Touch No Evil

by A. K. Alexander

  Last-Guy is enormous. John questioned whether or not Ayden could take him out. They ultimately decided that Ayden would be the best option, but expect the dude will be quite a handful for him.

  Ayden drops on the man from behind, covering his mouth, but lacks the strength to take out the man in an instant. John leaps over Ponytail and rushes into the room. Struggling, Ayden swings Last-Guy around, opening him up for John to grab hold of the guy’s face and put him to sleep. Once the giant goes limp, John snatches the man’s hat from his head and puts it on.

  Ayden grabs two coils of rope from a peg on the wall. He throws one to John and crouches to bind Last-Guy. Make sure they’re not a problem, or we should finish them off. You’re letting that angel stuff make you soft.

  Angel stuff?

  You know, Archangel Michelangelo.

  Michelangelo was a painter. It was Raphael.

  Whatever.

  John catches the rope, and binds the woman’s and man’s hands behind their backs, then ties her ankles. He can’t feel too sorry for leaving them bound as he let them both live even though they’re complicit in the torture of children. Still, as angry as he is about Simms’ work, Archangel Raphael gave him back his ability to protect life. It seems wrong to kill when not absolutely necessary.

  John stoops to pluck Ponytail’s weapon from under her left arm, a small-frame Glock 9mm, and stuffs it in his belt, then gives a quick look around the corner at the camera, right where they expect it to be. He quicksteps across the front room, positioning himself so the camera is focused on the back of Last-Guy’s hat, upon his head. If anyone happened to be watching in that split second before he moved into position, then the whole thing is already blown.

  But Julia has assured them they will pull it off.

  He steps out, using the back of his head to block the camera view, allowing Ayden and Noah to dash down the small corridor to the kitchen, where the elevator that leads into the compound waits for them, concealed behind a row of shelves in the pantry. Information courtesy of Kylie, who heard it plain as day. John positions himself in the elevator, standing so Last-Guy’s hat blocks the camera inside.

  “Okay, Ky, we’re heading down,” he whispers, knowing she will hear him.

  And she does.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The guys are in.

  The vibrato thrum of an old elevator motor sounds in my ears. It shouldn’t take them long to gain control of the alarm systems and security cameras before Julia and I enter the chalet. And since Julia hasn’t freaked out yet, I trust everything is still going according to plan.

  “So,” I whisper to her, since we have two minutes and fourteen seconds to kill. “You and Ayden.”

  She glances at me, bracing for an argument. Her eyes flare open as if she’s about to bite my head off for trying to start a shouting match right here, right now.

  I wink. “I was only going to say, good for you two. There’s nothing between us, in case you’re wondering.”

  The fire in her expression evaporates. “Well, he speaks very highly of you.”

  “That’s nice to hear, but there’s still nothing between us.”

  “Didn’t the two of you wake up in bed together not too long ago?”

  “We did, but nothing happened. I think.”

  “You think?”

  I shrug. “What can I say? We killed copious amounts of wine that night. And if something did happen—which I think is unlikely—it was a mistake.”

  She shrugged. “Mistakes happen.”

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  “Hard not to, right? I mean, look at him. The good looks, the body. I mean, he’s a freakin’ spy. Doesn’t get much more badass than that.”

  I wonder if she knows he’s snapped someone’s neck tonight… and there might be more bodies piling up, too. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to the boys effectively dismantle the next round of security. “That he is. We should start moving now.”

  I almost grab her hand before we dash out of cover, but catch myself. She might be my sister, but she’s not twelve. We leave the vehicle in a mad dash, dart across the expansive lawn, and into the expansive and elegant chalet. Thanks to Noah’s time and space traveling surveillance with Hope, we also know the layout of the property. Meanwhile, I ignore the two figures who are clearly not dead, tied to chairs in the living room. I’ve heard the exchange. John kept them alive on purpose.

  “He’s a good man,” says Julia, as we head into the elevator. “Except he really believes all that angel stuff.”

  Mashing the down button, I see the camera pointing at us, but know the boys have already cleared the path. Nice to have friends who can take care of business.

  I fidget. Truth is, I’m still not sure what to believe myself, but I can’t deny the monastery has a powerful energy about it. Was it the power of God? Or angels? I don’t know, but I push those thoughts out of my mind. We have a job to do.

  No one is waiting when we step off the elevator, which I fully expected.

  According to our plan, Julia and I are to follow a particular corridor in search of the GEPSI children, while the guys continue dealing with potential threats. We hurry toward that corridor before anyone happens to wander by, notice us, and set off an alarm.

  We haven’t gotten far before I pick up the sound of someone, not one of ours, coming toward us. Our objective is to remain stealthy for fear that Simms might hide or kill the children to prevent us from getting our hands on them, though I am not sure how well stealth is going to work with psychic children, and no doubt, a few psychic employees in the compound. We hope our shields will work, but there is no real way of knowing. This place has so much shielding in it already, anything could happen—or fail to happen—with our gifts.

  At the sound, I grab Julia’s arm and pull her into a recessed doorway. She yelps, startled. One thing I am beginning to understand about futurists, they need time and quiet focus to see the future. Julia doesn’t automatically know what will happen to her—or to any one of us. Luckily, she focused enough earlier to give us a clear picture.

  I clamp one hand over her mouth, the other gripping my sidearm. Once she stops trying to make noise, I release her mouth, grin, and put a finger to my lips. She nods. The footsteps run off in another direction, followed by shouting. Again, not one of our team members.

  I give Julia a lopsided smile. “You should’ve been able to predict that your big sister will not be boring.”

  “I knew some of this would happen, though I confess some of the details weren’t filled in until recently. It’s why I contacted you in the first place. Here you thought I would be something bad and I’m not. I’m the farthest person from bad that I’ve ever known. Well, at least until I met our sister, Hope.”

  Julia emits the kind of sigh usually reserved for cute cat pictures. “She’s so adorable and sweet…”

  I wink. “One big happy family.”

  We continue on until we find our target: a ventilation shaft that should bypass the remaining security. Soon, we are crawling through the narrow metal tunnel. So far, we remain undetected. I certainly don’t hear any alarms sounding over our presence. However, alarms sounding over the hell my teammates are raising is a different story.

  As we crawl through the grit and grime, Julia discusses with me again the future she has seen; in particular, what’s waiting for me at the end of this shaft. We go over the details of what she sees and doesn’t see and continue crawling in near darkness toward my destiny.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I peek through the slats of the ventilation duct cover.

  The room beyond looks like some kind of command center full of computer workstations and enormous server cabinets. As far as I can see on either side, there’s no one here. I know, of course, this is just an illusion. There is someone waiting for me in the room, someone hidden.

  To think that somewhere nearby are the GEPSI kids, held against their will, weaponized by Grant Simms, is enough to
make my blood boil. There’s lots of commotion going on beyond: shouts, gunshots, the crunch of bone. The boys are certainly raising hell. But, really, they are merely causing a distraction for my true purpose here: to isolate and kill Grant Simms.

  At the moment, he’s using powerful psychic shields generated by children to hide from even my acute hearing, but he can’t hide from the future Julia has seen. Julia tells me there’s a high probability that I will win the fight. There’s also a low probability that I might be killed in the next few minutes, too. To save the kids, it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

  According to Julia, Grant picked this location to hide in; it doubles as a panic room. Even he is unaware of the ventilation shaft. Unfortunately, according to Julia, there’s no way to slip in silently.

  So, I kick out the vent, which clatters to the floor beyond. No sense in being coy about it.

  According to Julia, he doesn’t pull the trigger immediately in most of her future scenarios. Most. Not all. I take in some air, and leap down, and feel the gun press against the back of my head. I wince, but no shot is fired.

  “Kylie Cain, the sewer rat,” says Simms. “Drop your weapon.”

  I toss the Walther to the floor.

  He steps forward and gives it a kick, sending it skittering under a workbench. He steps around me slowly, watching me like a hawk, knowing my skill and understanding that giving me the slightest opening will lead to his demise.

  Despite my earlier plea to her, Julia makes her appearance, sliding out through the ventilation shaft and dropping down beside me. She says it must be this way.

  “Why, look here, one half of the Cain quartet. Sort of sounds like a musical group, doesn’t it?”

  His attempt at humor is something new. Perhaps the ravings of a madman. Whatever it is, it’s a side of him I’ve never seen before. It’s a side John pointed out to me in detail for the first time when he and I sat together and talked on the plane ride here. Even as the mountain of evidence piled up, it was still hard to wrap my mind around the truth of the man who I spent so long looking up to as a father figure is really as bad as he is.

  Well, stupid me for doubting.

  “Julia, Julia,” he scolds. “Your disappearance from the Vatican has the world close to an international incident by now. I was right all along. Our dear Julia here is going to start Armageddon, but not by her own action. When her body turns up in North Korea, the planet will experience a slight uptick in global warming.” Simms chuckles. “Happy Belated Birthday, by the way.”

  Julia is as cool as they come. It shouldn’t surprise me. The first time I laid eyes on her was right after she’d slipped away from a Secret Service agent and smiled about it. I guess knowing the future has some advantages.

  “You do realize your plan is going to fail,” Julia says. “And seriously, what kind of moron are you, trying to start a nuclear war?”

  “Going to tell me my future, are you?” Simms rolls his eyes. “Well, you’re only human. You’re not perfect, so maybe you’re wrong. My plan is simple, I shall rise to power in the world that emerges from the ashes. Before anything great can be built, the old garbage must first be cleared away. I will have at my disposal the ultimate assassins. Not to mention an elite team of operatives. Sadly, you could have been part of all of this, Ky. Never realized just what a goody-goody you are. I thought I trained that out of you.”

  Truth was, he almost had, except he hadn’t counted on one thing: the power of family. It’s true, my pull toward Hope is undeniable, and now, I feel it for Julia as well.

  “Well, you win some, you lose some.” I shrug.

  “No truer words have been spoken. I hear the boys out there raising some hell.”

  “Hey, you trained the best,” I say.

  “They can’t win, and the kids are safe. This place is swarming with operatives. They are just, what, three?”

  “They have been guided by me,” says Julia.

  “And Hope,” I add.

  “Yes, she’s proving to be a bit problematic, jumping through space and time. That is, admittedly, a new wrinkle. No matter. We’re here now and I suppose we should get to the nasty business. I do have a world to destroy, you know.” He raises the pistol, aiming it at my face.

  Jesus, that look in his eye… he really has gone off the deep end.

  “I will miss you, Ky. You are one of my brightest and best—”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” says Julia, examining her nails. “Simms, you’re going to die in about five minutes, thirty seconds.”

  “I think you forget, I’m the one with the gun pointed at Kylie.”

  Julia shrugs and walks slowly to an empty chair beside the lab’s computer terminal. “I didn’t say anything about Kylie’s life or death. You are going to die in four minutes, forty-one seconds.”

  A vein pulses on Simms’ forehead.

  I decide to distract him with a question. “You want to tell me the truth about my parents now? I know you had something to do with my father’s death, but what did you do to my mother?”

  “Your father was weak,” he snaps, then nods toward Julia. “The only use he ever had was giving his genetic material to produce the three of you.”

  “The three of us?” I ask. “Hope is twelve. My father was dead for, what, nine years before she was born.”

  Simms chuckles. “He sired a lot of the children in this compound, posthumously, of course. It’s a wonder what DNA research has allowed us to do.”

  “You’re a sick son of a bitch,” I snarl.

  “Down to three-and-a-half minutes, Simms.” Julia folds her arms. “The only way you survive is if you turn yourself in right now.”

  “Be that as it may, I’m on the living end of this pistol and you both are on the dead end. We would not be here now if I hadn’t made you, Ayden, and Noah so good at your jobs. Regrettably, I’m going to have to terminate your contracts.”

  “Still going on about that?” I ask. “Didn’t you hear the futurist? You’re going to fail. And you’re going to die. Turn yourself in.”

  He sighs. “Don’t insult me. She’s bluffing, and you know it.”

  “What about my mother?” The thing is, if Julia turns out to be wrong and I’m going to die, then I at least want the whole truth before I do so.

  “Your mother is anything but weak,” he says. “You never knew that, of course. What you remember of her probably has you thinking backward on all of this. In reality, she possesses the greater and broader range of psychic powers. We have to keep her sedated most of the time so they don’t go out of control. Without medication, she’ll destroy everything around her and kill herself in the process. It’s because of her that you three sisters turned out the way that you did.”

  On some level, I suspected this, but having it confirmed by Grant… geez, my poor mother.

  “Oh, and I’ve saved the best news for last.”

  I don’t respond. I know I need to stall a little longer so that Ayden, Noah, or John can come in and double-tap him between his eyes before he can pull the trigger, but my temper has built to a point of rage I can no longer control. I am waiting for him to make the slightest shift, the slightest mistake that will give me a chance to turn the tables on him.

  “Through the magic of DNA research—and a special donation from someone very close to you—your mother was able to produce one more child, and this boy is my greatest creation yet.”

  The Child of Anarchy, I think.

  The instant he mentions my mother’s fourth child, I realize what Simms has done. He impregnated my mother with DNA from John—not the John that I know and love, but the one he altered with his torturous experiment into a touch-and-kill monster. My rage swings way out of control, leaving me at the point I don’t care if I catch a bullet for my trouble. I’m an instant away from exploding when a small voice chirps from behind him.

  “Hi, Grant,” says Hope, appearing behind him. Her sudden appearance freaks me out, too.

  As Simms flinches and t
urns toward her, I duck and spin. Enhanced reflexes allow me to deflect his arm off to the side before his finger can travel the two millimeters necessary to send a bullet into some console across the room. I snap-kick him in the wrist, launching the pistol over a bank of workstations. It hits the ground with a clatter and slides well out of reach. I spin away from him and whirl back to face him in a combat stance.

  “I told you that you are going to fail.” Julia laughs. “Oh, and she’s going to shoot you in the face, by the way. That’s going to hurt.”

  “Her?” Simms laughs, glancing toward where he’s kicked my Walther. He shifts to block me from going for it. “I taught her everything she knows about fighting.”

  I rush him. He sidesteps and turns away, but the heel of my left foot connects with his cheek and splits it open. I’ve drawn first blood. I intend to drain it all out of him a little at a time or all at once. It doesn’t matter to me. I spin into another kick, but he blocks it, catching my ankle and tossing my leg aside.

  “Lucky shot.” He smirks, wiping his cheek. “Not bad, but it’s the last solid one you’ll land.”

  “We’ll see,” I say.

  Unfortunately, Simms is right. We trade punches and kicks, circling each other like a pair of angry tigers for two minutes that feel like hours. I mostly avoid his counterattacks, but I’m going to have bruises, and possibly a cracked rib. Every time I try to move toward my Walther, he hits me harder, knocking me away. I get the feeling he’s only playing with me, but still, he’s way stronger than he looks. Good old genetic tinkering, I suppose. And, he’s remarkably quick for a man his age.

  I catch him with a front kick to the solar plexus that knocks him back over a desk, but he doesn’t even hesitate before springing again to his feet. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Hope’s disappeared again. Oh, shit. What’s happened? That wasn’t part of the plan.

  Simms comes at me, but I see the feint coming. I duck and weave in, going for a ridge hand strike to his throat that should put him down, but he’s too damn fast. He gets his forearm in the way, protecting his neck, then grabs two fistfuls of my shirt and throws me into the wall next to the vent. I bounce away from the impact and stagger straight into a roundhouse kick that catches me in the jaw, sending me sliding on my face. The room spins. It probably hurt a lot, but I don’t feel a damn thing due to adrenaline. Oh, I really hate his laugh. Fortunately, he’s such an arrogant prick, he keeps a few feet of distance between us.