Recalling Dargo’s presence, Cyrus turned to the large Russian. He was staring at him so intently that Cyrus felt as if the man were trying to see inside of him.
“To know these things…” Dargo said in his halting, broken Russian accent. “You have found Eleanor’s missing journal?”
Cyrus was surprised Dargo was aware of the journal, and cognizant enough to refer to it as missing. It implied he’d searched for it at some point.
“Yes.”
The man scowled. “And you believe it is your business to read such a thing?”
Under normal circumstances, Cyrus would’ve responded smartly to such a loaded question. But given the subject matter and those involved, he thought better of it. He decided that this was one of the rare cases where complete honesty was the best recourse.
“I didn’t make the decision,” Cyrus said. “Natasha gave me the book because she thought it would help sort out what was really going on here. She believes it’s worth considering that the recent attacks are related to what happened to her mother twenty years ago.”
It was a rare opportunity for Cyrus to see shock on Dargo’s normally granite-like face. The man sat stunned for a moment, then his lips moved silently, mouthing some sort of Russian phrase that Cyrus couldn’t make out.
“My God,” Dargo said at last. “Then Natasha knows?”
“That you’re her biological father? Yes. She’s read the book many times. She’s been aware for some time.”
Chapter 27
The Voss Compound
3:37 pm
His elbows resting on the desk, Voss sat with his head cradled in upraised hands. With his pulse hammering in his ears, the room continued to spin. He felt faint, and a migraine—the likes of which he’d never experienced—had enveloped him. His mind swam as he struggled to rationalize the crazy things Cyrus had just told him. But while his logical mind rejected the statements as outlandish accusations, in his gut he recognized the truth.
“Onyx,” Voss said. His voice was low and scratchy and cracked before he offered more than a few words. “Those people were my friends—my business partners. Tell me…how?”
“It’s been twenty years,” Cyrus asserted. “It’s hard to say. But there’s talk of an outside investor who put up money, then pressured the board of directors. Word is, it was someone who knew how to get things done. And they’re willing to play dirty in order to get what they want.”
“Who?” Dargo demanded. “Who has done this? Who is behind it?”
Dargo looked ready to fly from his seat, and Voss suspected he would. At the same time, Cyrus seemed equally indignant in regard to all that had happened. Still, Cyrus was doing a remarkable job of maintaining his calm.
Voss wondered how the boy’s calm attitude would handle the latest test results. His eyes fell momentarily on the thin file folder sitting on his desk beside his open laptop. Cyrus had closer ties to Lamplighter than he knew.
Reaching down to the bag on the floor beside his chair, Cyrus pulled out a folder of his own. He handed it to Voss who quickly turned it around and flipped open the cover. Inside was an 8x10 color photo of man, perhaps in his mid-seventies. His face was thin and unnaturally tan. Still, the hue of his skin did little to hide the liver spots that freckled his complexion. Voss recognized him immediately. He’d aged dramatically since they’d last spoken, but two decades would do that to a person.
“Gerard Combs,” Voss said without hesitation. “He’s the President and CEO of Onyx Gander.”
“He was the President and CEO,” Cyrus corrected. “He retired less than a year after you collected your severance package and allowed Onyx to buy out every joint patent you held with them. After his retirement, he was replaced by Philip Traue.”
“That can’t be right,” Voss interjected. “Traue was only a junior member of the board when I left. How could he, of all people, replace Combs so quickly?”
“I think you’re asking the right question,” Cyrus said flatly. “It doesn’t add up. But when I looked at the financial histories of both men, certain irregularities made it fairly obvious that they were the ones working directly with the outside influence responsible for putting pressure on your project.”
“What sort of irregularities?” Voss realized that his dizziness had passed; it had been replaced by pure outrage. Still, the analytical portion of his mind required substantiating facts.
“I’ll provide you all of the documentation you require,” Cyrus confirmed.
Voss shot a quick glance at Dargo. For the first time, he saw a look of respect directed at Cyrus. Apparently the young man’s investigative prowess had earned him points.
“From there, you can deal with Onyx Gander any way you see fit,” Cyrus continued. “I only ask that you let me settle things with their outside investor.”
Voss felt an acidic burn in the pit of his stomach. He knew what they were really discussing, and wanted no part of it. Even after all that had happened, he couldn’t bear to be involved in such matters. It went against everything he believed in. One look at Dargo and he knew that the matter was settled. His head of security had his own views—ones that wouldn’t be swayed by his objections.
Resigning himself to confirming Cyrus’s information before action was taken, Voss decided to let the matter drop. He would never talk Dargo out of looking into Onyx Gander. Not after this. And truthfully, nor did he want to. It was bloodshed he detested. There had already been far too much of that. But they had passed the tipping point; he knew such things were now well beyond his control.
“No,” Dargo grunted and glared at Cyrus. “I require the name of this investor as well. If he is responsible, as you say, then it is my responsibility.”
Voss wanted to object. He didn’t want Dargo extending the scope of his vendetta. There’d been enough loss of life already. Nevertheless, he reasoned, there was still a threat to his family.
“This all relates to the attacks on my family and my home? All of this is about Lamplighter?” Voss asked. He was attempting to put the discussion back on track. He suspected he understood how the facts of the past were related to the present, but such things had yet to be discussed.
Cyrus shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “This is about Shadowlight, your memory recording device. Someone is after it. They think that by taking either of your children they can motivate you to finish developing the technology for them, using your family as pawns. I’m sure you can see how it could be manipulated.”
“Perverted, you mean,” Voss virtually growled.
“I thought the gunmen at The Cuban were part of an assassination team. Now I’m pretty sure I was only half right. I think they meant to kill me, but they had another objective. They also intended to capture Natasha and use her as leverage against you.”
Leaning back in his chair, Voss took a long look at Cyrus. His mind ran through a battery of scenarios while calculating their odds. It just didn’t seem possible to him. As a scientist, he had witnessed profound luck and coincidence that could not be explained, he couldn’t see Cyrus’s presence in his home as such an example.
“Are you sure that’s all they want?” Voss asked. He had many questions, but they all boiled down to just that one.
“I had no idea Project Lamplighter continued after I left Onyx Gander,” he continued. “At the time, I was given the impression that the effort would be scrapped without my participation. There would’ve been a time when that motivated me to stay onboard to see it through. But after losing Eleanor, I had two beautiful baby girls at home. They needed my full attention. And that’s what they got.
“As you said, I cashed out. I sold my Onyx stock options, cashed in my 401K, I even allowed the company to buy out our jointly held patents. But I never knew Lamplighter continued after that. I hope you believe me.”
The curious slant of Cyrus’s eyes suddenly caused Voss to reevaluate everything he knew. “Lamplighter,” Voss said quietly. “Isn’t that why you’re really here?”
>
Cyrus shook his head. His gaze shifted slowly from Voss to Dargo, before once more settling on Voss. “I’m here for Natasha. The people who sent me are interested in your technology, yes. But I took the assignment because I care about Natasha. This was my opportunity to make up for the mistakes of my past. That’s all. I had no idea that these attempts to kidnap or kill her were on the way. If I’d known, I would’ve approached this entire situation very differently.”
Voss pinched the base of his nose between two fingers, trying to control his throbbing headache. He searched for a delicate approach for his question, but there was none to be found.
“Are you saying that you really don’t know who, or what you are?” Voss finally asked bluntly.
Leaning forward in his chair, Cyrus glared at Voss. For that matter, Voss had managed to fully capture Dargo’s normally stoic gaze.
“Lamplighter,” Voss said. He flipped open his file folder and pushed it across the desk to Cyrus. “The genetic signature is unmistakable,” he explained. “While I can’t explain how it came to be incorporated in your genome, the markers are conclusive evidence.”
The nearly blank look on Cyrus’s face convinced Voss that the young man really didn’t understand. He took a moment to consider the project and all that he knew of it while he searched for a place to start.
Voss began, “As I have stated, Lamplighter was in preliminary stages when I left the company. I was told it was going to be mothballed if I left. Apparently that never happened because, at some point, the project was taken so far as to include human experimentation.”
Voss rubbed the side of his head, still struggling to placate his migraine. “And you…you were obviously a test subject.”
Shaking his head, Cyrus rose from his chair and began to pace the room. He was clearly agitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Doc. No one’s ever experimented on me. Well, not until you slipped me that mickey along with the antibiotic when I got here.”
That confused Voss. “You’re sure? You were never part of a drug trial of any kind? Were you ever grievously sick at a young age?”
Voss knew he’d hit a nerve when Cyrus stopped mid step. He looked at Voss, his normal affable demeanor fractured and replaced by genuine concern. “How young?” was all he asked.
The best answer Voss could offer was a shrug. “I have no way of knowing. I would’ve been off the project while you were still in diapers. But someone clearly continued my work. Why? What do you know? What happened?”
Cyrus continued to pace for a few minutes more. Voss knew he was considering the question. When Cyrus finally returned to his chair, his walk seemed almost zombie like. His motor skills were functional at only a basic, muscle memory level. He watched Cyrus drop into the chair and feared the young man had checked out all together.
“What is it?” Voss coaxed. “What do you know?”
In a snap, Cyrus returned to the present. Life flashed into his eyes once more and he stared at Voss. Shaking his head, he still seemed unsettled. “It’s what I don’t know that bothers me. I have no memories at all prior to my tenth birthday.”
Even Dargo looked confused, possibly even concerned. “How is that possible?” he asked.
Cyrus shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess I don’t really know that I was ten years old. I had to be something, though; ten was their best guess. They didn’t even know my name, so they made that up, too.”
Cyrus went on to explain how he’d been found in the wreckage of a train derailment a little over twelve years earlier. It was later deduced that he was traveling alone because no parent or guardian was found among the casualties. He was discovered in the wreckage, and no one ever came forward to claim him. He’d landed in the American foster-care system, where he’d remained until he was able to legally emancipate himself at the age of sixteen. After that, he took a job and finished putting himself through school. Along the way, he earned a scholarship to Brown University, where he majored in literature. There, he met Natasha. It was also there that he became involved in journalism, and the investigative report that had spiraled out of control and eventually landed him in trouble with authorities.
Dargo glared at Cyrus. “That does not make sense. You are saying you have no memory of your youth prior to that train crash? How? How do you not remember? How, with a eidetic memory?”
While Dargo didn’t believe Cyrus’s tale, as far as Voss was concerned it made a lot of sense, at least when he factored in the telltale markers in his genome. But even those were different from what he might have expected. The project signature was missing. A specific RNA tag was part of every alteration Onyx Gander implemented, and that tag was missing from Cyrus’s genetic profile.
He didn’t know what to make of the discrepancy.
“How about dreams,” Voss asked. “Any flashes of your life preceding the train crash? Perhaps in dreams or following periods of extreme exhaustion?”
Cyrus just shook his head. This was clearly a sensitive subject for the boy. And the fact that Voss hadn’t experienced any memories of the time following the train wreck among those he had gained from the young man, meant he had either done a thorough job of compartmentalizing them, or that there were no memories to be experienced at all.
Voss directed Cyrus’s attention to the page inside the open folder he had pushed to the edge of the desk. He realized that, to those not familiar with a genome map, it just looked like a series of narrow, splotchy colored bar graphs that lacked a background grid. But he wanted him to see one sequence in particular.
“I can’t be certain what sort of modification was made to your genetic model,” he explained. “But this sequence here,” he pointed, “was something I worked on at the very start of the project. It isn’t naturally occurring. It is part of a base modification we indented to implement on every test subject.”
Cyrus glared at Voss. “Base modification?” he asked in a cold, impatient voice. “What the hell was—is Lamplighter?”
Voss contemplated the question. “It was an attempt to augment genetic traits,” he explained. “We looked at a lot of things, early on. At the most basic level, we thought we could alter a left-handed or right-handed person and make them naturally ambidextrous. Or take someone with a keen sense of hearing or smell and augment that ability, perhaps even learn how to trigger that trait in others.
“Some people are born with an innate sense of balance or coordination, for example. What if we could locate the genes responsible for those attributes and turn them on in others? Sort of like flipping the switch on latent talents, only at a genetic level.”
“Oh!” Voss felt his stomach drop with the sudden realization. “That must be what they did to you,” he muttered, almost to himself. “It would explain so much…”
“Doc?”
Voss looked up to see Cyrus seated at the edge of his chair, leaning toward the desk.
“What was that?” Cyrus asked again.
His mind racing as things suddenly made sense, Voss quickly organized his thoughts. “Your memory dump,” he explained. “In all my testing, I’ve never experienced anything like it. You really knocked me on my butt—the procedure gave me migraines! I’ve never had a response that came anywhere near what happened during your download.
“At first I thought it was due to the duration of the memory log. You were here for over a week and we—I—kept renewing your tag on a daily basis. It was the single largest transfer conducted to date. I assumed that was the cause of the discomfort, but something about that hasn’t felt right to me.
“It was the quality of your memories that seemed off. But I disregarded the observation, attributing it to the fact your experiences involved Natasha and therefore amounted to a very awkward and unsettling experience for me. But even that never seemed like an adequate explanation,” Voss concluded.
“I’m not following,” Cyrus admitted.
Voss could tell by Dargo’s countenance that he was equally lost in
regard to the explanation.
“Your eidetic memory, Cyrus,” Voss explained. “That’s what was altered. I’m certain of it!”
Cyrus looked unconvinced.
“By the time we left, all we had accomplished was theoretical and involved only rudimentary computer models,” Voss explained. The technology of the day was so primitive when compared to—.” He realized he was starting to ramble.
“Ah, we really hadn’t gotten past square one,” Voss went on. “But the theory was sound and there was marvelous potential. Ultimately, several stages down the road, we did have a plan in place for human trials. The goal was to take a subject’s already prominent trait and attempt to augment it via genetic manipulation. To supercharge the ability, if you will. Several stages further down the line, if all went well, we would attempt to replicate a dormant trait in another subject. So, in your case, example one would be to bolster your already impressive memory skills. Then, example two, would involve using you as a template to impart that same amplified memory trait into a host with normal cognitive abilities.”
Voss marveled at his own realization. Not only had his work been developed beyond theory, he was now confident that a living example of his theory’s success sat directly in front of him.
“So, which one am I,” Cyrus asked, pulling Voss from his revelry.
Not understanding the question, Voss thought he must’ve missed something while distracted. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re assuming I’m part of example number one,” Cyrus explained. “What if I’m part of example two?”
And with that, Voss was seized by the reality that truly was sitting before him. The thrill of seeing his work brought to life was suddenly smothered by the realization that someone had done this to Cyrus, and not taken steps to guide him afterward. Cyrus’s loss of childhood memory was most certainly the result of the procedure. It made perfect sense…it made it a part of the later phase of testing. But assuming Cyrus had volunteered for the experiment, someone should’ve been there to guide him, even study him, following the procedure. By all accounts, Cyrus’s life had been derailed every bit as much as the train that had wrecked and forever destroyed his youth.
Rogue Faction Part 2: A Cyrus Cooper Thriller: Book Three Page 23