Chapter 21 #2
The air smelled different here. Not antiseptic and fear. It smelled of leather, furniture polish, and money.
Disgust curled in my stomach, hot and wet.
Down below, somewhere in the concrete basement, men like me were strapped to tables, having their minds wiped blank with electricity and chemicals. Up here, twelve floors above the screaming, the architects of that hell sat in climate-controlled luxury.
They made monsters in the basement and profited in the penthouses.
“Dresner’s office.” Hellhound signaled, hand slicing through the air. “End of the hall.”
We moved. I took the rear, MP5 raised, scanning the empty corridor. My tactical programming whispered angles and drag vectors. But underneath the programming, a deeper, colder memory began to itch at the base of my skull.
We stopped at a heavy oak door. No handle this time. Just a sleek biometric scanner glowing a soft, malevolent red.
“Ninety seconds,” Havoc whispered, already sliding a decoder interface over the pad. His fingers flew. “If his encryption is as pretentious as his decor, maybe sixty.”
I turned my back to them, watching the hallway. The silence wasn’t empty, it was heavy.
Flash.
I was standing here. Right here. My hands were clasped behind my back. My head was shaved, the air cold against my scalp. Waiting.
Enter, Blackout.
The voice in my memory was calm. Possessive.
You’re my finest work.
My hands tightened on the weapon until the polymer bit into my skin. Rage, sudden and white-hot, flooded my chest, warring with sickening horror. I had been his pride. His pet monster.
“Got it.”
The lock chirped. Heavy tumblers engaged with a solid thud, and the door swung inward.
Havoc gestured us in.
The office was a cavern. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls exposed the weeping night sky over Geneva, the city lights blurred by the relentless sleet.
Rain lashed the glass, silent and impotent against the insulation.
Inside, massive leather furniture sat arranged around a desk that looked less like a workspace and more like an altar.
One wall was dedicated to ego. Framed photographs. Dresner shaking hands with senators. Dresner with generals. Dresner accepting awards from scientific bodies.
I recognized faces. I couldn’t place names, but I knew the shapes of their jaws, the medals on their chests.
“Havoc, the terminal. Xavier, watch the door. I’ll sweep the files.”
“Encrypted. This will take eight minutes. Don’t rush me.”
Hellhound moved to a wall of filing cabinets, sliding drawers open.
I didn’t move to the door.
My feet felt leaden. Weighted magnets pulled me toward the center of the room, toward that massive desk. Familiarity, sickening and deep, tugged at my gut.
“Xavier?” Hellhound stopped, his hand on a file. “You good?”
I stared at the leather chair behind the desk.
“I’ve been here before. I’ve stood right here.”
Flash.
The carpet under my boots. The smell of scotch. Dresner looking up, his pen hovering over a document.
Report.
Target neutralized. No witnesses.
“Reporting. I stood here and reported.”
From the computer, Havoc didn’t look up. “Muscle memory. Your body remembers the trauma even if your brain dumped the data. Don’t let it freeze you.”
I forced my legs to move. I approached the desk not like a soldier, but like an animal approaching a trap.
Papers were scattered across the mahogany surface. Not tidy. An active workspace. Files, notes in precise handwriting, a half-empty tumbler of water.
And a photograph.
It was lying face-down near the edge of the blotter.
My hand reached for it. I didn’t tell it to. It moved.
I flipped the photo over.
Green beret. Formal dress uniform. A confident, cocky grin that reached eyes that were bright, clear emerald.
My breath hitched. “That’s me.”
Hellhound abandoned the cabinets. He crossed the room in three strides. “Before?”
I nodded, unable to speak. I stared at the stranger who wore my face. He looked whole. He looked arrogant and alive and unbroken.
Underneath the photo lay a manila folder. The edges were worn soft from handling. It was thick.
The label on the tab was typed in stark black ink.
SUBJECT 4 - BLACKOUT - QUINTA GENERATION - MALFUNCTIONED
“Why would he keep hard copies?” Havoc asked, his fingers still dancing over the keyboard. “Everything’s digital now. Cloud storage. Encrypted drives.”
“Dresner’s old school. Paranoid. You can’t hack paper.”
I opened the folder. My hands were shaking, and it wasn’t just the neurological tremor.
More photos spilled out.
First, a military ID. Master Sergeant Xavier Hale.
Then, a mugshot. My face, but harder. Angry. A black eye blooming on the cheekbone.
Then, the after.
A photo taken in a clinical room. My head was shaved. Surgical staples ran up the side of my neck. My eyes were open, but there was no light in them. Dead. Vacant.
“Jesus,” Havoc muttered, glancing over. “He kept trophies.”
“Not trophies. Study material. Look at the notes.”
I looked. The margins were filled with handwriting. The ink was dark, fresh. He had been writing on this recently.
Dresner’s script was precise, sharp, clinical.
I read the words, and my blood turned to ice.
“Subject 4. Excessive emotional attachment. Sister: Maeve Durham, journalist.”
The room went silent. The only sound was the rain hitting the glass and the soft clack-clack of Havoc’s typing.
I forced myself to continue. “Vulnerability exploited during breakdown. Recommend: terminate family connections in future subjects to prevent emotional compromise.”
Rage, pure and blinding, roared in my ears.
“He was going to kill her.”
“He knew. He knew about Maeve the whole time. She wasn’t just... she was a target.”
I thought of the name in my head. Maeve. The sister I couldn’t remember but felt an instinctive pull toward. She had been hunting for me. And because of that, because she loved me, Dresner had marked her for death.
“He’s been studying you. Trying to figure out what went wrong. These files, he was actively reviewing them. Validating his hypothesis.”
Hellhound picked up another file from the chaotic spread on the desk. “Ghost. Cerberus. Hades. All the dead Quinta operatives.” He flipped one open. It was covered in the same red ink annotations. “He’s trying to perfect the process. Learn from his mistakes.”
I stared at the picture of myself with the shaved head. “I’m not a person to him. I’m data. A failed experiment.”
“Six minutes left on the download. We need to move.”
“Why keep them here? In his office?”
“Control. He reviews them. Studies them. Reminds himself he’s smarter than his failures.”
“Archivist’s pride,” Havoc added, a dark edge of humor in his tone. “Every mad scientist needs proof of his genius.”
My eyes fell to the record sheet in my file.
Real Name: Xavier Hale
Military Service: U.S. Special Forces. Honorable Discharge.
Arrest: Armed Robbery, Aggravated Assault.
Margin Note: Fabricated. Oblivion recruitment protocol.
They framed me. They stole my life, erased my service, and locked me in a cage so they could take me out the back door.
My eyes tracked down.
Prison Timeline: Declared dead 4 months post-arrest. Cerebral hemorrhage.
Actual Timeline: Acquisition successful.
And then the number.
Missions Completed: 55
The world tilted.
“Fifty-five. I killed fifty-five people.”
Fifty-five lives. Fifty-five families destroyed. Fifty-five triggers pulled by the hands I used to touch Clare’s face.
The room spun. I gripped the desk to keep from falling.
Hellhound’s hand landed on my shoulder. Heavy. Grounding. “For him. Not for you. You didn’t choose this.”
I looked at him, my vision blurring. “Does that matter to the dead?”
He didn’t answer. There was no answer.
“Xavier, you need to see this.”
On the computer screen, files were scrolling past in a waterfall of data.
QUINTA GENERATION PROGRAM SUMMARY
Subject 1 - GHOST: DECEASED. Execution confirmed. Former Navy SEAL.
Subject 2 - CERBERUS: DECEASED. Execution confirmed. Former Marine Raider.
Subject 3 - HADES: DECEASED. Execution confirmed. Former SAS.
Subject 4 - BLACKOUT: MALFUNCTIONED. At Large. Former U.S. Special Forces.
“He killed them. Dresner executed his own operatives.”
“He’s cleaning house. You were next.”
“We were all soldiers. He took soldiers. Men who swore to protect. And he turned us into assassins. Then killed us when we broke.”
A wave of memory, triggered by the files, crashed into me.
The chair. The bite of leather straps. The smell of burning skin.
Dresner’s voice: “Pain is your teacher. Obedience is your salvation.”
Training. Hours of it. Knife work. Strange faces in scopes. The recoil of a rifle.
The water pumping station. The fall. The glitch.
I doubled over, gasping, burying the heels of my hands into my eyes to stop the images.
“Stay with us. We’re almost done.”
I forced myself upright. My chest was heaving. “How much longer?”
“Three minutes.”
I gathered all the papers, pictures there was and shoved them inside my tactical vest. There would still be time later to look at them in detail.
Then the alarm sounded.
The alarm wasn’t a bell. It was a digital shriek that cut through the heavy silence of the office, vibrating in the glass walls and rattling my teeth.
“We’re blown. Havoc, finish the download. Xavier, cover the door.”
I moved. My body obeyed the command before my brain fully processed it.
“Thirty seconds. Encryption is putting up a fight. It’s slippery.”
“We don’t have thirty.”
“Done.” Havoc ripped the drive from the port. He shoved it into a tactical pouch. “Download complete. We need to move. Now.”
“Service elevator. Go.”
I turned and ran.
Chaos met us instantly.
At the far end of the corridor, near the elevators, tactical lights blinded us. Shouts erupted. “Contact! Contact front!”
Suppressed gunfire coughed through the air. Pfft-pfft-pfft.
Rounds chewed into the expensive wood paneling inches from my face, sending splinters flying like shrapnel.