“Mystique!” Luke exclaimed.
“Wanna take a picture?” Kate asked him.
“No need. I’ve got much better mental images in my head.” He kissed Kate, and they headed away from the crowd, toward food vendors and small tables near the back of the room.
“If we weren’t here right now...” Luke started, letting the words hang.
“If we weren’t here what? What would you rather be doing?” she asked, teasing him.
She leaned against the empty table behind her, knowing very well what he was referring to, but she wanted to hear him say it.
“You know what I’d want to do.” He lifted her up and sat her on the table. He stood between her legs and wrapped his arms around her, underneath the cape. He kissed her on the neck and whispered, “I would start by—”
A ring and vibration originated from his jacket, interrupting him.
“My phone,” Kate said, exacerbated.
Luke pulled back, got it out of his pocket, and handed it over.
“Unknown number,” she said aloud. “Hello?”
“Kate?”
“Who is this?” she asked.
The person caught his breath. “It’s me, Robbie.”
Kate jumped off the table and walked away, a finger in her other ear in an effort to block the background noise. “Robbie? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
Shouldn’t he be at the station? Why is he calling me instead of Dr. Dobbins or Agent Lack?
“I’m at a park somewhere. I don’t know how I got here.”
“Are you at The Common?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, I found your number in my pocket.”
“Tell me what you see around you. Anything special? An odd building? Flowers? Statues?”
He paused before answering. “Not much, but I can see the harbor.”
Kate spun around as if trying to see for herself. “What part of the harbor? What can you see?”
“Boats.”
“What kind of boats, Robbie? Tankers?”
“Some, in the distance, but lots of sailboats.”
“How big is the park?”
“Lots of benches along the waterfront.”
Kate was mentally running through a list of parks she’d gone through in and around Boston. “Can you see a building with a clock on the tower?”
“Yes, in the distance,” Robbie answered after a few seconds.
“Children’s park?”
“Yeah, I can see lots of kids playing around metal bars and such.”
“Do you see a gazebo with a funny looking pointy top?” Kate asked.
“Yeah.”
“I know where you are. Stay there. I’m coming.”
Kate sprinted back over to Luke. “I have to go.”
“Why?” he asked with confusion. “Who’s Robbie?”
“Long story. I can tell you on the way,” Kate said, pulling his arm, but Luke had planted his feet on the floor.
“Tell me who he is,” he ordered her.
It appeared as though Luke wouldn’t move until she explained herself.
What is going on with him? Is he jealous?
She moved closer and said, “It’s the thing I can’t talk about here, you know?” She took a step back to make eye contact with Luke who had a confused look. She shook her head. “I gotta go. Now. Give me the car keys or come with me,” she said firmly.
He dug the keys out of his pocket but kept them in his closed fist. “Kate, if you’re seeing someone else, you can talk about it here. Tell me now. Who is the other guy?”
She approached close enough to whisper. “It’s the fucking clone. I have to go talk to him.”
Luke’s face changed. “Jesus! Coming with you.” He gave her the keys, and Kate ran out as fast as she could, but the flock of superheroes was thick. She could barely walk at a brisk pace until she finally left the crowded building, at which point she began to run to the street where they’d parked.
Kate got to the car and had already taken off her cape and leg warmers then put on her jeans and shirt on top of the rest of her costume by the time Luke arrived. Thirty seconds more and she would have left without him.
“What took you so long?” she asked, fury making her blood boil.
“I saw Stan Lee and had to take his picture. What’s the matter, why is this so urgent? Can’t the FBI handle him?” he asked as he pulled open the passenger door.
Kate got in, moved the driver’s seat forward, and then started her car as he sat and buckled his seatbelt. She’d already merged back into traffic before she began explaining herself.
“The FBI let him go. Not sure why, but I guess the agents didn’t have enough to hold him any longer. This clone has some sort of split personality. Robert, the dominant side, doesn’t let Robbie, the weak side, surface very often. Robbie’s the one I’ve been talking to these past few days, trying to get information out of him. Robbie could turn into Robert any second, Luke. Robert’s the killer side. Only the Robbie side talks to me.”
“And why aren’t you calling the cops?” he asked.
“I am a freaking cop!” she growled out as she gripped the wheel.
“And what if he’s trying to trick you?”
“Robbie? No.”
Luke begged of her. “What about Robert?”
“He’d just run away. He doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“What do you hope to gain from this?”
“Can we stop with the questioning? I’m trying to get us there as fast as possible.” She floored it as she steered the car into the exit lane for the Ted Williams tunnel that would take them over to East Boston.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Piers Park.”
She parked the car and looked at Luke. “Stay here. He won’t talk to me if there’s someone around.”
“I don’t like it, Katie,” he said protectively.
“Fuck, Luko,” she said, her teeth clenched. “I’ve been through this over and over these last few days. For some reason, I’m the only one he trusts.”
She left Luke in her car and ran to the park. Kate slowed her gait to a walk once she got there, partly because she’d forgotten to change shoes—running in heels was plain dumb and painful—and because she didn’t want to attract attention.
She walked around the park twice, looking everywhere for Robbie, but after twenty minutes, she resigned herself to the fact that he’d left already.
She sat on the steps of the gazebo, facing the harbor.
Fuck!
She’d missed him and couldn’t call him back.
Robert was probably back in control.
She was annoyed and upset at herself. Maybe Robbie could have told her something important. Something that could have led them to the Colony, to where they could have proven that her uncle had been cloned. Something that could get him out of jail. If she’d been home, maybe she could have gotten to the park faster. If she hadn’t had to change, maybe she could have got to him in time.
A tear rolled down her cheek. She closed her eyes, and a few more tears came, pushed out of place by her eyelids. She curled up and grabbed her ankles, resting her face between her knees.
Breathe in... 1-2-3-4...
“Missed him?” a voice said in front of her.
She looked up. “Luko! You were supposed to wait in the car.”
“I know, and to be fair, I checked to make sure you were alone before I approached you. It’s been thirty minutes. I was worried, so I walked around the park. I’m sorry. I probably sounded like a jealous jerk earlier.”
“You think?” she asked, sending him an icy stare.
“Sorry.”
Kate wasn’t sure she was ready to accept his apology just yet.
“Can I sit?” he asked.
It’s not his fault.
Kate made room for Luko to sit next to her and wiped more tears off of her face.
He m
oved his thumb under her eye. “Are those directed at me?”
Kate didn’t reply. She didn’t even know why she was crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. I’m sorry,” Luke said.
Luke sat in silence, but his right leg started fidgeting. She placed her hand on his knee to make him stop.
“Sorry,” he repeated.
“Stop being sorry. It’s not your fault. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Let’s walk then. Let’s just enjoy the view and breathe,” he suggested.
Probably better than wallowing in self-pity.
Chapter Thirty-Five
August 1, 2015
Christopher Kirk
The Colony
Twenty large monitors arranged in four rows occupied the wall in front of them, each displaying a task that had already been assigned to a clone.
Stéphane and Christopher had just finished reviewing all of their current missions. Their plan was unfolding nicely enough, except for one puny detail that was staring at them right in the face.
“Pop open that one, will you?” Christopher requested.
Stéphane pressed a button, and the clone’s face expanded to fill two of the high-resolution screens.
“That sissy,” Christopher hissed. “I should’ve slit his throat when I had the chance.”
Stéphane pulled up Robert Robertson’s vitals on the screen to the right of his profile picture. His heart rate and blood pressure were normal. He hit another button, and the communication screen appeared with a red warning flashing across it:
“Primary phone cannot be pinpointed.”
According to the screen, the secondary device had been activated somewhere in East Boston.
“What the fuck happened to his original phone? Stéphane, check the map, will you?” He read off the coordinates.
“Police station,” Stéphane said.
“Fuck. Assign the Delete & Destroy program to run next time the primary mobile gets rebooted. Pull up the tosser’s whereabouts since the cocktail party.”
Stéphane brought up the tracking screen and double-clicked one of the icons to access the clone’s current location, then typed in a prompt to request GPS coordinates for the past three days. On a separate screen, he pulled up a map of Boston, and one-by-one, he entered the latitudes and longitudes that had been recorded by the implanted chip.
“Cocktail party until 11 p.m., some residential street ’til midnight, police station for a couple of days until this afternoon. Roaming through East Boston since,” Stéphane reported.
“What did the fucking wanker do?” Christopher asked, ramming his fist into the wall in front of him.
“Calme-toi! We can figure this out. It’s a residential street. The Senator probably followed some first-class bimbo home, and our clone followed him there. Would it not make sense? Then, he messed up and got arrested?”
Christopher ground his teeth together. “I never fucking trusted this one. Did he become a coppers’ nark? I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
“You know JJ wouldn’t have let you. Not him. And our brainwashing program is good. There’s no way he would betray us. They let him go, did they not?” he asked, nodding his head toward his current location on the map.
Christopher walked to the large keyboard area. He hated this thing. Way too many buttons and knobs. The worst part was the touch screen that Stéphane kept using. With so many gestures that did too many different things, he could never remember how many fingers he needed to move—and in what direction—to make the information he wanted appear on the main screen.
He backed away from the console.
“Fuck it. Stéphane, look at the senator’s expected whereabouts for the coming fortnight, and see what dormant clones we’ve got to finish that nancy boy’s job.”
Stéphane pulled up the senator’s calendar, which JJ had hacked last winter. According to her version of its acquisition, she’d managed to meet him at one of his official public appearances, flirted with him, got to meet him in his room late at night, and worked her magic while he was asleep. Now, they had access to his up-to-date whereabouts anytime he changed his online calendar.
Christopher and Stéphane knew what JJ did for them. Things that would have been impossible for a man to do. Christopher admired how calm Stéphane acted about the whole thing. If he had married JJ, he wouldn’t have let her sleep around, even to help them achieve their goals. However, he appreciated their current arrangement. They all did their share of illegal stuff: JJ used her body and seduction skills, Stéphane used his money and his connections to bribe the right officials and ensure the Colony had the technology it needed, and Christopher was the only one of them that ever got his hands bloody.
If it weren’t for him, their army of clones would just be a bunch of drones, walking around, doing God knows what. He was the one who’d brainwashed and trained them to become killers. He’d also ensured that those who didn’t show enough potential got terminated, all of them, except fucking Robertson, whom JJ had grown attached to.
Fucking motherly instincts.
Now, they had to re-assign the job to another clone. While they hadn’t seen any report of an assault on the senator on the news, that didn’t mean it hadn’t occurred. And with the clone having spent days at a police station, all signs pointed to a failed attempt.
“We have these guys in Boston,” Stéphane said, bringing up twenty-nine dormant clone profiles.
“Let’s see. I want a solid chap this time. Or even a bird! Actually, yeah. Something with tits would be better since the senator’s probably increased his security. Check to see if we’ve got a pretty one. He’s not gonna go for a ‘butter face.’ ”
Stéphane accessed the women clone profiles with a dormant status one at a time, and Christopher vetoed them all out based on their photos, except for the last one. “She’ll do.”
“I agree,” Stéphane said, looking at her detailed profile. “With make-up and a pretty dress, she’ll work fine.”
The stats on the screen showed her measurements: 5'8", 130 pounds, 26" waist, size 3, 34" length for pants, medium tops, 36D bra.
“Yeah, she’ll do just fine. I remember this one. The goods are there. I tested her out myself,” Christopher said with a smirk, his mind taking a short trip down memory lane.
He glanced at the rest of the information they had on file. She’d graduated two years earlier, same class as fucking limp-dick Robertson. She’d excelled at knife skills. That was good. Knives were much easier to sneak into a room than a gun.
“Let’s get her a plastic knife.” Christopher walked over to the wall next to the window that overlooked the Incubator then pressed the intercom button. “JJ, we need you in the Brain.” He turned to address Stéphane before continuing, “...unless you want to figure out what type of fucking dress we’re supposed to get her to wear to that event.”
“Not a chance,” Stéphane said.
“Thought so.” Christopher returned his attention to the calendar. “Boat fucking christening?”
“Sounds good,” Stéphane said, nodding.
“We can plant her somewhere nearby, on a boat, in a bikini? Or see if we can add her to the guest list? Upload the Activation Program to her mobile now. It should load tonight when she puts it on charge.”
Stéphane typed in a command on the console, and the status on Nicole Lewis changed from “Dormant” to “Activated.” Stéphane updated the mission details, as well. He entered the senator’s name and the date of the planned killing: four days from now.
“Once JJ figures out the outfit, you’ll upload the details of Nicole’s mission to her mobile, right?” JJ walked into the room as Christopher finished his question. “Speak of the devil. We’ll need your fashion eye on this one.”
After relaying their plan and reviewing the profile picture, JJ agreed. “He’ll fall for a bimbo, but he needs to know that she’s got class. He wouldn’t dare attempt anything
with someone who’d risk running to the media with dirt on him. Let’s dress her up in a classy cocktail dress, introduce her as...” She paused to finish reading her profile. “British nobility,” she continued. “It says she can pull off a British accent? You figure this out. Make her far enough from the Queen that we wouldn’t know her, but close enough that she’d be very keen on keeping her personal life private.” She paused again, this time looking at the calendar. “Looks like he’ll be there for a full afternoon and possibly the evening. There’s nothing planned that night. That snake is probably hoping to hook up with someone.”
She turned to Stéphane.
“You’ll find another boat nearby that we can use for a day or two? Plant her there, ready to sail out.”
Stéphane nodded.
JJ then faced Christopher again. “How do you plan to dispose of the body? Ocean? Leave it in the boat? We may need to hire a crew if you want her to leave the jetty—”
“Fuck,” Christopher interrupted her. “The whole point of these clones was to not worry about getting caught. She can kill him right there on the boat. Stéphane can find the right boat to rent, but we’ll give her the money, and she’ll pay cash. Double the price wanted by the owner and he won’t ask questions. A day will do.”
“If she gets caught, we won’t be able to use her again,” Juliet said.
“These things die way too fast anyway. When have we been able to use one of them more than once?” Christopher asked.
“You’re right. She graduated two years ago. She probably only has another six to twelve months before she starts getting sick,” Stéphane said.
“Too young, too soon.” JJ glanced down.
Christopher snarled at her. “Stop it. It’s not a person. Our clones are just things. You can’t feel bad for things we created.”
Juliet glared harshly at him. “Sometimes I think you aren’t a person either, Christopher.”
“JJ!” Stéphane interjected.
“If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t have these trained killers. We wouldn’t be on our way to changing this world, getting rid of corrupt politicians, pedophiles, and selfish arseholes who are destroying the earth for more money and more power,” Christopher said.
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