Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(22)
“What about his ID?”
“It’ll be as fake as he is. He’s not a tourist and he’s not a civilian, and he fooled us both, which made him smart, tough, and highly trained.” Stefan was already pushing the car, the sleeves of his shirt pulled over the heels of his hands to keep it print free, as the dead man’s slack legs scraped the ground.
“I know they’ll be fake, but who made them will tell me something. Different methods, different materials.” I moved past him as he stopped pushing the car, rolled the dead body to its side with no sympathy for the bastard who’d almost killed my brother, and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “All right. Now we push.” I followed Stefan’s lead and in less than a minute the car plunged down a nearly straight embankment into the river below.
He had fooled me, the son of a bitch, and that took a great deal of training . . . and a shitload of laziness on my part. But hadn’t I gotten lazy in Cascade Falls? I did my background checks, and I was properly suspicious of what lay behind all the friendly faces—at first. Then I’d gotten complacent. I filed this one under * tourist and didn’t use anything the Institute had taught me, didn’t take a second glance, much less the third and fourth he deserved. I’d thought earlier that you could read anyone if you bothered to look . . . but I hadn’t bothered to look. I, the shamefully stupid f*cking *, had almost gotten us killed.
“That is a lot of frigging curse words from someone who has to study up on just how to say them.” Stefan had my arm and was dragging me back to the car.
“Did I just say all that aloud?” I found my footing and ran with him.
“Yeah, it was damn impressive, but you did not almost get us killed.”
“Right. It must’ve been that other Michael. The idiot.” I slammed the car door and buckled up. “I’m guessing no Canada. We fool Raynor or whoever into thinking we went there, but head south? We’d better head for the new Institute before they get nervous with our being so close and move it. The cure is more or less done anyway.” I looked through the wallet. The ID was fake all right, and shoddy. That had government subcontracting all over it.
“I’ll call Saul and get the troops lined up then,” Stefan responded. We’d been planning this for a long time. Saul and about twenty mercenaries were on call, more or less, for when they were needed. They could meet us there. They’d be hours behind us, but that would give us a chance to check out the place close up and not just from satellite pictures.
Stefan had left the car running. He jerked the steering wheel and headed back the way we came, adding roughly, “And it’s not your fault.”
It was definitely my fault, but I’d fix it. Kids let someone else fix their mistakes. Adults fixed their own. It was time Stefan had an equal now, not a responsibility.
Time to grow up.
There were actually more than two ways out of Cascade Falls, but the third way was known only by locals or handymen the locals trusted. It also would rip out the bottom of your car by the time you made it out, but destroying—no, trashing; that was the more apt word—trashing a car was better than meeting Raynor face-to-face before we were ready. An adult, but an adult with a completely average vocabulary to go with completely average brown hair, eyes made as average by contacts—camouflage, you have to work at it. If we were ever free, then I could talk like the genius I was—if I stopped making mistakes and made it back to genius status.
I started to reach for my computer but stopped to dig a shirt out of Stefan’s bag in the backseat. “Do you want to get into something less . . . ummm . . . covered in ex-tourist?”
Anyone and everyone he’d killed he’d killed to save me, and as he’d said, I don’t think he’d ever done it literally face-to-face, mere inches away. Wearing the evidence of it probably wasn’t pleasant. Saying thanks, he let me grab the wheel as we bumped over the narrow excuse for a dirt road, and quickly took off his jacket and holster and changed the shirt. Once he was armed again and back in his jacket, he took the wheel. “Now, go e-mail your girlfriend.”
I was going to deny that I was intending to e-mail her, although I had been planning to, and certainly say that she wasn’t my girlfriend. I hadn’t met her in person yet. She lived across the country in New York, not to mention many other obstacles. I didn’t have a chance to get any of that out, however, as Stefan, instead of going with “holy shit” this time, went with “mother-f*cker.” He was looking in the rearview mirror. So much for locals giving out private town info only to their good-old-boy handyman.
The SUV behind us was built for this type of road while our used, low-slung Toyota wasn’t. It gobbled up the dirt and rocks behind us. It was black and I couldn’t see more than a shadowy shape through its tinted windows. Raynor? The Institute? Raynor working for the Institute? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t do to him what I’d done to the dead tourist—make him vomit up his breakfast or cut off the blood flow to his brain for a few seconds. The latter would cause unconsciousness, and maybe he would veer off the road, and we could leave him behind. But I had to be able to touch the person to do those things. We all did, Jericho’s legacy. All but one. And she wasn’t here now, although if she had been, she would’ve gleefully had his brain melting out of his ears, blood spurting from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Then she would’ve done the same to us.