If she was Mark’s shadow lover, she was the shadow mother of the rest of them. Momma in the sky, she followed all of them, this twenty-six-year-old, CIA-bred woman who tried to be—or at least appear—Company tough. She had felt a disturbing awe at the power she had been given to issue orders that might lead to men’s deaths. Now that power did not feel so awesome and her heart was miserable with regret. If only she had watched more closely, maybe she could have warned them. But the hybrids had never remotely been this aggressive before.

She told herself that Mark would be all right. He was an expert at this kind of field work. In Qurya, a tiny hamlet in southern Afghanistan, he had installed listening devices in a Taliban headquarters that had led to the destruction of the entire command structure for the province. She’d looked at the place—a wretched village in a grim, featureless desert. No cover, no safe approaches. The job was impossible, and yet he had done it. And in Iran, where he had lived off the land for over a year, he had found and marked air vents leading to the new secret nuclear facilities at Natanz. He and two of his men had accomplished this incredibly difficult and crucially important task without creating the slightest suspicion that they were even there.

He had also carried out assassinations, six of them. He was relentlessly efficient. It didn’t matter where the targets were, or how well protected, he would always reach them. All six of his victims had died of apparent heart attacks, auto accidents, in one case a mugging. None of the deaths were listed as suspicious. But how he had got near such people as the director of the Iranian uranium enrichment program, or Al Qaeda’s treasurer, who kept most of their finances in his head, was just not known.

She had read his whole record, from his life in foster care to his college career at Stanford, where Mark had lived with General Walker and his wife, Emma, the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist.

When they’d been together, she’d mentioned Dr. Turner to Mark and drawn a blank. It was illegal for her to share the contents of his dossier with him, so she could neither ask nor tell him more.

If he was an Inner Iron graduate, for example, would he know? Inner Iron was the Defense Advanced Research Project that Dr. Turner managed at DARPA. If Mark contained experimental organs, for example, it would explain why Dr. Turner had picked this particular soldier, and also why he would not want Mark to know he was behind the choice.