The Warning

by Michelle E Lowe

  There were no mannequins on the platform. He guessed they’d been put in storage, out of the harsh winter weather until the museum reopened in the spring.

  The locomotive on the track was an actual iron black CNJ Royal Blue train. Black coal piled in heaps inside the tender and seven passenger cars lined up on the track. Inside the cab, standing beside the engineer, was a wax figure of a boiler man, holding a shovel. Through the protective clear plastic tarp, draped over the side window, the engineer waved with a wide grin.

  He stopped to study the toy train when he reached the center of the platform. The model matched the locomotive, only the number on the toy had been drawn with white pencil. Train number 585.

  He raised his head to the iron beast with the number 585 written on the tender. Seeing the number, he was relieved. He feared he’d have to search for the right train, and the drizzle had developed into a heavy rainfall.

  The nearest passenger car door opened when he tried it. Inside, it was dark. He walked up the steps leading into the car and stood a moment to give his eyes time to adjust. The dim gray light coming in through the windows offered little help. The car was full of silhouettes, giving him the creepy feeling that he’d wandered into a spook house. When shapes formed in the dark, he saw the mannequins in their seats and a ticket taker standing in the aisle, punching one of the passenger’s tickets.

  He walked through three passenger cars before reaching the café and headed for the private car in the back.

  He came to a narrow aisle where windows were to his left and doors to his right. He came to number 9, the one he’d been instructed to go to. For a moment, he stood in place. He wasn’t quite sure if he was supposed to wait, or if someone was inside waiting for him. There was no window in the door to offer a view of the cabin.

  On his way to the car, he tried to be as quiet as he could in order to slip away if he wanted to. But he knew he wasn’t going to change his mind, not after coming all this way. If he opened the door only to find some asshole reporter wanting an interview, he wouldn’t be shy in saying kiss my ass before leaving.

  He decided to take the chance and open the door.

  It wouldn’t be anyone out to hurt him. He was no longer a wanted man so what value would that serve?

  The door slid to the side. There, sitting in one of the seats by the window, was someone he believed couldn’t be real. The shock alone forced him to drop the toy train and back away. He clutched his pounding chest. Another emotion came over him: fear. Fear that the person was nothing more than another mannequin, playing tricks with his mind.

  And then she spoke.

  “It’s not over until the heart stops beating, Nikolai.”

  Although his legs were numb, he managed to take a single step to the doorway and stop. He looked into the small private car and stood with a gaping mouth. At last, he summoned enough strength to speak. “Jade?”

  Chapter 33

  Jade smiled. “You better take a seat before you fall over.”

  For a moment, he remained in place, utterly stunned by the sight of her. The muscles in his legs melted into jelly, but he managed to walk over to the booth. He sat across from her, on the edge of the seat, his fingers digging into the old fabric.

  Jade Sho, his murdered girlfriend, sat breathing the same air he did. She was just as alive as he was, just as warm and solid.

  She’d cut her hair short and dyed it cherry-bomb red and wore square glasses with pink plastic lenses, yet he recognized her instantly. No disguise could hide the memory of her face from him.

  “I know you’re in shock, but there’s a lot I need to tell you,” she explained, turning up the light of a battery-powered lamp on the seat next to her.

  “Shock doesn’t begin to describe what I’m feeling,” he said, unable to blink. “I thought … No, you’re dead. Your stepmother had you killed.”

  “No,” she said flatly, “she only thought she’d killed me.”

  “But there was a body. I threw the ashes into the pond.”

  He spoke loudly, unable to control the volume of his voice until she said, “Baby, calm down. It’s all right. What you threw in the water today was hardly alive to begin with.”

  Hardly alive to begin with? What the hell is she talking about? Oh, God, is she really sitting here with me?

  He felt trapped in a loop, spinning in tight circles of utter confusion. The questions he had swelling inside his brain made him dizzy. “What have you done?”

  “Just relax,” she said. “I’ll explain everything.”

  He hadn’t noticed, but his hands had stopped digging into the seat. He brought one up to his forehead and rubbed it. “Tell me everything from the beginning.”

  She sighed. “It was Claudia’s idea to take over this country.”

  “Yeah, I know. The President told me.”

  “Shut up for a minute and let me talk,” she snapped.

  He saw her clearly then. He thought he’d never see her beautiful face again other than in photographs and a few home videos. Now he sat only a few feet from her. He could hear her speaking to him. Her body was fully animated, not motionless in a still picture. She was alive, and he slowly began realizing it.

  “I like to think she manipulated my father into going along with her plan,” she went on. “But I know my father, and he was probably just as excited and more than willing to be a part of it. Power wasn’t really what he was after, though. Ever since he witnessed his father’s murder, he’d been obsessed with giving criminals what they deserved. He wanted a way to extend his law beyond the city and bring his idea of justice to the world.” She shook her head with disgust. “I think Claudia used that to persuade him into helping her become the world’s most powerful woman. She was smarter than she let on. If she’d been able to handle herself under stress, she could’ve run for mayor. Instead she did the next best thing; she married a widower deputy mayor on his way up.”

  She looked through the curtains to watch the rain, now a downpour, slither down the glass. Her expression turned melancholy. “I understand why they married each other, and it wasn’t for love. She needed someone to bring her power. My father needed a good-looking piece of eye candy to appeal to voters.” She drew her eyes from the window to look at him. “It disappoints me that he remarried just to bolster his political career.”

  “Is that why you were on the outs with him?”

  “I guess. I felt he’d replaced my mother like a dead pet. Claudia wasn’t the motherly type, not even towards her own son. I got along with Aaron so well, it made having her as a step-mother tolerable. But I couldn’t wait to leave New York.”

  “And as soon as you graduated high school, you left for California,” he said.

  “Where I met Marko and Kip. Marko knew I was Hiroshi Sho’s daughter, and I think it’s the reason he befriended me.” She sighed. “He made casual inquiries about Dad here and there, but I never thought he was digging for dirt. Not until Marko tried bringing me into the Organization.”

  “Why did he want you? Hell, why didn’t you go for it?”

  “Being the daughter of the mayor, I already had a way inside politics, making it easy for me to snoop around. Perhaps run for office and really dig in. There’re people who’ve done that. But I didn’t want any involvement in shit like that. You know me; I’m a laid-back girl who wants a simple life. I don’t want to spy on our government.”

  “Do I know you?” he challenged, his voice dowsed with anger. “Because it seems that you’ve become the very thing you didn’t want to be—a spy. And against your own father.”

  He was angry, but not because she’d spied on her father. It was just the only thing he could yell at her for. He didn’t understand why he had such anger, nor what to direct it on. For an eerie moment, he understood how Twenty must have felt.

  “I had to,” she fired back. “You found out what he was willing to do with that crazy bitch. Don’t give me that ‘blood is thicker than water’ bullshit. I wasn’t about t
o have the blood of millions on my hands ’cause I stood by and did nothing.”

  He saw her point, but other questions remained. “If you were living in California, how did you catch wind of the plan?”

  “I received an e-mail, giving me an outline of the plan and who was involved. I deleted it, thinking it was some lame joke from Marko or Kip. When the same e-mail was sent again, I confronted them about it. Of course, they denied sending it, but Marko became interested. He got me to reply to this person, who then sent a more detailed description of the plan, explaining about the Replicas and how many were being created. Whoever it was had access to information no one else did. I didn’t want to believe it, especially since it involved my dad.”

  She rubbed her temple. Nikolai wanted to hold her, and he would have if he only knew where they stood. He still loved her, but he sensed she was hurting inside. The one person most women looked up to when they’re little girls was their father. For her to learn that her ex-role model had planned to murder millions, even in his skewed sense of establishing law and order to the country, must’ve broken her heart.

  “I wanted this person to stop e-mailing me this garbage, but Marko advised against it until he got an investigation going. I contacted Aaron and told him everything to speed things along after I got the pictures.”

  He drew his eyebrows together. “What pictures?”

  “Of the hundreds of Replicas in the lab,” she answered grimly. “Jesus, to think this Linden was actually producing these things like cars on an assembly line … Aaron couldn’t believe it either and said he’d look into it.” She sighed, only it was a short, frustrated huff. “By looking into it, he went straight to Claudia and asked her. It wasn’t long before he called to tell me one of his students had accused him of having sex with him. It turned into a circus. When that happened, Marko suggested Aaron might’ve been set up. When Aaron told me that he’d approached his mother with what I’d said, I realized she must’ve been part of the plan. That’s when I decided to go back home.”

  A wave of regret ran over him for having accused Hiroshi Sho of killing his own daughter. “How did you find out for sure that she was the one behind it?”

  “Keiko Yu told me.”

  He gave her a look of confusion. “The woman who killed you? I mean … well, whatever.”

  “She was my father’s right-hand man, so to speak. Keiko had been a friend of the family for years. She watched over me after Mom died. As Dad became more powerful, she moved up. Dad helped her become an agent.”

  “And she was the one who told you about Claudia?”

  She nodded solemnly. “My dad confided a lot to Keiko. He told her Claudia had a brilliant plan and he was going to go through with it. She tried convincing him to back out, but there was no stopping him. Because of everything he’d done for her, she stayed loyal to him. She said nothing until I came home and started asking questions.”

  Jade turned away again to watch the water slide down the glass in curvy patterns. The rain beat on the steel roof above them like stones.

  “I printed the pictures of the Replicas and showed them to Keiko. That’s when she started talking. She told me about Lloyd and how he’d laundered the money for funding. She also told me about a hardcopy with the names of every person who’d contributed to the Health is Golden Foundation. I had to expose Claudia, but she was a clever cunt. She’d covered her tracks well. I had to out her, but first I needed to … I had to …”

  Her voice trailed away as she looked toward the window again. She shut her eyes to keep the tears from falling, but they fell anyway.

  Nikolai placed a hand on her knee. “Hey, it’s all right. You did what you had to do.”

  She didn’t say it, but he knew what she meant. She’d been about to say that she first needed to get proof to expose the plan with everyone involved, including her father. The feeling that she’d betrayed him must’ve weighed heavily upon her.

  She finally opened her eyes and said, “When I moved back in, I only stayed for a couple of weeks. With me being there, Dad wouldn’t let his guard down, so Marko paid for an apartment until I could find out something solid.”

  “Marko paid for your apartment? You told me your dad paid the rent.”

  “No, Marko did. He made millions inventing the MIR card.”

  He thought it was a joke, but her serious expression told him otherwise.

  He gently squeezed her knee before leaning back.

  “It wasn’t until late September that I filmed the video. Keiko told me Dad was going to have a meeting with Linden and Lloyd. Keiko snuck me inside the house while everyone was out. I waited in a room next to Dad’s study until that night. When Dad and Claudia went to bed later, I snuck back out.”

  “If this Keiko was so loyal to your father, why did she help you?”

  “She realized how bad it would get. One way or the other, the plan to go to war would open Pandora’s box.” She grinned. “And she hated Claudia as much as I did. After getting the evidence I needed, I contacted Marko and told him about the hardcopy file and the bank. You know about that?”

  “Know about it? I saw the explosion.”

  “I held onto the video. That was my mistake. I should’ve sent a copy to Marko the night I filmed it, but I was afraid once Marko had both the video and file, he’d expose the truth before I could get any evidence against Claudia. Without it, she would’ve simply claimed innocence and gotten away scot-free while my father took all the blame.”

  “How did she hide herself so well?”

  “By letting everyone think the plan was Dad’s idea. He would never take her down with him and I think after a while he began believing that it was his idea. No one else had any inkling that she was in it with them. For all Linden and Lloyd knew, she didn’t have a clue about what the hell was going on, and that’s exactly the way she wanted it.”

  “Is that the reason why she paid Novak to do surgery on Crawford instead of going to Linden to make a clone of me?”

  “I don’t think so. It takes years to program a human clone. It would’ve been impossible to get a fully functional clone in less time. And if she’d gone to Linden for help, she would’ve had to go behind Dad’s back and hope he didn’t find out about her plot to kill me.”

  “Huh, I lucked out there.”

  “Yep. Cloning you, they would’ve had to kidnap and kill you after it was all said and done.”

  Nikolai counted his blessings on that one.

  “What did you do to flush her out?”

  “I did what Aaron did. I came straight out and told her I knew everything, and that I was going to expose the whole thing.”

  He gaped at her. “You told her you knew? Why the hell did you do that?”

  “It would set off a chain reaction—right up to her attempt to kill me.”

  “So, basically you set your step-mother up for your own murder,” he said, smiling. When she nodded, he became even more intrigued, particularly with how she’d escaped her own death. “And Claudia was dumb enough to go through with it. Wasn’t she worried that Keiko might tell your father?”

  “No,” she said. “I told Keiko to introduce the idea of killing me and she was very receptive to it. She told Claudia I’d confided in her about my knowledge of the plan and that I had to be taken out. She volunteered to do it.”

  “Then how did I come to be the killer?” Nikolai asked bitterly.

  She grunted. “It was Claudia’s idea. I wanted to keep you out of it, so I broke up with you.” She stared him dead in the eye. “Believe me when I say that it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. Everything that was done to expose Claudia and stop my dad was a walk in the park compared to telling you goodbye.”

  He almost said something when she cut him off. “Claudia had different plans for you, though. I had no idea, but she had my father’s two other agents, Zimmerman and McLean, on her side. She had them spying on me from the moment I confronted her. They found out about you before I cou
ld get you out of the picture. Keiko told me everything about the plot to murder me, and I had to let her go through with it.”

  “You could’ve warned me,” he said angrily. “Did you think I wouldn’t be able to handle it, or that I’d screw it up?”

  “I was afraid if I told you, you might not do it,” she said just as heatedly.

  “You used me,” he said, leaning forward.

  She looked at him for a minute before letting out a long breath. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It wasn’t anything like that. Let’s not fight about it.” She put the glasses in her coat pocket and raised her head to meet his gaze. “Let’s just say that the less you knew, the more you had to fight to stay alive.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Let me finish telling you what happened,” she snapped again.

  He fell back with a deep sigh. “Fine, explain it to me.”

  She ran a hand through her colored hair. “I needed help to protect both our lives, so I contacted the inside person in Linden’s lab and told him everything. Within an hour, he e-mailed me his own plan of how to make it happen.”

  She paused, leaving him hanging. “What?” he demanded. “What did this person tell you?”

  She turned toward the open door. “Do you want to explain this part to him?”

  Nikolai followed her gaze to the door where a bald child stood on the threshold. “Who are you?”

  “This is Christos,” she introduced. “He’s Linden’s first successful Replica.”

  Nikolai’s jaw dropped. “You’re the first Replica? How can that be? You’re like, what? Twelve?”

  “I’m thirty-one,” Christos said snidely, entering the room.

  He took a seat next to Jade, keeping his attention on Nikolai. “I’ve been injected with ACS to slow my growth. Recently I started injecting myself with small doses of ECR to force my body to grow into adulthood.”

  He remembered what Ebenezer had said about ACS and ECR when he’d asked how Replicas were created.

  “I contacted Jade and told her what my father was doing and who I knew was involved.”