Five

The man's shape was drenched in silhouette as he knelt in the dusty, crumbling dead end of the subterranean passage. Nearby construction-site lights blasted their heat against his back. He welcomed the warmth. For months, he'd been a bona fide mole man, a digger, supervising the highly illegal tunnel carved here, in the bedrock of one of America's largest cities . . . a tunnel quite near one of that city's most iconic boulevards.

His breaths were measured and confident. The half-face particulate mask he wore—a fancy filtration respirator that vaguely resembled the snout and jawline of Star Wars storm trooper—did a fine job of blocking the oppressive haze of airborne grime, permitting him to focus completely on the work before him.

His eyes zeroed in on the tangled clusters of wires ahead, his hand extended to the battered toolbox to his left. His manicured fingernails brushed against the nearby construction jackhammer instead.

The man flinched as he felt the gritty sludge of lubricant and powdered stone eke under his nails. The particle mask wheezed as he gave a half snarl, half sigh. Disgusting.

He turned his cool blue eyes away from the nest of wires, to the toolbox. He snatched up the wire cutters and brought them to the shoebox-size metal box by his knee. A dozen black metal barrels loomed behind the metal box, like an altar.

He snipped a wire. Stripped its insulation. Twisted its conductive guts with another exposed wire. A thumb's length of electrician's tape now, wrapping round and round the connection.

A smile from behind the half mask. He clicked his teeth, like a predator.

A lone red light blinked to life inside the metal box. Look at that. A cheerful Christmas light, for a very special gift.

The man closed the toolbox with a cavalier swipe of his hand—he no longer needed it, all preparations now complete—and gave it a thoughtless shove. It screeched as it slid on the gravel, finally banging against the carved wall of the tunnel. He turned his attention to the jackhammer now, and its industrial pneumatic hose.

His manicured fingers went to work, detaching the hose. He hefted it in his left hand, then stood, satisfied.

He squinted in the blaze of the construction lights, at his creation. He tugged the half mask from his face.

John Alpha grinned again, and his teeth—glowing white in contrast to his brown goatee—glittered, looking very sharp indeed.

He turned away from the dead end and dark altar, pneumatic hose still in hand, and strode down the passageway, toward the faint light ahead.

* * *

Alpha reached the tunnel's entrance, blinking at the swaying bulbs above. Still underground, but in the sloping hallway now, the hallway once used for hired help.

The portable air compressor was here, as was the silver, pistol-grip air-impact wrench. He picked up the tool, hefted it like the hand cannon it resembled, and clamped the pneumatic hose to its base. He casually flipped a switch on the compressor. It roared, alive, belching fumes into the dim hallway.

John Alpha glimpsed his reflection in the impact wrench. What a handsome devil. Smiled again.

He stepped into the hall, toward a thick door to his left. Behind him, the machine chugged on and on. The hose slithered behind him, an obedient snake attached to the wrench in his hand.

He opened the door, and his eyes, ever cool and observant, met those of his guest. His guest's eyes were suddenly wide, wild with fear. Good.

Alpha stepped inside, past the crates filled with sorrows-to-be-drowned, toward her. He paused at the center of the storage room, beside the video camera resting on a tripod. He gave his guest a wink, thrilling in the shudders it conjured. He tapped the red record button on the camera and finally made his way to the person tied to the chair before him.

Had he done that? Made that face so delightfully bloodied and misshapen? He certainly had.

"Yes, yes, you've told me everything," he said casually, as if resuming a conversation. And he was; his guest had passed out from the beating hours ago. "But I haven't told you anything. Not yet. I thought I'd remedy that"—he nodded toward the whirring video camera—"while finishing up this little project, our collaborative piece of cinema. I have a friend who's just dying to see how it turns out. He loves these kinds of movies."

Alpha brought the pulse tool to his captive's face. The bolt socket locked to its barrel glimmered, an inch away from her chin.

Alpha pressed the trigger. The tool screamed, a sound most often heard in auto shops—vippppp!—and she screamed, too, transfixed by the spinning socket, bucking her head away. The socket was a blur. He eased off the tool's trigger.

"This can take the lug nuts off a car wheel," Alpha whispered.

He lowered the air wrench to his guest's side, then stepped behind the chair, eyeing the bound hands, the fingers.

He leaned in close, his mouth hovering near her ear. "Let me share my vision with you. My plan. Pain will unite this world. There's a great deal of pain coming."

He wedged one of her fingers into the socket. And as the air wrench came alive again, and the flesh and bone were spun into slivers, and the blood sprayed against the chair, and the wall, and the floor, John Alpha never blinked. He kept cooing into that ear, low and cruel and certain, as the unholy noise filled the room.

"So. Much. Pain."

Six

Dr. DeFalco, the bearded moonman who'd whispered into John's ear yesterday when John had been strapped to a gurney, escorted the visitors through the hallways of the 7th Son facility. It was just after 7:oo a.m. DeFalco politely declined to answer any questions other than "Where are we going?" That query came from the thin one who had fainted; Jay, if John recalled correctly, and "When will we talk to Kleinman?" That had been Jack, the gene splicer.

The mess hall, DeFalco replied. After breakfast, DeFalco replied. Which prompted another question: "What's for chow?" (Michael, USMC.)

The bearded, bespectacled, gibbering fat man, whom John had nicknamed the lunatic—the only one of them who had neither bathed nor put on the new government-issued casual duds they all had in their rooms—peeped a question about his computers. DeFalco said they should be installed in the Common Room later that day. John almost questioned why Kilroy2.0 had been allowed to bring his personal possessions along . . . but then reconsidered, realizing his own Gibson probably wouldn't come in handy in a national crisis.

The hallways of 7th Son were more fascinating than frightening now that John was seeing them from an upright perspective. The lighting was practical: intermittent fluorescent panels between white ceiling tiles. The walls were pale gray slabs of unpainted concrete. A small, delicately crafted mosaic, embedded in the middle of each wall, was in the shape of a horizontal double helix, forever stretching out before them on either side.

My tax dollars at work, John thought.

They walked in bleary-eyed silence. The place had a labyrinthine, institutional quality . . . a peculiar hybrid of 1950s hospital and public-school sensibility. They passed a few doorways with keypad locks, and closed doors that slid open from the middle. John saw no windows.

The mess hall was a mammoth room dominated by swooping stainless-steel columns and at least a dozen rows of tables and chairs. John smiled up at the sun—this room had a skylight, too.

They piled their cafeteria trays with scrambled eggs, sausage links, and flapjacks from a hot bar.

"Have your breakfast, gentlemen," DeFalco said, as they were sitting down at the tables. "Dr. Kleinman will be here shortly."

"When?" asked Father Thomas, his voice trembling. John thought the man still looked priestly despite the khakis and the black Izod.

"Shortly." DeFalco closed and locked the cafeteria's double doors.

John sat down next to Jack. He squinted through the sunlight glinting from the columns, then rubbed his eyes. Last night's conversation was still baking his noodle—it felt both tangible and ephemeral, like a half-remembered dream. Like headlights in fog. Shower, shave, or no, John still felt like shit.

Jack, the geneticist, looked worse. The all-nighter had done in the family man. He sleepily scratched his beard and stared down at his breakfast. They didn't speak.

Michael clomped past Father Thomas, who was sitting alone at another table. The marine tossed his tray onto the Formica and sat across from John. Michael was alert, focused. He slapped two cartons of milk on the table and frowned at the sleepyheads.

"Get the lead out, boys," he said. "Today's a working day. Today we learn everything."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Jack said.

"What's there to be afraid of?" Michael asked, then stuffed his mouth full of eggs. John was horrified and amused. The marine held his utensils as if they were drumsticks, deftly shoveling up the grub and popping it into his mouth at a breathtaking pace.

"We get our orders today, hoss," Michael said as he skewered a sausage. "We won't be sitting on our pretty fannies anymore. We'll get to act."

Now Dr. Mike and Jay sat down at the table. John had noticed them wandering around the room like a couple of middle-schoolers, wondering where to sit. Dr. Mike didn't look so Dapper-fucking-Dan when he was out of his business suit, John thought. Particularly with that bruise on his head.

"You know what? That's great, just great," Jack replied. He eyed the newcomers, then turned his attention back to Michael. "But I'm not like you. I didn't ask for this, and I don't want to take orders. I have a home. A life. A wife. She must out for her mind right now. And my girls . . ." He gazed around the cafeteria, sneering. "It's sick. You know what two words have been going through my head this morning? Lab rats. That's what I feel like. A rat in a maze."

Michael downed one of the cartons of milk, crushed it in his hand, and harrumphed.

"What?" Jack said. "You don't feel that way?"

"I don't care who you are, hoss—janitor, gene-splicer, prez of the U.S.—there's always a chain of command," Michael replied. "There's always a bigger fish. We all take orders. The only thing that makes us different is who we take orders from."

"So?"

"So you're sore because there's been a change of command."

The thin one—Jay was his name—waved his knife in protest. "Now wait a minute." He nodded to Jack. He loves to talk with his hands, John thought. Just like me. "He's right. This is different. We're talking about cloning. Identity. Have you even thought about what that old man said? Have you processed it? Have you thought about how many international laws were broken creating this place? Have you considered that I might know every single dream—every dirty little secret—you ever had till the time you were fourteen?"

Michael glanced at John and Jack. "A little."

"And?"

"And it means I know your dirty little secrets, bub." Michael opened another milk carton. It looked fragile in his calloused hands. He turned to Jack. "Listen. All I'm saying is you were a rat searching for your cheese long before you came here. You cut up mice and cloned them. I went where the brass told me. John here plays guitar and makes drinks for club jumpers. The only thing that's changed now is our bosses."

Jack threw his fork onto his tray. "No. That's not all. This isn't some change of job title. Everything's changed. When people talk about their childhoods, Michael, they talk about seeing the same movies, reading the same books . . . they might even go on about their parents and crushes. That's not what happened last night. When you, John, and I talked last night, we talked about the same experiences. The exact same experiences. The same memories."

"If they were even our memories to begin with," John said.

Jay groaned and crossed his thin arms. "Then it's true."

The sound of laughter made the men stop and turn their heads. It was Kilroy2.0, John saw, sitting at a faraway table. The lunatic was staring up at the skylight, then down at the walls and the floors. Kilroy2.0 laughed again—this time at the floor—and began whispering to himself.

"Does anyone know what's up with him?" Jay asked.

Dr. Mike finally spoke up. "Schizophrenic, most likely. Either that or autistic savant. He hasn't said much yet. If he's autistic, he may not say much at all. If he's a schizo—and if we get to a subject he's fixated on—we may never be able to shut him up."

"Creepsville," John said.

"Don't worry about him," the marine said, then downed his other milk. He nodded to the table where Father Thomas sat, alone. "Worry about the priest. He's the one who's fubar."

John looked over at the man. Father Thomas was resting his head on his crossed arms like a child trying to nap. He was holding his rosary.

John turned his attention back to Dr. Mike. "You a shrink?"

"Criminal psychologist," Mike sniffed. "I've done a lot of criminal profiling for the LAPD; some consulting work here and there." He raised his chin slightly. "I wrote a book recently."

The marine chuckled. "Sounds like all of you were heads of the class. Way ahead of the curve. Bet you fellas jumped a grade or two in high school and college, didn't you? Caught the eye of your teachers, were given additional responsibilities, graduated well before your buddies? Regular Doogie Howsers?"

They looked at him.

"Well, that's what happened to me." Michael's eyes were haunted for a moment. "After I got out, I mean. Yeah."

The group didn't speak, waiting for more. It didn't come. Michael blinked and brightened as he shifted gears.

"I mean, I didn't go Corps until five years ago. You don't ordinarily score captain—and earn the right to be in Force Recon—in such a short time. Especially when you get a late start like me."

Dr. Mike cleared his throat and rapped his knuckles on the table, as if calling a meeting to order. "This conversation is cute, but let me be the first to say I don't believe any of it." His eyes flitted from the others' faces to the room around them. "This is a grand delusion."

"That's what I said last night," Jack said. "Until we talked about the Grand Canyon and piano lessons and first kisses."

Jay stiffened, a forkful of food halfway to his thin, pale face. "First kisses?"

"Yeah." Jack looked at the criminal psychologist. "The memories were the same."

"I wonder about that," Dr. Mike said, smiling slightly. "I really do. I believe you thought you had a conversation last night in which you shared the same memories. But I think your subconscious was trying to facilitate the delusion, based on what Kleinman had said."

John plucked his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook out a smoke, and lit it. "What do you mean?"

"All of this chitchat about similar memories and similar appearance—it was all planted by that old man," Dr. Mike said. "Do you understand how preposterous it all sounds, how irrational it is? We've been kidnapped because we look the same—and because we have the same names. That's it. John Michael Smith? Hello? An extremely common name. People have a way of finding patterns and significance where none exist."

The men watched him. Dr. Mike smiled slyly. "Kleinman and that general, they're trying to brainwash us. They're using our fear and the removal from our comfort zones to create this delusion. Marine, you know how this goes. Get a bunch of war vets in the same room and they'll start spouting specific details about battles they never witnessed. Kleinman's playing the music. You're singing along."

"You're talking about false memories," Michael said.

"To what end?" Jay asked.

"Hell if I know," Dr. Mike said, shrugging. He pointed to the lunatic across the room, then at Jay himself. "He's a schizophrenic. You're not. You're thin and don't need glasses. Jack isn't, and does. The priest's hair's thinning—just like yours—but the marine's isn't. John here plays the guitar. I haven't strummed a chord in years. Yes, there are physical similarities between us. But if we're supposed to be genetically identical clones, we're supposed to be the same. So why aren't we all shithouse-rat mad? Why aren't we all wearing spectacles? Why aren't we all pining for the Hair Club for Men? Think about it."

The table fell silent. John took a drag and chewed on the words. Grand delusion.

He looked into Dr. Mike's eyes . . . and narrowed his own.

No.

John remembered nearly screaming yesterday when he first saw Kilroy2.0's eyes, remembered how the priest had asked him if they were brothers. And nothing could downplay the impact of last night's talk with the marine and the geneticist.

And Dr. Mike himself had lost it yesterday—most notably, after Kleinman had told them their dead parents were alive.

John reached for his wallet. "I don't believe you."

Across the table, the marine cracked his knuckles. "I don't, either."

Dr. Mike raised his eyebrows. "Why not? What I said makes sense from a psychological perspective. Talk to your jarhead friend here. This is what the military calls the craft. It's textbook psyops. They're trying to reprogram us, John. Don't you see that?"

John placed the Camel in his mouth, flipped open his wallet, and fished out two wrinkled photographs. He plunked one of them into the middle of the table.

"Who are these people?" he asked, squinting through the smoke.

Dr. Mike looked at the picture. In it, a middle-aged couple smiled at the camera. The man was hugging a teenaged version of John from behind. A snowcapped mountain dominated the horizon.

"I have no idea," Mike said. "Never seen them before in my life." He looked at the four pairs of eyes scrutinizing him and raised his right hand, palm out. "Honest Injun."

"Fair enough," John said. "But you keep staying honest, Doc. As honest as I'm going to be. These are the people who raised me after my folks were killed. They're my uncle and aunt. Karl and Jaclyn Smith. Tell me something: what were the names of the people who raised you after your parents were killed?"

Blue anger flared in Dr. Mike's eyes. "That's none of your business."

"But it is," John said. "It's all of our business. Anyone else here raised like Kleinman said? By an Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn?"

Jack nodded slowly. Jay picked up the photograph and examined it. "They don't look like my aunt and uncle. They look similar, but not identical."

"Would they have to be?" Michael the marine asked softly. "Wouldn't you just need people who looked like the folks in the old picture? Remember? The one Dad always carried in his wallet? The old, banged-up one he used to show us when we'd get a postcard from them? It was faded, fuzzy. Lots of wiggle room there. Jesus."

Dr. Mike slammed his hand on the table. His silverware skittered.

"This is ridiculous!" he cried. "Listen to yourselves! There is no us. There is no we. There is only me. I'm not going to sit here and allow myself to be hoodwinked like the rest of—"

John tossed the other photograph onto the table. This time, the criminal profiler gasped.

"Now who's in this picture, Doc?" John asked. "Tell me."

They all stared down at the crinkled picture in fascination, in horror. The photo was old, faded, and unmistakable.

"Who's in the picture, Mike?"

Suddenly, another photograph was tossed onto the table. It, too, was gnarled. It, too, had the identical image of smiling man, woman, and blond-haired boy. The boy in the photograph was around six years old. John looked up—behind Dr. Mike—and saw the priest standing there. His wallet was open, too.

"It's your parents," Father Thomas said. His eyes were bloodshot; dark circles hung beneath them. "Our parents. The parents of the children who never were."

Dr. Mike laughed nervously. "Believe what you want. Continue walking down this path of delusion and you'll be just like the fat man over there. You won't know what's reality and what's concoction, what's fact and what's self-deluded fiction. Human clones. Nonexistent childhoods. An alter-ego villain who's so Freudian it's laughable. I'll believe it when I see it."

At that moment, the doors of the mess hall unlocked and opened. Dr. Kleinman, General Hill, and Dr. DeFalco stepped inside.

Kleinman gave them a patient, grandfatherly smile. "Then it's high time we began the tour."

* * *

As they strode through the halls, accompanied by four armed soldiers, Kleinman explained that the oldest part of the 7th Son facility had been built in 1951. Much of Project 7th Son was underground, due to the extreme sensitivity of the experiments and the need for secrecy—not just in principle, but in practicality. If built aboveground with the same dimensions, Kleinman said, the 7th Son facility would be about as wide as a city block and taller than Chicago's Sears Tower.

John listened and accepted this with detached awe and bewilderment, that breed of belief/disbelief found almost exclusively in dreams. (Of course Janeane Garofalo finds me witty and attractive—even though I'm wearing only a coonskin cap.)

The only other time John could remember pondering something so incredulously credible was in high school, as he doodled rocket ships into his notebook during American-history class. That was the first time he'd truly regarded mankind's first steps on the moon as something other than past tense. Now that was a genuine miracle; human will made reality. We went to the fucking moon, man. Bet your ass it was one giant leap for mankind. This here was the next leap . . . off the deep end.

Kleinman continued. The complex was located about fifteen minutes south of Leesburg, Virginia—a town about thirty miles west of Washington. Much of the land in this region was owned by the federal government, Kleinman said, and was where most of the Cold War–era contingency buildings were built. The nukeproof auxiliary White House (apparently nicknamed the Out House by insiders) was somewhere in this farm country, as were dozens of shelters for Congress-folk (Club Fed) and the Supreme Court (Judgment Stay).

They passed more silver doorways, T-junctions, and some passersby—young army folk, mostly. Hallways flowed endlessly to their right and left; that preposterous double-helix mosaic spiraled ever onward on each wall. Finally, the hallway they were following dead-ended. A small computer device sloped outward from one of the walls. Clearly, the only people who had maintained their sense of direction during the trek were the doctors, the general . . . and perhaps Michael.

Rats in a maze, John thought. Just like Jack said.

Kleinman approached the computer and let a device scan his eye. The dead-end wall suddenly opened like a giant mouth. Somewhere far away, John heard the machines opening the maw—a fluid, ear-piercing reeeeeeeee that sounded almost like a dentist's drill. He shivered. The lunatic beside him giggled.

The old man turned around to face them. Any tour-guide pleasantries were now gone from his face.

"Your retina configurations have already been loaded into the security database, so you all will have access to the elevator if needed," he said, nodding back to the dark compartment now behind him. "You might want to pop your ears now, and again when we reach the destination. The ride can be unpleasant for first-timers."

Kleinman stepped into the dark room and the group followed. Thirteen men and one woman (one of the grunts was female) crowded into the tiny, dim elevator. A computer panel inside and a small light above were the only illumination. They all watched the maw close. John felt the claustrophobia seep from the metal walls. He took in air in shallow breaths—he'd hated small places ever since he was a kid (ever since that incident in the cave, God, getting lost in the cave . . . ), and the giggling freak show beside him reeked to high heaven. General Hill's head towered well above them like the face of a dark, stone god.

"Gentlemen, what you're about to see won't be easy for you," Kleinman said.

"It's not easy right now, old man," Dr. Mike hissed, as he inched away from Kilroy2.0.

"It certainly won't be any easier in a moment. It's time you saw where you were born." Kleinman cleared his throat and looked at the ceiling. "Computer?"

"HERE," bleated a disembodied voice.

"Disengage locking clamps."

Ka-CHUNG. The entire elevator car quaked and bucked downward several inches. The floor suddenly felt unsteady, as if they were floating. John looked up at Hill's stony face. The general looked down at him—his mouth inched up gently. John closed his eyes.

"Computer, prepare destination," Kleinman called.

"READY FOR DESTINATION INPUT."

"Kleinman?" That was Jay's voice, the thin one, the one who'd fainted yesterday. His voice was high, trembling. "Where are we going?"

"The Womb."

"ENGAGED."

The elevator plummeted into the earth like a rocket gone bad. The walls rattled, the floor trembled beneath them. Somewhere outside this box, a loose sheet of metal fluttered against another, screeching over the roar.

Pressed against tense bodies, feeling the fillings in his teeth tremble, John heard one of himselves scream into the howling wind, into the darkness.

Next: Part 3