I saw no reason to discuss my “suicide fetish.” That was what the late Admiral Cutter had called it, a “suicide fetish.” He might well have mentioned it to Hauser.
Ignoring Hauser, I asked, “Can you get me to the building?”
MacAvoy shrugged his shoulders, and said, “No problem. We can get you there. Maybe we can rustle up a box of chocolates and a bottle of wine. Could come in handy.”
I chose to ignore that comment as well.
Hauser said, “At least call in if you need help.”
I said, “That’d work great if I had a phone.”
Hauser wasn’t carrying anything, and neither was MacAvoy. You don’t generally carry telephones or personal communications equipment when you survey the battlefield. Usually, the communications console in your bird is enough.
I said, “Look, General, give me an hour. If you don’t hear from me, send in your troops.”
• • •
Head four blocks east from Sunny’s front door and you’d find yourself standing in a Unified Authority barracks building. Four specking blocks. I know this because MacAvoy pointed it out as we flew by. At least his men wouldn’t have far to travel if they came to get me.
As we neared Sunny’s building, I handed out assignments. I told Tom Hauser to find a map showing the Cousteau underwater cities. I wanted precise locations and a means for reaching them.
He said, “I hope you don’t mean submarines. The Navy hasn’t had a submarine fleet for three hundred years.”
“The Unifieds are coming and going,” I pointed out.
“Mais oui,” he said.
“May we? May we what?” I asked.
“Mais oui—it’s a French term. It means that the Unifieds have probably recovered the boats the French used to build those cities and we’re out of luck.”
“You speak French?” asked MacAvoy.
“I speak some French,” Hauser corrected. He added, “Just like you speak some English.” At least, it looked as if that was what he’d said. I couldn’t be sure; he spoke softly enough that the sound of the engine drowned out his voice.
MacAvoy didn’t notice him mumbling or didn’t care. He asked, “Nobody speaks French anymore. Why do you want to learn a language that nobody speaks?”
Hauser answered with a knowing grin. I knew what he was thinking, though. He was thinking that languages were a hobby of intellectuals, something that Neanderthals like MacAvoy could never understand. He probably lumped me in with MacAvoy, the bastard.
Sounding colder and more commanding, I said, “Figure something out and figure it out fast; we need to know how they reach those cities and how we can reach them.”
“So you do plan on going down?” asked Hauser.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Do you plan on going down yourself or sending men?”
“I’m not sure. Are you headed up to the Churchill after this?”
He nodded.
I said, “Find out what you can. Once I’m done down here, I’ll take a transport up so we can strategize.”
I turned to MacAvoy and gave him his orders. I said, “Ray Freeman was running a recon op on a city in the mountains in the New Olympian Territories when the trouble started. I’m not sure what he stirred up, but it brought the Unifieds out of hiding.”
“Are you ordering me to open a second front?” asked MacAvoy.
I could generally spot it when officers were afraid or unhappy about the orders I gave. Their voices betrayed them. If the idea of starting a second war bothered Pernell MacAvoy, he did a masterful job of camouflaging it.
We were nearly to Sunny’s now. There had been very little fighting in this part of town and very little damage. The buildings around Sunny’s condominium had survived the fighting and evacuation unbroken. Most of them stood ankle high beside the behemoth in which she lived.
“That depends what kind of reception the locals give you,” I said. The Unifieds upped the ante the last two times I visited.”
MacAvoy smiled, and said, “Maybe they’ll raise it again.”
He liked to fight, that clone.
Not wanting to telegraph my plans to the enemy, I had the gunship touch down three blocks east of the apartment building. She dropped to a few feet off the ground, and I sprang out.
I hadn’t bothered forming a plan. I had entered a demilitarized zone; the Unifieds would shoot any of ours they caught strolling this close to their border, and we would gladly shoot theirs.
As I watched the gunship’s ponderous ascent into the skyline, I realized the fallacy of the stalemate. They would shoot any of our soldiers they spotted and we would shoot any of theirs, but how would we recognize theirs? They were only sending natural-born troops into our territory. How could we identify them? Natural-borns came in all shapes and sizes.
We were clones; in uniform or out, they could recognize us. Even me. I was a different make—taller and meaner, but I had the same face, the same hair, the same complexion. I gave in to impulses far too quickly. Had I thought about it, I would at least have changed out of uniform. Dropping into demilitarized territory wearing my Charlie service uniform . . . why not paint a target on my back and enter with a marching band?
The street was empty. When MacAvoy said his men had evacuated the area, he wasn’t joking. From what I could see, they’d done a good job of it. I cleaved to the shadows and awnings as I traversed that first block. At six-foot-three and wearing Marine khakis, I made an easy target. Had there been people around, I could have tried to blend in with the herd. In this no-man’s-land, there was no camouflage to be found.
I reached the street, looked both ways, and dashed across. There were cars parked on both sides of the road, mostly expensive ones. Sunny came from a wealthy family and was a lawyer, albeit a fairly young lawyer. Judging by the stories she told me, young lawyers served their time in ignominy, doing legwork for lazy partners, bottom-feeding on lousy cases that no experienced lawyer would take.
The next block was one of those downtown shopping malls, an open-air arcade along which all of the buildings had matching façades. I passed an expensive-looking dress shop, maybe one that Sunny frequented.
The two three-story buildings ahead of me were identical twins, with black granite exteriors and tinted-glass windows. The slate-tiled courtyard that separated the twins was lined with benches and picnic tables. The stores were closed and dark and silent: a gourmet coffee shop, a high-priced sandwich shop, a jewelry store, a shoe store for men.
I paused at the next corner to make sure no one would see me, checked both ways in search of guards and loiterers, then trotted across the street.
Sunny’s apartment building filled an entire block, tall and sparkling with silver sides and acres of glass. It jutted out of the ground straight and narrow, a giant sword stabbing out of the earth and into the sky.
I approached the front doors of the building, and they slid open automatically. I hadn’t expected that though I didn’t know why.
Entering the lobby, I spotted two men. They were natural-born and wearing civilian clothing. They might have been Unified Authority Marines or they might have been residents. They could have been both. But if MacAvoy was right, and this building had been evacuated, there was little chance that anyone I saw would be friendly.
Unifieds, sympathizers, or civilians, they were startled by my sudden appearance. They stared at me. One, an older man with patches of white in his hair, looked confused to see me. The other, a boy in his twenties, reached into his jacket for what could have been a gun, a phone, a wallet, or a key.
I didn’t have a gun, or I would have pulled it. Instead, I sprinted across the lobby and caught the boy as he brought out his hand. He had a pistol. It was not an S9. In fact, I didn’t recognize the make. I caught his hand as he brought it out of his coat, and forced the gun free.
The old one tried to slip behind me as the young one took a swing at me with his free hand. Using his right arm like a lever, I pivoted, p
laying my weight and momentum to force my attacker forward, then drove him face-first into the old guy. They crashed into each other with an oof and a clunk, and I grabbed the young guy by the hair and slammed his forehead into the bridge of the old guy’s nose, following up with a knee to the small of the young guy’s back, incapacitating him, then I backhanded him across the nape of his neck as he went down.
The old guy might have wanted to jump to action when I first started wrestling his partner, but seeing his pal collapse, he panicked, and I finished him with a slash across the throat.
I hid the stiffs behind the security desk, made sure they’d stay dead, then fleeced them of anything useful. I found a gun on the old guy as well. They both had elevator keys. I checked their wallets. They had credit cards and civilian IDs.
I took the young guy’s jacket. He was shorter than me, and the sleeves of the jacket barely reached my wrists. The jacket concealed my khaki uniform, though, and that was enough. I took their keys and their guns.
Somewhere along the line, my combat reflex had begun, and suddenly Sunny became less important than reconnoitering the premises. EME intelligence had no method for identifying Unified Authority Marines. They could move through our territory unrecognized. We were a clone minority in a natural-born world.
I adjusted the jacket as best I could, then walked to the security door and found it open . . . completely open. Somebody had removed the door from its frame. That somebody might have been one of MacAvoy’s soldiers, by the way. They would have removed security doors and any other obstacles that slowed down the evacuation.
I walked through.
I could have taken the stairs, but I chose the elevator on the off chance that someone might see me. Residents ride elevators, criminals take stairs. I didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention, so I rode the elevator up to the third floor and had a look around. The lights were off, the hall was silent. I stepped out and walked the floor from end to end without seeing people. I thought about forcing the doors of a couple of condos but decided against it.
So far, the building was as advertised, abandoned. Yes, I had run into a couple of gun-toting assholes in the lobby, but they might have come to explore, just as I had. I didn’t really believe they were random assholes, not for a moment. This was a combat zone, and looters generally prefer to travel in locales where they are less likely to be caught. Until I found confirmation one way or another, I would assume they were Unifieds.
I decided to take the stairs for the next few floors, preferring to enter and exit halls without the fanfare of flashing lights and sliding doors. I climbed to the fourth floor and found it empty, just like the one after that, and the one after that. When I reached the seventh floor, I found the lights on and doors open.
Having grown up in an orphanage and spent my adult life in barracks on bases, I’m never quite comfortable in luxury buildings or empty halls because the sounds that I associate with life tend to disappear in the air. My footsteps make no noise on the plush carpet. The walls squelch voices, the doors don’t creak. I approached the nearest open door and listened to silence. No one spoke, so I flitted down the hall, peering into doorways like a ghost haunting a castle.
The first apartment I passed seemed empty enough. The lights were off, leaving the room lit by whatever lingering daylight slipped in through an enormous window that faced east. It was late in the afternoon by that time, so the sun had already migrated to the west.
I stole into the apartment like a shadow and moved around the living room, looking for anything suspicious. I found nothing.
I had no idea what incriminating evidence I had hoped to find . . . a pallet of rocket launchers, a closet filled with armor, a Da Vinci–esque mural of Tobias Andropov and the Unified Authority Linear Committee eating their last supper.
I searched the bedrooms. The bed in the master bedroom was neatly made, its cover tight. Not so much as a wrinkle showed. The sinks in the master bathroom were dry.
Maybe they really were doing the same thing as me, I thought, referring to the men I had killed in the lobby. Maybe they had come to search the building. Maybe they were scouts.
I checked the closets, the extra bedrooms, the kitchen. Nothing of interest. There was food in the pantry and milk in the fridge.
Sunny lived on the thirty-eighth floor. Less than a month had passed since I’d been shot; I didn’t feel like jogging thirty-one more flights, so I took the elevator instead.
The door opened, and I heard voices. There were men in the hall. They could have been civilians, of course, but I thought that the same thing that had attracted Sunny to the thirty-eighth floor might also interest officers from an invading army—the view. From her window, Sunny could look past George Washington University and catch little cerulean glimpses of the iron blue Potomac beyond. Sunny’s apartment faced west. Upper-floor apartments that faced east might well offer a strategic glimpse into neighboring boroughs like Cheverly and Landover.
In an era of satellites and stealth generators, hijacking an apartment building with a panoramic view might not seem like much, maybe only a petty victory; then again, I still wondered if they might have stashed something inside this building.
I stepped off the lift, saw two men chatting in the hall to my right, and turned left. I kept my arms loose, my hands out and to my sides. They hadn’t seen my face, and my height marked me as natural-born. The jacket might even have looked familiar to them. If those guys were Unified Authority general-issue, they might have known the man to whom this jacket had belonged.
In the quick glimpse I caught of them, I saw men in their thirties. Both had short hair. They paid no attention to me as I slipped away. Did that make them civilians?
Officially, I was running this unofficial op to search for Sunny. Once you know that Sunny is out of the building and safe, what are you going to do? I asked myself. I would explore. There were ten more floors above this one. I could search an apartment or two on this floor, then return to the elevator and ride it to a higher floor. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I wouldn’t consider my recon complete until I had visited the top ten floors.
I looked up the hall and saw Sunny’s door.
The door was closed. I didn’t have a key to her apartment—she’d never offered me one—but I had a foot with a boot on it. That might make too much noise, I told myself. Civilian or not, the two guys down the hall would come to investigate if they heard me kicking in a door.
They weren’t civilians, though. I wasn’t fooling anybody; they were U.A. For some reason, I wanted to make myself believe I was in neutral territory when I knew damn well I wasn’t. The two men I’d killed in the lobby weren’t residents. They’d had guns. Had I not caught them off guard, they would have made the first move, and I might have ended the day hidden behind the help desk instead of them.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the little pistols I had taken from the stiffs. I steeled myself to kick in the door and deal with the fallout, but I tried the knob first, and the door swung aside.
I felt the stirrings of a combat reflex as I entered Sunny’s apartment.
The lights were off. The room was silent. I saw familiar trappings, chairs on which I had sat, a sofa on which I had once spent an uncomfortable night, a dining-room table at which I had eaten. Looking through the window at the back, I saw the familiar view. At night, that part of the city lit up like a field of stars.
I had killed two men downstairs without giving much thought to it. I had explored multiple floors of a building on the edge of occupied territory. Now I stood on familiar turf, an apartment in which I had spent many nights, and my heart had begun beating like an African drum. I still had steady hands, but only because I had slipped into a combat reflex.
My body, and on some unconscious level my mind, had prepared for war. My Liberator DNA didn’t come with precognition that warned me about danger, but veterans of the battlefield learn to recognize premonitions from jitters. Soldiers either
develop that talent, or they become statistics.
Most of my battlefield premonitions had been along the lines of the duck-and-jump variety. This was different. I couldn’t put my finger on what my emotions were telling me, but a moment later, a man dressed in combat armor stepped out of Sunny’s bedroom. In the moment before I killed him, I noticed something in his hands, a metallic cylinder about the size of a shoe box, maybe fifteen inches tall and six inches in diameter.
I’d experienced the gas that Unifieds carried in cylinders before. A whiff of that and my brain would reboot, almost as if I’d had an epileptic seizure. That was the first step to reprogramming, the only part of the reprogramming process that worked as effectively on me as on any other clone.
I should have shot the bastard. Hell, I still had that stealth pistol in my hand, but I was primed to fight and flat-out forgot about it. Instead, I charged at him, leaping over Sunny’s cream-colored leather sofa, and crashing into the bastard while he still had that cylinder in his hands. Had he shot me with his fléchette cannon or activated his shields, he would have won the fight before I got to him.
He looked up from the metal cylinder, and saw me hurdling the sofa. Then I landed on top of him, wedging my right forearm under his chin, hoping to crush his throat. He struggled to buck me off, but he didn’t activate his shields. Fighting for air, pushing against my face with his left hand, he raised his right arm. I was so focused on his shields that I’d forgotten about the fléchette cannon and barely managed to bat the arm away before he fired.
With my left arm pinning his right, my right arm across his throat, and his armored glove in my face, I didn’t have the situation under control. Trying to keep his eyes from connecting with the optic-controlled menu in his visor, I butted my head against his, knocking his helmet askew but hurting my head far more than his. All the while, the bastard kept digging his armor-plated knees into my thighs.
He rolled and turned his head, trying to right his visor so he could control its functions. Not especially strong, but protected from my knees and fists, the bastard had me beat even though he didn’t know it. He brought his right knee up, hoping to connect with my groin. He missed, but only because I swung to the right and rebalanced my weight higher up his body, rendering the arm I had pinned across his throat useless. I scrabbled for a purchase, hoping for a handhold I could grab to lock the bastard in place. He jerked his right arm back and forth, prying it out of my grip for just a moment, then he aimed that specking cannon at my knee. I swatted his arm away, but that gave him enough wiggle room to throw me to the floor.
The Clone Assassin Page 32