Chapter 5 The woman who built him

The building looked like it sold insurance.

Four floors. Clean glass front. A small corporate sign beside the entrance with three company names on it that meant nothing individually. Ethan stood across the street and let his brain work.

Registered owner. Meridian Solutions. He pulled the thread without touching a phone or a screen. His brain ran it the way it ran everything now. Meridian Solutions is owned by Vantage Pacific. Vantage Pacific had three directors. One name from Rosa's documents. A silent partner in a Cole Industries subsidiary was created eight months after his father's death.

Diana Voss had been sitting inside his father's company the whole time. Nobody had checked the lease on a tenant.

He crossed the street.

Service entrance on the east side. One camera covering the left approach. He came from the right. A delivery worker pushed the door open from inside without looking and Ethan caught it before it closed and walked in like he had been there a hundred times.

Ground floor. Receptionist. Young. Focused on her screen. He moved past the lobby without slowing and she didn't look up.

Second floor. Two workers in a corridor are arguing about something. Neither noticed him.

Third floor. Security guard in a chair outside a server room watching a football match on his phone. Three weeks old based on the kit. Ethan walked past close enough to hear the commentary.

Fourth floor. One corridor. Four doors. Light under the one at the end.

He opened it and walked in.

---

Diana Voss was smaller than he expected.

Fifty-eight. Short grey hair. Dark jacket. A desk completely clear except for a laptop and a single pen placed parallel to the edge with the precision of someone who arranged things once and never moved them again.

She looked up when he walked in.

No surprise. No reaching for anything. The calm of someone who had set an alarm and was simply noting that it had gone off.

"I was expecting you," she said. "Not this fast. But I was expecting you."

"Talk," Ethan said. "You have two minutes."

Something moved across her face. Not quite a smile. She sat forward and put her hands flat on the desk and talked.

"The program was mine. Not the government's. I used their funding and their infrastructure but the science was mine. Fifteen years of research into human genetic adaptability." She looked at him directly. "Your genetic profile has been in my database since you were four years old. A routine medical workup. National database. I had access through a research grant. You were not chosen randomly, Ethan. You were always going to be chosen."

He said nothing.

"Your father found out you were alive eighteen months into the program. I told him enough to keep him cooperative and not enough to give him anything he could use publicly. When he decided he wanted to go public anyway I gave him a choice." She held his eyes. "Sign the company over to Vincent or the facility gets shut down and you get classified as a liability."

"He signed."

"Within the week. He chose you over everything he built. He was crying when he signed it and he did not stop until it was done." She paused. "He had no choice, Ethan. Not a real one. I want you to understand that."

His father's hand was shaking on the pen. The tears. He had no choice.

Now it had a shape.

Ethan opened his mouth.

His brain fired before the words came out.

Something wrong. Downstairs. His brain had been passively tracking the movement patterns of everyone in the building since he walked in. Receptionist. Office workers. Security guard. The rhythms of a normal Tuesday morning in a building full of people doing ordinary things.

That rhythm had just changed.

He stood up.

Diana watched him.

He looked at the gap under the door. The shadows moving in the corridor outside were not moving the way people move when a fire alarm goes off. They were moving toward this room. Controlled. Spread out. Taking positions.

Three seconds later the alarm went off.

Diana was already on her feet. She reached into her desk drawer and took out a letter and put it in her inside jacket pocket without being told. She had prepared for this too.

"How many," she said.

Ethan held up eight fingers.

She nodded and moved to the window without hesitating. Checked the drop. Looked back at him.

The door came in.

Eight men. Professional. The same quality as the twelve from this morning which meant the same source. They came in fast and spread immediately and the first two had their weapons up before the door had finished moving.

Ethan was already inside the room before they finished spreading.

What happened next lasted twenty seconds.

It was not clean. It was not a performance. It was a man moving at a speed that the room had not been designed to contain doing things to eight trained professionals that their training had not included a response to. The second man's weapon discharged once into the ceiling before Ethan reached him. The ceiling took the damage. Nobody else did.

When it was over all eight were on the floor and Ethan was standing in the middle of them and breathing normally because twenty seconds of that did not cost him breath anymore.

Diana looked at the eight men. Then at Ethan.

"We need to go," she said. "There will be more and this time they will bring something bigger."

She went out the window first.

Fourth floor. She went without hesitating. Grabbed the frame. Dropped to the third-floor ledge. Dropped again. Hit the ground and moved immediately without looking back to see if he was following.

Ethan went after her.

They were half a block away when the black van came through the service entrance of the building behind them. Not through the door. Through the wall beside the door. Ethan heard the impact before he turned.

Twelve men got out of the van before it stopped moving. Moving fast and spreading wide the way the first group had but with more urgency. More anger. The anger of people who had been told a job was done twice today and were tired of being wrong.

One of them had something on his shoulder.

Ethan's brain identified it before his eyes finished focusing. Rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Single shot. Loaded.

Diana grabbed his arm. "Run. Even you cannot outrun a rocket-propelled grenade in an open street."

Ethan looked at the man with the launcher.

Two hundred meters. The man was raising it to his shoulder. His hands were steady. Trained. He had done this before.

Ethan looked at Diana.

"Go that way," he said. "Don't stop."

"Cole—"

"Go."

She went.

Ethan turned and ran directly toward the twelve men.

Not away. Toward.

The man with the launcher had his target moving away. He had not accounted for the target turning around. He had not accounted for a man running at him across two hundred meters of open street at a speed that did not match anything his experience had prepared him for.

He fired.

The rocket went wide left.

It hit a parked car thirty meters to Ethan's right and the explosion came at him in a wall of heat and pressure that lifted him completely off the ground and threw him fifteen meters down the street.

He hit the pavement hard.

Lay there for two seconds.

Then he stood up.

His jacket was on fire. He took it off and dropped it. Three of his ribs had broken from the impact. He could feel them already moving back into position like slow fingers straightening themselves out. It hurt in a way that was significant and getting less significant by the second.

He looked at the twelve men.

They were standing completely still. Staring at him. The man with the launcher had lowered it and was looking at Ethan standing in the street with his shirt burned and his ribs healing and absolutely no intention of stopping.

One of them said something into his earpiece.

His voice was shaking.

Ethan started walking toward them again.

They ran.

All twelve. In four different directions. Weapons dropped. Van abandoned. Twelve professional private military contractors running from one man walking toward them in a burned shirt on a Tuesday morning.

Ethan watched them go.

Then he turned and walked in the direction Diana had gone.

He found her two streets away pressed against a wall with her phone in her hand and her eyes on the corner watching for him.

She looked at him. At the burned shirt. At the complete absence of injury on a man who had just been thrown fifteen meters by an explosion.

She put her phone away.

"They fired a rocket at you," she said.

"Yes."

"And you're fine."

"My ribs are a little sore."

She looked at him for a long moment with the expression of a scientist seeing fifteen years of theory confirmed in under thirty seconds.

Then she reached into her jacket and took out the letter.

His father's handwriting on the front.

His name.

"He made me promise," she said. "That whatever happened I would make sure you got this."

Ethan took it.

He held it in his hand and looked at it and did not open it yet because opening it in a street with Diana Voss watching him was not how he was going to read the last thing his father ever wrote to him.

"Where are we going," he said.

Diana straightened her jacket and looked up the street.

"Somewhere they won't find us in the next ten minutes," she said. "After that, it's your plan. You're the one they can't kill."