Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (30 page)

We are almost ready for your next run,
the Sorcerer said. The link connecting them was more powerful than speech, conveyed emotion with a clarity that no expression or tone could match. Jawid’s fear was as thick as summer fog, riding on a current of desperation so keen that Ninip stirred, reaching back up the link toward the Sorcerer.

Schweitzer felt the jinn extending himself, his presence reaching out for the emotions that filtered down the link from Jawid. Ninip dipped into Jawid’s fear, coiling around it, using it as Schweitzer had used Sarah’s rosewater scent, a path that could be followed back to its source. Schweitzer felt Jawid recoil from Ninip’s exploration, and he reached out to push Ninip back. The jinn resisted briefly, but Schweitzer was much too strong for him now.

What’s the op?
Schweitzer asked.

It is back to the Baluch,
Jawid said.
Near to where you were . . .

I know where it is, Jawid. I’ve been there enough. I thought I made myself clear. This is a partnership now. You don’t call the op and send me. We call it together. That’s how this goes.

The Sorcerer was silent.

Where’s Eldredge?
Schweitzer asked.
Get him back in here.

He is coming soon,
Jawid said.
I wanted to talk with you first.

The Sorcerer’s fear traveled down the link with such strength that Schweitzer felt buffeted by it. There were two ways to deal with a frightened man, go nuclear and cow him, or go easy and make him feel safe. Both were dependent on the subject’s personality, both carried risks, and both were disastrous if you guessed wrong as to what the other person needed.

Schweitzer made his choice.
You can tell me, Jawid. I’m not about to go tattling on you to Eldredge.

The Sorcerer hesitated. Schweitzer felt the moment balance on a knife’s edge. Either Jawid would shut the link and cut the connection, or he would talk.

I know I can trust you,
Jawid said.
I am less sure about him.

Ninip?
Schweitzer asked.
He’s done.
He felt a pulse of anger from the jinn at that but no movement.

I . . . wanted to talk to you,
Jawid went on.
We are both prisoners here.

Schweitzer muffled his surprise. He could feel the vibration of the link that connected them, understood that as Jawid’s emotions were flowing to him, his were flowing in reverse. Was the Sorcerer as powerful as Ninip when the jinn was in control of their shared body? Ninip had been able to read Schweitzer’s thoughts and emotions with ease. He didn’t know if Jawid had the same ability. Schweitzer had only ever known the steady rhythm of their communication, Jawid faithfully translating until he faded into the background, Schweitzer barely noticing he was there.

I can’t imagine that they’d want someone with your abilities having weekends off,
Schweitzer said, hoping Jawid couldn’t see into Schweitzer’s mind, discover that Schweitzer was attempting to manipulate the Sorcerer into opening up.

I am given my rest,
Jawid said,
but I am always watched.

Schweitzer felt Jawid push his consciousness down the link between them, pressing into Schweitzer’s thoughts, trying to white out his vision so he could tell another of his picture stories. This time, Schweitzer pushed back, closing himself off and forcing Jawid to recoil back into himself.

He felt the Sorcerer’s shock. Schweitzer was getting better at this whole being-dead thing.

No,
Schweitzer said.
You don’t walk into my mind anymore. You want to tell me something, then tell me.

I was going to show you my home, where they keep me.

I’m sure it’s very nice.

I have seen your home. Before the attack. From pictures, not from invading your mind. I swear it.

I believe you.
Schweitzer realized that he did believe him, that he could feel the honesty vibrating through the link that connected them. There was so much to learn about how this new unlife worked, about what he could do.

I think we are the same this way,
Jawid said.
Denied family. You asked me about the girl you saw . . . in my mind, back in COP Garcia.

You said that she was lost to you, that it was pointless to look over your shoulder.

Schweitzer could feel Jawid’s embarrassment.
Before the Talebs took me, I was promised, betrothed. I would be married now were I still in my homeland. I will never have her now, or the children that would have come of it. We have both lost loved ones.

Schweitzer felt his anger spike at the comparison. He felt Jawid shrink from the rage resonating up the link to him. Schweitzer hauled on the emotion like a line, brought it in.

Schweitzer calmed himself with an effort, then spoke.
It’s not the same thing. I lost people I’d built a life with. You’re mourning a vision that might never have come to pass.

Of course, I’m sorry.
Schweitzer could feel Jawid’s anger giving the lie to his conciliatory words, mingled with disappointment. The Sorcerer wasn’t sorry. Jawid wanted something else out of this conversation.

What was her name?
Schweitzer asked.
The girl you were betrothed to.

Jawid’s shock resonated down the link. The Sorcerer clearly hadn’t been expecting the question. It took him a long time to answer.
Anoosheh. She was called Anoosheh.

You ever see her?

I think I did, once. My father beat me for that.

Schweitzer knew enough of Jawid’s culture to understand that seeing unmarried women was forbidden. Children could get away with it, but by the end of adolescence, a woman’s skin exposed to sunlight was treated like pure gold and toxic waste in equal measure.

Beat you badly, huh?
Schweitzer asked.

I lived.
Jawid’s voice was light, but Schweitzer could feel the pain in the memory.

Why are you talking to me about this?
Schweitzer asked.
Can’t you . . . you know . . . talk to someone alive?

They force me to talk to their psychologist,
Jawid said.
I meet her each week. She is kind.

That help?

She is . . . her questions . . . She is not seeking to help me. She is seeking to keep me calm. To know my intentions. To ensure that I keep working, that I do not flee.

Schweitzer had been off to see the wizard enough to know that the psych docs’ open smiles and soft voices could never conceal their mission: to determine if you were still fit to keep the government’s secrets and to do its dirty work.

You didn’t need magic to see that.

My guards do not speak with me,
Jawid went on.
The analysts here do not even use their real names.

Eldredge?

Eldredge is . . . all that man does is work. I have never seen him sleep. I have never seen him gone from here for more than a few hours. He is a machine.

So, you’ve got nobody to talk to. You want a buddy, is that it?
Schweitzer asked, but he knew it wasn’t. The emotions traveling down the link told him that Jawid wanted something specific. He was feeling Schweitzer out.

I thought . . . you are a father,
Jawid said.
I thought you would understand.

I was a father,
Schweitzer replied,
and that’s why I do understand. Family is everything.

And as Schweitzer said it, his own words rocked him.

All those years, his pride in his profession, his commitment to his art. Lying beside Sarah as she drifted off to sleep, fearing that loving her would strip away all in the world that made him great.

All of it possible because of her and Patrick. Her standing at the top of the stairs to her loft studio, grinning down at him. Patrick, before he could walk, seated in his pack and play, cooing and reaching. Each after action, Schweitzer marinating in the realization of what he’d done. What he’d accomplished. What he’d endured. Telling himself he was hard, that it didn’t matter, that he could shrug it off.

It had been Sarah and Patrick, hadn’t it? Before Sarah, he had been strong by leaning on his brothers and sisters in the teams. And after, he’d leaned on her. Even as he’d told himself he was being strong for her. His family was the foundation on which everything he’d achieved rested.

Sarah and Patrick, always.

Peter’s face flashed before him. Schweitzer remembered being chased by a dog as a little boy, running into his brother’s arms. Peter had swung him into the air and into safety. In a way, he’d never let him go.
Proud of you, bro.

That no person made it on their own was hammered into SEALs from the first day of training. They were a band, they were a team. They won together or they fell together. They left no man behind.

Always leaning. Always.

He’d never truly appreciated it until this moment. Now that family was utterly beyond him, he finally understood their significance.

Family is everything,
Schweitzer said again, and this time he let the emotion kindled by those words, his amazement at how much his family meant to him, reverberate up the link to the Sorcerer. He felt the emotion touch Jawid, envelop him. He felt Jawid respond to the feeling that he had never known, had always desired, savoring it much as Ninip savored fear and pain. This was a thing Jawid and Schweitzer shared, uniting them through the silent language that all men knew, the love of home and hearth and of the ones who came up with us.

Jawid had wanted to know what it was to have a family of his own, and now he felt it through Schweitzer. The Sorcerer drowned in the sensation and dropped his guard entirely. The link between Schweitzer and Jawid opened wide, the fear momentarily dissipating and leaving the link as wide as a corridor, a tunnel between their two souls.

Without knowing what he was doing, Schweitzer stepped into the link, pushed his presence up the channel of communication with Jawid, following the instincts of his new existence, flowing like water through the path of least resistance.

Schweitzer found himself in two places at once. Half of him remained in his own corpse, locking Ninip firmly in place as the jinn leapt to follow him. The other half of Schweitzer’s consciousness passed up through the link and into Jawid’s consciousness.

Jawid felt Schweitzer’s invasion of his inner space. The Sorcerer ripped himself from his reverie, his rapture shifting to anger, surprise, and panic. He pushed madly against Schweitzer, trying to force him back down the link that connected them.

But Schweitzer would not be moved. Jawid lay open to him, his thoughts and memories bare, just as Schweitzer had been vulnerable to Ninip when they first woke up together, sharing Schweitzer’s corpse. This was what Ninip must have seen. This was what it must mean to be the jinn in another’s form. Schweitzer could feel the sense of violation, the gut-wrenching revulsion gripping Jawid. This violation, the raping of memory and experience had been the worst of what Schweitzer had suffered since he’d been paired with the jinn. He knew that to delve into Jawid’s mind was cruel.

But Jawid was part of the reason that pairing had happened in the first place.

The Gemini Cell had been a labyrinth since Schweitzer had awoken under its thrall. He had backed Eldredge into a reluctant partnership, held him there only through the promise of his future utility. And now Jawid came to him with another op decided on, Schweitzer’s cooperation assumed. What else would he do? What else was there he could do? He was a monster, a dead thing created to make more dead things.

The truth wasn’t much, but it was something. Maybe that it was different from what he had was enough.

Schweitzer reached out, felt the membrane of Jawid’s memories resist him, felt the Sorcerer’s defenses shift from the futile attempt to push him out of his body to a scrambled defense of his mind.

Too little, too late.

Schweitzer plunged into the stream of Jawid’s thoughts. The images of Jawid’s memories flashed through Schweitzer’s mind now, all but blotting out his vision, faster and more vivid than they had ever been in any communication Jawid had willingly sent.

Schweitzer replayed Jawid’s memories. He saw through Jawid’s eyes as the Sorcerer stood in the command center beside Eldredge, watching the silver triangle that represented Schweitzer’s movements track across a map sketched out in black and glowing green. Schweitzer flashed to another memory of Jawid standing beside Eldredge and a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt, talking animatedly over an open file with Schweitzer’s picture paper clipped to one corner. His psych reports. The young woman was a “human terrain” analyst, trying to predict Schweitzer’s motivations, to explain to Eldredge why Schweitzer thought the way he did, to decode who he was.

As with all of the analysts, she was young, plucked from one of the best schools in the nation. Jawid’s memory told Schweitzer that the Sorcerer had been terrified of her, obscenely aroused by her. Schweitzer realized that Jawid had been thrust from a world in which he never saw women at all into a daily routine where he was surrounded by them, and in dress that in his homeland would have been considered scandalous.

And as with all of the analysts, her name was not her own. Jawid called her Jack.

Schweitzer didn’t stick around to learn more, he pushed further back through Jawid’s memories, going deeper into the Sorcerer’s past, not sure what he was looking for, pulled on by the satisfaction of finally learning about the events surrounding his resurrection.

Schweitzer left that memory and moved to another one. Jawid red-faced and arguing with Eldredge.
I did everything you asked me!
Jawid had said.
It is not such a great request. Let me go back, just for a night. You can send soldiers with me.

Eldredge’s sad eyes, looking old and tired.
I’m sorry. We can’t risk that. You know I’ll push for it. I’ve been pushing for it. We’ll get there Jawid. You just have to be patient.