Verris was rarely taken by surprise but he really hadn’t seen this coming. The only thing more surprising would have been finding Henry Brogan himself sitting on the bed with him. Now that would have been a sight and Verris almost wished he could see it. But it would never happen. The physical resemblance was only skin deep; past that, Junior was Verris’s son clear through to the bone.
He slipped the gun back into his pocket and stepped into the open doorway. The man on the bed looked up at him, then went back to what he was doing.
“I told you to stay in Colombia and await orders,” Verris said.
Junior looked up at him again. “I wanted to talk to you.”
His son’s voice was just a little too loud to be acceptable. The kid knew it, too, Verris thought, gazing at him sternly. Junior stared back, tongs in hand, refusing to admit he was in the wrong. All sons did this from time to time, even the best and most dutiful of them. It was how they tested the structure they’d been given. They needed to see if it held. A good father made sure his son knew that it would, that it was one of the few things in life he could count on never to fail him.
Junior could push pretty hard sometimes. It took almost half a minute before he finally dropped his gaze.
“Sorry,” he said.
When Verris didn’t respond, Junior looked up at him again, his expression turning wary.
Verris was staring through him now and Junior knew that meant he’d crossed a little too far over the line. He tried to go back to picking shrapnel out of his side but he couldn’t get a good hold on anything. The bleeding had increased.
Verris turned on his heel and went to his study. The retina scanner was a bit slow to unlock the door but he was in no hurry. He got his first-aid kit out of a cabinet behind his desk and gave it a full ten-count before going back to his son’s bedroom.
Junior’s expression was relieved if still a bit apprehensive when he reappeared. Verris shoved everything Junior had been using off the bed and had him lie down on his uninjured side while he finished removing the shrapnel for him. Boys will be boys, Verris thought as he soaked up the excess blood with cotton batting. No matter how old they got, they had to learn some lessons more than once. With any luck, this one would sink in hard enough to leave a mark as a permanent reminder. Verris loved his son but there were moments when Junior came uncomfortably close to genuine rebellion. That wasn’t supposed to happen… yet.
Verris adjusted the long-necked high-intensity reading lamp on the nightstand, then offered Junior a syringe of lidocaine. Junior shook his head. He was facing away so Verris allowed himself a fleeting smile of approval. At least Junior had never had to relearn the lesson about overcoming pain. In truth, Verris had never known anyone else who was as adept at conquering their own physical discomfort.
But that didn’t mean Verris wanted to prolong it. Enduring pain put unwanted stress on even the healthiest person, not just physically but mentally as well. He worked as quickly and as gently as he could, dropping each fragment in an empty compartment of the first-aid kit so Junior could hear it and know it was out.
It wasn’t the first time Verris had pulled shrapnel out of a soldier, and he’d done so under much worse conditions—but there were more fragments than he’d realized, many of them tiny. He couldn’t risk leaving any behind—sepsis was no joke. He’d seen guys keel over with crazy-high fevers, bodies shutting down because some ham-handed medic had done a half-assed patch job. The men and women under Verris’s command died in combat like the warriors they were, not flat on their backs in delirium from massive organ failure.
He disinfected Junior’s wounds again before he started suturing. Just as he finished closing the first laceration and was about to go onto the next, Junior suddenly said, “He’s… very good.”
Verris didn’t have to ask who he was. “The best,” he replied. “That’s why I sent you.”
“He knew every move of mine before I made it,” Junior went on. “I’d have him, right there—then when I pulled the trigger, he was gone. Like a ghost.”
“Did you happen to get a look at his face?” Verris asked, finishing with another laceration.
“Not really,” Junior said. “I saw him up the stairs in the abandoned building, through a dirty mirror.”
“Thought you were on the roof,” Verris said sharply.
Junior sighed. “I was but he got a line on me. Had to jump down.”
“What do we always drill?” Verris asked him, his voice brisk. “Hold the high ground, put his back to the wall and—”
“Don’t let him off,” Junior finished in unison with him. “The whole thing was weird. Wiggy.”
“How?” Verris asked as he started on the last wound in need of suturing.
“Like I was watching it all, but—” his son hesitated. “But I wasn’t actually there. Who is he?”
Junior being a little spooked wasn’t the only thing Verris found worrisome. He had trained his son to stay squarely in the moment, to focus on the immediate situation, but the way Junior was talking, it sounded like he was distancing himself instead. This was no good; Verris knew he had to nip that in the bud before Junior developed any seriously bad habits, like over-thinking, or wondering about the nature of his existence.
“Junior, the thing you’re struggling with—that strangeness—it’s fear.” Verris tied off the last suture and sat him up so he could look directly into his eyes. “Don’t hate it. Lean into it. Embrace it. Learn from it. Then overcome it.”
Junior nodded, looking sheepish.
“You’re right on the threshold of perfection, son.” Verris held up his thumb and forefinger with the thinnest sliver of a gap between them. “This close.” Pause. “You hungry?”
“Yes, sir.” Junior nodded again, this time with enthusiasm.
“Bowl of cereal sound good?” Verris asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Junior.
Verris saw his gaze move to the framed photo on the nightstand. It was the two of them, taken on one of their hunting trips when Junior had been eight or nine and they’d shared a less complicated existence.
He smiled at his son and took him into the kitchen.
The blown-up bus lay on its side, burn marks obscuring most of the large curved script that ran the length of it below the shattered windows. From where he stood in the roped-off observation area, Junior didn’t have to see the words clearly to know they said City Transportation Company. He’d been fluent in Arabic, both Modern Standard and Egyptian, for over half his life.
The scene in front of him was equally familiar: civilian ‘casualties’ lay motionless on the ground around the bus, dropped by ‘insurgents’ who had taken up positions behind it and picked them off as they crawled out of the wreckage. There were no live rounds, of course—they were all armed with tasers. Some of the civilians had been desperate enough to try for one of the low buildings that served as a village or neighborhood or installation or whatever the war games scenario called for. A few of them had made it but without weapons; they were pretty much sitting ducks. Eventually the insurgents would come out from behind the bus and advance on the village, ‘killing’ anyone they found.
In any case, the insurgents were in for a fight. As an observer, Junior had access to all the feeds for the exercise; his phone screen showed today’s designated good guys, an elite team of fighters coming in on the other side of the village, as yet undetected by the insurgents. Their uniforms were Libyan Army but there was an extra patch on their sleeves that identified them as Gemini support troops.