Noah whistled. “Not bad at all,” he said. “The only question left, then, is what in the world can you do with it?”
“Pretty much anything you want to,” Marco said. “Not all of us live here. I don’t, but when I’m helping out with a newbie, like you, I get to stay at the motel for free, instead of having to pay for a hotel room downtown.”
“Really? So where do you live?”
Marco grinned. “Middle of nowhere, in Louisiana. I got a little place on the Bayou, where nobody bothers me. I like it that way. Once you’ve been with the organization for a while, you can apply to live anywhere you want to. They give you a cover job to explain your income, so you can live right out in the open. Me, they got me listed as a truck driver. Every now and then, I really do drive a truck, but it just makes a convenient excuse for why I’m out and gone a lot, so the few neighbors I’ve got don’t get suspicious of anything.”
They got back to the motel, and Noah carried his bags into his room. He put the soft drinks into the refrigerator, then opened the bag of chips and lay back on the bed to watch some TV.
ELEVEN
Noah had gotten into the habit of waking at five thirty in the morning, the usual time when the lights came on at the prison. His eyes opened, and he rolled over on the big bed, instantly remembering how his circumstances had changed. He sat up, and a moment later he climbed out of the bed and staggered toward the bathroom. A couple of minutes later, he came out and grabbed some clean clothes, then went back in to get a shower and shave.
Allison’s message had said that someone would pick him up at around eight, so he had plenty of time for breakfast. He slipped out the door, glancing over at Marco’s room to see that there were no lights on yet, and then walked to the restaurant alone. He had just gotten his coffee when he heard his name, and turned around.
Allison was walking toward him, and sat down in the chair opposite his. She smiled at him, and he returned it out of habit.
“I thought I’d just come and collect you myself this morning,” she said, “and I figured you’d be over here early for breakfast, so I decided to join you. I haven’t eaten here in a while, but I know how good it is so I thought it was well past time to pay a visit.”
Noah picked up his cup and saluted her with it. “Glad to have the company,” he said. “Anything I need to know about today, before we get started?”
A waitress hurried over and took Allison’s order, and Noah waited until she was gone before he looked expectantly at his boss.
“Nothing specific,” she said. “We’ll be going over some rules and regulations that are in place, and getting your new identity all set up. A lot of it’s already been done, but there are some simple things we need to go over.”
Noah nodded. “It occurs to me that I haven’t actually thanked you,” he said. “Your intervention has saved my life, and I do appreciate it.”
She grinned at him. “Well, considering the alternative, I’m sure you do,” she said. “The thing you gotta remember, though, is that you earned the opportunity. You demonstrated some incredible abilities, and those are abilities that we need in this organization. It simply made sense for me to do everything I could to recruit you.”
“Then here’s hoping I prove to be worth all your effort.”
Allison smiled. “There’s something special about you, Noah,” she said. “Doctor Parker says he wishes we could figure out a way to boil you down to your essence, so that we could just inject it into people. Luckily for you, he hasn’t found a way to do that, so we can’t produce dozens of you. You get to stay unique, and everyone who’s gotten to know you so far is convinced that your uniqueness is going to pay off for us in many ways.”
“Because I don’t have feelings?” Noah asked.
“That’s certainly part of it,” she said. “The significance of your lack of emotions is that you don’t suffer from guilt or remorse, so that you effectively have no conscience.”
“I know,” he replied. “That’s why I had to develop a sort of moral programming code, something to let me know when I was overstepping the bounds of propriety. It’s my own sense of right and wrong.”
Allison nodded. “Yes, and it seems to be an effective one, because you’ve gone this long without ending up in trouble. From what I’ve been able to determine through my own research and Doctor Parker’s, most people who suffer from conditions like yours can’t even function properly in society. I think your success in doing so probably goes back to the fact that you had an extremely intelligent friend who could help you understand what was happening to you when you were a child.”