"Obviously. The question is what." Losham squinted against the sun and adjusted his pace. "I couldn't read his mind. Natural barriers. Strong ones."
"That's uncommon."
"Not for smart Russians." Losham waved a hand dismissively. "It doesn't prove anything by itself."
"Do you still believe he enhanced himself with the drugs?"
Losham considered the question as they walked. The adrenaline explanation was plausible enough to satisfy a casual inquiry, and the workers-as-unreliable-witnesses angle gave Dimitri cover. But the horror on his face when Losham had ordered him to start the human enhancement research had been genuine. A man who was already secretly enhancing himself wouldn't recoil at the idea of developing the methodology openly.
Unless the horror was specifically about other people dying from the process that he'd survived.
There were too many variables and not enough data. Losham needed to observe Dimitri more closely, test him in controlled situations, and look for the moments when his mask slipped.
"I'm not sure what he's hiding," Losham admitted. "But something about him has changed. The way he carries himself. The way he reacted, or rather didn't react, to my questions. He did better than any human in his position should do."
"Should we test him? Put him in a situation where he'd need to reveal enhanced abilities?"
Losham had considered that.
They could engineer a confrontation, throw Dimitri into a fight with a couple of warriors, and see whether the superhuman speed and strength materialized. But there were problems with that approach. If Dimitri was using the drugs intermittently, he might not be enhanced at the moment of the test. The drugs he used on himself might require reinjection before manifestingthose increased abilities. Testing him and getting a negative result would prove nothing except that the timing was wrong.
And if the test yielded a positive result, if Dimitri did fight like an immortal, Losham would have to explain to his brothers how that was possible, and he preferred to keep them in the dark about the possibility of enhancing humans.
"We need to cover for him whether he's using the drugs on himself or not," Losham said. "I don't want my brothers learning about the new research."
Rami nodded, a small smile lifting one corner of his lips. "Now I understand why you asked me to kill the surveillance of the lab. I assume that we are going to leave it that way?"
"Very astute of you, Rami. We don't want anyone finding out what Petrov and Volkov are working on. That being said, I want to increase our own people guarding and monitoring the lab from the outside. After all, it's imperative that we keep our scientists safe."
31
DIMITRI
The sun had set an hour ago, but the air was still warm and heavy, thick with the scent of tropical flowers and the salt tang of the ocean. The island didn't cool down at night so much as shift from oppressive to merely stifling, the heat radiating up from the stone pathways long after the sky had gone dark.
Dimitri stood outside the lab building and checked his watch. Seven-thirty.
He was right on time.
Above him, the sky was spectacular, a canopy of stars so dense and bright that it looked artificial, like something projected onto a planetarium ceiling. He'd grown up in Moscow, where the night sky was a dull orange smear of light pollution, and then he’d spent a miserable time in a Siberian labor camp where the stars were bright but associated with freezing temperatures. Here, the stars were beautiful, and enough time had passed since Siberia for him to enjoy them.
The lab door was locked behind him. Mattie was upstairs, nervous but resting in bed, and Petrov was in his room doing whatever Petrov did at night when he was not visiting the brothel, which was mostly drinking vodka and reading scientific journals in that order.
The truth was that Konstantin had stayed in the lab instead of visiting his lady friend in the brothel only because he'd refused to leave Mattie alone while Dimitri met with Dave, so there was that.
Petrov was a drunk, but other than that, he was an okay guy.
Dimitri heard Dave approach before he saw them.
It wasn't the synchronized boot rhythm that he'd come to associate with Dave's arrivals, but rather a quiet rustling of movement from the shadows between buildings, the soft crunch of gravel under multiple feet.
They materialized out of the darkness one by one, eight figures emerging from different directions and converging on his position with the fluid coordination of a single organism controlling eight separate limbs.
Number One walked up to him.
He was the tallest of the Eight, and in the starlight, his features were hard planes and deep shadows. His expression carried that characteristic quality that all eight shared, a look of calm attentiveness that made their different faces seem almost like variations on a theme. It wasn't that they were identical. They weren't. Their faces, their builds, and their coloring were all distinct. But the expression behind the eyes was the same, and that sameness was what made them so unsettling.
"Dimitri," Number One said. "It is a lovely evening for a walk. Thank you for agreeing to accompany me and talk about improving the formulation. I feel a little restless lately." He leaned closer. "We are not alone. Let's keep walking."
