Hammer of Angels Read online

  This is why I check Brando with my vision Mods. If he shows in infrared, he’s Brando. If not, he’s Trick. Either way, my gut clenches and my palms sweat. It occurs to me I should’ve used my infrared on the subway slag last night. Next time for sure.

  Brando jabs the elevator’s up button. He pushes a curled lock of brown hair off his high forehead and says, “The Front Desk wants to see us. I thought we’d catch a minute beforehand.”

  All ExOps Levels and Info Operators, like me and Brando, have commphones implanted in our heads so we can talk during missions without making any sound. They’re also handy for private conversations at work.

  Brando comms, “Are you feeling all right? You look pale.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He silently stares at me.

  I narrow my eyes. “I’m fine! What does Cyrus want to see us about?”

  “This.” He presents his newspaper. The front page features a large picture under the headline “Metro Shoot-out Leaves One Dead.” The image looks like someone sloshed a modern art masterpiece all over the inside of a subway car.

  The elevator arrives. Since it’s midmorning, all the nine-to-fivers are safely ensconced in meetings, which leaves us to ride up alone. I read the article and hmph at the part about me vanishing into thin air. If only. There’s no point trying to fool Brando, or anyone else at ExOps for that matter. They always know when it was me, so I’ve learned to ignore the wrist slaps and bask in the attention.

  I give him his paper. “At least they got my gender right this time.”

  He takes his glasses off, wipes the lenses on his shirt, and addresses me by my field handle. “Scarlet, I wish you’d brought me in on this. I could’ve helped you maintain a lower profile.”

  “I know, but it was late. I didn’t wanna roust you outta your test tube.”

  “Jesus, Scarlet,” my partner barks, “I don’t sleep in a tube!”

  He’s right, of course, but sometimes I can’t resist teasing him about being a clone.

  Brando has the same handsome features as my first partner, Trick. But he isn’t quite as impervious to my cruel jibes as Trick was, especially about being a clone. El Brando is sensitive about that.

  Patrick Brandon Owens is a product of the Reproduction Using Asexual Cloning Heuristics program. RUACH replaced America’s original cloning program, the Asexual Reproduction Initiative, because the blockheads running ARI were spectacularly irresponsible about how they acquired cell samples from their Originals. All the ARI cell samples were destroyed, but the Patrick clones had already been incubated, so they were transferred to RUACH. Destroying incubated embryos was not an option. RUACH’s charter grants lab specimens the same rights as naturally conceived citizens. Basically, clones are people, too.

  This is all fine and dandy if you don’t fall in love with someone, witness their corporal dismemberment, and then meet their carbon copy. Every morning it’s like a kick in the stomach when I see him. The gruesome hallucinations don’t help, either. I try to play it cool, but I still get uptight and say stupid shit I don’t mean.

  Whenever I aggravated Trick, holding his hand was usually enough to cool him down. The first time I tried holding hands with Brando, he stared at me like I had two heads. It wasn’t that he minded, but he didn’t know it’s my way of saying “Hey, I’m sorry for whatever stupid dumb-ass thing I said or did.”

  Brando has received the same Mods as Trick, and he knows about all my missions. When he volunteered to be my new partner, the Med-Techs infused Brando with Trick’s archived memories of all the Job Numbers we’d pulled together.

  The hypnotic transfer process isn’t supposed to include nonwork experiences. This is part of ExOps’s privacy policy. The Meddies discard their subjects’ personal memories. Except Trick and I were much more than field partners, which means Brando “remembers” sleeping with me as vividly as I remember sleeping with someone who looks exactly like him.

  This is why I almost had a heart attack when he picked me up at the airport last November.

  The Front Desk—my boss, Cyrus—had planned to meet my flight personally so he could soften my introduction to Brando, but the White House called just as he was leaving. Cyrus had his secretary say he was unavailable, then continued down to the ExOps garage with Brando.

  They’d barely buckled their seat belts when a hulking black van blocked their exit. A gang of Secret Service agents escorted Cyrus out of his car and into their vehicle. President Jackson wasn’t taking no for an answer. Brando knew my flight was arriving soon, so he drove Cyrus’s car to fetch me by himself.

  Earlier, while Brando was remotely guiding me through our mission in Riyadh, I noticed his comm-voice sounded like Trick’s. That was our first time working together, and I only knew him by his field name, Darwin. I thought that maybe all Info Operators picked up the same accent from their training or that it was just my head fucking with me. It never occurred to me my new partner comms like Trick because he basically is Trick.

  While Brando drove me to ExOps headquarters, I shakily asked him who he was. He told me the CIA transferred him from the U.S. embassy in Berlin to ExOps’s German Section to replace Trick.

  “No, that’s where you came from,” I said. “Trick, er, I mean Solomon, didn’t have any family. Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m his brother,” Brando answered. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  He hesitated. “I’m sorry, Alix. Cyrus wanted to tell you all this. Solomon and I were incubated from the same genetic material.”

  “What?”

  “His full name was Patrick Allan Owens. He was selected to be your partner at ExOps. I went to Berlin as a diplomatic liaison. My other brother—Patrick Charles—works in Japan as a strategic analyst.”

  “There are three of you?”

  “Yes…well, no.” He took a long, shaky breath. “There’s only me and Charles now.” We rode in silence while my brain staged a no-holds-barred neurological demolition derby. I stampeded through anger, skipped to confusion, made a quick stop at grief, and then charged through anger again.

  Trick was a clone.

  I grasped my armrest so hard that I ripped it off the door.

  All that time together and he never told me. Cyrus must have known, and he never told me either.

  I turned to this new Patrick. “We’re gonna be partners?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, partner,” I snarled. “Don’t you ever fucking lie to me! You tell me everything, no matter what fucking Cyrus says.” I jabbed him with the dismembered armrest. “Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Where did you and your…brothers come from?”

  My new partner’s answer was a mind-blower. The short version is the three clones produced by the American cloning program in 1960 grew up and became the three Patricks.

  The original Patrick was born to Marty and Nancy Owens, a married couple from Lawrence, Kansas. Original Patrick inherited his braininess from his parents, both of whom taught graduate-level science classes at Kansas University.

  They were invited to be potential cell donors for ARI, the fledgling American cloning program. Original Patrick, who was fourteen at the time, watched fascinated as the medical personnel took cell samples from his parents. He begged his parents to let him donate his DNA, too. The ARI technicians humored the boy and took his samples after promising his parents they wouldn’t include their underage son’s cells in the selection process.

  A few years later, ARI knocked the world on its butt when they produced a trio of cloned human embryos. ARI then set the Olympic speed record for spectacular collapses when they inadvertently revealed that their clones were grown not from any of their legitimate donors but from cells of the distinctly off-limits Patrick Owens.

  When this story broke, ARI went from “Top of the World, Ma” to “Public Enemy Number One” in nothing flat. Religious leaders decried their God playing, and human rights activists protested their theft of gen
etic material. Even their fellow scientists had to admit ARI had fucked up royally, although they didn’t quite say it that way. Congress shut ARI down, formed RUACH to manage ARI’s assets, and left the remaining decisions about clones to future generations of Capitol Hill whoremongers.

  The three embryonic clones were given their Original’s first and last names with unique middle names to tell them apart. Original Patrick’s parents couldn’t bring themselves to raise three copies of the son they already had, so RUACH quietly found a foster family. RUACH’s psychologists, fearing the boys would be social outcasts if their unique origin was known, created a cover story and issued each of them a revised birth certificate. The boys were fostered as orphaned triplets by a childless couple from the Treasury Department.

  The adoptive parents, working closely with RUACH, eventually told the boys their true origin. As planned, when the brothers reached high school, Patrick Allan, Patrick Brandon, and Patrick Charles were presented with opportunities to work in the prestigious American intelligence community. But there was a catch: they couldn’t work at the same agency.

  Hiding their unnatural births from regular civilians was one thing, but keeping it from a building full of spies was another. If triplets of the correct age walked into the same agency together, everybody would figure out who they were and the boys’ mental well-being could be jeopardized. So Charles took their Original’s brains to the CIA’s Tokyo office, Brandon took his interpersonal skills to the American embassy in Berlin, and Allan, my Trick, brought his sense of humor to Extreme Operations. All three of their files were altered to state they had no siblings. Contact between the brothers was permitted, but it had to be done secretly.

  If my experience so far is any indicator, clones don’t come out to be exact duplicates of each other. Brando is more serious than Trick, which I’d say is a result of their work environments. Embassy employees live in a delicate world of well-mannered diplomacy unknown to us Wild West covert operatives. There’s also a certain swagger that comes from being biotically enhanced, and Brando is still acclimating to his Info Operator Mods. But it’s mostly because—unlike Trick—Brando is grieving for his dead brother.

  This earned me a scolding the night Brando met me at the airport. As soon as he finished the story about him and his brothers, I blew my stack and mounted an epic bitchfest. When it became clear I wasn’t going to pipe down, Brando finally let me have it.

  “Godammit Alix, enough! I know this is a shock and that you’ve lost your partner. But I lost my fucking brother! So cool it, all right?”

  I folded my arms across my chest and spent the rest of our drive silently trapped in a bog of resentment, sadness, and guilt. The next day we began working together, which has gone perfectly well since we already know so much about each other. It hasn’t been easy for either of us, though. I have my spells, and if someone mentions a job I pulled with Trick, Brando gets testy and bites his fingernails.

  When we aren’t wigging each other out, I’m teaching him the in-jokes I had with Trick. Brando “remembers” some of them but not all. It was surreal to explain Freaking Unstoppable Cranium Krusher to the person who invented F.U.C.K. in the first place.

  The elevator doors open. We step out and walk across the German Section’s busy office. Phones ring, computer terminals beep and blink. It’s a modern beehive of earnest activity. Across the floor, in the Front Desk’s office, Cyrus broods in his chair and glowers at the world outside his window. His brows are jammed tightly together. He’s pissed. Again.

  I breeze past Cyrus’s secretary and enter his office. Brando follows and shuts the door behind us. We stand at attention.

  “Sir,” I blurt, “I know we’re supposed to minimize our actions in front of civilians, but quickly eliminating that female competitor last night was the best way to avoid collateral damage.”

  My heart pounds. Cyrus silently regards me, then Brando, then me again. He rises from his chair. “Agreed. Zero civilian casualties, apart from emotional stress, is acceptable given where you are in your Development Cycle.”

  I exhale twelve pounds of anxiety.

  “Now, Scarlet.” Cyrus plants his fists on his desk. “Why the hell are you following Jakob Fredericks?”

  * * *

  CORE (Catalogue of Records: ExOps)

  PER-A59–1460

  From the desk of Dr. Thomas Herodotus, ExOps Medical Director

  Cyrus,

  Scarlet has made steady, if painful, progress with her recovery from the trauma endured while investigating Winter’s Blades of Persia and their Darius Covenant. Her fiercely self-motivated personality, inherited no doubt from her father, has helped her greatly during this process.

  She has found a measure of support from our grief therapy group, although her first partner’s violent death still haunts her terribly. Scarlet continues to suffer debilitating nightmares and hallucinations, especially when unoccupied with work.

  To answer your original question, yes, your star Level will be ready for ANGEL, but please include me on Scarlet’s reports so I can track her status.

  Respectfully yours,

  Tom

  04

  SAME MORNING, 10:10 A.M. EST

  EXOPS HEADQUARTERS, HOTEL BETHESDA, WASHINGTON, D.C., USA

  Cyrus repeats, “Scarlet, why are you following Fredericks?”

  How does Cyrus always know? “Ahh…uhh.” I grope for words, freshly reminded of how smart my boss is. “Sir, may I sit?”

  Cyrus leans back in his chair and steeples his hands in front of his face. He takes a long time before answering. “Yes, sit. You, too, Darwin.”

  We flop into Cyrus’s guest chairs. “Sir, I’m following Director Fredericks to practice tailing an experienced target.” I gesture to my partner. “Darwin doesn’t know about it.”

  Cyrus shuts his eyes and rubs his temples. “I should’ve known you weren’t going to any damned hardware store.” He inhales slowly and deeply. “Scarlet, Extreme Operations Division prohibits freelancing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I prohibit freelancing.”

  “Yes, sir,” I repeat.

  “Do you know why?”

  No fucking idea, boss. “Uh, do you mean yourself, sir, or Extreme Operations?”

  “Either one is fine.”

  “Umm…”

  Finally, he just tells me. “Freelancing is prohibited by Extreme Operations because the brass hats upstairs think that agent is probably moonlighting for a competitor. Freelancing is prohibited by me because sooner or later the brass hats order me to interrogate—and often eliminate—that agent.”

  Jesus H. Christ. Those twelve pounds of anxiety rush back into me.

  “Imagine my thrill, Scarlet,” Cyrus rumbles, “when the phone rang at four o’clock this morning to inform me one of my people had pulled a mission I knew nothing about. My first thought was of you.” He catches me smiling. “That was not a compliment! Wipe that smirk off your face!”

  I squeeze my lips into a flat line.

  He continues, “I traced your No-Jack data and saw that the first thing you did with that agency car was drive it to Fredericks’s office. Then you spent the better part of a week using it to track him to his house in North Bethesda, where he’s lived for five years!”

  Like a complete doofus, I ask, “You know his real address?”

  Cyrus uncoils to his full height of 6'2" and booms, “Alixandra, I’m Front Desk of the German Section at Extreme Operations—”

  Uh oh…

  “—I’ve known the man for almost twenty years—”

  …this is gonna be a loud one.

  “—he’s brilliant, he’s dangerous—”

  Here it comes!

  “—and he tries to KILL my agents! OF COURSE I know where the FUCKER lives!”

  The chatter and clatter outside Cyrus’s office stops. His eyes bore into me like drill bits. “Now, why are you following him? And cut the ‘practice’ bullshit or I’ll stick you behind a desk in
Dubuque!”

  “Sir,” Brando pipes up, “if I may interject.”

  The eyebrows swing toward my partner. “What is it, Darwin?”

  “Well, sir, it doesn’t strike me as reasonable to expect a fully trained Level to wait for someone else to go after the person who betrayed her own father.”

  “It doesn’t strike you,” Cyrus says very quietly, “as reasonable?”

  Ohhh, boy.

  “Darwin, when I want to know what strikes you as reasonable—”

  Here we go again!

  “—I’LL BLOODY WELL ASK YOU!” Cyrus stands and pounds his desk. “We are NOT cowboys!” He’s so steamed that he paces back and forth a few times. “Alix, I don’t know who would kick my ass harder if…” He stops, frowns at his reflection in the window, and says, “Never mind. You stay away from Fredericks. Justice has warned me he’s untouchable, at least until we sort out this thing with Germany.”

  This “thing” with Germany is America’s worst international crisis in three decades. It turns out the German public has little tolerance for crashed cars, shot-up college campuses, trashed public facilities, and bullet-riddled city streets. My sheboomigans in German territory last year featured all this and more, but our ambassador in Berlin kept it quiet by distracting the local politicos and mediarazzi with buffets of all-you-can-hump professional virgins. However, nothing could suppress the story of fifty kids in a German Youth troop being blown up by a U.S. Navy cruise missile.

  That cruise missile eliminated the global threat posed by the Darius Covenant and the Blades of Persia. It was also supposed to kill the Blades’s leader, a man known as Winter. In fact, I snuck in with the ill-fated German Youth troop and snatched Winter only moments before blam time. We coordinated all this to give the kids plenty of time to make it out of there.

  But they didn’t.

  The German press went wild. When the forensics came back “Made in U.S.A.,” everyone from Herr Chancellor to Herr Six-Pack called for American heads to roll. This really screwed the pooch.