Quinn.” Dylan raised his voice and gestured for SDF’s all-American jet jockey. “Take Kid and go get the gimpy spook off our street. Be careful with him. Zach remembers him from a couple of undercover ops with the drug cartels in Colombia.”
From across the garage, Quinn stopped and picked something off the floor, looked it over, then took a couple more steps and picked up something else.
“Hey, boss,” he said, jogging back over to where she and Dylan were standing. He handed them a wallet and a phone. “Looks like Christmas came early. See you in ten.”
Dylan kept the phone and handed the wallet to her. “Tell me what J.T.’s been up to, Skeeter.”
She flipped it open and quickly went through the contents. It didn’t take long to catalog everything: Paraguayan driver’s license, no credit cards, no business cards, no library cards, no grocery discount cards, no membership cards, no pictures, plenty of cash, and one mag stripe key card.
She turned it over.
“He’s staying at the Star Motel,” she said.
Dylan looked up from checking the phone. “And Jane’s last call was to us. I need you to stake out the motel.”
Dammit.
“That’s the crap job, Dylan. I want to be in on the interrogation.” She wanted to get face-to-face with Sam Walls and see what he was made of.
Dylan obviously had other ideas. He gave her a look that said she knew better than to second-guess a direct order, and she did. Dammit.
Denver.
He breathed the word in through his consciousness, let it swirl though his mind. It smelled cool, and clean, and fresh with the coming rain.
Denver.
Armageddon.
Ragnarok.
The end of the world.
The end of Conroy Farrel’s world.
Monk stood at the corner of 16th and Market, in the darkness of night, in his sunglasses, in front of the bus station in LoDo. He was young, and strong, and healthy, big and muscular, with silvery hair and pale, nearly colorless eyes. MNK-1, Monk, he had no last name.
He’d come a long way and needed to stretch his legs and start getting the lay of the land. He’d studied the maps of the city and every file on Conroy Farrel/J. T. Chronopolous that he’d been able to find in the Bangkok lab of Dr. Greg Patterson, a superheated cauldron where Monk had been reborn using formulas pioneered by the legendary Dr. Souk and tweaked into the new millennium by Dr. Patterson.
Monk knew his lineage, and he knew Con Farrel. The files had been his training manual. Alone in the lab, he’d pored over them, gleaning out his purpose in life, the reason he’d been created, even as he’d lamented his abandonment. He knew what Lancaster expected of him, what he wanted—destruction, utter and absolute—and Monk was going to give it to him, a gift to his master.
At times it drove him crazy with a longing he scarcely could bear. All Monk needed was to be by Lancaster’s side, to do his will, to bear his arms and demolish his enemies—brutally, totally. It was what he’d been born to do.
But Lancaster had been lost to him, and, for that, Dr. Patterson had died.
Conroy Farrel was his way back to Lancaster’s side, and the key to finding Farrel was to track J. T. Chronopolous. Monk had the cunning to have come to understand the nature of the hunt that consumed Lancaster. Farrel had never been to Denver, Colorado. Chronopolous had been born and raised here. Whatever was left of J.T. would have more play in this place than in any other. Monk had struggled with the same situation in San Diego, his point of reentry into the world and the United States. Anywhere within a forty-mile radius of Coronado Island, and he’d felt himself slipping toward the consciousness of another man: the man he used to be, before Lancaster had recruited him four months ago for a trip to Thailand and the adventure of a lifetime, a chance to be the best that he could be.
Things hadn’t gone exactly as planned under the Bangkok medical team’s regime, nor exactly as Lancaster had promised, but Monk had no regrets.
He knew Lancaster couldn’t say the same—not yet. The old man was a visionary, and he’d gone too far, asked for too much, and gotten Monk instead of the indestructible superman he’d wanted.
And yet Monk was nearly indestructible, much more so than any of his predecessors. And he was unique, a thousand times more intelligent than any soldier before him. There would be no more like him. He’d guaranteed it.
Death.
He