Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [83]
“You may be right, but I bet you’re not. Some asshole with money might’ve picked up where the army left off. It happens sometimes.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He said, “Think about it—all that money and research and effort, all dumped into something that winds up blacked out and shredded. It happens all the time. And every now and again, a private corporation will take an interest, and take another stab at it. They use whatever’s left of the military documentation to seed the new experiments, picking up where they left off. Sometimes they even look up the former researchers, engineers, and scientists. Anyone who took part in it.”
“Then where does the CIA come into it? Doesn’t the very presence of CIA operatives mean it’s not a civilian operation? Or …” I reconsidered my words. “Or at least that it’s a different kind of official operation?”
“Nah,” he said. “CIA guys are wild cards. They’re allowed to freelance, and a lot of them do.”
“Like mercenaries?” I asked.
“More or less. People are always talking about setting guidelines for what they can and can’t do, but nobody ever does. There’s plenty of … let’s say ‘conflict of interest’ going on where they’re concerned. But …” He shrugged. “There’s no regulation. So they moonlight wherever the money’s good.”
“Huh.” I handed the ID back to him, but only after noting for the record that Adrian deJesus and Peter Desarme bore no resemblance whatsoever, and we wouldn’t have any luck repurposing the official cards. “You learn something new every day.”
He said, “Yeah. I’m learning a bunch of new things today, for example.” Then he dropped his hands and slapped the wallet onto the counter. His gaze went back and forth between the floor and the scotch glass, respectively. Quietly he asked, “So let me see if I can learn one more thing, while we’re talking. Did you know my sister? Is there any chance of that?”
“No,” I said. “But there’s a chance my client did. They were in the same program, anyway. Can you tell me a little about her? Something I can use to refresh his memory?” Or satisfy my own curiosity, as the case may be.
He sighed. “Isabelle ran away from home to go live with a boyfriend—a useless piece of shit she’d met someplace downtown. Our parents wouldn’t have it; they threw her out.”
“Can you throw somebody out who’s already moved out?”
“It was the principle of the thing,” he said. He tipped his finger at the glass and asked, “A little more? If you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind. It was expensive scotch, but I never drank much of it anyway. I think that the bottle was a gift from Horace, received ages previously. Adrian was welcome to it—and all the more so if it loosened his tongue.
While he sipped, I asked, “She was your younger sister, I assume? Did you try to talk her out of it? Being big brother, and all?”
“Of course I tried. But she wouldn’t hear it, and I was already overseas by then—”
“Military,” I said, remembering what the PDF had said about the thief.
“Navy SEAL,” he specified. “I was wrapping up training far enough away from here that there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, she started to dabble in drugs, and then the boyfriend died or disappeared—I’m not sure which. She tried to come home but our mother wasn’t having it. Momma gave Bella the line about how if she wanted to go be an adult, she could stay out there and be an adult.”
“Ouch. What’d she do then?” I was going for the sympathy play, and it wasn’t entirely a ploy. I honestly wanted to know about his sister—how she’d been turned, how she’d been captured, and how she’d died.
“Lived on the streets, I guess. Bounced in and out of shelters.”
“Dropped out of school?”
He nodded.
Well, that was one more paper trail I wouldn’t bother chasing.
“By the time I had leave to come home, the household was a war zone between my mother and my father. And Isabelle was nowhere to be found.”
“Your mother wanted her to stay gone, and your father wanted her to come home, is that right?”
“Yes.” His eyes narrowed, watering with exhaustion or very old pain. “How did you know?”