Elizabeth slumped against the pillows and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. She waited for the men to pass, her heart pounding. Instead, the footsteps stopped.
Dr. Kosta didn’t hesitate. “Of course. Charles, this was just…” He paused, as though searching for a word. “A glitch, a bug in the programming.” He laughed nervously. “Give me a few days with her and some heavy psychotropics, and I’ll get it worked out.”
Elizabeth’s heart rate soared. She wondered if the accelerated beeping from the bedside heart monitor would raise alarm. That fear forced her to calm herself. She focused on her breathing, making it slow and even.
“I sure hope so.” The Leader’s words were honed with an edge of hostility. It sounded like a threat to Elizabeth.
Zeus must have thought the same, because he didn’t answer.
“This girl is very valuable to the organization,” the Leader said. “As long as we have her, we have Senator Hawthorne in the palm of our hand.”
The footsteps started up again. She sighed in relief, glad to hear them go.
“Thank God,” she murmured.
Then she realized the hollow clapping wasn’t getting softer, as it would have if the men had continued down the hall. The sounds were becoming louder, closer.
The men had entered the room.
She stiffened under the covers, terrified they’d heard her whisper or saw her lips move.
The footsteps stopped. She sensed the men looming over her. She couldn’t see them, not through her closed lids, but she felt their presence in the air all around her. It reminded her of the oppressive stillness that came just before a lightning strike. There was even the same staticky sensation, crawling over her like a thousand ants. She tried not to shudder.
“I want you to understand something, Dimitri,” the Leader said, at her bedside. She imagined him as a human shadow stooping over her, perhaps resting his hand on the headrest. “I recognize your talent and loyalty, which is why I’ve given you such an integral part in the Project.”
“I know, sir,” Dr. Kosta stammered. His voice was soft, but she couldn’t tell if he was just talking quietly or if it was because he was standing farther away from her.
“But you are merely an extension of Project Pandora’s main body. You vet every decision through me first. You keep me updated on everything, and you keep your subjects on a shorter leash. One way or another, this will not happen again. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Dr. Kosta said.
“Good, I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding.” The Leader paused. Elizabeth felt a cold, dry finger scrape across her forehead, brushing back her hair. She tried not to shiver. “Now, I’ll let you begin her treatment. It’s essential that she recovers as soon as possible.”
The echo of the Leader’s retreating footsteps was accompanied by a soft clatter. Through the slits of her eyelids, she observed Dr. Kosta using a syringe to draw clear fluid from a small bottle.
Elizabeth tensed but knew that if she writhed and yelled, the doctor would realize the sedative had already left her system. She prayed that Hades hadn’t lied about switching out the drugs with harmless saltwater.
After wiping down the IV port, Kosta injected the drug into the port and glanced at his wristwatch.
Elizabeth maintained her breathing, keeping it calm and slow. She felt the straps loosen from around her wrists and heard the silver clicks of the buckles being undone.
Although every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, she knew this was the time when Kosta would expect disobedience. If she waited until he moved her, there was a better chance of taking him off guard. It would also give her time to find a weapon.
Kosta transferred her to a wheelchair. She slumped against the leather back with her hands splayed at her sides. She rested her head on her shoulder. Through her narrowed eyes, she observed her surroundings.
Dr. Kosta wheeled her down the hall. When they arrived at an unmarked wooden door, he pushed it open with his shoulder. As he brought her inside, fear seeped through Elizabeth’s veins at the sight of the stainless-steel container that occupied the farthermost wall. Under the glow of bright fluorescents, the tank reminded Elizabeth of a torture device from a more barbaric time.
There was no time to waste. As he leaned over the wheelchair, presumably to lift her up, Elizabeth shot to her feet and rammed her knee between his legs.
She had never struck anyone in the balls before and, for a second, thought she had somehow missed. But the way he collapsed, choking hoarsely, with his hands curled around his wounded parts, made it clear she had hit her target.
She shoved Kosta aside and dashed into the hall.
Case Notes 41:
Artemis
Shannon followed Hades through the mansion’s double doors and into a spacious foyer. A pair of Rottweilers rose as she entered, and they advanced toward her, snarling.
“Grün,” he barked. “Fuss.”
Immediately, the dogs lowered their hackles and joined their master’s side. He bent down and stroked one of the dogs on its head.
She recognized the language, but she wasn’t exactly sure how she recognized it.
“Why German?” she asked as he rubbed the Rottweiler behind its ear. He seemed more interested in petting his dogs than hunting down Dr. Kosta and finishing him off.
“I don’t want to confuse them if I use command words in normal conversation,” Hades said, smirking. “They’re about as smart as you are, which means I have to talk to them very slowly.”
“You’re such an asshole.” Lowering her voice to a whisper, she added, “Where is he?”
“Probably in his study.”
Shannon kept her hands shoved into the pockets of her coat. The barrel of her pistol made a barely noticeable bulge in the fabric. She had turned on the safety but kept her finger hovering just above the switch, ready to flick it off in an instant.
Even though Hades maintained his cold, cocky demeanor, she sensed that she and Tyler had gotten through to him somehow. Multiple times during the drive, she had watched the other boy’s mocking smile fall from his lips and briefly be replaced by a distant, almost troubled expression.
As they walked down the hall, she lingered a step or two behind Hades, just in case he tried reaching for her gun. He was six or seven inches taller than she was. From his lethal build alone, she knew he would easily be able to overpower her in a competition of strength. Her pistol was her only advantage, a way to level the playing field.
“Do you live here?” Shannon asked.
“No, I’m stationed here,” Hades said, glancing back at her.
She lifted her eyebrows.
“Like a soldier,” he said.
Shannon scoffed. “You’re not a soldier.”
Hades shrugged. “I was going to be one.”
“How old are you anyway?” she asked.
“Seventeen,” he said. “Same as you.”
“Soldier, my ass.”
The study was deserted. He ordered the dogs to keep watch outside the room, then shut the door and locked it.
“I can access the whole security system from here,” he said, going to the desk.
She withdrew the gun from her coat pocket. As she pointed it at Hades, he sighed.
“Is that really necessary?” he asked, opening the laptop.
“Don’t touch any of the drawers,” Shannon said, worried that he might reach for a gun hidden in the desk.
“I didn’t plan to.” As he began typing, his expression hardened. His gaze flitted from her to the laptop screen to the door.
Just looking at him, she could tell the cogs in his brain were working in overdrive. How he could think straight after getting clobbered in the head was beyond her. Did he have a skull made out of steel or something?
“What exactly are you doing?” she asked.
“Turning off the gate and alarms,” he said. “Elevator, too. I’ll keep the lights on, but that’s about it. Won’t hel
p if they trap us in.”
“They?”
“I don’t know how many, if any,” Hades said. “But I just remembered there’s a meeting tonight. And Mr. Warren might still be here, and at the very least he’ll have a security detail with him.” He plucked out the flash drive attached to the laptop and stuck it in his pocket, then returned both hands to the keyboard. “Give me a minute. I’m going to look through the cameras.”
She joined him behind the desk as he brought up the video display. She had no idea who “Mr. Warren” was, but she decided that now wasn’t a good time to keep asking questions.
Hades identified each video as he skipped past it. “Downstairs bedroom, bedroom, library, game room, study. Oh shit, Elizabeth.”
Before Shannon could react, he rushed past her. By the time she lifted her pistol, he was already halfway through the door. Instead of shooting him in the back, she took off after him, with the Rottweilers racing at her heels.
Hades wasn’t her captive anymore, Shannon realized as her feet pounded across the floor. He was a wild card, an unknown variable, but not an enemy or a prisoner. And there was nothing she could do but follow him and hope his interests remained aligned with hers.
As they reached the foyer, a door to her right flew open and a teenage girl barreled through the opening, breathing heavily. Dressed in a blue hospital gown, with her blond curls surrounding her face in a tangled jungle, she hardly resembled the girl from the photos. Only her features were the same, those ice-blue eyes that widened with shock and the mouth that fell agape at the sight of them.
“I remember, Two,” Elizabeth said between gasps. “I know who you are now.”
Hades stared at her like she was a stranger, his expression blank.
“You can,” Elizabeth said and stepped toward him. “That’s what you told me. I didn’t believe you back then, but now I know you were right, and it’s not too late. Let’s run away together.”
Their reunion didn’t last. The moment Hades’s hands locked around her waist, the front doors opened and three men strode in.
Case Notes 42:
Apollo
As Shannon and Hades disappeared into the mansion, Tyler darted across the driveway, crouching forward to make a smaller target of himself. Once he reached the garage, he pressed himself against the wall, holding his pistol at the ready as he typed in the first of the two passcodes.
The tiny light on the keypad blinked green, and the garage door rolled up with the soft groan of well-oiled hinges. Over the downpour, the sound was reduced to a whisper.
He slipped inside the moment he could fit through the opening. A second control panel on the inside wall allowed him to close the door. The entire process took thirty seconds, which was far longer than he would have liked.
Pallid light filtered in from a single dust-encrusted window, shallowly illuminating his surroundings. The garage was large enough to house two cars, floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and little else.
As the garage door rolled shut, he hurried to the back wall and began opening cabinets. Two were shelved and contained paint cans, tools, and a stack of license plates from different states. The third cabinet housed a golf bag, which he shoved onto the floor to access the inner paneling.
He squatted, set the gun onto the floor, and ran his fingers along the bottom panel. There was a small crack between the cabinet’s base and its interior walls. He felt leery about trying to remove the panel with his fingers, in case Hades had neglected to tell him that the entrance was booby-trapped in some way. Instead, he retrieved a screwdriver from another cabinet and wedged it into the joint between the panels. He set the board on the floor once he had lifted it all the way and discarded the screwdriver.
Four bolts affixed a steel panel to the concrete beneath. A keypad much like the one on the door outside was inserted flush against the metal. Tyler consulted the numbers he had written down as he pressed the corresponding buttons.
As soon as he typed in the last number, the back of the cabinet swung forward on heavy hinges. The panel wasn’t flimsy particleboard, as he had first assumed, but laminated wood atop an inch-thick steel core.
Wealthy, powerful, and paranoid. Just who were they up against here, aside from a nut job of a psychiatrist?
Concrete stairs led into darkness.
Feeling woefully underpowered, Tyler picked up the pistol and stepped onto the landing. He left the door slightly ajar, worried that if he closed it, he wouldn’t be able to open it from the inside.
Naked bulbs in steel cradles, activated by motion sensors, provided slightly more illumination than the watery daylight filtering in from behind him. He followed the stairs down to a narrow passageway with an arched ceiling. The air below was cold and clammy. In the sallow light, the raw brick walls almost resembled the inside of a creature’s gullet, engulfing him.
Heart racing, he hurried down the corridor, ducking to avoid scraping his head on the low ceiling. A pipe ran along the length of the tunnel. He passed an alcove on his left side that contained a churning machine and emerged through another steel-cored door to find himself in a lavish hallway.
Unlike the tunnel behind him, the hall had been designed to be pleasing to the eye. The floor was tiled in polished black stone, and decorative paneling hugged the walls. Tyler could have been in Paris, or London, or another D.C. residence, anywhere safe and welcoming. Except there was a boy tied to the bed in the first room he came across.
Against his better judgment, he entered the room and shut the door behind him.
“Hey, can you hear me?” he asked the boy, staring in befuddlement at the helmet covering the kid’s entire head. When the kid didn’t respond, he set his pistol on the nightstand and removed the helmet.
The kid’s eyes moved restlessly beneath his closed lids. He didn’t respond when Tyler repeated the question.
Tyler pressed two fingers below his jaw to check his pulse. Slow but even. His gaze went to the plastic sack hanging from a metal rack next to the bed. Whatever drug the boy had been administered kept him docile and unresponsive—but he wouldn’t remain that way for long, if Tyler had any say in it.
He peeled off the tape affixing the IV tube to the boy’s inner arm and withdrew the hollow tip from beneath his skin. He fumbled in removing the straps, his palms damp with sweat, but within a minute the restraints fell to the mattress.
He didn’t like leaving the boy here to come down from his sedation alone, but there was no time. He had already delayed long enough. He refused to leave Shannon alone with Hades for any longer.
He retrieved his pistol from the bedside table and stepped into the hall. He glanced back once, only long enough to confirm that he was alone, then continued forward.
Before Tyler had an opportunity to explore the contents of the remaining rooms, the door ahead burst open and a blond girl rushed out.
She froze at the sight of him, eyes wide and lips parted in blank amazement. Her face was identical to the girl in Hades’s photo. As soon as her gaze lowered to the gun, she pivoted on her heel and fled.
“Wait, Elizabeth!” As he rushed after her, he glanced through the doorway she had come from—and froze.
At the sight of the man kneeling inside, Tyler’s finger curled through the trigger guard. His chest tightened and an overwhelming hatred engulfed him.
“How are you even here?” Dr. Kosta asked, his voice ragged with shock and pain. His hands were folded loosely over his crotch, and it didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why.
“Don’t move,” Tyler ordered, stepping into the room.
“Just put the gun down,” Kosta said.
“You’d better start explaining things now. What did you do to me?”
“Did you kill Hades?”
“Answer the question.”
“Olympus is rising,” Kosta said.
“Nice try, but that’s not going to work with me.” As tempted as Tyler was to pistol-whip Kosta into obedience, he needed information more than sava
ge satisfaction. He decided to take a blunter approach than mere words and cocked his pistol’s hammer.
Kosta tensed at the low click and moistened his lips. “Wait, just wait a minute. Let’s not be rash here. Who am I talking to? Tyler or B-10?”
“What?”
“So, you still don’t remember.” Kosta chuckled weakly. “Tyler Bennett…never existed. He’s a lie.”
Tyler narrowed his eyes. What exactly was Dr. Kosta trying to pull here?
“Tyler Bennett is an alternate personality that I made,” Kosta said, and his pallid eyes shone with hateful glee at the shock that Tyler felt contort his own features. “You wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for me. I created you!”
Tyler struggled for breath. He felt choked, beaten down with each word that left Kosta’s mouth.
“Your memories are artificial, built from photographs, records, nothing real, nothing substantial.”
“Shut up.”
“Your past, your sense of self, all lies. Your desires, your goals, your inspirations, all ideas that I implanted into your subconscious through psychic driving.”
“It’s not true.” His voice trembled with shock and fury.
“Just where do you think you came from?” Dr. Kosta asked, staggering to his feet. “If not for Project Pandora, you would never even exist in the first place! You would still be an embryo refrigerated in some shithole of an IVF clinic!”
Each word hit Tyler like a punch. His rage simmered into overwhelming confusion. Suddenly, he felt engulfed by a feeling like being adrift on a stormy sea, clinging to flotsam in an attempt to stay afloat as the world churned beneath him.
What was Project Pandora? What was this talk about an IVF clinic?
“Enough riddles!” Tyler said. “Tell me what Project Pandora is now!”
A sly light entered Kosta’s eyes, and he took a step closer. “Project Pandora was created with the sole purpose of raising genetically superior children who would become this country’s future military and political leaders. Through psychological programming, the children would be unaware of their own nature, their purpose, until called upon by the organization. They would devote every waking moment to fulfilling their ‘dream’ of rising to power, unaware that it wasn’t their dream in the first place.”
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