Брэд Мельтцер - The Fifth Assassin

Cool story, right? It’s not the only one. According to the Surgeon, Mac isn’t a retired tech genius. He’s a nineteen-year-old social misfit who, like every talented hacker who gets caught by the U.S. government, is hired to work for the U.S. government. The Girl Scout cookies are really for his sister.

I don’t care which story is true. All I care is that when trouble hits, no one’s faster than the Immaculate Deception.

Tot hands me his phone over the cubicle partition. Onscreen is a photo of a man with buzzed black hair, standing against a light gray wall. My accuser Ozzie’s mugshot. He looks about my age, but it’s hard to tell since his face… his right eye sags slightly, making him look permanently sleepy—and the way his face is lumpy, like it’s coated with a shiny putty… I think he’s a burn victim.

Then I notice his eyes. They’re pale gold like the color of white wine.

Behind me, the door to our office opens as one of our fellow employees arrives. I barely hear it. My skin goes so cold, it feels like it’s about to crack off my body.

There’s only one person I know with gold eyes. And as I study the photo, as I look past the burns… No. It’s impossible. It can’t be him.

But I know it is.

Marshall.

3

Twenty years ago

Sagamore, Wisconsin

Marshall didn’t hear the rip.

Like any fifth-grade boy, he was moving too fast as he kicked open the passenger door. Even in the small and usually slow town of Sagamore, even before his dad put the car in park, Marshall was out in the cold, racing around to the back of the car and using all his strength to pull his dad’s wheelchair from the trunk.

Barely ten years old, the youngest in his grade, Marshall was always told he was chubby, not fat—that his weight was perfect, but his height just needed to catch up. He believed it too, anxiously awaiting the day that God would even things out and make him more like his fellow fifth graders: tall like Vincent or skinny like Beecher.

Marshall was a polite kid—almost to a fault—with a mom so strict she taught him that if he had to pass gas, he had to leave the room. Discipline ran deep in the Lusk household, and the central discipline was taking care of Dad.

“At your service, sir,” Marshall announced, making the joke his dad always cringed at as he rolled the wheelchair to the driver’s-side door.

“On C,” his father said, turning his body and giving the signal for Marshall to lock the chair’s wheels and hold it in place. “A… B…”

“C…!” Marshall and his dad said simultaneously. Marshall’s father used all the strength in his arms to pivot out of the driver’s seat, toward the wheelchair, swinging what was left of his legs through the air.

In medical terms, Timothy Lusk was a double amputee. On the night of the accident, as he drove his pregnant wife to the hospital, a brown minivan that was being driven by a woman in the midst of an epileptic fit plowed into their car. Blessedly, Marshall was born without a scratch. Timothy’s wife, Cherise, was fine too. The doctors cut off Timothy’s crushed legs just below the knees.

“Careful…” Marshall said as his dad’s full weight tumbled from the car and collided with the wheelchair. He hated it when his dad rushed, but his father was always annoyed and impatient at being cooped up in snowy weather. Even though neighbors helped to shovel the Lusks’ walk, it didn’t mean they could shovel the entire town. For anyone in a wheelchair, winter was a bitch.

“Are you holding it?” his dad barked as his landing in the seat sent the chair skidding back slightly, sliding across the last bits of slush on the ground. The stump of his left leg slammed into the metal base of the armrest.

“I got it,” Marshall called back, readjusting his thick glasses and maneuvering the chair to mount the curb. Twenty years from now, every new street would be outfitted with a curb cut, and wheelchairs would weigh barely twelve pounds. But on this day, in Sagamore, Wisconsin, the curbs were unbroken and the wheelchairs weighed fifty.

In one quick motion, Marshall’s father popped a wheelie that tipped him back.

Gripping the wheelchair’s pushbars, Marshall angled the front wheels onto the curb. Now came the hard part. Marshall wasn’t strong, and he was overweight, but he knew what to do. With his palms underneath the pushbars, he shoved and lifted, gritting his teeth. His father pumped the wheels, trying to help. Marshall’s palms went red, with little islands of white where the pushbars dug in. It took everything they had…

Kuunk.

No problem. Up the curb, easy as pie.

“Galactic,” Marshall muttered.

From there, as his dad rolled in front of him, there was no plan for where they were going. His father just wanted out —strolling down the main drag of Dickinson Street… an egg sandwich at Danza’s… maybe a stop in Farris’s bookshop. But all that changed when Marshall’s father said, “I gotta go.”

“Whattya mean?” Marshall asked. “Go where?”

“I gotta go ,” he said, pointing down. But it was the sudden panic in his father’s voice that set Marshall off.

“You gotta poop?” Marshall asked.

“No! I gotta pee .”

“So don’t you…?” Marshall paused, feeling a rush of blood flush his face. “I-Isn’t that what the bag’s for…?” he asked, tapping the outside of his own left thigh, but motioning to the leg bag his father wore to urinate.

“It ripped,” his father said, scanning the empty street and still trying so hard to keep his voice down. “My bag ripped.”

“How could it rip? We haven’t even—” Marshall stopped, glancing back at their car. “You tore it when you got out of the car, didn’t you?”

Racing behind his dad and grabbing the pushbars, he added, “Now we gotta get back in the car and go all the way home…”

“I won’t make it home.”

Marshall froze. “Wha?”

His father stopped the wheelchair, keeping his head down and his back to his son. He’d say these words once, but he wouldn’t say them again: “I can’t make it, Marshall. I’m gonna have an accident.”

Marshall’s mouth gaped open, but no words came out. For most of his life, because of the wheelchair, he had been nearly at eye level with his father. But he’d never noticed it until this moment.

“I can help you, Dad.” Grabbing the pushbars, Marshall spun the wheelchair around, running hard up the sidewalk. The closest store was Lester’s clothing store.

His father was silent. But Marshall saw the way he was shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“Almost there,” Marshall promised, running hard, his head tucked down like a charging bull.

There was a loud krunk as the legs of the metal wheelchair collided with the concrete step.

“ I need help! Open up! ” Marshall shouted, rapping his fist against Lester’s glass door. The small bell that announced each customer rang lightly at the impact.

“Dad, tip back !” Marshall yelled as Dad popped a wheelie, and one of the employees, a thirtysomething woman with bad teeth and perfectly straight brown hair, opened the store’s front door.

“It’s an emergency! Grab the front of the chair!” Marshall yelled as the woman obliged, bending down. He jammed his own palms underneath the pushbars. “On C…” he added. “A… B…”

There was another loud krunk as the back wheels of the chair climbed the first step, wedging just below the second.

“Almost there! Just one more!” Marshall said.

“I’m not gonna make it,” his father insisted.

“You’ll make it, Dad. I promise, you’ll make it!”