realized now it was a kind of confession as well.
“No. She didn’t. She was quite the actress. They all were.”
“They?”
“Yes. There were others who had knowledge too, but in varying degrees. Dean Chaplin, Dr. Lewis, Susan and Richard Greer. Keeping you away from the truth proved to be quite an elaborate and expensive task.”
Peter sprang to his feet and rushed across the room at Nichols with every intent to strangle the life out of the old man.
Nichols put up both hands. “Wait, Peter. You haven’t gotten your question answered yet, the most burning question.”
Peter stopped, panting, sweating, clenching his fists. A sense of great betrayal ate at his heart like a raging cancer. They’d turned him into a monster and then erased his very existence. Populated his new world with false friends, with lies. “Where are Karen and Lilly?” He almost didn’t ask it because he was afraid of the answer, afraid Nichols would tell him that the funeral was indeed real and Karen and Lilly were gone.
“Sit down,” Nichols said. He lowered his hands to his lap. “If you want to know the truth, you need to sit down and take it like a soldier, like the soldier you still are.”
Peter drilled Nichols with burning eyes, then turned and sat in his chair.
“Peter . . . Karen and Lilly don’t exist. They aren’t real.”
Peter gripped the seat of the chair so hard he nearly bent it. “You’re lying.”
“I wish I was, son. In order for the imprinting to work, we had to give you some strong connection to each reality, a common factor that would travel through each one, something you’d be willing to die for in order to hold on to your life as you knew it. Some emotional tie that bound you to it. So we created Karen and Lilly. We were all very surprised by how quickly and fiercely you latched on to them, by how thoroughly you accepted them. The emotional tie was incredible. Unbreakable even. It was a perfect scenario. A little too perfect, though, and that’s why we had to make you believe that they had died in a car accident. You’d still have the emotional tie, the anchor, but without the problematic issues of keeping their existence going.”
Peter shook his head. “No. You’re lying.” The room spun around him as if his chair were the axis of a giant wheel. His head swam; bile pushed its way up his throat. He thought he’d vomit right there in front of Nichols.
“I wish I was, son. I do.” Nichols stood. “I’ll leave you alone to process this. I know it’s hard news to accept. I wanted to tell you the truth, though, and you wanted to hear the truth. Now you have the truth. I’m sorry.” He walked to the door and opened it. “Some guards will be by for you in a little while. I suggest you be on your best behavior when they arrive.” He left, and the door closed.
Peter stood, picked up the chair, and threw it against one of the walls. It clattered and landed on its side on the floor. It was a lie—it had to be. Everything else felt fabricated and mass-produced, except Karen and Lilly. It wasn’t possible that they were mere figments of his imagination, concoctions of some lab tech who’d fed him information while he was being imprinted. They were real; the memories he had of them were as real as the skin on the back of his hand. Uniquely his. He refused to believe what Nichols had told him.
But what if Nichols was right? What if he was telling the truth? Everything else he’d said made sense. It was a twisted, demented form of sense, but it all added up. Why would this be different? If Karen and Lilly really didn’t exist, then Peter had no reason to live, no reason to fight and go on. His life was a sham, his relationships phony; everything about him came out of a lab, where his mind had been scrubbed and imprinted. He was a man who didn’t exist, a mirage. No one would miss him if he died now because no one knew he was still alive. All his old friends, relatives, and whoever else knew him from his original life had probably accepted his death and moved on.
If he didn’t have Karen and Lilly, he had nothing.
Peter was about to fall asleep in a very uncomfortable position in the chair when the door opened and three guards entered. They all wore black commando garb and carried Glocks, standard issue for these types of grunts.
The lead, a broad-shouldered guy with a wide, angular face and deep-set dark eyes, stepped forward and said, “Mr. Ryan, please stand and turn around, and put your hands on the wall.”
Peter didn’t move. He sat in the chair and stared at the guard as if he’d suddenly gone deaf and hadn’t heard a word the man said. The other two had positioned themselves on either flank of the lead. Both had their guns trained on Peter’s head.
Peter noticed that each of the guards wore a utility belt that contained several magazines of ammo, pepper spray, handcuffs, and a Taser. They’d come prepared for whatever might transpire. He also noticed the lead gripped the gun with his left hand; the guard to the right of the lead was sweating terribly, soaking the collar of his shirt; and the guard to the left continuous
ly shifted his feet.
“Sir,” the big lead said. “I’m going to ask you again to stand and put your hands on the wall.”
As if he were a Trappist monk and had taken a strict vow of silence, still Peter said nothing and did not move.
The lead guard circled Peter and stood behind him. The barrel of his gun nudged Peter’s head. “I’m not going to ask you again.” He spoke forcefully, confidently. “If you don’t stand on your own, I can make you do it.”
Peter knew he could. He had a Taser, and its fifty thousand volts would incapacitate Peter long enough that the three could pounce on him and cuff him in seconds.
Slowly Peter complied. He rose and walked to the wall. The lead guard followed.
Peter stood a foot from the wall.
“Hands on the wall,” the guard said.
Peter hesitated, testing the man. If his stare didn’t hold the power to atomize concrete, the least he could do was try to draw the man in closer. It worked. The guard stepped nearer and pressed the barrel of his gun against Peter’s back, between the shoulder blades.
Quicker than the lead could react, Peter spun to his left, knocking the guard’s arm out of the way. The gun discharged, sending a round into the concrete inches from where Peter stood. The gun then clattered to the floor. Peter continued his spin, using his momentum to place a tight choke hold on the guard with his left arm while grabbing the man’s Taser from the utility belt with his right hand. It took him less than a second to aim and fire and hit the sweating guard in the thigh. The guy twitched and grunted like a marionette dangling from a tangled mess of string and finally collapsed to the floor.
The remaining guard shouted something unintelligible and squeezed off a round that nearly struck Peter’s head but slammed into the wall behind him. Shards of concrete bit the back of Peter’s neck. Still holding the lead guard, Peter groped for the man’s pepper spray canister, found it, and coated the remaining guard’s face. The guy stumbled back, pawing at his face; he gagged, sputtered, spit, and wheezed.
Peter released the lead guard from the choke hold and smashed his elbow into the side of the man’s head, then delivered a kick to the chest of the man he’d just hit with the pepper spray. The guard backpedaled and slammed against the far concrete wall. Peter followed and easily disarmed him. He went to the guard he’d Tased, who was still lying on the floor, salivating and sweating profusely, and retrieved his gun. The lead guard’s gun was in the corner. Peter picked it up too.
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