The Clone Assassin (21 page)

MacAvoy asked, “This Cardston? You figured out the term ‘siege’ yet?”

Sounding as if he was speaking through gritted teeth, Cardston said, “Yes, General, I understand the term ‘siege.’”

“Glad to hear it, son. So why don’t you stop wasting our bullets and keep your damn men in the coop?”

“General, what do you hope to accomplish with this attack?” Cardston asked, sounding surly and annoyed.

“You know, Major, anything I might want is above your pay grade. Now, I would be willing to discuss my commands with Watson if he’s around.”

“I’m sorry, General. President Watson is not in the building.”

“He’s not likely to enter the building as things stand now, is he? Tell me where to find Watson, and maybe we can do business.”

Cardston let out a long, exasperated sigh. He said, “I’m not sure where he is at this time.”

MacAvoy laughed, and said, “Things are looking up, Major. I believe you this time.”

 • • • 

Contradictory orders.

The soldiers of 3rd Corps had two objectives—“Locate Watson” and “Business as usual for civilians.”

The first objective included instructions to “search government buildings, businesses, and residences as necessary.” The second directed soldiers to “avoid direct interaction with civilians if at all possible.”

It wouldn’t be possible, and MacAvoy knew it.

Reporters and bystanders gathered around the Pentagon parking lot to watch the confrontation. MacAvoy and his soldiers neither ignored nor acknowledged the observers; they simply went about their business.

Around the capital, jeeps and troop carriers traveled the streets. Soldiers wearing disc-shaped gas masks set up security stops outside government buildings and transit centers. They didn’t stop pedestrians or civilians in cars, not yet, but they left the option open.

On behalf of Harris and Hauser, MacAvoy contacted every military base in the empire to inform the commanders that the Pentagon was officially off-line. Until further notice, all directives would come from the EMN
Churchill
.

Location: Mazatlán, New Olympian Territories
Date: July 30, 2519

Around the city, things changed on a daily basis. When I had first arrived in the New Olympian Territories, the only building that had power and running water was the hotel in which we planned to hold the summit. Now the city had a working waste-disposal system, streetlamps, and traffic lights. The only thing those traffic lights ever stopped were the trucks used by the engineers who installed them and the occasional police car, but that would change soon enough. The camp to the north of town sat mostly abandoned.

I returned with the “First of the First,” the First Battalion First Marines, seventeen hundred barbed-wire-chewing, bullet-spitting seasoned infantrymen. You could fight a world war with these sons of bitches and they wouldn’t quibble. The New Unified Authority had trapped and reprogrammed their brothers, and these boys wanted a little “specking revenge.”

“What exactly is that Marine doing?” I asked Ritz as we prepared to load the troops into their transports. Ritz walked over to have a look. Seeing Ritz, the man jumped to his feet and saluted. The man had been using his combat knife to whittle his bullets.

Ritz, freshly promoted to the rank of two-star general, spoke to the master gunnery sergeant. They traded a few words, then the master gunnery sergeant saluted, and Ritz responded. He said, “He’s carving nipples into the points of his bullets.”

“Nipples?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did he explain why?” I asked.

“He says he ‘wants to give them something to chew on,’ sir.”

Nipples,
I thought, then I remembered another man’s doing something similar, carving a horizontal line and a . . . Penises.

“Are they all that sick?” I asked.

“Sick, sir?” Ritz asked, feigning a naïveté he’d probably lost by the time he turned five.

The local police drove out in force to greet us, twelve jeeps forming a wall of cars along the landing strip. A tall, white-haired man led the way, followed by policemen in civilian garb. I suppose they didn’t yet have uniforms. They’d barely moved into the city.
City first, then uniforms, then paychecks,
I told myself.

The white-haired police chief counted the stars on my collar before extending his hand. Apparently he knew something about ranks, pay grades, and chains of command. He said, “Three stars. Does that make you General Harris?”

I said, “The stars don’t make the man.”

“But you are Harris?” he asked.

“I am.”

He shook my hand, and said, “You gave us quite a scare a few weeks ago. I’m Mark Story. I’m the chief of police in these parts.”

I said, “Good to meet you,” then I introduced Ritz. They knew each other. Apparently Story had come out to visit Ritz before I turned up.

Story looked past me, and said, “That’s a pretty big army you have in there, General. Are you expecting trouble?”

I had come with twenty-seven transports, some artillery, and a lot of men. I looked back out of reflex, then pretended to take a mental inventory of my forces. I said, “I ran into difficulties the last time I visited.”

Story nodded, and said, “Yes, sir, General, I know exactly what you mean. I expected you to be dead after I saw your hotel room. What exactly happened in there?”

I didn’t have anything against Story, but I didn’t have time for him. He could only get in the way of my current operation. I had come to see Brandon Pugh. Pugh and Story knew each other, of course, but they probably weren’t friends.

I chatted with Story, but I kept my answers terse. “What happened in the hotel room? Not sure.”

“Why would my Marines attack me? Good question.”

“Why did I have so many men with me? Marines, too much is never enough.”

Story eventually cottoned on and excused himself. He left, then the mission began.

We’d have no problem finding Pugh. I knew where to find him. He’d made sure of that before he delivered me to Ritz. I could have sent Ritz or some of my men to fetch him, but I hoped to run into someone else along with the gangster. I did bring Ritz with me.

Along with a full battalion of Marines, I’d returned to Mazatlán equipped with jeeps, Jackals, and gear. Now we put some of the Jackals to use.

In my opinion, Jackals were little more than jeeps with a face-lift. They had turrets on the back for combat, a little extra plating, and souped-up engines that more than made up for the extra weight, but those were the superficial modifications. Jackals had stealth gear that did a moderately decent job of blocking radar. They also packed enough communications equipment to serve as a command center, but they were meant for combat.

Story and his police would have us under surveillance. That was fine. We sent out a convoy of ten cars that reached downtown Mazatlán and scattered in ten separate directions.

Even if the police had tracked us with satellite surveillance, they wouldn’t have known which Jackal was on an errand and which ones ran interference.

Two Jackals went to the north edge of the city, and they didn’t stop there. One continued north along the coast, and the other headed inland. Several units drove circuits in the center of town. One went to the beach, another went off road in the wilds just east of town.

Ritz and I were in one of three cars that entered a southern peninsula. The others split away, but we continued on, crossing the bridge that spanned the harbor, then entering a mountainous island that rose like a knuckle out of the sea. We followed a winding road that took us to the top of the mountain, and there we found a lighthouse.

The lighthouse was primordial, a relic from days when men and goods traveled on water-bound ships because commerce relied on the ocean. When men first turned their attention to the stars, terms like “ship” and “shipping” lost their nautical origins. Now, neither the Unified Authority Navy nor the Enlisted Man’s Navy maintained oceangoing vessels.

The lighthouse was a stubby, three-story missile at the top of the island. It wasn’t the sleek spike I had expected, and not entirely round, either, but a nearly round structure made up of narrow, flat facets. Decagonal.

I climbed out of my Jackal and looked back toward town. The view stretched from the harbor to the north end of town. I saw so many hues of blue, tan, and white that I felt like I was staring into a kaleidoscope. The air was clear and hot and dry. Sand and rock pulsed with heat while the open waters sparkled like stained glass.

A pelican glided overhead. With its beak out and its wings spread, it created a jagged profile like a piece from a puzzle or maybe a shard of glass. The big bird dipped and glided toward the rocks along the base of the mountain, where a disorganized flock of seagulls mingled.

A few long weeks ago, I had jogged along that shore. Had I appreciated the sights at that time?

Time and the salt in the air had left their mark on the walls of the lighthouse. Pockets of cement had crumbled. A word about General Hunter Ritz—he was not the kind of man who appreciates nature. He climbed out of the jackal, removed his sunglasses, and asked, “Do you think they have snipers in that tower?”

“It’s a lighthouse,” I said.

“Yeah, right, a lighthouse. Should I be worried about snipers?”

“I doubt they have rifles. They might have a guy with a slingshot.”

“You must be specking joking, Harris. You said this guy was a big-time gang leader.”

“Was,” I said. “He had something going on Olympia Kri, then we evacuated the planet. Now he’s trying to rebuild his organization.”

Ritz nodded and smiled. He nurtured some snide remark in the back of his head but kept it to himself.

He said, “Cardston mentioned something about a girl.”

“Did he say that before or after they converted him?” I asked.

He laughed, and said, “Of all the officers I’ve ever known, I can’t believe Alan Cardston is a Reproman.” He shook his head, and added, “I believe we spoke before they
reprocessed
him. I guess that means there was a girl.”

“There was a girl,” I agreed.

Pugh and his men came out from behind the lighthouse, still fifty or sixty yards away. Kasara stood with them.

Ritz asked, “Which one is Pugh?”

“Third to the left.”

He looked at Kasara, and said, “Cardston said that the girl was his niece.”

Pugh and his five thugs led the way. Kasara walked a few paces behind them. They wore suits and swung their arms like apes as they walked. They were big men who wanted to tread like dinosaurs.

“I met her when I was fresh out of boot,” I said. That wasn’t exactly true; I’d been out a couple of years and had already been promoted to sergeant.

“What about your girlfriend?” Ritz asked. He didn’t know Sunny, but I’d told him about her.

“Good question,” I said. “She doesn’t hear about anything that happens here.”

“Unfaithful bastard,” he muttered. He said the words under his breath because Pugh and his friends were now close enough to hear us. From him, the term came with a tone of admiration.

Pugh’s jacket flapped in the wind. He could have tucked a gun in the back of his waistband, but he had probably come unarmed. In the real world, people don’t like to tuck guns into their waistbands where they are hard to reach and the barrel digs into your ass.

Pugh stopped three yards ahead of us, his friends forming a wedge behind him. He stood silent for a moment.

Kasara didn’t stop. She walked around Pugh and his formation and hugged me.

As she approached, I saw surprise in Hunter Ritz’s eyes. I don’t know if he had ever actually seen Sunny, but word gets around, and Sunny Ferris was a beauty. Ritz had met Ava, the former Hollywood goddess I’d dated in another lifetime . . . my one true love.

Kasara had been pretty back when I first met her, which was back in 2510 . . . nine years earlier. She’d had silky blond hair and the last traces of baby fat still in her cheeks. She’d been athletic back then, swimming like an otter in the ocean and jogging for exercise.

Over the last nine years, she’d married and divorced, seen her planet conquered then incinerated by aliens, and spent a year as a refugee in an overcrowded spaceport on Mars. Kasara’s body was the right length for her sundress, but it rode on her bony shoulders as if she were a wire hanger. Wind blew the loose fabric of her dress as if it were a flag. Her eyes and mouth looked slightly large for her face.

She was still pretty by New Olympian standards. With few exceptions, these people had starved and suffered. Pugh still had some excess poundage. So did a few of his boys.

As Kasara wrapped her arms around my neck, the bones in her wrist and forearm pressed softly into my skin. She whispered, “I’m glad to see you.”

Pushing gently through the cascade of dress around her, I found her waist and placed my hand on it. My fingers touched pelvis and hollow and rib. I said, “You look beautiful.”

She laughed, hugged me tighter for just a moment, then stepped back. She knew she was an unattractive shade of her former self. Her smile might have been in gratitude for my lie, or it might have been simply because she was glad to see me. She said, “Harris, you’re so full of shit.”

Then she turned to Ritz, and she said, “Is he like this on base, too?”

“Like what, ma’am?” asked Ritz.

Skinny as she was, with her long, bony arms and skeletal body, Kasara must have looked like a cross between a human woman and a preying mantis to Ritz. And yet . . . and yet she still had an air of mischief about her. Given a few months of good food and walks on the beach, life would return to Kasara. She’d never again be the shallow, attention-loving nymph she’d been; you can’t erase experience—at least you can’t erase them from the minds of natural-borns.

When I first met her, she’d been a cocktail waitress sharing an apartment and saving her dimes for an annual vacation on Earth. When she came to Earth, she squeezed life out of every minute of her time, swimming, sunning, dancing, drinking, and doing whatever she pleased. One-night stands had pleased. She was “scrub,” that was what Marines called party girls. Most girls got mad when they found out that was what we thought of them; Kasara wore the moniker with pride.

She asked Ritz, “Does he tell you things you want to hear? Has he ever told you ‘nice shot’ when you missed the target?”

Neither easily intimidated nor easily impressed, Ritz said, “I wouldn’t allow myself to miss the target in front of the general, ma’am, not unless I had a surgeon handy.”

“To remove your gun from your ass?” she asked.

His punch line stolen, Ritz said, “Something like that.”

Pugh interrupted our friendly conclave. He cleared his throat to attract our attention, and said, “I noticed you brought half the Enlisted Man’s Marines with you.”

I said, “The smaller half. The other half comes with tanks and missile launchers.”

“Is there a reason you have so many men?” he asked. He maintained his distance, about ten feet from me. It occurred to me that a ten-foot clearing was more than enough space for a sniper, even a bad one, to hit his target without taking collateral damage.

“I may need them,” I said. “I’m going after Freeman.”

The chill in the air suddenly vanished. He must have thought I wanted revenge for the scene at the hotel. Now that he knew my plans, he shook my hand and introduced himself to Ritz. He said, “Ritz? I heard you were a colonel.”

Ritz said, “I was.”

Pugh said, “Good thing you got your name on your uniform. I couldn’t tell you from anyone else without it.”

Kasara froze when she heard that. As a former cocktail waitress, she knew what to say and what not to say around clones. Most people did. One of Pugh’s thugs sprang over to him and whispered in his ear, no doubt informing him that he had broken the cardinal rule of dealing with military clones—don’t tell them that they’re clones.

I didn’t worry, though. Ritz wouldn’t take the comment seriously. He’d been programmed to disregard such comments, and his lackadaisical nature insulated him beyond his programming.

Apparently anxious to change the subject, Pugh asked, “Have you heard from Freeman?”