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  “Adrian Moore. I recognize you from the papers. But how do you know me?” I asked, keeping the AK-47s trained on the group. I thought I could probably take them all out, but I figured that I’d get shot and killed in the process. I’d only use that as a last resort.

  “Mutual acquaintances. For instance, Holly,” Moore smiled.

  “Where is she?” I demanded.

  “You’ll be reunited soon enough, Mr. Blast. For now, I’d like to get to know you myself. So why don’t we put down our weapons and speak like civilized people.”

  I lowered the AK-47s and let them drop to the floor.

  Moore turned to one of his men. “Go get the guns.”

  The stooge did as he was told. I didn’t try to stop him.

  “Now, you may leave us alone,” Moore told his men. Four of them left, but a fifth stayed. He was armed to the teeth.

  “What’s with laughing boy?” I asked, gesturing to the remaining gunman.

  “Luther is with me at all times. Don’t let it make you uncomfortable. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Yeah, sure. Whiskey. Straight up.”

  I looked around and took in the surroundings while Moore made the drinks. Moore himself was not what I expected. He was a pleasant man. Average in every detail. He was a little on the short side, and slightly older than what I expected, probably around 55 or so. His hair was black, but speckled with gray. A completely non-assuming figure. Luther, on the other hand, was about the biggest monstrosity of a man I’d ever seen. His biceps where about as big around as my waist. He was tall, too. At least six foot five. Judging from the mess of scars that covered his face, he’d seen quite a few battles.

  “So, Mr. Blast. Tell me a little about yourself,” Moore said as he handed me the whiskey.

  “Not much to tell. I guess you know about the MK-ULTRA project. That’s really all there is. All that I can remember.”

  “So what did you do before that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. As far as I know, there is no 'before that'.”

  Moore sat down and motioned me to do the same. I grabbed a chair across from him, with my back to Luther. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. Moore suddenly switched topics on me.

  “You’ve done quite a bit of damage to my operation. Nothing that can’t be fixed, but a definite inconvenience. All those people dead. And just you and Holly did this?”

  “Holly wasn’t a part of it. She tried to stop me, but as you can no doubt tell, I’m pretty good at killing, so she wisely chose to not oppose me.”

  “I don’t know what Holly has told you, but I’d be very careful what you choose to believe.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything. Besides, I’m more interested in what your boy Aryan told me before I carved his brain up. What’s this disk that you greaseballs are looking for and what makes you think I have it?”

  “If you don’t have it, it’s better for your health if you don’t know anything about it. Suffice it to say that Holly stole some very valuable information from me and I will stop at absolutely nothing to retrieve it. It is a one of a kind item, and I must have it. If you have any idea where she hid it, I suggest you tell me.”

  “I told Aryan and I’ll tell you. I don’t know a goddamn thing about any disk. If I did, what makes you think I’d tell you?”

  He took another look at my bloody, broken face and got the point. I didn’t give up the disk under torture. I sure wasn’t going to give it up just because he said “please”.

  “I have information that might concern you, Mr. Blast. Information on your life prior to the MK-ULTRA experiment. Complete biography taken from CIA, FBI, and local law enforcement records. Your real name, the identity of your parents, and the names of a sister and a brother. That and much more. Interested?”

  “Of course I am, if you’ve really got something. Chances are, it’s just a load of shit, though. You want something that you think I’ve got. You know that I have no recollection of my past. What better bait than that?”

  “I assure you, it’s true. All you have to do is tell me if you have the disk or not. You don’t even have to tell me where it is. For now. You give me a little something and I’ll tell you one thing about yourself. Anything you want to know. Give me the disk, and I turn over to you every file I have on your past.”

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew that he was telling the truth. I can spot a liar like a chunk of shit on fresh white linen, but this guy wasn’t lying. He had all the answers I wanted. And all I had to do to get them was sell out Holly. That and find this mysterious disk.

  “So what is your answer, Mr. Blast? Do you or do you not have the disk?”

  I considered a while longer. This was a big deal for me, and I was going to blow it.

  “Fuck you, dirtbag,” I told him and spit some blood up on his expensive oriental rug.

  “Very well,” Moore said. “Luther, bring Holly to me.”

  What now?

  Luther left the room, but three minutes later, he was back -- with Holly in tow. I’d expected her to be almost as beat up as I was, but she wasn’t. She looked just as good as the first time I’d checked her out. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but it had only been two days.

  “Holly! Are you all right?” I asked, just happy that she was still alive.

  She didn’t answer. Moore did her talking for her.

  “I told you to be careful and not believe anything that she told you, Mr. Blast, and yet you ignore my advice. How did a man a stupid as you ever live this long?”

  “You’ll find out, Moore. I guarantee it.”

  “Holly, I tire of Mr. Blast’s inane threats,” Moore said, turning to his wife. crossed over to a desk, opened a drawer and produced my .45. He handed Holly the gun.

  “And now it is time for you to prove your loyalty to me again, my dear. Kill him.”

  -7-

  She looked down on me through the sights of her .45, her lips curled in a sneering smile. Her pink tongue moved across her lips, leaving a red glistening trail in its wake. As her finger squeezed in on the trigger, my mind raced trying to figure some way out. There had to be something. If I could just concentrate. There was something I was missing.

  “Why the melodrama, Moore? Why not just ask your loving wife where the goddamn disk is?” I spat.

  “Wife? Who?” Adrian looked genuinely surprised. He gestured to Holly. “Her?”

  “Yeah, her. Who else are you married to?”

  “I told you to be careful what you believed coming from her. She’s not my wife.”

  My eyes darted from Adrian to Holly. Holly looked down at me with a mixture of scorn and sorrow. What the hell was this all about? If Holly wasn’t Adrian’s wife, then who was she? I realized I was more in the dark than ever. A disk that I never knew about until tonight. A mobster who knew more about me than I did. And it was all connected to the dame that I’d come to the rescue of in a bar that I’d never been to before. A dame that had lied to me at every turn, but had saved my life on a few occasions. The pieces didn’t add up right now, but I wasn’t that far from the complete picture.

  Then I remembered what I was missing. The thing that I’d forgotten about. I still had the 9mm in my waistband. I started easing my right hand behind my back. I sat back on the sofa and eased the gun out of my pants. Holly and Adrian were standing in front of me and Luther was behind me to the left. I had to stall and think this thing out if I wanted to leave the place alive.

  “So what’s the story? Why doesn’t she just give you the disk back?” I asked.

  “She tells me that she left it in your care. Frankly I don’t know who to believe.”

  “So if she’s not your wife, who the hell is she?”

  “That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that if she wants to live, she is going to shoot you in the forehead in about ten seconds.”

  I still didn’t know the score, but I was willing to bet that Holly would cover me. I gave her a litt
le smile and she resumed aiming my .45 at me. With a speed that I doubted I still possessed after the beating I’d received, I swung the 9mm around and got off an off-balance shot at Adrian. He dove for cover behind the desk. Luther brought up his AK-47, but before he could fire off a volley, Holly had nailed him right between the eyes, splattering his gray matter all over the expensive rug.

  “This way!” Holly said, and started for the door.

  “What about Adrian?”

  “We have to let him go for now. If we don’t leave immediately, we’ll never make it out alive.”

  I decided to trust her again. Just like that. Twenty seconds ago she was going to blow my brains out. Now we were a team again. Dames.

  I stopped to grab Luther’s Kalishnakov before joining her in the hallway.

  I was just out the door when the crossfire started. There were four guards in the main hallway and Adrian Moore in the living area, all firing at us. One of Moore’s shots whizzed past my ear and I saw one of the guards take his boss’ bullet full on in the face. A closed casket burial for sure. I swung around and laid down some cover fire to buy Holly some time. She took out two of the guards with my .45.

  The last guard, meanwhile, had circled around behind us. I lost track of him until I felt the blade in my back. I let out a little shout and turned around, pressing on the trigger of the AK-47. Nothing happened. The assault rifle had jammed.

  It wasn’t a problem, though. I simply pulled back and then rammed the barrel of the AK-47 into the guard’s gut. I ended up ripping a hole so big that vital organs began spilling onto the marble floor.

  “Let’s go!” Holly shouted.

  I ran after her and we crashed through the front door. I turned back to see Adrian Moore running out of the living room with his .38 blazing. It looked like he stepped on one of his guard’s organs. He slipped and fell on his ass in the pool of blood that I’d left in my wake and he didn’t get up again. With any luck, he’d cracked his skull and died.

  Holly and I made our way to the garage, where we found an SUV that would get us where we needed to go. I hot wired it and got behind the wheel.

  “Let me explain, Blast,” Holly said as I gunned the engine.

  “Save it till we get out of here,” I told her. I wanted to hear her explanation, but I had other things to worry about. Every guard on the property had been alerted to our escape. It was a cinch that the front gate was closed, which meant we’d have to knock it down.

  A single guard stood in front of the gate, firing an AK-47. The SUV was taking a lot of damage, but the tires and windows were all holding. I got my speed up to around sixty by the time I plowed through the guard and the front gate. My front bumper hit the guard, immediately shattering his spine. Seconds later his body was torn in two as we crashed through the gate. His torso and head bounced up onto the hood and came to a rest with the head pressing on the window. I reached out, grabbed the corpse’s arm and yanked it off the hood. It hit the macadam with a sickeningly wet smack.

  I waited until we got about five miles away from Moore’s estate before I questioned Holly.

  “So what’s the deal, sister?”

  “It’s true. I’m not Adrian’s wife. I met him a little over a year ago. I’m not a drug addict or a former prostitute. I’m a D.E.A. agent. I infiltrated the mob and got close to Moore.”

  “What’s with this disk he kept talking about?”

  “It’s hundreds of pages of information. He keeps records of everything. I was supposed to deliver it to a contact at the D.E.A. He was supposed to meet me at that bar where we first met.”

  “Whose idea was that bar?”

  “His.”

  “Okay. Now, why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t know you. I wasn’t going to jeopardize my cover. By the time I figured out whose side you were on, there just wasn’t enough time to straighten everything out.”

  “Okay. Let me see if I have this down. A little over a year ago your superiors order you to infiltrate the mob and get close to Adrian Moore. You gain his confidence by killing one of his rats. Maybe you sleep with him, maybe you don’t. That’s not important. The important thing is that you gain his confidence. Then one day you stumble onto this disk and swipe it. Moore notices that it and you are missing. Or maybe his man at the D.E.A. fills him in. Then your contact at the D.E.A. tells you to meet him at this bar, where I meet you. Right so far?”

  “Yeah. That sounds about right,” she said. She was still hiding something.

  “So, while I’m covering for you in Chinatown, you make your way back to the car and manage to stash the disk before Adrian’s men nab you. Where did you hide the disk?”

  “It was in one of the duffel bags in the back seat,” she said.

  The duffel bags. Of course. We were doing pretty good, then. I’d locked the duffel bags into the locker at the train station and had thrown out the key.

  “How does Moore know who I am and about the MK-ULTRA project? Did you tell him?”

  “No. He knew already. He knew all about you.”

  “So it’s a safe bet that us meeting up at the bar wasn’t mere coincidence. Moore wanted us to meet.” I mused.

  “I’m sorry, Steve. I really am. I should have told you the truth as soon as I knew you were on the up and up,” Holly said, taking my hand.

  “It’s okay, Holly. I probably would have done the same in your shoes. As long as there are no lies between us now,” I pulled the car to the shoulder and looked into her eyes. “This is far from over. We need to trust each other implicitly.”

  “I agree.”

  We were close now. Her lips were inches away from mine, but the electricity was buzzing all over. I took her in my arms and kissed her hard. My left hand ran the length of her body, eager and hesitant, all at the same time. I pulled away from the kiss and took her face in my hands.

  “Let’s get a room for the rest of the night,” I said and she nodded her head in agreement. There was still something there. Something she was hiding from me. I looked her deep in the eyes. “Tell me.”

  “It’s about your past. It’s all there, Steve. I’ve seen it. It’s all on the disk.”

  -8-

  The news hit me like an electric shock. I’d convinced myself that Adrian was bluffing about his knowledge of my past, but now here was Holly backing him up. Part of me still didn’t trust her, but I wanted to so badly that I probably would have believed that night was day if she'd told me so. There was another rationale. That the bio info was fake.

  But I didn’t think so. Since Holly had seen the disk before we met, that meant that Adrian had been studying up on me for a while. I was more sure than ever that there was a lot more to the whole mess than just a missing disk. I was involved in some way that I had no clue about. I had to find out what connection I had to everything, and Holly was my best bet for doing that.

  “What did the disk say about me?”

  “I really can’t remember most of it. I looked at a lot of things on that disk, most just cursory glances.”

  “So how do you know that the bio was mine?”

  “I remember the last part of it. The part that dealt with your CIA involvement. There were some other things I remember as well. According to the disk, your parents are both dead, but you have a brother and a sister still alive. Apparently before you got involved with the CIA you were somehow connected with the Navy SEALs. That’s all I got. At the time I didn’t think it was important, so I didn’t spend a lot of time on it.”

  “That’s okay. It’s not important,” I said. I meant it too. Now that I was on the verge of discovering who I really was, I realized that none of it mattered. My past had been taken from me years ago. Now that I had the chance to get it back, I wondered if I really wanted it. I could read it off a piece of paper or a computer disk, but would that bring my memories back, or would it just be like reading a dossier on a complete stranger? What would happen if I didn’t approve of the person I used to be? For better or for wor
se, I was now Steve Blast. That guy that was once affiliated with the Navy SEALs meant no more to me than the bum begging for change on the corner that you walk past every day.

  Besides, I had more important things to occupy my mind at the present. I had a beautiful woman who actually wanted to sleep with me. When you look like I do, it’s not often that a really beautiful girl wants anything to do with you. I mean, I’ve never had to pay for sex, but “beautiful” is not a label I’d attach to 99% of my partners.

  Yet here was Holly. Drop dead gorgeous. She could have any guy she wanted, but for some reason, tonight she wanted me. And I wanted her -- more than I cared to admit to myself.

  I let her off the hook for lying to me. It made sense and I would’ve done the same thing had I been on assignment. I drove the SUV to a motel way off the main highway and checked us into a room using one of my false identifications. When I got back to the room, Holly was in the shower.

  For the first time I became aware of how beat up I was. My ribs were sore, my head hurt, everything was throbbing with pain. I sat at the end of the bed and managed to get my clothes off. My shoulder still hurt where I’d been shot, but it didn’t look infected. I made my way into the bathroom, where Holly had already fogged the mirror up and the place was thick with steam. One look through the shower glass and I wondered if she was using hot water, or if the cold water was turning into steam as it hit her body.

  I slid open the shower door and wrapped my arms around her waist, kissing her neck. I heard a low moan escape from her luscious mouth and I forgot all about my aches and pains.

  I awoke the next morning, and for the briefest of moments, everything was all right in the world. I forgot about disks and CIA experiments and mobsters and killing. Then I came out of that half-awake/half-asleep fog and remembered. I looked at Holly lying next to me still asleep and thought back to the previous night. It had been wild, uninhibited, and unbelievable. She’d told me that she loved me, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t believe for a minute that a dame like her could love a killer like me. It didn’t make any sense. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the knowledge that she was D.E.A. I didn’t trust the government. Not after what they’d done to me and the others.