Page 90 of The Lazarus Protocol

Ash cleared his throat. “I was requested last fall. I picked up the packet from a trash can in Chicago and delivered it three days later just outside of Anchorage.”

Noah didn’t take his gaze from Adam. Jay and Dan, and Marina, had been silent through this entire exchange. “And you?”

Adam stared at him.

“You can’t tell me.” After the psychologist had told Noah that his parents had found it necessary to go underground and ensure the twins—him and Caleb—were protected, they’d evidently set up the Lazarus Protocol as a way to keep doing what they did best.

“The NDA says that if we talk, we’re out. Like a spy being burned, we’re left in the cold with no resources and no way back.” Adam shook his head. “But if it’s really your parents behind it…”

“According to what I was told, it is them.” Noah looked at Ash.

“I’ve seen them,” Ash said. “But it was a long time ago. At least six years.”

“I was with the teams then.”

Ash nodded. “I’ve been out a long time. Long enough I started to forget the danger. But the guy we went after is still out there, and there’s a contract on me that’s never going to expire. He has a network of smugglers across the world. I’ve been targeted in Budapest and in Pakistan in the mountains, miles from anywhere. I won’t ever be safe for the rest of my life.”

Noah sat back in his chair. “You guys never would’ve told me if I hadn’t found out they’re the ones who created this…exit strategy.”

“They saved my life,” Adam said. “And that’s not something I take lightly.”

THIRTY-ONE

“In a lot of ways my story is similar to Ash’s.” Adam looked at his hands, and the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. The one Ash had noticed the day they’d met. “Different country. Different bad guy. Same result.”

Noah shook his head. “We need more of an explanation than that.”

“Telling you puts you in danger. Kind of like saying it out loud makes it more real.” Adam winced. “It’s been so long you’d think some of the details would be fuzzy, but I remember every second of it.”

“You were captured.” It wasn’t a question, because Noah knew. They all did.

Why hide the scars when he had so many? “The army didn’t want the scandal. They wanted it all to disappear.”

Noah stared at him. “Why not just give you a couple million to keep your mouth shut?”

“It was your parents who did that,” Adam said, “and in the process they gave me my life back.”

Still, he’d have to explain. “We were on special assignment. Turned out it was about endurance research. Our endurance. It was a secret base. Small detachment. Eighteen of us went in, and two of us came out. The other guy killed himself later, and…” He couldn’t even say the name. “It was the base commander, the colonel in charge of the installation.”

Sickness roiled in Adam’s stomach.

“He should’ve been locked up.”

“You were tortured by an army Colonel?” Noah said.

Adam heard the tone in his voice. “I know how it sounds. But no one rang the doorbell and did spot checks to see how things were going. Montrose reported in personally on his trips to Washington, and the assignment called for no communication for the length of the deployment. No phones or internet.”

“So you were trapped there.”

“Under the authority of a psychopath who demanded the highest security clearance for his so-called experiments and had enough autonomy that the brass left him alone.” Adam swallowed back the sickness threatening to come up. “He wanted to better understand human endurance, and we were the soldiers he used to find out what a person can handle.”

“That sounds like something from centuries ago, or darker times when there weren’t checks and balances.”

Anger flared in Adam. “I know what it sounds like!” He gasped. “I tried to tell anyone who would listen, but Colonel Montrose told them all I’d lost my mind on the deployment. That the isolation got to me, and I’d cracked. He had me committed to a mental institution. And then he visited me.”

Noah flinched.

“I escaped. With a little help from some friends.”