Thriller: Code Name: Camelot - An Action Thriller Novel (A Noah Wolf Novel, Thriller, Action, Mystery Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

“Lieutenant, I’m not the one who put you in this position. In fact, I’m the one who’s actually in this position, not you. You have an out; I don’t. You can walk away; all I can do is move forward, propelled along by a system that is being used by a political machine to cover up what really happened, to make me pay for Lieutenant Gibson’s crimes. If you can show me any fairness in that, then maybe I can help you figure out how to live with yourself when this is all over.” He rubbed his hands over his face, and she thought the gesture was odd. Most people used it to try to get themselves under control, but if there was one thing she knew already about Foster, it was that he never lost control in the first place. He put his hands down, and looked her in the eye once more. “Lieutenant, I don’t want to feel like I’ve hurt someone who’s innocent. Give me the form I need to file, so that I can release you.”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that.”
    “There really isn’t much choice,” Noah said. “You can’t win, and continuing to try will only hurt your career. If I’m going to die, I’d rather die knowing that I at least tried to always do the right thing.”
    “Yeah, well that’s pretty much how I feel, too. If they win, then sometime, maybe a few months, maybe a few years, they’re going to kill you. When that day comes, it’ll be over for you, but I’ll have to keep living with it. Frankly, I don’t know if I can. If I don’t do whatever I can for you, then the day may come when I just can’t cope with being me anymore.” She looked down at the file in front of her and opened it up. “Sergeant Wolf,” she said, “tell me about your childhood.”
    Noah’s eyes went wide. “My childhood? Surely you’ve been able to get at least that much information, right?”
    She nodded. “Yes, but I want to hear from you. Please, go on.”
    Noah let out a long sigh. “Okay, but you’re getting the Reader’s Digest condensed version. Seven years old, I saw my father kill my mother and then himself. Got sent to the foster care system, lived there for almost a year before my grandparents showed up to take me, lived with them for a short time until they figured out I was a Pinocchio, then they couldn’t cope with me anymore and I ended up back in the foster system. Grew up there, spent most of my time in a couple different foster homes, until something happened that made everyone afraid of me. I joined the Army to get out of my hometown, and I finally felt like I’d found a place where I fit in. The same parts of me that were considered a problem in civilian life became assets in the military, and I got a stack of commendations about what a fantastic soldier I was.”
    Matters had been scribbling furiously, even though she had a recorder lying on the table taking in every word and shoving them into its memory chip. She looked up at him. “What do you mean, that your grandparents figured out you were a Pinocchio?”
    Noah shrugged. “That’s what a friend of mine used to call me, a Pinocchio. Pinocchio was a puppet who wanted to be a real boy, everybody knows that story. In my case, it sort of describes how I am, a real person but without any emotions, without any sense of what it means to be human. I don’t know how to act like a real person, so I just mimic the people around me. That works fine, until I’m confronted with a situation that’s so unusual that there isn’t any right or normal way to handle it.”
    “Such as what happened with Lieutenant Gibson and the other men, right?”
    “Yep. I’ve never had the opportunity to watch someone else decide how to handle that type of thing, so I just went with what I thought was the most logical thing to do. Since it was obvious to me that Gibson would rather kill me than let me report what he’d been doing, the logical thing seemed to be for me to kill him first. Same with the other men: since they wanted to kill me to keep