“Okay, I see you’re way ahead of me,” she said. “Gas mask and night vision together, very smart. But can I ask you something?”
“Would you actually stop talking long enough for me to answer?” clone-Henry said with a fed-up edge in his voice.
Danny smiled inwardly. She was getting to him. “How much do you know about Henry?” she demanded. “What have you been told?” He dragged her over to one of the steel support rods. “Did anybody tell you why they want him dead? Did you even ask?”
The clone gave a heavy, put-upon sigh. “The guy cracked,” he said, pulling some zip-ties out of his backpack. He bound her wrists with the rod between her forearms, positioning them so she couldn’t try chewing herself free and so tightly she couldn’t slide her arms up or down. That was a real problem; pretty soon she was going to lose feeling in her hands, and if she complained he’d make them tighter. “He killed eight ops in a single night. And his spotter.”
“That’s what they told you?” Danny said incredulously.
“That’s what he did,” the clone corrected her.
“Not exactly!” Danny fumed, forgetting she was trying to make him lose it. All at once, she was close to tears and didn’t care if it showed. “I was with him the night all those operatives got hit. They’d been sent to kill him. And me—by Gemini. Think about that: Henry saved my life even though I was surveilling him!” She was shouting at him now, full of rage at the way everything she said just bounced off him while he rummaged around in his backpack.
“And not that it matters,” she went on at high volume, “but his spotter was shot in Virginia, the rest of those men went down in Savannah. Henry can shoot long distance but not that long. I—”
Clone-Henry suddenly stood up again. “You know what?” Without waiting for an answer, he mashed a thick piece of duct tape over her mouth, pressing hard for a couple of seconds. “That’s better,” he said.
“Fuh yuh,” she replied, enunciating as clearly as she could.
He screwed a silencer onto the end of the Glock and started shooting out the light bulbs in the chamber, spraying glass and fragments of bone into the air. Danny wanted to kick him for violating a place where the dead from ages past had been laid to rest with the idea that they would rest undisturbed for all eternity, but she couldn’t reach him.
He was about to shoot out the last light when the grenade went off.
CHAPTER 17
Yanking the mask down over his face, Junior ran into the passageway, his heart pounding with a mix of anticipation, excitement, and confidence. The explosion that had blown his target to pieces had also blown the world back into its proper orbit. Everything was now in order again. As soon as he finished mopping up, his next mission would be waiting—
He stopped short. The goggles were very high resolution, letting him see, in various shades of luminous green, the iron gate now hanging crookedly from one hinge, and the crater that had been blown out of the cement, with countless bone fragments and shards spread all over the blast zone. But there were no splatters of blood and tissue, no body parts, no dead or dying old guy. Had the son of a bitch somehow set off the mine from a safe distance? No, impossible. Even with night-vision goggles, Brogan couldn’t have spotted the wire unless he’d known where to look for it and there was no way he could have known that. He couldn’t even have guessed.
Light exploded in his face, so blinding it hurt his eyes, and he staggered backwards, tearing off the mask, blinking rapidly to try to clear his vision. He reached out, blindly sweeping his arm around until his hand hit a steel rod; he grabbed it and held tight. At the same moment, he sensed something moving in front of him.
As he raised the Glock, a shot knocked it out of his hand, stinging his palm. His vision began to clear and he caught a glimpse of a red flare sizzling on the cement a second before something slammed into his head. The force of the blow sent him flying and he landed hard, the back of his skull rapping sharply on the cement.
Furious, he made to get up but someone put a heavy boot on his chest, grinding the heel into his solar plexus so that he could barely breathe. Junior tried to feel around in the bone fragments, which made the boot on his chest press harder. Nearby, another hissing flare threw shifting red light over everything. He raised his head and felt the muzzle of a rifle between his eyes.
His vision cleared some more and he saw it was the old guy he had failed to kill in Cartagena. He couldn’t believe it. Brogan had to be at least fifty. How could anybody so old fight off someone as young and well-trained as he was without help?
Brogan flicked on his rifle’s Tac Light, shining it directly into his eyes, then proceeded to pat him down, relieving him of both the pistol in his ankle holster and the commando knife in his forearm sheath. How hard had he hit his head just now, he wondered as he watched Brogan’s movements, because it was like he was watching himself. Only he knew he was sitting on this goddam concrete, refusing to give the pain in his head any place in his thoughts. So he couldn’t be watching himself.
Except he was.
No. Junior squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He couldn’t see properly. It was a trick of the very dim light.
Brogan stepped back, picked up one of the sizzling flares, and motioned at him with the rifle.
“Up.”
Junior got to his feet. All at once, they were eye to eye, and there was no denying the face staring back at him was his own. There were more lines around Brogan’s eyes, his skin wasn’t as tight or as smooth, and his lips were rougher. It was like looking into a mirror that showed him how he was going to look in nearly thirty years. And it wasn’t just their faces that were identical, it was their expressions, too. He had no idea how long he and Brogan stood staring at each other before Henry poked him with the gun and marched him back to the Quartz Chamber.
The first thing Brogan did was pull the tape off Zakarewski’s big mouth and cut her free from the pipe. Apparently her constant talking didn’t get on his nerves. Maybe that was some kind of old person thing.
“Thank you,” Zakarewski said.
“Thank you for the tip about the grenade,” said Brogan.
Junior’s mouth fell open, which the two of them thought was hilarious. Zakarewski scraped something off the back of a front tooth with one finger, then held it out to him. The light in the chamber was bad but he knew the small black object on her fingertip was a mic.
He looked from it to her and then to Brogan. “She was talking to you the whole time,” he said, trying not to sound impressed and failing.
Brogan shrugged. “Hey, you either search somebody thoroughly or you don’t. Being thorough will keep you alive.” He took another flare out of his pocket and handed it to Zakarewski. “Know how to light one of these?”
“Jesus, Henry.” She rolled her eyes as she lit the flare. Brogan was now walking a slow circle around him, like a drill instructor conducting an inspection, and it was a real effort not to squirm. Dammit, Brogan stood like him, moved like him, even gestured like him.