Free Saint by Ted Dekker Page A

a good, hard run. So long as he successfully blocked the pain. But today was different. At some point, he’d tried to split his focus and succeeded. Then he tried to break through the wall in his tunnel and, to his surprise, again succeeded. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, he had pushed back the heat crowding his safe place.
    He wondered if Agotha had noticed anything in her detailed charts. Kelly hadn’t said a word of it, but if he wasn’t mistaken, the light in her eyes was brighter. Regardless of what caused this, he was glad for her. She was pleased with him, which made him happy.
    Where do I come from?
    The stray thought surprised him. He briefly wondered who his father was, then put the question away. There was no answer to it, he remembered.
    They were waiting by the sandbags when Carl made his way down the slope to the shooting range. The vegetation had been cleared four thousand yards to the south—he could see the trees bordering the encroaching forest but no detail from this distance.
    There was something ominous about those trees, he remembered now. Oh yes. The compound didn’t need a fence to keep them in, because if any of them stepped beyond the trees, their implants would send a debilitating electrical charge into their brains. He’d tried it on two occasions with disastrous effects, but he couldn’t remember anything beyond that.
    At least a dozen assorted personnel drifted in and out of contact with him in any given week, guards and scientists and the like. He knew a few by name, but most existed like ghosts in his mind, beyond the scope of his immediate concern, which was survival and success.
    Two of these personnel stood fifty yards to each side of the sand-bags now. Carl focused on the three people who were in the scope of his immediate concern. Kelly, Englishman, and Jenine.
    The recruits were not allowed to talk to one another except as required by their training. As far as he remembered, he’d never spoken to either Englishman or Jenine without Kelly present.
    Jenine. The sight of her standing in black slacks and brown pullover, facing the south with her arms crossed, evoked nothing but curiosity in him. Did she have a pit? Jenine looked at him without expression. Her hair was black, shoulder-length, framing a face with fine features browned by the sun. The Ukrainian, as they called her, was always quiet and hard to read. She could smile softly and slit your throat before you realized that her smile had left her face.
    Carl wasn’t sure if he liked her or not.
    Englishman. From twenty yards he looked angry, but this was nothing new. The man often looked angry, as if he resented being in Carl’s company. This wasn’t a weakness necessarily. He compensated for his lack of emotional control in other ways. There was something profoundly unusual about the sandy-haired man who stared at him over crossed arms, wasn’t there? Whereas Carl could shut out distractions and focus on his intentions, Englishman seemed to join the distraction and use it to his advantage. He didn’t strike Carl as a man who needed to be taught anything by either Kalman or Agotha. Kelly said that the exercises kept Englishman’s skills sharp. One day, when Carl was truly skilled, maybe he would learn to do what Englishman did.
    â€œHello, Carl.” Kelly smiled. “You look refreshed.”
    â€œThank you. I feel good.”
    Not a word from the other two. Though often pitted against one another, they rarely trained together with a common objective. By the looks of the three sandbags set thirty yards apart, the X Group was going to be shooting downrange. That will change before the end of the training exercise, Carl thought. Beside each shooting post lay a crate. He had no idea what these were for.
    Kelly faced all three of them. “The reactive targets are set at twelve hundred yards. You will each use the M40A3 with a 150-grain boat tail bullet today. All three