I Am the Mission: The Unknown Assassin Book 2

by Allen Zadoff

  I watch Father’s face. It is impassive, unreadable.

  Something contracts in my chest, my breathing suddenly shallow.

  I give the feeling a name:

  Fear.

  But it fades almost as quickly as it arises.

  That’s how it’s always been. Things that would make other people afraid don’t seem to affect me.

  I look at Father coming toward me.

  Instead of being afraid, I recalculate the angles and odds. Father’s presence inside the circle has reduced the firing solutions by as much as 20 percent. The soldiers cannot shoot through him, so he has unwittingly tilted the odds. Not yet in my favor. But better.

  He comes closer until he is no more than eight steps away. Far enough to be out of range of a physical strike, close enough to be heard.

  “They do not know your name, so I will not use it,” he says quietly.

  I look at the soldiers.

  “These are not our people,” he says. “They think they’re backing a Homeland Security operation.”

  The Program is not a part of Homeland Security. We are something else. Something that does not officially exist.

  “Why do you need them?” I say.

  “A precaution,” he says. “We didn’t know your status.”

  I scan the area, judging the size of the operation.

  “It’s a lot of people for a status check,” I say.

  I note the tension in Father’s jaw. There’s something he’s not telling me.

  “What do the soldiers know?” I say.

  “They know you are deadly. They know you are potentially an enemy to the United States.”

  An enemy?

  But I am the opposite of an enemy. I am a soldier for The Program, which means I am a patriot defending the United States. This is the basis of my training, the entire reason for The Program’s existence.

  Why would they think differently?

  Father does not provide me with any clues. He crosses his arms and examines me from a distance.

  “It’s been a long time since I put eyes on you,” he says.

  “True,” I say.

  I haven’t seen Father since graduation day. I had fought dozens of people by that time, and I had an inch-deep knife wound in my chest. The knife belonged to Mike, my so-called brother in The Program. My brother who was ordered to kill me as a test.

  I survived my first fight with Mike. So I completed my training.

  “Graduation day,” Father says. “That was the last time.”

  He remembers, the same as I do.

  “That was two years ago,” I say.

  “Two years and a lifetime. You’ve done so many amazing things since then, grown in ways we could only dream of. Mother is very proud of you.”

  Mother. The woman who controls The Program.

  “So am I,” Father says. “Which is why I’m surprised to find us in this predicament.”

  He gestures to the soldiers around us.

  Predicament. Now I understand why this is happening. At least a little of it.

  “I’ve been off the grid for seventy-two hours,” I say.

  “Seventy-two hours or seventy-two minutes. You don’t go off the grid. It’s not a part of what you do.”

  My protocol is to complete the assignment, then wait for the next one. This is the perpetual cycle of my life. Work and wait. Work again.

  Simple.

  “Why would you come to a place like this?” Father says, looking around disdainfully.

  “I needed to get away,” I say.

  “Away from what?”

  My memories. But I don’t tell him that.

  “Just away,” I say.

  “You are a soldier,” Father says, as if he understands the problem without my telling him. “You do work that has to be done. Sometimes it can be unpleasant, but that’s not news to you.”

  “No.”

  “Then what happened?”

  The truth is that I don’t know. The old me would never be here at a camp, disobeying orders, even in the smallest way. The old me did not go off the grid. It wouldn’t even enter my consciousness.

  That was before my last mission.

  Before the girl.

  “Are you going to hurt an entire summer camp to punish me?” I say.

  “Hurt? No. They’re sleeping. About six hours, and they’ll wake up with terrible headaches and diarrhea. They won’t remember anything. Worst-case scenario, they’ll examine last night’s dinner in the trash. It will be filled with salmonella. We’ll lace it before we go.”

  “That will explain their symptoms.”

  “An entire camp feels bad the morning after Fish Thursday. Life is cruel like that.”

  But maybe I am the cruel one. I came here, after all. And what did I think would happen to these boys? To Peter?

  Father takes another step toward me. His voice softens.

  “I know why you did what you did,” he says.

  The statement surprises me. I watch Father more closely.

  “The thing with the mayor’s daughter shook you up,” he says.

  His voice is uncharacteristically sympathetic, like he’s talking to someone he cares about and wants to help. I feel my body relax the tiniest bit.

  “You understand?” I say.

  “You needed some time,” he says. “You could have asked us for it. You could have made the call.”

  My special iPhone. Destroyed at the end of each mission. That’s standard operating procedure. But I didn’t pick up another one. That’s where things got strange.

  “It was wrong of me to cut off communication,” I say.

  I look at the two dozen soldiers around me standing at full readiness, fingers inside trigger guards.

  These men are prepared to fire.

  That’s the first lesson of weapons training. Do not touch the trigger unless you’re prepared to fire.

  Father said the soldiers were here as a precaution, but they have not lowered their weapons. Which means Father does not trust me.

  It’s true that I went off the grid, but this reaction seems out of proportion. Father could have sent a car to pick me up or passed a message through channels. He could have made up some excuse and knocked on the door of my cabin. There are a thousand ways he could contact me if he wanted to do so, none of which involve weapons.

  So what is going on here?

  I calculate the angles, the danger to myself and Father, the bullet trajectories.

  I look for an escape.

  I might make it to one rifle, use it to take out the one opposite. But these men are not stupid and they have staggered their positions so as not to be directly in each other’s lines of fire. Still, I might achieve something. I might take out one or two. Maybe even four. But two dozen men?

  Perhaps if I got to Father first, the soldiers would not shoot—

  No. Everyone is expendable. That’s what I’ve been taught.

  Father. Mother. All of these soldiers.

  And, of course, me.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Father says.

  “Do you?”

  “Naturally. I taught you how to think.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “You’re wondering the purpose of these soldiers and why they have not lowered their weapons. And you’re calculating angles.”

  “How do you know?” I say.

  “That’s what I would do in your situation.”

  “Have you ever been in my situation?”

  He doesn’t answer, only smiles at me. A sly smile.

  That’s when I see it. The way out.

  I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I don’t need to use Father as a deterrent.

  I need him as a shield.

  Get to the first soldier, use his rifle to take out the two across, then grab Father and use his body to protect me against the inevitable fusillade of bullets.

  If I sacrifice Father, I will live. I play it out in my head, and I know my chance
s are good.

  My facial expression does not change, not in any way a normal person could detect, but Father is not a normal person.

  He grins. “You see it, don’t you?” he says.

  “I do.”

  The calculus of bodies and angles in space. A human puzzle devised by Father as a test.

  It’s always a test—that’s what I’ve come to understand.

  “It’s you or me,” he says. “But not both.”

  I nod.

  “You’ve been trained to protect The Program and survive at all costs,” Father says. “That’s your mission imperative.”

  I look from Father to the soldiers. I take a long, slow breath, preparing myself to leap at him.

  “Would you sacrifice me to complete your mission?” Father says.

  “I’d have to determine which of us was more valuable to The Program.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’d do what I had to do,” I say. “I’m loyal to the mission. Not to you.”

  That’s all it takes.

  Father raises his hand, signaling to the soldiers. I brace myself for the pain of multiple bullets.

  It doesn’t come.

  Instead fingers are removed from triggers. Guns are lowered. The circle disperses.

  “I came to check on you,” Father says. “But I see now that you are well.”

  I was right. It was a test.

  And I passed.

  The soldiers walk back into the forest. Father comes toward me now, a wide smile on his face.

  “Well done,” he says.

  “You needed all these troops to make your point?” I say.

  His face turns serious.

  “There are some things you don’t know.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  He looks around the camp. “Not here,” he says. He turns toward the forest. “I think we need some father-son time.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “A driving lesson.”

  “I already know how to drive.”

  “A different kind of driving lesson,” he says, and he heads into the woods.

  I have no choice but to follow him into the darkness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE WALK FOR ABOUT A CLICK BEFORE WE COME TO A CLEARING.

  Military trucks are parked in a convoy. This is the staging area for the operation in the camp.

  “Are you ready for your lesson?” Father says.

  He reaches into his pocket, removes a key chain, and tosses it to me.

  “I know how to drive a Humvee,” I say.

  “I don’t mean the trucks,” he says with a smile.

  He points to a clearing beyond the staging area. I note the blades of a helicopter rotor camouflaged in the forest.

  “I’m not rated for a helicopter,” I say.

  “Not yet,” he says.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DAWN IS BREAKING OVER THE VALLEY BELOW US.

  I’m piloting the helicopter with Father next to me, watching the ground whip by beneath. Apple orchards, farmland, stretches of forest. The beauty of the Northeast spreads out for miles in all directions.

  “How do you like her?” Father says over the roar of the wind.

  “She’s a beautiful machine,” I say.

  Helicopters are complex to fly, even more so than small planes. I did seven and a half hours in a trainer as part of my initial studies in The Program, but I didn’t get my rating. It was deemed unnecessary. I received enough training to understand the flight dynamics along with the basic controls and avionics should I need to talk about helicopters in conversation, or more likely, if I intercepted information about them and had to interpret what I was seeing.

  But now I’m actually flying a military helicopter under Father’s tutelage.

  “Pull the cyclic toward you,” Father says. “Gently. That’s it. Now give it some throttle.”

  I do as he says, and the craft adjusts, the angle steepening as we aggressively power forward.

  “This is great!” I say.

  “She’s a beast,” Father says. “This is a domestic variation, but you should see the real thing in combat.”

  “I’d like to,” I say. A blur of speed, a flash of dark blue as a lake goes by, all of it accompanied by the whoop of rotors churning above us.

  I can’t help but smile. How many sixteen-year-olds get to fly a helicopter?

  A small mountain looms several miles ahead, high enough that we won’t clear it. I bank east, anticipating it with plenty of time to spare.

  “You didn’t think you could handle her, did you?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “But you can,” Father says. “You can do anything. You just have to remember your lessons.”

  Father is being kind, guiding and teaching me. This is how it was when I came to The Program. I lived and trained for two years at the house. I passed from normal life into this new life, a life most people only experience for a few hours when they’re watching a movie.

  “I brought you up here so we could talk man-to-man,” Father says.

  I glance over to find him looking at me. I don’t like what I see. I grip the cyclic too hard, and the helicopter tilts left.

  Father notes it with an eyebrow raise.

  He reaches across my seat, puts his hand on top of mine, and adjusts the flight path. His touch surprises me, the sudden intimacy of his hand on mine in this small space. But his adjustment does the trick. The helicopter stabilizes.

  “Are you off the reservation?” Father says, his voice serious.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You went away.”

  “I took a break,” I say.

  The mountain has somehow returned to the center of my windscreen in the last adjustment. I bleed off power and angle the rotors to take us out of its path. But before I can complete the maneuver, Father reaches over and puts his hand on top of mine, clamping down and preventing a change of direction.

  That puts the mountain in front of us on a collision course.

  “I said a man-to-man talk. That means we tell each other the truth,” Father says.

  The test with the soldiers was not enough. I see now that there is another test.

  There’s always another test.

  Do not fight power with power. Flow and redirect it.

  That’s a principle of many martial arts, and it’s a lesson I have been taught over and over again by Mother.

  So I don’t argue with Father. Instead I tell him the truth. As much as I can.

  “I went away because I needed time to think,” I say.

  “We give you time between assignments.”

  “I needed my own time. In my own way.”

  Father puts more pressure on my hand. The craft angles forward and down, the mountain threatening before us.

  “We’re in danger,” I say.

  “Exactly. It’s a crisis of confidence,” Father says. “You in us. And us in you.”

  The mountainside comes into focus. What looked like a beautiful mosaic of green and brown from a distance becomes jagged rock peaks and sharply angled trees.

  “After the mission I was waiting in the hotel as instructed,” I say. “But the thinking started.”

  I hesitate, not knowing how much I can risk telling him.

  “The thinking?” Father says. “What is that?”

  I glance through the windscreen. Forty-five seconds until impact.

  “Sometimes it gets difficult for me between missions,” I say. “I start thinking about the past and the things I’ve done. I came here because I needed to clear my head.”

  “You weren’t hiding from us?”

  “No.”

  Collision sirens blare. Lights flash red across my instrument panel.

  “What can we do to help you?” Father says.

  “Get me back to work,” I say.

  Father watches me carefully, his hand never moving from the cyclic.

  Fifte
en seconds before impact. My eyes scan the mountainside ahead. The density of the trees, the lack of a landing zone.

  “I need to know where your loyalties lie,” Father says. “Are you still with us?”

  Why is he asking me these questions?

  “Who else would I be loyal to?” I say.

  I note the square set of Father’s jaw as he searches my face for the truth.

  Then, suddenly, he removes his hand from the controls.

  But it’s too late.

  “Prepare for impact,” I say, bracing my back against the seat to protect my spine.

  “Listen and do exactly what I tell you,” Father says. “Pull the cyclic aft, reduce the collective, and give it hard right pedal.”

  I do it. I don’t ask questions.

  G-force pushes me forward as the helicopter rapidly decelerates.

  “Now gain altitude. Faster.”

  We rise and bank tightly, wind whipping by outside, the mountain coming up fast—

  And then, as if by magic, the aircraft shudders and lightens, the angle increasing as we clear the mountain by no more than ten feet. I wait for the crunch of metal on stone, for the skids to catch on a tree branch and yank us down, for any one of a dozen things that could propel us into a fiery impact.

  But they don’t come.

  We are clear. We are safe.

  “What’s happening here?” I say. “The raid at camp, this flight, all your questions—this is not about me going away for a few days.”

  Father pauses, taking time to choose his words carefully.

  “Someone went missing,” he says.

  “Someone?”

  “A soldier. Like you.”

  “Was it Mike?”

  Mike is the only Program soldier I know other than me.

  “It’s not Mike,” Father says. “Something like this would never happen to Mike.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Someone else.”

  There are others.

  That’s what Father’s telling me without saying it directly. There are other operatives in The Program besides Mike and me. I thought there might be, but I’ve never known for sure.

  “So you lost a man?” I say.

  “A boy,” Father says. “He was just a boy. He disappeared a few weeks ago, then you cut off communication. You can understand why we needed to be cautious in finding you.”

  This explains Father’s behavior, his testing me.