Page 49 of The Ghost

I’d spent so much time trying to find Ryan’s killer. It turned out, I was the one responsible. This situation was likely to haunt me for a long time, even if Theo and I did manage to retire. I hated Ryan for what he’d forced me to do. I hated myself for doing it, but more than anything, I hated Mr. Ashcroft for setting the entire thing in motion.

Forcing myself to get up, I dug into the corpse’s pocket for the gun. Wiping it off on a corner of Ryan’s shirt that hadn’t soaked up too much blood, I took it with me. It was time to find Mr. Ashcroft and stop him from making a mess of the entire world. Hopefully I could undo some of the damage he had caused to me and my friends. Better yet, if I could stop Armageddon from happening, we could finally leave all this heartache behind.

Chapter 22

Clark

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I SCRAMBLED OUT INTO the hall, expecting New Dawn to rain down hell on me. The retaliation didn’t materialize, though. The hallway seemed empty outside the sunroom. I had no idea which way to go, so I just picked a direction.

Turning right, I jogged the length of an industrial hallway, ignoring at least a dozen doors before picking one to break into. The lock was engaged, but that didn’t stop me. I rammed the thing, slamming it open on its hinges. Inside, it looked like some kind of file room. Old cabinets stretched into the distance, remnants of a bygone era. There was no one there, so I chose a different course of action.

I couldn’t very well wander through the building, breaking down doors left and right. There had to be some kind of central command that would give me a clue as to the layout of the fortress. At the moment, I was operating completely in the dark. And it was only a matter of time before New Dawn became wise to my activities.

I tried to think. I’d spent many formative years with Mr. Ashcroft. There should be something in those reclusive memories that would help me guess where he was going. He’d abandoned Ryan to my blade, but I doubted he was giving up on his goal. He knew that I no longer had the key, so that meant he was probably moving on to his backup plan.

If I was Mr. Ashcroft, I would have hidden the launch codes in a central location. Maybe I would have distributed them to the agents I thought I created, or maybe not. But I would definitely have given myself a secondary method of detonation just in case the first didn’t pan out.

And since the implant in my shoulder was a digital device, that meant the secondary launch codes would also have to be inside a computer.

I returned to the hallway with a renewed sense of purpose. Theo and Lukas were probably on their way, but would they make it in time? I had to find the central processing station and prevent Mr. Ashcroft from launching the nuclear strikes. Knowing what I did about infrastructure, I could tell that there would be a good amount of power going into whatever room held all the equipment. Power could be traced. I just had to find the wires.

Holding my breath against failure, I hustled from one end of the corridor to the next, looking for a panel. I found one at the far end, past the room where I had so recently murdered Ryan. His body lay still in the distance, no one yet coming to his rescue.

The command room was designated by an alarm panel and a biometric lock. I stood back, glaring at the thing. There had to be a way around it, but for a moment, it had me grasping at straws. Then my mind locked upon the unthinkable solution.

I hurried away to the sunroom, crossing its gory tiles with steel in my gait. Kneeling down beside the body, I used the scalpel to remove a thumb. I had to think about Ryan as just another soldier. He was the enemy, not a longtime friend. He was the means to an end, not a person whose life I had just snuffed out.

Turning back to the hall, I raced to the opposite end, knowing that time was short. Arriving at the lock, I pressed the severed thumb to the screen and was rewarded with a green light. I stuck the thumb in my pocket, thinking I might need it later. It was a good bet that Ryan had access to almost every room in the facility, seeing as he was buddy-buddy with the boss.

It hurt my heart to have to use him that way. If I stopped to think about it, I was afraid I might cry. But I packed those feelings up into a little box and shoved it into the closet of my mind. I could open it much, much later when all this was behind me and I had a moment to grieve.

The door opened, and I pushed my way through. Just as I suspected, there was Mr. Ashcroft, sitting alone at a computer terminal. He turned to face me, his eyes lighting up with something other than fear.

“Clark,” he said, as if we were old friends and he was inviting me in for tea. “I knew you would find a way to free yourself.”

“Mr. Ashcroft,” I began, moving toward him. I had Ryan’s gun in my pocket, and I was working my way up to pulling it out. It had been difficult ending Ryan’s life, and I didn’t know if I could do the same when it came to my foster father. Why did so many people in my life have to be criminals? Why couldn’t I have had a normal childhood with parents and friends I didn’t have to kill?

I took a deep breath, steeling myself for the road ahead. But Mr. Ashcroft was full of surprises. He flicked a switch, showing a map with dozens of tiny lights. I knew instinctively that those were the locations of the nuclear weapons he planned to deploy. What other agenda could he have this late in the game?

“I need you to understand what I’m doing,” Mr. Ashcroft said.

“It’s too late,” I replied. “I have to stop you.”

“Not until you fully comprehend my logic,” Mr. Ashcroft argued. He moved away from me casually, as if he wasn’t really concerned. But I could see a spark of caution in his gaze that he didn’t mean to give away. He was worried. Maybe not frightened just yet but concerned enough to keep some distance between us. “Humankind is on a one-way path to self-destruction.”

“Things are bad,” I agreed. “But you’re just going to make it worse.”

“When there is an infection in a limb, you cut the limb off to protect the heart,” Mr. Ashcroft said.

“No,” I argued. “You call a doctor and have surgery to remove the infection. Or you take medicine.” I wasn’t sure where we were going with this analogy, but I wasn’t willing to concede anything.

“And what if the only way to stop people from killing themselves is to do it for them?” Mr. Ashcroft asked, clearly hoping that I would fall in line.

“You can’t kill people to make things better,” I replied. “Yes, there’s war and poverty and climate disaster, but that doesn’t mean that nuclear winter is going to solve anything.”

“Not solve anything,” he agreed, launching a finger in the air as if I had only proven his point. “Return us to a point of sustainability.”