“Sure we can,” he said, gripping my arm tighter.
I knew he was confident, but he was scaring me, so I pulled my phone out of my purse, “I’d better call Boris.”
Paul’s hand snaked out, faster than lightening. He took the phone from my hand, grinning his perfect grin at me, “I can’t let you do that, Marina.”
I watched, incredulous, as he took the phone and flung it over the cliff.
I scrambled backwards in horror, tripping over a root. I reached in my purse, and this time I disengaged the safety the same time I drew my gun… Just as he’d taught me.
“Nice draw,” he smiled, “But you won’t shoot me.” He kept coming towards me.
I gritted my teeth and pulled the trigger. His eyes flew open in shock. I looked at the gun in horror, realizing that he’d just unloaded it. I grabbed for the Taser in my purse, but before I could get it he was on me, rolling me over and pinning my arms roughly behind my back.
“You little bitch! I thought you liked me,” he actually sounded hurt.
He sat up on my back, flinging the gun and then my purse high in the air and over the cliff into the pounding surf. He clamped my arms together in a vise-like grip and yanked me to my feet. I was in shock, trying to process what had just happened.
“You work for Edwards?” I gasped.
He laughed, “Are you kidding? That vain old man?”
He laughed in my ear, brutally frogmarching me all the way back to the lab. There were two cars in the parking lot, and the security guard I’d confronted was standing by the open entrance.
“That’s the one!” he told Paul. “She nearly shot me!”
“Help me!” I pleaded to him, “I’m being kidna–”
Paul clamped his hand over my mouth. I bit it, and he twisted my arm so hard I thought it might snap.
“She’s one of those crazy animal rights types…The university wants to handle this internally,” he said through gritted teeth. “We’ll be shutting the lab down for a few days. You can take the next week off… paid. They’ll be a bonus for your cooperation.”
He looked dubious, “What about the gun?”
“It was only a replica,” he called over his shoulder, dragging me into the building and closing the door behind us. He brought me to the lab door and pounded on it with a fist. It swung open, revealing a slightly balding, slightly grey, but mostly nondescript man in a lab coat.
Paul sounded almost gleeful, “Doctor Neuman, I have a new subject for you.”
I looked into the same eyes I’d seen before. Cold as ice, they were completely soulless, making me catch my breath, same as before. There was only one difference.
This time, they regarded me eagerly.
~
Chapter Twenty
PAUL
~
“Marina Vanderpool, I presume,” the doctor said with a nod. “I’m Doctor Neuman. We’ve been expecting you.” His politeness was bizarre, and only added to the surreal quality of what was happening. He looked to Paul, “Did you know she was here before? I found her snooping around in the hallway, oh, must have been two days ago.”
“I figured as much,” Paul grasped me tighter. “She was asking me about electronic locks.”
“How could she have possibly discovered the code?” the doctor looked at Paul suspiciously, gesturing for us to follow him.
“That’s a good question,” said Paul, squeezing me roughly. “She’s full of surprises.”
I was thrust through the door, and it slammed behind me with a terrible finality. I looked around the now brightly lit room to see a small, pale young man in a lab coat, busily cleaning up the mess I’d made. Paul half shoved, and half dragged me along behind the doctor, who was still surveying the damage I’d caused as we passed by the wreckage.
“Unfortunately, she’s cost us a good deal of time,” the doctor said sourly, gesturing to a restraining chair that looked like some kind of torture device. I started to struggle even harder when I saw it, terrified as a trapped animal. The doctor came to Paul’s assistance, and together they forced me to sit, snapping wrist and ankle cuffs into place. Paul held my head still while the doctor affixed a velcro collar around my neck, along with a metal band that encircled my head, rendering it immobile. I could only look straight ahead at my tormentors.
“I have a phone call to make,” Paul announced. “I trust you can keep an eye on her for a few minutes?”
“Certainly,” Doctor Neuman said stiffly, adding, “I’m not the one who lost track of her.”
I watched Paul leave, and turned to the doctor desperately. “Listen– my aunt is rich,” I panted, breathless from the fight. “We can double whatever they’re paying you.”
He smiled blandly, “This is a once in a lifetime scientific opportunity.”
He pulled a penlight out of his breast pocket and shined it into my eyes while I desperately tried to look away. I finally squeezed them shut in defiance, causing him to pry each eyelid open with his thumb and finger.
“Ha!” he cried triumphantly, “I knew it the second I laid eyes on you. There’s something about a hybrid… it’s in the irises…”
“If you let me go, we can make you a very rich man. You’ll have everything you ever wanted.” I tried to stay calm, but I could feel the panic welling up within me, and my heart was pounding so hard I felt like it was going to beat right through my chest.
He inspected each of my ears as he spoke, clinically detached, “I already have what I want. This research is going to be truly priceless. It’s really very exciting… because just as we suspected, there are several anomalies in your DNA… Mutations that make you unlike any of the other hybrids.”
“My DNA?”
“You’re the last piece of the puzzle. We’ve already narrowed it down to several modifications on one of the X chromosomes, and compared it to a number of hybrids and several mermaids.” I gasped in shock and he looked surprised, “Surely you must know that we only need a single hair to sequence your entire genome.”
I was stunned into silence, because it was clear that they had been at this for some time, and they were much farther along than I’d realized.
“You’re a murderer,” I spat out, the metallic taste of fear in my mouth. “I saw what you did to the mermaid.”
“Unfortunately, I received that specimen post-mortem,” he recalled with real regret.
Clearly, immortality only went so far.
He turned towards a nearby table, reaching into a drawer for some more equipment. He returned, brandishing a first aid kit, and meticulously donned a pair of rubber gloves. He started to clean and dress the raw rope burn on my wrist, his face expressionless. I flinched, unable to move away.
He moved to my other side, pulled out a pair of surgical scissors, and preceded to cut away the arm of my sweater. He pulled out a needle, continuing to chat with me as though we were having a simple meeting over lunch.
“Mermaids are magnificent creatures, aren’t they? I’m very much looking forward to the capture of another live subject. You can only get so much information from an autopsy. Unfortunately, there was quite a bit of soft tissue damage by the time I got the specimen.”
He plunged the needle into my arm without warning, methodically extracting several small vials of blood. He casually called over his lab assistant to collect the specimens, and I glanced up to make eye contact with the approaching man, hoping for any signs of sympathy.
He was a short and slight, with sharp, pointy features and greasy looking dark hair combed to one side. He looked seriously offended. His eyes regarded me as if I was something he’d just scraped from the bottom of his shoe.
“She ruined all of my cell cultures,” he grouched.
“Now, now, Jones,” Doctor Neuman said soothingly, “We’ll simply have to start over. On the bright side, your new equipment is already on order, and having her here to observe is going to be fascinating.”
“Fascinating,” he repeated sourly.
&nb
sp; The doctor handed him the vials of blood, “I’m going to need a full work-up on these. We’ll have to sedate her for the MRI and CT scan.”
“No! No you won’t,” I lied. I shuddered at the thought of getting into one of those machines.
He spoke as though I wasn’t even there, talking under his breath, “If what they say about you is true, we’re in for a real treat.”
“Let me out of this chair and I’ll cooperate,” I lied again.
He shook his head no, smiling his bland soulless smile at me. The phone in his breast pocket rang, and he excused himself politely to answer it. He was acting like it was just another day at the office, despite the fact that I was shackled to a chair, being held against my will, and about to be subjected to unspeakable medical experimentation.
After a few minutes Paul returned. He pulled up a chair and straddled it, inspecting the bite mark on his hand. I looked at him in misery, thinking of how stupid I was to call him. I did it again, I thought. In a misguided effort to spare Ethan the worry, I had made a huge mistake.
One that might cost me my life.
“Well,” Paul was full of grudging admiration. “You’ve certainly made my job very interesting.”
“How could you do this to me?” I asked, unable to stop my eyes from filling with tears, “I trusted you.”
“Aww, don’t take it personally,” he smiled sincerely. “I had a really good time training you, and I must say, you are a quick study. You intuitively know things I haven’t even told you yet... Things it takes most operatives years to learn.”
“Let me go,” I pleaded.
He ignored me, “You know– you nearly caught me that day on the roof.”
I closed my eyes in a futile attempt to block it all out. I was disgusted with myself for not seeing what had been right in front of my face.
“And that day you were shopping… It’s like you have some kind of animal instinct,” he chuckled. “What a waste. You’d make an amazing soldier… For a woman, that is.”
I opened my eyes, and they burned into his, “Don’t do this.”
I wondered how long it would be before I was missed. Ethan might be expecting me, but Evie and Cruz were going out of town for at least a week. Amrita would tell my dad I had left mysteriously in the middle of the night.
“You saw me that night you were surfing… didn’t you?” he continued, scooting the chair closer. “I followed you to the beach, but lost you in the water. I waited for a while, and finally went out to check out that surfer spot on a hunch. I watched the two of you with night-vision goggles– What a spectacular show! If you’d only have stayed there a little longer, we could have gotten the boat launched in time to get the mermaid.”
“How did you track me to the beach?” I croaked out, thinking about all the steps I’d taken to avoid being followed.
“The Taser. It was bugged. It’s the one thing I knew you’d take with you wherever you went.”
I wanted to throw up, thinking how easily he had fooled me. He’d used my mistrust of Yuri to make himself seem like the good guy. Once again, appearances had been deceiving, and I’d judged the situation horribly wrong. I had assumed Paul was like Ethan, and just happened to be a very muse-proof sort of man. Unless… like Boris, his allegiance had already been set in stone…
“It’s Olivia, isn’t it?” I guessed. “You’re her boy.” I spat out the last word with contempt.
“She is brilliant,” he said, without a trace of defensiveness. “Do you know it was her idea to come between you and the boyfriend? If it was up to me, I’d have just extracted you right away, but she told me how easy it was to make a man in love jealous. And she was right, as always. By doing it her way, we bought plenty of time to move you at our leisure. ”
“What way?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear it.
“Olivia found the boyfriend’s mother in Vegas, and convinced her that she needed to come out and save her little boy from a spoiled rich girl that was sure to ruin him. It wasn’t hard to convince her to travel– she was slinging cocktails at some crappy casino and only too eager to get out of town… for the right price.”
“Oh my God,” I gasped. It all made perfect sense now.
He leaned back, satisfied with himself, “Right about now, the boyfriend is getting his ‘Dear John’ letter… and the mother will be right by his side to comfort him.”
“He won’t buy it… he’ll need to see me.”
“But that will be impossible. You see, you ran off with me,” he grinned devilishly. “It seems that you tried to fight it, but in the end, you were unable to resist my charm. I’m taking you on a trip around the world, and you have so missed traveling. You ask him to not bother trying to find you, and tell him you’re ever so sorry that things simply didn’t work out.”
“He’ll never believe it,” I choked.
“Oh, it’s quite a convincing letter... in your handwriting. Olivia spared no expense in creating a top notch forgery. Your car will be found abandoned at the airport, and she’s even gone so far as to hire a pair of look-alikes to travel on our passports, just in case Evie decides to check up on the story. Those oafs Boris and Yuri are much too stupid to be suspicious, I’ve been telling them all along how you complain to me about the boyfriend,” he chuckled, impressed by his own cleverness.
“Evie knows I wouldn’t leave without telling her,” I said, a hard knot forming in the pit of my stomach.
“Does she?” he asked. “Maybe. But she’s taking off for Argentina today. When she gets home, they’ll be a goodbye letter waiting for her… asking her to break the news to dear old dad.”
My mind started racing. Evie had been suspicious about my defense of Paul, and I could kick myself for agreeing to keep being followed a secret. For God’s sake– I’d even asked her not to fire him if anything happened! And Ethan… Oh Ethan… I wanted to cry. The pictures taken in Germany had made him irrational, and he would have Ruby there, whispering her suspicions in his ear.
Maybe Paul was right, and nobody would come looking at all. I’d never felt so completely alone in my life, and tears started to splash down on my dirt stained sweater.
“Oh my God,” I repeated, whispering this time.
“Don’t take it so hard,” Paul said, “This way the boyfriend gets to live. If it was up to me I would have killed him in a fiery crash. And Evie too, if that’s what it took to get you away clean.”
“The congressman?” I asked, “That was you? I suppose you killed Peter too.”
He smiled, sphinxlike, “Olivia has been working with Edwards for some time now… And I’m her most trusted employee.”
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
He shook his head, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What about her?” I pointed with my eyes to the metal cabinet, “The dead mermaid in there… Did you kill her too?”
He laughed, reeling back in his seat, “How do you do it? How did you even get into this lab in the first place?”
I stared at him with accusing eyes, and he sighed with amused exasperation.
“I’ll set your mind at ease about that one. We bought her from a Japanese whaler. It seems she got herself caught between a ballistic harpoon and a whale. Blew a giant hole straight through her chest, and pinned her right onto the beast.”
Again, I squeezed my eyes shut at the horrible imagery. It was the only thing I could control.
He laughed callously, “When word got out, I was coptered out immediately– before they even made port. She certainly cost Edwards a pretty penny. I had to pay the ship’s captain a king’s ransom… enough for him to pay off the entire crew.”
I thought about my sisters, and their close relationship with the whales. It made sense, and it was another incredibly sad thought. I opened my eyes, and made one final attempt to find the humanity in his.
“You may not plan on killing me, but they will.”
“Nope. Not a chance. I’m under strict orders to make sure yo
u stay alive. I’m still your bodyguard, only now I’m guarding your body for Olivia. In fact, I’ll be right here to supervise the sci-boys and move you out of here when they’re finished with you.”
“Move me where?”
“Wherever she wants me to.”
“What if she orders you to kill me?”
He paused, considering, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” The look on his face told me everything I needed to know.
I closed my eyes again, “Leave me alone.”
I heard the chair scrape and footsteps walk away. I was on my own. I knew how ruthlessly efficient Paul could be. I doubted he’d make any mistakes that I could exploit to get away, and he couldn’t be turned. He was to Olivia as Boris was to Evie; he had somehow imprinted on her, and belonged to her, body and soul.
I belonged to Ethan, and when I looked down to see my engagement ring, still sparkling on my finger, I wanted to cry. I twisted it around on my hand, protectively clenching the stones in my fist, a talisman against the darkness and despair that was closing in on me.
I heard footsteps, and looked up to see Doctor Neuman advancing on me with a syringe full of something, and I panicked, rattling the chair with my struggles. Paul looked up from where he was lounging on a chair with a magazine, rising to come and observe.
Once again, the doctor spoke to me as if there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary going on, “I’m a great admirer of your father’s work. He really is a brilliant scientist.”
“Then how can you do this to me?” I spat out, “He’d be disgusted if he knew what was going on here!”
He looked at me calmly, “Science is everything.”
“No it’s not,” I cried. “Science is only science. What you’re doing is wrong!”
He looked at me like I was being horribly naive, reaching for my arm with the needle in his hand.
“You don’t have to do this,” I begged, cringing as I felt the sting of the needle.
“Of course I do,” he replied, “I’m going to need you to keep perfectly still in order to get the optimum scan.”
The Turning Tides (Marina's Tales) Page 20