by Ric Beard
Plans change.
The room was furnished lavishly, decorated in soft, relaxing colors and had a stocked auto bar and plush seating. But the smell was aged, like it hadn’t been cleaned or vacuumed in some time.
“What is this?”
“It’s the safe room. It’s also a bomb shelter.”
“How did you know?”
“It is my job to know.”
“How was my palm print programmed in the door?”
“You’re full of questions today,” she said, placing a hand on Mikael’s shoulder. “It wasn’t programmed until you put your palm on it.” She smiled at her mentor. “Please sit and relax. I’m going to step outside and talk to the men.”
Mikael formed a crooked smile. “I have always wondered at you, solnyshko.”
Lexi smiled. She knew the Russian term. It meant “little sun.” She felt warmed by the sight of his slightly wrinkled face, warm disposition, and the term of endearment.
“Go ahead, Lexi,” Kara said, sliding into the seat next to her husband and placing a hand on his knee. “We’ll be fine.” She displayed her perfectly aligned teeth.
Mikael’s Tab beeped as Lexi approached the door.
She stepped into the hallway and left her heel in the crack of the door, so it wouldn’t close on her. She talked to the smaller of the two men, the one with gray in a streak above his ears. The fact that he didn’t dye it was refreshing.
“Go upstairs and get an update on the enemy’s location. If they’re still deep in the safe zone, we’re going to get him moved to the estate, out of combat range. They could battle inside the city for three days and never know the estate was in those woods.”
“You got it.” The two of them jogged away, back toward the elevators.
Lexi turned back into the shelter and waited just inside the door. Mikael was standing in the opposite corner of the large room, facing the wall. She couldn’t make out what he was saying.
After a few minutes, Mikael tapped his Tab, dropped it into his suit pocket and turned to her.
“Lexi, my love, please sit.” He gestured toward the chair across from the sofa. She slowly lowered herself into the seat, noting that the salve was doing its job on the bruises. She almost felt normal. Mikael slowly eased down onto the sofa across from her, his eyes set on her. “You’re troubled. I can see it.”
“I can handle it,” Lexi said, forcing confidence into her voice.
“I’ve just spoken to my son. He has come clean, and I have to admit I’m a bit disturbed.” The Russian he usually hid so well was accenting his words now. If Lexi knew anything from the display of his accent, it was that he was telling the truth. Mikael was disturbed.
She could almost see an ominous cloud forming over her head.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Deeply.”
Kara sat with her head swiveling back and forth between them, a look of confusion holding steady in her features.
“How so?” Lexi asked.
“Lexi,” he said with a disappointed tone. He spoke with his hands, pleading. “Let’s this once speak honestly as the enemy knocks at our gates, and so much depends on our cooperation with one another. Can we do that?”
“Of course, Mikael.” But she had no confidence they could do that. What had Blake told him?
“Tell me, how old were you when your parents died?”
The question caught her off guard. She worked her back teeth together, trying to fashion a theory about where he could be going with this.
“I was thirteen.”
“Very sad. They died violently.”
She started to answer but then realized it wasn’t a question.
“An explosion in their research lab.”
Shock rushed through her brain and body. How could Mikael know this? Had he accessed the archives and found some kind of information related to her stint in the foster system? A newspaper article?
“What? They—”
He held up a hand. “Miranda, I know what happened to your parents.”
Lexi’s breath stopped in her chest. Her throat closed. The world went silent and her ears began to thump.
Miranda?
A fiery image of the window-shattering explosion that blew out all the windows on the top floor of her parents’ lab as she sat across the parking lot with her brother bounced into her mind, complete with a near-perfect recollection of the sound and the associated shockwave that had knocked them backward.
Her breath returned and she began to speak, but it came out as a croak. She cleared her throat.
“What did you just say?” she asked.
“I am an old man, Miranda.”
“Why are you calling me that?” she demanded, her voice rising in volume.
“Because it is your name. May I show you something?” He didn’t wait for a response. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his Tab. He tapped and swiped.
Her Tab beeped.
She fumbled it from her holster and looked at the display. There was, of course, a message from Mikael. She tapped it, and a slideshow appeared. There was a thin girl, probably tall for her age, with red hair, standing outside a brick building next to a boy with dark hair. The boy was a head taller, but awkward.
Her eyes filled with tears.
She swiped.
The same girl, a different boy of the same height, his arm around her as they stood beneath a green awning before two coffins draped in flowers. Lucian.
She swiped.
The same girl, a book bag flung over one shoulder, walking out of a small house with an Asian man in the lead. Her foster father, Miko.
The tears escaped her eyes and began to roll down her face.
She swiped.
A young man, standing in a courtroom, wearing a tan jump suit, hands restrained behind his back. The back of a red-haired girl sitting in the front row. The same Asian man with jet black hair sitting next to her.
She wiped tears away with the padded sleeve of her combat suit as she continued to stare at the Tab.
The redhead, a view from outside a window. She was older, her feminine curves apparent, her leg raised high in the air kicking a pad held high by the shorter, Asian man.
She cried.
She swiped.
She swiped again. Again. Again.
She raised her head. Mikael was sitting upright on the sofa, his arms resting on his knees, his fingers interlocked in front of him. His eyes glassy, the corners of his mouth relaxed into a full frown. She looked into his eyes. What did she see? Pity?
“I have to tell you the truth now, Alexia. Circumstances demand it. I had planned on telling you when your time in Triangle City inevitably came to an end, anyway. Something tells me this is that time.”
“Tell her,” Kara said. “And stop dancing.” She stood and walked over to the minibar.
Lexi was no longer inside her body. She was outside watching as the redhead in the black body suit yanked the pistol from its holster and leveled it on the old man across from her.
Part Twenty
Triangle City
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Nuh-uh!
Thousands of times she’d yanked that pistol out of that holster at the range. Never had it shaken so. She thought she would either drop the weapon or fire it. She had no idea which. The old man did not respond; he was perfectly still, his arms on his knees, his fingers interlocked.
“I see you have it, then,” Mikael said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lexi asked. She heard the voice as if she were in her childhood home with William standing on the other side of the closet door as they played hide and seek. Hearing William say that he knows this is where she likes to hide. Young Miranda saying, ‘Nuh-uh!” in response and covering her mouth in embarrassment. “Answer me!”
But she knew. Lexi—Miranda, in another life—wanted him to convince her she was wrong.
“I helped to fund the research at the facility. I was an investor for many
enterprises. Theirs was promising. Of course, I thought they were simply doing plant research, at first. But I dug deeper. It was my way to investigate the companies I planned to invest in, and theirs was no different.”
“So, you had a man on the inside,” she said, looking down the barrel of the pistol wavering in her hands. She flicked the setting to high. Kara dropped her glass, and it shattered.
“I was a horrible man,” Mikael said, looking down into his lap.
The gun started to stabilize in her hand. Mikael glanced at it, but he turned his tired eyes back to her and continued.
“When I learned that your cells were replicating at an accelerated rate, cuts and scratches on your body healing in half the usual time, I knew that your parents were onto something. I knew they’d made a most significant discovery.”
Lexi pressed two fingers into the bruise on her face, knowing it would heal in a couple days.
“So, you killed them for it.” It wasn’t a question.
He held up one finger. “I participated. I received treatments. I was not a good man in the old world, solnyshko.”
“You have got a lot of nerve, calling me that! Especially now!”
If she’d discovered her parents’ killer was anyone else in the world, she would have pulled the trigger by now. If it had been anyone else, that person would be a mess on the sofa across from her. Her finger itched to release the weapon’s energy.
“I am sorry.”
She stared at him, feeling her lip quivering and hating him for it.
“Wait. How fucking old are you, Mikael?”
“I am 143 years old.”
“How did you know I was here? How did you know I’d survived? What have we been doing?”
“That’s an interesting story,” he said. “One that I obviously couldn’t have told you before today. I have told you the story of how I came to be here, how I lived in the townships along the east coast, struggled with my fellow man to survive.”
“You make it sound epic,” she choked as more tears rolled over her bruises and down her disgruntled face.
“That was not my intent. When I bought JenCorp, I invested in facial recognition technology.”
“That’s not new information.”
“Well, as you also know, because of your role in the company, the government isn’t the only one with cameras around the city. For instance, we have cameras in the quarantine area. We have cameras on the wall that face the gates. We maintain shoulder cameras that the Expeditionary Forces use to identify hostages during rescue operations.
“When we developed the recognition software, I used Blake’s face for its development. During that process, I thought it appropriate that I use his face, since one of the goals of the software was to make our city safe. Call me a romantic.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking of calling you.”
Kara leaned back against the bar, apparently afraid to interject. Lexi loved Kara, and in that moment, hated Mikael for it.
“Of course, that led me to think of your parents, and what I did to them in my old life. How they, too, did work that involved their own children. Having experienced all the charity, all the love of the people in the townships who traded my work and expertise for my safety and shelter, I became a different man.”
She lowered the gun to her lap but continued to point it in his direction.
“I heard one common theme from the people in those townships. Then I heard it in the city. Do you know what that theme was?”
Instead of answering, she stared at him through burning eyes, the tears having dried up for the moment. She wondered why she was reacting this way after all these years. She cursed fate that she was more than 100 years old and she still had the hormones of a twenty-five-year-old.
“Community,” he said.
“What?”
“The common theme. Everyone wanted to let the old ways go. They wanted to protect each other and feel protected. Work for a higher cause than greed. Community. It was pervasive, and in a lot of ways, it still is. It’s that feeling that makes me want to run for mayor now. I robbed so many people in the old world. I lived in service to myself. I forced my will on people when it suited me, and I won out more often than I lost. I was like Vaughn.
“When I escaped to the mountains of Vermont, I had only an aging dog to keep me company. Nothing but time to look around at my empty house and see that my selfishness landed me alone at the end of the world. I thought of you, William, Lucian, and Marie—children I had orphaned, lives I destroyed. I’d had you followed for years. Those pictures are the products of that surveillance.”
“Guilty conscience? Is that why you followed us?”
“I wish I could claim that. The truth is, I didn’t know if the experiments were working. I had painful side effects. I kept tabs in case I needed you.”
“That’s some dark shit, Mikael. Some dark shit.”
“I am just being honest.”
“It’s about time,” Lexi said flatly.
“I’ve held this truth from you. But I have never lied to you, Alexia.”
Lexi waved the gun, encouraging him to continue his story, so he could have it out of his system before she reconfigured his face, or that’s what she told herself. But in the annals of her mind, the deeper places constructed of more than 100 years of hell on earth, she wanted to hear every word. She wanted to know why her destiny had been altered by this man.
“Citizens volunteered to have their faces recorded by the system. It was an effort in solidarity. After all, their parents stood with the National Guard of the old world to draw their line in the sand upon this ground. Those are the kinds of values that are passed down.
“Before I put in the first citizen’s face, besides Blake’s, I put yours, your brother’s, Lucian’s and Marie’s as a tribute of sorts. I am sure it sounds corny, but that is what I felt was right after my journey out of the old world and out of the old Mikael. Hell, I’m sure it sounds like the sentimental ravings of an old man, but it meant something to me to have you live on in the new world, even if only digitally. The irony here, of course, is that you showed up. Nearly six years ago, I got a message at my desk. I still remember the flashing red square around that beautiful face with that red flowing hair.”
Realization dawned for Lexi.
“Are you still aging, Mikael?”
“Yes. Very slowly, but I am aging. My body is equivalent to a seventy-year old’s.”
She released the gun, and it tilted into her lap. The experiments had only partially worked. Mikael Jensen was going to die of old age, like everyone else. That could mean only one thing.
“You never tried to use me to learn how to stop aging.”
“I use conventional methods, but I would not use you. There are good reasons not to share what you have with the world, Lexi. And if you do, it should be your choice.”
“I’ve already shared it, Mikael. Just not here.”
“I’m glad you have found people worthy.”
“I came here, and you handed me an easy road, at risk to yourself and your company.”
“Then Lucian came.”
She felt the anger draining away.
He knew who Miles was.
The face upon which her eyes rested started to mold before her to become the father figure it had been for the last few years.
“Lexi, I would never intentionally hurt you. Just the opposite, I would keep others from hurting you. The exercises we conducted in your apartment made you stronger. The training with the military made you stronger. Your position in my company made you stronger. But now, that time has come to an end. You must leave this city. I just couldn’t have you leave it without knowing the truth. You could only rightfully stay for so long before people start to notice you don’t age anyway, true?”
“Well, yes.”
“Today I got another message from the camera system. This is why Blake called me. It seems my son has a conscience. You see, Blake worked out a deal wi
th Morgan to bring a battle truck from Oklahoma City so he could license it through JenCorp in the east.”
“He told me. Must be a hell of a vehicle.”
“Try to remember he grew up inside this city,” Mikael said. “He has lived under siege. This truck presents a unique opportunity to defend the city, if he can reproduce it.”
“Why if?”
“The technology is apparently…unique. We don’t believe this truck came from Oklahoma City. I’m afraid I have no other details. It was not the focus of our conversation. Blake received a ping at his desk, and this is why he actually called me. You see, it was in relation to the courier, whom you passed as you left Blake’s office.”
“When I walked onto the elevator outside Blake’s office?” Lexi asked. “That guy?”
It suddenly occurred to her she was bantering with the killer of her parents. Her hand twitched next to the gun, but who was she kidding? She was as likely to kill this man as she was to kill Lucian or Marie. It had been too long. He had been too good to her. There was little doubt he’d changed his ways.
“Yes,” Mikael said. He leaned back on the sofa. “It seems that the facial recognition I programmed is still sending messages to Blake’s system.” He held up his Tab. “But mine is new, it isn’t plugged into the JenCorp servers anymore, as required by law.”
“Because you’re running for mayor. I was the one who wiped you from the system.”
“And I did not receive a ping.”
“Okay?” Lexi said, perplexed.
“So, when you passed him today, the system snapped a picture.”
“The man I passed today outside of Blake’s office was in your database?”
“Yes. When I set it up, I inserted you, Lucian, Marie—”
No-fucking-way…
“—and the final subject of your parents’ experiments…”
“William?” Then she was on her feet. “Mikael, are you telling me my brother is alive? That he’s here?”
Mikael beamed the widest smile Lexi had ever seen on his face.
“I am.”
“Mikael!” She ran around the table and sat next to him. She hugged him, and he squeezed her hard. It wasn’t lost on her that a moment ago, she’d wanted to kill him. But half the reason was because events led to the separation of Lexi from her brother.