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“No, it’s not,” Kev cut in. “It can’t be, and it’s not.”
Sean shook his head, bewildered. “But he looks exactly like—”
“No,” Kev said. “Look again. He’s too young. Twenty, maybe. And too pale. His hair’s ash blond. And he’s not tall enough, and his shoulders don’t have the bulk of Bruno’s. And his eyes are set closer.”
But Sean’s head could not stop shaking. “This is so fucked up. So this is one of the lost siblings Petrie was going on about. But how about the other guy? He doesn’t look like Bruno at all. But he could be the guy that Aaro and Zia described from the hospital.”
Kev shrugged, indifferent. It was eerie, yeah, but he didn’t care whose siblings they were or weren’t. DNA be damned. They worked for the guy who was fucking with Bruno. That made them walking dead men.Getting dead, of course, only happening after they performed the last and possibly only useful task ordained for them on this earth. Which was to lead Kev to wherever Bruno was.Please.If there was a God, he begged for this much grace. The rest he’d take care of himself.
“I still think we should have tagged her,” Sean fretted. “We could have remote activated a tracker as soon as they got on the road.”
“They’re not stupid,” Kev repeated. “They’d have found it. That’s what they’re doing right now. Searching her. Not just sweeping her, but physically searching her. That’s why they’re not already on the road.”
Agonizing minutes passed. Kev stared at the screen, desperate to move. Air rushed back into his lungs when the young Bruno-esque dude poked his head out. He backed out, holding monster chick by the shoulders. Mr. Bland had her by the legs. She was still wrapped in the tarp, but less tightly now. They heaved her into the back of their vehicle without gentleness or ceremony. The Bruno look-alike slammed the door and headed for the wheel, like he was done with an unpleasant but necessary task.
“Huh,” Sean murmured. “I am not feeling the love here.”
“Maybe monster chick is tough to work with,” Kev surmised.
“Ya think? But still someone ordered them to pick her up. Maybe they’re short on staff. A lot of them got dead recently.”
“Good,” Kev said darkly. “Dead is good.”
The vehicle was on the move. Sean fired up the van’s engine, and nudged her to the end of the street, so they could see when the black SUV poked its nose out of the storage facility’s main entrance.
It turned away from them, thank God. If it had turned right, the Butthead Brigade would have had a dead on close up view of Kev and Sean’s mugs behind the old van’s windshield. Their first stroke of luck.
Sean hung back, let a car or two get in front on the busy street, and pulled out after them.
* * *
“Melanie? Melanie! Respond immediately!”
What the hell? King tossed the com device down, and swung around to click open the monitor that showed Lily Parr’s room. Still those legs were stretched out, the bare feet looking pale and cold. The video played on, nothing had changed. Melanie had not yet arrived.
His blood pressure rose. Useless bitch. Unable to perform the simplest task. She’d been too fuddled by the intense orgasm he’d so unfortunately granted her. God knows, she didn’t deserve it.
He had never felt so irritated, so exposed. Every last one of his elite cadre of personal operatives were either dead or trying to cope with these irritants and tormenters. Leaving him alone to take care of all the myriad details of his enterprise—personally.
And they were extensive. Currently, he was monitoring the young ones in the programming room, who had been scheduled today for the eight hour sessions of combat programming. He’d considered cancelling it, but it had annoyed him to think of his smoothly running machine disrupted by these hooligans. So he’d ordered Hobart and Melanie to retrieve the teens from the satellite dormitory facility and set them all up this morning, right on schedule, as if nothing were amiss.
So at this moment, ten of his trainees, aged 13 to 18, were hooked up to the programming consoles, their senses and brain functions augmented by King’s own brilliant drug cocktails, processing massive amounts of information at accelerated rates. With each of them, he came closer to his ultimate dream of plumbing the vast realms of untapped human potential. And using it for his own ends.
But he’d been forced to spend the last half-hour checking their vitals, their brainwaves. Eight of them were fine, but two of them, A-1423B, also known as Annika, and F-1684C, also known as Fallon, looked destined for the cull. The stressful DeepWeave and drug combination were provoking severe seizures.
Pity, but still. This crop’s eighty percent success rate was statistically quite good. A steady improvement. In the beginning, back when he started, with Zoe and her vintage, he’d enjoyed a thirty percent success rate. Indeed, if a Zoe appeared to him now, with all her obvious flaws, he’d have culled her before she reached the age of eight.
Yes, his standards edged ever higher. That pleased him, this slow but steady march toward complete perfection. Utter control.
But it was a sensation he was not at liberty to enjoy today, with his staff scattered to the four winds, or dead, or falling to pieces. And he had the little ones to think of, too, the children produced from the last of the viable embryos obtained from Magda. He’d had them brought over today with the notion of showing them to Bruno, for entertainment value as well as professional curiosity. He wondered, for instance, if that mechanism of noble self-sacrifice which had worked so well with Lily would work with the babies, too. If his son would feel an immediate bond with the children because of shared DNA. After all, look what mere sex had reduced him to, poor boy. Fascinating question. Brain candy.
Still. It had been self-indulgent to order the children delivered today. There was no one to attend to them when they woke from their drugged sleep. Hopefully that would not happen for hours yet. Their pod leader had been sent away, not being privy to the secrets of his enterprise. He’d decided years ago to outsource early childcare, for reasons of cost-effectiveness. Changing diapers and wiping mouths did not require millions of dollars of specialized training. The pod leaders were well paid to do exactly as he requested and tell no tales—but they weren’t welcome on the premises today.
Once the actual programming of the children began, he used only DeepWeave programmed staff, so as to avoid misunderstandings. Only a DeepWeave alum could understand the totality of his vision, or have the necessary loyalty and commitment.
He sighed, and swung the chair over, clicking on the video monitor of the quiet, out-of-the-way room where the children lay in their drugged sleep. No movement.
He swung over to the opposite bank of computers and checked the tracer embedded in Zoe’s clavicle, as well as the ones in Zoe’s cell and Rosa Ranieri’s. Zoe’s signal was stationary, but the two cells were clustered together, on the move. He hit the key that brought the overlaid satellite photo onto the map, and zoomed in. Yes, it appeared to be the same vehicle. So it was true. They’d left Zoe unconscious in the storage unit, and one of the McClouds was driving his wounded brother to the emergency room. They had not determined which brother was wounded, but it hardly mattered. McClouds were interchangeable.
