“Mostly nap. I don’t need much sleep. Same with food.” He reached into another armored compartment on his waist and withdrew a curved container that looked like a large hip flask. “Concentrated nutrients infused into me. The CID monitors my blood and adjusts the nutrient mix.” Brad was just sitting there, shaking his head slightly. “Go ahead and ask me anything, Brad,” Patrick said finally.
“What have you been doing?” Brad asked after a few moments to clear his swimming consciousness. “I mean, what does President Martindale have you do?”
“Most of the time I train with Chris Wohl’s and other direct-action teams using a variety of weapons and devices,” Patrick said. “They also use my computers and sensors to plan possible missions and do surveillance.” He paused for a moment, then said in a very obviously somber tone, “But mostly I stand in a storage locker, plugged into power, nutrients, medication, waste disposal, and data, scanning sensor feeds and the Internet, interacting with the world . . . sort of. Digitally.”
“You stay in a storage locker?”
“Not much reason for me to be walking around unless we’re in training or on a mission,” Patrick said. “I creep people out enough already, I think.”
“No one talks to you?”
“During training or operations, sure,” Patrick said. “I put together reports of things I see and submit them to Martindale, and we might discuss them. I can instant-message and teleconference with just about anybody.”
“No, I mean . . . just talk with you, like we’re doing now,” Brad said. “You’re still you. You’re Patrick McLanahan.”
Another pause; then: “I was never one for chitchat, son,” he said finally. Brad didn’t like that response, but he said nothing. “Besides, I didn’t want anyone knowing it’s me in the CID. They think it’s unoccupied when in storage and that a bunch of pilots show up to train with it. They don’t know it’s occupied twenty-four/seven.” He saw the look of absolute sorrow in his son’s face and desperately wanted to hold him.
“Doesn’t it get . . . you know, kind of rank in there?” Brad asked.
“If it does, I can’t detect it,” Patrick said. “But they put me in a different CID periodically.”
“They do? So you can exist outside the CID?”
“For very short periods of time, yes,” Patrick said. “They change dressings, give me medications if I need them, check stuff like muscle tone and bone density, then lower me into a clean robot.”
“So I can see you again!”
“Brad, I don’t think you’d want to see me,” Patrick said. “I was pretty busted up, sitting in the windblast of that shot-up B-1 bomber for so long. By the way, thank you for bringing us back safely.”
“You’re welcome. But I’d still like to see you.”
“We’ll talk about that when the time comes,” Patrick said. “They give me a couple days’ warning. I’m on life support while I’m outside.”
Brad looked even more dejected than before. “What is all this for, Dad?” he asked after a long silence. “Are you going to be some sort of high-tech killing machine, like the sergeant major says you’ve become?”
“The sergeant major can be a drama queen sometimes,” Patrick said. “Brad, I’ve seen the importance of the gift of life, because it was almost taken away from me. I know how precious life is right now. But I also want to protect our country, and I have an extraordinary ability to do that now.”
“So what then?”
For a moment Brad thought he saw his father shrug his huge armored shoulders. “Honestly, I don’t know,” Patrick said. “But President Martindale has been involved in creating many secret organizations that defended and advanced American foreign and military policies for decades.”
“Any you can tell me about?” Brad asked.
Patrick thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’ve seen the Predator with the Customs and Border Protection shield on it, but I think you’ve noticed that the guards and other personnel here are not CBP. It’s one way to do surveillance within the United States but maintain complete deniability. It gives the White House and Pentagon a lot of room to maneuver.”
“Sounds illegal as hell, Dad.”
“Probably so, but we do a lot of great work as well that I feel kept the world from going to war several times,” Patrick said. “President Martindale and I were involved in a defense contractor company called Scion Aviation International, providing contract aerial surveillance and eventually attack services to the U.S. military. When I joined Sky Masters, I lost track of what Scion was doing, but now I know he’s kept the operation going. He does a lot of antiterrorist surveillance work all over the world, on contract to the U.S. government.”