Tethered Twins Saga: Complete Trilogy (Twins, Souls and Hearts)

by Mike Essex

  TWENTY EIGHT

  We said goodbye to the girls and told them not to worry about the snatcher. I ran with Grace to the briefing, already twenty minutes late and unsure how Jacobi would respond. If he put the same focus on punctuality as he did on trust then we could have a problem.

  The briefing was held in a room ominously marked “War Room” according to the mark spray painted on its door in neat yellow letters. We entered a rounded room with a dome like ceiling and curved corners. On the solitary flat wall in the room was a large computer with an even larger screen, frozen on the image of a dark alleyway. We snuck in towards the back of the group, who were all looking at Jacobi stood in front of the giant screen.

  “How nice of you to join us,” Jacobi spotted our arrival instantly and singled us out.

  “Sorry,” replied Grace with a hint of sarcasm.

  “Sorry,” I replied, feeling embarrassed as everyone stared at us.

  “Well there’s no time to start everything again so we’ll just have to carry on.”

  “Great,” I thought to myself. My first mission with Jacobi and we had already missed part of the briefing.

  In amongst the crowd I saw R&R watching Jacobi diligently. My hopes of leaving them behind faded. I’d never told them where the briefing was or exactly when it would happen. There was no way they could have stumbled upon this room at the right time. Jacobi must have told them.

  The large screen flickered into life and began to play a video. It had presumably been shot via CCTV as the footage was recorded from a high vantage point and was angled downwards. The intermittent lighting of a solitary streetlight offered glimpses into the dark and highlighted the cobbled street.

  “He’s back,” said Jacobi.

  Right on cue a figure entered the frame of the camera. I couldn’t see his face but he was hunched over and walking very slowly along the street. His motion was irregular, sometimes taking two steps, other times just a single lurch forwards.

  The more his arm came into the shot, the more it became clear that he was dragging something heavy behind him. The man’s long flowing coat obscured most of his frame from view. It was only when he stepped towards the streetlight that everything became clear. A spark burst from the light and illuminated a wider area for just a second.

  Another man was being dragged along the floor, his face bloody and his body lifeless. Yet that was not the most horrific part of the image. What terrified me more was the purple robe of the man walking in front.

  It was identical to the one I had seen Will put on and in that moment I noticed the other similarities; same height, same dark hair colour, same build. As he moved directly in front of the camera I tried to see his face but it was obscured by a golden mask that covered most of his facial features.

  “The snatcher?” whispered Grace to me.

  “Could be,” I replied, curious to know if he was more than the myth I’d presumed.

  The man, whom I suspected was Will, walked past the edge of the camera and dragged the body off screen. I could see from the camouflage pattern that the bloodied body belonged to an SO13 soldier, although Will’s motives for hurting him escaped me. Perhaps he had been attacked and defended himself, yet why he would take a soldier prisoner was the bigger mystery.

  From the reaction of the people in the room it seemed they too had questions. Gasps were heard when the purple hooded man appeared and people started muttering to themselves. I hadn’t told them about the robe so they just seemed concerned that there was a killer on the loose.

  Jacobi said nothing, preferring to let the video speak for itself. When the footage showed the empty street once again Jacobi wound it on. According to the timer on the video thirty minutes had passed and then the purple robed man walked back in front of the camera in the opposite direction.

  When he next appeared on the camera he was dragging along the floor what looked like the same SO13 soldier. I wondered if the footage had been looped but time had passed on the camera. There were differences too in the way the purple robed man was moving and pulling the body. The camera quality wasn’t good enough to tell for sure but I suspected the second SO13 soldier had been a twin of the first.

  If Will, or whoever this figure was, had killed someone then he’d have to hide the body of not only his original victim but also their twin. As far as I knew SO13 soldiers were still twins like everyone else. Kill one of them and you’d kill two of them; something that could come in handy if we got caught in another fight.

  I felt conflicted about the footage. Part of me wanted the golden mask to slip away so I could confirm if this truly was Will. Yet at the same time I hoped this horrific figure, someone who dragged bodies through the streets of London, was nothing to do with my brother.

  “The snatcher is back,” said Jacobi.

  “Back?” I thought to myself. What other things had this man done? The murmurings amongst the other citizens suggested that he had been a concern for quite some time. I wished Grace hadn’t made us miss the start of the briefing.

  “But he’s been sloppy,” Jacobi continued. “Two bodies, both collected over a relatively short time period. At long last we can find him.”

  “How?” asked one of the citizens.

  “It took him 27 minutes to drag the body away before he came back for the second body. That means his base has to be close to the camera location.”

  “You could cover a lot of London in 27 minutes.”

  “Not if you were carrying a body,” Jacobi jumped down from his podium and walked towards a circular table in the centre of the room. Everyone followed him, eager to hear what he had to say. He had a strong presence amongst the crowd.

  On the table sat a map of London covered in black scribbles and notes. Transparent blue circles covered parts of the map including the Houses of Parliament, whilst red coloured circles ran across the entire city border and were also dotted across the city.

  A thick, jagged, black line was drawn across one of the bridges, presumably to indicate it was no longer a safe path. The finality of the line gave me doubt that London would ever be totally repaired. This was a line that could not be washed off. Jacobi’s broken city was beyond saving.

  It must have been horrific for the original citizens of London to see what had become of their homes. Smyth West was not a safe city to live in, but at least I had always seen it that way. I’d never seen the vibrant beauty that had been destroyed before it became the shanty town I called home.

  Yet for Jacobi, the streets he grew up on were always above him; a reminder of what he had lost. Not just the city but the people he had known. No wonder he hid himself underground. Yes it was for his own survival but to me that seemed like more than just physical survival. Perhaps it was the only way he could try to forget his memories of the Siege.

  He took a transparent purple circle from the pile and using a knife from his pocket cut it to size. He placed it on to the map, directly on top of a scribbled drawing of a small rectangle with a circular end and the words “camera”.

  “This is the area he could have covered in the time available,” said Jacobi.

  I looked at the map trying to see anything that stood out; including Buckingham Palace, Victoria Station and St James’s Park. “Could that be the park where I was saved?” I wondered. I looked near to the park on the map and saw the Houses of Parliament were close enough to make it possible.

  Perhaps that was how the snatcher had been able to find two soldiers so easily, grabbing them from the containers in the St James’s Park base. It made me certain that was where the purple hooded man had emerged from at the start of the footage. If I told Jacobi the information it would no doubt help him catch him; but what if it was Will? I couldn’t give up my own brother’s location. Could I?

  “This is where we search,” said Jacobi. “In two days we can cover every building in this location. He won’t have anywhere to hide.”

  I looked down at St James’s Park on the map and drew an imaginary line
in my mind from the park to the camera. From that location it seemed sensible to believe that the purple hooded man had continued walking in a straight line initially and then possibly diverged off. This left around one quarter of the circle remaining as possible places he could be.

  It was enough to convince me that the upper right segment of Jacobi’s circle was the most likely place he would be hiding. I knew information that help Jacobi catch the snatcher.

  And I kept quiet.

  There was no sense in giving away the information just yet. Better that Grace and I scoped out the area before alerting Jacobi. Only when we were sure this man was not Will could we let Jacobi know.

  Jacobi walked through the different segments of the map and what everyone could expect. He explained the most likely locations for SO13 soldiers and set paths that everyone could follow to potentially keep them out of trouble.

  Jacobi was careful not to assign anyone a path that branched through a red coloured circle. This was somewhat troubling as the segment I wanted to explore had more red circles than most. Only one other part of the map had a larger red circle and that was the area around Javon Prison.

  “What about this segment?” I asked, pointing to one of the red circles that intersected with the purple circle of the snatcher’s whereabouts.

  “He’d have to be crazy or close to death to go there,” replied Jacobi. “Those red circles indicate areas that have got a very high quantity of SO13 soldiers cleaning up the Siege signal. If the soldiers don’t kill him then the signal will.”

  I suspected it would be the other way around. If I could survive the signal Will could probably do the same. If Will was the purple hooded man it seemed a good place for him to hide himself away out of reach.

  None of the citizens of Q-Whitehall wanted to go to the red part of the segment; clearly they had not discovered the same tech that Grace had found which enabled anyone to survive small bursts of the signal; the same tech she had given to R&R when we entered the city.

  It dawned on me that Jacobi had yet to return our backpacks to us. Every minute R&R went without their earpieces was more time they could be exposed to the sound wave. Not to mention that they were our only link back to The Deck and to March. If we could get the backpacks returned to us we’d be able to help R&R and maybe March could give me the help I needed.

  “We’ll go into the red zone,” I held my arm up in to the air and Grace did the same.

  Gasps emerged from the crowd.

  “You’ll never survive,” said Jacobi.

  “Then you have nothing to lose by sending us there. But there’s one thing I need you to do for me first.”

  TWENTY NINE

  Jacobi took us to the storage room where he had stashed our bags; an entire room filled with boxes stacked on top of each other, separated by white stone shelves.

  Many of the boxes were locked, royal secrets probably hidden away. Jacobi didn’t divulge their contents and I doubted he could open many of them. On the left side of the room were located larger racks and boxes, which we walked towards.

  Jacobi retrieved a golden pocket watch from his pocket which was connected to a keychain. There were no more than three keys on the chain, a surprisingly small amount for someone in charge of such a locked down facility. Either Jacobi had master keys or the base relied on electric security instead.

  He used one of the keys to open two large boxes and returned our backpacks to us.

  “And the others?” I asked.

  “I will return theirs as well,” he replied.

  I opened the backpack to find it almost entirely empty. “Where is all the food?”

  “I told you when you arrived Emmie, what’s yours is ours. We don’t have secrets here.”

  I rummaged around the pack to try and find my headset but it was missing. “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?”

  Grace tossed her bag to the floor to indicate she too had found nothing.

  “The headset!” I demanded.

  “Oh you mean your outsider technology? We smashed it,” Jacobi smiled, revealing the yellow stains on his chipped teeth.

  My face fell as the thought of speaking to March evaporated. “You smashed it!” I shouted out, and in doing so felt a burst of heat surge across my insides.

  Fearful of the monster I may be about to unleash I backed away. Noticing instantly, Grace moved in front of me and took over the conversation. I moved to the corner of the room and tried to focus my attention elsewhere.

  “Will, R&R, Tom, Chris, Olive, Grace, March, Dad,” I ran through the names of the people who were depending on me to keep it together. It scared me how many ties I had now. That’s not to mention everyone at The Deck and now Q-Whitehall who needed my help. A year ago I had a handful of people I needed to protect and now entire armies were dependant on me. I had to keep it together.

  “Are you insane?” asked Grace.

  “Do you know how long I have survived in this place?” he asked. “Over twenty years. I didn’t last that long by being naive. Your headsets could have contained GPS trackers and revealed our location, so I had my colleagues take them far away from the base and destroy them.”

  Grace looked at him for signs of deception but found none. I could tell she wanted to lose it, that she was tired of playing by Jacobi’s rules, but if she lost it now then my grip on reality would crumble. Neither of us had any choice but to play nice. It was a reminder that we were still prisoners.

  Maybe everyone here was, or perhaps they enjoyed being under his rule. Maybe it was easier to have someone feed and clothe them in return for letting Jacobi control them. Everyone had certainly seemed keen to take on his latest mission, with the exception of a few small children and elderly citizens, almost every man and woman in the base was ready to search the streets above for the purple hooded man.

  “I smashed your friend’s trackers too so don’t even think about looking for them. You have your backpacks now so it’s time for you to go.”

  “Not until you tell us who the snatcher is,” said Grace.

  “I assumed you knew. You two are the ones who want to find him.”

  “We just want to help.”

  “Right,” he seemed suspicious. “He’s been taking our citizens and SO13 soldiers for quite some time. He’s a vigilante who doesn’t seem to pick sides, always taking people away in pairs of twins.”

  “And doing what to them?”

  “No-one knows. We’ve never found anyone once he’s taken them. There are not enough working cameras in the city to follow him all the time. He has to be getting desperate now though; the regeneration efforts are cutting down on his number of hiding places.”

  “So you think he’s only going to get worse?”

  “Yes. The longer we leave him out there the more people he will take. I may have no idea why the hell you two want to find him but you’d better be ready when you do. He’s a killer who doesn’t care who he hurts. If you let him live he’ll kill you in an instant and your twins.”

  Twins. The last word lingered and I realised I’d yet to meet Jacobi’s twin. No one we’d met in the base bore a similar resemblance to him. It seemed odd to me that Jacobi wouldn’t keep his twin close, a man with such a strong sense of self-preservation would surely want to know where his twin was at all times.

  Although, perhaps his twin was in the base after all, maybe locked away somewhere so no-one would find him. That way no-one could use him against Jacobi. I started trying to picture how a twin of Jacobi’s would look so I’d know if I saw him. If his twin was in the base somewhere then we’d have leverage if we found them. Perhaps enough leverage to get Olive and R&R out of here once we found Will.

  “I said you needed to do something for me,” the fire inside of me was starting to wane so I used the opportunity to walk towards Jacobi. Grace stepped aside but her body remained tense, ready to grab me at a moment’s notice.

  “Yes, get your backpacks, which I have done,” he replied.

/>   “No. You didn’t fulfil your bargain, so we need something else.”

  “Forget it,” he turned around and started locking the boxes.

  “Fine,” I shouted. Looking back at Grace I mouthed the words “it’s ok” but she remained ready to stop me if needed. “Then send some of your other colleagues to the red zone. We’ll see how long they last.”

  Jacobi fumbled with the keys. “They will do anything for me. Even die.”

  “And you can live with that? What about Trey and Taylor?” instantly I regretted saying their names.

  He dropped the keys to the floor. “Their death was an accident. A heart attack,” he spoke slowly, trying to find the right words, a sign that their death had registered with him after all. “No one could have helped them.”

  “And you told me it wasn’t my fault. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. Because it wasn’t. It was just an accident.”

  “If you send your people into the red zone it will be no accident. Maybe not today, maybe not this week but one day the exposure they receive in that zone will kill them and it will be your fault that time. They trust you.”

  I will never know if it was those last three words that registered with Jacobi or merely that he felt Grace and I were more expendable than his underground family. He agreed to our request, it was a fairly simple one after all. In return for Grace and I exploring the surface he agreed to send R&R off on a fool’s errand; a simple supply mission to take food from the storage area to each person’s room.

  Despite the knowledge that my friends would be doing nothing more than servant’s work whilst we were gone I didn’t feel the sense of security that I had hoped for. Although we had kept them safe we’d also shown to Jacobi that we cared deeply for R&R and that could mean their lives were in more danger than ever.

  THIRTY

  “We’ll come with you,” said Rex as we stood by the south west exit of the base. “Whatever it takes.”