Chapter 4 You can't kill what's already dead
The government man's name was Harlan Price.
Ethan had pulled that information the moment he got in the car. One look at the man's face. His brain did the rest. Harlan Price. Senior intelligence coordinator. Eighteen years in government service. Two commendations. One disciplinary hearing in 2019 that had been quietly buried. His current salary is significantly higher than what his official grade should allow.
That last detail was interesting.
"The person behind the transfer document," Ethan said. "The one who designed the program. Give me a name and an address."
Harlan looked at his hands. A man preparing himself to say something that he understood was going to change his situation permanently.
"Her name is Diana Voss," he said. "She ran the enhancement program from a private research division that officially doesn't exist. When the program was shut down she walked away clean. No record. No liability. Nothing connecting her to what was done to you or to any of the other subjects."
"Other subjects," Ethan said.
"You're the only one who survived," Harlan said without looking up. "The others didn't respond to the enhancement process the way you did. You were an anomaly. That's why she closed the program. She got what she needed from you and she didn't need anyone else surviving to complicate things."
Ethan sat with that for a moment.
"Address," he said.
Harlan reached into his jacket and wrote something on a card and held it out. Ethan took it and looked at it and filed the address without needing to look at it again.
The car stopped.
Not a traffic stop. Not a light. The driver said nothing but his shoulders went rigid and Ethan was already looking through the windscreen before the first SUV appeared.
Three of them. Black. Moving fast from two directions and closing the gap in front of the car with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before. The street was busy enough that civilian cars were swerving and stopping and horns were starting but the SUVs moved through all of it without hesitating.
Twelve men got out before the vehicles fully stopped. Ethan counted them without moving his head. Armed. Private military. The equipment was too good and the movement too coordinated for anything else. Someone had spent serious money on this and had very little time to deploy it which meant they had been ready and waiting for exactly this moment.
Harlan went completely still beside him.
"This isn't mine," he said quietly. The voice of a man genuinely scared. "I didn't arrange this."
"I know," Ethan said.
He opened the car door and got out.
He stood on the street between the car and the nearest SUV and looked at the twelve men spreading into position around him. His brain had already finished processing all of them. Dominant hands. Weight. Stance. The three who would move first and the order the rest would follow. The two at the back left who were positioned for a shot if he ran. The one directly ahead who was the team lead based on where his eyes kept going.
The team lead looked at Ethan standing alone in the street with his hands at his sides and said something into his earpiece.
Then he raised his weapon.
Ethan was already moving.
He covered the distance to the team lead in less time than the man's finger to reach the trigger. The weapon went one way. The team lead went to another. Ethan was already past him before he landed.
What followed was not a movie fight. It was not choreographed or clean or fair. It was forty seconds of Ethan moving through twelve trained men at a speed that their training had not prepared them for because their training had been designed around fighting humans.
Two of them got shots off.
He felt both bullets. One on the left shoulder. One on the side. They hurt the way bullets hurt. He did not stop moving.
When it was over he was standing in the middle of the street and twelve men were on the ground around him in various states of consciousness and the civilian traffic had stopped completely and people were out of their cars with their phones up because of course they were.
He reached up and pushed the bullet out of his shoulder with two fingers the way you work a splinter out of skin. Dropped it on the pavement. Reached down to his side and did the same.
The wounds were already closing. He could feel the tissue knitting back together under his shirt. It felt like a deep itch that moved.
Harlan got out of the car.
He stood at the car door and looked at the twelve men on the ground. Then at Ethan. Then at the two bullets sitting on the pavement. Then back at Ethan.
His mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
He tried again. "They told me the program worked," he said. His voice had lost its government smoothness completely. He sounded like a man who had been told a thing and nodded and thought he understood it and had just discovered he had understood nothing at all. "I didn't know what that meant until right now."
"Who sent them," Ethan said.
Harlan pulled his eyes away from the bullets on the ground. "Not Vincent. Vincent doesn't have this kind of resource or this kind of speed." He paused. "It's her. Diana Voss. She knows you're back and she wants you dead before you find out the full picture."
"She already knows I'm back."
"She probably knew before you got in my car this morning." He looked genuinely shaken. "She has been three steps ahead of everything for four years. I told you that."
Sirens. Distant but getting less distant. Someone in one of the stopped cars had made the call that anyone would make after watching one man take apart twelve armed professionals in forty seconds.
Ethan looked at the weapon on the ground nearest to him. Picked it up. Checked the chamber. Put it in his jacket.
He looked at Harlan. "The address you gave me. Is it still good?"
Harlan hesitated. The hesitation of a man calculating whether the answer to that question put him in more danger than he was already in.
Then he nodded.
Ethan started walking.
"Cole." Harlan's voice was behind him. He hadn't used the name before. It came out differently than the careful government tone he had been using all morning. It came out like a man talking to another man. "They will send more. You understand that. She will keep sending people and escalating until—"
Ethan kept walking.
"Let them," he said.
Behind him, he heard Harlan exhale. The long exhale of a man who had just watched something that rearranged everything he thought he knew about what was possible and was now standing alone in a street full of unconscious bodies trying to decide what to do with that information.
Ethan turned the corner.
The sirens were three blocks away now.
He checked the address on the card in his pocket without slowing down.
Diana Voss had been three steps ahead for four years.
He had been running for less than twenty-four hours.
She had no idea what was coming.
