Page 50 of The Hijack

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I HALF EXPECTED CLARK to say goodbye right then, but she didn’t. She sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes but then simply walked to the end of the island and picked up her plate. I watched her carefully for a moment before handing her a fork.

“Let me think about it,” she said finally.

“Take your time,” I allowed, feeling like the longer she spent debating whether to leave me, the better.

I didn’t want to make it hard for her, but I definitely didn’t want to part ways. As far as I was concerned, we could do both of the things we needed to do together. Regg hadn’t just targeted me; he’d also abducted Clark. And New Dawn wasn’t just a threat to Clark and her foster siblings, but a threat to all of mankind. So if you looked at it that way, we were more powerful as a team.

I decided to let the matter drop. I wasn’t going to ask her again. I trusted her to bring it up later if she felt it was necessary. In the meantime, we could continue to research New Dawn together or try to track down Regg.

“Let’s see if Z and Lukas want to eat,” Clark suggested. “And then we can commandeer the command room.”

I liked the sound of that. That was teamwork in action. Not that I was convinced that either Z or Lukas were working at cross purposes, but there was only one person I really trusted. If Clark and I could get a moment alone with the computers, maybe we could figure out a better game plan.

I finished my portion of the omelet, which wasn’t half bad. I waited for Clark to finish hers, and together, we went back upstairs. Lukas and Z were right where we left them, poring over the files Lukas had found.

“There’s food in the kitchen,” Clark announced.

“No thanks,” Z said.

“Theo actually cooked,” Clark added, hoping to entice them to move.

That did the trick. Both Lukas and Z perked up, clearly unaccustomed to home-cooked meals. They left the console and went downstairs, giving us free run of the server room. We took their seats, and I watched as Clark maneuvered through some of the data that Z and Lukas had been studying.

She clicked through a couple things so fast that I couldn’t even register the scope of the project. It seemed that there were schedules and personnel files going back more than two decades. The schedules were listed by year, by month, by week, and by day. Each day contained at least twenty names, but the names weren’t always consistent.

“Hold on,” I instructed, putting a hand over hers. “What are these?”

“Training files,” Clark said. “Not important.”

“I’d like to know,” I replied.

She sighed, clicking one of them open and sitting back to let me read it. It was her own file, with her name in bold lettering at the top. Her day started at 4 a.m. with a jog, followed by hand-to-hand combat training at dawn, then breakfast and studying politics until lunch. Afterward, she was assigned to bathroom duty, then ballistics training, then Spanish language, then dinner, and finally another run. The schedule didn’t have her going to bed until 11p.m., giving her only five hours to sleep. It was a grueling day for anyone, much less for a child.

“Is this how you grew up?” I asked, incensed.

“It’s nothing,” she said, scrolling past it to things she thought were more important.

“I don’t think it’s nothing,” I argued. “That had to be painful.”

“Don’t go there,” she snapped. “That’s not going to help us do what we need to do.”

She opened a different file that had more personnel records. These weren’t children, though; they were heads of state and members of presidential cabinets going back twenty years. Each file listed the name of the operative as well as the bureau they worked in and the country they were assigned to.

Clark clicked one open and found that it was a female, late thirties, in charge of weapons allocations for the French Foreign Legion. Her personnel file listed her background including her education, as well as some personal information about her family. Whoever had culled the information seemed to favor things that might be potential blackmail facts such as her divorce and a traffic accident she was involved in.

Clark clicked through a few more similar records, and we discovered an alarming trend. Not only was Abernathy growing soldiers for his army, but he was actively recruiting people who were already embedded in governments across the world. It was clear that some were on the payroll, but others had been roped into service through nefarious means.

That and the munition dumps throughout the country spoke of an operation that was much bigger than any I’d ever seen before.

“How have they managed to stay off the radar?” I asked after seeing enough to realize that New Dawn had its fingers in nearly every pie that existed.

“Maybe they have a file on Regg,” Clark suggested, ignoring my comment.

We spent a few minutes searching, but then Lukas and Z rejoined us. Clark gave me a warning look, and we stopped searching for my former handler. I wasn’t sure why we were keeping her foster siblings out of the loop, but I trusted her instincts. If Regg was involved in New Dawn, and it was looking increasingly likely, then that was something we would keep close to our vests.

“I think we should talk,” Lukas announced.