by Ana Calin
“Oh, you were always an attractive girl. It’s just that you looked so . . . fresh, most men thought you were still underage. Your fellow students are too young to appreciate the type. They’re intrigued by the mature, well versed women. But Novac saw the goddess in you from the beginning.” He turned around and walked along the windows.
“He watched you on campus. You were the only woman to have ever caught his attention, actually, as strange as that sounds. At first I accredited his interest to the fact that you were Preda’s daughter – since it had been Dr. Preda who’d infiltrated him on campus with the mission of protecting you in the first place – but it soon became obvious that he found pleasure in the sight of you. Especially after that night at the dorms, when you spent half an hour together in the bathroom. Which was very inconsiderate, by the way. Yes, I was there, too, observing. Since that night something changed in Novac’s entire body language. His eyes glinted in a special way as he glanced around for you, and his interest grew by the day. It was a shock even to me. In six years I’d never seen a spark in those dead eyes of his. Well, except in the depths of his studies – the science of man fascinates him, as it does any psycho.”
He turned to me, dark eyes sharp as he marked the heavy. “Novac is a genetically engineered killing machine with little trace of humanity left, but somehow you managed to reawaken the man in him.”
My heart jumped. Hector grinned.
“I didn’t say anything at the hospital because I wasn’t sure,” he said. “But now I have no doubt. After that night at the party, Novac finally began acting like a man and not a thing immune to all cravings like a Terminator. After he met you I could read feeling in his face, in his moves, in every twitch of his facial muscles. Back in the mountains it was obvious that wanted to rip your clothes off.”
I looked away from him, out the window to my own reflection. The fuzzy face was flushed, chest rising and falling fast as I breathed. The scenario Hector’s words put in my head . . . Damian between my legs, moaning and slamming into me, hands clenched on the edge of the bunk above my head, veins showing between his arm muscles.
“Damian’s shrewd,” I said, making an effort to control my breathing and my voice. “Calculated. Maybe this is a strategy of his to manipulate me more easily.”
“I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the case. But you can and must use his feelings to manipulate him.”
Hector and I looked at each other at the same time, and I knew this was it. This was the point where he’d tell me why I was here.
“Alice, the R.I.S. desperately needs your cooperation. Lives depend on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Damian Novac is an engineered killer with friends in high places, and he’s planning a bloodbath. Our only chance to stop it is to use his only weakness against him – to use you.”
I clenched my jaw, my eyes burning with the need to slap him. “This is outrageous! You’re a freaking trained R.I.S. agent, you have the entire Intelligence Service and the entire police force at your disposal, and you’re putting this on my shoulders?”
“Listen, Alice. Novac is an extremely dangerous creature, and he’s got the support of entities so powerful you can’t begin to imagine. None of my agents can get anywhere near him, no one can. The only one who can is you. You he welcomes in his proximity, he seeks your closeness. He stalks your house, and he’s got someone there whenever business keeps him away. That’s why Officer Sorescu had to create the illusion that you were safe in your home this evening, knock you out with chloroform – I know, old school, but still highly efficient – and sneak out through the back door after the rest of my men baited Novac’s minions away.”
Blood thumped in my ears. Damian is stalking me. Hector came really close, clasping my shoulders.
“Alice, listen.” He took a deep breath, his gaze darkening and locking on mine. “The Executioner is planning a bloodbath at the Marquette on Saturday night.”
I threw my head back, squinting at Hector as if that could help make sense of what he was saying.
“BioDhrome holds a nucleus meeting with their most important members once every ten years,” he continued, “and Saturday is when the next grand event takes place. A chance the Executioner and the Order of Lords have been waiting for since forever, and a chance they’ll take to wipe them all out. Novac will order the doors closed at midnight, and he and his minions will massacre everybody at the club – including innocent people, since protocol says everybody might be working with BioDhrome.”
“But, if the R.I.S. knows . . . there must be some way for you to stop this!”
He shook his head. “The Order of Lords is much too powerful. The only person who can stop this is you – if you’re at the club on Saturday, Novac will desist. He’ll call off the operation.”
I refused to believe Damian capable of such a monstrous thing. “This can’t be. I can’t – Damian would never –”
“Don’t be a fool, Alice. With you, Novac is showing only his best side, but he is, in truth, a monster. I guarantee that you won’t be in the slightest danger if you help us. Novac would never hurt you or the people you care about, so Miss Ignat, George Voinescu, everybody who means something to you will never have anything to fear from him either. But don’t confront him about his plans for Saturday, because that would give him the chance to find a way and keep you from the whole thing. Innocent people will die, and no one will be able to stop it from happening. Your presence there must be a surprise to him. Saturday will be the only night he won’t have your house under surveillance because he needs all of his men at the Marquette, so you’ll be able to move as you please.”
The dying Wretch, blood gurgling out of his mouth, stabbed my brain. It’s happening again. “What do I have to do?”
“Make him jealous and get him out of there.”
Say what? I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Go to the club with a group of friends, flirt with one of the boys. It’ll get Novac to grab you and storm out, leaving his commando position. His minions won’t do anything unless ordered by him, so the whole thing will be disarmed. You could use that young man whom you were supposed to marry not long ago. Mr. Anghel. He follows you around like a slobbering dog lately. He’s moldable like clay in your hands.”
“Yeah, seems I suddenly have a fan club,” I sneered.
“BioDhrome’s gas works wonders on the pheromones. Imagine everything they’d had time to do with Novac during the year they had him.”
“I wish I didn’t have to imagine. I wish I knew exactly.”
“Dr. Nathaniel Sinclair’s books describe much of the upgrading process. Thank you for having led us to them, by the way, they are crucial for our purposes.”
I shook my head, the abrupt turn in the direction of this discussion making my neurons a bit dizzy. “All right, you’re losing me. How do you even know about the books?”
“I’ll be direct and clear with you, Alice. You’re our villain’s love interest, so we follow your every move.”
“Can I still count on privacy in the ladies’ room?” I spat.
Hector looked amused for a change. “We don’t have cameras installed in your house, if that’s what you’re asking. Your mother or your friend, Miss Ignat, would’ve surely sniffed them.”
“And in what way are those books valuable to you?”
“You still ask? They hold key information on how creatures like Novac are made. The content of those books is so precious it should never reach the world at large. Believe it or not, the underground archives at the county library were a perfect hideout.”
“Hector, you won’t get a formula in those pages. They’re made to elude mediocre intellects.”
He caught the insult, but bridged over it with a grin. “Of that I have no doubt. We’ve retrieved the books to send them to our professionals. They’ll work out a way of undoing what BioDhrome has done with Damian Novac. We’ll humanize him again. That’s our ultimate goal.”
A chill ran down my spine. “What would you do that for? I mean, what would be the use of re-humanizing him?”
“What would be the use?” He snorted as if I didn’t see some obvious truth. “The man is a genetically engineered Terminator, Alice. His body is steel-strong, his reflexes snake-swift and his mind blade-sharp. Not even a whole squad of our best men can take him down and, believe me, that’s no exaggeration. If we want to ever defeat him and others of his kind, we have to weaken them. You want a clear picture of what Novac is?” He walked away from me and around the room, his tone that of an actor taking the stage.
“Years ago, BioDhrome used him alone against a military squad sent for their people at a manor in the Carpathians. The place was heavily guarded, men with guns and all. Cruel mercenaries, but human mercenaries, vulnerable to bullets and blades. Our team took them down and penetrated the premises only to find a boy standing in the middle of the great hall with a dagger in each hand.
“The squad knew who he was. The Executioner. He was only sixteen at the time, but he’d already made a name for himself as a hitman, with only the highest-ranked assassins in the Far East as his equals. He already had a portfolio of fifty hits with deadly outcome. Fifty. Our squad was the fifty-first. They were twelve, and only one survived to tell the tale.
“I see this affects you. Good. Wanna know exactly how he took down the entire squad, and what his code name – the Executioner – means? Yes? As soon as they pointed their guns at him – the Executioner was to be shot on sight and not given the chance to fight – he kicked open a hatch under his feet and disappeared through it.
“The only survivor said the boy killer was faster than a cobra. He hunted down the squad one by one and sliced them into ribbons of flesh. The man could hear his comrades’ screams echoing through the manor, and later stumbled over their bodies in hidden corners and behind creaking doors. It was a horrific experience, Alice, as you may imagine.
“When the Executioner finally got to the survivor, the first thing he did was cause him to drop his weapon by breaking his arm. Screaming in pain, the survivor sent a punch with his good hand toward the Executioner, but his fist smashed into a shoulder as hard as concrete. His knuckles cracked, making him collapse in agony. The last thing he remembered before he blacked out was the impact of a punch to his face. The Executioner left the man alive to tell the tale and further his myth, since that’s how he got his reputation – by always keeping a witness alive. BioDhrome scared people into loyalty with that technique.
“Damian Novac is a villain, Alice. BioDhrome manipulated his DNA and turned him into that. Their exact methods are still unknown, but Sinclair’s books will help us begin to understand. We’re still decades away from engineering our own super soldiers to counter BioDhrome’s and the Order’s, but we’ll be able to at least weaken them.”
Hector’s words resounded inside my head. Genetically engineered Terminator, fifty kills.
“The survivor you told me about,” I breathed, “Maybe he noticed some kind of weakness, no matter how small. Did you talk to him personally?”
Hector’s eyes darkened even more, hidden deep under his thick eyebrows. “I did.”
“Can I meet him?”
“Why?”
“I think I know what to ask. How to put the matter.”
“Then go ahead.”
“What?”
“Go ahead and ask, because you’re looking at him.”
“But . . . How come? He would’ve recognized you!”
“I was wearing a face mask that night, like the entire squad, and under it my face was painted army green. Anyway, Novac never bothered to remove the mask. The rescue team found me with it on.”
He was surely wrong. That must’ve been how Damian had always known that Hector was an undercover agent. I chose to keep that conclusion to myself, though.
“Jesus, Hector, that’s . . . that’s . . .”
“Yes. And trust me, before he met you, this monster didn’t have any weaknesses at all. I’ve spent years looking for one. I made a life purpose of getting the Executioner and putting him behind bars that would be able to keep him there – no metal can restrain him, so we’ll only be able to lock him up when he’s human again.”
“But, if BioDhrome made of him what he is, it’s not his fault, Hector.”
“He has his share of guilt for his destiny. He proved such good raw material, that after less than a year among BioDhrome’s killers he became part of the Cleric – the highest ranked assassins in the world. Do you realize what this means? We cannot fight these creatures as what we are, simple men, no matter if we’re the police, the R.I.S., Marines or Seals. We don’t stand a chance. Our only hope is to strip them of their powers.”
Hector looked around, as if searching for a place to sit down. Or, judging by what he said next, a place where he could invite me to take a seat before this new blast would knock me off my feet.
“A few months after my squad was murdered in the Carpathians, your father returned from his lodge in the mountains in the company of none other than the Executioner.”
The veins in my head threatened to explode. “What? How? Where did that come from?”
“Hear me out,” Hector said, eyes on me. “Novac had been sent to Dr. Preda’s lodge to either persuade him to join BioDhrome or wipe him out. Yes, the Executioner had been assigned to either recruit or execute your father, Alice. But, by some miraculous method that still remains a mystery to this day, Dr. Preda managed to reason with him.”
“Are you saying my dad was the ranger in the mountains, the one Damian barged in on?”
“Your father was there for experiments that could only be carried out in isolation, so he chose the Carpathian woods. The word ‘ranger’ was Marius Iordache’s choice because he didn’t know who the person who’d found Novac was. He could’ve found out the truth had he tried harder, but I guess he was more interested in the sensational headlines of organ trafficking and illegal experimentation. Anyway, fact is Dr. Preda got Novac to switch sides, and join the Order of Lords.
“Soon Novac started working with your father in Constanța. He was your father’s protector, but also his partner in research, all on behalf of an organization more powerful than any you’ve ever heard of.”
“Come on, Hector,” I burst out, throwing my arms in the air. “There must be some way for the defense structures in this country to stop the Executioner.”
Hector snorted. “Those who could do something are on the Executioner’s side, Alice. They helped organize the bloodbath on Saturday. Now you understand why no one can do anything about it besides you?”
My head swam. I raised my eyebrows as if that could help understand things better. “Say what?”
Hector exhaled and put his hands in his pockets. “Listen. A few days ago, the Minister of Defense himself came to Constanța to have a one-to-one meeting with Damian Novac about the threat of BioDhrome. He authorized the massacre, Alice, and he authorized the collateral damage. And this very room is where they met. Hard to believe, isn’t it? You look around and see nothing but an empty space, stripped even of the wallpaper. You know why? Because they had to erase every trace of that meeting. To erase every trace of Novac’s DNA in a Ministry-owned space. One day they’ll erase all proof of his existence because he is a classified project in himself that mankind is never supposed to learn about. He’s goddamn superhuman.”
Hector stopped, looking out the window, lost in his own reflection. My ears buzzed in the silence. The load of information hung heavy in my head.
“You, Alice, you’re our only hope at this point,” he said. “You can manipulate him and, yes, that’s what we expect you to do. You reawakened the man in him. The cold-blooded killer now has a weakness. Alice, if necessity demands it, we expect you to go all the way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know it’s a lot to ask.” He tried for a warmer, maybe even more compassionate tone. “You know there is blood o
n his hands. Hell, you now know that he’s not even entirely human. But if you refuse to do this, Alice, many innocent people will die.”
“Hector, what you ask . . . this is huge.”
“If knowing that Damian Novac is an Executioner, an engineered superhuman that will kill dozens of innocent people in a bloodbath isn’t incentive enough,” he said gravely, coming closer to make a point, “then maybe this is: I’ve gathered enough on your father to put him away for a very long time, because he works with the same assholes as Novac. But your father isn’t exactly young anymore, and he could end his days in prison, Alice. Do you realize what that would mean for him?”
I bit my lip, thinking of the ramifications.
“But if you help us, I promise I’ll forget all about him.”
Chapter Fifteen
Sorescu drove me home in silence, while I stared out the window, sunken into my own agonizing thoughts. The Executioner hadn’t mended his ways by switching sides, but merely adjusted them. There was blood on his hands, and more yet to be spilled.
Tears pooled in my eyes as I entered the back door. It was one o’clock in the morning when I tiptoed through the antechamber to my own room, where Leona waited in the rocking chair, a laptop on her knees.
She looked at me with a guilty face. I had a feeling she knew about my meeting with Hector, and that she’d helped to orchestrate it. I didn’t say anything, but sat on the edge of the bed, facing her and the nightly window in tears.
“I did some research on this Dr. Sinclair,” Leona said, her introduction careful and soft. “For some reason it wasn’t easy to find information, even though he’s some personality.”
When I failed to ask for details, still staring out the window, she continued.
“In short, he initiated the theory that people can be perfected. And he proved it. During the first years he did in-depth research on what he called nuclein. He’d adopted the term from Dr. Miescher. It’s basically what modern science calls DNA. He also investigated how to manipulate genes to turn humans into the best versions of themselves. And you know what the most shocking part is?” She paused and stared at me to make a point. “This was happening in 1885. I mean, think about it, DNA was officially discovered – or coined – in the 1950s by Francis Crick and James Watson.”