The Terminals (35 page)

“In part.”

“You gave us bucket list things because your employers were killing us,” Siena muttered.

Ward wrinkled his nose at the characterization. “Things you might not have had the resources or opportunity to
ever
do on your own. Oddly, though, the most common dream was to do something good for the world. So I proposed missions using three criteria: (1) to do something good for mankind; (2) to satisfy one or more recruit's wish; and (3) to advance the cause of the organization. You truly did great things. Your session almost didn't get going because our idiot doctors got themselves kidnapped. But we worked that right into the program, and you fixed it! Everyone was very impressed, by the way. Then you ensured that a corrupt, unpredictable man would never hold a high position in this country's government. Frankly, you're the best class since TS-5 saved an entire nation from civil war.”

“Whoa,” Wally exclaimed. “An entire nation?”

“Small country. Long story.”

Donnie watched the monitor. The helicopter was still in the field, but it was possible Pilot had radioed out. “If you're trying to delay us while more soldiers come, we will not hesitate to kill you,” he warned Ward.

“I know. But I can assure you nobody is coming. I shouldn't be telling you this, but we're fresh out of men. Pilot will have to fly out to regroup. It's not as easy as you might think to find reliable employees willing to risk their life. Risk their life, maybe. Reliable, maybe. But both together is tough.”

“We killed people,” Cam said. He knew he should have been furious, but he was unable to rid his voice of guilt.
Guess there's still some of that nice guy in here
, he thought.

“It doesn't matter,” Ward said. “They like the program. You're the stars of their research. But if I can't fix this issue, they'll go back to a contained experiment. No beach houses for the next group. No bucket lists.”

“Who are ‘they'?” Cam asked suddenly.

“Stockholders. Managers. Foreign investors. A small council monitors this program through several layers of anonymity. I don't know them. They don't even know each other.”

“Names aren't important,” Cam said to himself. “You don't care about us. Only the TS matters.”

“I don't give a flying fig about the TS! Don't you understand? I'm the one person who does care about you!” Ward's lip quivered, his expression somewhere between angry and hurt.

He is a Boy Scout
, Cam thought, convinced more by the fact that Ward didn't swear than anything he'd said.

Cam changed the subject. “How much do you think this facility is worth to them?”

“I don't know. The research alone is worth millions.”

“Not if we burn it down,” Cam said. He turned to his teammates. “Okay folks, this'll be our third mission, the last good thing we do before we graduate. Let's finish what we started here.”

Donnie didn't move to join him. “I have one more thing I need to do.”

“What's that?” Cam asked.

“I'm going to go ‘talk' to the guy in the helicopter.”

“Why?”

“Because he shot Owen.”

Siena nodded. “Pilot won't wait for Ward forever. And we can't let him fly out and regroup.”

Cam thought for a moment. “Ward, we're gonna need your shirt and pants.”

They stripped Ward and tied him to the pool table. Donnie looked up as he pulled on Ward's clothes. Cam saw pain in his face, physical pain against which he was waging a mighty battle. Donnie was getting the headaches, Cam realized, the bad ones.

But Donnie refused to show weakness. He gritted his teeth against it. “I hope you'll forgive me for being a little intense at times,” he said, struggling for words. “It's just … it's how I perform best.” He extended his strong hand, and Cam grasped it tightly.

“I'm just glad you're on my team,” Cam said.

It was enough.

“Wally, you with us?”

Wally laughed. “Dude, I love to fly.”

*   *   *

Cam slouched as Donnie walked him out into the field. The chopper was still turned away in case of gunfire. Donnie marched Cam and Wally ahead of him, prisoner style, keeping his own face concealed behind Wally's red head. With his build and Ward's clothes, Donnie looked just like their personal trainer. Halfway across the field, he even gave one of Ward's hand signals. The chopper blades still rotated so that the bird was ready to lift off, but the trio was able to approach within fifty yards before Pilot realized it wasn't Ward and fired up the engines.

They broke and ran across the uneven ground. Donnie and Wally were amazingly fast, but running was one thing Cam could do just as well, and he flew with them, unenhanced, through the grass, past the wounded or dying mercenaries. Perhaps one day everyone would be enhanced, Cam thought. Then he wouldn't be fast anymore. But he also wondered what the point of having enhanced athletes or soldiers would be if their opponents were enhanced too.

Pilot wasn't enhanced. He hadn't recognized Donnie soon enough, and he didn't react quickly enough. Wally and Donnie leaped onto the chopper's skids before he was clear. Cam thought he could hear Wally howling maniacally, or it might have just been the whine of the engine. Cam jumped too. And he fell short.

“No!” But his voice was lost in the thumping of the blades.

He stood quickly. It was too late. The helicopter rose beyond his reach. It struggled with the weight of the two boys hanging on one side, but Pilot began to level it.

Cam stood and pulled out a length of chain with a heavy padlock tied to each end. A crude bolo, the same weapon with which Zara had taken him down his first day. Three quick swings, and he let it loose, throwing it as high as he could. It struck the rotors atop the cabin and disappeared into their invisible circle, whipping around and around with the blades, its padlocks hammering the cabin with a machine gun cadence.

Up went the chopper, climbing into the sky. Donnie stood on the left skid and kicked out the window, while Wally wrenched the door from its hinges and Cam's chains beat the rotors to hell. They continued to rise until the only thing Cam could see was the trajectory of the fading chopper as it banked in a lazy arc and descended into the jungle canopy. The sound of the impact was distant, a muffled
whump
not unlike the bullet of an AR-15 hitting the loam of the forest floor. If there was a fireball, he didn't see it. Didn't want to.

Cam squeezed his eyes shut. Moments later, he felt a hand on his back.
Siena.

“Can I hold you?” she whispered in his ear.

“Yes.”

 

CAM'S PLAYLIST

42. WE'RE ALONE TOGETHER
  

by The Flat Earth Society

 

 

 

 

“No such thing as alone when I think of you.”

Cam and Siena worked their way down the steep hill to the oceanfront clearing a few miles southeast of the TS-9 compound. Trees had been cleared in a circle fifty yards inland to create a helicopter landing zone, and a small bunkhouse was hidden in the foliage nearby. The Zodiac was pulled up onto the shore and hidden in brush as well.
Our ticket to civilization.
There was no beach. The forest spilled directly into the water, eroding heavily, its green trees doing battle with the blue sea, and losing.

Two hours earlier, Dr. Singh's assistant technician had furnished them with the location the landing site. Not at first, but Singh's death had convinced him. Cam hadn't needed to ask or even participate—he'd simply walked out of the room and left his unsmiling doctor with Donnie. When he'd returned, Singh was gone, and his helper was more cooperative.

The techie was good for more than just directions. Hacking computer passwords might have been something people only did in the movies, but getting someone to cough one up was entirely possible, and the panicked man had given it up so fast that Siena hadn't even had time to threaten him.

With the help of a printer with a scanner, Ari's diary was quickly turned into a computer file. Cam omitted the pages with Jules's personal details. There was no general access to the Internet, but there was an e-mail function of sorts, and Cam knew his friend Mason's address.

Their message included the diary, doctor's notes, incriminating protocols, and instructions to Mason to forward the information anonymously to the USDA and every other drug regulation agency and media outlet he and Siena could think of. Cam had no way to know if they would take it seriously, but Siena convinced him it was worth a try. Multiple watchdog organizations were to receive copies too, along with the governments of Suriname and Brazil, who could find the facility within a few hours, long before the organization could arrive and scrub the site. The e-mail was sent with photos they took on a camera they found in storage. Cam included one of himself so Mason would know it was all legit. He signed the message simply: “Deathwing.”

The tech doc was a good talker. He would spill everything when the government arrived. They left him alive. Singh and the other doc, Siena's killer, had been a tougher call, and Cam had agonized over it. But Donnie had saved him the moral dilemma. “I knew you couldn't do it, pal,” he'd said after it was done. “And I know you don't approve. But just think of it this way: they're killing a lot of people. With them gone, we're a lot of lives in the plus column.”

And Ward … Cam still wasn't sure whether he was good, bad, or somewhere in between. They gave him the benefit of the doubt and left him for the authorities to sort out. He'd have some explaining to do, Cam thought.
The picture of him and the tech sitting in front of row after row of open drawers with teenage bodies is going to require all of his communication skills.

They left Ward locked in Cam's drawer, and the assistant in Siena's. Cam worried that they might get claustrophobic, but not for very long.

As they readied the Zodiac for their trip along the coast to find the nearest village or town, Cam took inventory of their packs. He still had his headphones and player, and Siena still had the diamonds. The jewels would serve them well when they reached civilization. Siena had been right about that too.

He looked up to find her staring at him. He clicked the
PLAY
button, and “We're Alone Together” drifted up faintly from the earbuds in his hand.

“Are you still having headaches?” he asked her.

“Not so much anymore.”

“Now that you're off of it, maybe you'll survive.”

“Cross fingers.” She paused, thoughtful. “I'm going to miss it, though. The enhancement I mean.”

“You don't need it. I like you normal.”

She smiled.

But Cam frowned. “I've always been just some normal guy. I never got to be special.”

“True,” Siena said, nodding. “You're just some nice, normal guy who fought his way through the Amazon jungle and saved me from a murderous international corporation, unenhanced.”

Cam laughed.

“And you kissed a dead girl,” Siena added.

“Why on earth would you bring that up right now?”

“Because I'm alive.…”

Cam smiled. He slid one earbud into her ear and one into his own, and then they kissed. A lot.

 

EPILOGUE

The Western Washington University campus looked just the way Cam had left it—green and dripping from rain, with students scurrying past on their way to calculus, the gym, and the student union building. He stared out from beneath his hoodie. A month of facial hair obscured his jawline, and even kids he knew walked past without giving him a second glance. They laughed and chattered about their futures as though he had never existed at all.
The world just went on without me.

Mason's dorm sat at the far south end of campus.

Cam had thought, had hoped, there would be stories about the organization in the news. Big stories. A huge pharmaceutical corporation crashing down as a result of his e-mails to Mason containing the details of the TS operation. There weren't. Clearly, his friend had thought it was a hoax and hadn't sent them on.

But he would remedy that. Cam grinned. His appearance was going to be quite a surprise to Mason. He had debated visiting his family first, but their shock would be greater, and he wasn't ready for the emotional turmoil. His childhood friend was a good test run.

The benefit of a quiet dorm was that it was quiet. When Cam stepped into the Buchanan Towers lobby he saw only a boy in sunglasses and a girl with a book in her face, and they looked away as quickly as he did.
Serious academic types
, Cam thought.

Cam took the elevator to the fifth floor and knocked at Mason's room. No answer. He didn't hesitate; the technique Ward had taught him to force a door had him inside in less than a minute.