He concentrated and listened carefully to the people around him. Ears that could hear a heartbeat from thirty yards away strained and he sorted the busy noises until he could distinguish the background sounds from what he wanted. Regular humans were damned near deaf in comparison to him, a concept that almost always left him amused. He sniffed. The sad lot stank of beer, cigarettes and failed deodorant.
He hit the redial button and listened. The phone made its purring sound in his ear, and on the other side of what the owners called “the Lounge,” where only people old enough to drink alcoholic beverages were supposed to sit, a phone rang at the same time. He looked in that direction and saw a man sitting at a small table. Even from across the room, he could almost smell the fear coming off the guy.
He studied the stranger as the phone rang in his ear. Sure enough, the man watched his phone ring four times and then as soon as the voice started asking him to leave a message, the man set the phone down on the table next to a drained beer mug.
Seven was big, especially for a fifteen-year-old, and while he could pass as an adult from size alone, no one was going to mistake him for being old enough to drink. That didn’t stop him from entering the Lounge. He had business to take care of, and he wasn’t planning on buying a beer anyway.
He took the long way around the collection of tables, deliberately checking out the women around him instead of eyeballing Clarkson. The man was sweating and looking all over the place.
A grizzled man with tattoos covering his beefy arms looked him over as he stared at the woman draped on the man’s arm.
“What are you staring at, kid?” The man’s voice was a challenge, primal and simple. It said, Don’t try to take my woman from me or I’ll beat you down.
Seven grinned and leaned in closer as he let himself slow down. The man looking at him blinked, shocked that his question was being answered with words instead of with fear. “I’m not looking at much. Just trash.” His eyes slid from the man to the woman with him. She was older, easily five to six years out of his normal range, but still attractive. She wore too much makeup and stank of perfume that was sweet enough to kill a diabetic. “And more trash.”
The response was what he expected. The man stood up fast, muscles tensed, and prepared to swing. The woman with him, realizing she’d been insulted, despite the alcohol blurring her reasoning skills, opened her mouth and started to stand up as well. Her man wanted to be chivalrous, and she wasn’t used to that.
Seven grinned, baring his teeth, and readied himself.
The man did as he expected and took a swing. He blocked the blow easily and drove his clenched fist into the man’s stomach hard enough to knock all the air from the fool’s lungs. As his opponent started to double up, he caught the man’s throat in his hand and lifted him back into a standing position.
There was no reason for the conflict except that he could use the distraction to keep Clarkson off guard. He didn’t want the man to know he was being stalked. Not yet. “Stop while you’re ahead, loser. Don’t make me break your stupid face.” Oh, the thrill! He liked the look of understanding on the man’s face. His fingers gripped the man’s trachea. One squeeze, a few extra ounces of pressure, really, and the man wouldn’t be able to breathe again without major surgery. He doubted anyone in the place knew how to save a loser with a ruined airway.
The man started fidgeting. He leaned in closer and whispered in his ear. “Sit down, or I’ll kill you here and now.” In the distance a ball struck pins with a resounding crash and a couple of kids made victory noises. He looked at the woman watching them both and his grin grew another notch wider. “Trust me, she isn’t worth dying over.”
The woman with him looked furious, but the man wised up and backed down. Seven dropped the man, nodded and began to move on.
And then the woman got dumber. She charged him from behind. He could hear her footsteps, the sound of several people taking in a shocked breath and her voice starting into a scream.
Before she could finish the five steps to reach him, he’d turned around and taken in the situation. She was holding a beer bottle in her hand and had it back behind her and ready to bash in his skull. Her arm was already in motion, but it seemed to take forever for her to get her arm around.
He had plenty of time to grab her wrist before the bottle could swing into his skull. She let out a startled squeak as his fingers closed over her arm and he flexed, pushing her backward.
“Sit down.” His eyes looked into hers and he saw it, the fear that grew as she studied his face. It was a lovely thing.
“I. You. What you said . . .” Her voice faded down as she spoke, no longer certain.
“Was rude of me. Get over it.” He let go of her arm. It paid to know how people’s minds worked. He’d been studying people ever since he first woke up.
Clarkson hadn’t moved. Seven opened his phone and hit the redial button again, watching his target.
Clarkson picked up the phone when it started ringing and checked the caller ID.
He reached out and caught Clarkson’s hand in his grip, squeezing the fingers hard enough to pin the hand around the cell.
“Hey, what the hell?” Clarkson’s voice was nervous, shaky.
He leaned down and looked at the man. His other hand held his phone up and he killed the attempted call. The cell in the man’s hand stopped ringing at the same time, and he grinned as he watched Clarkson realize exactly who he was dealing with.
“Daniel Clarkson.” His voice was a purr as he leaned in closer still. “Have I mentioned how much it pisses me off to be left hanging?”
“I didn’t know you were here.” The man licked his lips, and the worried expression on his face was enough to wrinkle his brow below the wide bald spot at the top of his head. He looked like an accountant, which was what he had been once upon a time.
“You would have if you answered the phone.”
“I could get in a lot of trouble if the wrong people found out about this.”
“I don’t care. That’s why I agreed to pay you fifty thousand dollars.”
“You can keep the money. I don’t need it that badly. I can’t take this chance.”
Seven kept his cool despite the rage that rushed through him. This was a matter that had to be handled the right way if he wished to avoid losing the information he needed. “Here’s the deal, Daniel. I give you the money in this bag, and you tell me what I need to know.” He squeezed harder on the captured fingers and saw Clarkson wince. “Or I beat the information out of you. Like I did with Marty Hanson. You remember Marty, don’t you? He was tough to convince. I had to break four fingers before he started talking to me.”
Clarkson’s eyes flew wide and he opened his mouth, ready to say something before he closed it again, the words apparently forgotten. Before the man could try to speak a second time, Seven leaned in closer, so close that he could smell the sweat and aftershave that tainted the man’s shirt.
“Think it over carefully. You have two minutes. If you try to scream or fight me, Daniel, I promise you I’ll make you wish you were never born. Do you believe me? Or do you want to test it?”
Daniel believed him. They left the bar together and walked across the street to a diner that looked just as seedy. Seven was calm; he waited until they’d both ordered food before he started the interrogation. Daniel Clarkson was fidgeting and looking all too ready to rabbit. Seven set a hand on the man’s wrist and watched him flinch.
“Why are you so nervous, Daniel?”
The sweating man barely dared to look at him. “Because I know who you are.”
“Really? Who am I?” He smiled, watching the nervous wreck in front of him.
“Subject Seven.”
The smile actually grew larger. “Now how did you know that?”
“I remember you. I saw you a few times.”
“I thought you just did paperwork, Daniel.” His smile faded. He’d never thought that the people providing him with information might have bee
n among those who tortured him. That changed the equation.
Daniel looked like a dog that’d been whipped too many times. Seven guessed that if he screamed boo too loudly, the man would likely bolt from the diner. He was granted a few seconds’ respite when the short, round waitress brought them their food. He held his answer until after she’d left. “All I do now is paperwork. That’s all I did then, too, but now and then I saw things.”
“When did you see me?” Seven took a bite of his burger. It was half rare and heavily salted and he loved it.
“I saw all of you. All ten. I mean, not all at once, but I saw all of you. I saw you when they found out what made you special.”
“What made me special, Daniel?” He kept his voice calm. He wanted answers, and he would have them, but not if he lost his cool.
Clarkson looked a little surprised by the question. “You, you were an Alpha.”
“Want to explain that to me?”
“Alphas, that’s like with a pack of wolves, okay? Alphas are the leaders.”
“Daniel, let’s pretend that I don’t know all the lingo, okay?” He set down his burger and put his hands on the table where Clarkson could see them. His voice was low, but he knew the man was hearing every word. “Let’s pretend that back in the day, no one told me much of anything. They just did what they wanted. Start at the beginning and tell me what an Alpha is and what makes it special.”
Daniel nodded and inhaled half his burger, chewing fast and hard while he tried to figure out exactly what to say to avoid getting himself murdered. When he’d finished his eating frenzy, he started talking. “Okay, so, the idea was always to make soldiers. And what do you need to have good soldiers? You need a leader. You need to have someone in charge who can make split-second decisions. That’s you. That’s an Alpha.”
Seven nodded. He didn’t care about the reasons. He just wanted to know the results.
“Listen. You, all of you, were failures. They thought they’d screwed it up again, okay? Nothing they did, none of the tests, showed any measure of noticeable change. None of you were performing up to expectations at first, so you were all going to be discarded. So, they were almost ready to scrap everything and start from scratch, but somebody got the idea to watch all of you together to see how you reacted to one another. Remember, you were all . . . part of the same batch. They put you all in a room where they could observe you by video camera, but then there was an accident. I think it involved Three if that matters to you.”
It didn’t. Not anymore. He’d long since dealt with the deaths of the others as best he could.
“Subject Three got loose and they sent a couple of guards after her. She was trying to get out and they had to, well, they had to shoot her. She didn’t survive. But she was hurt before she died. She suffered is what I’m saying.”
Seven closed his eyes for a second. Deep in the recesses of his thoughts he could remember the sudden screaming pain, the way his stomach had clenched and the way Three’s screams had echoed through his mind.
Daniel continued. “They watched the tapes, and they showed me the sequence. They saw how you reacted to Three’s escape and death, and they knew they’d succeeded.”
“Cut to the damn chase.” Seven’s voice was a rumble.
“Call it a psychic link. You don’t have any of the others around right now, but back at the labs you used to respond whenever anything happened to one of the others. You would scream when they were angered, and you communicated with them. We saw it. We studied it. They cataloged the whole thing. You’re the reason the program went on, Seven. You made them know they were on the right track.”
“How very nice for them.” His sneer was enough to make Clarkson flinch. “Now tell me about the rest of them.”
“The rest of them?”
“They kept ten out of the batch. There were more than that.”
“How do you know that? No one knows that but—”
“What do you think I was paying Hanson for? His company?” He took a breath to calm himself down. The anger was there again, reminding him that he hated Janus and everyone associated with the company. “Of course, he eventually clammed up and I had to use more than money to get him to talk. Be smarter than him, Daniel. Tell me everything I need to know and it doesn’t have to get as messy. See my point?”
Clarkson nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I get you. There were more. Most of them, most of them were eliminated.”
“But not all of them. You kept some, didn’t you?”
“What? No. What the hell would I want with a bunch of kids?” Clarkson shook his head. “I sold them. Me and Marty, we were in the same boat, see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it was wrong, okay? It’s one thing to create them, but to just, to just throw them away? Like they never even existed? Man, that shouldn’t even happen to dogs.”
“Happens every day. Ever hear of a puppy mill?”
For just a moment Clarkson looked offended. “Well, we didn’t want any part of that, and we were the ones who got stuck with the job of disposal. Marty because he was low man on the team and me because I was supposed to handle the paper trail and get rid of the evidence. No one wanted to know what happened to them. No one wanted to deal with the details, okay? So we decided to put them up for adoption.”
Seven nodded and munched on a few fries. “And if you could make a little money, that didn’t hurt your feelings any either, did it?”
Clarkson looked down, caught in his self-righteous lies. “Yeah, okay, so maybe we made money from the deal, but the kids got to live, didn’t they?”
“Where did they go?”
“I’ve got a list.”
“How many did you send out there? How many did you put out in the world?”
“From your batch?” He squinted in thought, but Seven suspected it was for show. Clarkson was the sort that already knew the answers, or at least thought he did. “Ten.”
Seven’s heart pounded hard in his chest. Ten! The possibilities were staggering. “And have any of them shown signs of changing?”
“I don’t think so. Look, it’s not that easy. You know that. A command has to be given.”
“A command?” Seven frowned. There was something back in his memories, something about a command, wasn’t there? So much had happened since then he had trouble remembering everything sometimes.
“Okay, an Alpha, like you? You can give them a command to wake. Another to sleep. But there’s also command words. Like the ones they used on you.” Clarkson frowned. “How did you get past that?”
Seven shook his head. He didn’t need to let the idiot know about the car wreck and how much that had changed his life. “Doesn’t matter. Tell me about the others.”
“Well, they were failures, of course. There’s no proof that they were anything special. You were all failures, the only reason even you made it out was because they thought there might be potential. You especially, I mean, but none of you were considered successes. Not until later.”
“I don’t care. Tell me about them. Tell me how to reach them.”
“They all went through the same agency. It was a setup, of course. I was the agency. I have the names of their parents and the names we gave the kids.” He shook his head. “That’s all I’ve got. I don’t know if any of them are like you or if they’re just normal kids. I didn’t check in on them. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. You just have to give me the list.”
Clarkson pulled out three sheets of paper stapled together and folded over on themselves. His hands shook a bit as he handed them over. Seven’s hand was steady as he took them and then looked at the contents.
After several moments of studying the short list, he slid his bag across the floor under the table between them. “We’re done.”
“We are?” Clarkson sounded surprised.
“We had a deal. You kept your end. Barely, but you kept it.”
“You can see why I was
nervous . . . .” Again the man tried to apologize and Seven couldn’t have cared less.
“You want to count that?” Seven asked, pointing to the duffel bag.
“No, I’ll trust you.” Seven almost laughed at that. Instead he nodded and finished off his burger while Clarkson made the money disappear.
“It’s really you?” Clarkson’s voice was subdued. “What . . . um . . . what are you going to do with them?” His eyes flickered down to the list in Seven’s hand.
“It’s really me. Be smart and keep that to yourself.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
Seven stared hard at Clarkson until the man looked away.
“I don’t know yet. I’m still thinking. It’s a lot to absorb.” Seven stood up and stretched and looked around the room. There were a few diners, but none of them paid him any attention. “You get to buy me dinner. I gave you all my cash.”
Clarkson nodded and stayed where he was. Seven left the diner and moved into the darkness. The three pages of names and addresses had just cost him fifty thousand dollars that he’d worked hard to earn—or steal.
The information was worth every penny.
Seven followed Clarkson home. It was easier than he would have expected. The man drove his car and Seven ran, following along the side roads that the informant had taken to get to the bowling alley. Not surprisingly, Clarkson hadn’t met him very far from his home. He was the sort that needed the comfort and security of his own place. Seven had never had that in his earlier life and had no need of it now.
Now he knew where Clarkson lived, and that was all he’d needed to know.
He walked back to his hotel room and settled in for a few moments before he pulled out the list Clarkson had given him and looked at the names. One family name, one first name and a gender. It could all be lies, and then he’d be screwed. He’d wanted to kill Clarkson, but first he had to make sure that the information he gave him was good. Clarkson had recognized him as Subject Seven, and that could be dangerous.
Subject Seven Page 4
