by Steven James
I’ve been taking TaeKwonDo for three years, but I’m only a brown belt. Besides, I’m weaponless; he has a knife and a big size advantage. Still, I’ve spent a lot of time sparring and I can take care of myself pretty well in a fight.
However, I’ve never fought an armed assailant.
And I’ve never sparred in a space this small.
Though mostly shadowed, the look on Charlene’s face tells me that she has noticed the knife as well. She is fingering the cross she wears around her neck.
I rest my hand on her shoulder to try to reassure her, to tell her without words that things are going to be okay.
A tiny nod, then her hand goes on top of mine.
The intruder types for a few moments. The color of the monitor’s glow changes, becomes brighter and white, and I guess that he has moved past the desktop to some specific program or file.
As the moments pass I’m caught up again thinking about the tight quarters, and I don’t know how long I can stand being in here.
Based on what I’ve seen, people who’ve never experienced claustrophobia have no idea how desperate and frantic it makes you feel, when—
It’s all about your breathing.
Calm. Stay calm.
I breathe, yes, I do, but it’s not calm breathing at all.
Trying to distract myself, I think of the escapes I’ve done, all the closed-in spaces I’ve been in and how I’ve survived them—sealed tanks filled with icy water, the coffin I was buried alive in for two days, the controversial million-dollar bet I accepted from a TV psychic I’d debunked. He challenged me to an escape even I couldn’t have come up with on my own: I was put in a straitjacket, locked in a trunk with a parachute beside me, then dropped from a plane at 22,000 feet.
To give the chute enough time to open, I only had ninety-one seconds to get out of the straitjacket, strapped into the chute, and out of the trunk. It hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea at the time, but free-falling made it a lot harder to get out of the jacket than I expected, and then when I popped open the trunk, I didn’t quite have the chute buckled and almost lost hold of it.
But I made it down safely and took home the million dollars.
And I had to admit that the adrenaline rush was something else.
You did that, you can at least stand being in here for a few more minutes.
But then the chair squeaks, alerting me again to where I am, and I see the saber of light from the flashlight swing around the room.
Toward the chamber.
The man’s footsteps follow it.
My heart is beating.
Beating.
I grip my flashlight, which really is too small to serve as much of a weapon. “Get back,” I tell Charlene softly. She steps backward.
The man aims his light at the crack.
And then the door to the Faraday cage flies open.
Blood
It happens all at once, in a swirl of light and shadow and movement, blurred and swift.
I flick on my flashlight and shine it into the eyes of whoever opened the door, hoping to momentarily blind him, perhaps give us a chance to push past him and escape, but he’s quick and knocks it away. The flashlight goes spinning around the chamber, clattering to the floor.
Whipping, twisting shafts of light.
Dizzying in the darkness.
Directing his own flashlight into my eyes, he slashes the knife toward me, and as I avoid the blade he swipes it at Charlene.
She jerks backward but is too slow, and the knife slices through the sleeve of her shirt.
She gasps.
I see blood. The cut is deep. It’s in her left forearm.
I go at the man, who’s now in the chamber with us, and instinct and three years of TaeKwonDo sparring take over. I use an inner forearm block to knock his knife hand to the side. Then, despite the close quarters, I’m able to land a fierce front kick to his thigh. I aim a punch at his throat, but he’s able to partially block it.
He feints at me, then swishes the blade in a figure-eight pattern in the air.
But he’s holding the knife in his right hand, which is good for me because I’m on his right side. I avoid the blade, almost manage to trap his wrist. He expertly flips the knife around and raises it to bring it down toward my chest.
An ice-pick grip.
Bad idea.
I step forward, wrists crossed, and snap them up against his forearm to keep him from bringing the knife down, then I move toward him as I twist my right hand, grasp his wrist, and swing the knife he’s still holding down, fast and hard, toward his leg.
The blade must be sharp, because it goes in smooth and quick and deep, not to the hilt, but far enough to do some serious damage.
Amazingly, he doesn’t back off, only lets out a small grunt of pain. He holds his ground, levels his flashlight at me, and with the other hand grabs the hilt of the knife and pries the blade, dripping wet with his blood, out of his thigh. “Do not move.” A coarse, low whisper.
This guy is either unbelievably tough or on drugs, or somehow the adrenaline was blocking the pain, because his voice remains slow and measured.
Still I cannot see his face.
My arm is hidden in shadows, and I pocket the item I took from him when I brushed my hand across his arm. Sleight of hand. I did it without even thinking. My heart is churning, my breathing fast. He didn’t see. He didn’t notice.
My TaeKwonDo instructor’s words flash through my mind: “A tense muscle is a weak muscle.”
I know that from my escapes as well.
Relax. Relax.
But I can’t seem to. Charlene is here and this guy just cut her and I wasn’t about to let him get close to her again. My fists are tight, my stance ready, my muscles tense and flexed. It’s not ideal, but it’s not an easy time for a tai chi state of mind.
I could make a move, but if something happened to me, I couldn’t imagine what he would do to Charlene.
I edge in front of her.
Relax.
Relax and respond.
A wire-tight silence stretches through the air.
He backs up a little, but Charlene and I are still trapped in the chamber. She’s pressing her right hand against the wound to stop the bleeding.
I’m about to ask if she’s okay, but before I can the man speaks, keeping his voice in the gravelly whisper. “Who are you?” I say nothing. He swings his light toward my face. “Tell me who you are and who sent you.”
I blink against the brightness. Don’t reply.
“You tell me”—now his voice is ice—“or I will kill you both. Right where you stand. Do you understand me? Who sent you?”
He might have more weapons, a gun.
Based on the size and type of the knife he brought with him, I take the guy seriously. I search for what to say.
Think, Jevin, think—
“Who sent you?” He tightens his grip on the knife and tilts the blade first toward me, then toward Charlene.
I have an idea, go with my gut.
“RixoTray,” I tell him. “To verify everything.”
He keeps his flashlight directed at us. “RixoTray,” he repeats softly, but it doesn’t sound like a question and he doesn’t ask me to elaborate.
Okay, don’t let him ask a following question. Please don’t let him ask a follow-up question.
All I can think of is helping Charlene. I don’t want to fight this man, but in a rush of emotion I find myself wondering how far I would go to defend her if he came at us again. Would I die for her? Would I be able to kill for her?
Yes to the first. I wasn’t sure about the second.
And thankfully, I don’t have to answer it, because finally, without another word, our attacker backs slowly through the room and disappears out the door to the hallway.
I hurry to Charlene’s side. “Are you alright?”
She’s still holding her hand against her wounded arm. Her sleeve is soaked in blood.
“I’m fine.”
>
“Let me see.”
“No, Jevin. It’s okay.”
I lay my hand softly on her shoulder. “Charlene. Let me see.”
Gingerly, she lifts her hand, revealing a dark, bleeding gash over four inches long, visible through the slit fabric.
Not good.
She quickly puts her hand back on her arm.
“Here.” I take off my belt, wrap it around her arm, and carefully cinch it off, not as a tourniquet, but snug enough to serve as a pressure bandage, to slow the bleeding. “We need to get you to a hospital; you’re going to need stitches.”
“We have that test tomorrow.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Jev, a man just tried to kill us. This is no longer just about some kind of ESP test. We need to find out what else is going on here, and we’re not going to be able to do that from a hospital room. I’ll be okay, we’ll just bandage it up. I saw a first-aid kit in the bathroom at the cabin.”
She knew first aid, had to, working as my assistant. CPR too. She was the one who’d brought me back after the water escapes I didn’t quite succeed at. I figure she should be able to evaluate how serious the cut is.
But still—
Argue with her later. Just get her out of here.
“Okay, come on.” I help her to her feet.
“You stepped in front of me, Jevin. I saw that. Thank you.”
“Sure.”
“Where did all that come from, by the way?”
“All what?”
“Those moves. How you swung the knife down into his leg? I’ve never seen you do anything like that before.”
I’ve never had to.
“I guess those Bruce Lee movies are paying off.”
“I guess they are.”
Gently, I lead her out of the chamber and into the room. I’m not certain if she needs me to or not, but I support her with one hand under her armpit. She doesn’t pull away.
Before we head to the hallway, she insists that we check the computer to see what the guy might’ve been accessing. “Go on. I’ll be okay.”
Though I want to keep moving, I tap the keyboard and wake up the screen, only to find that the computer is password protected. As Fionna had pointed out to me more than once, you hack a site, you hash a password. I had no doubt she could hash this one in seconds, but it might take me hours.
Obviously there was no time for that.
Did the guy hash it, or did he already know the password?
It was impossible to know.
“Let’s get out of here, Charlene. Get back to the cabin and take care of that arm.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
A voice in my head: That guy might not have been alone. Watch out in the hall. Edging open the door, I tip the light quickly in both directions. After making sure the coast is clear, we head in the opposite direction from the spotty blood trail our assailant left behind.
Unfortunately, even though Charlene has her wound covered, we leave our own sporadic trail of blood as we go, and I wonder what kind of suspicions it might raise in the minds of whoever would be cleaning this floor tomorrow, but—
She whispers to me, “What made you think to say RixoTray when he asked you who sent us?”
“Follow the money.” We reach the stairwell, cautiously start down the steps. “Where there’s a twenty-million-dollar investment, there’s a lot at stake. Behind every dollar sign there’s an agenda. RixoTray has a dog in the hunt, and I took a stab that our guy would know that.”
“A stab.”
“Bad choice of words.”
Obviously, Charlene knew that our shows in Las Vegas and Atlantic City were by no means financial failures and money wasn’t a big concern for me. Over the years I’ve made some sizable investments, and I always keep an eye on them. After all, unless your income is in the stratosphere, you don’t throw millions of dollars, or in this case, tens of millions, into a project and then fail to monitor its performance—even if that means doing so in unorthodox ways.
We reach the lower level, the other end of the hall from where we first entered.
“But Jev”—she’s been thinking about what I said—“it’s just as likely that he was sent by a competitor to find out what the research was about. In fact, that might even be more likely.”
Hmm. “True. Come to think of it, all he did was repeat ‘RixoTray’ when I told him they’d sent us. He could’ve just been muttering that because it gave him information he didn’t already have.”
“Exactly.”
Near the exit I see a small waiting area with six chairs and an end table just outside a door with Dr. Tanbyrn’s name on it. We quietly leave the building and pick our way through the woods until we reconnect with the trail that leads toward our cabin.
I’m worried about her arm, about nerve damage, but I’m also thinking about our assailant, wondering who he might’ve been, what he was looking for.
And why he’d brought a knife like that along with him into the building.
Wound for Wound
Riah and Cyrus finished passing through the last of the three security checkpoints to RixoTray’s R&D facility.
An ultramodern fortress of steel and glass, the building was surrounded by razor-wire fence, a myriad of electric sensors, even a fifteen-foot-deep moat that was made to look like an innocuous, landscaped stream.
This was where RixoTray researched the effects of its experimental drugs and developed new strategies for pushing out pharmaceutical products faster than their competitors. It was here where their biggest secrets were kept, here where they coordinated placebo tests for their drug trials, and here where they were close to a breakthrough in developing a commercially available telomerase enzyme to reverse the effects of aging.
In this building, tens of billions of dollars could be generated by a single discovery or lost by a single miscalculation.
Cyrus strode beside Riah through the main corridor on the east wing. The hallway was high-ceilinged and bright, with pictures of scientists and plaques of patents decorating the walls. The conference area they were heading toward was at the end of the hall, next to the renovated research rooms that served as a two-bedroom office apartment for the twins when they were in town.
It was just down the hall from Riah’s lab. She was involved with electrical brain stimulation, specifically deep-brain stimulation (DBS), which had most often been used for treating people with Parkinson’s disease, although it had also been used to help people manage obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and even the symptoms of epilepsy and Alzheimer’s.
Primarily she used an EEG to scan specific areas of the brain involved in speech production, then, by identifying the sounds or syllables those brain waves represented, she was working toward translating those signals into actual audible messages.
A pair of guards stood sentry at the terminus of the hallway.
“We’re here to see Daniel and Darren,” Cyrus told them.
The broad-shouldered, shorter man nodded. He tapped his fingers subconsciously together, which Riah took to be a sign of nervousness. She wasn’t surprised. When people close to the project found out what the twins had done, uneasiness was the natural reaction. Especially if you were going to be alone in a room with them. “Okay, sir. Yes. I’ll get them.”
He left, and as she and Cyrus waited for the twins to arrive, she found herself reviewing what she knew about them.
The best way to describe the two brothers was that they were practitioners of death—apparently two of the most effective ones the Army’s Delta Force had ever trained.
As identical twins, Daniel and Darren shared something fundamental that so many twins share—the ability to communicate on a seemingly subconscious level in ways that defy typical categorizations. Of course, since she was the principal investigator on the team, part of Riah’s job was to find out what those ways were.
According to the information she was privy to, the twins had been born to a teenage girl who�
��d been raped and decided to give her sons up for adoption rather than abort them.
Because of a clerical error, Daniel and Darren were separated at birth, adopted by different families, and raised separately in New Jersey and South Carolina, respectively. They never met until they were in their twenties, yet the similarities between their lives were striking.
They both lettered in soccer and wrestling in high school, both had girlfriends named Julie with whom they had their first sexual encounter, both tinkered with cars in their spare time, both worked in fast-food restaurants—not unusual for teenage guys, but both were fired for spitting on the hamburger bun of a female patron. Who was wearing a blue dress.
Yes, a blue dress.
The stories were astonishing, and when Riah first heard them, she’d thought they were manufactured to create a sense of awe or amazement at the two men. Or even that they were simply an honest mistake, an inadvertent misrepresentation of the facts, but after reading more identical twin studies—some dating back to the nineteenth century—she’d found herself believing the seeming inscrutable coincidences between Darren’s and Daniel’s lives. In truth, the similarities weren’t nearly as incomprehensible as many of those found in the rest of the literature.
Both Daniel and Darren joined the Army.
Which is where they met.
A colonel visiting Fort Bragg saw Darren at the shooting range and mistook him for a soldier he’d seen the previous day at Fort Benning. After some inquiries and a bit of deciphering, Colonel Derek Byrne made the serendipitous connection. Some people might call it chance. Or fate. Or coincidence. Cyrus once told Riah it had to do with quantum entanglement, but whatever the reason, the colonel was able to reunite the two brothers.
They both made it onto the Delta Force and eventually moved into the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command.
Some people think that the CIA is responsible for the majority of the United States’ political assassinations carried out abroad, but over the last few months, Riah had found out that those people are wrong.
After a little research of her own and some frank and astonishingly forthcoming conversations with the twins, she’d learned that the military’s covert operatives were happy to work in the shadow of the CIA and let the spooks take the brunt of the media’s scrutiny and Hollywood’s ever-watchful eye.