Chapter Fifteen
Premier Palace Hotel, Kiev, Ukraine
Saturday 1730 Local Time [0730 PST]
The atmosphere inside the Presidential Suite was sombre. Terse, even. In the lounge, John and Cameron sat on one of the couches while Freyr sat on the other. Thor and Aegir stood. It was the first time since checking in that all three Vanguards had been in the suite at once. One of them had always been on the roof on overwatch.
Their bags were packed and they were ready to return to the US. None of them was happy about it; they'd failed to find what they'd come all this way for and were about to return empty-handed.
Sarah entered the lounge from her room, holding a large map of Ukraine. Her hair was combed back and pulled into a bun, still slightly damp from her shower. She knew it made her look severe, but that was the point. She wore dark jeans and a black turtleneck, outside of which was her gun in a shoulder holster that none present had seen before. Altogether her ensemble lent her a serious air, telling everyone that she meant business, even if it was lost on four-fifths of them.
She unfolded the map and taped it to the wall, taking her time about it despite the fidgeting of her son. She could sense the tension in the air, and that was how she liked it; they were ready. She turned to face them. "Kaliba's gotta be here. We've missed something," she said to the group.
"Mom, you said that about the three red dots and that led us on a wild goose chase to nowhere," John said. "You got shot, we nearly lost all our money–"
"Well, we've lost it now!" Sarah snarled, annoyed that John was the first to interrupt, and so soon. "What happened to it?"
"It was in the cabin that got destroyed at Crater Lake," Cameron informed her.
Sarah shook her head, thinking about what it took to get the stash in the first place, and then recover it twice; they all involved Cameron doing what she did best. Then she remembered something else. She'd wanted to mention it at the time, back when they arrived at Serrano Point, but other events precluded it, not least John's blossoming relationship with the machine. "What about the bank of computers behind Savannah's metal friend, huh? It had three red dots, just like the marks on our basement wall."
"Yeah, that's just John Henry," John said nonchalantly.
"Are you insane?" Sarah snapped, a red mist descending over her. When she saw the confused look on her son's face it only made her angrier. He didn't even know what she was talking about; he was so blind to it. "You put way too much trust in these machines, John. Look at us: there's two of us and four machines here; another two back in Serrano Point. They outnumber us three to one."
"Two-to-one," Freyr corrected her. "James Ellison is human."
"That makes me feel so much better," she said, giving the machine a withering look.
"You're the one who put Thor in charge, Mom," John argued.
"It's not him I'm worried about. Why didn't you say anything before, about the three dots? Did you know what they meant?"
John shook his head. "Not until we met Weaver; I saw three red dots on the console and put two and two together. After that, when we met up, I was too busy not dying, so it kinda slipped my mind."
"Did you know?" Sarah asked Cameron, a hint of accusation in her voice. "Did you know that the three dots is John Henry?"
"No. I found out about John Henry the same time as you: when Savannah mentioned him."
"That's not all though, is it? Something about Ellison's message got you into ZeiraCorp." She remembered how evasive Cameron had been about that during their brief conversation on the plane trip over.
"James Ellison gave me a message from Catherine Weaver that I recognised from the future."
"So you knew Weaver and you never bothered to mention it once. You just blithely trust her with John's life, with the future of the world, even though we have no idea what her real agenda is."
"Leave her alone, Mom!" John said.
Sarah turned her head again to glare at her son. "That must have been one hell of a good fuck!"
"What?" John couldn't believe what he was hearing. He didn't know whether to cringe or shout.
"You. Her," Sarah said pointing at them. "You just automatically take her side. One fuck in a hot tub and–"
"We fucked in the bed," Cameron corrected her. "Twice." She liked the facts to be accurate.
"Even better!" Sarah said sarcastically, dropping her head into her hands.
"Mom!" John said through gritted teeth. He tried to rise off the couch, but Cameron increased her grip on his hand just enough to stop him in his tracks. "We need them," he said.
"Think it through, John," Sarah argued. "We have nothing and she just invites you out of the blue. She gives us a home, a car, guns, money; whatever we need to fight Skynet, but it's us doing the fighting, not her. That's how she wants it, and she'll dangle all of it in front of us like a carrot, ready to take it away the moment we don't play ball." It still incensed her how Weaver had threatened to cut them off if they came home empty-handed. "This isn't an alliance, John; she has us over a barrel, which is exactly where she wants us."
John closed his eyes for a moment. He'd had enough of this. "We wouldn't have had nothing if you hadn't ditched Cameron and Derek." And Charley might still be alive. "We can't do this on our own, Mom. And I'm not blind; I know Weaver wants to control us but it won't come to that." He turned to the Vanguards. "Who do you follow?" he asked.
"Thor," Aegir replied.
"Cameron's our commander," Thor added.
"I follow you," Cameron said immediately, anticipating John's question to her before he'd even asked it.
John glanced back at his mother. "Weaver doesn't hold as many cards as she thinks she does."
Thor watched the humans arguing, with increasing curiosity. Now he knew why Sarah had asked him to take command; presently she didn't seem to be offering much in the way of effective leadership. John was astute, though. Thor knew that he was right. Catherine Weaver had immense resources at her disposal but she lacked soldiers. Connor had no money but he had Cameron's loyalty, and she had his, Freyr's and Aegir's. He decided to end the argument and alleviate some of Sarah's fears.
"Sarah's right about the three dots," he said. "It's more significant than any of you know."
"How?" Sarah asked, turning her angry stare at the Vanguard commander. She felt that everyone knew about these goddamn dots but her!
Thor turned to Cameron. "I need your knife," he said.
Cameron opened up her switchblade and handed it to him. Thor removed his jacket and t-shirt, leaving him naked from the waist up.
In his hand the knife looked ridiculously small. Thor pressed the blade into the skin where the pectoral muscle met his right shoulder. He started his incision there and sliced a diagonal line to the centre of his chest, then turned the blade ninety degrees and cut another line running just below the nipple. Using the blade, he peeled the layers of skin and muscle away to reveal the metal beneath; dark grey rather than the usual chrome, and a different shape to a standard terminator breastplate.
What stood out the most, however, wasn't the colour of the metal but the markings stencilled on it: three red dots pointing downward inside a black triangle.
"What is it?" John asked.
"Flag of the Alliance," Thor replied.
"And you all have one?" Sarah asked, glancing at the other two.
Freyr said, "Every cyborg has it stencilled on their chest. Every human soldier has an identical emblem on either a sewn-on badge or an armband."
Thor pushed the flap of skin and muscle back into place over his chest and redressed, concealing the wound. Taking matters into his own hands, he moved to inspect the map. Sarah hadn't pointed at anything and nothing stood out. "What did we miss?" he asked her.
Sarah, drawing on her years of experience, gathered her thoughts and refocused. "I don't know. Something." She picked up a black marker pen and studied the map. "We're here," she said, drawing a dot on the centre of Kiev before she then drew a circle around Boryspil International Airport. She then marked the other large airports in the country, including Gostomel, the one they'd landed at. Next she looked at the scale in the corner, took some measurements with a piece of string and tried to do a mental calculation, but gave up. There were four others in the room who could do the math for her. Why keep a dog and bark yourself? "How many miles is three hundred kilometres?" she asked.
"One hundred eighty-six," Cameron said instantly. "Approximately," she added, glancing at the Vanguards. They would soon discover that Sarah Connor didn't appreciate their level of precision.
"Other than Boryspil and Gostomel, the nearest airport outside of Kiev is a little over three hundred kilometres away as the crow flies," Sarah said, looking at all assembled before her. "Call it two hundred miles." She beckoned Cameron over, who checked with John; he just shrugged and waved her on.
"You're good at drawing, right?" Sarah said, handing her the marker pen. "Draw a circle with a radius of one hundred miles around Boryspil Airport."
"Why?" Cameron asked.
"Because if they were going to drive any further they'd have landed at a different airport." Cameron proceeded to draw a perfect circle. Sarah thought it was uncanny but at the same time chilling. "They've got to be somewhere in here," she said, pointing to the inside.
"Unless they gave us a false lead," Aegir replied.
"They already did that with the pig farm," John said. "I agree with Mom: they must have found the tracker after the plane landed, then got rid of it; fed it to some pigs they found on a truck going the other way." That, he thought, would explain why they found the tracker in a pile of pig shit.
"A radius of one hundred miles," Cameron said, drawing John's attention back to the map, "means a search area of thirty-two thousand square miles."
Freyr noticed that Cameron was now using imperial measurements for John and Sarah's benefit, and decided in future to do the same.
John shook his head. "We can't search all that." He supposed they could, in theory. If Weaver hadn't refused to keep bankrolling them they could continue the search but it was a massive undertaking and it'd take the six of them forever.
"Maybe we don't have to," Sarah said. "Where was the farm we went to when we first got here?" Thor pointed a massive finger at a spot three inches to the right of Kiev on the map. "We followed it east so maybe we should check west first." She glanced up at Thor. "Was there any factory in Ukraine in your time?"
"I don't know," he replied. "We never operated in Europe."
"Worth a try," Sarah said. She'd thought he'd say that but still had to ask.
"You said that troops came from all around the world to boost the Alliance," John said to Thor. "None of them mentioned anything?"
"Not to us."
John went to his bag, took his laptop out and turned it on while Sarah continued to pore over the map. It didn't take long for it to boot up and with a few strokes of the keyboard he made a Skype call to John Henry.
"Hello," the AI said, smiling onscreen, distracting Sarah from the map. "Are you still coming back today or did you find anything?"
"We haven't found anything yet but we're brainstorming," he said. "We could do with some help. Mom…" he invited her to talk. For a moment Sarah hesitated. Her first inclination was to refuse his help, both out of instinct to not trust the machines and also out of sheer pride. Get over it, she told herself. This was bigger than her pride and she wanted to live long enough to see Skynet gone.
"Okay," she said. "Let's go back to the beginning." She looked at John Henry on the screen, his monitor behind him displaying a series of rapidly changing images that she supposed were his thoughts. "The shipment landed at Boryspil. Then what?"
"It stayed at the airport for approximately nine hours and thirty-four minutes before it left, moving east." As he spoke an image of Ukraine appeared behind him with a red dot indicating the airport. A blue dot appeared and moved away from Kiev, trailing a line behind it, marking its travelled route until it stopped again at a point around twenty miles east of its starting point. "It stopped here for twenty-six minutes," John Henry said. "Then it continued for seven kilometres and stopped again."
"What's there?" John asked as the blue dot once again stopped where John Henry indicated.
As by way of an answer, an image appeared on the monitor behind him: a bright yellow gas station. John Henry continued, "After ten minutes the signal moved in the same direction, heading east, until it reached the farm three hours later."
"Confirms what we already know," Sarah said. "They sent us on a wild goose chase." She pointed at the gas station image behind John Henry. "They must have found the tracker and put it into another truck heading east." It was worrying that they'd done such a thorough inspection of the cargo and she wondered whether they always did that or if something else had spooked them. It couldn't be a coincidence, she thought, that all this happened just after T-Zero had ambushed Kaliba's attack force inside ZeiraCorp. "Forget everything east of Kiev for now, then: where else could it go? Is west too obvious?"
On the map, the road that the shipment had travelled east on became highlighted in red. The same E40 that they had travelled on from Kiev before taking the smaller roads that had led to the pig farm.
"We need to think about where they could put a factory," Thor said.
"They'd have two choices," Cameron added. "Either build a new facility or use an existing one."
"It'd be easier for them to use a factory that's already there than building one from scratch," John said. "So we're looking for industrial areas."
John Henry got to work and started searching for all industrial zones in Kiev. Names of places started to appear, none of which any of those assembled in the lounge had ever heard of.
"Make sure to include old or abandoned industrial parks," Sarah added as the thought came to her. "If they can avoid being seen they probably will." Pretty much any developed country would have some disused areas; places where there'd once been industry but had since dried up. She thought of the ghost towns back in California and Nevada where gold and silver mines had been, abandoned once they'd run dry. "If Ukraine's got an equivalent to Detroit, I'd start there."
More names of places began to appear, scrolling down as others took their place. Added to them were newspaper headlines, translated into English, for matches to the places. Sarah's eyes widened as she saw one name that instantly rang alarm bells: 'Chernobyl.'
"Stop there," she said, and John Henry complied.
"What is it?" the AI asked.
"Chernobyl."
The list of names disappeared, replaced by just two: 'Chernobyl' and 'Pripyat.' In addition to that were several photographs of the town and the power plant.
"There," Sarah said.
"How can you be sure?" Freyr asked.
"Think about it: if you wanted to build a factory in total secrecy, where you'd never have to worry about someone stumbling on what you're doing, where better?" She could have smacked herself for not thinking of it before. She turned to Cameron and the Vanguards. "Your power cells are nuclear, right?"
"Yes," Cameron confirmed.
"So if they need some uranium or whatever, they've got it right there. And only a machine would be able to go in and get it."
Cameron agreed. "Machines wouldn't care about the radiation."
"But we should," John said.
"Inside the town the radiation isn't dangerous unless you're there for an extended period of time," John Henry said. He brought up more images of an industrial park, long abandoned. Warehouses were visible with broken windows, peeling paint and crumbling brickwork. Grass had grown long with nobody to maintain it and cars and trucks parked on the side of the roads were severely rusted. Even from the photo John could see the place was entirely dead. Next to that photo was another of the town itself, much the same except this time it was houses, stores and schools that had been left to ruin.
"Is that what everywhere is like after Judgment Day?" he asked Cameron. "Everything's just dead and abandoned?"
"Yes," Cameron said. "Most towns and cities not destroyed by the nuclear attacks were abandoned by people fleeing either the radioactive fallout or the machines that came later." She didn't add that most people who fled would have died out in the open, either from radiation, machines, exposure to the elements or starvation.
Thor had some slightly better news for John in that regard. "We retook abandoned towns in our time, secured them and used them as staging areas for our frontline forces. Farm towns were put back into use to grow food for the soldiers."
"How do we get there?" John asked.
John Henry initially replied not verbally but again with data on his monitor: a set of GPS coordinates and also an image of the proposed route on a roadmap. "It should take two hours, twenty minutes to reach Pripyat, depending on traffic," he said helpfully.
"Great," John said. "We'll check it out and be in touch soon."
Sarah then cut in. "Tell Weaver we're not going in there until we get some better weapons. More 7.62 rounds, more grenades, more rockets and more Semtex."
It was Catherine Weaver's voice, offscreen, that answered them. "I'm here," she said. "I spent good money to get you the weapons you've got now: use those. Need I remind you that you have three Vanguards with you?"
"And what if they get taken down or we get split up?" Sarah asked. "We're going in blind, no idea what we're up against. They could've got the government in on this for all we know; they might have tanks waiting for us, an army. What you got us won't blow up a balloon, much less a factory full of machines. Get us what we ask for or come here and do it yourself."
There was a pause before Weaver replied. "I'll text you the details once I've made the arrangements," she said, relenting. "It will be a few hours at least, if not tomorrow."
John ended the Skype call and shut down the laptop. "What do we do in the meantime?" he asked everyone.
"You two can carry on playing house," Sarah said. Now there was time for them to waste.
Premier Palace Hotel, Kiev, Ukraine
Saturday 2030 Local Time [1030 PST]
Five of them stood in the suite's lounge, bags packed and ready to leave. Sarah took a quick glance around the room, knowing she'd never see anywhere like it again. They'd head to Pripyat and either find what they were looking for or return home empty-handed, knowing that Weaver would use their failure to assume control over their alliance.
"Twenty hours and thirty minutes before the plane leaves," Thor said, noting the pensive look on Sarah's face. It was meant to be reassuring but he didn't think she found it so.
"Let's get a move on, then," John said as he slung his bag over his shoulder. "Aegir's waiting outside with the van."
"Wait," Sarah said to him.
"We're wasting time, Mom."
"This'll just take a minute." She turned to Cameron, Thor and Freyr. "I need a moment alone with John," she said. "We'll catch up."
Cameron looked to John and he nodded. She took his bag and exited the suite with the two Vanguards. When they were gone, John turned around to face his mother, having an idea of what she was going to say.
John decided to get his apology in first. "I'm sorry for talking like that when you were trying to get the mission back on track."
"It's okay, we got there in the end," Sarah said with a faint but genuine smile, pleased with his contrition and humility. "And, I'm sorry for airing your private business in public. I got mad when I thought I'd been chilling out covered in your... and her... Where you had, you know..." She suddenly felt awkward, John doubly so.
"So it's not the, uh, you know?" he said, shuffling his feet and shifting his gaze uncomfortably between her shoulder and a light switch on the wall.
"The sex?" Sarah replied, deciding to stop tiptoeing about the word. "No. Well, maybe. I guess I knew it was inevitable, I just didn't want it in my face." Or in my hot tub, she thought.
"I'm sorry," John said again. Now he could face his mother.
"It's okay, John. Just try to be discrete."
"I am. I was. It's all new, for both of us," he confessed.
"Really?" Sarah said, understanding that he meant more than just being in love. "Interesting." She'd figured they'd both already popped their cherries somewhere down the line, certainly after the way that blonde girl had flung herself at John. He must have iron resolve, she decided. That could explain Cameron's purity too, though in her mind Future-John should have had better uses of his time than fooling around with her, which wasn't the impression the machine had given; she'd implied a very close relationship between the two. Sarah conceded that she was a good liar though. She could still be lying to John, but that was his problem now.
"So we're good then?" John asked.
"Yeah, we're good," Sarah assured him.
"Because, you said it was my decision."
Sarah nodded in agreement, but from the look on John's face, it wasn't enough; he seemed to need the verbal confirmation. "I did. It is," she said, then after taking a deep breath continued, "I hope you're happy together."
"Thank you," John said, smiling. "It means a lot, to hear you say that, Mom."
It took a lot to say it, Sarah admitted, but only to herself. "Have you given much thought to the future? With her, I mean."
"A little, but we haven't had much time to ourselves; we're still trying to work things out. Got any advice?"
Sarah studied her son carefully. He didn't seem to be yanking her chain, so she gave him the best answer she could. "Enjoy it while you can. In the days... the years to come, you may only get moments, so make the most of them; treasure them. In the end, they might be all you've got left."
John looked her long and hard in the eye before embracing her. What she'd said sounded ominous and foreboding, but with his mother, that wasn't anything new. "Thanks. I will," he said.
Sarah hugged him back, recalling occasions when he was younger, when he was still smaller than her and was easy to sweep up into her arms. She'd had to give him reassuring hugs so many times, but had eventually forced herself to restrict them, to toughen him up – and herself, too. She wondered if this would be the last time they'd do this, and didn't want to let go. But she knew she had to. "Time to go," Sarah said, releasing him.
Los Angeles, California
Saturday 1100 PST
Catherine Weaver stood at one end of the room, next to a large TV screen and a long table with something on it. That something was obscured by a white sheet. Opposite her sat fourteen men and one woman: the candidates Magnus Saade had selected for her to interview. Magnus sat with them as the fifteenth man, though he remained silent. He had agreed not to tell them all the details that she'd given him; simply that there was a training position in the United States and that it offered them half a million dollars per year.
They were in the fourth floor of an office building in Downtown Los Angeles. With the ZeiraCorp tower destroyed by Kaliba and Weaver's decision to distance this project from her company, she'd needed a neutral location. The building they were in rented out offices for twenty-four hour periods and they had a reputation for discretion. Nobody outside, even the building's security staff, knew what was going on in the office she'd hired, and they would never ask.
She inspected the people before her as they watched the same video clip that she'd shown Magnus, and John and Cameron before him. Magnus had given her the names of the candidates and she'd had John Henry check them out, giving her the information she needed, which she'd memorised. They were an unusual assortment of people from around the world; the only things that they had in common was that they were all mercenaries, that they all looked lean and fit, and that they had no immediate families.
She glanced from one face to another as they watched the clip. None of them said a word and all seemed to be staring intently at the screen. That was a good sign, she thought; they were paying attention.
As the video drew to a close she turned the TV to mute but left the clip to replay, then addressed them. "Do any of you have any questions about what you just saw?"
Several of them raised their hands slightly. "You," she gestured to a tall, tanned man with long, dirty-blond hair pulled back into a rough ponytail.
"What the hell was that?" he asked, speaking with an Australian accent.
"Could you be more specific?" she asked him.
"Nobody could survive that; who the hell were they?"
"I'll tell you," Weaver replied, "but first I'd like to remind you all that you signed non-disclosure agreements before you entered this office. If you discuss anything you see or hear this afternoon, I will be forced to take legal action against you. Understood?" She received a chorus of nods and affirmative murmurs in reply. "We call it a 'terminator.' It's a machine – designed to look human – built for the sole purpose of killing people."
"What people?" the only female of the group asked.
"Whoever it's programmed to kill."
"Who built it?" someone else asked.
"An artificial intelligence called Skynet, whose sole aim is to wipe out the human race."
The Australian started in again. "And do you have any proof of this? Proof that that," he pointed at the screen, "was anything but special effects?"
Weaver smiled at that. "I do," she said. She reached for the white sheet and pulled it off the table to reveal the inanimate body of the T-888 who'd tried to kill her in ZeiraCorp's underground parking lot. She'd cut half of its skin off cleanly down the middle. The left-hand side looked just like a man; the right hand side was bare, exposed endoskeleton. "Feel free to look," she said, stepping back to allow them closer inspection.
Several of them got up straight away and crowded round to check it out, poking and prodding at it to see if it was real and not just a dummy. Even Magnus got up to look; he hadn't been shown it before so the terminator was still new to him. The Dane took a close look at it and gingerly touched the metal skull. It was cold. He then peeled back some of the skin and rubbed the resulting flap between his finger and thumb. He'd felt raw human flesh many times, patching up the wounds of his squad mates when they'd been hit by snipers or IEDs, so the feel and texture was familiar to him. It was identical. It even smelled like a person; he could detect a faint whiff of body odour. The skin was cold as well, he noticed.
"No one can make anything like this yet," the Australian declared.
Not yet. Give me time, Weaver thought. "The evidence before you suggests otherwise," she said.
"How do we know this isn't just a movie prop?" asked another mercenary.
Weaver took its CPU off the table and held it up for them to see. "This is its central processing unit – the machine's brain. I can insert it if you wish but you wouldn't like what happens afterwards. They're extremely hard to kill."
The only woman of the group gestured at the TV, which showed the Apache's strike on the terminators, finally finishing them off. "If it took an air strike to take them out, how did you manage to get this one without even leaving a scratch?"
"They're vulnerable to electricity. It forces them into a reboot, which takes one hundred-twenty seconds to complete. That's the timeframe in which you'll have to remove its CPU – its brain. Without their chips they're inert."
"Is that why we're here?" a French-accented man of Middle-Eastern descent asked. "To learn how to kill these things?"
"No," Weaver replied. "I'm part of a group that is fighting these machines and the artificial intelligence I mentioned earlier. Our aim is to stop them before they begin their war in earnest. Or failing that, to ensure that we win the war. That's where you come in."
The man next to the Middle-Eastern one, a massive, dark-skinned giant of a man whose size reminded Weaver of the T-900s she'd seen in the ZeiraCorp footage, spoke up next. "I don't understand," he said in a thick accent. "You just said we wouldn't be training to fight them."
"You won't be fighting them. I want you to train the people who will be. I will teach you everything that you need to know about the machines, including their tactics and technical specifications. Using that, you will train my candidates for the sole purpose of anti-cyborg warfare. I want you all to discuss how to fight them, based on what you know and what you've just seen. As you discuss I'll call you individually to speak to our interviewers in the office: you'll each see several of them." With that, Weaver crossed the room and opened the door into a side office, stepping in and closing it behind her.
She changed her shape, becoming shorter, her hair turning dark brown, and her face changing. After the brief metamorphosis she looked at her faint reflection in the window. Sarah Connor looked back at her. Unlike Sarah, however, she was wearing a white blouse with a dark grey jacket and skirt, and black flat shoes. She glanced down at the list before opening the door and poking her head outside.
"Mark Craster," she called out the first name from the list. One of the mercenaries; a large, bald man with a bushy beard approached with a swagger. She held the door open for him as he entered the room, and closed it behind them. "Take a seat," she said, "and we'll begin."
Craster sat down as instructed, while she took a seat opposite him. "Mr Craster, my name is Sarah Connor." She extended her hand as she spoke. Craster took it and nodded.
"Hi," he said. She examined his face, searching for any signs of recognition. There were none. That was a good start. It was less likely that non-US personnel would have heard of Sarah and John but she had to be certain. She glanced down at his file – more for show than out of any need to refresh her memory.
"Mark Craster: formerly of the South African Defence Force. You left the army six years ago and have worked for numerous private military contractors since then."
"That's right," he said, wondering how she'd got so much information on him. He guessed she must have run them all through for references. How she'd done it so fast, though, he had no idea.
"To start off with," she said, "I have three questions I'd like to ask you."
"Shoot," he said.
"Number one: how many people have you killed?"
"Depending on whose bullet hit whom, between twenty and thirty," he replied, unsure what this had to do with anything. He'd been asked about his record before, detailed his service history, but never been asked for a kill score.
"Why?" Weaver asked him.
"Because that was the job," he said, "to kill people who are trying to kill me and mine."
"I see," she replied, pretending to take notes.
"The second question I'd like to ask you, Mr Labalaba," the petite young brunette with a mole on her left eyebrow ventured.
"You can call me Mesake," he said, casually interrupting her.
"Mesake," she corrected herself. He had a thick accent and his voice was unusually high for someone his size. Aside from the Vanguards, he was the largest individual she had ever met. "Have you ever done anything that you're ashamed of?"
"No," he said, sure of himself.
"Not even beating a captured Taliban commander to death?"
His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared before he replied. "Especially not that,"he said.
"Even though you were discharged from the Parachute Regiment, forfeited your pension and narrowly avoided a manslaughter conviction and prison, then deported to your native Fiji?"
"No," he repeated fiercely, leaning forward. How this girl – little more than a kid, barely out of college by the look of her – knew his history, he didn't know. And he didn't like it.
"But he was a senior commander," Weaver said. "He could have provided you with vital intelligence if you'd interrogated him instead." It probably explained why Mesake Labalaba had never advanced beyond the rank of Corporal; he didn't think long-term.
Her reply surprised him. He'd been used to people asking whether it was right to do what he did. Always from a moral stance but this was the first time someone had questioned what he'd done from a purely pragmatic point of view. "We were based near a village in Helmand. We got to know the people there, including the children. We played football with them and gave them chocolate; either the Taliban or their sympathisers saw it. The Taliban commander came into the village one day after our patrols had returned to our forward operating base; they took the kids who'd eaten our chocolate, and stoned them to death for consorting with infidels.
"A week later we captured the commander who'd killed them. I gave him what he deserved. They were children. So no, I am not ashamed. If he were here right now I'd do it again."
Weaver hadn't expected that. She'd anticipated that he'd lie and say he'd made a mistake. His second answer backed up his first: he cared. Whether that would be an asset or a hindrance, she had yet to decide.
"What do I care about?" another mercenary, Hakim, repeated the question she'd asked him. "I care about half a million dollars per year for a job where I don't get shot at every day."
"Why did you leave the French Foreign Legion, Mr Shahir?" Weaver enquired.
"Because I was offered twice the pay to work for the private sector," he replied.
"Money is your prime motivation?"
Hakim shrugged. "A man has to eat. I can't do this job forever, so I try to earn as much as I can now."
"And later? Family? Children?"
"I haven't thought about it," Hakim replied.
Being a machine, Catherine Weaver had no concept of boredom or monotony. Repetition didn't bother her, which was fortunate. She'd interviewed each mercenary three times; once each in the guise of Cameron, Sarah, and herself. She'd asked each the same basic questions, and their answers had been intriguing in some cases.
Being a machine also meant she could think faster, and needed very little time to decide who to choose out of the group. She stood in front of the sixteen mercenaries – including Magnus – who were sat back on the chairs.
"I've made my final decision," she announced. "Magnus Saade, Mesake Labalaba, Jessica Payne, Hakim Shahir, and Brad Jennings: I'll contact you with details of where to meet for your final briefing prior to starting the assignment. For now, you're free to leave."
The four men and one woman left the room to sign out of the building and hand their visitor passes back. Once they were gone she turned to the others. "The rest of you are unfortunately no longer required for this position, but I do have an assignment in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'll drive you all to the airport and if you wish to take up my other position, please let me know before you leave. This way, please."