Kill Switch Read Online Free PDF Page A

me because I actually believe in something. He thinks it’s a distraction. He accused me of losing focus.”
    â€œDo you believe, Prospero?” asked Greene, surprised. “You’ve told me on numerous occasions that you reject the idea of the Judeo-Christian version of God. You said that Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha were all con men. Those are your words.”
    â€œI know. I was only ten, so that was the best I could phrase it at the time.”
    Greene had to suppress a smile. He said, “Would you care to restate your position?”
    Prospero shot him a sly look. “Let’s just say that I’ve opened my mind to other possibilities.”
    â€œWhat possibilities? Is it something your mother suggested?”
    The boy seemed surprised by that. “What? No. She’s a loon.”
    â€œThen what?”
    Prospero shrugged. “Something else. I’m not ready to talk about it.” He paused, considering, then changed the subject. “Do you remember the dream I had last Christmas? About having brothers and sisters?”
    â€œOf course. You said that you believed there were at least fifty other children like you.”
    â€œExactly like me. Same face,” said Prospero. “Even the girls looked like me. We were all in a big room. Not a school exactly and not a hospital. A little of both. It was a horrible place, though. The people who worked there hated us. No … no, that’s wrong. They were afraid of us.”
    â€œSo you told me. Why do you bring it up now?”
    The boy looked at his hands for a moment. “I dreamed about one of them again. Last night, I mean. In my dreams most of my brothers and sisters were dead. All but one. A sister.”
    Greene said nothing. He’d asked Oscar Bell about this and had been told, very curtly, to mind his own business. The encounter, and the boy’s persistent dreams, reinforced Greene’s suspicion that Prospero was adopted.
    â€œWhat can you recall about her?” asked Greene, but Prospero shrugged.
    â€œNot much. She was sad. She was older in my dream. Grown up. And she was sad. She’d been hurt. Shot, I think. She didn’t die but she was sad because she couldn’t have babies.” The boy knotted and unknotted his fingers. “That was all there was to the dream, but it was so real. More real than us talking right now. I don’t think it was just a dream. I think I do have a sister and that she’s out there somewhere. And … she looks exactly like me. Not like clones. Something else…”
    His voice trailed off.
    â€œVery well. Have you ever shared these dreams with your father?”
    â€œNo. I tried once and he smacked me across the face.”
    â€œThat was two years ago,” said Greene. “Your father told me that he’d hit you and that he was very sorry. Perhaps you could try to talk to him again. If not about your dreams, then perhaps about your relationship? About your feelings about his focus on your scientific achievements.”
    â€œShare? With Dad?” Prospero laughed. “Dad doesn’t talk to me. Not unless it’s to ask what I’m working on and how it could be used.”
    â€œUsed?”
    â€œYou know what I mean,” snapped Prospero. “Daddy-dear’s always fishing for the next shiny toy to sell to the military. You think all of this—the mansion, the cars, the private jet, all that crap—comes from what he makes in the private sector? Please. It’s all military contracts and he’s always after me to come up with something because he’s tapped out when it comes to his own genius.”
    â€œYou’re only a boy.”
    Prospero gave him a withering look. “We both know that’s not really true.”
    In that moment the boy sounded like an old man. There was a world-weariness unearned by the number of years he’d already lived. It was in his eyes, too.
    â€œSo,