He pauses, letting his words echo in the silence. I can’t tell if he’s lying or if the Syndicate is lying to him, but I know it’s not true. The council would never let anyone have a slice of their power. Even a fellow member of the brotherhood.
“This has been the plan from the very beginning. From the day I threw that party at our old house and the cliff collapsed, this has been the plan all along. The Syndicate welcomed me into their family from day one. Drew has been the father to me that I never had, and all the meanwhile, we worked together to concoct a plan that would ensure my father didn’t die in vain and that the glories of this technology are shared with all of humanity,” Jake says proudly, his chest sticking out and eyes glowing bright in the darkness of the smoke. “You thought this entire time that you were making progress and that you were the one with the power, when every step of the way the Syndicate has watched your every move. I have had a tracker implanted inside me since the beginning, and have a microchip planted in my brain that allows me to communicate back and forth with the brotherhood. They have known everything that we have been doing from day one. I knew I had to go to prison, and when you broke me out, Drew and I already had everything we needed to do set. We knew that eventually, when the time was right, I would give them our location to kidnap us and form a fake alliance. And we knew that we would just use you to destroy Li Wang. But now that’s he’s gone, you are going to die with him. Now that we have the platform to bring this cube onto the global stage, that is exactly what we are going to do. Soon the world will be ours, and that one nuke is just the beginning of a new era for humanity.”
“How could you do this?” The pain of being choked turns into a numb sensation that coats my entire body. No thoughts even run through my mind as I try to absorb the shock and understand what is happening. “How could you do this to me after everything we have been through? After all that we have done together?”
“This was never about you,” Jake says. “This was never about you. This was about the principle of things. This was about doing what needed to be done, even if it meant doing something that is hard.”
“No! No! Stop spitting out the bullshit they are telling you to say!” My voice echoes off the lake, the grip of the operative loosening on my neck just as black rings appear around my vision. “This wasn’t about doing what is right. This wasn’t about the principle. This was about power!”
“Isn’t that what everything is about?” Jake smiles; from the looks of it he is enjoying every moment of this. From the looks of it, he is no different than Drew and the rest of the Syndicate. Just another addict hooked on the rush of power that they are willing to give up everything for it. “This was about the Chimera Cube. This was about making sure that the future of the world remains in our hands and not the hands of the descendant of a man who wanted the future all to himself.”
“I hope one day you find out the truth. I hope one day you realize that my dad wanted to do the right thing by everyone, and that you guys only want to do what is right by yourselves. I hope you realize that you are making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“At least I’ll live long enough to regret those things.” His expression shifts, and for the first time I see a hint of sadness in his eyes. “You know what happens to those who break the covenant. You know the one way that exists to leave the brotherhood.”
The energy in the air shifts after he closes his mouth. I analyze the obstacles in front of me, running through a round of possibilities in my mind where I can somehow disarm one of the guards and kill everyone here but Jake.
But it’s too late to get out of this now.
The Syndicate has me trapped in the tentacles of their power. The Syndicate has already won.
“Goodbye, my friends,” Jake says, waving to both me and Ai. “I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish that it could be different. But you know what they say about breaking the covenant.”
The second his final words leave his lips, the operatives grouped around us spring into action. The chokehold resumes its deadly grip as the shotgun is shoved into my stomach. I vomit, the hit of the shotgun causing everything inside my intestines to spew outward.
No doubt, a rib or two got permanently damaged in that interaction. And the pain from that hit is all the leeway the Syndicate needs to slam my body against the ground and have a team of people surround me. With one person pinning down each of my appendages, they finally pick me up and drag me into the water towards the helicopters.
I keep flailing my body in all directions, doing everything I can to escape from their hold on me. But with the cold water flooding my airways, every time I move, I force more water into my lungs.
Then I feel the familiar sensation of a needle piercing my neck. Before the darkness takes hold of my consciousness, I already know what vile liquid is contained inside of the syringe that is forced into my neck.
It’s poison.
And this time, I don’t know if I’m going to wake up.
Chapter 6
I don’t know whether to be happy or terrified that I’m alive. My body is still in one piece, my ribs are bruised but not broken, and my mind hasn’t been drugged to the point that I can’t remember my first name.
I’m okay. Well, relative to what could have happened. I should be dead. Instead, my body is trapped on a chair. My wrists tied around my thighs, and my calves zip-tied around the legs of the leather chair I am seated on. I have been stripped of the bullet-proof suit I was wearing and the backpack containing the patents of the Chimera Cube. Instead, a thin sheet of white cloth hangs over my body, leaving all my private parts in a fairly exposed position.
By this point, I have lost all expectations of what happens when I open my eyes after the Syndicate drugs me. I could be in the middle of a pack of polar bears and I wouldn’t be surprised. The Syndicate doesn’t need to show me any more of their terrible nature for me to know what they are capable of.
It’s Jake’s words that leave my mind and body in a state of shock as I adjust to the environment around me, every sentence that he uttered feeling more like a dream than reality.
But it happened.
Jake has been the enemy all along. And now he has the Chimera Cube and I am all but defenseless to stop the most powerful secret organization in the world from doing whatever they want to me and Ai.
“Long time no see, my friend.” Drew smiles at me, his breath reeking of cheap beer as he leans in front of my face. I am in the first row of brown leather seats in the aircraft, the plane suited more for the private vehicle of a business executive rather than a flying torture chamber. But for the time being that’s exactly what this place has been converted into.
The floors have soft, velvet carpeting, while the walls and ceiling are covered in tinted windows that from the inside show off a panoramic view of the blue sky surrounding us. At the front of the airplane there is a large holograph that services as the control center of the aircraft, with live readings from the air pressure to the altitude and every data point in between.
If I woke up inside here without context, I might actually feel safe. But the masked operatives all strapped with high-powered assault rifles that stand on the sides of the aircraft make it impossible to not tremble with fear.
“Shut up,” I snap back at him, searching around for Justin, Kamala, or any of the familiar faces from the Syndicate operation. None are in sight. Jake, along with the council and any other Syndicate members, must be in the aircraft flying parallel to our path, the black exterior of the aircraft lighting up spectacularly.
“I should be the one saying that to you. Pretty soon you won’t be able to stop screaming.” He smiles. That statement may just go down as the most frightening thing someone has ever said to me.
“If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.” I wince as I try to break free from the restraints, but the moment I put force on them, the sharp edges cut through my skin. Ai seems to be discovering the same feature of the restraints at the
same time I do, as we both stop trying to break free as abruptly as we started.
“This will never end.” Drew chuckles, the same mechanical way to his body language. He places each of his hands on my kneecaps, every move by this man looking like it is scripted.
“You’re insane.” I shake my head, purposely letting spit fly off my lips to land on his face. I consider it a mini victory when he lifts one of his hairy hands off my knee to wipe his face. Even from underneath the cloth sheet I can feel how cold his hands are, his long fingers running down the sides of my legs like icicles.
His face is just as terrible as I remember it. In fact, each time I see him, the wrinkles in his skin and the sunken-in quality to the middle portion of his face only gets worse. His two missing front teeth are not even the worst part about his mouth anymore. It’s the layer of yellow plaque coating all of his other teeth, the bad breath from him not brushing his teeth all part of the horrible display he puts on in front of me.
“We will be sending you both to a place where all our enemies go.” Drew smiles, finally standing up and exiting my personal bubble of space to pace between Ai and me. “A place where no one comes back from, no matter how hard they try.”
“Let me go!” Ai yells. Her hair is springing from her head in a million different directions, both her eyes and face red as she desperately tries to escape.
She doesn’t know yet the rules of these people.
They don’t listen to anyone but members of the brotherhood. Not even dying children faze these men.
“Now, now.” Drew holds up a finger as he walks over to her. He signals for one of the masked figures to step forward. They pull a large syringe out of their pocket, the needle inches away from piercing through Ai’s neck. “Don’t struggle. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
He whispers, his lips grazing over Ai’s soft, beautiful skin. I don’t need to be a mind reader to know exactly what that man is thinking. He wants her. He wants her in every way possible, and with her tied up and anyone in this room who could stop him all being paid off by the Syndicate, he can do whatever he desires without any consequences.
“Don’t touch her.” I narrow my eyes at him, trying to burn a hole through his heart with the heat of my stare alone.
“Aww, is Sammie trying to stick up for his friend?” Drew teases me, all the meanwhile he lets his hand move from Ai’s cheek to her breasts. She doesn’t do as much as breathe in the moments that Drew has his hand on her chest, it hard to tell whether he is getting more pleasure from the cheap thrill or from the look of terror in her eyes.
“Agh.” I grunt, the rage getting the best of me as I thrust my core as hard as I can forward to try and claw myself in his direction. To my surprise, my movement works, just not as I had planned.
I thought that I would be able to break free from the restraints and tackle Drew to get him to stop. Instead, I direct enough force forward that the leather chair topples over, leaving me stuck to it as it collides with the ground. Of course, this results in me taking the brunt of the fall, with a hundred-pound leather chair on top of me. The sharp edges of the restraints slice through all the flesh in my wrists and thighs and form a deep abrasion in my skin, while the zip ties tied around my calves continue to cut my blood flow off to my feet.
Drew’s laughter only throws salt into my open wounds that are gushing out blood to accentuate the red color in the velvet carpet. With the chair trapping me to the floor, my vision is swathed in darkness except for the few cracks in between the corners of the chair that allow light to pour in.
To say that was an epic fail is an understatement.
I gave Drew exactly what he wanted. A reaction that not only made me look like a complete idiot, but knocked my face and body into the smelly, damp carpet.
“Wow, Sam, you’re my hero.” Drew attempts to mock Ai, but his Asian accent doesn’t even remotely resemble Ai and just makes him sound even more disgusting than we already know he is.
“Fuck you,” I spit out, trying to push myself out from underneath the chair. Normally, I’d be able to use my legs to bring myself upright pretty easily, but with my thighs chained to the chair, my mobility is limited.
“You might be doing a better job torturing yourself than I could,” Drew says, chuckling, my blood boiling with the terrible sound of his voice. I know he is still fondling Ai, and if he has stopped, it’s only because he is about to do something equally horrible to me.
I shake my head, the pain in my wrists and thighs so great that all I manage to force out is a pitiful wince. The barbs encircling the restraints have a way of not just slicing my flesh open but shredding it apart in the same way a chainsaw would.
I push through the pain, deciding that if I am going to attack Drew, I need to use my wits instead of my strength. There are enough people in this room with rifles to kill me a thousand times over before I can finally get my hands on one of their weapons.
If I want the cube back, I am going to have to manipulate the Syndicate in the same way they have set up traps to deceive me for months.
In the silence that follow his words, my heavy breaths are the only thing I can hear in the mini echo chamber that the leather chair forms around me. The desperation and adrenaline work in tandem in my mind to allow a flurry of ideas to come to me all at once. In a few moments, I develop a rough outline of a plan. It’s not a good one, and chances are that I will end up dead anyways.
But I have to try.
If I can’t get back the cube, this world will never be the same. If I can’t make sure that me and Ai make it out of this aircraft alive, then not only will my father’s legacy die with me, but the future of the world will too.
“Why are you letting Jake have that cube?” I say as I work on breaking free from the restrains. Despite the extreme discomfort of being stuck under the chair, being out of Drew’s sight gives me a major advantage. I don’t have to worry about him seeing me. “Imagine what he can do with it.”
“He won’t do anything that we don’t tell him to,” Drew says, his feet rubbing against the carpet as he moves towards the toppled-over chair I am under. “He will make more of the cubes, one for each member in the Syndicate, so that we can all spread the glory of this machine to the rest of the population.”
“You’re just going to use it to control everyone.” I hiss as I work to shimmy my right hand out of the barbed restraint it is trapped in with my thigh. All I need to do is let the barbs rip the flesh in my hand apart, and I can take the sharp restraint and use it to cut my zip ties off.
I will be free.
“That’s been the plan all along.” He chuckles. “For decades, Bradley and I planned this out. The day Bradley knew about the cube, he told me, and I convinced him and your father to join the brotherhood.”
“You bastard.” I slide my hand out of the first restraint, the pain of the barbs slicing through all the flesh in my fingers so intense that I almost black out. If my dad could only hear the words that Drew just said, then that would have changed his strategy completely.
If he knew that the Syndicate was onto him from the beginning, maybe he never would have chosen to hide the technology underneath the earth and build Zion. Maybe he would have never chosen to end his life along with it.
“I’m a smart bastard. Smarter than you and your father combined. That man thought he was ahead of us his entire life when he didn’t see that we were right in front of him, waiting for him to fall into our trap. Ever since Bradley and James joined the Syndicate, I had my plan for global domination that I proposed to the council. They accepted it, and for years the challenge was getting your dad to accept to it too. Finally, after Isaac Savery died, we were ready to bring this technology onto the world stage. Your dad at the time thought Bradley was the only one who knew about the Chimera Cube, and that’s why when Bradley started saying he wanted to bring this technology to the masses your dad lost it and killed him. He was too scared to bring this thing out in the world until he bel
ieved that society was ready for it. He never realized that we have to force the people into it. That no one will ever be ready for this kind of power, but that we have been ready for it since the day the founding brothers created the Syndicate.”
“No!” Ai screams, interrupting his speech. My mind runs through all the possibilities of what he is doing to her, and my skin crawls with each one. Her scream is the extra motivation I need to force my left hand out of the sharp restraints. I feel a sharp rip in my pinky finger as a chunk of flesh collides with the ground. I have no desire to look down and see if I am missing a finger. I don’t need to see the flesh to know that there is a pool of blood on the carpet beneath me, and that all the flesh on my hands, wrists, and upper thighs have been skinned.
I hurriedly force the two restraints down my thighs and bring them down to my ankles where I can pull them off my feet and pick them up with my hands. My left hand is too injured to pick up the restraint, every neuron in my hand numb from the amount of trauma it has experienced. My right hand struggles to pick the restraint up, but I manage to grasp it with my thumb and pointer finger, the amount of blood gushing out of me making my grip weak as I dig the barbs into the zip ties on my ankles.
From the lack of words coming from Drew, I know that whatever he is doing to Ai, her plea doesn’t make him stop. If anything, it makes everything that much sweeter for him.
“Leave her alone!” I roar, the rage almost bringing me enough strength to return my body upright with the power of my core. “She’s innocent in this. She’s innocent.”
“You are a fucking idiot.” Drew kicks the leather chair, sending the side of it jamming into my bruised ribs and knocking the barbs off the groove in the zip ties. These zip ties are thick and made of some sort of pliable yet tough material that is almost impossible to cut through even with the ends of the restraints that easily ripped through to my bone. “When are you going to understand that every word you say will be used against you? That this pain will never have an end? You’re just like your father. An ignorant fool who will never understand the power the brotherhood has.”
The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2 Page 57