Midnight Kiss

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Yeah.” Hope grabbed her laptop and moved to the living room. Luke followed. She opened up her home banking account. She didn’t bother trying to hide the password. Luke was watching her, anyway, instead of what she was typing in. “So, first of all, it’s strange having two bank accounts. Why two? They are both mine. Why split it into two accounts, one large and one smaller? One with my name plus an extra middle name and the other —”

  She sat back to allow Luke to see the screen properly. He squinted. There were two accounts listed with their numbers and a name. One Hope Catherine Ellis and the other …

  “Immortals?”

  Hope sighed. “Yep. Immortals. I googled it. Immortals is a movie about Greek gods, a fantasy sports league, another movie, this time about vampires. A series of fantasy books. The members of the French Academy are called The Immortals. But I can’t see what any of that has to do with me.”

  “Wait.” Luke scrunched his brow. “The Immortals. Huh. The Emperor of Persia’s guards were called the Immortals.”

  She sat up. “Yeah? When was this?”

  Luke put his hand on her shoulder. “About two thousand five hundred years ago. The Achemenid Empire. When I was a kid I was crazy about military history. The Immortals were an elite unit, ten thousand strong. They were ferocious. Think ‘300’.”

  “The movie or the graphic novel?”

  “Both. They had really cool gear and they always numbered ten thousand. If someone died, or was seriously wounded or sick, another Immortal immediately took his place.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting but I don’t see —” Something lit up in her head. “Say that again.”

  “About the Immortals?”

  She nodded. “About them being always ten thousand strong.”

  “Okay. They were essentially both the Imperial Guard and the standing army of the Persians. There were ten thousand of them. Always. Forever. Never less and never more than that. Any member of the elite force that died or was wounded or sick was immediately replaced from a separate force created as a pool to keep the main force at exactly ten thousand. It was why they were called the Immortals, as if no one ever died, because their ranks were never depleted.”

  “Oh my gosh.” Hope scrolled through the financial history of the second, smaller account, Immortals. “These accounts were set up in 2013. Originally the larger account was ten million dollars, exactly. But you know keeping accounts costs money, they make you pay to keep your money for you. And they pay close to zero percent interest so the amounts go down slowly.”

  Luke nodded.

  She pointed to the two amounts. “So the original ten million, deposited seven years ago, is now $9,897,445. But the Immortals account has remained exactly the same, unchanging. Do you see?”

  “Yeah. Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep that sum unchanged. So?”

  “So, it’s not a question of the money, per se. If it were, there’d only be one account. Splitting the money into two accounts makes no sense if it’s about the money. But it makes a lot of sense if the Immortals account is about the number, not the money.”

  Something deep inside her started thrumming. The same something that happened when she solved a tricky software issue or saw a pattern in the data. Only more this time. Stronger. She could feel her heart beating in her chest but it also seemed like she could hear the earth breathing, some cosmic rhythm that reached out to the stars. This was what truth felt like.

  She went to Tor and started digging deeper until she got to bedrock, then typed in the exact number of the Immortals account, including commas and the period.

  A green link popped up on the dark screen. It glowed and seemed to throb. It looked dangerous.

  “Wait.” Luke squeezed her shoulder gently and bent forward, until his face was next to hers. She could feel the heat of him. Glancing sideways she could see the blond fuzz that would soon be pale scruff over his tanned skin. The temptation to kiss him was so strong she had to mentally bolt herself to the chair.

  He went into the bedroom and brought back his own laptop. Hope was an electronics snob and had to refrain from sniffing when she saw it.

  “I heard that.” Luke was smiling as he set his laptop up next to hers. Hers looked like a different species.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she protested.

  “You didn’t have to. It’s clear what you think of it.”

  The blood rushed to her cheeks. “I — um —”

  He laughed. “It’s OK. I don’t have to perform magic on my computer like you do. And ASI is assigning me a new one, it’s ready at the office and Felicity has already given it her kiss of approval. This is my old one and I guess she’ll just have it taken out back and shot.”

  Out of mercy. Hope thought it, but didn’t say it.

  “You take us to the point on this computer where all I have to do is click,” he said. “I don’t think I can be trusted to do more than press a key. If it’s a destructive virus it will have killed an ancient broken-down steed instead of a thoroughbred. I know your laptop is surrounded by magic incantations and spells but why risk it?”

  Hope switched to his laptop, entered Tor, drilled down down down again until all that was left was a dark screen and a small white field in the middle. She entered the number exactly without taking her eyes from the screen.

  “Wow.” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Luke’s surprise. “You didn’t need to check. Huh.”

  “It was only 9 digits, two commas and a period. When I was a kid I won a prize because I could recite pi to the two hundredth digit. I have a good head for numbers.”

  “You surely do.” He nudged her a little out of the way and sat down in front of his laptop. “I’ll do the honors.”

  He looked as intrigued as she did. She was going to feel foolish if the number led nowhere. But somehow she thought something would happen, though she had no idea what.

  “Hit it,” she commanded, and his finger hovered.

  “Wait.”

  The screen dissolved and a man appeared. He was leaning on a cane and took a few halting steps forward.

  Hope gasped. “I know who that is! That’s Frank Glass! He died over five years ago. This looks like it was late in his illness.” The man on the screen looked very ill, emaciated and bald. His expensive clothes hung on him.

  Luke narrowed his eyes. “The Frank Glass?” He leaned forward a little. “Yeah, it is. Man, he looks awful.”

  “He wouldn’t allow himself to be photographed the last six months of his life. You can see why. He died of a glioblastoma, a very aggressive brain tumor.”

  Frank Glass was a living legend, the man who almost single-handedly made AI and quantum computing possible and possibly commercial. From nothing, he’d made over a hundred billion dollars, but more than that, he’d revolutionized computers, the way we understood intelligence. He’d expanded humanity’s boundaries. She’d cried the day she read his obituary in the newspapers, and had gone to a nearby church and lit a candle for him.

  The image was super clear even on Luke’s super crap screen. Glass looked exhausted and at least sixty years old, though she knew he’d only been 46 when he died.

  Glass sighed deeply and for a moment his hand trembled on the handle of his cane. His head dipped down, looking at the ground. Then he looked up and smiled sadly.

  “Hello, Hope,” he said. “Congratulations on solving the puzzle. You’re seeing this after I’m dead. I’m Frank Glass. I’m your uncle.”

  Washington, DC

  Court Redfield thought long and hard about joining Resnick in Sacramento, where it all started. To make sure it was done right this time. It would be like travelling back in time, but not in a good way. He’d always hated the place. It smelled of dust and neglect and regret. Washington had always smelled like power to him. The perfume of the big time — a place where powerful men lived powerful lives. The center, not the provinces.

  Court read history and he loved Roman history above all. He hadn
’t enjoyed his period as a Senator — too much kowtowing to morons — but he’d loved the idea of it. He identified with the biographies of the Romans he’d read. He knew that though life in the provinces might have been sweet, a real man of power needed to be in Rome. Just as he needed to be in Washington. Because one day he’d end up Imperator.

  Sacramento was the dusty outlying provinces and he’d hoped never to go back. California was lost to his party anyway, so he’d planned on sending his vice presidential candidate to campaign there.

  In the end, he’d decided to stay in Washington, and use a very secure videoconference app. Resnick was in a parade rest position. Good old Resnick. Loyal as ever. Goddammit, why the fuck couldn’t his son behave like his employee? Court was aiming at the highest office in the land, a position of almost unimaginable power. He should have his son by his side, not a member of his Pretorian Guard.

  As soon as the connection was established, Resnick spoke.

  “Morning sir,” he said. “I think I have their location pinpointed. A man and a woman. The woman has been confirmed as being Hope Ellis, formerly Catherine Benson. I’ve sent a drone to their location. As soon as I have confirmation, I’ll wait until nightfall to strike.”

  A smile crossed Court’s face for the first time that day. “Excellent.”

  “Sir.” Resnick’s head bowed. It was a gesture of fealty.

  “End this,” Court said. “Everyone involved. And don’t be seen.”

  Resnick’s head bowed once more. Court knew how Resnick viewed him and what he was thinking.

  Thy will be done.

  Sacramento

  Luke was a former Ranger. He got a lot of shit from the squids at ASI about SEALs being so badass, but Ranger training was one of the toughest in the world. Ranger School was sixty-two days of hell. Every single thread in the Ranger cloth tab was soaked in blood and every single molecule of the metal tab was paid for in blood, sweat and tears.

  To earn his tab, he’d trained twenty hours a day, averaging three and a half hours of sleep, carrying ninety pounds of gear, patrolling more than two hundred miles throughout the course. Every day he had live fire drills and there was the constant threat of ambushes by Red Team.

  That was the training.

  He’d seen brutal combat over three deployments, had been shot at constantly. He was unshockable. Or so he thought.

  But right now, it was a good thing he was sitting down. Because it felt like he’d been gut punched.

  Hope looked like someone had switched her off. Her face was bloodless. He’d only ever seen that color in dead men. She had that same look — waxy and lifeless.

  “What?” she whispered.

  Whatever was going on in that goddamned screen, Luke had to tend to Hope first. Shock could kill — he knew that. And though he was falling in love with her, right now he felt like she was his teammate and he had to protect her. He reached out and froze the monitor.

  “Sit down.” Hope turned her head to him, her eyes following slowly. She couldn’t coordinate her movements. She didn’t even know she

  “Down, honey.” Putting a hand on her shoulders, he pushed gently until she sat back down in the chair next to his. She resisted, then suddenly lost all resistance, and simply plopped down. Her hands were shaking.

  In a moment, he had a tumbler with two fingers of whiskey and put it into her shaking hand. “Drink this.” She looked at him, completely unfocused, uncomprehending. As if he’d spoken to her in a foreign language. He cupped the hand holding the tumbler and nudged it up toward her mouth. “Drink.” Luke put command in his voice. He’d commanded men in battle. He knew how to make people obey.

  She drank the whiskey in a couple of swallows and coughed. Some color slowly came back to her face.

  “Good girl,” he said and gently tightened his grip on her shoulder. Reminding her she wasn’t alone in this. “So. We need to watch this. You ready?”

  And his admiration for her, already strong, went up several notches. She sat up straight, nodded. “Yes.” And reached out herself to click the video back on.

  Luke sat back down in the other chair, sliding it as close to hers as it could get, and took her hand. It was small and icy cold.

  Frank Glass appeared again on the screen, emaciated, with only wisps of blond hair on his bald head, gray skin hanging off his jawline. Luke had seen many wounded men, but rarely any sick men. This man had death written all over him. You could see his skull beneath the skin.

  He hadn’t followed Glass’s story at all. Luke wasn’t in the computer world. Glass had been famous for being famous, as far as he was concerned. And he’d died when Luke had been on a mission and they hadn’t had access to any news that didn’t come from HQ.

  But for someone in the world of computers, apparently, Glass was a very big deal. Their god.

  And, apparently, Hope’s uncle.

  Hope was sitting on the edge of her seat, face forward, the monitor’s light reflected off her pale face.

  “Before I tell you your story, my darling niece, I’m going to need to sit down.” He reached out with his cane and pulled a rolling office chair towards him. “Sorry. Not doing too well these days. But you’d know that. The tech press is speculating on when I’ll die. The stock price of Glass Inc will change and some people will make a lot of money. And some will lose a lot of money.”

  He was in some kind of studio. There was no furniture at all besides the chair. Some kind of bland backdrop of an indeterminate gray-brown, featureless. Just the sick man, sitting down in a chair, telling his story.

  The camera must have been on a tripod because it was rock steady. He was probably alone in that room.

  He sighed, a small rattle sounding when he exhaled. This was one sick dude. A small smile played around his lips as he hooked the cane on the arm of the office chair and folded his veiny hands in his lap.

  “So. Now that I have your attention, I’ll assure you that you can verify what I say. I am your uncle. Your mother, Lucy Benson, was my sister. Half sister, which is why we don’t — didn’t — share a last name. But I left a vial of my blood with my lawyer, Morris Cannon, in Mountain View. You can google him. He has instructions to give it to you when you ask. The DNA analysis will prove that I am telling the truth, but in the meantime, I am just going to have to ask you to take my word for it.”

  Luke was interested in what the man was saying but he was more interested in how Hope was taking this. Glass stopped and wheezed for a moment and Luke watched her. That look of absolute shock was gone, but she was intensely focused.

  Focused, but ok. She was holding up. Luke settled back and waited for the sick man to catch his breath to tell his story.

  “The truth,” Glass wheezed. “I’ve been waiting a long time to tell you the truth. Maybe I would have waited forever but I don’t have much time left. It started in my head —” he stopped for a coughing fit that left him shaken. “Sorry. It’s spread to the lungs. This isn’t how I imagined telling you. I imagined telling you in person, then hugging you. Tight.”

  Glass cut away and on the monitor appeared the photograph of a young woman. California-cute, very blonde, blue-eyed, with big hair. Luke had never seen her before but neither had Hope. She frowned, but otherwise didn’t react.

  The screen cut back to Glass. “That was your mother, Hope.”

  Luke turned to Hope as she gasped. Her hand reached out for his and he folded her hand in his fist. Her skin was icy cold.

  He hit pause.

  “You okay?” he asked quietly.

  Luke couldn’t imagine anything more stressful than this. Discovering you weren’t who you thought you were. You were someone else entirely. And now discovering who she really was. Everything about her face was sharper, as if she’d lost weight she didn’t have to lose in the past few minutes.

  “I — I don’t know.” She spoke as if having to catch her breath. As if someone had punched her in the stomach. “None of this makes any kind of sense.”

/>   Luke believed firmly in the ripping-off-the-bandage-fast theory of bad things. Get it all over with quickly. “Let’s hear it all,” he said firmly. She nodded and he pressed Play.

  “Or rather Cathy. That’s the name on your birth certificate. Catherine Frances Benson. Frances was the name of our maternal grandmother, Frances Caldwell. Our mother married twice. First husband was Thomas Glass and she had me, and second husband was Bob Benson. Both marriages ended in divorce. Mom and Lucy ended up living in a trailer park in Sacramento. Happy Trails Trailer Park. It was temporary and only because Bob Benson cleaned out our mom’s bank account before disappearing. Lucy was 16 and I was 24, trying to put myself through Stanford on a scholarship and working three jobs when Benson lit out. I helped as much as I could but I couldn’t do much. Lucy worked after school and on weekends. She was a really hard worker.”

  He smiled and suddenly Luke could see the man he’d been. He remembered now reading articles. In the first flush of success of his new generation of computers and smart objects, he’d been a young god. Tall, blond, good-looking in a nerdy sort of way. Nothing like the stooped, bald sack of bones on the monitor.

  “Lucy was really smart and funny. Got straight As in school. The year Lucy graduated from high school, our mom died. She was never the same after Benson left and she just smoked and drank herself to death. Lucy helped as much as she could but mom just wanted to die … and she did. But anyone who was around Lucy for any amount of time knew she was going places. I was going places, too. We were going to make it. She graduated class valedictorian and enrolled in a local junior college, business major. Was doing really well. She was destined for the big time.”

  Luke hit pause again, glanced at Hope. “How you doing? Is this all too much for you?”

  Hope took a big breath, let it out slowly in a controlled stream. Luke recognized a stress reliever. “It’s a lot to take in. I don’t — I don’t even know if it’s true. That woman, the one who is supposed to be my mother, doesn’t look anything like me. None of this is making any sense to me.”