“Thank you, Marco,” he heard, and he recognized the voice as Lieutenant Colonel Hogan. “Noah, just relax. We’ve gotten you out of the Castle, and we’re well on the way to the training facility. The cocktail of drugs we gave you should wear off the rest of the way shortly, so don’t fight it. You’ll be able to sit up in just a few minutes.”
Noah took her advice and relaxed, and a few seconds later he began to feel some of his muscles twitching. He tried again to open his eyes, and this time it worked. A quick glance around told him that he was in the back of an ambulance, and Hogan was sitting beside him along with a paramedic.
“Well, hello,” Colonel Hogan said. “Welcome back to the land of the living. Oh, wait a minute—I spoke too soon. You’re actually quite dead, just wait and I’ll show you the news stories about it.”
“No problem,” Noah said. His voice sounded rough. “I’m not worried about the news of the past, just what’s to come in the future.”
“Well, that would spoil all my fun,” she said. “It’s really quite a story. It seems that this young sergeant, who was sentenced to die for killing his platoon leader and several of his men, had this horrible attack of conscience and hung himself in his cell. There was a faint heartbeat when he was found, so of course he was rushed out to the hospital, but unfortunately, he passed away in the ambulance. He’ll be buried in the prison graveyard tomorrow morning. Pretty good story, don’t you think?”
Noah, his muscles still weak and sluggish, struggled up to a sitting position. “I think I read a book with that plot, once. In the one I read, though, the hero got a second chance at life. Your story go anywhere like that?”
Hogan reached up and took off her wig, tossing it into a bag at her feet. A moment later, she scratched just in front of her left ear and Noah saw a flap of skin come loose. She tugged on it, and a rubber mask peeled off of her face. The woman who sat there in Hogan’s uniform was suddenly blonde and twenty years younger.
She extended a hand. “I’m Allison Peterson,” she said, and Noah shook hands with her. “I’m the administrator of E & E, and your new boss.”
Noah grinned and nodded. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, “for the second time. So, I gather everything worked the way you expected? I did as you said, didn’t eat a thing all day and tried to act depressed.”
“Like a charm,” Allison said. “Fasting helps the drug work better, so it can slow your heart down to almost nothing. We needed the prison doctors to call for the ambulance. However, you’ve actually been out cold for almost thirty hours. Your death has already been certified, and your body has already been shipped back to the prison for burial. Fingerprint records have all been changed, dental records, everything; the body they got looks so much like you that even you might believe you’re dead, if you saw it.”
“I doubt it,” Noah replied, still grinning. “I tend to disbelieve things that are obviously not true, and since I’m sitting here, well…So, what’s next?”
She took a deep breath and let her smile relax a bit, even though it stayed in place. “Next is your initial training. We have a facility set up here in Colorado where you’ll be instructed in new styles and techniques of martial arts, various new weapons, and lots of other super-spy-type stuff, and some of the most intense physical training you’ve ever experienced.”
“Sounds cool,” Noah said. “I’ve been involved in martial arts since I was eight years old. My grandfather thought it would be a good idea, something to help me focus my ‘anger and other emotions.’ I enjoyed it, because it had so much structure to it.”
Allison watched him coolly. “I know,” she said. “I also know that it was one of the things that caused your grandparents to send you back to the foster homes. They said you became violent and too intense, that you scared them.”
He shrugged. “This man showed up at our house one day and started screaming at my grandmother,” he said. “I thought he was threatening her, so I ran into the room and attacked. Turned out he wasn’t actually screaming at her, he was a friend of theirs who was crying because his wife left him. That was the one that actually set them off, but it seemed like the more I got into the martial arts classes, the faster my reactions became. My instructor said I was a natural, but my grandmother thought there was something weird about me, because I was always working out anytime I didn’t have something else to do.”
“And what did your grandfather say?”
Noah chuckled. “He put me in the martial arts classes because he’d been a marine, years before. He naturally thought that being able to defend yourself was a skill every man should have, so he wanted me to be able to do so. He thought it was hilarious, though, six months into my training, when I began beating my instructor. Needless to say, he and I were not in the same weight class, so when he agreed to spar with me, it was more of a gag than anything else. Kinda surprised him when I began winning our little matches. Grandpa thought it was funny.”