He watches me, gauging my reaction.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I would be thinking the same if someone had told me this four months ago.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking I’m insane.”
I look at Francisco sweating in the cool forest air, his flesh marked by a hundred cut marks, his eyes wild.
“That’s right.”
“You’re also measuring what I say against your own experience. So you know it’s true.”
I smile, trying to placate him.
“I know you believe it.”
“You still don’t understand, do you?” he says. “I’m telling you these things because I want you to know. So you can save yourself.”
My smile fades.
“I don’t need saving.”
“Do you know the easiest way to die, Daniel?”
“I know several ways.”
“Not the easiest way to kill. The easiest way to die.”
“In your sleep.”
“Very good. And why is that?”
“If you’re asleep, you don’t know that you’re dying,” I say.
He nods. “That’s you. You’re dying right now and you don’t know it. You are asleep and dying. I’m trying to wake you up.”
He steps toward me. I look at the marks up and down his arms.
He says, “Find the joint where your humerus meets your elbow. Check an inch interior from there.”
I can’t listen to this anymore. It’s a distraction. He’s trying to trick me, get my arms out of position so he can strike.
“Check,” he says, his voice urgent.
“There’s nothing to check,” I say firmly, and I step away from him.
He looks at me, astonished.
“They own you,” he says in a whisper.
“It’s not ownership,” I say. “It’s loyalty. I’m a soldier. You seem to have forgotten that.”
He shakes his head.
“That’s what I thought. They taught me to forget my old life and replace it with loyalty to them. But they didn’t finish the job. Because the memories came back. It took years for me, but they did. The chip only works on fear. Everything else is still there, suppressed by your training. Until it isn’t anymore.”
I think about the way my memories come back between missions. The way I still see my father when I close my eyes, the way he sometimes visits me in my dreams.
Francisco says, “These people you work for, they’re not good people.”
“They defend this country,” I say. “They’re patriots.”
“They are not,” he says. “When you remember, everything changes.”
There’s only one thing I must remember. My training. The things I’ve been taught to do, the way I’ve been taught to do them.
“You’ll look for the chip later,” he says.
He traces the fresh cuts that crisscross his chest, some healed, some still pink and raw.
“I had to look for a while,” he says. “But eventually I found it. You’ll find it, too. Then you’ll know I’ve told you the truth, and you’ll get out.”
“I’m not looking for a way out,” I say.
“You’re still asleep,” he says. “I feel sorry for you.”
There’s something about the way he says it, what I perceive as a sneer on his lips, his tone of voice.
“And what are you?” I say, my anger flaring. “You’re training to poison the water supply, or blow up nuclear power plants, or whatever the hell you’re doing, and you call that being awake? You’re a terrorist.”
His face goes rigid. He holds up a finger in warning.
“Don’t you dare use that word,” he says.
“Does Moore have a different word for it?”
“I don’t agree with everything Moore does,” he says, “but the end justifies the means.”
“What end? You’re a soldier like me, Francisco. You were trained to protect the country, not dismantle it.”
“I’m still a soldier,” he says. “But I have a different mission now.”
“What mission?”
“To wake up this country.”
“They don’t need you, Francisco; they’re already awake. Nine-eleven. The Cole bombing. The war in Iraq. The attacks in Syria. They are wide awake.”
“What about us?” he says.
“Us?”
“The Program,” he says. “The things their country is doing behind their back. Are they awake to that?”
I can see now that I am the only patriot here. Francisco has become something else.
A traitor.
He is a traitor, and I cannot allow it.
So I attack.
I cover the ten feet between us in an instant, opening with a lightning-fast strike to the center of his chest that stuns him. Then I quickly turn to the side, grab his arm, and spin him hard, slamming him against a tree.
There is no reaction time before he is coming back at me. In an instant his energy shifts from attacked to attacker, so fluid it would be easy to miss. Miss and die.
That’s how well trained he is.
He aims a strike toward my head, but I sidestep and take the force of his blow to the shoulder instead. Even this is enough to send a shock wave through me.
We separate in the woods, and I look at him, shirtless, muscles rippling. What seemed a moment ago like an average body seems like something else.
His body, his style, his reaction time—they’re all too familiar to me.
It’s almost like I’m fighting myself.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he says.
“How else can it be?”
“You asked me why I let you into the camp when I could have killed you. It’s because I knew you had doubts about The Program. Just like I did when I came here.”
“You’re wrong about me,” I say.
But it’s not the truth.
I doubted during my last mission. And I doubt now. My purpose for being here, the reason I was sent in the first place.
“Look at me, Daniel. I’ve gotten my life back. You could have yours back, too.”
“I already have a life,” I say.
I come at him, indicating a high attack while I strike low at his feet.
He does not take the bait but kicks out at me, his style suddenly switching to Muay Thai. I instantly match him, our legs flying, shins crashing together, a spin kick to my head that I dodge, a return kick toward his chest that only just misses contact.
But it sends me off balance, and he pounces.
He is as fast as me and as smart. Yet he is not my equal. Not quite.
Because in surrendering his mission, he has not gotten stronger. He’s gotten weaker. Something is broken inside him. I sense it like an animal senses weakness in another animal. Beneath the hard exterior, the training, the calculation, the intelligence—
He
is
damaged.
An operative who has stopped operating. Such a thing cannot be allowed to exist.
Suddenly my phone buzzes in my pocket, the single vibration that indicates a text message coming in.
Francisco senses my distraction and takes advantage of the moment, coming at me with a side swipe, then a full-on kick to my chest that sends me careening against a tree trunk.
The force of the kick is such that it takes my breath away, a shiver passed down through my body.
A shiver, but also a realization. I was out of position and the kick hit me dead center.
Francisco has the strength and training to kill with one kick.
A heart blow. A heel to the chest, a twist at the last moment to sharpen the angle, shatter the ribs over the pericardium, puncture the fluid sac, and cause heart failure.
He could have killed me, and he didn’t.
Which means he pulled his kick, sparing my life.