Lukian covered his eyes and grunted. “Dumbass.”
Asher smiled and nodded. “Oh yeah, they’re real.”
“Bullshit!” yelled Roi, standing and making his chair fall over once more. He blushed. “Um, no way. Really?”
“Really. Though they’re rare to find anymore. And some of them are bat-shit crazy.”
Lukian eyed the colonel. “I think you’re screwing with us.”
Asher flashed a wide smile. “I think you’re right.”
Lukian touched his friend’s arm. “Sit before you break something.”
Asher watched the men, enjoying the sense of brotherhood that came from what they did.
“What the hell are we doing here, exactly? Krauss behind the pier slaughters?” asked Roi, sitting without bothering to try to appear calm. “I’m sick and tired of the German prick. How can one man older than dirt evade us?”
“First,” said Asher, “you have no idea how right you are. Krauss is much older than he even appears. Trust me, gentlemen, he’s seen more days than all of you put together.”
“No,” said Lukian, shaking his head, touching a chair. “Really?”
“Really.” Asher remained standing.
A tall red-headed giant of a man entered the room. His shoulder width was enough that he filled the doorway. With as large and fit as he was, he looked like a total badass. Asher knew the man could be when called for, but was actually gentle by nature.
He smiled at the man. “Green. Good of you to join us.”
Green held a set of folders in his hands. “I gathered up what you asked for, sir.”
“Thank you,” said Asher. “Please see to it each man has one.”
Green passed out the folders and then took a seat. Asher didn’t need to see what Green had brought. He’d memorized it. Jinx and Aneta had gathered so much intel that they made a lot of agents within PSI look incompetent from their sheer lack of producing anything close to this magnitude of information.
Sex could get just about any information out of anyone.
He thought about his wife. She was currently tucked safely away in his home here in Virginia, pissed that he’d forced her away from her club but happy to be with him. They were still working out the kinks of what would become of her club without her being there to run it full time. Aneta was more than capable and Asher had a strong sense that Jinx would hand the keys over to her trusted friend.
Asher had seen to it that PSI operatives were assigned to the club to watch over it, making sure Helmuth didn’t send any more surprises.
Asher looked to his men as they pored through the information before them. It was overwhelming. He knew.
“What the fuck am I looking at?” asked Roi, the severity of it all sinking in.
Wilson glanced at Roi’s files as if his were somehow different from the ones before him. He covered his mouth with one hand and then pulled it away, shock evident on his face. “There is another team of I-Ops? There are others like us? Engineered supernaturals?”
Roi pointed to another page. “The Outcasts didn’t die in the fires? Where the hell are they all and what is our government doing with them?”
Asher exhaled slowly. “I’m digging for information on them. So far, Weston Carol is the only one who has surfaced enough to gather any details on.”
Green cleared his throat. “Weston was a good man. We were told he died on the operating table after complications from the genetic altering.”
“We were fucking lied to,” breathed Wilson. “A lot.”
Green touched the filed before him. “I can see keeping some details from us in the start—in case we too snapped mentally or were captured or something. But we’ve been at this a long time. We’re stable.”
“Speak for yourself,” managed Roi, finding at least some humor in a humorless situation.
Lukian remained strangely quiet and Asher knew why—he was pissed. He’d been led to believe the surviving Ops were the only ones remaining. So had Asher. Everything they’d been told had been a lie. It didn’t sit well with Asher either. “Why didn’t you tell me the minute you had all this cross your path?” asked Lukian in a hushed tone. The tension in his shoulders showed with abundance.
Asher knew Lukian’s reaction came from somewhere much deeper than simply being lied to. Lukian’s DNA had been used during the attempted creations of various Immortal Ops Teams. Prior to Lukian’s arrival they’d lost many good men. Men who volunteered in hopes of serving their country at an entirely new level. They’d not banked on the hand they’d been dealt, or the fact the survival rate during early testing stages was nearly zero percent.
Weston had been one of the men to receive Lukian’s DNA. The Ops had seen what could happen to an Outcast—Parker had ended up twisted and mentally unstable. None of them wanted to think Weston met that same fate.
“Because no matter what, I knew you’d take this bad. It gets worse,” said Asher.
“Meaning?” Lukian’s eyes fluttered shut momentarily.
“Preliminary reports on the Seattle bloodshed are pointing in the direction of some Outcasts,” said Asher. He didn’t want to be the bearer of the news. No one in their right mind would. This wasn’t information anyone wanted to hear, let alone a man whose DNA had been used.
Wilson lowered his head, his temper coming through. “You mean the brave men who signed on for this but ended up dead because of the fuck-ups of the scientists? They end up slaughter on a pier and we find out how many days later?”
“Hey,” injected Green. “Colonel wasn’t here for any of that. You know as well as I do that he wasn’t part of the organization when we were created. He came on after. And, they weren’t the slaughtered, Wilson. From what we’ve been able to gather, they might very well have been the ones doing the killing.”
Wilson gasped.
“I don’t know what I know anymore,” said Roi, thumbing through the files. “Missy once asked me if I was I-Ops Team One or Two. I thought she was nuts. But she was right.”
Asher nodded. “She is the reason I asked Jinx to put an ear to the ground to start with. I started digging for more information after Missy’s intel came past my desk. I didn’t find anything, but that was the problem,” Asher admitted. “I should have found something. The very fact there was nothing, no mention of the Outcasts, no anything, it made me wonder who was doing what to try to clean up everything to do with the Ops teams.”
“This has to go high and deep,” said Lukian. “And no, I don’t blame you.”
“We should call Jon back in,” said Wilson. “He was close to Weston. He’ll want to know he’s still alive.”
Asher put his hands on the back of the chair before him and looked at his men. Jon had finally called in, letting them all know he was fine but that he needed more personal time. Asher couldn’t have agreed more. “Jon is where he needs to be. His head isn’t in the game. He could get himself killed. None of us want that. Besides, you all need to go to the last page of the files before you. I think you’ll understand why we can’t recall Jon right now.”
Lukian flipped to the last page and gasped. “He’s alive?”
“Who?” asked Wilson, looking as well. He leapt back in his seat. “We buried him. We were all there.”
“We buried what we thought was Lance’s body,” said Asher, his tone solemn. He couldn’t let the rage inside him out. He knew as much but his anger burned deep.
“Our government did this?” asked Roi. “They fucking switched bodies and did what with Lance?”
“Not our government,” said Green. “Read more. Krauss and Molyneux were behind it. This is one thing we can’t pin on the men in charge.”