The Clone Assassin (33 page)

I decided to take the stairs for the next few floors, preferring to enter and exit halls without the fanfare of flashing lights and sliding doors. I climbed to the fourth floor and found it empty, just like the one after that, and the one after that. When I reached the seventh floor, I found the lights on and doors open.

Having grown up in an orphanage and spent my adult life in barracks on bases, I’m never quite comfortable in luxury buildings or empty halls because the sounds that I associate with life tend to disappear in the air. My footsteps make no noise on the plush carpet. The walls squelch voices, the doors don’t creak. I approached the nearest open door and listened to silence. No one spoke, so I flitted down the hall, peering into doorways like a ghost haunting a castle.

The first apartment I passed seemed empty enough. The lights were off, leaving the room lit by whatever lingering daylight slipped in through an enormous window that faced east. It was late in the afternoon by that time, so the sun had already migrated to the west.

I stole into the apartment like a shadow and moved around the living room, looking for anything suspicious. I found nothing.

I had no idea what incriminating evidence I had hoped to find . . . a pallet of rocket launchers, a closet filled with armor, a Da Vinci–esque mural of Tobias Andropov and the Unified Authority Linear Committee eating their last supper.

I searched the bedrooms. The bed in the master bedroom was neatly made, its cover tight. Not so much as a wrinkle showed. The sinks in the master bathroom were dry.

Maybe they really were doing the same thing as me,
I thought, referring to the men I had killed in the lobby. Maybe they had come to search the building. Maybe they were scouts.

I checked the closets, the extra bedrooms, the kitchen. Nothing of interest. There was food in the pantry and milk in the fridge.

Sunny lived on the thirty-eighth floor. Less than a month had passed since I’d been shot; I didn’t feel like jogging thirty-one more flights, so I took the elevator instead.

The door opened, and I heard voices. There were men in the hall. They could have been civilians, of course, but I thought that the same thing that had attracted Sunny to the thirty-eighth floor might also interest officers from an invading army—the view. From her window, Sunny could look past George Washington University and catch little cerulean glimpses of the iron blue Potomac beyond. Sunny’s apartment faced west. Upper-floor apartments that faced east might well offer a strategic glimpse into neighboring boroughs like Cheverly and Landover.

In an era of satellites and stealth generators, hijacking an apartment building with a panoramic view might not seem like much, maybe only a petty victory; then again, I still wondered if they might have stashed something inside this building.

I stepped off the lift, saw two men chatting in the hall to my right, and turned left. I kept my arms loose, my hands out and to my sides. They hadn’t seen my face, and my height marked me as natural-born. The jacket might even have looked familiar to them. If those guys were Unified Authority general-issue, they might have known the man to whom this jacket had belonged.

In the quick glimpse I caught of them, I saw men in their thirties. Both had short hair. They paid no attention to me as I slipped away. Did that make them civilians?

Officially, I was running this unofficial op to search for Sunny.
Once you know that Sunny is out of the building and safe, what are you going to do?
I asked myself. I would explore. There were ten more floors above this one. I could search an apartment or two on this floor, then return to the elevator and ride it to a higher floor. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I wouldn’t consider my recon complete until I had visited the top ten floors.

I looked up the hall and saw Sunny’s door.

The door was closed. I didn’t have a key to her apartment—she’d never offered me one—but I had a foot with a boot on it.
That might make too much noise,
I told myself. Civilian or not, the two guys down the hall would come to investigate if they heard me kicking in a door.

They weren’t civilians, though. I wasn’t fooling anybody; they were U.A. For some reason, I wanted to make myself believe I was in neutral territory when I knew damn well I wasn’t. The two men I’d killed in the lobby weren’t residents. They’d had guns. Had I not caught them off guard, they would have made the first move, and I might have ended the day hidden behind the help desk instead of them.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the little pistols I had taken from the stiffs. I steeled myself to kick in the door and deal with the fallout, but I tried the knob first, and the door swung aside.

I felt the stirrings of a combat reflex as I entered Sunny’s apartment.

The lights were off. The room was silent. I saw familiar trappings, chairs on which I had sat, a sofa on which I had once spent an uncomfortable night, a dining-room table at which I had eaten. Looking through the window at the back, I saw the familiar view. At night, that part of the city lit up like a field of stars.

I had killed two men downstairs without giving much thought to it. I had explored multiple floors of a building on the edge of occupied territory. Now I stood on familiar turf, an apartment in which I had spent many nights, and my heart had begun beating like an African drum. I still had steady hands, but only because I had slipped into a combat reflex.

My body, and on some unconscious level my mind, had prepared for war. My Liberator DNA didn’t come with precognition that warned me about danger, but veterans of the battlefield learn to recognize premonitions from jitters. Soldiers either develop that talent, or they become statistics.

Most of my battlefield premonitions had been along the lines of the duck-and-jump variety. This was different. I couldn’t put my finger on what my emotions were telling me, but a moment later, a man dressed in combat armor stepped out of Sunny’s bedroom. In the moment before I killed him, I noticed something in his hands, a metallic cylinder about the size of a shoe box, maybe fifteen inches tall and six inches in diameter.

I’d experienced the gas that Unifieds carried in cylinders before. A whiff of that and my brain would reboot, almost as if I’d had an epileptic seizure. That was the first step to reprogramming, the only part of the reprogramming process that worked as effectively on me as on any other clone.

I should have shot the bastard. Hell, I still had that stealth pistol in my hand, but I was primed to fight and flat-out forgot about it. Instead, I charged at him, leaping over Sunny’s cream-colored leather sofa, and crashing into the bastard while he still had that cylinder in his hands. Had he shot me with his fléchette cannon or activated his shields, he would have won the fight before I got to him.

He looked up from the metal cylinder, and saw me hurdling the sofa. Then I landed on top of him, wedging my right forearm under his chin, hoping to crush his throat. He struggled to buck me off, but he didn’t activate his shields. Fighting for air, pushing against my face with his left hand, he raised his right arm. I was so focused on his shields that I’d forgotten about the fléchette cannon and barely managed to bat the arm away before he fired.

With my left arm pinning his right, my right arm across his throat, and his armored glove in my face, I didn’t have the situation under control. Trying to keep his eyes from connecting with the optic-controlled menu in his visor, I butted my head against his, knocking his helmet askew but hurting my head far more than his. All the while, the bastard kept digging his armor-plated knees into my thighs.

He rolled and turned his head, trying to right his visor so he could control its functions. Not especially strong, but protected from my knees and fists, the bastard had me beat even though he didn’t know it. He brought his right knee up, hoping to connect with my groin. He missed, but only because I swung to the right and rebalanced my weight higher up his body, rendering the arm I had pinned across his throat useless. I scrabbled for a purchase, hoping for a handhold I could grab to lock the bastard in place. He jerked his right arm back and forth, prying it out of my grip for just a moment, then he aimed that specking cannon at my knee. I swatted his arm away, but that gave him enough wiggle room to throw me to the floor.

I rolled away, sprang to my feet, and dashed to the front door while he causally sat and adjusted his helmet. I had dropped the pistol and the other one was buried in my pocket. As he stood, an orange-gold glow materialized around him, meaning that I no longer had the option of shooting the bastard.

Sunny wouldn’t thank me for what I did next, but I had no choice.

During our wrestling match, I’d liberated a grenade from the bastard’s belt. Running for the door, I pulled the pin from the grenade and dropped it.

The son of a bitch shot at me. The fléchette dug tiny holes in the wall ahead of me as I leaped behind the sofa and crouched to stay low. The guy was now toying with me. He was sealed from harm in his shielded armor and thought I had no place to run. About that, he was wrong. I counted to three, then sprang for the door, which I threw open and pulled closed behind me as I tumbled into the hall.

Even if he’d shut off his armor and found the grenade that I’d left on the floor behind the couch, what would the bastard be able to do with it? If he lowered his shield in time, he could open the door and jump out like I had . . . and I would shoot him as he entered the hall.

His armor would protect him from the shrapnel, but I had something else in mind.

I had sprinted forty feet down the hall by the time the grenade exploded, launching Sunny’s front door so hard that it stabbed through the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. Fire alarms screamed along the hall.

I stared into the room and saw what I’d expected to find. That Marine’s shielded armor might have protected him from shrapnel, but it wouldn’t stop the percussion from sweeping his armor-clad ass out through the window.
Happy landings,
I thought.

“Did you see what happened?”

I looked away from the bloodless carnage of Sunny’s living room. The two men I’d seen standing near the elevator had come to survey the damage.

I shook my head, and said, “Man . . . it looks like a grenade went off in there.”

“A grenade,” one of them repeated. “More like a bomb.”

A strong wind blew in through the shattered glass wall. Sunny’s leather furniture had been blown to shreds and splinters. The sofa had entirely disappeared, probably washed out the window with the U.A. Marine. Her entire dining-room set appeared to have suffered the same fate. Her desk and entertainment center, on the other hand, now existed only as unrecognizable piles of debris.

I checked the floor for the canister that bastard had been holding. Gone. Maybe he took it with him.

“Did you see anyone come in or out?” asked one of the looky-loos.

I shook my head.

Other people came to see what had happened, all dressed like civilians, all the right age to qualify as Marines.

With my brown hair and brown eyes and clone facial features, I did not want to wait around any longer than necessary. I backed away from the crowd as more men arrived. Keeping my head down and hoping not to be noticed, I entered a stairwell.

“Hey! Wait,” someone shouted in my direction. He quieted down quickly when I shot him between the eyes. I opened the door to the stairs, leaped the entire first flight, pushed off against the wall, and leaped the next one.

Sunny lived on the thirty-eighth floor, that left seventy-two more flights of stairs until I reached the bottom. I had not fully recovered from my experiences in the New Olympian Territories, and at this pace my knees would turn to jelly long before I reached the street.

I made my way down two or three floors before I heard the door open and the footfalls of the herd of men pounding after me. Had I had the presence of mind to steal a second grenade during my wrestling match, I would have dropped it on the stairs and escaped on the next floor. When a grenade goes off in the tight confines of a stairwell, few people survive.

I held my little gun out and ready. Two floors down, then four, then ten; my legs hurt, and my heart ran cycles it wasn’t meant to hit. My guts knotting like a rope, I ducked into the next doorway, not even bothering to see what floor I was on.

I stepped into an empty hall and closed the door behind me. Maybe the men who were chasing me would continue past this floor, but I doubted it. I checked the closest apartment and found the door locked. I could have kicked it in . . . maybe, and maybe I could have hung a sign in front of it that said
HE’S IN HERE
.

The next door was locked, and so was the one after that.

As I tried the next door, I heard the door to the stairwell open and ran as best I could toward the elevator. My strength mostly gone, I found an open door down the next hall and stepped into it.

If Sunny’s apartment was on the thirty-eighth floor, this one might have been somewhere in the high twenties. It looked out east into an extended cityscape and the flatlands beyond. With the pistol still in my right hand, I placed my left hand on to the armrest of a leather chair as I doubled over and forced air deep into my lungs.

I wasn’t sick in the
here comes the puke
sense, but my heart was pumping and my lungs burned. My head hurt, but I wasn’t dizzy.

If the Unifieds had followed me onto this floor, they could have stood right outside my door without my hearing them. The thick carpeting in the halls would absorb the sound of their footsteps. The doors and walls were designed for privacy.

I went to the bathroom and sipped water from the tap. I went to the bedroom, hoping for a change of clothes. All I found were dresses and lingerie.

I returned to the window for another look. Day had ended in the east, and night would soon settle on that horizon. A few streetlights had flickered to life. I didn’t know how long I would need to hold out. MacAvoy would have sent men to collect me by now. He’d probably come at the head of his column.