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“Who am I talking to here? You or Fanning?”
Her eyes sharpened with anger; his words had hit the mark. “I took an oath, Peter. Same as you, same as Apgar, same as every man on that wall last night. I stayed with Fanning because I believed he’d leave Kerrville alone. Yes, he was good to me. I never said he wasn’t. Believe it or not, I actually feel sorry for the guy, until I remember what he is.”
“And what’s that?”
“The enemy.”
Was she lying? For the moment, it didn’t matter; that she wanted him to believe her was leverage he could use.
“Tell me what we’re up against, how many dracs are out there.”
“I think what you saw last night.”
“The rest of Fanning’s forces are in New York, in other words. He’s holding them in reserve.”
Alicia nodded. “I wasn’t followed, if that’s what you mean. The rest are in the tunnels under the city.”
“And you don’t know what he wants with Amy?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you. Trying to understand Fanning is a fool’s errand. He’s a complicated man, Peter. I was with him for twenty years, and I never figured him out completely. Mostly, he just seems sad. He doesn’t like what he is, but he sees a kind of justice in it. Or, at least, he wants to.”
Peter frowned. “I’m not following.”
Alicia took a moment to form her thoughts. “In the station, there’s a clock. Long ago, Fanning was supposed to meet a woman there.” She looked up. “It’s a long story. I can give you all of it, but it’d take hours.”
“Give me the short version.”
“The woman’s name was Liz. She was Jonas Lear’s wife.”
Peter was caught short.
“Yeah, it surprised me, too. They all knew each other. Fanning loved her since they were young. When she married Lear, he pretty much gave up on the whole thing, but not really. Then she got sick. She was dying, some kind of cancer. Turns out she loved him, too; she had all along. She and Fanning were going to run away, spend her last days together. You should hear him tell the story, Peter. It’d just about rip your heart out. The clock was where they were going to meet, but Liz never showed. She’d died on the way, but Fanning didn’t know that; he thought she’d changed her mind. That night he got drunk in a bar and went home with a woman. She was a stranger, nobody he knew. He killed her.”
“So he’s a murderer, in other words.”
Alicia made an expression of demurral. “Well, it was sort of an accident, the way he tells it. He was half out of his mind; he thought his life was basically over. She pulled a knife on him, they struggled, she fell on it.”
“Putting him on death row, like the Twelve.”
“No, he got away with it. He actually felt awful about the whole thing. He was plenty mixed up, but he was no hardened killer, at least not yet. It was later that he went to South America with Lear, which is where the virus comes from. Lear had been looking for it for years; he thought he could use it to save his wife, though that was a moot point by then. Fanning describes the guy as totally obsessed.”
“Was that how Fanning caught the virus?”
Alicia nodded. “As far as I can tell from Fanning’s story, it happened by chance, though in his head Lear was responsible. After Fanning got infected, Lear brought him back to Colorado. He was still hoping to use the virus as a kind of cure-all, but the military got involved. They wanted to use it as a weapon, make some kind of super-soldier out of it. That was when they brought in the twelve inmates.”
Peter thought for a moment. Then, his thoughts crystallizing: “What about Amy? Why did the Army make her?”
“They didn’t; that was Lear. He used a different virus, not descended from the one Fanning carried. That’s why she’s not the same as the others. That, plus she was so young. I think he maybe knew that the whole thing had gone bad and was trying to make it right.”
“It’s a strange way of doing it.”
“Like I said, Fanning is pretty much of the opinion that the man was off his rocker. Either way, in Fanning’s mind, Amy is the fish that got away. Killing the Twelve was a test—not of us, since we never stood a chance against them. Fanning was testing her. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time, his positioning them all in one place like that. He was never particularly fond of them, to put it mildly. A bunch of psychotics, is how he puts it.”
“And he’s not?”
