Page 121 of The Maverick
"That's the question."
A voice behind us:
"I can answer that."
We turned.
My father had come up the corridor without any of us hearing him. He had a folder under one arm. His face had gone harder than it had been in the doorway of my suite, and thehardness was the operational hardness of a man who'd spent his life living crisis to crisis.
He stopped six feet from us.
"I just got my own confirmation," he said. "Two minutes ago. Source I trust."
"Confirmation of what?"
"Dominic Craine was a close confidant of Victoria's."
I waited for the name to land.
It didn't, because it couldn't, because I'd never heard it before.
"Dad?"
"Yeah, son."
"Who's Victoria?"
He looked at me for a long second.
Wyatt's face had done the thing again, slower this time. Grant's had set into the careful flat plane of a man who knew the answer and was watching me get there.
My father drew a breath.
"That's a longer story," he said. "I'll tell you the whole thing tonight. Right now, the short version."
"Short version."
"Victoria was part of Project Trueborn. From the beginning. She was inside the program, then she was kicked out, and then she spent the rest of her life trying to weasel her way back in." He paused. "She's dead, Tommy. We thought her sins had gone with her. They didn't. That’s what we’re left with. Victoria's leftovers, surfacing one at a time."
"Project Trueborn."
"That's the name, yeah."
I held very still.
"Dad."
“What the hell is Project Trueborn?”
He glanced at Wyatt. Wyatt nodded once.
“Trueborn was a government program. Designed to make a particular kind of soldier. It tried to do it through engineering and it failed. It tried to do it through training and it failed. It worked when it figured out the variable it had been missing, which was the way kids with real childhoods turn into the kind of men no piece of engineering can produce."
"Real childhoods?"
"Real mothers, son. Real fathers. Real homes. Real brothers." He held my eye. "Real lessons taught at real kitchen tables by real women."
I felt the room do its thing again, the way it had done its thing in my suite earlier. The downward shift in my balance. The recalibration of where my weight was on the floor.
