John Doe on Her Doorstep

She was lying.

“I’m just glad you came along,” she repeated, her voice too cheery as she pressed a series of numbers on the keypad, then lifted the phone to her ear.

Not enough digits. Any local call in this part of the state would be a long distance one on his phone, requiring one and the area code. When she made no move to redial his suspicion was confirmed.

The sound of frosted grass crushing beneath a heavy footstep came from his left.

Adam started to reach for his weapon.

“Don’t move, man!” a male voice commanded.

Young, nervous.

Adam felt the unmistakable cold, hard barrel of a pistol press between his shoulder blades.

“You don’t want to do this,” Adam told him quietly. There was no way to disguise the element of danger in his tone. It was instinctive. The shakily exhaled breath behind him told him the guy had noticed it as well.

“What’re you doing?” the woman asked, her voice rising with hysteria as she flung the cell phone to the ground. “You didn’t say nothing about guns, Jimmy!” The child in her arms whimpered as if he sensed her anxiety.

“Shut up,” the guy, Jimmy, growled. “You said my name, you stupid bitch!”

“Put the gun away, Jimmy, and we’ll forget this ever happened,” Adam suggested. He didn’t have time for this crap. He thought highwaymen had gone out of style about a hundred years ago. The last thing he needed was a nervous one. If he could distract the guy, he might have the opportunity to go for his own weapon.

The scrape of a boot heel in the gravel on the side of the road sounded a few feet away.

Adam stilled, listening. Jimmy hadn’t moved. Neither had the woman. Someone else had joined their little party.

The distinct scent of cheap aftershave hit Adam’s nostrils.

Another man. Jimmy wasn’t wearing any deodorant, much less any aftershave. Adam could smell his sweat. Jimmy was scared…the other guy presented an unknown variable with his silence. Adam knew instinctively that the unknown enemy was a far more serious threat. His tension escalated to a new level.

“What’s he doing here?” the woman protested. Her child’s perpetual fretting underscored her mounting fear.

“Say good night, big guy.”

Not Jimmy’s voice. The other man’s.

Adam reached for his weapon. His fingers curled around the pistol grip at the same instant that he prepared to pivot toward the threat.

Something crashed into his skull before he could turn. White flashes speared through his brain. His knees buckled. Another blow. He jerked with the impact of it. Brilliant points of light stabbed behind his clenched lids. He had to…

But it was already too late.

Ghost Mountain, Colorado

Center

RICHARD O’RILEY scanned the latest report on the Judas mission. One target had been eliminated, but not the second. He looked up at the man seated on the other side of his cluttered desk. “Still no word on our man?”

Dupree, Center’s top analyst, shook his head. “Nothing. Either his TD has malfunctioned or he’s dead.”

O’Riley’s jaw clenched. Adam was the best Enforcer they had. And O’Riley wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. Electronic devices malfunctioned from time to time. It wasn’t impossible, just not probable. With the tracking devices neurologically implanted, they stopped functioning only when the host stopped breathing. Unless, of course, there was a malfunction, which had to be the case now. O’Riley refused to believe anything else at this point.

“He’s only been out of the loop for twenty-four hours,” O’Riley pointed out. “No matter how it looks, we’re going to keep an open mind. I know Adam. Whatever has gone down on this mission, I can assure you he’s been in tighter spots. He’ll figure a way out.”

At least Dupree had the good sense to keep his mouth shut instead of arguing. O’Riley was well aware of how he felt. Dupree had weighed the known data, ran simulations and assessed all the variables, but O’Riley didn’t give a damn. This was his operation. He would say when it was time to give up on Adam, and that wouldn’t be anytime soon. A team had already been dispatched to retrace Adam’s steps.

Dupree stood, clearly frustrated but lacking the necessary nerve to push the issue. “We’ll keep monitoring local law enforcement activities. We know Adam left Alexandria. Considering the time that his TD went down, I’d say he was about halfway to the primary target, maybe closer. If he’s been in an accident of some sort, we’ll hear about it soon enough. There can’t be that much going on along that sleepy stretch of country road. The recon team will be reporting in any time now. They hit ground zero about twenty minutes ago.”

When Dupree had left his office, O’Riley tossed the status report aside. Dupree was an uptight ass, but the best intel analyst on staff at Center. O’Riley released a heavy breath. This whole situation stunk. First, Daniel Archer is murdered; then, Donald Thurlo’s betrayal is discovered and Joseph Marsh is suddenly missing; now this. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something vital was missing from the scenario. Something he and all these highly trained, overpaid intel analysts were missing.

The Eugenics Project was far too valuable to risk for any reason. Anyone involved in this mess would be eliminated. Too tired to think as clearly as he should, O’Riley rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

He stood and turned to stare out the window of his office. The scene beyond the specially designed outer shell that encased the entire building was slightly distorted, but welcome nonetheless. Sometimes he hated the copper-lined walls and soundproof glass of this place. Hated it, but it was, undeniably, necessary.

Though Center was located on a remote mountain in Colorado, it was still vulnerable. Ghost Mountain was owned by the U.S. government, operated by the Collective and heavily guarded with state-of-the-art security systems. No one outside this building knew the identities of those who worked inside. But even with those extreme measures in place, secrets could still escape.

They’d just learned that the hard way.

A technology war had long since replaced the Cold War. They weren’t fighting the KGB moles and double agents anymore. Now it was the code war and some computer geek sitting in a dark room listening to their every uttered word and computer keystroke. The weapons of today were every imaginable kind of electronic and laser device for stealing bytes of communication via the Net, fax or any one of numerous other analog or digital means of transmission. Nothing was sacred anymore.

Of course, all secrets weren’t necessarily stolen. Some violations of security were merely mistakes.

Fatal mistakes.

Archer had known better. The risk he’d taken by keeping a copy of his files, encrypted or not, at home was a very dumb move for such an intelligent man. In the end, he’d had to pay the ultimate price for that error in judgment.

If Adam failed, which was a highly unlikely scenario assuming he was still alive, they would send another man to finish the job.

Adam had never failed before. O’Riley wasn’t ready to admit that he had this time.

He turned back to his desk and looked at the open dossier lying there. Adam. Thirty years old. Six foot two, one hundred and eighty pounds. The cream of the crop. IQ: immeasurable. Physical condition: perfect. Skill level: unmatched. No one in the program was quite as good.

Well, O’Riley confessed, there was one who could hold his own with Adam. Cain. But there was one key element that marred Cain’s track record. He was every bit as skilled as Adam but lacked any capacity for compassion or any other essential emotion. That missing component limited his usefulness in many situations. Thankfully, Archer had observed that deficit and all who’d come after Cain, the original prototype, were better for it.

Archer. It was still hard for O’Riley to believe he was dead. They’d worked together for more than twenty years. How could something as simple as a thoughtless mistake lead to this? He shook his head, weary of trying to make sense of it all. It was done. There was no way to change it. O’Riley could only see that the traitors were eliminated. The identity of the primary Judas made the situation unbelievable.

He refused to analyze it any further. It had to be done, regardless of his reservations or his personal feelings. No one regretted the decision any more than he did. Joseph Marsh would be next, if they could find him. Fury twisted in O’Riley’s chest. He would like to kill that son of a bitch with his own hands. He had to be guilty…otherwise, he wouldn’t have vanished into thin air. Well, Marsh could run, but he couldn’t hide forever. They would find him and when they did, he would die.

For the moment, O’Riley would be happy if Adam just reported in and let him know what was going on.

There had to be a reasonable explanation for why his tracking device had failed. O’Riley was unwilling to accept that he was dead.

Not yet, anyway.

Chapter Two

Virginia