Under Hidden Skies (Shadows Between Lies Book 3)

by Nicky Webber

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Fred said, looking from Maddy to Logan. ‘But the Doc insisted that we all get tested. Naturally, I didn’t divulge the paternity thing, so played along. It was an easier option.’

  Logan shifted uneasily in his seat, and Maddy looked down at her lap.

  Both Fred and Logan had discussed genetic combinations with the specialist at the hospital.

  Fred began explaining he had read some recent research suggesting that many people inherit slightly more genes from their father’s side than their mothers. While this goes against traditional thinking, they have proven it to be the case in most mammals and in early human trials embarked on last year.

  ‘Yeah, I understand our DNA comes from our ancestors, but we aren’t an exact copy of any one of them,’ said Logan. ‘It’s always a random mixture from a selection of family members. That’s why everyone is so unique.’

  Maddy started loading the dishwasher. ‘That explains how sometimes a completely random person in another country turns out to be a genetic match, and people from their own immediate family aren’t.’

  ‘Crazy. You may not inherit any DNA from a particular ancestor,’ said Fred. But at the back of his mind, a DNA test of both sons would absolutely confirm his paternity. Or not. He maintained silence over his motives. The other elephant in the room, which he also wanted to keep to himself, was his project discussions with Hawke. There was no need to involve Maddy or Logan—ever. Fred marveled at his ability to entertain criminal activity. He believed, given the right circumstances, everyone is capable of subversion and deceit and sometimes murder.

  ‘Even Sacha wants to be tested and willingly wishes to donate a kidney to Hawke if it’s a match,’ Logan said.

  ‘Unlikely,’ snorted Fred. ‘But then I guess I’m unlikely too.’

  ‘At this rate, we could end up with two people having only one kidney and Hawke getting a full set!’ laughed Logan, attempting to break the tension. ‘I think we’re going a bit overboard. Hawke’s best chance is a parent or sibling.’

  ‘Well then, we’ve got the bases covered,’ Fred said, passing the dirty dinner plates to his wife.

  The next morning, Maddy and Logan left to visit Hawke in the renal ward at the Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Boulevard. It was a warm day with a gentle off-shore breeze, but both barely spoke, absorbed in their own personal hell and harboring acute fear for Hawke. Fred remained at home and sat eating a late breakfast of bacon and eggs, his favorite, when his cell phone buzzed. It was a call from the hospital.

  ‘I’m afraid Logan Jones is not a DNA match for your son.’ the Dr. Lee paused, waiting for questions.

  Fred remained silent, his brow furrowed. Finally, he said. ‘Surely that’s not correct? Are you absolutely certain?’

  He felt as if someone had punched him out of left field, tasered by a reality check from medical science. Was this even possible?

  The medical specialist explained. ‘We confirmed you as Hawke’s father, but the genetic match isn’t perfect for the transplant.’

  ‘Are you telling me I’m Hawke’s paternal father?’ Fred repeated incredulously.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the doctor confirmed, a little perplexed.

  ‘But… how can you tell?’ Fred asked, a rush of blood electrifying his entire being.

  ‘It’s your DNA. I can tell you, Mr. Davis, with a 99.7 percent certainty that you are Hawke’s father. There’s no question.’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you still there, Mr. Davis?’ asked the doctor, having never experienced such an unusual reaction from a donor patient.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’ Fred spoke slowly and carefully. ‘If I’m Hawke’s father but not a match for organ donation, then who the hell is?’

  ‘That’s easy,’ said the specialist. ‘It’s his brother, Blake, your older son. He’s a perfect match which minimizes the risks of rejection and other complications.’

  The doctor’s words reverberated around Fred’s head. It was as if some stranger had placed the last piece of the puzzle in a complex and intricate image, and the entire picture suddenly emerged into sharp focus. It all seemed so obvious. How could he have missed this? How much of a fool had he been? He let out a tremendous sigh. He was, in fact, the father of both his sons!

  Dr. Lee filled in the silence on the phone line with the mechanics of the next steps. ‘Blake needs to come in for a consultation, and we will discuss the whole procedure. There are some ethical and medical risks he needs to realize before he can officially agree to organ donation.’

  Fred concurred and ended the phone call, gently placing the cell phone on the surface of the kitchen counter. In shock and disbelief, he paced the room. Finally, he slumped into one of the dining chairs, continuing to flay on the hook of Dr. Lee’s comments. It slowly dawned on him that if Logan was not a match, then the thirty years of purgatory they had all endured were for nothing. It was a game of roulette, and it seemed he had won! But at what price? He tried to repress the anger and frustration over all the emotional upheaval they had suffered by repeating to himself that he was the father of both his sons! He was the winner, after all!

  ‘What the hell,’ he said and swore out loud into the empty room.

  CHAPTER 29

  No Match

  Hawkes’s shared apartment seemed empty without him there. Bruno was also out of town on an investigation. He was likely to be gone for a few more weeks. The two sisters had enjoyed being alone and together for the first few days, but admitted last night they missed both men. Sacha aimlessly wandered around from the kitchen to the living room, collecting a couple of empty coffee mugs and placing them in the sink. She had walked this domestic circle several times, getting angrier. Sacha couldn’t wait any longer for Suzie to get out of bed, so knocked on her bedroom door. She stood listening to Suzie’s door a few moments, checking for any signs of life, before gently tapping with her knuckles, in the hope she would get a response.

  ‘Yup,’ Suzie called out, her voice still heavy with sleep.

  ‘Just had a call from Maddy, and I need to talk to you,’ explained Sacha.

  A few moments later, Suzie was sitting in the kitchen waiting for coffee, and Sacha was explaining the conversation she had had with Maddy only minutes earlier.

  ‘You won’t believe this, but it turns out, after all the genetic testing, that Fred is actually Hawke’s Dad,’ Sacha announced.

  ‘Whoa,’ laughed Suzie. ‘That’s a turn-up…’

  Sacha interrupted. ‘That’s the good news, I guess. The bad news is that the best possible organ match is his brother of course.’

  ‘Blake? Sure, that makes perfect sense,’ grinned Suzie. ‘Why are you looking so down on it? You okay?’

  ‘Maddy told me that Blake is refusing point-blank,’ Sacha said. ‘He’s not about to donate one of his kidneys to Hawke and suggests they keep him on dialysis until they find another perfect match.’

  Suzie frowned and hesitated, closing her mouth. Her lips formed a tight, hard-line. ‘Is that it?’ she finally asked.

  ‘Yup, pretty much. He seems to think he needs both for himself.’

  ‘Has anyone explained?’ Suzie ventured. ‘It’s just nuts. I can’t believe he's so selfish.’

  ‘Apparently, he listed a lot of future scenarios where he may need to donate one of his kidneys to future children, or if he got a kidney disease himself, blah blah,’ Sacha shrugged her shoulders and looked away from her sister’s astounded expression.

  ‘Wow. I’m just shocked,’ said Suzie.

  ‘Me too,’ Sacha said. ‘It’s hard to believe that he can be so self-absorbed and ruthless in a dire situation like this.’

  Suzie shook her head in disgust.

  ‘Oh, and there was one other thing,’ Sacha continued. ‘He didn’t want to risk wasting his kidney on someone likely to get cancer again.’

  Both sisters stood silently in the kitchen, speechless with horror.

  ‘What about Fred?’ Suzie anxiou
sly asked after a few minutes.

  ‘Evidently, he’s not a suitable match.’

  The sisters continued to discuss the quirks of genetic sequencing and how they needed to talk to Blake and put him firmly in the picture.

  ‘Does he realize that he’s the most likely candidate? Does he get Hawke could die with both kidneys so badly damaged?’ Suzie asked.

  ‘I’m not totally convinced. It’s just so odd and unexpected. Maddy is meeting with him today to talk it through. Let’s just sit tight and see what happens. God help us if she can’t talk some sense into him,’ Sacha said.

  It was back at the parents’ house, where tensions were running high. Logan had reverted to a calm coldness in talking to Maddy and Fred about his lost paternity.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Fred asked Logan. ‘You’ve seen how Hawke has taken it all in his stride. Shouldn’t we all take that as our cue in this situation?’

  ‘What a ridiculous waste of energy and time over all these years,’ Logan replied. ‘A total waste of emotion for us all.’

  Maddy tried to soften the mood and reminded them that Hawke had always thought of them both as his father. Surely that’s all that matters. All the children, including Hawke, were happy and well-adjusted. ‘Isn’t that all that counts?’

  ‘I just find this a special type of lunacy. The stress it caused us and then Fred. You must surely agree, Fred?’ asked Logan.

  ‘What did a famous mountaineer once say? Don’t look down,’ Fred said. ‘Down is the path where you’ve been, it’s well-trodden, and it’s in the past. We can’t go back and rework what’s already gone down.’

  Maddy looked at Fred, surprised by his philosophical response and the depth of his understanding, especially as he was the person who had to show patience and tolerance right up until yesterday when he got the paternity news.

  Logan looked from one friend’s face to the other. He could see by the look on their faces that they both felt empathy for him.

  ‘I guess you guys are right,’ he finally said. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by arguing or going over a lake of spilled milk.’

  Maddy hugged him and turned to Fred and smiled, hugging him too. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she said, looking from one man to the other before leaving the room.

  Fred reached out and held Logan, patting him on the shoulder. He pulled back and looked into his friend’s sad eyes. ‘We’ve got much more critical issues to solve Bud.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Logan with a faint glimmer of a smile.

  ‘Those sons-of-bitches next door!’ Fred said with loud enthusiasm.

  ‘Remember, we’re going to teach that prick a lesson,’ Logan said.

  Fred snorted. ‘I already have.’

  ‘What? When?’ Logan asked. ‘Does Maddy know?’

  ‘About 2.35 am,’ grinned Fred, knowing it would impress Logan. They were at their best when they hatched a plan to solve a problem.

  ‘You did it?’ Logan sounded incredulous.

  ‘Sure did,’ said Fred. ‘I wrote their initials on the bullet and left it in their mailbox. Come Monday morning they may just call the police so be ready with your story.’

  ‘What about your fingerprints?’ Logan asked anxiously.

  ‘No, I used rubber gloves and if you’re wondering, I’ve removed all evidence of anything associated with our house.’

  Logan raised his eyebrows and briefly grinned at his friend.

  In the past, thought Fred, he had considered Hawke’s criminal gene must have come from Logan. As soon as he thought it, he chuckled at himself, suddenly realizing any criminal gene had to be from direct Davis family descent.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Logan asked, his dark mood lifting.

  ‘Nothing much.’ Fred grinned. ‘Just you, thinking all this time, you could beat me in the father stakes, huh!’

  Logan leaned forward and playfully smacked Fred across the side of his head, barely touching him.

  ‘Just wait until there’s a bullet in your mailbox with your initials on it!’ Fred laughed.

  ‘Shh. Keep it down, Bud. We don’t want Maddy to find out.’

  ‘We better brace ourselves for a hard knock on the front door tomorrow.’

  ‘No. They’re cowards,’ Logan said.

  ‘Besides,’ Fred responded, ‘no one saw me put it in their mailbox.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  CHAPTER 30

  Test Run

  Hawke continued going three times a week to the hospital for dialysis while they decided about the kidney donor. He found it distressing that an electronic piece of machinery was the only thing keeping him alive.

  He tolerated nightmares, worrying about the time they took to confirm a donor. In his wildest fantasies, he had never thought that actual life would play a hand that was so agonizing, so loaded with risk. The shock of finding himself debilitated by this disease made him more determined to go ahead with the project, with or without Fred’s involvement.

  His parents agreed not to tell him that Blake refused to offer his kidney, believing this would cause unnecessary upset for Hawke now that his health was on the line. The following day Maddy called Blake’s wife, Kyra, arranged to meet. Maddy assured her son’s new wife that all she wanted was to share a coffee and some delicious chocolate cake at the local café and maybe do a bit of shoe shopping. Kyra laughed with delight. She always enjoyed her mother-in-law’s company.

  The two women sat across from one another at a small round table at Café Paris, a small local eatery with the Eiffel Tower sandblasted on the large window opening on the narrow busy city street.

  Maddy pressed her cake fork through the luxurious chocolate icing and looked down before saying. ‘I asked you here on false pretenses,’ she said. ‘I really need your help, Kyra, and didn’t want you to discuss anything with Blake until we talked things through.’

  Kyra flicked her sandy blonde hair behind her left ear and leaned forward slightly, with a look of confusion on her face.

  ‘Please tell me we are still going to try on some of those gorgeous Italian shoes.’ she grinned. ‘That’s the key reason I’m here!’

  Maddy looked up and smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said as she shoveled the first forkful of delicious cake into her mouth. ‘We’ve got priorities, darling.’ They both giggled like two schoolgirls. The initial unease Kyra sensed from Maddy was placated by the older woman’s reassurances.

  They sipped their hot coffee in silence before Maddy tackled Kyra about Blake’s attitude towards organ donation. At first, both women discussed the issues with tact and diplomacy, carefully avoiding the risk of cracking the eggs as they warily tip-toed on empty eggshells with one another.

  By the time they had finished their respective slices of cake and re-ordered a second coffee, they had achieved an amicable understanding. Kyra fully understood and accepted she had a duty to talk to Blake and encourage him to support his brother.

  ‘Kyra, I fully appreciate where Blake’s coming from. His objections are reasonable,’ Maddy said. ‘If he raises them again in discussion with you, please reassure him that if anything went wrong with him, both myself, and his father would instantly offer him one of our kidneys.’

  Kyra nodded in agreement.

  ‘You both must know too, that if the shoe were on the other foot, Hawke wouldn’t hesitate to offer any help he could to his older brother.’

  While Maddy was grooming Kyra to reiterate the kidney donor issue with Blake, Fred and Hawke were running a closed-loop trial on the test software for their project back at home. Strangely, with Hawke getting ill, it had provided just the right impetus for Fred to take things to the next level. Instead of worrying himself sick about his son, he buried himself in work, crafting an elegant piece of programming code to be tested in-house while Maddy and Logan were both out of the way.

  Fred had set up the project test-run across four of his home computers. The two men sat in Fred’s office, a converted bedroom where two walls lined with reference book
s and thick folders of documents. The one double window in the room had the blinds pulled down so that no daylight entered the room. This was not just for their clandestine operation but had always been the way Fred liked to work. Logan had often joked about Fred’s need for a man-cave to shut out all other stimuli when he was passionately working on infinite lines of programming code.

  There were several keyboards scattered across a substantial L-shaped timber desk with three large computer screens suspended in various positions above the surface of the desk. A small laptop, crammed on the outer edge of this computer arrangement, lay open, surrounded by pages of notes, littered with penciled code scratchings and arrows, scrawling curves and boxes of object orientated diagrams.

  During the previous fortnight, Fred spent his spare time crawling over CashGuard’s client database and copying customer information. He then wrote a simple string of code to change the customer details so that it was unrecognizable from the original data. This would be their test database.

  Fred explained to Hawke that with millions of lines of customer data taken from other independent banks, he could replicate operational transaction processing. They could see the action on screen as they activated a dummy-run of the project software. This would confirm if the code were delivering the partial credits into their Day Care head office business account.

  ‘Let’s call it Panda Bear Holdings,’ said Hawke.

  ‘Sure, you loved that Panda you had as a kid. Anyway, this test-run will provide proof of concept,’ Fred said. ‘If it works, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, then I can easily upgrade it to a fully functional program.’

  ‘So, the next step is positioning the project on the client’s SQL server inside the donor business,’ grinned Hawke.

  ‘Hilarious,’ smiled Fred. ‘But this is serious criminal activity.’ He tapped on the keyboard, and all the screens lit up with pages and pages of code, flickering at high speed in front of them.

  After about ten minutes, Fred pointed out the screen on their hard-left where a full-screen depicting three fast-moving columns was showing the partial sums from the mocked-up client database.