studying people ever since he first woke up.
Clarkson hadn’t moved. Seven opened his phone and hit the redial button again, watching his target.
Clarkson picked up the phone when it started ringing and checked the caller ID.
He reached out and caught Clarkson’s hand in his grip, squeezing the fingers hard enough to pin the hand around the cell.
“Hey, what the hell?” Clarkson’s voice was nervous, shaky.
He leaned down and looked at the man. His other hand held his phone up and he killed the attempted call. The cell in the man’s hand stopped ringing at the same time, and he grinned as he watched Clarkson realize exactly who he was dealing with.
“Daniel Clarkson.” His voice was a purr as he leaned in closer still. “Have I mentioned how much it pisses me off to be left hanging?”
“I didn’t know you were here.” The man licked his lips, and the worried expression on his face was enough to wrinkle his brow below the wide bald spot at the top of his head. He looked like an accountant, which was what he had been once upon a time.
“You would have if you answered the phone.”
“I could get in a lot of trouble if the wrong people found out about this.”
“I don’t care. That’s why I agreed to pay you fifty thousand dollars.”
“You can keep the money. I don’t need it that badly. I can’t take this chance.”
Seven kept his cool despite the rage that rushed through him. This was a matter that had to be handled the right way if he wished to avoid losing the information he needed. “Here’s the deal, Daniel. I give you the money in this bag, and you tell me what I need to know.” He squeezed harder on the captured fingers and saw Clarkson wince. “Or I beat the information out of you. Like I did with Marty Hanson. You remember Marty, don’t you? He was tough to convince. I had to break four fingers before he started talking to me.”
Clarkson’s eyes flew wide and he opened his mouth, ready to say something before he closed it again, the words apparently forgotten. Before the man could try to speak a second time, Seven leaned in closer, so close that he could smell the sweat and aftershave that tainted the man’s shirt.
“Think it over carefully. You have two minutes. If you try to scream or fight me, Daniel, I promise you I’ll make you wish you were never born. Do you believe me? Or do you want to test it?”
Daniel believed him. They left the bar together and walked across the street to a diner that looked just as seedy. Seven was calm; he waited until they’d both ordered food before he started the interrogation. Daniel Clarkson was fidgeting and looking all too ready to rabbit. Seven set a hand on the man’s wrist and watched him flinch.
“Why are you so nervous, Daniel?”
The sweating man barely dared to look at him. “Because I know who you are.”
“Really? Who am I?” He smiled, watching the nervous wreck in front of him.
“Subject Seven.”
The smile actually grew larger. “Now how did you know that?”
“I remember you. I saw you a few times.”
“I thought you just did paperwork, Daniel.” His smile faded. He’d never thought that the people providing him with information might have been among those who tortured him. That changed the equation.
Daniel looked like a dog that’d been whipped too many times. Seven guessed that if he screamed boo too loudly, the man would likely bolt from the diner. He was granted a few seconds’ respite when the short, round waitress brought them their food. He held his answer until after she’d left. “All I do now is paperwork. That’s all I did then, too, but now and then I saw things.”
“When did you see me?” Seven took a bite of his burger. It was half rare and heavily salted and he loved it.
“I saw all of you. All ten. I mean, not all at once, but I saw all of you. I saw you when they found out what made you special.”
“What made me special, Daniel?” He kept his voice calm. He wanted answers, and he would have them, but not if he lost his cool.
Clarkson looked a little surprised by the question. “You, you were an Alpha.”
“Want to explain that to me?”
“Alphas, that’s like with a pack of wolves, okay? Alphas are the leaders.”
“Daniel, let’s pretend that I don’t know all the lingo, okay?” He set down his burger and put his hands on the table where Clarkson could see them. His voice was low, but he knew the man was hearing every word. “Let’s pretend that back in the day, no one told me much of anything. They just did what they wanted. Start at the beginning and tell me what an Alpha is and what makes it special.”
Daniel nodded and inhaled half his burger, chewing fast and hard while he tried to figure out exactly what to say to avoid getting himself murdered. When he’d finished his eating frenzy, he started talking. “Okay, so, the idea was always to make soldiers. And what do you need to have good soldiers? You need a leader. You need to have someone in charge who can make split-second decisions. That’s you. That’s an Alpha.”
Seven nodded. He didn’t care about the reasons. He just wanted to know the results.
“Listen. You, all of you, were failures. They thought they’d screwed it up again, okay? Nothing they did, none of the tests, showed any measure of noticeable change. None of you were performing up to expectations at first, so you were all going to be discarded. So, they were almost ready to scrap everything and start from scratch, but somebody got the idea to watch all of you together to see how you reacted to one another. Remember, you were all… part of the same batch. They put you all in a room where they could observe you by video camera, but then there was an accident. I think it involved Three if that matters to you.”
It didn’t. Not anymore. He’d long since dealt with the deaths of the others as best he could.
“Subject Three got loose and they sent a couple of guards after her. She was trying to get out and they had to, well, they had to shoot her. She didn’t survive. But she was hurt before she died. She suffered is what I’m saying.”
Seven closed his eyes for a second. Deep in the recesses of his thoughts he could remember the sudden screaming pain, the way his stomach had clenched and the way Three’s screams had echoed through his mind.
Daniel continued. “They watched the tapes, and they showed me the sequence. They saw how you reacted to Three’s escape and death, and they knew they’d succeeded.”
“Cut to the damn chase.” Seven’s voice was a rumble.
“Call it a psychic link. You don’t have any of the others around right now, but back at the labs you used to respond whenever anything happened to one of the others. You would scream when they were angered, and you communicated with them. We saw it. We studied it. They cataloged the whole thing. You’re the reason the program went on, Seven. You made them know they were on the right track.”
“How very nice for them.” His sneer was enough to make Clarkson flinch. “Now tell me about the rest of them.”
“The rest of them?”
“They kept ten out of the batch. There were more than that.”
“How do you know that? No one knows that but-”
“What do you think I was paying Hanson for? His company?” He took a breath to calm himself down. The anger was there again, reminding him that he hated Janus and everyone associated with the company. “Of course, he eventually clammed up and I had to use more than money to get him to talk. Be smarter than him, Daniel. Tell me everything I need to know and it doesn’t have to get as messy. See my point?”
Clarkson nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I get you. There were more. Most of them, most of them were eliminated.”
“But not all of them. You kept some, didn’t you?”
“What? No. What the hell would I want with a bunch of kids?” Clarkson shook his head. “I sold them. Me and Marty, we were in the same boat, see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it was wrong, okay? It’s one thing to create them, but to just, to just throw them away? Like they never even existed? Man, that shouldn’t even happen to dogs.”
