Rise: Luthecker, #2

by Keith Domingue

  “Hello, Dollar.”

  Dollar heard the voice, heard his name, but his eyes and brain couldn’t focus. He instinctively shook his head for clarity, but the move was a mistake, made clear by the intense jab of pain in his skull that resulted. He realized he was hyperventilating, tried to control his breathing, and failed. He blinked for several seconds before the source of the voice came into focus. When Eddie Dollar Monday saw who stood in front of him, a wave of fear ran through him. He forgot his pain.

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Lucas, I—

  “Shhhh.” Parks held a finger to his lips. “It’s okay. I understand. You did what you had to. That’s what we all do in life. And that includes what I am about to do to you.” Parks’ voice was calm and almost soothing in tone. He slowly circled Dollar once, his footsteps echoing off the concrete floor. Parks wanted to give Dollar a moment to realize his predicament. He wanted Dollar to feel the fear. Parks stopped in front of Dollar and looked hard into his eyes, looking for that fear, before speaking again. He smiled when he saw it.

  “What people like you fail to realize is that your fate is no accident. You are here, now, as a direct result of decisions you have made. You don’t see it, but it goes back to the very first time you chose to compromise. In other words, Eddie, this day, for you, was inevitable. The only mistake, the only error in this formula, was that I didn’t see it. And I should have. It’s a mistake I won’t be making again.”

  Dollar’s eyes darted around the room as he tried to take in his surroundings. He was in a small empty space with a concrete floor and unpainted concrete walls. The damp smell led him to believe it was a basement. And it was only he and Parks in the room.

  “W-where am I?” Dollar blurted out.

  “At death’s door. We both know that. And you have one decision left to make. Quick or painfully slow. Not good options; again something we both know. But they are the only options that your wretched past will allow you.”

  Dollar watched with terror as Parks pulled a switchblade from his pocket. He flinched at the sound of the blade snapping open. “I’m sorry, Lucas, I had no…”

  “Choice? Most who view the world through the prism of victimization feel that way; that they had no choice in their destiny. Tell me, Dollar, do you see yourself as the agent of your circumstance or the victim of it?”

  “They made me do it. You don’t know these guys.”

  “I very much would like to. So tell me who they are. I know it’s not the Calderon brothers. If anything, they’re relieved that I’m taking you off their hands, but they won’t say why; all of which I find very strange, as I’ve known Juan and Carlos for many years, and they fear no one, not even myself. Who is it, Dollar, that the Calderon cartel fears? What mysterious rival of mine turned you traitor against me?”

  “I don’t know his name. Or where he was from. I got busted for some bullshit solicitation charge in San Diego, and he was at the police station waiting for me when they brought me in. At first, I thought he was a lawyer. He sat across from me, and he had a file. He knew everything about me. And I mean everything. He made it clear that he could get to me, or anyone in my family, at anytime. And no one, anywhere, could do anything about it. He wanted to nail you. And he had everything on you, too. He had all the evidence ready to go, and all I had to be was the mouthpiece. That’s it. And the Justice Department, they were expecting me when I walked in the door. They wouldn’t mention his name, but they made sure to reference the guy who was waiting for me at the police station; and that they wouldn’t stand in his way. It was planned all along. It was this big fucking game. And I was the patsy. I wasn’t sure who was working for who or why. I just knew I was fucked. And so were you.” Dollar realized that he was very thirsty. “C-Could I have something to drink?”

  “What did he look like?”

  Dollar struggled to swallow. “It’s tough to remember. He was kind of baby-faced. I do remember he wore a very nice suit. I only saw him that once.”

  Parks slashed Dollar’s throat so fast that, at first, Dollar didn’t realize it had happened. He watched with curiosity as Dollar choked for air, his windpipe now cleanly severed. Eddie “Dollar” Monday quickly bled out from the neck, bright red liquid pumping out in sheets down his chest, soaking the front of his T-shirt a dark crimson. Dollar’s eyes grew wide with the last flicker of life before going blank with its absence.

  Parks looked at Dollar’s slumped over and lifeless body a moment before carefully wiping his blade clean on Dollar’s pant leg, folding the blade shut, and pocketing the weapon.

  It was the Coalition, Parks thought to himself. It was James Howe and his organization behind it all, and Howe wanted Parks to know it. That was the reason they could give Dollar to him so easily. They were using the powerful and much feared Calderon cartel, and the cartel allowed it. Howe wanted Parks to know that he, and by proxy the Coalition, controlled everything on every side and were afraid of no one. They wanted to make it clear to Parks that he, like Dollar and the Calderon cartel, was just another puppet, another patsy for their ambitions, easily put in their jails, just as easily freed for their own use, and just as easily killed for failure to do their bidding.

  Parks smiled. This was going to provide him far more opportunity than he had originally thought.

  He pulled out the security camera picture of Alex Luthecker and Nicole Ellis and looked at it a moment, carefully studying the details of the two before placing the photo back in his pocket. If the Coalition wanted these two, and were willing to go through the lengths of enlisting the likes of him to find them, Parks wanted to know exactly what kind of threat he was dealing with. He wanted to know exactly who Alex Luthecker and Nicole Ellis were, and what they were capable of. And regardless of the machinations or wants of James Howe and The Coalition, Parks was now very eager to find them.

  5

  Waiting

  Nikki sat in the lobby of the Tibet Gorkha Hotel trying to stay awake. It was 1am. local time, and even after two weeks, her body clock still hadn’t adjusted to the sixteen-hour time difference between Lhasa and Los Angeles. She had been wired and unable to sleep for the past twenty hours, and now that Alex had left to meet Chodak and Choden for the second time that evening, a little over an hour ago, she could barely keep her eyes open. She chose to wait for Alex in the hotel lobby and not their room to avoid crashing out on her bed and falling into a deep sleep before he returned. Knowing Alex, he wouldn’t wake her when he came back, choosing instead to let her sleep, and she would want to know right away what had happened. It was one of many differences in their personalities.

  Alex had returned from his earlier meeting with the two Nepalese guides elated, something she hadn’t seen in him since long before their trip to China. He had talked about the serene and peaceful patterns of existence that the brothers, Chodak and Choden, had displayed during their conversation. They had mentioned another individual called “Kunchin”, a name that meant “All Knowing” in Tibetan, and Alex claimed that he knew right away, at the mention of this individual and the effect that it had on the brothers, that he would finally get to meet someone like himself. Nikki had tried to warn him that there were more con men than true spirits in this part of the world, but her warning had only served as another disappointment for Alex, which only served to make him more distant.

  “Do you think I wouldn’t know with one look?” he had snapped back at her.

  Nikki was unsure how to interpret her feelings toward Alex. That she loved him, there was no question; there was a unique bond between them, unlike anything she had experienced with any man before. As long as she lived, she would never forget the first time she had set eyes on Alex. How he had approached her that night at Club Sutra in Los Angeles, his visage locked onto hers, warning her not to get into a car that, less than an hour later, would crash into a tree, seriously injuring her brother and killing her brother’s best friend. He had told her point blank, “Do not get in the car; you will not su
rvive it,” and with the look in his eye, and the certainty she saw there, she knew, she believed on some level that he was telling the truth. She remembered that the words barely registered before Alex was gone, chased from the club by men who she found out later wanted Alex for his clairvoyant abilities, men from the corporate giant known as Coalition Properties.

  She became obsessed with finding Alex after that, relentless in her search for him, in part because he had saved her life by accurately predicting unseen events, but also because her professional life had revolved around a very similar concept—Nikki was a well-respected software designer with an education from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While still in school, she had developed PHOEBE, a powerful software program designed to find distinct patterns within extremely large data sets and use those patterns to predict short-term trends. It had proven remarkably accurate with large-scale commodities that were greatly influenced by human behavior—money, oil futures, global exchanges, anything that was transaction-based. The common thread of human influence that provided PHOEBE with its power was also PHOEBE’S flaw, however, proven so when a terrorist attack on a Saudi Arabian oil refinery that PHOEBE did not account for literally crashed Nikki out of the oil trading business. The incident had changed Nikki forever. But despite the horror and lost lives caused by the attack, for Nikki, in retrospect, it had proven a blessing in disguise—had it not happened, she would have never met Alex Luthecker.

  When she and Alex finally began spending time together, Nikki found out that he, too, had become obsessed with knowing more about the woman he had chosen to step into the momentum—as he called it—and save. When he found out about PHOEBE, he was both excited and in awe. In Alex’s mind, Nikki was, by mechanical extension of herself, the only person he knew who could peer into the same mysteries of the universe that he could. He viewed PHOEBE and, by proxy, Nikki’s abilities as complimentary, but she saw it differently. She was more self-effacing and had been direct when she told him, “PHOEBE’s great, but let’s face it, she’s just a program, and we both know you could kick her ass.”

  In the beginning, there had been an adolescent-type excitement in how they communicated, how neither felt they could express their thoughts, ideas, and emotions about the world, and eventually about one another, fast enough. The one thing Nikki had found unexpected and special was that Alex steadfastly refused to interact with PHOEBE, even though she had offered him the opportunity. It was something she had just as steadfastly refused to allow others to do, but being the scientist, and trusting Alex’s innocence, she was intrigued by the potential of the program in his hands. She was surprised when he explained to her that he had no interest in interacting with PHOEBE. Alex believed that Nikki’s software design was an integral part of who she was and a rare mystery, one that he enjoyed, and he preferred it stay that way. It was at that point that Nikki began to fall for Alex.

  They quickly became inseparable, and he took her under his wing in regards to training in the martial arts. She was hungry to learn both the craft and philosophy and did so quickly, and it wasn’t too long before she could hold her own with Kali stick fighting, much to the amusement of Master Winn, Yaw, Camilla, and Chris. Alex, the loner, appeared to have found someone who could relate to his unique abilities on his level, and they were all more than pleased to see it.

  In no time, Nikki had forgotten about the high-paced, high-anxiety life of a New York futures trader. It felt to her that the Nikki of that world was a different person in comparison to the person she was now, the former unknown character in a quickly fading memory. She realized that a simpler life, where she helped others in real need directly, provided something that had eluded her during her professional life in New York. She was at peace. She was happy.

  That sense of peace all changed, however, when Alex’s headaches and hand tremors started. Soon after they began, he became more distant and easily irritated. He withdrew from the others first, then eventually her. He found the little differences between them increasingly frustrating—her comfort with clutter, particularly when she was consumed with work, contrasted his obsession with neatness and order. Details such as these became more and more of an issue for him. For a man whose entire life was based on rationality, he was becoming increasingly irrational. Despite her reservations regarding the initial impetus to be here in Tibet, she hoped that their visit would provide some answers, or at the very least some relief.

  Nikki snapped awake with a start, angry with herself for dozing off. Disoriented, she quickly looked about the hotel lobby and realized she was alone. She rubbed her face to try and remove the fog of slumber before checking her watch—it was now 2:15am, local time. Alex had been gone for over two hours. She had brought her laptop with her for company, and it was tucked neatly between her side and the armrest of the much-to-comfortable-to-stay-awake-in leather chair she reclined on. The hotel had free Wi-Fi for its guests, and she decided to pass the time waiting for Alex by surfing the Internet and checking emails.

  After scanning over various news websites, perusing the events of the world, Nikki logged onto her email account. Most of the public accounts she had from her days in New York were deactivated, but she kept one private account, which was heavily encrypted by PHOEBE, and therefore nearly impossible to trace. Only two people had the address—Master Winn and her younger brother Ben. She opened the account to find two emails waiting; one from her brother, with an update on his life in Hawaii, which made her smile. Ben was an avid surfer, and after recovering from the car accident and much encouragement from his older sister, he decided he would take a year off, follow his passion, and attempt to master the waves of the islands. She was happy to read of his work bartending three nights a week at a beachside restaurant, making him just enough money to surf during the day. He had fit in well with the laid back local surf community, and it made Nikki smile when she read of a girl Ben had met. He mentioned her rather casually in the email, but knowing her brother, it was more than likely serious.

  She opened the other email from Winn, an update on Camilla and her baby, as well as the others in their close-knit group. Winn also asked how Alex was doing and when they would be back. She was about to reply when another email pinged her inbox, startling her. When she saw that it came from neither her brother Ben nor Winn, she froze. When she saw the subject line, she nearly stopped breathing.

  “I know why Alex Luthecker is the way he is. And I can help him. Please reply.”

  She hesitated before she opened the email. The source address, Trace@me.com, was indistinct and unknown to her. She knew PHOEBE, whom she programmed to float from server to server at random intervals around the Internet like a cyber-ghost, would not allow anything to pass through her email that contained a virus. She could see that the email contained an attachment—a photo. Unable to stem her curiosity, Nikki swallowed hard and clicked on the email.

  The body of the email contained no message, but only the photo—a black and white image of a young happy couple holding an infant of less than six months. The woman in the photo was fair skinned and blonde. She wore little makeup, yet her features were stark. Her hair was straight and pulled back tightly in a ponytail. In Nikki’s mind, she looked the stereotype of either nurse or schoolteacher.

  The man in the photo was darker skinned, and he had thick dark hair cut in a style indicative of the late ‘80s. He wore a polo shirt and glasses, and his simple look implied a certain liberal persona, the indication he might also work in the human services industry.

  The visage of the child was altogether different. Although less than a year old, the kid had a cognizance in its eyes beyond its age. The structure of the adult male’s cheekbones and smile looked familiar to Nikki, and she noticed that the photo was dated August 10, 1987. It took Nikki a moment to process, but she knew what she was looking at. This was a photo of Alex Luthecker and his birth parents.

  6

  Potala Palace

  The streets of Lhasa after midnig
ht were noticeably quiet as Chodak and Choden led Alex through the darkness toward the famed Potala Palace. Although visible from a distance due to its size, as the men approached the entrance to the lower levels of the multi-tiered structure, Alex couldn’t help but be impressed by its scale. Nestled into the hillside at an altitude of over 12,000 feet, the palace, named after Mount Potalaka, the mythical abode of the Buddhist deity Avalokitesvra, was an architectural marvel. Built over caves and temples that dated back over 1,400 years, the red and white brick structure, as it currently stood, had been completed in 1645. Its walls alone were more than sixteen feet thick, with copper poured into the foundation to help proof the structure against the region’s many earthquakes. The complex in its entirety had a footprint of nearly one and half million square feet, and the structure rose toward the sky with thirteen stories of buildings that contained over 1,000 rooms, 10,000 shrines, and roughly 200,000 statues.

  Alex had briefly researched the famous palace before he and Nikki came to China, and he knew that the bright-red center structure that towered above the ones to either side was known as the Red Palace, which was devoted primarily to religious study and Buddhist prayer. He also knew that the Red Palace was build around the Dharma-King Cave, the oldest and one of the holiest sections of the entire monastery. It was here, in the Dharma King Cave, Alex had been told, where Kunchin would be waiting for him.

  “This way,” Choden whispered, as he and his brother Chodak led Alex through the entrance and into the palace. The surprisingly narrow corridors were dimly lit and silent at this time of night, as most of the monks who roamed the halls during the day were fast asleep. The three men made their way through the Byzantine array of halls, chapels, libraries, and galleries. Despite the low level of lighting, Alex couldn’t help but notice all of the colors, predominantly deep red and bright gold. They passed by countless ceremonial statues on their trek, many carved of gold and some over thirty feet in height. Their journey deep into the palace toward the Dharma King Cave took them through several shrines, the chambers of worship often illuminated by hundreds of candles, which highlighted the statues and countless murals that adorned every wall—all cultural and artistic masterpieces.