The Warning

by Michelle E Lowe

  “How did you find that out?”

  Christos gave him a look as if he’d asked a stupid question. “I’ve lived in that damn lab my entire life, Mr. Crowe. I think I would notice something odd taking place. I found the photographs in one of my father’s computer files one night when I first suspected he was up to something.”

  It was like a sideshow circus with freaks and fortune tellers. A thirty-one-year-old cloned boy and a ghost, telling him an impossible story. “Why did you want to stop the plan?”

  “It wouldn’t have affected me in the least to see this country overrun by my kind. Which would have happened,” he added quickly. “I was cloned from Linden and I’m like him in every genetic way. But I don’t share his soul. He craved endless power, and men who crave such power and are willing to kill for it always fail. The proof is in your history books. I didn’t want my father to have that kind of power. All he would’ve accomplished was the death of millions. No one should suffer for someone else’s greed.”

  Nikolai couldn’t agree more. Those who wanted too much power only ended up destroying themselves in the end. They became nothing more than black marks in history, never the superior god-like idols they fantasized themselves to be.

  “To your question about Jade’s survival,” Christos went on. “I sought help from my father’s old lab partner, Doctor Hagley.”

  “Hagley?” He remembered the name from a two-month-old news story. “Isn’t he the cloning specialist who killed himself?”

  “He didn’t kill himself. He faked his own death and left the country.”

  “Why?”

  “To help us,” Jade explained. “He didn’t want to take the chance of being linked to anything Christos and I had planned. I think he’d been waiting to fake his own death for years. He already had a clone of himself stored away. I saw it myself. All we did was give him the push he needed to go through with it.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, waving his hand. “When did you see it? Did you go to him? Did he make a clone of you?”

  “Yes.”

  The surprises came with less and less potency. Soon they’ll tell him that Bigfoot was in the next car, reading The New York Times and he would hardly raise an eyebrow.

  “I’ve kept in contact with Hagley off and on throughout the years,” the boy explained. “Father never knew, but I felt I had the right to speak to him. After all, Hagley was my father as well. Only he was more open and honest. I enjoyed my chats with him. Tomorrow, I’m leaving to stay with him.”

  “After I told Christos about the plan to set up my own murder,” Jade cut in, “he came up with his own idea. I was to go to Hagley and have him make a clone of me, a brain dead clone, nothing more than a warm body. We had less than two weeks to grow this clone while Claudia tried finding a surgeon to make Crawford look like you. Two weeks wasn’t long enough for the clone to match my age, even with heavy injections of ECR. It came out looking like a teenage version of me.”

  “If the body I found in the park was the clone,” Nikolai said, “what about the tattoo around its wrist?”

  “I tattooed it on,” she admitted. “I was a tattoo artist, remember?”

  “And Crawford?”

  “Crawford came into my place, thinking everything was going as planned. As I struggled with him, Keiko came up behind me with a fake knife and punctured a blood bag strapped to my back. When Crawford ran to the bathroom, we brought the clone out. Keiko had already stabbed it with a real knife to fully kill it.” She emphasized the word to remind him that the clone had been insentient. Killing it had been nothing more than pulling the plug on a coma patient. “Crawford took that body to my car, where he met with Zimmerman and McLean to drop it off at the park.”

  “That was a horrible moment for me,” Nikolai said. “I thought you were dead. Shit, I believed you were up until twenty minutes ago.”

  “I know,” she said solemnly. “And I’m sorry for that, but…”

  “You should’ve let me in on it. I could’ve done without the nightmare of thinking you were dead. I would’ve done anything. What did you mean when you said keeping me in the dark would get me to fight more to stay alive?”

  She opened her mouth to speak but another voice spoke.

  “She means you wouldn’t be so reliant on others looking out for you when we could no longer protect you.”

  Nikolai craned his neck over to the door.

  Chapter 34

  The source of his anger surprised Jade. He wasn’t upset about being set up for a murder he didn’t commit or for not having been told about it, or even the hell he’d gone through because of it. His anger came from the pain he’d endured believing she was dead. She sensed that he considered her the love of his life. She was heartened by it, but the feeling quickly dissolved, leaving her feeling colder when the thought of losing him forever came to mind.

  “Hello, my friend,” Ebenezer said. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Hey, Eb,” Nikolai said with a grin. “I wondered when you’d show up. You were in on it too, huh? What was your purpose?”

  “To protect you, of course,” Eb said, standing by the door as if guarding it. “And to guide you to the clues Jade left for you.”

  “Starting with the voodoo doll I left on Jean’s desk,” she said. “I needed you to know I’d been there to see her. Marko put a virus in Jean’s computer to give you a reason to go by her place. If you didn’t figure it out on your own, Ebenezer would’ve hinted around until you’d gotten it.”

  “Let me guess,” Nikolai said to Eb, “it was you who broke into my car this morning and put the toy train inside.”

  Ebenezer smiled. “I was the only one who could without triggering the alarm.”

  “I’ve studied the Alphas for some years now,” Christos admitted.

  “Studied them?” Nikolai said.

  “Yes. You get bored when you’re locked away in a laboratory.”

  “No video games for you, huh?” Nikolai jested.

  “I became friends with Seven—Ebenezer, as you call him. Father never noticed the bond, nor would he have cared if he had. Ebenezer was different from the other Alphas in small ways. He was smarter and more …”

  He stopped and glanced over to the Replica, who said, “Human.”

  “Human,” Christos repeated. “More so than Father.” He smiled a bit, amused by his little joke.

  “How did he end up protecting me?”

  “In the beginning, no one but the Alphas were going to be involved,” Christos explained. “My plan was to simply eliminate the hundreds of unfinished Gammas and be done with it.”

  “Why didn’t you just do that, then?”

  “What if we failed?” Ebenezer posed. “What if we’d gone against Linden with the Betas present? It was a very real possibility that they would have destroyed us. If that had happened, there would be no one to stop the plan.”

  “I’d found a way of getting the Alphas out of the lab by convincing my father to let them escape as a test for Twenty.”

  “Yeah,” Nikolai said grimly. “Let’s not bring him up.”

  “Once they escaped, it granted the Alphas time to come up with a plan to return to the lab while the Betas were looking for them. But there were also more people to bring down.” He looked over to Jade. “I decided to bring in someone from the outside who could expose the people involved. Jade was that person.”

  She turned to Nikolai, who gave her a warm smile. When he’d squeezed her knee earlier, her heart had skipped a beat. Her feelings for him burned like white fire.

  “I’ve known about Jade since she protested for the rights of same-sex marriage years ago,” Christos went on. “I felt she was our best bet.” He smiled fondly at her again. “And she was. It took some persuasion, but after she came onboard, things began to click.” He returned his focus to Nikolai. “When she told me about the plan to fake her death, and that you were going to be framed for her murder, she insisted I protect you. Guess who voluntee
red for the job.”

  Nikolai shifted his eyes to Ebenezer, his expression soured. “Since you were in on the whole thing, maybe you didn’t have to be so rough.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” Ebenezer said regretfully. “I was only acting the part.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe it’s time you told me why you couldn’t save me at the park before I was taken to the police station.”

  “We had to let the cops believe setting you up was going as planned,” Ebenezer said, “at least until the body was removed from the scene.”

  “It was very important for them to remove the body and get it to the morgue before anyone noticed the blood under the nails,” Christos said. “If Ebenezer had acted then, it would have delayed the body’s transportation, running the risk of the wrong person finding the evidence.”

  Nikolai gave everyone a quick glance. “Okay, who else was a part of this? Detective Knox? Marko?”

  “No,” Jade replied. “Knox had no idea, but he played a very important role. I knew my father would assign him to find you, so I left him a few clues that might’ve helped him find the real people responsible.”

  “What other clues?”

  “The love letter, for one. I handwrote a letter to you for Knox to find. I wanted him to realize I didn’t break up with you out of anger or that I didn’t love you anymore. Maybe it would’ve forced him to look deeper into another reason why I left you. It was a long shot, but the scratches I left on Crawford’s face were the real key. It wasn’t easy getting the little bastard’s skin out of my nails and under the nails of the dead clone in the short time Keiko and I had. Douglas was only supposed to get my purse from the bedroom, but we got bonus time when he got sick. Once done, I ran into the hallway closet and stayed until everyone had left. I then unlocked the window and snuck out the way Keiko did.”

  “What would’ve happened if Knox hadn’t noticed the scratch marks or seen me in person?”

  “I hadn’t expected Knox to see the scratches the way he did; but either way, he’d find out when Judith told him.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s a mortician. She helped Marko pinch the bodies from a morgue.”

  “What?” Nikolai said. “How did you get someone like her to help?”

  “She’s part of the Organization,” Jade explained. “She has been for years. She and Marko used to work together in their younger days. He contacted her and told her everything. The coroner who examined the clone’s body made sure no one found the blood under its fingernails.”

  “If Marko was in the loop, why did his people swear up and down that I’d killed you? I almost got my head blown off.”

  “Marko was the only one other than Judith who knew I wasn’t really dead. Both Marko and Kip were my friends, but I asked Marko to keep it a secret. I didn’t want more people than necessary to know that I was really alive.”

  “I’m not necessary,” he pointed out. “You could’ve left me in the dark for the rest of my life if you’d wanted to.”

  She blushed and shied away to the window. “Yes, I could have.”

  Silence fell in the room when she said nothing else. Ebenezer cleared his throat, drawing their attention. “And Jade’s step-brother helped, too.”

  “Really?” Nikolai said, turning back to her. “What did he do?”

  “He told Knox a phony story at the hospital about Dad saving my life when I was a kid. It made Dad look like the hero and Claudia a shrew who wanted to use the incident for political gain. It helped steer Knox in the right direction.”

  “That must’ve been hard for Aaron to do,” Nikolai said. “Turning his own mother in like that.”

  “It was and I was afraid he wouldn’t do it. He’d called Dad that night, wanting to tell him how I’d confronted Claudia about the plan and let him deal with her instead. But Dad didn’t want to speak to him. It hurt him to go to Knox, but she’d nearly destroyed his life with that scandal. He never thought she’d kill herself over it, though. Nether did I.”

  “Why didn’t you just send Marko to get the MIR card instead of going through the trouble to leave clues for me to find it?”

  “I wanted you to find it to lead you to Marko. You’d be safe with him.”

  “I didn’t stay safe for long,” he muttered.

  “That was your own damn fault,” she said with a smile. “You had to be the genius to go looking for that reporter and then walk into a trap at your sister’s house.”

  “I got the word out, didn’t I?” he defended. “Wasn’t that the idea?”

  “I’m sorry for leaving you the way I did,” Ebenezer broke in. “I was supposed to stay at your side until you reached Marko. But it got too dangerous.”

  “Yes,” Christos agreed. “The Alphas were getting slaughtered faster than I expected. If he hadn’t left to find the others when he did, the plan to take out Father’s laboratory would have never worked.”

  “I hated leaving when you still needed my protection. If I’d known Twenty was after you, I wouldn’t have abandoned you.”

  Nikolai waved a hand at him. “All in the past.”

  “That’s right,” Jade said softly. “It’s in the past, and everything worked out the way it should have.” She bowed her head sadly. “No, not everything. Keiko’s death wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “She died?” Nikolai said. “What happened?”

  She raised her head. “Like I said, she was very loyal to my father. She goaded Knox into gunning her down.” Her eyes became glossy with tears. “I wish I’d known what she was going to do, I could’ve talked some sense into her. Claudia didn’t deserve to take such an easy way out, but Keiko … she just didn’t deserve to die.”

  Nikolai leaned over and wrapped his arms around her as she cried.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away from him. “It’s just that I feel like I’ve lost my entire family. My mother, my father, even Keiko. I won’t even be able to see or contact Aaron anymore.”

  Nikolai placed his hand on her face. “It’s all right. Guys, could you give us a minute …” he said as he turned to the Replicas, but they were already gone.

  “Listen to me,” Jade said, taking his hands. “I’m leaving the country tonight, under a new name. I’ll never come back and no one will ever see me again. You were right, I could’ve kept my secret from you. It was a risk, but I couldn’t leave without talking to you and to ask if you would …” She stopped and stared at him, but nothing came out.

  “Ask if I would what?” he prodded.

  In a voice just above a whisper, she said, “If you’d come with me.”

  Nikolai stared intently at her before sitting back.

  “Nikolai?” she said softly.

  He rubbed his temple.

  “Say something before I hit you.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I mean, look at this from my perspective. This morning, I threw what I thought were your ashes into the pond. Now, all of a sudden, you’re asking me to leave with someone I thought was dead. It’s a real mindfuck.”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said, slightly amused. “And I’m sorry for the shit you went through. I love you and I want you to …”

  “Is this about the money?” he abruptly cut in.

  His question took her aback. “What?”

  “The money,” he said. “The four million dollars I have. Is that why you wanted me here?”

  Her pale face glowed with anger and her large eyes narrowed to slits. He swallowed nervously at the sight of her expression.

  “You prick! You arrogant prick! You want me to look at things from your perspective? Look at it from mine. Do you realize what I’ve given up to do what I’ve done? I had a good life in San Francisco, and I left everything to come back and rat out my father. I’ve left friends behind. They believe I’m dead. I cry at the thought of the grief I’ve put everyone through. My father will spend the rest of his life thinking his only child is dead. Can you imagine the agony a parent goes through whe
n they lose a child?” She took a breath. “I’ve sacrificed a lot. Maybe not my life, but I gave up nearly everything I love. That’s why I brought you here. I didn’t want to give you up, too. Out of everything I’ve lost, you’re the one thing I wanted to keep the most!”

  “Jade, I …”

  “How can you think so poorly of me? You bastard,” she shouted. “After everything we’ve shared, this is what you think of me? Some shallow gold digger? Well, fuck you!”

  Nikolai stood to catch her before she stormed out, but it was too late. She ran out down the aisle, sobbing.

  “Jade, I’m sorry. Please don’t leave,” he called, tripping over the toy train still lying in the aisle and falling against the window. “Damn it!” he cursed as he rose and raced after her. He had almost caught up to her when Ebenezer emerged from one of the other private cars.

  “Nikolai, you need to see this.”

  “Not now,” he said, trying to get by. “I have to—”

  “It’s the detective,” Ebenezer interrupted.

  He went still. “The detective?”

  Ebenezer led him into the car and drew the curtains back a crack.

  “Shit,” he said when he saw who stood on the platform. “It’s Knox.”

  “He must have followed you. He’s a smart man.”

  “Yeah. He’s very smart. I’ll go talk to him. You find Jade and keep her here. I said something stupid and it’s gonna take some major sweet-talking to undo it.”

  “But you always say stupid things.”

  “Funny.”

  He left the car, heading for the nearest exit. Taking a breath, he reminded himself that Knox wasn’t looking for him anymore. He opened the door and stepped onto the platform. “Detective Knox.”

  Knox turned on his heel. “That’s Chief Knox now. I’ve been promoted.”

  “Congratulations. How’s the arm?”

  Knox glanced at his arm cradled in a sling. “Fine. At least it’s not summer. There’s nothing worse than wearing an itchy cast in the heat.”

  “Can’t imagine,” he said mildly. “Still tracking me down?”