First Light (15 page)

I pulled on sweat pants and a jumper and waited for him. I felt empty inside, but as soon as he emerged from my en-suite with a towel wrapped around his waist, his muscular body dappled with water, a pit of nerves filled my stomach. I grew hot, averting my eyes.

‘I’ll wait for you downstairs, I left some dry clothes for you there.’

I left the room, my heart threatening to burst out of my ribcage. I’d barely sat down in the living room when he walked in. Quietly thanking me for the clothes as he perched on the edge of a chair opposite me.

His eyes searched my face. ‘Ronnie, why were you spying on me?’

‘I need answers,’ I said as boldly as I could manage.

‘What answers?’ he snapped. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want to know who you are.’

Pursing his lips tightly together, he stared at the carpet. ‘Who told you I’d be there?’

Uh oh.

‘Ronnie?’ He lifted my chin so our eyes were forced to meet.

‘I’ll tell you when you tell me what I want to know,’ I demanded.

His expression hardened, but suddenly, much to my own surprise, he relented. ‘Fine.’

He let out an exhausted sigh and my stomach responded with a lurch. I was about to learn information I’d wanted for weeks, but now I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.

‘What do you want to know first?’ he asked solemnly.

After a brief hesitation, the words almost fell out of my mouth. ‘How did you know my father?’

‘He saved my life.’

My face must have been a picture, if it betrayed my shock. The answer was so blunt, yet of all the things I’d considered he might say, this had been furthest from all of them.

‘About three years ago,’ he continued, leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the ground between his feet, ‘I was in Portugal, running from people who were trying to kill me. I had been running for a long time. I was bleeding heavily and close to collapsing. Your father was driving and saw me on the side of the road. He stopped and picked me up, taking me back to the place you were staying at the time. You were on a family holiday. He fixed me up, gave me food and shelter for a full twenty-four hours, never once asking me who I was or what I was running from. All he said was: ‘
whatever you’ve done, it’s not worth such a young boy’s life.’
Your father was a good man. I haven’t met many.’

I was dumbstruck. It was so far removed from the response I was expecting and I was filled with an overwhelming love for my father. I was hooked – I wanted to know everything.

‘Portugal – Lisbon, I remember that holiday, did I meet you?’

‘No, you were asleep when I arrived and by the time you woke up the next morning I was hiding in one of the unused guest rooms.’

I thought about that, him being so close to me without my knowledge. It was a peculiar feeling. ‘Who were you running from? Why would anyone want to kill you?’

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, his lovely face contorting into a frown of desolate sadness.

‘I suppose I’d better start at the beginning. I need you to understand that what I’m going to share with you will put me in danger. But more importantly, it will put you in danger. I’m going to leave out information you don't need and you must never repeat any of this. Don’t even discuss it with people you assume already know, such as my friends. The less you know the better, and the fewer people that know you know. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

I nodded mutely, every hair on my arms standing on end. Part of me didn’t want to find out any more, but it was too late for that now.

‘I’m an orphan, as I told you. We all are. When I was four, I was taken from an orphanage in Boston and given a home. I believed I was so lucky the day a loving couple came to collect me. I’d dreamed of a family and all of a sudden out of nowhere I was getting one.

‘But, I never saw that perfect couple again. I was taken to a farm in the Midwest, operated by several men and women, none as caring as the actors they’d hired to collect me. I was the first, but soon after I arrived so did other boys around my age. We were home schooled to the highest standards in all subjects: economics, technology, sociology, languages. I speak four fluently and can get by in three others.’

He coughed into his hand and the way he spoke next made me reel. His accent suddenly reflected every American television show I’d grown up with. Absolutely flawless. This was so obviously his natural manner of speaking, yet his English pronunciation had appeared so normal I’d never suspected it.

‘Accents were next,’ he continued, ‘acting or, I guess, lying. Though we didn’t call it that, of course, nothing is called what you think it is where I grew up. For seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day I was conditioned on how to walk, talk and breathe so I could be nobody. Sounds ridiculous, right? But being invisible can be the difference between life and death for us. For that reason, I saw no other boys except those I lived with, unless absolutely necessary. I was treated like a man from a very young age, spoken to only when a situation required it. The point of such treatment was to strip us of normal human emotions.

‘Soon after we’d become used to this routine, they slowly introduced the endurance and combat training. I was seven when I first abseiled off the side of a cliff and nine when I jumped out of a helicopter into the ocean.

‘Fighting, climbing, running, driving... at first it was fun, but soon enough the real purpose of the strange farm became apparent. As we each turned thirteen, they told us what it was all for. That we were being trained to be the world’s “best soldiers”.’ He laughed darkly. ‘Soldiers – another word that has no meaning. Infiltration, insurgence, assassination; they told us we were saving the world. By then it was too late to have objections, it was all we knew and we were excited to move to the next level. We cared for nothing else.’ He paused then and I could tell he was remembering times he would rather forget. I didn’t know how to feel about what I’d heard. It was hard to believe, yet somehow, I knew he was telling the truth. Minutes passed in silence. I reached my hand across to his. It was fiery hot.

‘Kal, you’re burning up,’ I whispered with concern. His eyes narrowed as he looked at me and he pulled his hand away sharply. I had no idea what he was thinking, or what I should do, so I clasped my own hands back on my lap in front of me.

‘For three years, from the age of thirteen,’ he continued gruffly, ‘I worked for them. Spying on men three times my own age, gathering information and terminating anyone they ordered me to.’ The same dark and painful laugh escaped his lips and intensified my goose bumps.

‘As it turned out, such power isn’t suitable for children. Some of us couldn’t be controlled, despite the punishments that were handed out when things went wrong, which of course they often did. Too many boys acted out and it was all too little, too late, when they realised none of us could ever be anything other than what they had made us: cold-blooded killers. We could never be integrated into society, go back to being normal kids. Or normal adults for that matter.’

I flinched at the word killers. I couldn’t believe that of the boy I had such strong feelings for. Though my voice came out tiny and pathetically desperate, I forced myself to speak. ‘I don’t understand, who did that to you?’

‘The government, Ronnie,’ he said bleakly. ‘The people you’re supposed to trust the most.’

‘Why would they make children do that?’

‘Project Five Fifteen of the S.R.U. – Special Requirements Unit.
The Agency
. They thought child assassins would be the ultimate guise, a weapon no one would see coming. Most of us were recruited at the age of five – though I was younger – and used for their missions until we were fifteen. A lot of countries use children in war, so it’s not that shocking. Not really.’

‘But a child couldn’t do those things, a child can’t kill a grown man.’

Unhappily, he pursed his lips, staring at me with a mixture of sadness and regret, so I knew instantly how wrong I was. Images of Laith, Ace, Nash and Denver raced through my mind and so many things fell into place.

‘So, they let you go?’ I croaked, knowing the answer to my incredibly naïve question before he spoke.

‘One man who worked for them – I’ll call him Andrew for the sake of this conversation. Andrew looked after us more than anyone. He was what we call our handler. He found out that each of us were to be terminated before we turned sixteen and he took pity on me. He told me to get out. Long story short – I told others and we ran. We were lucky, I guess, or perhaps the world was unlucky, who knows which.’

‘Ace?’ I uttered his name and a pain shot through me at the thought of him.

‘Ace has never done anything wrong. He was only twelve when we ran so he’d never been sent on a job. Anyway, that was nearly four years ago. They were on my tail until your father saved my life. Since then, I haven’t seen or heard from them. I sneaked onto a cargo ship over to the UK and haven’t had much trouble keeping a low profile. I think we’re safe – for now. We just want to survive. We have to steal sometimes, because there’s no way any of us can get real jobs. We don’t own anything, we don’t keep anything; when we leave a place, all we take are the clothes on our backs. We know we can’t expect much from our lives now, but we won’t let them take us down. We won’t let them win.

‘They’re out there, though. Any day they might turn up and we could all die. I expect many of the old team are dead already. There were nineteen of us in the beginning. After casualties and before the project ended, sixteen of us had survived.

‘So that’s my life, Ronnie Rose. Tell me, how do you feel about me now?’

Canter Creek training facility, Iowa – July 2003

‘I can’t do it,’ A complained.

‘That’s your call, man.’

‘Yeah, but I know what you’re thinking!’

‘Hey, I don’t care what you do, but you know what it’ll mean if you disobey an order.’

‘I like this horse, K, it’s a pet!’

‘I think that’s the point,’ he answered without looking up from the firewood he was chopping outside the front of the big farmhouse they shared.

‘But it’s a horse! It’s not a pig, or a cow – why the hell have I got to kill it?’

‘I know what a horse is!’ K bellowed impatiently. The boy was young, but they had all been there, all done things they would rather not do. He didn’t want to live someone else’s pain; his own was quite enough.

‘I just don’t see the point,’ the young boy finished quietly, his head dropping.

‘You don’t?’ K threw his axe down and stepped forward, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. ‘All this whining over an animal, how will you fare when it’s a human being? You’ll be sent out soon, what’ll you do then? Huh? Now get lost, I’m busy, do what the hell you like.’

A swallowed the lump in his throat and stared at his teammate. Eventually K stopped chopping again and stared back. An unspoken understanding passed between them. K knew very well how it felt to kill an animal that trusted you, that you had treated as a friend. He knew the torture of it. What he didn’t know was how to help his younger teammate when he couldn’t even help himself.

Shortly after the exchange, the youngest of the group left the front yard dejected. An hour later, a shot rang out in the forest.

***

My mouth had completely dried up. I had to swallow several times before I could find enough voice to respond. ‘I don’t feel any different about you, Kal. I just feel so sorry–’

‘Don’t.’ He almost growled the word.

I flinched, but it wasn’t his tone that scared me. I couldn’t believe something so horrific could be real – that he’d come through all that. I lowered my eyes.

‘So,’ I breathed, staring at my lap, ‘You came to my father’s funeral.’

‘It’s not difficult to keep tabs on someone who isn’t hiding. His saving my life meant a lot to me. I was saddened when I learned he’d fallen ill so I came to Clanots to find out more. When he died I wanted to pay my respects. I saw you there and – I felt for you. You’d lost your father, a great man, and I wondered how you’d cope. I thought I owed it to him to ensure you did.’

‘So you only visit me because you feel you owe it to my father?’