The Clone Assassin (39 page)

I took a deep breath, opened the hatch, and stepped out onto one of the wing-shaped ballast tanks. Emerging from the confines of the Manta, I began to shiver in the frigid air, air so cold that my breath seemed to turn to steam.

The Manta’s autopilot function had brought her right up to the catwalk that led across the moon pool. I grabbed the handle, stepped onto the ladder, and pulled myself up, my palms nearly freezing to the cold, metal rails.

Looking around the room, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. No matter where I looked, I felt an oppressive sense of familiarity.

The moon pool was as big as a football field, only round. My Manta had churned the water as she broke the surface, sending wavelets that lapped at the well-like wall that surrounded the pool. I stood in the center of a narrow-but-sturdy catwalk that ran the entire diameter of pool.

Staring down at the glowing yellow lights that shone into the depths below unearthed some nebulous memory in my head that refused to sharpen into focus. Racks of bright lights hung from the ceiling. Would you call it a ceiling? This chamber was a dome; at what point did the walls become the ceiling?

A few men worked on the deck that surrounded the moon pool. They wore jackets and gloves. I would have liked to have killed them for their gloves. I didn’t count that impulse as inhumane. In a few short hours, Hauser’s bombers would drop torpedoes on all eleven underwater cities. Killing those men would not even rob them of an entire day.

I looked down into the water and felt my legs go weak. The fear I had felt stepping onto the Turtle had been nothing compared to what I now experienced. It had been a taste, a precursor. I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I had been here before, that something terrible had happened in this place.

Walking quickly, I crossed the catwalk, my hands in my pockets, my right hand wrapped around my pistol.

“Hey, where’s your jacket?” one of the men asked, as I stepped onto the deck. “D’you forget it on the Manta?”

“Worse,” I said. “I forgot it from the start.”

The man shook his head and returned to work.

Anxious to get away from the cold, I headed toward the exit, somehow sure that the rest of the city would be warmer. As the hangar door slid open, a burst of warm air blew in. The heat felt good, but it reinforced my feelings of déjà vu.

The hall I had entered was narrow, maybe eight feet wide, and circular. It was brightly lit. I had expected the relatively narrow fit and the circular shape, but, for some reason, I had thought it would be dark. I had the strongest impression that I shouldn’t turn left, as if something dangerous waited for me in that direction. It made no sense. I almost turned left just to prove to myself that there was nothing there to fear . . . almost.

I turned right, and true to my continuing sense of déjà vu, found myself standing in front of a large door that looked entirely too familiar.
This opens to the city,
I told myself.

It did, but the city was nothing like I had expected. I had expected someplace dark and nightmarish, like a man-made forest with girders instead of trees. The expanse that awaited me on the other side of the door looked like every other military base, only abandoned and housed under a gigantic dome.

The buildings looked like they had come off an assembly line. Some stood one or two stories tall, a few stood six, but all were the same color, made of the same material, and with identical windows and doors. The domed ceiling above the city seemed to stretch on forever. And it was bright; the glow coming from that dome was every bit as radiant as a noonday sun. When I turned away from it, spots flashed in my eyes.

I didn’t know if this was how the French had originally envisioned their underwater cities. They had built the shell, but I thought the Unifieds had filled it in.

A man on an electric cart drove past me, not giving me a second glance. Except for the wheels, his vehicle was silent.

The place was a ghost town.

This was not the first time I had visited a military base that had been largely vacated for war. I recognized the signs the moment I saw them, the empty buildings, the motor pools filled with vehicles, the roads on which few people drove, and the sense of anticipation in the air.

Trying to behave like a natural-born lieutenant, I walked with purpose, scowling at the few enlisted men I passed and not quite meeting the gazes of senior officers.

The way I saw it, I had two objectives and one destination. I needed to find whatever building served as the strategic command center. The data Hauser wanted would be on the computers inside that building. If Nailor was here, I’d find him in the command center as well. He’d billet someplace else, but that was where he’d spend his days.

Finding my way around their city came easily enough. I’d spent my entire life living on Unified Authority military bases. The Unifieds had planned Gendenwitha the same way they planned all the others.

The walk from the moon pool to the command center was nearly two miles. When I found a building with sedans parked beside it, I thought I might have located the right spot. I needed to verify this, of course, and the only way to do that would be to have a look around.

No one stopped me as I entered the building. They left the entrance unguarded. Why guard it? Who could break into an undersea city?

I entered the lobby, saw the gathering of majors and colonels waiting to enter the officer’s mess, and knew I had found the strategic command building. Standing across the lobby, I could see round tables covered with white linen tablecloths. A waiter in a white jacket guided officers to their chairs.

As a lowly U.A. lieutenant, I knew better than to linger near such a dining hall, so I walked past, feigning no interest. The feelings of déjà vu had completely vanished by this time, even though I now stood in a building as familiar to me as my own home.

When a herd of officers walked in my direction, I stepped into the head and found that this head had the same fixtures as the heads on the
Churchill
. Like the admin. buildings at Benning and Anacostia-Bolling, this one had its mess hall and its officer country on the first floor, meaning that all the serious work would be done one floor up. I headed up the stairs and found the computer room easily enough. Peering through the windows in the doors, I saw, a large, quasi-refrigerated storehouse with rows of computers the size of coffins.

The room was vacant, with soundproof walls that eliminated outside noise, allowing nothing louder than the soft hum of electronics inside its doors. The only people who entered this area were the techs who maintained the equipment, officers sending coded messages, and spooks. Rooms like this were the domain of intelligence operations. The computers, the communications equipment, and even the environmental controls carried encryption.

I found a terminal with a holographic keyboard and a touch screen, neither of which meant anything to me. I’m a Marine; my computer expertise didn’t extend beyond the optical controls in my combat visor and the keyboard on my stove. Had Hauser wanted me to snoop through data banks, he would have been disappointed—I wouldn’t have known how to access them.

Hauser, however, had provided me with a modicum of spy gear—a device made out of some sort of stiff cloth that was the size and shape of a large bandage. My job was to wrap this device around the conduction cable that ran between the computers.

The terminal was a chest-high cabinet with a metal shell that probably weighed two hundred pounds. It sat wedged between two larger computers that I could not have moved without a forklift.

I thought this next moment might be the most dangerous part of the entire operation—stealing data without being caught. From where I stood, I could see the hall outside through the window panels in the door, and people in the hall could also see me. The walls were soundproof, so I wouldn’t hear people walking by, maybe stopping to watch me work. I sighed and set to work, knowing that there was nothing I could do.

After one last check through that window, I wrapped my fingers around the edges of the terminal and pivoted it from side to side, slowly walking it out of its parking space so I could see the cables on the ground behind it. I turned it to the left, then the right, at first only able to pivot it an inch or two. Once I had wiggled it free from its neighbors, I pulled it an extra foot away and found a long, flat cable that ran from the terminal and disappeared into the floor. It might have conducted data; it might have conducted power, possibly both.

This was espionage, and I was a Marine. I didn’t break into things, I broke them. My Military Occupational Specialty was infantry, not computer science. If Hauser didn’t get what he wanted, it would be his own damn fault for sending a Marine to do the work of a spy.

I dropped low to the ground as if inspecting the bottom of the terminal. Then, on the ground, hidden from the view of any passersby, I pulled the stiff cloth swatch from my pocket, reached as far as I could to get behind the terminal, and wrapped Hauser’s device around the cable. At this point, the success of my espionage objective was out of my hands.

My instructions were to watch the spying device. A red stripe would appear along its spine if I had placed it correctly. That stripe would turn green once it had gathered the data Hauser’s intel team had programmed it to record.

So I remained on the floor on all fours beside the terminal, looking for all the world like a computer tech who had come to fix a malfunctioning machine, and that was where I was when Colonel Franklin Nailor stepped through the door. I hadn’t known his rank. If I had been forced to guess, I would have thought he was a general because of the authority he wielded and his swagger.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,
I thought, but there was nothing coincidental about it. I was in the strategic command center of a military base, in the information-systems section, the domain of intelligence officers. Nailor’s insignia indicated that his MOS was intelligence. I was in his backyard.

I’d only seen the man in person once, and that time I was lying on the floor helpless and bleeding. He’d looked larger-than-life on that occasion, him standing and me on my ass, my back filled with buckshot.

Nailor looked at me and through me. I was a tech and a lieutenant; in his world, that made me no more significant than a tadpole. He grunted a quick question, “Any problems with the sending gear?” I shook my head, and said, “No, sir.” Not bothering to respond, Nailor gave me a cursory glance and walked past.

I noticed Nailor peering at me again, a puzzled look on his face. Hoping to appear in my element, I neither returned his stare nor turned away from him. I pretended I was busy checking cables.

The little twerp was short, shorter than the computer towers. He might have stood five-five on his toes. I must have already known he was short, but seeing it firsthand made more of an impression. He had blond hair, which he parted down the middle like a girl. Between his hair and his eyebrows, there was a round scar with jagged, furrowed edges. It looked like someone had stamped him right between the eyes with a pipe or the muzzle of a shotgun.

Strange as it sounds, the little bastard intimidated me. Maybe it was the arrogance that he radiated. His expression was a constant smirk. It was as if he sized up every man he had ever met and knew he could beat every one of them.

I tried to imagine killing Nailor, but I only saw images of defeat. I saw him laughing at me, treating me like a corpse, playing with me. That strange sense of déjà vu had returned when he walked in the room.

This was my chance to kill him. I had the pistol and the knife. Maybe he was tough enough to beat me in a fair fight, but I hadn’t come to fight fair. He’d walked into the computer facility alone. I could kill him and . . . I couldn’t kill him, not yet. Whatever data that spy piece was supposed to gather, it hadn’t yet gathered it. If I killed Nailor now, someone might come looking for him.

This is your chance,
I told myself, but killing Nailor would need to wait.

He glanced at me again and walked over to the terminal I was pretending to examine. He stuck his head behind it, and said, “That’s an encryption bandit. What the speck are you doing?”

I hated the bastard. I wanted to run. I wanted to dash for the door, to hide. In my head, visions of him choking me flashed like the warning lights on an overloaded nuclear reactor before it explodes.

“You’re nothing if not observant, Nailor,” I said, forcing myself to sound calm and reasonable. I had my S9 pistol out where he could see it. I tried to force a smile. “There’s a little red strip on the back of that . . .” He’d called it an “encryption bandit.” Of course he’d known what to call that thing; the bastard was a spook. “You and I are going to chat until the strip turns green.”

His eyes dropped down to the gun. I was scared. Hell, I was petrified, but I held the gun fairly steady, and I faked that killer glint in my eye. He scared me, but my S9 sure as speck had his sphincter puckering.

I said, “You know, Franklin, you look a lot smaller when you aren’t hiding behind a shotgun.”

He looked me right in the eye, and recognition finally showed. He sneered, and said, “Harris. You’re the one hiding behind the pistol.”

Damn, he was calm. His demeanor, his absolute lack of concern, he intimidated me more than any man I had ever met . . . even more than Freeman . . . Freeman, who could have lifted this little turd with one hand and snapped his neck with the other.

“Do you recognize the place, Harris?” he asked.

“Should I?” I asked, feeling my resolve melt around my feet.
Shoot him!
I thought.
Shoot him!

He laughed, a scorning, derisive sound that came drenched with déjà vu.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve been in a Cousteau city,” he said.

“You’re full of shit,” I said, though in my heart, I knew it was true. The feelings of déjà vu were too strong, too constant, too . . . crippling.