“Why care about Koda now? You people didn’t care when I tried to tell you before. No one did. The media laughed at me. The police told me to quit wasting their time. And when I wrote letters to every government official I could think of, I received a list of numbers for mental health facilities.” Reese’s eyes burned. He did not want to relive this. But no matter how hard he tried, the feelings wouldn’t go quietly into the dark. And while he’d turned his back, they’d grown into a mountain. “But you had a reason to me shut up. You used the betas when you didn’t want to send in people because you knew it was a death sentence.”
“No one knew,” she said.
“Really?” Reese laughed.
“The private military companies the government contracted with were just one of a dozen or more branches of New World Genetics. We had no reason to suspect they were using people who’d been changed.”
“Nah, no reason. It’s perfectly normal for seven out of eight men to walk away from a helicopter blown apart by a land-to-air missile, survive IED’s, to take out hundreds of armed men with nothing but their hands. Yeah, sounds like standard operating procedure to me.”
A bit of flush rose in her cheeks, and Reese didn’t hold back the smile. One small victory in his worthless life.
“We knew they had technology capable of preserving human lives. We had no idea what that technology was.”
“Don’t ask don’t tell? The Military motto?”
“Dr. Dante.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, wiping away tears he wasn’t aware he’d lost.
“Please, just go. Just let me…” Disappear.
“Whatever happened between you and the sub—”
Reese looked at her.
“Koda. It obviously wasn’t just a standard patient doctor type relationship.”
Reese wasn’t going to try to refute it. He was done lying to himself. “Looking at psych evaluations helped in selecting the betas, but it didn’t do anything for finding an Alpha. When looking for a subject capable of housing the Anubis, transferring it successfully, and then strong enough to keep a team together, took something special.”
“What?”
“Have you ever noticed how some people are just born good? That no matter what life throws at them, they don’t turn bitter, they’re humble, they’re kind. That’s the type of person who makes a good Alpha.”
“And how did psych evaluations help you find someone like that?” Her mouth twitched with the threat of a smirk.
“We didn’t use evaluations, we used the pattern of amino acids we found in the Book of Anubis to identify suitable subjects.”
Phillips widened her eyes. Harrington shifted his weight.
Reese nodded. “I told you there were things on that wall that couldn’t be there.”
“And how did you get DNA samples?”
Reese stood and paced again. But it wasn’t the same frantic anger filled movement; it was simply something to do. “Bone marrow programs, organ recipient and donor lists, those genealogy tests people send in to try and figure out where their ancestors are from.”
“That’s a wide area.”
“Yeah. The odds are about one in a million, give or take. Then you have to luck out that one: they’re dead. Two: relatively intact. And three: they agreed to donate their body.”
“How difficult was it to find someone?”
“After six months, New World got pretty impatient. After a year? Reese shrugged. We were lucky. Lottery odds lucky.”
“You found Koda?”
“Yeah, within twelve hours of his death, we had him at the lab.” Reese could still hear Echols’s shouts for personnel to prep the operating table. He could still hear his own shouts for them to move faster.
How the wheels on the gurney clicked against the floor.