Chapter 9 - The General’s Confession
The interior of the speeding Jeep smelled of heavy gun oil, wet canvas, and old leather. The engine whined as it took a sharp turn onto an unpaved service road leading away from the city limits, bouncing violently over ruts and potholes. In the driver’s seat sat an elderly man with salt-and-pepper hair, his shoulders hunched over the wheel, wearing a civilian flannel shirt instead of his Air Force uniform. It wasn’t until the dashboard lights illuminated his profile that Clara recognized him through the gloom: General Thomas Vance.
Clara scrambled back against the passenger-side door, her hand instinctively reaching for the tire iron she had dragged into the vehicle with her. “What is this? Is this another trap? Where are you taking me?”
“Put the iron down, Clara,” Thomas rasped, his eyes fixed on the winding dirt road ahead. His knuckles on the steering wheel were bruised and raw, the immaculate facade of the gala completely gone. He looked older, smaller, stripped of his medals and his power. “If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t have made it out of the hotel lobby. Those men back there—they don’t answer to the Pentagon anymore. They answer to the directorate that replaced us the moment we tried to shut the project down.”
Clara didn’t lower the tool. Her dark eyes burned with suspicion. “You spent thirty years pretending my town never existed. You signed the orders that made me an orphan. Don't sit there and play the victim now.”
“I’m not playing the victim,” Thomas said, his voice breaking on a ragged sigh. He took one hand off the wheel to fumble in his shirt pocket, pulling out a battered metal dog tag on a frayed chain and tossing it onto the center console. “Recognize that? It belonged to Captain Sarah Hayes. Your mother.”
Clara stared at the scarred metal resting on the cracked plastic dashboard. The serial numbers stamped into the steel matched the digits tattooed onto her own forearm. Her breath hitched, but she refused to let her guard down.
“She died in the containment fire,” Clara said, her voice shaking despite her best efforts to keep it steady.
“She didn’t die in the fire,” Thomas corrected, turning the Jeep hard down an overgrown trail that ended abruptly before a rusted corrugated-metal Quonset hut half-buried under a hillside. He cut the engine, plunging them into sudden, heavy silence broken only by the ticking of the cooling radiator. He turned to face her in the gloom, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “She walked back into the hot zone to save you after the strike was ordered. I gave her thirty minutes to get you out before the drop. The directorate intercepted her before she reached the extraction point. I lied to the board, I lied to my wife, and I lied to myself to keep them from hunting you down for the next three decades.”
Clara’s grip on the tire iron finally faltered, slipping from her numb fingers to the floor mat. “If they wanted me, why let me live all this time?”
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“Because they couldn't synthesize the genome without a natural host reaching adulthood,” Thomas whispered, pointing a trembling finger at her tattooed forearm. “And you just walked right up to their front door and handed them the key.”
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