She stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of his desk, causing his head to swivel like he was watching a tennis match.
“I am my own person, Dad. I have a right to live my life how I intend to live it. By the same token, I have as much a right to decide how I’m going to die as well. I’ve had my grief, and while it may come as a shock to you right now, I carefully considered what happened with Mom and I think at some level she knew something was wrong. She made her decision to do as much for me as she could before she died. You always said that she was with me morning, noon and night and now I understand why. I don’t have children, and I’m thankful for that. However, I want to help those who can’t help themselves and if that means working my cases until I don’t wake up one morning, then that’s how it’s going to happen. I’m not going to run from one doctor’s office to the next, one lab to the next, with so much blood taken that I can’t even get out of bed. That’s not a life I want to live and I won’t go down that path. You told me that Mom never was seriously bedridden, right?” She stopped her pacing to stare at him.
He had so many emotions going through him… could she be right? Could Merideth have known? Why wouldn’t she have told him? “That’s right.”
Bethany Anne reached down to his desk and picked up a rock paperweight she had given him on her sixteenth birthday. She told him then that it represented the rock he was in her life.
“So I might as well continue working until the day God takes me home. If I can help one more person, it beats waiting on Death.” She put the rock down and took a seat.
“How do you know that everything has been tried? I know that we could have found something to help Mom if she would have just confided in me. I wasn’t the man your mother needed, but I won’t let you go.” Lance’s eyes were hooded by memories and pain.
He was feeling the pain of the past, she had seen him do this from time to time. “Dad, you’ve never let me go, you raised a hell of a woman, one I am proud to be. You allowed me the opportunity to become who I am. Whether it was for ninety years, or just twenty-nine, I’m proud of my life. There are many who make it to seventy and can’t say that much. I can. I’m sorry that I waited this long to tell you. I couldn’t face hurting you, I didn’t want to see the pain in your eyes, to bring you the pain that I see in your heart right now. I’m sorry, I’m not proud of how weak I’ve acted in this. I wanted my life my way and if I didn’t have to talk to you right now, I’d just keep on until close to the end.”
She leaned back in the chair. She said her piece the best she could. No parent should go through the death of a child, and she had to be the one to tell him. If she could have run away from this, the temptation might have been too much.
She spied the orders, still sitting on his desk. She wanted to know what they meant, and how they affected her. Like she thought before, she had a hard stop and time was wasting. Maybe this could get her dad to come up for air.
“What are your orders, General?”
Lance looked up and followed Bethany Anne’s eyes to the forgotten orders she had handed him.
Orders? he thought. His orders were for her to go see more doctors. His orders were for her to not accept this result. His orders were to, well, to live.
And, to a point, Lance realized she was living. She hadn’t allowed this death sentence to stop her from doing that. She was living what time she had left her way, on her terms. Just like Meredith had. Meredith hadn’t lost faith in him, Meredith had total faith that he would carry on like the soldier she had known him to be.
A tear formed in his eye. His wife had total faith in him and spent every minute she had been able to with their daughter. She was the rock that his family had been built on, not him. Now, his daughter was the rock and he was just figuring this out. Why was it that we never saw the obvious?
The old man’s voice came back to his thoughts. “We are the ones who protect the protectors, we are the ones who nightmares fear.” Tom’s comment that maybe they were doing scientific experiments on those who were going to die soon came to mind as well.
They all knew it. Carl, the spook in Washington, and the old man. They all knew that Bethany Anne was the person being interviewed. Frank had tried to tell him that the family worked for the protection of people. Carl had told him that the operative would officially die in the records. Just like Bethany Anne was certainly going to die in just a few months.
Finally, the man had told him that his family wasn’t created like a normal family. That they used those in the military and others. They came calling for someone very special, unique. They had come requesting Bethany Anne. And they wouldn’t have done that if they thought she was just going to die in a few months. They knew how to fix this blood issue, but they weren’t saying so. He felt a little hope. But how to reconcile that he would never know what happened?
He tried to gather his thoughts about everything that had gone on that day. His intuition guided his decision. He didn’t know all the answers, but he did believe one truth, Bethany Anne’s best chances were with her orders.
He might not ever try to find out about the family, but if Bethany Anne disappeared tomorrow night in that vault, he sure as hell would continue to search for his family. If that pissed off Carl’s boss, well then he could just come talk to him about it. It’s not like he would be hiding anywhere.
Carl nodded to the soldier on guard duty outside of the plane and stepped up into the aircraft. They had connected power so that the engines didn’t have to run. He went ahead and hit the button to close the door after letting the guard know to be careful when it came up.
He wasn’t really sure how Michael had gotten to the base. He never felt him during the trip, and he wasn’t aware of him getting on the plane ahead of him. While he hadn’t gone back into the rear bedroom to see if anyone was in there, he was pretty sure that the pilot would have mentioned something about it when he got on the plane.
If Michael needed Carl to open the door for him, he would certainly know about it.
Carl went over to the bar and poured a small amount of Drambuie into a glass. He didn’t like it on the rocks, it just watered down the liquor. Carl had never actually been drunk, but he did enjoy a small amount after an operation and right now he was wound up tight enough to feel like he had been on an operation.
He sat back in one of the luxuriously upholstered seats. There were only six seats in this plane, plus the bedroom. You could sleep in any of them, they all laid back, and there was a small kitchenette and bathroom up front. They were good for a few days of living on the plane.
Michael typically didn’t interact much with anyone when he was awake. When Bill was working, you could toss a coin sometimes to figure out if he would talk with the humans around him. Carl had studied him for a while and realized that if it was a new group, he probably would. Then, if they worked with that group for the next few years he would again. It was only after about five to seven years that he would stop fraternizing with them.
In Carl’s fifteen years with the group, Bill had looked in his mid-thirties. He died looking the same age.
Carl had talked with Michael about what he saw on the videos. Michael had explained that Bill should have remembered the stories about how the three agents had died in Japan so many years ago.
Bill wasn’t one of Michael’s immediate sons, he was a first generation grandchild. He was still incredibly powerful. He lasted a long time during the transformation as Carl understood it, and somehow persevering during the transformation affected their strength.
Bill was a bit of a ball-buster, but he had been fun at times, too.
Carl wasn’t a complete nerd. He enjoyed watching most sports and an occasional MMA fight. He loved Indian food and the spices would drive Bill’s hypersensitive nose up the wall.
He wouldn’t do it too often, just enough to ‘poke the lion’ and make life interesting around Bill.
He made sure never to call him Billy Bob or anything like that exc
ept while he was on a mission and he couldn’t immediately retaliate. Bill had been an easygoing vampire, all things considered, and if Carl didn’t piss him off later, he would just let it go.
Carl was going to miss him.
He was getting to the bottom of his drink.
He wasn’t sure when Michael would get back, or if he would come on board. Carl had realized early on that sunlight didn’t affect Michael like it did Bill. That alone showed Carl how different they were.
There were a couple of times that Carl was allowed to watch them spar in the basement.
If he could have seen the fight, he was sure it would have been spectacular. But he heard and felt it more than seeing it. Michael would come down dressed in his black ghi, Bill in his yellow ghi. After some discussion, Michael would show Bill how to attack or block a move, and then let Bill throw him for practice. All of this was at a natural human pace. Then they would get serious.
It just looked like a bunch of fast movements until you heard a huge slam as Bill’s body hit the mats. Michael would explain what he had just done to Bill and let Bill try it at human speed. Then they would fight until Bill was on his back again.
Carl thought that Bill fighting Michael was about on par with the couple of times that Carl tried to take on Bill. Which was to say, impossible.
For a human who wasn’t special ops, Carl was very good at fighting and with weapons. Well, he was good with guns. He totally sucked at most martial weapons. While he understood and was able to handle hand-to-hand combat for the most part, he just didn’t like edged weapons.
He studied them. Often as the eyes-and-ears, he had to be able to describe and name all sorts of weapons whether they shot projectiles or had been crafted hundreds of years ago.
Considering some of the jobs they had worked on, Carl was happy to be safely out of the danger zone.
His mind mellowed and relaxed. It had been a very tense few days since Bill had died and Michael had been awakened. This was the first time he wasn’t focused on getting through the interview without scores of people dying and a price on his own head.
He didn’t think that the military would only blame Michael for everyone’s death. Somehow Carl thought ‘aiding and abetting’ would be attached to his name and he would go down as well.
Ride the tiger and sometimes it will turn and bite you.
They handled some incredibly important ops, not just for the nation, but occasionally the world, and they were as black as you could get. There was never any proof anywhere that any of it happened. If there had been, he wouldn’t be doing his job very well.
Carl snorted. That was something. If he did his job perfectly, there would never be any proof that he did his job at all.
He wasn’t the best hacker in the world, but with the equipment and contacts the family had, he was certainly in the top one hundred. Probably top twenty. Half of those others in the top twenty belonged to major countries either in their spy or military services, six worked for corporations and one worked for the American Council of Weres. Of the other three there were two who were in the black market and one who was in Michael’s family, over in Asia somewhere.
So, how did someone know where Bill and I were going to hit, anyway? Carl put down the glass, now empty, pulled out his laptop and propped up the laptop tray. This aircraft had its own connection to the Internet which randomly made requests to Netflix and had a couple of background applications running fake research requests. Underneath all of this traffic were the real requests. Carl got busy tracking down information on their enemy.
All of this was being done inside the video communication in the network traffic. Carl didn’t believe for a second that the military wouldn’t intercept and try to sniff any and all packets to see what was going on with their communications. They were sitting on a government base. If Carl was the other guy, he sure as hell would be stealing all the info he possibly could.
You know one of the best ways to annoy those who try to decrypt your data? Provide a data line with high-level encryption which you want to be decrypted after a significant effort and then have the data inside that data stream be complete gibberish. The inside data stream will look like another encrypted communication. The opposing team will focus on the obvious stream and if your video packets look and work well, they won’t continue to make the effort to see if you are sneaking anything else in.
All this protection support for $9.99 a month, thank you Netflix.
That attitude was what got Bill’s attention fifteen years ago and it was a good attitude to have today.
Carl couldn’t bring Bill back, and he most likely couldn’t hurt whoever took him down.
But if he could find them, he knew Michael would like a word with them.
8
Washington D.C.
Frank worked in the basement deep under an older building in Washington, D.C. He was near a couple of underground pathways which were pretty useful when he needed to meet with vampires who couldn’t be in the sun.
His arthritis would act up during the winter; it got pretty cold down here.
He was too damn old for this and he knew it. It was time to bring in someone else to take control.
He could and did tell himself that he stayed out of patriotism, but he really couldn’t lie to himself. He enjoyed the game too much.
When he was tapped to take over from his predecessor, Frank knew a few people in and around the city. He had been on the staff as naval liaison during the war.
Young, but not dumb, and with his family connections, he was well known enough in the right circles.
He was approached during the middle of the war and recruited into this section. Having been explained that what they did was top secret, Frank couldn’t wait to get into the action.
He often wondered if he would have been more hesitant if the war wasn’t going on at the time.
He wanted to be in the action and didn’t understand how helping his Navy boss at the time was helping take care of the Nazis.
By the time he understood he wouldn’t be ‘on the front line,’ he was too deep to back out without needing part of his brain yanked out of his head.
There were secrets that the military and government kept from their people for good reason. It allowed them to sleep at night. It was the responsibility of the few who knew the nightmares to shoulder the burden for the rest of the nation.
Many felt that the President had it the worst of all. A few who knew of the secrets would occasionally argue amongst themselves over a brandy and cigar when they were alone together.
Everyone had witnessed how those who took the presidency went into the job looking young, only to have aged way beyond their years by the time they stepped down.
It aged a person. The weight and shouldering of responsibility usually did.
Frank would normally have left his position a couple of decades back had Michael not given him a small rejuvenation. He never understood how it happened, exactly. It was back in the 1990s and they had a pretty nasty underground war going on in South America that was backed by one of the forsaken families. Michael had come to visit him one night when he was working late, trying to pull information from the government’s assets down in Brazil.
They had a good talk about what he wanted to do, and what kind of person he believed he needed to find in order to pass the baton.
He remembered admitting that he wasn’t happy having to give up his post. He liked doing what he was doing. He might not have ever been on the front line, but like Carl, he understood that he wasn’t the right person for the front line. For one thing, he wasn’t dead yet.
Not that the vampires were actually dead, they were humans who had been transformed into something... else.
When he had just started with the group, he hadn’t listened to his mentor and had tried to find out more about the families. Fortunately, his mentor was watching for him to do this and stopped it before any of the requests had started to filter out through the security
net.
He had come in one morning, only to see his mentor waiting for him with a handful of innocuous looking questions that Frank had so carefully worded to not raise any suspicions. His stomach dropped out of his body when he realized the notes were his.
He had passed a test, somehow, with those questions. He’d been hired to take over the role, and he had to be smart. His office only had one top secret level dispatch line. He hadn’t known at the time that it went straight to his boss who would then either approve its release, or hold it.
He had held on to all of Frank’s requests for information for a week to collect them. When Frank hadn’t requested any more info for two days, he came into the office and had the ‘talk’ with him.
It seemed that his boss had done something similar, and his boss’ mentor had been prepared like Frank’s boss had been prepared for Frank to do the same thing. When the time was right, he would do the same for his protégé. If his protégé didn’t even try this, they weren’t the right person for the job. They would wake up in a hospital with a mild form of amnesia. They would probably only forget two or three months.
His boss/mentor shared some of what he knew, after he was able to convince Frank that to have released the cables could have potentially dire consequences not only for himself, but the agency and the military, and would have given the enemy a huge boost.
Should enough people find out what was going on, then certainly Michael’s family would eventually all be found and killed. With their ethics, they wouldn’t be able to grow their family faster than they could be destroyed, for sure. The enemy did not subscribe to the same ethics as Michael did. They could be hurt, certainly. However, they didn’t care if a person wanted to become a vampire. Their family could grow so much faster, when in need, without the worry over moral issues.
For the enemy, growth was always a balance between a need for new members and the potential that a new member would eventually challenge them for supremacy. In their families, it was always survival of the fittest and one way to survive was to limit how many potential challengers there could ever be.
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One: Books 1-7, Death Becomes Her, Queen Bitch, Love Lost, Bite This, Never Forsaken, Under My Heel, Kneel or Die (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets) Page 7