Point and Shoot (11 page)

Now that you’ve seen the little jagged surprise on the back of Hardie’s head, you realize you’ve been fed misinformation from the start of the mission.

My God, you realize with a start.

Were you even meeting with the NSA over this past year? Or were you in the custody of someone else? You did the
one thing
you should never do in this game—accept something at face value. Just because you were remanded to the custody of US intelligence didn’t necessarily mean you remained in the custody of US intelligence …

So what is going on? What part of the game board can’t you see?

At the bathroom mirror, Hardie took a good long look at what was left of his face. The Other Him had done a thorough job. You couldn’t see much of his flesh, other than the raw red charred meat around his eyes and his mouth. There were two slits in the bandages around his nose that allowed him to breathe. His ears were exposed, and they didn’t seem too bad. Nor was his hair singed.

Hardie remembered an old Bogart movie called
Dark Passage
—based on a novel written by a fellow Philadelphian named David Goodis. Bogie spends a good chunk of the movie wrapped up in bandages following some back-alley plastic surgery, San Francisco–style. Hardie always thought Bogie looked kind of ridiculous—almost clownlike. He had to emote through his eyes, and, boy, did that old tough guy emote. Now the joke was on Hardie, because he looked just as ridiculous.

Okay, whatever. Who cares what he looked like underneath? He wasn’t going to be entering any amateur modeling competitions at the mall.

Hardie’s bandaged fingers found a loose piece of gauze under his chin and he started to pull.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the Other Him said. He was standing in the bathroom doorway behind him, with his fully functional face and hands.

“Why?” Hardie asked. “You about to eat lunch or something?”

“No. Because of the risk of infection. I should have taken you to a hospital with those burns, but we both know you wouldn’t last long in a place like that. Not before they heard about it and took you out.”

So the burns were that bad. Great.

“Hey, I did the best I could.”

“Yeah.”

“Be grateful you’re alive at all.”

“Didn’t you hear?” Hardie asked. “We’re unkillable. We can’t die.”

“You might be,” Chuck said, “but the same doesn’t go for me. I’m absolutely mortal.”

Hardie shook his head. “Trust me, I can be killed.”

The Other Him looked at him and smirked. A trademark Charlie Hardie™ smirk. Which creeped Hardie out, just as your reflection would creep
you
out if it started doing something different in the mirror.

“That’s only because you’ve never heard of Project Viking.”

“Project what?”

Project Viking had been buried for twenty years.

Nobody
knew about Project Viking.

That is, until your handlers put together the
Annotated Charlie Hardie
—including a little shocking document they called the Arbona Memorandum—and discovered the truth about what had happened to Hardie in the early 1990s.

Back in the early days of the Iraq invasion, which had been treated like a field test for a lot of crazy stuff they’d been saving up over the years, a private corporation received the nod to treat a few soldiers with a series of hormones and vitamins that would amp up their endurance. The soldiers weren’t told; nor were their superiors. But the idea was that if soldiers could last even a few hours more on the battlefield, modified to bleed out more slowly, or could be given extra blasts of adrenaline at the right moment, then the savings would be astronomical. You wouldn’t have to deploy a new soldier if a bunch of old ones could last even a short while longer. Add those hours up, and you’re talking billions.

Hence Project Viking. Soldiers were given doses during basic training, totally unbeknownst to them (they were told they were simply deficient in some vitamins and had to report for extra supplements). The creators of Project Viking thought they’d have a good old field test when the US Army kicked down Saddam’s door and got into a serious rumble. The excitement was palpable. Would Crazy Hussein (in the membrane, Hussein in the brain!) use his rumored stores of chemical weapons? And if so, would the Viking subjects last longer?

As it turned out, Project Viking did jack shit in this kind of war. Didn’t matter how many vitamins and hormones and supplements you gave a soldier: An IED was still going to turn him into chunks of lunchmeat.

And then the people in charge of funding fell in love with drone weapons and robots and all at once Project Viking was seen as a relic, a Captain America-ish dream that belonged back in the 1940s.

“You were a Project Viking test subject,” the Other Him said.

“What are you talking about? I don’t remember signing up for any experiments or tests. I was just there to escape my shitty neighborhood and my shitty life.”

“These kinds of experiments, they didn’t ask for volunteers. They just ran them. No permissions slips, no questions asked.”

“They,” Hardie said, anger building in his face as he tried to find the right words, “they just can’t
do that shit
to people!”

“And yet they did. Look, the files were buried deep, but they exist. There’s nothing more suspicious than a blank page in someone’s biography. Well, the Cabal kept digging until they found it. And once they realized who they had on their hands, you suddenly became hot property. Since then, we’ve dug up copies of them for ourselves. I’ve read them. I know what happened to you. And it’s been a part of your life ever since.”

“What do you mean?”

The Other Him gave a creepy look that bordered on pity.
Oh, you poor baby
. Which was surreal. Was that what Hardie looked like when he was trying to look sympathetic? No wonder everybody seemed to want to punch him in the face.

“You can stop beating yourself up because you lived and Nate died.”

The words were like ice water through Hardie’s veins.

“You may think you know what happened,” he said quietly, “but every part of my life is not contained in a bunch of files somewhere.”

“You lived because of Project Viking. Your body is able to rally and heal itself a lot faster than an ordinary human being’s body. Just think about that for a moment. Think about what you could have done with that gift, rather than wasting it on … whatever it is you think you’ve been doing.”

“If this is a pep talk,” Hardie said, “you suck at it.”

The Other Him smiled. “Maybe this is my version. Because, buddy, you and me got a long road ahead of us.”

“They’re going to find us anyway, aren’t they? I mean, this is your all-powerful Cabal we’re talking about. How long can we hide from people like this?”

“We can do this,” the Other Him said. “We have to make it to my debriefing station. That’s the only way now. I have to assume the field teams working the mission have been taken out, as well as my communication channels. It’s in person, or it’s nothing.”

“Where’s this station?”

“Somewhere in Virginia. I know it by sight.”

“And we’re somewhere in California right now.”

“If we leave now, we can be there in two days.”

“Wait … you mean drive it?”

“No other way.”

“How about in an airplane, maybe?”

“They’d spot us within seconds. Especially with you, looking like the Mummy’s ugly cousin. And me, wearing your face.”

“Driving sounds insane,” Hardie said.

“You don’t understand,” his double said. “I’m not giving you a choice here. This is how it plays out. Otherwise we’re all dead. Including Kendra and CJ. We’ve gotta take down the Cabal while they’re vulnerable.”

“Uh-uh,” Hardie said. “We get my family first. Once they’re safe, then I’ll do everything I can to help you bury these bastards. I’ll do a drunken jig on their graves. But not until I know my family is safe.”

T
HE GREASY SPOON
on the ground floor of the motel was decorated for Christmas. Strips of aluminum foil were meant to be tinsel, cotton balls were meant to be snow, pine cones were meant to be … pine cones. Plastic molded Santa Clauses and reindeer were affixed to the walls and coated with at least two decades’ worth of airborne grease and dust, the remnants of past holiday customers and what they ate.

Appetizing.

Charlie Hardie had no idea what to order. He didn’t know what his stomach could handle after nine months of freeze-dried and powdered space food. Order a burger, and he could be seeing it again within minutes. And it wouldn’t be nearly as appetizing the second time around. But he also knew he should be eating
something
. His double had insisted: Eat now or hold your peace for three thousand miles. Hardie realized the guy was right. His body needed fuel. He’d be of no use to Kendra and the boy if he was passing out every few minutes.

But what? Nothing on the menu didn’t make his stomach pre-emptively clench. Everything seemed to be fried, breaded, or grilled—or covered in onions that were fried, breaded, or grilled. Wasn’t this supposed to be California, land of healthy living?

Whatever he ordered, he was definitely going to pair it with a beer. It would probably hit him way hard, just like it did the last time. But screw it. A man who survives a crash landing from outer space deserves a cold one.

Hardie was still at a loss. “What do you recommend?”

“The pie’s good,” the counter girl said.

Yes. Pie. Wholesome, nourishing all-American pie. The staple of American diets since the colonial days. No, seriously. Hardie had read about it in an in-flight magazine once. How pies weren’t just dessert. They were entire meals. Throw a bunch of ingredients into a dough shell and there you go.

“Pie,” Hardie said. “Yeah, a big slice of pie.”

“What kind?”

“Doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as bad pie. And also, a beer. Doesn’t matter what brand, either.”

“Beer and pie. At 7:30 a.m.”

“That’s right.”

“We don’t serve beer. No liquor license.”

“Then I guess it’ll just be the pie, then.”

The waitress nodded but lingered on his eyes a bit. Hardie could tell she wanted to ask him about the bandages on his face and hands but ultimately decided that she could live without that knowledge. She turned to the Other Him. “How about you?”

“Pie sounds great, any kind. Something different from my friend’s order, okay? That way if we don’t like it we can switch.”

“I’m not switching pies with you,” Hardie said.

“What, you don’t want a beer or anything?” the waitress asked, not even the barest trace of a smile on her face, even though she was joking.

“Me? No. Not this early in the morning. My friend here’s the drunk.”

She went off to the cooling case to pull out two different pies. They were uncut, virginal. Hardie watched her use the knife on the pies and turned to the Other Him and said, “We need a name for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t call you Charlie, I’m sorry. You’ve got a real name, don’t you? Before all this you were Secret Agent somebody, right?”

“I’ve had a few names in my career.”

“So pick one.”

“I can’t. They’re all classified.”

“And your birth name?”

“It’s been so long I’ve forgotten it.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Okay, it’s classified, too. Look, they take this stuff seriously. But more than that—if you start calling me another name, it’ll mess with my mind. The key to being you for all of these months? Truly believing that I am you. It’s hard enough being with you right here. The bandages help a little.”

“What do you mean, believing you’re me? You’re not me. We’ve established this already, right?”

“The thing is, some part of me still thinks I am you. So you can’t call me anything other than Charlie Hardie.”

“You’re fucked in the head, you know that?”

“Welcome to my world.”

The waitress put the pies in front of them. Cherry for Hardie, Apple for He Who Had Yet to Be Named.

It could all end here, with a slice of apple pie.

You tell yourself: Be smart now.

Quickly you plunge your fork into the center and reach into your pocket at the same time. You ask Hardie to pass you a napkin, because (luckily) the dispenser is on his side of the counter. You jab the pie with your left hand, pinch the capsules in your right. Meanwhile, Hardie’s distracted, looking for a napkin. His peripheral vision is crap, thanks to those bandages. Now. Make your move. Do it, and do it quick. Burst the capsules with your thumb and index finger. Sprinkle that shit liberally.

Hardie’s picked up his fork now and is ready to plunge it when—

“Wait,” you say. “I can’t eat this. I’m allergic to apples.”

Hardie’s head snaps to the right and his beady eyes peer at you from behind the bandages. “I’ve never heard of an allergy to apples. Plus, you’ve already stuck your fork in yours. No thanks.”

“The fork didn’t touch my mouth.”

“I don’t care if it didn’t touch your ass. I’m sticking with the cherry.”

“Come on. Cut me a break.”

“Order another slice then.”

You’re thinking fast, tap-tap-tap-dancing inside your own skull. Boy, this really could go in any direction right now …

Hardie plunged his fork into his own pie, chopped off a ridiculously large portion of it, and shoved it into his mouth. Cherry juice stained the bandages around his mouth.

“You’re an ass,” you tell him.

“Mmmmmm, mmmmm, you really should order a slice of this,” Hardie says.

But you’re not done yet.

Oh no.

“You’ve got cherry gore on your face,” you tell him, then reach across him for a napkin.

“Don’t touch me.”

People are staring now, which is fine, because they’re all focused on him and not on your right hand, which has the contents of three burst capsules in it—and now you’re sprinkling that stuff right into the gaping wound in Hardie’s cherry pie.