“Home?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her. “I’m back.” This wasn’t working. “With you.” Why wasn’t this working?
Gina just stared at him, confused, clearly unsure of the situation.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. He could feel something crumbling away inside him.
“Ray, c’mon. I’ve moved on.”
His eight-story face plant off the hotel in Cape Town had hurt less.
He swallowed hard and tried to keep his composure. After everything he had done to get here he could feel the tears welling up behind his eyes.
“What do you mean you’ve moved on? Why? We love each other.” He was almost pleading for her to understand.
“We did, but we settled this,” she told him. It didn’t make sense. She was talking to him like they’d broken up, not like she thought he’d been killed. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“But I came home,” he told her. He very much wasn’t okay. “I always come home.”
She regarded him carefully for a moment or two.
“I didn’t want you to come home. I wanted you to stay home,” she told him. It had been the old discussion. No, call it what it was, he thought, the old argument. He wanted to tell her that that was what he wanted as well. It was all he wanted but he could hear the finality in her voice.
“But... Harting told me you were dead and I—”
“What are you talking about? Who told you I was dead?”
He could hear it in her voice. She still cared. But love...?
Bloodshot slumped against the doorway.
“There was this doctor... He put machines in my blood. Messed with my memories. You don’t know how hard it was for me to get back to you. How hard I fought to find you again.” Even as he said the words he knew he must sound like a crazy person. The craziest of ex-boyfriends turning up on her doorstep with the craziest of stories. It was written all over her face. Concern, and just a hint of fear, something he had never hoped to be the cause of in her life. No, you just didn’t want to see the fear. She was afraid every time you left. Every time you came back with a new scar. He knew that there was only so long you could live in fear.
“Mommy?” A child’s voice.
Bloodshot squeezed his eyes shut. Because of course she has children, just like we had always wanted. Because she lives in an expensive part of London with her new life, her new family.
A beautiful girl, her blond hair, her eyes just like Gina’s, was walking cautiously toward them, drawn by concern for her mother. Bloodshot just looked down at her. He felt like closing down. He had nobody but Gina.
“Daisy, go inside honey,” Gina told her daughter.
Bloodshot watched the child walk away, looking over her shoulder suspiciously at the man upsetting her mum.
“Gina, when was the last time you saw me?” he managed.
“I don’t know. It was back in San Diego,” she told him.
“When was it, Gina?” he asked, sounding much calmer than he felt as his world crumbled away.
“Five years ago.”
He stared at her. Eyes wide. Unable to process what he’d just been told. He rocked back on his feet.
“Ray?” Gina asked. It was clear that she was worried about him but it was also clear that she did not want to get any closer, did not want to touch him.
“Five years...”
“Mommy, c’mon...” he heard Daisy say. Now he was frightening the child.
“Just a second, honey,” Gina called before turning back to him. “Ray, are you okay?”
Ray stepped back, and almost collapsed onto the cobbled pavement. His anchor gone. The world that he thought he’d been returning to was gone as well, if it had ever existed.
“Is there someone I can call?” Gina asked.
He knew she didn’t mean it as such but the question was a sick joke. Call whom? Chainsaw? Harting?
“Mom, please... Mom. Mommy,” the frightened child growing more insistent. Gina looked between him and her child inside the house, torn.
“Daisy, please. Go inside and play with your brother,” she said turning to face her daughter. He couldn’t take any more.
* * *
Gina turned back to the street but Ray was gone.
She heard her five-year-old son take Daisy by the hand and lead his sister back into the lounge.
CHAPTER 36
The NSA, CIA and FBI all had files on the Twins. She had studied them on the flight from KL to Guarani International Airport. Manu Gonzalez and Gan Tae-Yung were not, of course, twins. They had earned the nickname because despite one of them being an American-raised Paraguayan, and the other a North Korean, they looked surprisingly similar. Growing up in Florida, Gonzalez had been a hotshot coder who had gotten tired of working for other people and had decided to move back to his homeland. Tae-Yung was suspected of being a Room 39 – North Korea’s government-sponsored organized crime operation – defector. Both were ruthless, well protected, and the biggest fish in the world of black-market tech with Baris out of the picture. They had always stayed clear of RST it seemed, which was probably the reason that a paranoid Harting hadn’t sent Bloodshot after them yet.
“Just me,” KT said to herself as the plane flew over the banks of mist created by the magnificent Iguazú Falls, and banked toward the sun and into the haze of the city. Surrounded by farmland and jungle the urban sprawl spread out beneath, with the Paraná and Acaray Rivers winding through it like blue ribbons gleaming in the sunlight.
* * *
The hotel was a massive ochre-colored baroque edifice dating from the nineteenth century, covered in some kind of creeping greenery that KT did not recognize. It sat on a cliff overlooking the Paraná River. KT made it through the grand reception area purely by looking as though she belonged and knew where she was going. RST had reached out to a local CIA asset on KT’s behalf and he had told them that the Twins could be found holding court in one of the conference rooms on the fifth floor of the hotel.
She spent some time scoping out the area, getting used to the layout of the building before heading upstairs.
* * *
It was the Twins’ own security who finally stopped her. Heavyset men in bulging suits with a certain air of entitlement that came from having the means and the wherewithal to commit acts of violence.
She was walking down a carpeted corridor toward the double doors to the river-facing conference room the Twins were using for their meetings when one of their guards held a hand up in her face.
“Sorry, miss, this corridor’s closed, you’ll have to go another way,” he told her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being polite because he had been told he had to be. After all, it was a nice hotel.
“I’m here to see the Twins,” she told the man. She failed to keep a look of extreme distaste off her face as he looked her up and down.
“What you got for them, girl?” he asked.
“That’s their business,” she told him, letting her irritation bleed into her voice.
He smiled as though he was enjoying himself.
“What you got for me?” he sleazed. It was nice of him to volunteer to be the object of the lesson.
“Just this,” she said and extended one of her batons with a flick of her wrist. The man hesitated, distracted by the baton, which was what she wanted. She kneed him in the throat. He staggered back, already choking. KT extended her already raised leg, the sole of her boot catching him on the bridge of his nose. He went down like a felled tree. The other three guards had their sidearms out, leveled at her. She raised her hands.
“I’m not here to mess around. Tell the Twins that Harting sent me.” It pissed her off even having to say his name.
The guards glanced at each other. Not quite sure what to do. The one whose windpipe she had damaged was lying on the floor, still. KT was pretty sure that she hadn’t killed him.
* * *
Less than a minute later she stood in front of the Twins.
It was true, they did look very similar. Close in age, both had slicked-back black hair, the cheekbones and the structure of their faces were nearly identical, the same dark eyes. Of course them dressing in matching blazers and cravats heightened the effect, but other than one being Latin American and the other being Asian she could definitely see where the nickname had stemmed from. They were both seated behind a long table with a spotless white tablecloth spread over it. Behind them a balcony overlooked the river. There were more guards milling around, some of them helping themselves to a breakfast buffet on trestle tables pushed up against the wall. Tae-Yung took a sip from his cup of coffee. Gonzalez stood up, moving to the open doorway of the French windows, the gauzy curtains blowing around him, hands behind his back. KT could smell the river.
“We don’t like dealing with Harting,” Tae-Yung said. She was a little surprised at the lack of niceties, or even threats. They were all business, it seemed, or when it came to Harting, an absence of business.
Gonzalez turned to face her.
“Because he’s a psychopathic control freak who sooner or later turns on everyone he works with,” he added.
Tae-Yung nodded in agreement with his “twin” as he dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin.
“You’re not dealing with him, you’re dealing with me,” KT told them.
They both sighed. She wondered if they’d had to work at synchronizing mannerisms. It was a little eerie.
“We are very busy,” Tae-Yung started. “And you have interrupted us.”
“Perhaps if you were to get straight to the point,” Gonzalez suggested.
“Wigans,” KT told them. It was as to-the-point as she could manage.
Neither of them gave anything away in their expression.
“We won’t insult your intelligence—” Tae-Yung started.
“—by lying to you, but we have our reputation to consider,” Gonzalez continued.
“If we were to give Wigans up to Harting—” This from Tae-Yung.
“To me,” KT told them.
Tae-Yung looked pained at the interruption.
“Then we would no longer be trusted,” Gonzalez added.
“And people would cease to do business with us,” Tae-Yung finished.
“You understand how Harting deals with disappointments?” KT asked. She hated sounding like Harting’s mouthpiece.
“Oh no, Miss Tor,” Gonzalez started, pacing in front of the French windows now.
“And you were doing so well,” Tae-Yung added.
“Harting’s tailored revenge scenario?” Gonzalez asked.
“His ghost?” Then Tae-Yung.
“No,” they both said simultaneously. The double act really was discomforting.
“Do not threaten us,” Gonzalez told her.
Breakfasts had been put down and the guards in the room were now very much paying attention to her. A bulky-looking submachine gun had appeared in the hands of one of them.
KT tensed, watching Gonzalez very carefully.
“How much do you want?” she asked.
They shook their heads in unison.
“We have a lot of money,” Tae-Yung told her.
“There are other things of value to us,” Gonzalez added.
“Your breathing apparatus for example,” Tae-Yung finished.
This is exactly the sort of thing that will result in a visit from Bloodshot, KT thought. It didn’t matter, however, Gonzalez had finally moved to where she wanted him.
KT started to run. The guards went for their weapons. The one with the SMG brought it to bear. KT vaulted the table. The SMG started firing. Tae-Yung dived away from the table as bullets chewed into the wood. The guards drew their sidearms. KT hit a very surprised Gonzalez and carried him over the balcony in a hail of gunfire.
They fell four stories into the pool on the veranda sticking out from the cliff side. They went in at the deep end, which was why KT’d had to wait until Gonzalez was standing in just the right place. The momentum from the fall still carried them to the bottom of the pool. They bounced off the tiles. KT let go of Gonzalez; she could already see bullets hitting the pool, making eddies in the water. KT understood the ballistic science of high-velocity objects impacting a medium seven hundred and eighty times denser than air. Bullets were literally drifting to the bottom now.
Gonzalez was thrashing through the water toward the edge of the pool. She followed him, like a shark.
“Why are you shooting?” Gonzalez was screaming up at the balcony when KT broke the surface next to him. She could hear shouting from above them. It sounded like Korean, but then changed swiftly to Spanish.
“Where’s Wigans?” she demanded. “Are you crazy?” he screamed at her, considerably less composed without his “twin” and after the four-story swan dive. “My men and their guns haven’t just evaporated!”
KT grabbed him and kicked away from the edge, diving down to hold onto a grate at the bottom of the pool. Gonzalez thrashed around but she had a tight hold of him. He was between her and the surface of the pool. Depending on the degree of panicking he was doing, he would also be aware of the bullets hitting the water. It seemed that Tae-Yung hadn’t completely managed to get his trigger-happy men under control. She wondered if Gonzales knew as much as she did about the ballistic property of bullets in water. If not, then she imagined that even the slackening rain of bullets would look pretty frightening.
As she felt his resistance weaken she let him go. He thrashed through the water again. When she caught up with him at the edge of the pool he was a coughing, spluttering mess, snot running down his face.
“Wigans!” she demanded. She checked her surroundings. The few people around the pool who hadn’t fled had taken cover when the gunfire had started. Quite reasonably, they seemed to have no interest in interfering. The gunfire had stopped now, however. Which was good in one way but bad in another because...
“You know they’re on their way down here, right?” Gonzalez asked.
“Think they can get here before you drown?” she asked and grabbed him again.
“Look, I don’t know. Best way to keep a secret, we just provided him with the resources he needed to hide, security... that kind of thing. We don’t even have a way of contacting him!”
“That’s no use to me,” she told him and pushed him under the water, holding him there.
“Wait!” he managed in the brief moment she let him up. “I know where he’ll be!”
“Stop stalling! Tell me now, or you die with your lungs full of pool water and I take my chances with your brother.”
He told her. He had only just finished when the guards burst out of the hotel and into the pool area. KT pushed herself out of the pool and onto her feet, sprinting for the edge of the cliff-side veranda. She heard the gunfire, bullets zipping past her. Heard the screams of the terrified hotel guests. She felt a hammer blow to the meat of her right thigh but she didn’t go down. Then she was in a dive considerably more graceful than the one from the conference room balcony. The rock of the cliff side flashed past as the Paraná River rushed up to meet her.
Then there were more bullets drifting down through the water again. Her wound wasn’t bad but she didn’t like all the blood she was seeing drifting out of her. She tried to remember what sort of predators that could attract in a South American river. Crocodiles, or was it caimans? Piranhas? Anacondas? Wasn’t there a small spiky fish that swam up your urethra?
CHAPTER 37
Bloodshot staggered away from Gina’s house, her perfect family, her perfect reality devoid of his presence.
* * *
The ’64 Mustang convertible parked on the airbase’s hot asphalt. Gina, in a haze of heat, leaning against the car, looking like a sixties It girl pinup, effortlessly beautiful.
* * *
He felt like an invader, a foreign body, a corrupting cell. He existed in a world of violence and insanity. Hers was a world of domesticity and calm, the quiet and peaceful life that real adult
humans were supposed to live.
* * *
The sun burned gold where the sky met the Pacific as the Mustang raced along the near-empty coastal road. The water was the color of liquid metal as it lapped against the cliffs below but Garrison didn’t care about that. He was watching his wife as she put the aging muscle car through its paces, working the stick like a pro, hair blowing in the warm wind.
* * *
He felt sick, feverish, his augmented body covered in flop sweat. A voice in the back of his head was screaming at him: What do you have now? What do you have?
Nothing.
* * *
Sweat beaded Garrison’s skin in the gray light as he lay with Gina among the rumpled sheets. He was on the edge of sleep having recovered his breath, the post-coital glow fading to warm contentment. He couldn’t think of a single place he’d rather be than lying by his wife’s side in the hotel room.
* * *
The world spun around him. This trendy European neighborhood full of cafe/bars and people sporting man-buns that he found himself in was so different from his experiences of life that it might as well have been a simulation, another head-trip.
His life was a lie.
* * *
Gina tied to the wheelchair in the slaughterhouse. Terrified, but still telling Garrison with her eyes that she loved him even as Baris put the bolt pistol to her head.
* * *
He wasn’t a real person. He was a simulation invented by Harting, constructed from the fragments of Ray Garrison.
* * *
The stainless steel of the bolt gun against Gina’s soft skin. Martin Axe leering at him, the pleasure on his face.
* * *
He was just an experimental weapon platform. A gun with the implanted memory of a dead wife as the trigger.
* * *
Now a nameless older Chinese man held the bolt gun to his wife’s head.
* * *
His ex-wife. Gina did not love him anymore. He had kept her waiting too long for too little.
Who even was Ray Garrison?
* * *
The hydraulic snap of the bolt gun. The crunch of steel meeting skull. The spray of blood.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 16
