Hunter (Decorah Security Series, Book #20): A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel

by Rebecca York

He turned his face away from her and spoke rapidly. “That night when the storm came and we talked, you asked if I remembered my mother or my father. I said I didn’t. That was a true statement. But I didn’t want to tell you I remembered waking up in the lab. Lying on a table, cold and naked and confused.”

  She sucked in a strangled breath. Her knees threatened to give way, and she locked them to keep standing. “Hunter—” she tried to speak, even when she didn’t know what to say. But the memory of that nightmare place was too vivid. She had seen things that could drive a sane person to madness.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then focused on her face. “The time with you was good,” he whispered. “Like nothing else in my life—before or after. You were my friend—and more. You didn’t laugh at me when I made a mistake—like when I thought the flowers might be part of supper. I will remember that.” She saw his hands clench and unclench. “I will remember all of the things that happened between us. The alligator toy. The steak. The sound of you singing.” His voice hitched. “Holding you. It was all good. But I understand that it will no longer have anything to do with me.” His arm lifted toward her, then fell back to his side. “For a little while, with you, I had the things you said people need.” He stopped, then went on quickly. “But at least now it will be easier to go on my mission.”

  “No,” she whispered, unsure of what she meant. Yet after the shock of Swinton’s lab, it was impossible for her to respond in any kind of normal fashion. She had been stunned past her capacity to function, and she truly didn’t know what she felt.

  “I can’t—” she wheezed.

  “I know,” he answered. “It’s all right. I understand. I’ve been waiting for you to change.” Shoulders slumped, he turned toward the house. In moments, he had disappeared.

  On legs that barely supported her weight, she tottered forward and gripped the edge of the window, somehow finding the strength to pull herself inside.

  The ten feet to the bed might have been ten miles, but she made it across the vast distance and collapsed. As soon as her legs no longer had to carry her weight, her shoulders began to shake uncontrollably. The shaking turned to sobs, and she pressed her face into the pillow to muffle the sound.

  ###

  He got up at the usual time. Showered. Shaved. Dressed. Neatly made his bed the way the orderly had taught him. Outside Kathryn’s door he stopped and imagined he could hear her breathing. She had been crying last night. He had heard her. Now she was sleeping. He was glad, because he didn’t want to see her now—see the look of fear and disgust in her eyes. He wanted to remember the relief and joy on her face when he came back from the hospital, but the scene kept slipping out of his mind.

  Quietly he walked down the hall to the kitchen. He fixed a pod of coffee and drank it without milk or sugar as he looked at the box of doughnuts on the counter. He could eat more of them. As many as he wanted. Instead, he picked up the box and pitched it into the trash, then wiped his hands against the sides of his jeans.

  Moisture blurred his vision. Like when Beckton had slapped him. But this pain was different. Not physical. Something worse.

  He had thought he could deaden himself, the way he had been dead before Kathryn. But banishing the anguish churning inside him was impossible. He had told himself he didn’t care what she thought of him. Just the way he didn’t care what Swinton thought, or Beckton, or McCourt, or any of the rest of them. With them it was true. With Kathryn, it was a lie.

  Quietly he walked back to his room and began to pack the clothes he had brought from his quarters. He had never asked Beckton or anyone else to do him a favor. He would ask for something now.

  In the living room, he hesitated in front of the bookshelves. The green alligator was where he had left it. Before he could stop himself, he snatched it up and stuffed it under the clothing he had packed.

  When the security men came to pick him up fifteen minutes later, they eyed the duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” the senior one asked.

  “I am going back to my quarters.”

  “You don’t make those kinds of decisions.”

  “Living here is interfering with my work. I will tell that to Major Beckton.”

  “Oh yeah?” The man laughed. “I guess Dr. Kelley would interfere with my concentration, too.”

  Hunter kept his expression blank. He would not talk about the things he and Kathryn had done. That was private. A memory he would lock away in his heart for the rest of his short life.

  He climbed into the car and set the duffel bag on the seat beside him. The driver started the engine, and they rode to the training center. But leaving the house didn’t help. The pain rode with him.

  It wouldn’t go away. He had invested too much of himself in the feeling of being connected with her. In the talks, the sharing, the touching and kissing, and all the little things.

  The song she had been singing while she worked in the kitchen began to run through his mind. He liked the song. It had words that talked about life.

  He had thought that he and Kathryn might have a little more time together before he fulfilled his purpose.

  He had been wrong. But he knew his duty, and he hoped now that they would deploy him soon. He could go off and assassinate General Kassan, the dictator of Gravan. Kassan was evil. Colonel Emerson had explained many times that the man was destroying the lives of everyone in his country. Killing him would be a good deed. But nobody could get close enough to kill the general and escape. So, the clone Swinton had made was going off on what Colonel Emerson called a kamikaze mission. Like the Japanese airplane pilots in World War II who dive-bombed American ships and sacrificed their lives for the glory of the empire. He would be killed, too. But that was good, because then the pain would stop.

  ###

  Kathryn fought against waking, fought against the need to face reality. But once awareness returned, it was impossible to slip back into the blessed oblivion of sleep. The images from the night before came back like demons sent to carry her off to hell.

  With a small sound of protest, she tried to push them out of her mind. But the pictures were too vivid. She covered her eyes with her hands, but it didn’t help. Over the course of her career, she had seen shocking things, like the miserable conditions that could prevail in a state mental hospital or refugee detention camps. But nothing had prepared her for the laboratory in Building 22. For as long as she lived, she would never forget that place.

  Who had given the approval for the research here, she wondered? Did the President know Dr. Swinton was growing men in tanks? Or had permission come from some madman in the Pentagon?

  She shuddered, then thought of Hunter. Oh God, Hunter. He’d been worried when he’d heard the siren and come out to meet her. Then he’d seen the horror on her face, and she’d been too upset to talk to him coherently.

  Much of the scene between them was now a blur. But she could remember some of the things. His words. Her totally inadequate responses.

  Leaping out of bed, she rushed to his bedroom. It was empty, with the bed neatly made. A drawer was slightly open. He never left anything out of place, she thought, as she crossed the room and looked inside. The drawer was empty. His clothes were gone. So was the duffel bag from the closet floor.

  With a feeling of dread, she pelted down the hall. The front of the house was also deserted.

  He had left. Run from her.

  Eyes stinging, she sank into a chair, thinking about what she’d done to him. For the first time in his life, someone—she—had reached out to him on a human level. At first, he’d been wary. But she’d worked hard to reach him, and finally he’d let himself trust the warmth and sharing growing between them. Last night, she had shattered that trust, destroyed the private world she and Hunter had built.

  She felt her heart being ripped from her chest as his words came back to her. He had said that he would remember the things that had happened between them, but that they—how had he p
ut it—would no longer have anything to do with him.

  Oh God. Oh God. What had she done?

  He seemed so strong in many ways. Yet he didn’t know what to expect from himself, she realized, as she remembered the way he kept checking his reactions with her—checking to see if he was normal. And he certainly didn’t know what to expect from her.

  Trying to block out the look on his face, she covered her face with her hands, her body rocking back and forth. But she couldn’t hold back the tears welling up inside her. They leaked from between her fingers and ran down her cheeks as her shoulders began to shake.

  ###

  Beckton called Emerson. Thirty minutes later, they had a staff meeting in the little office off the training area. Emerson, Beckton, Swinton, Anderson, and Kolb.

  While the five of them argued, Hunter was sent off to clean his spotless automatic weapon. But he could hear the loud discussion. Kolb wanted him to move back into the cottage. Beckton and Winslow had always thought it was a stupid idea. Emerson said that he had changed. His request to leave the guest quarters proved that he had changed.

  They called him in, asked him questions, made him show them what Kathryn Kelley had taught him. They watched to see if he could eat a sandwich neatly. They made him pretend he was sitting in an airport waiting area, then asked what he would do if someone accidentally bumped against him.

  He said, “Excuse me.”

  They asked him to talk about other things. He remembered to use the contractions. They asked why he wanted to change the living arrangements. He told them he wanted to concentrate on his assignment.

  He was pretty sure that he did everything right. He showed them he had learned a lot of important socialization skills. Really, he had known many of the things already. He simply hadn’t thought of them as important—because nobody had made them important before Kathryn. Now he demonstrated that he could pass for human. He hoped he had convinced them he was ready for his assignment.

  They let him put his clothing back in his quarters. He unpacked everything and softly touched the green fur of the alligator before shoving it into the back of a drawer. If anyone asked, he would say it was a souvenir.

  That night he would sleep in the narrow bed where he had slept since he had left Swinton’s laboratory. Except for the two nights he had lived with Kathryn in the guest cottage. Only two nights. It seemed like longer. His whole life. The meaningful part of his life. He clamped his teeth together, trying to hold back any sound as he put his shaving cream and toothbrush onto the shelf over the sink. But he couldn’t hold back the feeling of emptiness inside.

  ###

  Kathryn couldn’t get an appointment with the Chief of Operations until well into the afternoon. She entered his office braced to argue that she could still be of help in Hunter’s training.

  To her surprise, the Chief of Operations concurred immediately. “You’ve done a tremendous job with him in a very short time,” he complimented her.

  “Thank you.”

  “I was hoping you’d stay at Stratford Creek in case we need some further assistance.”

  “I’d certainly be willing to do that,” she agreed, both relieved and elated that she wasn’t being dismissed.

  “And I’d like to see the report on the sessions you had with him,” he added. “Could you start writing it up?”

  She nodded, wondering exactly what she was going to say. Probably tommyrot. But at least making it up would give her something to do.

  When she left the office, she almost ran into Dr. Kolb, who was pacing back and forth in the waiting room.

  He looked up when he saw her, his face gray tinged, his upper lip beaded with perspiration. “Are you leaving us?” he asked.

  “No. Mr. Emerson wants me to stay.”

  He relaxed a fraction. “I was hoping we would get a chance to talk.”

  “Uh, yes,” she said, unsure of what they had to say to each other.

  “Maybe we—” he stopped and glanced at the secretary, then ushered Kathryn into the hall.

  She eyed him questioningly.

  “I was wondering if we could meet somewhere private.”

  “Where?”

  “You jog. What about the woods at the end of East Road?”

  She thought about rendezvousing with this man she didn’t trust in an isolated patch of woods. Too dangerous.

  Before she could politely decline, Emerson’s voice rang out. “Kolb, where the hell are you? We have an appointment.”

  The doctor went rigid. Giving Kathryn an unreadable look, he squared his shoulders and marched into the outer office, leaving Kathryn staring at his back.

  ###

  The night was the worst, Hunter thought. He missed being with Kathryn. Missed seeing her smile. The little jokes she made. Sharing food with her. The warm looks she gave him. He had said he would lock those things away, that they could no longer be part of him.

  But as he lay alone on his narrow bed, he found he needed them. In his mind, he brought them out, one by one, like jewels from a treasure chest.

  She had sung while she had made the pancakes. When he came home from the hospital, she had leaped into his arms. Later, they had talked about making love. They would never do it now, but he had held her close in her bed—kissed her, felt her body rocking against his. That had felt so good—even the tight aching part of it. Better than anything he could imagine.

  In the darkness, he could relive the moments with her, pretend they were happening again. In the daylight, as he ate runny eggs and drank cooling black coffee, he knew he was only fooling himself.

  But it helped a little to focus on the training sessions, and to remember that he wouldn’t have to stay here for long.

  Reid came to get him after weapons drill and took him down to the lake to practice setting plastic explosives. Usually Reid was in security, but it seemed he had also been an explosives expert, so he was on the instructional team today.

  It was odd for Reid to be working with him alone, he thought. But he didn’t focus on it. Or ask questions. He simply followed his orders.

  “Have you detonated these before?” Reid asked, holding up two bricks of dull gray plastic.

  “Yes.”

  “What is the explosive power?”

  He recited the spec, until Reid stopped him with another question. “What do you think about using a transmitter instead of fuses to blow up the cabin at the end of the pier?” He pointed to a weathered gray house that sat about fifty feet from the shore.

  “No problem,” he answered, thinking this was like a test, only he wasn’t sure that Reid knew the answers.

  ###

  Kathryn sat with her laptop computer at the dining room table, working on the report Emerson had asked her to write, trying to make it sound as if she and Hunter had focused exclusively on business.

  But her mind kept wandering. She wondered where Hunter was. What he was doing. Whether he was thinking about her as much as she was thinking about him. But probably that wouldn’t be good for him, she decided with a pang as she pictured the tortured look on his face two nights ago.

  She clenched her fists, trying to wipe away that scene. She had messed up badly. But it was Swinton’s fault, damn him, she told herself. Swinton and his Frankenstein lab. And as she contemplated his research, she couldn’t stop her mind from starting to form a terrible hypothesis—a hypothesis based on what she already knew and what she could guess.

  This was a secret DOD research center, and they must have invested millions of dollars in a project to develop clones—and train them for special assignments. Why?

  Well, suppose you had a human test subject, she thought. But you didn’t think of him as a man because you’d grown him in a laboratory—so you could send him off on a dangerous mission. Would you care about bringing him home when he finished the job? Or would you figure that you didn’t need him anymore, because you could always produce another one to fit your specifications.

  Maybe you didn’t even
care if he succeeded in his assignment, because you could always try again with an equally expendable subject.

  She almost gagged, then thought of something equally sinister—something that helped confirm her hypothesis. You didn’t have to kill a man to clone him. If you had his cooperation, you could ask him for cell samples. There were lots of guys at Stratford Creek Swinton and Emerson could have used. But they had wanted a particular blend of brains and physique—combined in the person of an ex-athlete and physicist named Ben Lancaster. She’d bet they hadn’t asked him for cell samples. Or maybe they had, and he’d refused. Then they’d been afraid he’d blow the whistle on the project.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t going tell her what had happened, because he was dead. And now they had Hunter—to send off on a one-way trip. The whole theory made a kind of awful sense, once you added up all the other factors.

  She told herself there was still time to wreck their plans. But how?

  Feeling trapped and helpless, she got up and paced restlessly around the house. It had become impossible for her to work on the report, so she wandered back to the bedroom and picked up her pillow with the thumb drive sewn inside. She might as well get it out and read about the pack of criminals who ran this place.

  To her relief, the pillow was still stitched the way she’d left it. After ripping the seam, she pulled out the thumb drive and brought it back to the dining room where she inserted it into the USB port.

  She had planned to go over the personnel records. Instead, she was drawn back to the biographical information on Ben Lancaster, avidly reading the details of his life and his career. He had been a strong, capable man. Like Hunter, she thought with a pang. So many athletes never went on to achieve anything noteworthy after their early successes. Lancaster was different. He’d been one of the outstanding researchers at the Sandia Lab, and he had traveled widely. Maybe his personality was part of Hunter. Maybe in some unaccountable way, some of his memories had also come through.

  But at least they’d picked the right candidate for cloning, she thought with bitter irony. A man with a superb body and an IQ to match. Her thoughts switched easily from Lancaster to Hunter. She had to figure out how to get to him as soon as possible, how to regain his trust, and how to get him out of Stratford Creek. Small stuff, she thought with an edgy laugh.