The Broken Room is a new supernatural thriller from New York Times bestselling author Peter Clines, which is out now from Blackstone Publishing. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from the first chapter!
You can still owe the dead.
Hector was the best of the best. A government operative who could bring armies to a halt and nations to their knees. But when his own country betrayed him, he dropped off the grid and picked up the first of many bottles.
Natalie can’t remember much of her life before her family brought her to the US, but she remembers the cages. And getting taken away to the Project with dozens of other young children to become part of their nightmarish experiments. That’s how she ended up with the ghost of a dead secret agent stuck in her head.
And Hector owes Natalie’s ghost a big favor.
Now Hector and Natalie are on the run from an army of killers sent to retrieve her. Because the people behind the Project are willing to risk almost anything to get Natalie back and complete their experiments.
PART ONE
A GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR
ONE
If a dive bar had family, the Pharaon would’ve been the redheaded stepchild. Or the black sheep. Possibly both. The story went that, sixteen years ago when it first opened, it was supposed to be the Pharaoh. But the sign painter messed up and the original owners just didn’t care enough to go back up and add a vertical line with some red paint. The Pharaon was on its fourth owner now, and each one had cared about the name a little less than the last one.
Hector didn’t care about the name at all. He’d chosen the bar for the same reasons he chose most places. Cheap booze. Low lighting. Limited entrances and exits (probably a fire code violation, but Hector didn’t care about that, either). At least three booths shallow enough not to get trapped in, which also gave direct line of sight to the main entrance and the back room’s swinging door.
And right now, out of those things, the only one he cared about was the cheap booze.
Over the past two and a half years Hector’s days had fallen into a nice, simple schedule. He got up with the sun, showered, grabbed a breakfast burrito from one (chosen at random) of the four hole-in-the-wall places within a block of his studio apartment. Then he sat on a bus or train station bench (also chosen at random) and ate the burrito. Sometimes, if said form of public transport came while he sat there, he’d pay cash and ride it for an hour or two.
Hector paid cash for everything.
One way or another, at half past noon, he walked into the Pharaon just after they unlocked the doors. Then his day really began with a drink in one of the three booths with direct line of sight to the main entrance and the back room’s swinging door. Sometimes he’d let one drink sit for hours, sipping at it as all the ice turned to water in the yellowed double-rocks glass. Other times he’d kill an entire bottle before dinner. It all depended on how he’d slept the night before.
Usually, he killed the bottle.
Today had been a rare day so far. Almost four in the afternoon and he’d had only three drinks. The whiskey gave the bar a soft edge, rubbing at the shadows like a charcoal artist. It had been, overall, a peaceful day, internally and externally. The first one Hector had experienced in at least two months.
He raised his hand, signaled Stu at the bar for a fourth drink, and the girl walked in.
Hector assessed her, as he did everyone who stepped through the big swath of afternoon sunlight and paused to let their eyes adjust. He didn’t dismiss her because of her clothes. Every item was new. Superhero T-shirt, jeans, red-and-blue sneakers, sweatshirt, denim jacket, school backpack, and a sparkly, sequin-covered baseball cap declaring unicorns rule. Lower-end stuff, but all of it new, barely broken in at all. Despite the hat—because of it, really—he was also pretty sure the outfit had been picked to blend into a crowd. To let attention slide off the girl.
His attention didn’t slide.
He put her weight at fifty-three pounds. Four foot four. Short, dark hair peeking out from under the cap, closer to a crew cut than a pixie. A decent amount of Latino heritage, like himself. Slightly malnourished. She was twelve, tops.
She blinked twice and looked back and forth across the room.
Stu stepped around the bar, holding a glass of liquid amber and pointing himself at Hector’s table. “Whattya want, kid?”
The girl looked at him and blinked again. For a moment, Hector thought she didn’t understand the man. Then she shook her head and said “Nothing,” in a voice like a stage whisper.
“Bathroom’s for customers only, and you’re too young to be a customer.” He stepped past her and delivered Hector’s drink to the booth.
Hector nodded his appreciation but didn’t take his eyes off the girl.
She turned her head, pointing her eyes at each of the seven afternoon patrons. She paused at Hector, then settled on a guy at a tall table near the bar. Hector had never spoken to the man, but eavesdropping and observation had taught him that Jorge worked as a security guard at one of LA’s many film studios and was freshly divorced after he caught his wife cheating on him.
The girl walked in a wide arc, circled Jorge, and parked herself at the table across from him. She was two-thirds turned from Hector, so he could see her jaw and mouth move but couldn’t read her lips. He watched Jorge’s expression. The security guard shook his head, then looked back over his shoulder at the bartender.
“Kid!” Stu’s voice hit the loud, slow pitch people somehow thought translated across all languages. “You can’t be in here. So get out before I call your parents.”
She ignored him and walked a beeline across the bar to Hector’s booth. He sipped his drink and stared at her. She stared back.
“Hello.”
“What’s up, kid?”
“Are you Hector Ramirez?”
His eyes and hands never moved, but something tickled the back of his neck. He hadn’t been Hector Ramirez in at least six years. He’d even destroyed the Ramirez passport, license, and other docs. Standard procedure.
“Name sounds familiar,” he said. “Why are you looking for him.”
She set her hands on the table and balled them into tiny fists. “Are you him?”
He lifted his glass, let his drink touch the tip of his tongue. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to answer a question with a question?”
“My mother’s dead. And my father.” Her lips kept moving, forming silent words as she stared.
He flinched. “Sorry, kid.”
“You are him,” she said. No, not said. Stated. Whatever doubt had been in her voice had vanished like smoke in a hurricane. She knew.
“Maybe.” He set his glass down.
“You are,” she repeated. “You’re supposed to help me.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Are you selling band candy or something? Girl Scout cookies?”
She stared at him as her head pivoted back and forth. Left side up. Right side up. Back to center. “I don’t know what band candy is.”
There was an odd cadence and tone to the words. To all her words. Hector recognized it from a few different places around the world. She hadn’t been taught English. She’d picked it up, learning random words here and there from different people.
“Candy for your school band,” he said. “You know, musical band. You sell the candy to pay for uniforms or trips to DC or drum skins or something.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly not having any idea what he was talking about. “I’m not selling band candy.”
“So what’s up?”
The girl slid into the booth across from him and laced her fingers together on the tabletop. “I’m being pursued by two standard two-man retrieval teams with a tactical support team on standby. I think I’ve lost them, but I know they followed me here to Los Angeles. They want to take me back to the Project.”
He’d been reaching to pick up the drink again. Instead, he set his palm flat against the cheap Formica. The tickle on the back of his neck grew into an itch that spread down his spine like a rash.
“Hey,” Stu called out. “You know that kid? She begging for money?”
“No,” Hector said, still not taking his eyes off the girl.
“I have plenty of money,” she said with a nod.
“Who are you?”
“Natalie Gamma Sixteen.”
“Gamma Sixteen?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“It’s my group designation. There were thirty-five of us in each group.”
He set those facts to the side of his mental desktop, somewhere he could grab them quickly if he needed them. “But what’s your name?”
“Natalie Gamma Sixteen.”
“Your real name.”
“I don’t know anymore.”
The drink called to him, but the back of his neck buzzed hard, the way it used to. “Who said I’d help you?”
“A friend of yours.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
Her head did the side-to-side thing again. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you can’t just say ‘a friend.’ You have to give me a real name.”
“Timothy Steirs. He said you’d help me. He told me where you’d be.”
A chill blotted the itch for a moment as he processed the name. Heat replaced the chill. Annoyance. A bit of anger. A generous amount of suspicion.
Hector hid it all. He’d been trained to hide sudden emotions. “Really? Tim Steirs sent you?”
“Yes. He said you’d help me.”
He reached out with one finger and caught a drop of condensation as it rolled down the outside of the glass. His eyes had never left the girl, but his attention was on the exits now. “Did he? When did he say this?”
“He told me about you for the first time eight days ago, just before I escaped. He said you’d be able to help me, and that you would.”
Hector flicked the drop from his fingertip. “See, that strikes me as odd.”
“Why?”
“Because according to everything I’ve heard, Tim Steirs died seven years ago.”
Across the table, the girl’s shoulders sagged beneath her backpack straps. “Yes. This is good.”
“What is?”
“You already know. He thought you might take it hard.”
“Take what hard?”
“Finding out he was dead,” said Natalie Gamma Sixteen. “We were worried I’d have to tell you.”
