Verris had wanted so much to tell Junior that but the kid simply wasn’t ready yet. Junior was educated, he was trained, he was a warrior. The problem was, there was still too much of the adolescent in him.
Gemini’s psychologists told him he had to be patient. Every person matured at a different rate, and in general the male of the species usually lagged behind the female. Verris was just going to have to watch and wait, they said, play it by ear.
So he’d done that but Junior still wasn’t ready at twenty-three and Verris was damned if he knew what was wrong. There shouldn’t have been anything holding him back. Finally Verris realized the solution had been right in front of him all along: Henry Brogan.
Junior would never come into his own as long as Henry Brogan was alive.
It was so obvious, he should have seen it right away, Verris thought. But it wasn’t just that Henry had to die—Junior had to be the one to kill him. Then Junior would be able to take his rightful place in the world as who and what he was.
Then he would be perfect.
Henry Brogan was broken and flawed. Junior was the new, improved version, and best of all, he was Verris’s son. Verris would continue to make sure Junior knew he had a father every moment of every day. That would make sure he stayed perfect.
Another soldier would have stopped at the infirmary to have his gunshot wound checked out and clean up a little before he reported in, but not Junior. Junior would know Verris had already been informed of his failure to accomplish his mission for the second time. He wouldn’t wait to account for himself.
He didn’t knock, either, to Verris’s annoyance. Verris blanked and muted the feeds. He’d been watching the exercises long enough that he had a pretty good idea of how they were all going to go. If anything blew up that wasn’t supposed to, he’d hear it.
But Jesus, the guard in the lobby had been right—Junior was very much the worse for wear. He looked as if he’d gone swimming with all his clothes on, then slept in them while they dried.
Verris waited for Junior to say something but his son just stood in front of his desk giving him a hard stare. Finally, he leaned back in his chair. “Tell me something,” he said, looking directly into those glaring eyes. “Why is it so hard for you to kill this ma—”
“Do you know how much I hate Big Hammock park, Pop?” Junior demanded.
Alarm bells went off in Verris’s mind. It was never a good sign when Junior started a conversation with something he hated. The bizarre juxtaposition of his birthday with his second failure to accomplish his mission meant he had let himself be distracted by irrelevant shit. Verris was tempted to give him a sharp, hard slap in the face, like hitting a radio with a loose connection. But a good father never struck his son in the head, not off the training field.
Maybe this was a childish attempt to divert attention from his failure, or even to deny his own responsibility: I failed to kill Henry Brogan because you’ve been forcing me to go to Big Hammock park on my birthday.
Junior should have been a little too old for that one but you could never tell with young people. Whatever was going on with him, Verris knew he would have to take it step by step and see where it led.
“Come again?” Clay said, careful to keep his tone neutral.
“Every year since I was twelve, we shoot turkeys there on my birthday. I always hated it—I mean, I was an orphan, right? How did we even know when my birthday was? But you never seemed to notice so we just kept going there.”
At least he hadn’t gone soft about turkeys, Verris thought. He had raised Junior with the idea that those who couldn’t kill what they ate were too weak to fight for their own lives or anyone else’s. But the kid still wasn’t making sense and if he didn’t start soon, he’d have to call in PsyOps.
Aloud, Verris said, “Fine. Next year we’ll try Chuck E. Cheese.”
“Yeah?” Junior tilted his head to one side. “Who’s ‘we’—you, me, and the lab guys who made me?”
Verris kept all expression off his face although he felt like he’d been punched between the eyes. “Oh.”
He had known that despite all his efforts to shield Junior from the truth, there was a possibility he might find out that very thing he wasn’t ready to know. But Verris had always thought that if such a thing happened, it would be here at the Gemini compound, where he would be able to manage his son’s reaction to some degree (and also know whose big mouth to staple shut).
Over the years, Verris had supervised Junior’s life as well as he could, restricting his contact with other personnel. That had worked pretty well throughout Junior’s childhood and his teen years, when even the best kids could become rebellious and uncooperative. It wasn’t so easy to do that with an adult, however, even one conditioned to follow orders and not ask too many irrelevant questions. The other soldiers tended to keep their distance from the CO’s son, which helped to minimize the amount of rumor, gossip, and general scuttlebutt that came Junior’s way.
This wasn’t always easy on the kid. Sometimes Verris caught him looking longingly at a group of soldiers going off for a drink together after an exercise. Whenever that happened, he would draw Junior’s attention away with something more suited to his intellectual and physical skills and abilities, and pretty soon the kid seemed to forget all about trivial shit like drinking buddies. Protecting him until he was ready to know the truth was more important than anything else.
From time to time, though, Verris had wondered if he should have told Junior everything as soon as he was old enough to grasp the basic biology. Maybe if he had grown up with the knowledge, it would have normalized everything and there would have been that much less to agonize about later.
Or maybe Junior would simply have found another reason for an existential crisis. Kids were good at that.
And it was all moot because his son was still standing in front of his desk, glaring at him, waiting for him to explain himself.
“I, uh, I always believed you’d be happier not knowing,” Verris said finally.
“Happy?!” Junior gave a short harsh laugh. “The only time I’m happy is when I’m flat on my belly about to squeeze a trigger. ”
The alarm bells in Verris’s mind were louder this time. He had heard those words before but not from Junior and he was damned sure it wasn’t a coincidence. This was worse than he’d realized. Not only had Junior failed to kill Henry Brogan again, but somehow Henry had found out about Dormov’s program and used the information to get into Junior’s head. Verris wasn’t sure what was more disturbing—Henry’s finding out about the program or his having cornered Junior long enough to tell him about it. And how the hell he could have found out in the first place—
Budapest. That Russian rat Yuri, friend to Jack Willis.
Dammit, Verris thought; if he had called in an airstrike on Willis’s yacht while he and Brogan had still been hugging it out like teenage girls, this whole thing could have been avoided. He would never have had to tell Junior he was a clone and this rite of passage wouldn’t be necessary.
No.
That would have been easier but there was something else to consider: the symmetry of Junior supplanting Henry by punching his ticket. That was so beautiful, so elegant, so perfect. And Brogan deserved nothing less. The arrogance of that self-righteous prick, putting on that hitman-witha-heart-of-gold act, refusing to come work with him at Gemini, as if he was actually better than his old CO. As if he was too good for Gemini.