The Clone Assassin (7 page)

Harris’s hate for the Unified Authority ran deep. He’d borne the brunt of the prejudice from the people he’d been created to protect his entire life. He was worn-out and angry. He’d seen brave men, clones, die willingly to protect the natural-born civilization that betrayed them time and time again.

He’d been sent into battles in which natural-born officers had calculated that every Marine and soldier would die. He’d known officers who placed a higher value on tanks and ships than the clones inside them. “Clones, boots, and bullets,” he would say, meaning that the U.A. military placed the same approximate dollar value on all three.

For the last year, Watson had spent more time with Don Cutter than Harris, but his feelings toward Cutter were mostly ambivalent. Cutter was a newer make of clone, clones who had absolutely no idea of their origin. Instead of a combat reflex, later clones like Cutter had a gland that released deadly poison into their brains the moment they realized they were not naturally born. Clones like Cutter had complex sets of neural programming in their brains, one set of programs prevented excessive introspection. Another fooled them into ignoring clues about their origins.

Ask Don Cutter about clones, and he would tell you about growing up as a natural-born child in an orphanage filled with clones. Harris, on the other hand, knew the truth.

Watson tried to imagine Harris as a boy growing up in an orphanage. Like the other kids around him, he’d been told he was the one natural-born, and that his parents had died in an accident.

“Orphanage #553,” Watson whispered, amused that he had heard Harris reference his orphanage so many times that the number had imprinted itself in his memory. He had no idea which orphanage Cutter had called home.

During the halcyon days of “manifest destiny,” Unified Authority factories had stamped out slightly over a million infant clones every year and raised them in orphanages.

What was Harris like as a boy?
Watson wondered. He tried to imagine him as a ten-year-old. Would he have been taller than the others, even back then? Mature Liberator clones stood six-foot-three. Standard-issue clones stood five-foot-ten. Did the height genes kick in when they were babies?

Even as an adult, Harris had not always known he was a clone. He’d found out about it after joining the Marines. An admiral had called him in one day and told him the news. Watson knew the story well. Harris had told him about it. The admiral had called him in and told him that he was a Liberator clone and that knowing he was a Liberator would not kill him.

Harris said he almost vomited on the admiral’s floor he was so scared. He also said he went out and drank himself drunk that night.

Harris never gets drunk,
Watson thought. Beer had no more effect on him than water, part of his Liberator makeup.
Harris never gets drunk,
Watson thought, choosing to believe the story about the admiral but not the story about the bar that came later the same night.

Watson looked down, realized he was on his fourth glass of Scotch, and that he had become quite morose indeed.

Location: Mazatlán, New Olympian Territories
Date: July 17, 2519

Freeman reached the outskirts of the city by 23:00. It would take him another two hours to reach the camp on the northern end of town.

As he stole closer to town, he moved more slowly and tried to keep to the shadows. The night air hummed in a few small, lit pockets. The New Olympians had placed standard-issue military generators to power high-priority projects so that workers could take round-the-clock shifts.

Freeman watched a team of workers from across a dark street. In the white glare of the arc lights, men with laser torches climbed in and out of a trench. Some of them joked and told stories along the ledge of the trench, their voices audible but not understandable above the sound of the generator. Others silently climbed down ladders, disappearing from view. They might have been working on the power grid or possibly the waterworks.

The project didn’t interest Freeman. He moved on.

Freeman had the single-minded instincts of a shark. He noticed everything—sights, sounds, smells, vibrations—sifted them for valuable intel, and dismissed the dross. For Freeman, every stroll was recon and every chat an interrogation. He gathered information and filed it away in his mind.

His first stop was Harris’s hotel. He wanted a chance to search it without cops looking over his shoulder.

The police had barricaded the drive that led onto the hotel grounds. Seven policemen manned the gate. A small generator purred in the background. Pods of lights showered glare around the area.

Had he come to kill these men, Freeman couldn’t have engineered a better scenario. They stood in an island of light, blinding them to everything that happened in the darkness around them. A sniper could see them clearly and target them quickly with impunity.

Remaining in the shadows, Freeman slipped past the policemen. He spotted the motion sensors they had placed around the grounds, bargain-basement burglar alarms any thief, spy, or mercenary would spot and avoid. He adjusted his path so that it took him into the sensors’ blind spots and beyond their range. He breathed slowly, stepped softly, did not brush against shrubs or leaves. He pressed tightly against walls, crawled between parked cars, and entered the building using the security pass he had swiped from the policeman he had knocked out earlier that morning.

The lights were out in the lobby, a crescent-shaped foyer with inch-deep carpets, elegant furniture, and a glass wall facing the sea and the moon. Freeman wished the windows faced inland instead. The light of the moon poured in through the glass, illuminating the floor, the walls, the furniture. He would look like a shadow to anyone peering in from outside, but an alert guard would notice his movement.

Without realizing he had done it, Freeman ran the odds in his head. Moving slowly and creeping behind furniture, it would take him nearly a minute to cross the lobby. He ducked behind the concierge’s desk, then slipped behind a row of chairs, then a table. He moved slowly and methodically, his breathing nearly silent, then he scurried around a corner into the complete blackness of inner hallways; doors and elevators sat hidden in the darkness. Even here, hidden by the walls of the hotel, Freeman traveled with care.

He didn’t step as he walked. Instead, he shuffled his feet in a C-pattern, barely lifting them off the ground. His footsteps made no noise. He traced his left hand along the wall to gauge his position, identifying doors by touch and trying their handles as he moved. It took him several minutes to find the stairs.

He climbed in total darkness. Darkness was an inconvenience but little more.

Even gentle steps would echo in the empty stairwell. Freeman wasn’t nervous, but his senses were keen to stimulation. If he dropped a coin, he’d have counted the number of stairs it touched before it landed. He’d have known in his head how far it had traveled before it stopped.

Counting flights and doors, Freeman worked his way to the twenty-third floor. He opened the door a crack and did a visual sweep, finding no lights. A motion sensor would have tracked him opening the door, but he wasn’t worried. This was a crime scene, not a military base. The violations had already taken place. The police had already searched. They were trying to keep people out, not tracking violators who let themselves in.

Silent as a shadow, Freeman slipped from the stairwell and counted doors until he found the entrance to Harris’s suite. He didn’t need to kick the door open or pick the lock. The police had sealed off the building and left the door open.

Pale moonlight shone into the room from the door to the balcony. The police must have left it as they found it, open. Curtains fluttered in the breeze.

Freeman stepped into the room, looked from side to side to be sure he was alone, and proceeded. He saw the patches of dried blood on the floor and wall, coin-sized drips and plate-sized puddles that looked black in the moonlight. Transmitters no bigger than bullet casings sat in the spots where the bodies had been, ready to project bodies on demand.

Freeman didn’t care about negs. The police had come to investigate crimes and bodies, not him. He’d come looking for Harris.

Freeman didn’t worry about leaving fingerprints. The police already knew he’d been in the room; they’d been in it when he arrived. He’d made a point of entering the bedrooms and the bathroom with them looking over his shoulder. So what if they found his fingerprints in the room? They’d seen him touch the furniture and the walls.

He went to the bed. It was made, the comforter wrinkled where someone had sat on it—probably a policeman. The pillows along the top ran in a perfectly straight row.

As a Marine, Harris would likely have made his own bed when he awoke. Harris didn’t own a home. Freeman had visited him in different billets and had seen that he preferred orderly quarters.

He went to the closets. Harris had brought a pair of slacks and a couple of button-up shirts. In Freeman’s experience, Harris practically lived in his Charlie service uniform and wore his Class-A uniform to formal events. Only a Class-A hung in the closet.

Freeman pulled the civilian shirts from their hangers and caught a faint whiff of flowery perfume.
A girl?
Freeman asked himself. Harris was no Puritan, but he wasn’t enslaved by penile urges, and he had a girl he supposedly liked back in Washington, D.C.

But the scent on the shirt still lingered. It was weak, but unmistakable.

He went to the sliding door that led to the balcony outside. Heavy curtains hung across it, billowing as a strong breeze whistled through the partially opened glass. Freeman twisted the curtains so he could examine them in the moonlight. He searched them for traces of blood and found nothing.

There were no bloodstains on the carpet around the door to the balcony. Freeman stepped outside. He surveyed the floor and the waist-high railing, knowing that the police had done the same.

From twenty-three floors up, the roar of the waves sounded more like a whisper. Moonlight illuminated the scene below, making the landscape visible while hiding its colors. Freeman watched uneven rows of whitecaps rolling from the charcoal sea to the granite-colored shore.

Knowing the police had done this as well, Freeman crawled along the balcony and checked the ledges for signs of blood or bullet casings. He found nothing.

Had Harris been shot? He’d lost a lot of blood. He’d been weak. Where would he have gone? In Freeman’s experience, the simplest solution usually proved accurate.
Not even Harris could climb down from here,
he thought.
Harris had either walked out the door or somebody had carried him.

Why hadn’t anybody seen him? Simple enough, for the same reason no one had spotted Freeman. The hotel wasn’t open for business; the only people on the premises were Harris, a few diplomats, a skeleton crew . . . and three general-issue clones.

Had any other high-ranking officers been sent, the entire floor would have been filled with aides and adjutants, but Harris eschewed entourages. He referred to the junior officers who rode the coattails of their superiors as “remora fish,” and allowed no hangers-on.

Off in the distance, several miles away, the relocation camp glowed like a fire. It stood out from the black-and-gray landscape around it, its golden light transforming the ground around it.

Freeman gazed down at the camp. If there were answers to be had, he knew where to find them.

 • • • 

No barbed-wire fences surrounded the camp. The New Olympians didn’t build gates or guard posts at the front. The residents could come and go as they pleased. So could Freeman.

He walked around the perimeter of the camp, hiding in the brush and scrawny trees, and the darkness. This was not a prison or fortress—the perimeter lights faced into the camp, illuminating the ground so that people could see where they were going, obscuring the world outside the perimeter. Freeman knelt in the scrub no more than twenty feet from men in a small cart collecting trash. The men driving the cart didn’t notice him.

They dragged an empty Dumpster to a collection site, backed it into place, and unhitched it from their cart. Then they drove around the platform to the spot where a full Dumpster sat. They hooked it up to their cart and drove away, all the while gabbing about fishing.

Freeman moved around the outside of the camp until he found an unlit area. Once he entered the camp, he walked straight ahead. He no longer stuck to the shadows. Now that he had entered, his only camouflage was to pretend like he belonged.

With seventeen million refugees, the New Olympians had many camps beside many cities throughout the Territories. Freeman estimated the population of this camp to be between fifty and one hundred thousand people. He saw whole avenues of prefabricated housing that served as dorms for families and neighborhoods.

These people had just spent a year on Mars, living in a spaceport. They’d showered in communal showers. Those among them who needed sex more than privacy had learned to fill that need in crowded halls. For these people, privacy was a distant memory.

As he walked down a lane that ran between two three-story dormitories, Freeman heard couples chatting. He heard snoring. The sound of babies crying was loud, the occasional argument even louder.

The people Freeman wanted wouldn’t linger around the dormitories at night. Like him, they would dislike the noise and clutter and bustle of families. They would find twilight zones in which they could quietly gather and whisper among themselves. He wasn’t looking for citizens; he was looking for lurkers, the rats and roaches of society who flourished under the floorboards and lived a cancerous coexistence.

Freeman walked past a streetlamp under which two young lovers kissed. The boy spotted him, turned to get a better look at him, and stared.

“What is it?” asked the girl. She followed his gaze toward Freeman. Not saying a word, they stood and walked away, breaking into a jog as they got farther from him.

Freeman saw their fear as a confirmation. They had meandered into an unfamiliar neighborhood. They had chanced a murky, poorly lit lane, then, seeing someone strange and menacing, they had run to a safer place to hide.

There were plenty of streetlamps in this part of the camp, but some stood unlit. Fires burned in metal drums by an open shelter in which men sat on chairs.

The fires weren’t for heat. It was nearly eighty degrees. A combined chorus of crickets and cicadas creaked.

Freeman felt more than heard the men following him. One might have bumped into a trash can. One might have scuffed his shoe. He might have heard them whispering. It didn’t matter. Freeman didn’t need audio cues to sense them. He didn’t turn to look at them and did nothing to alert them as he walked to the shelter.

They closed in on him, standing no more than ten feet away.

The men chattering under the shelter went quiet. They turned to look at Freeman as he approached. He quietly returned their gaze.

“What do you want?” someone asked.

Freeman answered, “Information.”

Someone asked, “Why the speck would we talk to you?”

Freeman got the sense that they knew who he was or at least why he had come. He’d spent time on Mars living among New Olympian refugees. He’d traveled in their underground circles. These people would have seen him as an ally back then, back when their only ambition was to relocate to Earth.

The men who had been tailing him made their move. Relying on his senses, Freeman knew their speeds and their positions. His instincts were accurate, his reflexes instantaneous. Just by the sound of their steps, he knew the one to his right would strike first, then the one to his left.

Timing his reactions to the last millisecond, he stared straight ahead as if unaware of the danger. He spun right, threw a short punch that hit the first man flush on the jaw, shattering it at the point of his chin and breaking it at the hinge. He turned to the left, caught the man’s wrist and lifted it out of the way, then dug a hard right into the man’s exposed ribs.

Freeman did not bother taking the man’s knife. He knew precisely how much damage he’d dealt.

The second man was big, only a few inches shorter than Freeman. He grunted softly when the fist dug into his side, took a wobbling, shuffling step backward, and teetered in place. His knife slipped from his fingers. A moment later, he dropped to his knees. He knelt, silently struggling to breathe as the bubbles of blood escaped from his lips.

Freeman sensed that guns were now pointed at him, but he didn’t know how many.

Somebody said, “That wasn’t very nice.”

Freeman said, “I’m looking for information.”

A large man stood. He was six-foot-three, maybe taller, with beefy shoulders and a wide, solid girth. He stood silently and stared back at Freeman, an unconcerned expression on his face when his eyes locked with Freeman’s. He had the solid chin of a fighter, short brown hair, and small dark eyes. Finally, he said, “You don’t give the orders around here.”

Freeman said, “I want to know about three dead clones and a missing Marine.”