especially high expectations for King Banner and Rock Howe, the last two LeedTech soldiers to come out of Souk’s lab. They were the pinnacle of the good doctor’s twisted art.
Rick Karola and Sam Walls were the flotsam and jetsam of Souk’s lab—not quite whole, a couple of mistakes, but skilled and exceptionally loyal. Basic, true loyalty went a long way with Lancaster. It made up for any number of other deficiencies.
And then there was MNK-1.
He pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and dabbed at his upper lip.
Monk, the doctor had called it. Monk the mistake is what Lancaster had called it, the Bangkok disaster. Dr. Souk hadn’t been the only doctor experimenting with creating the ultimate soldier, and after Souk’s untimely death, a man named Greg Patterson had risen to the top of the heap. If the MNK-1 thing had functioned, it would have gone a long way toward redeeming Patterson, the Bangkok bungler, a half-American, quarter-German, quarter–mad genius Irishman. Lancaster hesitated even to call the man a doctor or scientist, not after what he’d come up with. Certainly Patterson wasn’t getting any more contracts or money out of him. He needed distance and plenty of it between him and … and the abomination Patterson had tried to foist off on him as the world’s ultimate warrior.
The very thought of the thing made his skin crawl, made him feel unclean.
God, he’d been there when Patterson had woken the creature up, and he hoped never to have such a shock again. Those weird albino eyes snapping open and locking onto his with such painful intensity, that mouth gaping wide, then wider, words choking in its throat. Its hair had been long and streaked, platinum blond and pale gray, almost silver, and crazily matted in twists and knots. The creature had looked human, remarkably still like the young man Lancaster had recruited in San Diego, but along with adding strength and speed and cunning and fifty more pounds of sheer muscle mass, Patterson had turned something inside out in the man, and it showed. What Patterson had been left with was not a soldier of any kind Lancaster could bear to have on board his LeedTech juggernaut, which made MNK-1 useless except as combat fodder, like a rabid wolf to be carted around in a cage and let loose to kill and feed.
He’d walked out on the deal and gone back to the basics, to the tried and true, good guys like Rock and King. They’d been following the Mercedes in an SUV, and when four cars had exited Steele Street like bats out of hell, Lancaster had sicced his good guys on them. But they’d lost the one car they’d almost caught, and now they were cruising the city, checking out the chop shop boys’ old haunts.
His two knuckle draggers sure as hell had better have caught something by now. Failure was not an option.
Crutchfield pulled a cellphone out of his pocket and punched in a speed-dial.
“Status report,” he said. After a moment, he met Randolph’s gaze. “King says they picked up another one of the cars, a GTO. They think it’s Farrel, and they’re closing in.”
“Good.” He wasn’t impressed. He expected results. “Remind them of their rules of engagement. No lethal force. I want him alive, and I want him here. I have questions. When they’re answered, Rock and King can have him back and take him apart.” He meant it literally, and knew that’s exactly what he’d get, Conroy Farrel, his most dangerous mistake, utterly destroyed to the point where no amount of drugs and pills and elixirs could bring him back to life.
He refused to take the blame for MNK-1. That was Patterson’s mistake, not his. He’d divorced himself from the Thai lab and its line of products. No one could tie him to Dr. Patterson’s creation, and now it was dead. There were no records of the transaction anywhere. He’d made certain of it. To the world’s knowledge, MNK-1 had not and did not exist. Only Lancaster and the Bangkok bunglers knew what they’d done—and perhaps Crutchfield had a slight supposition.
Genetic imprinting, Patterson had called his great breakthrough, a loyalty gene, a small chromosomal reconstruction way down in the double helix, a way to assure absolute obedience.
Lancaster hadn’t seen obedience or obeisance, or whatever the hell Patterson had wanted to call it. What he’d seen was far more disturbing.
He’d seen love—passionate, absolute, sickening. The creature had longed for him. Not sexually, but with such intensity