Subject Seven (7 page)

“Really, George, why didn't I just have them killed and be done with it?”

George let one of his little half smiles show for a second. “Because you were trying to look nice and clean for that General Saunders at the time.”

“Oh, pish. I should have let you handle the details.” She waved her hands as if trying to dispel an unexpected stench.

“Live and learn, Evelyn.”

“Too true. Very well, why don't we find Martin and bring him in for a conversation?”

“Should I bring in Dan as well?”

Evelyn shook her head. “Not yet. It's possible that they simply got lucky at the track or some such; best to let him think we aren't keeping tabs until we have to let him know, don't you think?”

George reached past her and picked up her phone. She watched his fingers race across the numbers and pretended to ignore him telling one of the teams to grab Martin as discretely as possible. Discretion was a good thing, especially in their business.

When the call was done, George looked at her and waved his fingers. “That should be that. I'll keep you posted.”

“What on earth would make them start talking after all this time, George?”

“Some people forget how close the past is, Evelyn.”

She nodded and steepled her fingers, resting her chin against the tips of her manicured nails for a moment. George stayed where he was. He knew when she was thinking and when she was done with him, which was still another reason she had kept him around so long.

“Just to be safe, George, I want you to move the main warehouse to a new location. And I think it's time we got rid of the old compound. I don't want any connections to those days.”

He sniffed. “If you think it's necessary.”

“You brought this to my attention, dear boy, not the other way around.”

“Touché.” He left the room a moment later. Evelyn watched him leave, never moving from her seat.

If someone was digging into the past, there might be serious repercussions for the company.

Only a handful of people knew where all of the bodies were buried. One of them she trusted. Two of them had recently gotten an unexpected bonus from an undisclosed source.

“Unacceptable.” She spoke aloud only because she liked the sound of her own voice. “Absolutely unacceptable. I'll not have anyone ruining what we've worked for.”

HUNTER DIDN'T WAIT AROUND. He woke up and checked his surroundings. It was the same sleazy hotel he'd been in the last time he'd been awake. That was all he needed by way of information.

Maryland wasn't home. That was somewhere in Boston. He had family, he probably had friends. Okay, he couldn't remember them, but maybe they'd remember him, help him realize who he was supposed to be and get him away from whoever it was that was trying to force him to play private detective.

Anything was better than waking up alone and scared in a different place all the time.

The tape recorder sat where it always did. He ignored it and unlocked the door, squinting against the bright sunlight of another day. A quick search of his pockets yielded almost a hundred dollars. Enough for food and maybe a bus ticket to Boston.

“Anything. Please, God, anything is better than this.”

The bus ticket cost more than he hoped, but he had enough left to get a cheap burger and a Pepsi that was watered down and flat. It tasted better than he expected because he felt something he'd almost forgotten about. He felt hope. He was finally going home. He was going to get the answers he needed to—

His leg throbbed with dull agony and he reached down and found a chain wrapped twice around his ankle like a dog leash. He stared at it for a few seconds and then wrangled his foot out of the chain. It might have been a problem, but the links were loose enough to let him manage the feat with minimal effort.

He looked around and felt his heart sink in his chest. “You gotta be kidding me.”

The same room. He was back where he'd been before. There was one difference: the mirror had been broken over the desk, and the note written for his attention was scrawled across the plywood backing for the glass.

PLAY ME! He looked at the note, sighed and reached over to the recorder. A moment later, the voice started up again.

He had learned to hate the voice already.

“What? Are you retarded? Do you have a death wish? Do you really want to stay in the dark forever? I can arrange that, Hunter. I can make sure you never remember a damned thing.” The voice didn't yell, but it was low, menacing and very obviously angry. He smiled at that thought, taking pleasure from inconveniencing his captor.

“You listen to me, Harrison. You get the information I asked for. There's a laptop under the bed. Use it. Surf the Internet; check them out. Learn about them and leave me the details. Like I said before, I don't have the time for this and you won't get what you want until I'm happy. Guess what, loser. Right now I'm about a million miles from Happy Land. Don't piss me off, Hunter. You don't even know how bad I can make it for you.”

Hunter listened and felt his blood pressure rise until his ears rang. “You better watch who you threaten.” His voice shook, not with fear but with fury. He'd been so close! The last thing he remembered was crossing the state line into New Jersey and counting his change so he could maybe grab another soda at the next rest stop.

“Before you get any more stupid ideas about spending my money, I've hidden it all away. You won't find anything. You got nothing. You don't even have the money for a newspaper, loser. There's two cans of spaghetti and there's water in the closet. Do your job the right way and the food will look better next time around.”

The tape went silent.

And Hunter went postal.

He screamed and thrashed and cursed his captor. He punched at the wall because he couldn't find the voice's owner, and the impact scraped his knuckles bloody. That was okay—the pain was just another reason to be furious. He'd find the source of the voice! He'd find it and he'd destroy it!

If he'd had a gun and a target, he'd have killed the man who left the recordings. His hatred was a growing, living thing that wanted out, wanted to burn everything in his path. He cursed the man and demanded that he show himself, knowing full well that the bastard was too cowardly to ever answer the challenge.

It didn't make sense! The bastard was watching him somehow. He'd checked the last hotel room and this one too, looking for cameras, trying to understand how the man could knock him unconscious and keep him that way without even trying, and so far he'd found nothing. When he finally calmed down, he pulled out the computer and powered it up. The names were taped to the top of the case. He thought about his options for all of ten minutes and then he started searching for information.

It was a puzzle; he knew that. He understood that he was dealing with pieces of a bigger mystery and that he was being given only a handful of clues to work with.

His enemy hadn't thought of one important thing.

He was good at puzzles.

At least he thought so.

He still couldn't remember enough of his past.

For now he would do as he was told. But only for now. There would be other chances to escape. When they came around, he'd take them.

HE'D BEEN ON THE GO for almost fifteen hours without stopping, without resting. His hands ached from the business he'd taken care of only an hour earlier.

Poor Dan had an accident. Pity, really. He hadn't held any malice for Dan. He just needed to know that what the man knew was going to stay secret. So he'd waited for him outside of his home and then he'd removed the last person who knew his secret before he could start flapping his gums. Then he drove Dan's vehicle all the way to New York and then into the Hudson River. He wore gloves the entire time.

And it seemed like he was wise to get rid of the evidence. Somebody had taken Marty Hanson from his home in the middle of the night. Just come and pulled him out of his home and left his family wondering what had happened. It very well could have been the people who had kept him prisoner for ten long years.

He wondered how Hunter would feel about waking up in another strange town. It probably meant the fool would be ready to run again. “Poor Hunter,” he mumbled. “I think you're actually getting desperate enough to be stupid.”

He looked at the darkened streets around him and felt no fear. Fear, he knew, was for the weak. He was strong, oh, so very much stronger than the would-be predators around him.

The Bronx was alive but slumbering around him. Only a few of the more foolhardy people who called it home were awake. It was a weeknight, so the rest caught up on their sleep in preparation for another day of work or school. Seven could hear them in their rooms, sleeping or talking softly with lovers or even reading a book.

A window across the street showed him his reflection: a dark-haired teenager with broad shoulders and a face half hidden by shadows.

He looked at his watch and felt his lips peel away from his teeth. The three punks who'd been eyeing him like maybe he needed to be separated from his wallet suddenly thought better of messing with him.

Pity,
he thought.
I could have used a little exercise.

The heat of the day was still in the air, but he knew it couldn't last much longer. Autumn was creeping in fast and the air temperature was bound to drop by at least fifteen degrees before the night was over.

He checked the time on his watch. Eleven p.m. That felt like about the right point to start everything going.

“Wake up!” he called out, his deep voice loud and clear as it cut through the darkness and the miles of distance that separated them. He called out with his voice because he liked to hear himself. He called out with his mind at the same time.

He listened with his mind, the same as he'd called out with his mind and not just his vocal cords. There was silence at first and he wondered if everything poor, dead Daniel had told him was a lie. He hadn't thought too hard about that before he took care of business and maybe he should have.

Then he felt it, heard it, the tentative sound of their thoughts, their inner voices. They awoke to the sound of his call.

There were more than he had honestly expected and it took a few seconds to sort out the voices and the noise. Most of them were in their bedrooms, but a few were up and walking about. He didn't know where they were, but he could sense that some were closer and others were a great distance away. Of course that didn't guarantee that all of them would show up when the time came.

“Who's there?” The voice that came to him was closer than he expected, and though the others didn't ask, he could sense them listening. Could they hear each other? He wasn't sure. Perhaps, but he didn't think so. He thought they could hear what he let them hear.

“Me.” Did he have a name? He had to think about that for a minute. No. No he did not. He'd need one.

“Who's ‘me'?”

He thought about where he was, where he was standing as he spoke through the darkness of night and sent his words to them. The building he leaned against, for all its slow degradations, would work for a good first name. St. Joseph's cathedral was a beautiful building and he could live with the name Joe.

“Call me Joe Bronx.”

“Okay.” Another one spoke up. Her voice was soft but held an edge. “So who am I?”

He shrugged and then remembered they couldn't see him. At least he didn't think they could. He hadn't ever consciously linked to others before. When he was a child, the linking had been instinctual. Part of him thrilled to feel them again, the others out there, the ones that were at least a little like him. “You'll have to figure that out for yourself. I can't help you with that part. Not yet.”

“Why did you wake me?”

“You've been asleep for a long, long time. Don't you think you're overdue for waking up?”

“Where am I?”

“I have no idea. You'll figure that out all on your own.”

“What do you want from me?”

Joe Bronx smiled. “Ahhh . . . That's the very question I was waiting for.”

THE SOUND OF THE garbage truck rumbling a few feet down the alley woke Gene Rothstein from his troubled sleep. He opened one eye first and looked around, seeing garbage, graffiti-covered brick walls and a rat gnawing on what might have been a piece of donut.

That woke him up in a hurry. He should have been looking at his bedroom wall and the poster of Lindsay Lohan in a bikini, not at a brick wall or a half-starved rodent.

“Ahh!” Under the circumstances, it was the best thing he could come up with to say.

Gene stood up, wincing at the pain in most of his muscles, and did his best to figure out exactly why he was in a strange alleyway. To add to the fun, he wasn't even dressed in his pajamas. Instead he was wearing a ratty pair of blue jeans, shoes that felt too large for his feet and a T-shirt that fluttered around his narrow shoulders in the stale wind that blew across him.

“Ahh!” He looked around again, desperate for anything that looked familiar. There was nothing.

“Oh, shit, Mom's gonna have a cow.” He muttered the words under his breath as he started for the closest exit from the alleyway. The rat looked at him indifferently and kept eating its breakfast.

Gene looked around at the buildings on the other side of the street and felt his stomach churn a bit. He had no idea where he was, but Cioffi's Transmissions across the way didn't even come close to looking familiar.