by S A Gardner
He paused for a long moment before he concluded, “My weapon, along with the detailed reasons why it has been deployed, will make everyone less tolerant of depraved beliefs and practices in the name of human rights and religious freedoms. It will leave this world a more sober, more accountable place. For a while.”
Then he fell silent.
My heart floundered around the beats accumulating inside its crumbling chambers. My mind sizzled with the conflicting thoughts colliding within its fractured confines.
Some things were just too huge to be assimilated, to be borne. No feeling did them justice. No reaction was enough.
So I laughed. And laughed.
Forty-Eight
I cackled maniacally until I choked, until my tears flooded my face and drowned my soul.
Jake watched me all through in such patient indulgence.
“Oh, Jake,” I finally spluttered, wheezed, my sides seized in agonizing stitches. “I should have known you’d end up a mad scientist when you always rooted for Lex Luther.”
He only smiled back. A smile full of appreciation of my morbid reminiscing, of delight at my idiosyncratic mirth. As if we weren’t facing off on one of the most perilous routes on earth, almost freezing to death, after such devastation. And after he’d told me he planned to eradicate millions. The beautiful, soulless being I now knew he was.
And soulless wasn’t an insult or a condemnation, just a fact. All that remained of him was intellect, vast and brutal.
But he says he loves me.
Maybe that meant he still retained some spark of humanity. An Achilles’ heel. I had to try. For that. For the man he once was. For the possibility that what he was now could be turned to the path of good.
But what was that? He was doing all this for the greatest good. Clear-cut, self-serving evil I could handle, could fight. But what could I do against such a noble, world-reshaping cause through such cataclysmic means?
I had no arguments to debunk his conviction, no weapons against his reasoning. I fought the same disease in piecemeal fashion, doled out analgesics, knowing I was digging in the sea. He’d concocted a lethal treatment that would blast it all away, reaching our impossible prize in one fell swoop.
But the world didn’t work that way.
Yet—what if he could make it work that way? If anyone could, it would be him.
But who were we to decide how it worked, who lived or who died? That was the one thing I could cling to.
Now there was one thing I wanted to do.
“Jake, I want to help you.”
His smile died as mine did, a somber sadness darkening his eyes. “You can—as my partner. But you won’t be, will you? Damian succeeded in turning you against me. He was supposed to die with my wardens. Then I would have brought you to my way of thinking slowly. I knew I’d never win you this abruptly. But you had to go change the plan at the eleventh hour.”
“I had to come save you myself.”
His nod was regret itself. “I gathered as much. I couldn’t tell you my plan for now obvious reasons, so you thought me totally helpless. You no doubt couldn’t trust Damian to save me, and had to intervene.”
He’d gotten everything right. As usual.
He shifted, made a gesture with his good hand, tranquil, deliberate. “And here we are.”
I was running out of things to say. One thing remained.
“Just how did you plan all this, Jake?”
He’d brag. A genius always itched to flaunt the intricacies of his strategy.
“You’re hoping I’ll oblige the stereotype? The mad scientist craving recognition, boasting about the diabolical minutae of his plan, when he should be securing his escape?”
Dammit. Was his intelligence boundless? Or was he really a mind reader?
Disappointment tinged his gaze. “Are the PACT agents occupied, and you’re keeping me here until they catch up?”
“I don’t need anyone to catch up, Jake.”
“No, you don’t, do you? You’d overpower ten elite mercenaries twice your size. I’m so proud of what you’ve become, Cali. You’ve fulfilled your potential in a way even I couldn’t have anticipated. At least the potential you could fulfill without letting go of your ultimately cruel mercies.”
Flattery? To soften me up?
No. He meant it. And his opinion wasn’t that flattering. He believed I was holding myself back, that I caused more harm than good doing so, that I owed it to myself, to the world, to let myself evolve to his level.
Had to make it more tangled and mutilating, didn’t he?
I exhaled a measure of the heartache brimming inside me like magma. “No one’s coming, Jake.”
He nodded, believing me at once. “There could be only one reason for that. You saved Damian. But he must still be under in IC, and unable to order his team to hunt me down and dissect me alive. With him out of commission, you’re in absolute charge and ordered them to stay put. And since they don’t know anything about me except that I shot their leader, and believe you’re fully capable of capturing me on your own, they had no reason to defy you.”
“You’re scarily accurate as always, Jake. This is between you and me. I need to know. So tell me. How?”
His expression melted into such gentle understanding. This man was bound on giving me a heart-deep scar.
“Very well, Cali. I always intended to share with you, at the right time. But things have deteriorated to this point, and the gradual method is no longer viable. So—how I did it.” He tried to inhale, winced with the pain of his broken ribs. “I was physically incarcerated here, but I had access to the whole world through the Internet. I formed connections you’ll find impossible to believe.”
“There’s nothing I’d ever consider impossible again. Not where you’re concerned.”
His smiled approvingly. “Indeed. Everybody has a price and I possess all forms of payments—information, problem-solving, power, money…even wish-fulfillment. At the beginning I paid all that for one purpose. To track your every move, so I could feel close to you. I couldn’t contact you then, because I thought it would be cruel to you, to know I’m alive, yet to know you could never find or free me. It would have devastated you.”
He understood me well. Completely. I felt more vital pieces of me shriveling as he went on.
“But then you began your vigilantism and I lost your trail once you became too good at covering your tracks. I spent years trying to find you again. And this time, when I found you, I still couldn’t risk reaching out to you directly. I was being closely monitored and I didn’t want to implicate you or endanger you. But I planned to have you find me, now I knew you’ve developed all the skills and support system to do it. So I planted this idea of popularizing the militant movement in my captors’ minds, started the discord with their parent terrorist organization. Then it was an easy matter of manipulating PACT and TOP to get all the players I wanted here.”
“You wanted Damian here?”
“Of course not. But if I’d resisted his inclusion more than I had, he would have taken independent action. I couldn’t have that. I settled for putting you as the thorn in his side, the harness that would limit his power and reach.”
He was responsible for that? He had access to TOP’s top people?
This was getting more surreal by the second. There was no getting used to the impossibilities he was capable of.
He was far from done. “Coming here, Damian already suspected my role in the weapon research, but not its extent. Through the revealing conversations he had with my captors at my bidding, he formed the real picture. Only concerning the weapons, of course, not that you were all here through my manipulation. I wanted him to know so he’d change his plan. I needed his abhorrence of me to be unleashed, so he’d get irrational. This always guarantees the opponent making mistakes. The problem was, it was then he went after you. To secure you on his side when sides had to be taken.”
He’d already intimated that Damian had only been u
sing me. The way he’d put it now… Good thing I was beyond getting shocked or injured by any of this.
“I had no other option but to let him use you as his team’s security ticket, until I won you.”
Which could be another truth-mingled lie. Or not.
“But if Damian knew you worked with the militants,” I rasped. “What made him think you wouldn’t have him and his team killed, while sparing us?”
“Because he knew I wanted out, that I’d do everything to help even him to that end. I told him, after all.”
I gaped at him.
“Why do you think he didn’t want you to ask me for insider information? For the exact layout of the base? I’d already given it all to him. We had a deal. He intended to double-cross me. I double-crossed him first.”
I was wrong. I wasn’t beyond being shocked. Or hurt.
The sheer depths of duplicity of the two men I’d loved. Still loved.
Something must be fundamentally wrong with me, to be attracted only to undetectable, convoluted manipulators.
“Then you insisted on being part of the invasion,” Jake went on. “That would have worked just as well within my plan, if you hadn’t remained to search for me. Then Damian somehow realized what I’d do prematurely, and left his team to pursue me. I bet he didn’t even warn them before he did, that catching me meant more to him than their lives. Too bad his desertion must have alerted them that something was wrong and they acted too quickly before they could get buried with the rest. Then he caught me. Believing I’d be dead or worse shortly, I called to you. And you came. It complicated matters, but it did give me a second lease on life.”
He believed he had telepathic powers, too? Maybe even ones of compulsion? Over me?
That was another thing I couldn’t contest.
I had felt his call.
Another shudder rattled me to the roots of my soul. “Why didn’t you escape before? Why didn’t you get one of your powerful connections to spring you? Why didn’t you manipulate your captors into letting you go?”
He seemed pleased that I was coming up with all the relevant questions. “Let’s say that after the first couple of years, I developed a severe phobia about trying to escape. What I told you about what they’d done during that time was the truth. First, I was punished myself. Then I became invaluable and they punished others. That’s how my team died.”
God. It was unimaginable what he’d been through. It had damaged him in ways I couldn’t even imagine.
And from the wreckage he’d risen. This ghastly, all-powerful phoenix, bound on a path of extinction.
“My powerful connections had no way of storming the base without sacrificing me. But they provided me with everything I demanded to construct the safe route as a preliminary step to my escape plan. I had every confidence you’d find it. The militants thought I was presenting them with a way around the cordon their masters put around them to limit their movements into Russian soil. As for manipulating my captors, I did. You’re here, aren’t you?”
And that was everything explained.
Only one thing was left. “What do you intend to do now?”
“I intend to pursue this to the end. Major players can’t wait to have me, and my creations. I’ll use them all to fulfill my endgame.” His gaze softened even more, the emotions he felt for me laid bare. “What do you intend to do, Cali?”
So. Moment of truth.
“I intend to take you back,” I choked. “To help you.”
He lowered his gaze to the ground. After a moment, he raised it, eyes considering. “You truly think I need help?”
I threw my frozen arms up. “I don’t know, okay? Your logic is overpowering, but it’s also terrible. What you intend to do is…unspeakable. This isn’t the way to change the world, Jake.”
“What then? Do you see any measures being performed or even proposed that aren’t making things worse? That aren’t maintaining the steady over-population by our race’s worst elements, and enabling them to escalate conflicts, and cause a plunge into global regression?”
“Maybe that’s just the cycle of civilization, Jake.”
“Not so, Cali. This time, there’d be no rise from the fall.”
“Maybe. And maybe our role is only to keep the balance, as much as we can, as long as we can, not to force the course of history, or prevent Armageddon by our own apocalyptic counter measures. Maybe we shouldn’t presume to play gods.”
His huff dripped of disparagement. “As if those have ever done a passable, or even forgivable job.”
“I have no answers, okay? All I know is that if you see this through, you’ll cause incalculable damage, while the benefits you intend might never come to pass. Please, Jake, give this up, come back with me.”
“And what? We’ll be lovers again?”
Since he saw everything, I bet he saw the answer in my eyes.
His nod was acknowledging. “Then what? We’ll work together? You’ll forget what I did, what I can do, protect me 24/7 from Damian’s assassination attempts?”
This propelled me an urgent step forward. “I will protect you, I swear. You were hurt too much, suffered such brutalities you’ve gone to insane lengths to put a total and final end to them. But you’re too intelligent not to realize that this is a pathological reaction.”
“Pathology is defined as a process that interferes with normal function and deteriorates it. I’m functioning at a far superior level to normal.”
“And you expect to outstrip all the limitations of humanity and have the power of life and death over millions and not fragment and deteriorate?”
“I haven’t yet, after all I’ve been through.”
“Maybe you already have. Haven’t you considered this?”
He sighed, winced as he hugged his side. “I don’t have delusions of grandeur, Cali, or any other psychotic malfunction. By definition these exist when perception of one’s abilities are divorced from reality. It’s not my case. I know what I’m capable of. I’ve already achieved the first phase of my plans. Now it’s time to implement the rest. Like all radical surgeries, what I’m doing seems atrocious, until the effects of my resections manifest. The nuclear bomb was horrific. But it forged a new world that was far better than the alternative without it.”
“So you believe your weapon would be comparable in its devastation to a nuclear detonation?”
“No. My weapon will far surpass it.”
I shook again at the totality of his pragmatic calmness. “And you don’t consider this insane?”
“Insane in whose opinion? In yours? Of course. You’re not ready yet, Cali. I would have led you through the process gradually, over as long as it took. This isn’t how I planned it, and I am sorry beyond expression that it had turned out this way. But when you start seeing my results, the better world I’ll create, you’ll believe. You’ll come to me then. I said I’d wait forever, and I will. But it won’t be that long before we’re together.”
With one last pledging glance, he turned and started walking away.
I gaped after him, a cyclone of emotions tearing at my psyche, one urge roaring louder than all the rest.
Let him go.
A voice inside me, delirious with exhaustion and cold, overwhelmed with shock and heartache favored that course of action. Its argument was compelling. For what could an injured man without as much as a car, who was going to seek shelter in a miserable refugee camp cut off from the world by landmines, with nothing but godlike delusions, do?
This is Jake you’re talking about, another voice lamented, resigned, grieving.
He’d diagnosed himself as accurately as he did everything else. He wasn’t delusional. I had no doubt he had the powers and the persistence to make every single one of his intentions and plans come true. A devil of the worst kind. The to-save-you-I-must-destroy-you-first variety.
His damage potential was that of a calculating meteor that no one could predict or guard against.
I could overpower hi
m and drag him back. Literally. But I couldn’t bear subjecting him to the indignity. I had to resort to another solution. A scopolamine based cocktail. Enough to conquer his resistance, put him in a suggestible state, but leave him able to walk under his own power.
I raised my multi-drug dart gun, a tear freezing somewhere down my cheek. “You’re coming with me, Jake.”
He answered without turning, making my plan null and void. “It won’t make a difference if I do, Cali. You can put me in an asylum with round the clock supervision, or throw me in a supermax prison, and I’ll still carry on with my work. I will finish what I started. Nothing you or anyone else can do will stop me.”
Yeah. And didn’t I know that for a fact. I had the proof of what he, and my father, had managed to do from their prisons. Capturing Jake was not the answer.
Only one thing was.
Killing him.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.
I started weeping as I warned him one more time. And he turned. With the gun he’d shot Damian with raised and pointed right at my own heart.
He had to be bluffing. This was the man who said my memory sustained him for all these years, who’d gone to those incomprehensible lengths to have me by and on his side.
The man who’d said he’d wait for me forever.
If there was anything I believed, it was that he could and would never harm me.
Time disappeared as we faced each other, weapons raised.
Then without any discernible expression, he finally sighed.
“I can’t let you take me back to my enemies, Cali. I’ll do literally anything not to be incarcerated again. Let’s end this.”
Then he pulled the trigger.
Forty-Nine
I fired first.
My reaction was automatic, engrained. And instantaneous.
My projectile lodged in his carotid artery as I threw myself to the ground. His bullet whizzed over my head, would have gotten my heart, had I stood still.
No time to load another dart. And no need. I’d switched the drug just as I’d fired. It would drop him in seconds.