“Ungrateful,” muttered Isaac to himself.
“May I get you anything to eat, sir?” asked the gentleman with the cart full of food.Isaac was hesitant, not wanting to see food he didn’t recognize.Realizing he still had a ways to go and his stomach was rumbling, he had no choice but to give in.
“What do you have?” he asked.
“We’ve got some lovely sandwiches with a variety of sides.I have curried rice and chicken, and curried noodles with lamb.”
Isaac made his selection, paid the man and purchased a bottle of water and a soda.He stared at the empty seat across from him, missing his brother.He didn’t tell anyone that the seat was available, instead keeping the two seats for himself so he could stretch out.
The meal was surprisingly tasty and made him sleepy.It was perfect timing as the sun settled in the distance and others were beginning to snore.Putting his ear plugs in, he leaned the chair back and lifted his feet to get comfortable.
Leo had been very concerned about the soldier and his friends and family but thus far, Isaac had seen nothing to be worried about.Leo.Always making mountains out of molehills.
With just three more stops to make, he might just be able to reach the numbers that his buyers were hoping for.The final two would be the ultimate test.If he could make the serum work for a group of millions, he’d be the wealthiest man on the planet, and the most difficult to find.
He’d already booked his appointment with the plastic surgeon in Brazil.He was going to look half his age when they were done and no one would be able to find him.Not even the super special soldiers that Leo feared so much.
He chuckled to himself and closed his eyes.Just a few more hours and he’d be at the next stop.With any luck, it would move quickly.By the end of the week, he’d be recovering on the beach in Rio.
In six months, he’d be on his own private island waiting for his next opportunity to serve those that shared his thoughts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The private carriage rocked with a lazy elegance as the train moved north through the Indian countryside, its brass fittings gleaming softly under shaded lamps and its velvet seats swallowing the men in improbable comfort.It seemed they were in a bygone era of train travel and luxury.
Conor sat nearest the window with a glass of cold water beading in his hand, watching fields of millet and scrub slide by in bands of green and dust, while Moose worked through the remains of a lunch so carefully prepared it belonged in a palace rather than on rails.
Fitch had spread a paper map across the lacquered table, though Sor insisted the route mattered less than the timing, and Pax, Saint, River, and Logan listened with the taut stillness of men who knew their target was still ahead of them, somewhere beyond the shimmering distances.
Servants in crisp uniforms entered and left with almost ceremonial precision, laying down silver covers that released the aromas of saffron rice, lamb in dark spice, flatbreads brushed with ghee, and bowls of fruit cooled on ice.
Moose muttered that the food alone could make a man forget what country he was crossing, and Logan answered with a glance out the window, where a cluster of mud-brick homes leaned into the heat, children barefoot in the dust beside a hand pump, and women carrying bundles that looked heavier than anything the eight of them had lifted that day.
The dissonance sat with them at the table like an uninvited ninth passenger, impossible to dismiss no matter how polished the cutlery or how attentive the service.
Their target had become a rumor before he became a man, a name passed in fragments through laboratories, military archives, and dark private networks where moral language was used only as camouflage.What made him monstrous was not merely his ambition but the arithmetic behind it: he believed entire populations could be sorted into worthy and disposable categories by the patterns hidden inside their blood.
He had built, stolen, or coerced the tools to turn that belief into a weapon, and somewhere in the chain of evidence the eight men had discovered the unbearable truth that their own DNA made them exceptions to the slaughter he intended.
They were not chasing him only because millions would die, though that was reason enough; they were chasing him because they had seen the shape of his logic and understood that survival under such a system was only another form of surrender.
Logan carried the burden of decisions in the set of his shoulders, weighing every delay against the possibility of catastrophe, while Moose relied on a blunt practicality that had kept the others alive more than once.
Fitch trusted data but had learned, painfully, that brilliant models still broke against the cruelty of human will.Sor rarely spoke unless he had something necessary to cut through the noise, and Pax, whose faith had survived too many ruined cities, seemed to understand the difference between hope and denial better than any of them.
Saint wore gentleness like armor, River had the restlessness of a man born to movement, and Conor masked fear under a dry wit that returned whenever silence threatened to let darker thoughts take hold.
At smaller stations, the train slowed long enough for them to witness whole worlds compressed into moments.Men in faded shirts walked the platform with tea kettles blackened by coal fires, calling out to windows that would never open for passengers in a private car.
Families waited under sheets of corrugated metal with bundles, chickens, sacks of grain, and the hard patience of those accustomed to long uncertainty.A boy stood balanced beside the tracks with one hand shielding his eyes as their carriage rolled past, and River watched him until the platform disappeared, as if there might be some answer written in the child’s expression to explain how a country could hold such splendor and deprivation in the same breath.
When the plates had been cleared and coffee arrived in thin porcelain cups, Fitch began outlining the next phase again, this time with fewer abstractions and more names.
According the team back home, Isaac’s network had narrowed around a research facility hidden behind a legitimate agricultural program, with transport lines, security contracts, and local officials all stitched together so neatly that an outsider would mistake the pattern for ordinary bureaucracy.This is where his contacts would meet him, see his madness.
Sor pointed to the stop where they would leave the train, Paz described the contact who might still be trusted, and Saint reminded them that a plan depending on everything going right was not a plan but a wish.
Logan let each of them speak before he folded the map, because once they stepped down from luxury into heat and noise, there would be no more room for debate.
