Dean broke the spell, doubling over as he sought to bring equilibrium to his world. Lifting his body to toss the rock the Chinese soldier gave him into the pile, he responded to the only question he had an answer for, “That this is probably against my better judgment.”
CHAPTER 63
Laughter, clinking glasses, and the world’s global leaders and elite dressed in their finery, regalia, and uniforms for the second and final time in forty-eight hours filled the private penthouse’s ballroom. Hidden within the almost two-hundred-foot waterfall, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the city between breaks in the gushing curtain of water. An exquisite exterior light display and double-sided glass kept outsiders from any knowledge the secret penthouse existed.
“Imagine,” General Goddard Frohm tipped a delicate crystal champagne glass toward Global Security Council General Lindor Stenberg.
“Things any other way? I can’t.”
It was nearly over. The hard work—centuries in the making while navigating an obstacle course that would have made even Zeus’s two sons Hercules and Hermes, the latter known to the Romans as Mercury, call the impossible.
Frohm glanced around the room enjoying all the pretty people. Like a pearl in the ripeness of time, the cultivation of generation after generation had created these superhumans. They’d tried many times over the course of several centuries, but it had been too soon.
Frohm’s triumphing ended abruptly the moment he laid eyes on his inferior. Lt. General Terrance Young appeared to have pinned someone against the wall. Couldn’t he keep his willy in his pants for a few more hours?
“The media tower?” Young hissed. “Why would you put someone like Hatchett in the candy store with the keys to the chocolate factory?”
Wearing a ruched white Grecian sheath evening gown, the young woman’s svelte back was pressed hard against the wall, unable to escape. “There aren’t exactly prison cells in the family fun amusement complex,” she shot back defensively.
Newly shorn flaxen hair and pale skin in an eye-popping red velvet tux arrived in time to defend his partner against a man he’d grown to detest over the last four years. “Sir, we’ve been over this,” Zedd spoke through clenched teeth. “I don’t think there’s a significant threat.”
“Do you have any idea what can happen in just a few hours or less?” Young wasn’t impressed. “In the blink of an eye, battles have been lost, nations defeated, and great men taken down with a single shot.”
“Insanity done by men to other men, and the innocent,” snarled Cadence, bolder now that she had backup. “You’ve no one to blame but yourselves!”
“A femi-Nazi,” Young was practically foaming at the mouth. “That’s why they didn’t give you the vote until last century. Get out of my sight. And you,” he turned his wrath on Zedd. “Find her or I’ll have you deported.”
___
Less than the length of a football field away, Thomas Ruby Hatchett worked feverishly to complete the exposé before time ran out. Just like old times, Studebaker had argued for immediately airing a breaking news story that Vegas was intact, and more information was to follow. Truby’s counter-argument that a resulting all-out manhunt for her, and possibly him, might prevent them from delivering the goods was enough to convince him to back down. Now a team effort, Studebaker wore producer headphones to check sound levels while Dean worked master control. Finally, the pieces were coming together—all except one.
“Who is behind this elaborate global hoax and why?” Truby spoke to the camera before she yelled, “Cut! We need a source. Who do you have?”
Studebaker stammered, embarrassed. Racking his flummoxed brain, “Gosh, I haven’t had to develop sources in decades. You got anybody, Dean?”
“Of course not, you dinosaurs!”
The shadow that caught Truby’s attention earlier reappeared lifting the hairs on her arm. She watched anxiously toward the exit door.
“No sources?” Maybe she was paranoid. “Okay, any tips or leads? You know, something that might lead us to a source.” Her eyes left the exit door, “Studebaker, weren’t you going to teach Dean the lost art of journalism?”
“Undercover!” shouted Studebaker. “We go undercover to get a tip that generates a lead that will take us to a source!”
Without forewarning, two weary stragglers sauntered into the newsroom, exhausted from their day’s activities.
“Just like I said. She’s here,” said Rose.
“Well done, Princess.”
“Where did you come from?” Truby asked Rose and Pete, suspicious of everything and everyone.
Already on edge, she thought she heard the click of a door latching ever so gently. Suddenly, she bolted toward the emergency exit door. Hurling the door open against the hard back wall, there was only a well-lit stairwell.
Truby inspected behind the door and the stairwell as she counted to fifteen. The alarm didn’t sound. “Door’s busted,” she said nodded casually, still catching her breath. Despite the widening disparity between logic and intuition, Truby filled with a renewed sense of urgency.
As the mouths of the three men still gaped, the beautiful little girl, let out a giggle.
“Princess Rose?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Truby didn’t know she had.
Suddenly Truby heard an unmistakable whirring sound outside the building. A headlight flashed through tinted windows near the exit door.
___
Rose sat shotgun in the self-navigating flying vehicle she’d “found” for Truby as the older woman studied a map on the multimedia screen. Truby was less likely to ask how she’d known they would need a car in that moment any more than she’d bother asking how she and Pete continually appeared out of nowhere. Rose was an Alpha, the daughter of an Alpha ahead of his time.
“Go that way, Truby.”
Truby adjusted their heading, the car moving in the direction where Rose pointed. Relaxing now, Rose turned around to smile at the three men crammed into a back seat for two—Dean, Studebaker, and Pete—especially the youngest one in the middle.
She wrinkled her nose before scrutinizing Truby again as if seeing her for the first time. Coquettishly cocking her head to one side, “You two really need to talk.”
Pete winked at the daughter he loved more than life itself, even more than her.
“Yeah, what about?” asked Dean. “How crazy you all are?”
He still doesn’t recognize me. Truby wondered if the young man’s brain injuries were in play or if the repression was psychosomatic like her “migraines.” That this was all her fault eternally seared her conscious mind like a branding iron.
Let it happen organically, she thought. But did she have the luxury of time?
CHAPTER 64
President Zhang wore a simple, pure silk paneled Chinese tunic that understated her country’s position in the world. The woman’s strength was displayed in her stature and the depth of her eyes as she paused to receive a friendly greeting from President Gerald Cane, Vice-President Olivia Flores, Global Security Council Secretary-General Punam Arya, and others as if they were the best of friends.
“You swore on your life!” Following behind his President, General Chen berated his bodyguard under his breath.
Wu hung his head in shame, “I have failed China. I am sorry.” Dismissed, he slunk away.
At the podium, General Stenberg tapped his champagne glass to get the room’s attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d say the bar is now open, but I think you’ve already divested it.” There was laughter from those not engaged in conversation. The room was quite boisterous. “Please, continue to enjoy yourselves this momentous evening.”
At the ballroom’s entrance, Rose’s curious face peered through a crack between the imported oversized 50,000-year-old ancient Kauri wood doors. “The man who gave you both that mineral— He’s definitely here.”
She closed the door bumping into Pete, Studebaker, Dean, and Truby stacked shortest to
tallest behind her.
“How do we get in there?” asked Studebaker.
“This is insane!” whispered Dean loudly.
“So you keep reminding us!” snapped Studebaker. “Truby, I can’t take it anymore. Tell him before I do."
“Tell me what? Let’s just get out of here before—”
“You get caught?”
Behind them, a formally dressed Hector and Zedd each held stun guns that shot nasty wireless high-voltage shock probes.
Just then, from the other side, Wu gave the blocked ballroom door a push, then a shove, taking four steps into the hall before realizing his mistake. Unsure what was happening he reversed his steps to retreat.
Hands on her hips, blocking the twelve-foot-high doors, “Where do you think you’re going?” asked Rose.
“Uh, I feel sick!” He’d seen the trick once in an old American movie about death row. Wu retched into his hand, stumbling toward the Americans. The Americans made gagging noises of their own, quickly moving away.
“Zero, I guess they’re all sick.”
Zedd shook his head in disbelief. “Then quarantine them. We’ll sort it out with China later.”
Oops, Truby thought.
___
“Phew! what a day, huh, Pops?”
Pete sat on an overturned bucket in the corner of the penthouse’s maintenance closet with Rose on his lap. “Yes!” kissing the top of his progeny’s head. “And what an amazing one!”
Love conquers all, or warps perception, Truby noted, amazed how being locked in a closet by the bad guys hours away from doomsday could count for an amazing day. So much for her winning streak.
She fiddled with her video camera as she listened to Dean and Studebaker bicker over the best way to finish producing her exposé. The Chinese soldier nodded gleefully to everything both men said for this was his lucky day. He might soon be dead, but with his honor intact.
Truby had just finished recording Wu’s statement. The other source she needed, it had left her reeling. The fine print of the original Global Security Council WREN project legal document gave the GSC the authority to act as attorney-in-fact for all WREN related decisions for the purpose of minimizing bureaucracy and red tape. Wu admitted that the Global Security Council had been later coerced into signing a secret exclusive Rare Earth minerals trade agreement so that China wouldn’t tie up Project WREN for a decade with lengthy investigations over the alleged Three Gorges dam sabotage. But, then China’s mineral exports began to mysteriously decline.
Chinese intelligence had learned Thomas was behind the illegal news outlet before the U.S. Wu was ordered to deliver a primitive cryptic package to Thomas to dodge electronic counter-spying. Hoping the Hatchett Report’s findings would damage the U.S., it backfired in the end
She also now knew where the U.S. was secretly mining Rare Earth minerals. Corporations had been trying to find a way to get at the Uranium next to the Grand Canyon for decades. Once protected lands were opened to exploitation, had they discovered Rare Earth minerals while mapping the Uranium?
“We’ve got to get out of here now,” declared Truby.
“Somebody call out a bathroom emergency!”
“Stupendous, Rose! Godzilla’s got to pee!”
Bickering between the boys ceased mid-sentence. Crammed together in nine by six feet, Truby felt rather than saw Dean turn to confront her.
“What did you say?”
Truby’s heart rate doubled. It’s coming back to him. She felt her face grow flush, beads of sweat popping at the temples. She turned to look Dean in the eyes. “God... I have to pee?”
“They’re going to do this here, aren’t they, Pops.”
“Back away,” said Pete. “This is going to make a six by six cell feel like a condominium.”
The silence was as deafening as the air was stagnant.
Truby carefully chose her words. “You were born Hempstead Dean Hatchett. Hempstead, on Long Island, is where your mother and I met. Your mother’s name was Claire Dean. Your sister’s name was Devlin.”
“What?” Dean’s knees slightly buckled as he took a step backward in shock.
“Hemmy... I’m your father. Or I was.”
“Don’t say that!” Truby’s son screamed. The grief he’d glimpsed hours earlier struck him in the chest like a flying hammer on a cold, steel nail. “You’re lying!”
“The remover of obstacles,” Truby reached for her Ganesha elephant on the chain underneath her shirt. “You have one. Remember, I gave it to you?”
Dean shook his head in disbelief. Hemmy’s entire youth flashed in front of him, before it was taken away.
“Remember the operation? I had one, too.”
“You killed my father! I mean my mother. I mean—” Dean/Hemmy struggled in confusion. “My family!”
Pete clung to Rose tightly for both the beauty and frailty of life.
“No, Hemmy, I didn’t die. They wouldn’t let me see you. I tried, but they sent me away.”
Studebaker broke his silence. In his pocket was his Ganesha elephant from his time in India. Studebaker had been Thomas Hatchett’s mentor when Thomas was a young man trying to break into the news business. When Loren quit news, vanishing for a while, he’d sent Thomas a Ganesha elephant with a note explaining its significance and to stay strong.
Studebaker showed his Ganesha to Dean/Hemmy. “She did try, Hemmy. I’ve kept my promise to your fath—to Truby to keep watch over you. You’ve both been in a kind of witness protection program.”
“What are you? Transgender?”
“I don’t really know what I am.” Truby searched frantically for the words that would ease the torrent of anguish pouring from the grown child’s eyes that were Hemmy’s eyes. Her gaze would remain steadfast and true for an eternity if that’s what it took to reassemble a heart so shattered, only one as equally devastated could recognize the pieces. Grasping his shoulders, “Look at me! Doesn’t love transcend gender?”
So near drowning, Dean fought against his rescuer and the moment he’d imagined a thousand times over a thousand days. It was Hemmy who finally broke, allowing loving arms to pull her into a tight embrace, so that Dean could live.
He fell to his knees. Embraced by Thomas Ruby Hatchett, the only surviving member of his family, she fell with him.
Parent and child weeping, Studebaker let loose his own spigot, throwing his body on top of the heap.
Laughing in delight, Rose, was followed by Pete.
Wu pounded ferociously on the hollow door as if the room was on fire. “Let me out of here. Crazy Americans! Let me out!”
The thin utility closet door flew open at the sound of a jiggling lock from the outside.
Cadence smiled the smile of the wicked. “You should have heard yourselves. Sounded like all of human history in here!”
Nobody moved except the Chinese guard now running down the hall.
Trust her? “Where are your boyfriends?” Truby glanced around knowing all bets were off.
Cadence opened the door wider. “He’s cool.”
National Guard, Coby Holt, sheepishly poked his head around the corner. “It didn’t take much for me to convince her,” he sniffed.
Cadence rolled her eyes, “Hurry! Follow me!”
Truby hoped her gut was right. Winning streak back on, it was all she had.
The doors to the elevator Wu already stood in were about to close when Coby wedged himself in like a sausage, then didn’t move.
“What’s wrong?” Cadence asked Coby.
Coby glanced nervously at the Chinese man smiling mischievously at him. It was the guard from the underground squirrel incident. “Just checking something. Nothing.”
Moments later, seven people were crammed in a flying vehicle meant for four as it struggled to stay aloft.
CHAPTER 65
“Please... Ladies and gentlemen, if I could please have your attention. Yes, it’s all very exciting, isn’t it?”
Taking assigned seats around
luxurious six-person Italian Carrara marble tables, guests in the DupliCity penthouse ballroom requiring translation devices activated wireless buds inside ear canals.
“Thank you,” Stenberg continued. He stood center stage on the elevated circular platform equipped with an overhead hologram projector. The device once again scanned his well-cut figure to create a mirror image so every table surrounding him like the petals of a flower saw a full-frontal view. “My dear colleagues, gathered in the safest location in the world are planet Earth’s esteemed global leaders. I say safest location, for the rest of the world thinks it no longer exists.”
The audience broke into applause at their achievement. The most perfectly sculpted physiques on the planet, these wealthy individuals had the means to 3D print any replacement body part or grafted enhancement. Implanted optical lenses equipped with artificial intelligence allowed ordinary eyes to adjust automatically to night vision, penetrate fog, and even pick up heat signatures giving select individuals superpowers once only reserved for comic book heroes.
“Where is the best place to hide, but in plain sight? Am I correct?” Stenberg laughed at the simplicity within the complexity of his world as he waited patiently for the applause to die down again. “Extreme measures perhaps, but these are extreme times. It is you who will decide the next chapter of the human race in a book yet to open.”
It took only unfettered champagne to dissolve the constraints of upper crust refinement as guests whistled and shouted. Anticipation rising, even Stenberg applauded.
Expecting a juicy promotion in rank when this was over, Lt. General Young gratuitously applauded General Frohm and his billionaire wife across their shared table, mouthing “bravo,” giving a two-thumbs up.
The rabble-rousers’ applause changed to a steady drumbeat atop the table.
General Stenberg’s hearty belly laugh encouraged others to join. Things were escalating to a fever pitch. He cued wait staff to bring him another glass of champagne.
Raising his flute, “All right, all right. You are behaving like children tonight and rightly so. Let us become drunk with glory, the sweetness of red wine, roses, and victory upon thy lips.”
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