********
When it was time to leave, Myrine asked Greco to walk with her for a moment. “Why have you not told her?” Myrine asked as soon as they were out of hearing range.
“I meant to tell her after I left here earlier today, but so much had happened in Jacksonville and she had so much going on, I just couldn’t do it. I will tell her everything when the time is right. I promise.”
“I hope so,” Myrine said. “Secrets can be very dangerous, Greco. You should know that better than most.”
“I do.”
Mirissa was waiting patiently by the statue where they left her. She gave Myrine a hug goodbye, and a moment later she and Greco faded away until they were gone from Tritonia once more.
“She is evolving too quickly, Artemis. I fear she won’t be able to hold on to her control.”
“You underestimate her, Myrine. She learned how to use and control three of her powers in the short time she was here. Three powers that she didn’t even know she possessed until today. That was quite impressive. I have faith that she will fulfill her destiny.”
Myrine thought for a moment. “If she doesn’t, then all is lost.”
Chapter 22
Back on the couch in the safe house’s den, Mirissa sat up and stretched. Even though her consciousness had spent the last few hours active, her body hadn’t, and it needed a little stretching. Looking over at Greco, who was also mid-stretch, she realized that she was more than a little disappointed that he was fully clothed again.
“I think you’ve had enough for one day. Let’s ask your mother where you will be sleeping and then you can turn in.” Greco turned and left the room.
Hmm, Mirissa thought. His mood certainly soured quickly.
The house was buzzing with activity when Greco and Mirissa emerged from the den. Ken and Jackie sat at a small table beside the fireplace in front of their laptop computers, furiously typing away. Myrine and Steve were in the midst of a heated discussion with Myrick and Carter. Han stood to the side with a cell phone to his ear, speaking Mandarin to whoever was on the other end of the line.
Myrine looked over her shoulder as they entered the room and greeted them with a forced smile. “I’m glad you’re back. How did it go?”
Before Mirissa could answer, Greco said, “She did well. We’ve uncovered a few of her powers—telekinesis, sensory expansion, and the ability to control the elements—but she still has much to learn.”
“Excellent,” Myrine said. “I need you to stay close to her while she’s evolving. Help her stay on top of everything.”
“Hello?” Mirissa whined. “I’m standing right here.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Myrine gave her daughter’s hand a quick, reassuring squeeze. “We’ve just got a lot going on right now. Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to be doing. Did something happen here while we were gone?”
“Kind of.” Myrine looked over to where Ken and Jackie were still plugging away at their keyboards. “Julian, our computer expert, thinks he may have uncovered something. Daedric has always been heavily invested in oil: that’s how he accumulated most of his wealth. But Julian now thinks that there might be more to it than just money. He’s been tracking patterns that Daedric has formed over the last twenty years and he found a few anomalies, as he put it.”
Mirissa tried to look interested, but business and investments were probably the least interesting things she could think of. I thought we were supposed to save the world, not critique Daedric’s investment strategies.
Unaware of Mirissa’s thoughts, Myrine continued. “Daedric’s investments have always been unusually profitable, incredibly so, in fact which is why we’ve not paid much attention to them. Him using his powers to become rich was expected. But Julian has found several large investments that Daedric made through shell companies that weren’t profitable at all. Most of them lost him millions of dollars each.”
Mirissa couldn’t help but let her frustration show. “So, he made some bad investments. Haven’t you been watching the news lately? People everywhere are losing their shirts these days.”
“You’re forgetting who Daedric is, Mirissa.” Myrine continued as though in schoolteacher mode. “He’s a demi-god with powerful abilities. Judging by the strength of ninety percent of his investments, he’s used those abilities to ensure his success, making him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Add that to the fact that most of his losing investments happened in the nineties, a time when the economy was booming, there is only one conclusion to be made. If Daedric lost huge sums of money, it was because he wanted to.”
Mirissa couldn’t argue with that logic. If she had Daedric’s powers, she wouldn’t have accidentally lost millions of dollars. “So, what are Ken and Barbie doing?”
Myrine raised her eyebrows at Mirissa’s use of her nickname for Jackie. “They are sifting through the data on the companies that Daedric took large losses on and trying to determine how it benefited him.”
Han joined them as he hung up his phone. “My people are saying the same thing as everyone else. Preternatural activity is almost nonexistent right now. Patrols are turning up nothing unusual and no one has any idea why.”
Chapter 23
Daedric allowed a smile to raise the corners of his mouth as he hung up the telephone. It never ceased to amaze him how easily manipulated and controlled the humans were. This phone call, like all of the others he’d made that evening, ended with the phrase “We’re ready, sir.”
It was almost time. After nearly twenty years of moves and counter moves, all of the chess pieces on Daedric’s board were in place. It had been more difficult and time consuming than he’d imagined, but with the need to involve lesser beings came the need to accept slower progress.
He was on the cusp of realizing a dream—a dream that began almost twenty-five years ago. To Daedric, it felt like a lifetime.
He’d been seventeen years old when his true lineage began to show. Until that point, his life had been as uninspiring as the millions of people rushing to and fro on the streets below. He was a mediocre student with no real athletic talent, living in a small two-bedroom house with his single mother. His college prospects were almost nonexistent so his mother suggested he get a job selling cars. His good looks would benefit him there, she had said. Daedric’s future was most definitely not something he looked forward to in those days.
And then everything changed. It wasn’t an immediate, drastic change, but more of a gradual evolution. At first, he didn’t even notice the differences. His muscles became stronger and better defined. His eyesight, which had been dismal since he was a toddler, became clearer every day. It wasn’t until his intellect also began to increase that he realized something amazing was happening. In a matter of a few months, Daedric went from being an average teenager with no hope of impacting the world, to an exceptional young man with nothing but opportunity ahead of him. His mother was happy for him, of course, but Daedric saw the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes would be filled with fear and uncertainty instead of the love and pride he felt he deserved.
Then the real transformation started. Powers that he’d never even thought possible began to manifest themselves. He could think of something—almost anything—and make it happen. He had thought it was telekinesis, but it was so much more than that. The captain of the cheerleading team, a girl that hadn’t known he existed even though she’d been in his classes since the seventh grade, called and asked him on a date, immediately after he had daydreamed about that exact scenario. He watched as a raffle ticket he purchased in hopes of winning a new car was drawn from a barrel holding thousands of others, just as he had wanted. Then, his high school nemesis, Burt Wagner, was paralyzed in a freak accident that was eerily reminiscent of a sketch he’d drawn of Burt falling off a ladder and landing badly on a fence.
Daedric didn’t know what was happening to him, or why,
but he was determined to find out. He spent hours at the library scouring the books, looking for anything that would explain his new abilities, but there was nothing. He wrote letters to the authors of some of the more magical stories, but no one ever responded. Eventually, he decided to try a little closer to home—his mother.
Daedric sat his mother down at their dining table, told her what he was experiencing, and waited for her to give him some logical explanation. Instead, she started to cry, repeating over and over again that she didn’t know. Some months ago, he might have believed her, but now he simply willed her to stop crying and tell him the truth about whatever it was she was hiding. To stop the blubbering that he knew would take place next, he simply willed her to be succinct.
“Your father’s name is Ares. He’s the God of War,” she said. “I didn’t know what he was at first. I thought he was a travelling salesman. We would get together every time he came through town. When I got pregnant I thought he’d be upset, but he just laughed when I told him, saying that it had taken longer than he’d expected. He told me who he was and I, of course, thought he was crazy. He proved it to me by taking me to Paris—In the blink of an eye—then to an island somewhere in the South Pacific, and then back home. He said he would come for you one day. That he had big plans for you. But after so many years passed, I thought maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. I guess not.”
As unbelievable as that should have sounded, Daedric knew it to be true as soon as the words were out of his mother’s mouth. He was the son of a god.
His first order of business, he decided after discovering his parentage, was to get rich. Daedric walked into a convenience store, purchased a lottery ticket, and strolled home, whistling a tune. By the time the drawing took place that weekend, he’d already decided exactly what he was going to do with his winnings, then, unlike the million others that purchased tickets that week, Daedric was truly shocked when his numbers didn’t come up.
He tried several more times with the same results before he realized that he could only shape events when they occurred close to him. Initially disappointed, his new-and-improved intellect soon imagined many more ways that he could manipulate the world around him and create wealth almost as easily as winning it.
Daedric took a job at the largest car dealership in the city, exactly where his mother had suggested he work months prior, and quickly became the top salesperson in company history. It wasn’t difficult to do when he could simply will every customer he spoke with into buying whatever car he wanted them to buy. Within six weeks he set his sights on taking over the entire business. One simple meeting with his boss, and Daedric became the new owner—for the bargain basement price of one dollar.
From that point forward, Daedric’s business career snowballed until he was one of the wealthiest men in the country. His ability to convince previously inconvincible CEOs to sell him majority shares in their companies was reported by The Washington Post as “some of the most spectacular moves ever made in American business.” His attention to detail, as the media put it, was legendary as he insisted on being present at every meeting with every executive of every company he wanted to purchase, politely declining to simply videoconference.
Daedric had everything, but it wasn’t enough.
His confidence and his ego had grown to epic proportions. Just being respected by the business world was no longer satisfactory. Daedric wanted to be revered—by everyone. Then, in the back of his mind, a real plan began to form. It wasn’t a plan to attain more wealth, although that would most certainly come, it was a plan to attain the entire world. He was a demi-god after all.
Although there were too many differences between countries to count—religions, languages, and cultural beliefs—there was one thing that every nation in the world had in common. Their need for energy was all consuming. If he could control that basic necessity, he could control everything.
So, he started buying up shares in energy companies; oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, even green energy. Within two years, his portfolio included pieces of every company that produced, manufactured, refined, distributed or developed energy sources of all kinds. He watched as commodities traders drove up the price of gasoline at will, and how environmental groups pushed for alternative energy, and he watched as governments worldwide tried, and failed, to find long-term sustainable solutions.
Once he had a grip on the supply of energy, he shifted his focus to controlling the demand. Daedric spent vast amounts of money finding, and stopping, every viable alternative to conventional energy production. Whenever some new tree-hugging genius came up with a plan to save the world, Daedric would shut it down. Usually he would buy the company, or the patent, and destroy the research, but sometimes more drastic measures needed to be taken. There were many accidents in the research and development community. Some developments slipped through his fingers, like electric cars, but those things were of no concern to him. A few electric cars on the road didn’t even put a dent in the overall oil consumption, like taking a bucket full of water out of the ocean. The major breakthroughs—dozens of companies had actually perfected the collection, storage, and use of solar energy to the point where entire cities could be powered using nothing but the sun—had been terminated in such a way that no one left alive even knew the technology ever existed.
With alternatives either hidden or destroyed, Daedric was able to increase the demand for oil by astronomical amounts. America, already using about a quarter of the world’s supply of oil, increased its consumption from fifteen million barrels per day to almost twenty-one million. China, Japan and India followed suit.
Daedric had successfully maneuvered himself into a position where he could destroy every nation on earth with the proverbial push of a button—and he was almost ready to do just that.
Chapter 24
It didn’t take long for Grainger to find the flight plan for the chartered jet that carried Omega Group agents stateside from Greece. One of the benefits of working for Daedric was the almost unlimited resources he had access to and, given enough motivation, there was almost no piece of information that he couldn’t get his hands on.
And Grainger had all the motivation he needed at this moment.
The jet, a Bombardier BD-700 Global Express, was scheduled to land at Deep Forest Airport in less than an hour. Grainger was already in place where Hodges Boulevard, the only road in or out of the airport, met Butler Boulevard. He’d pulled his jeep back into the thick woods surrounding the area and turned his headlights off. Now, all he needed to do was wait for them to arrive and follow.
Grainger sat in his car, watching the night sky for the telltale signs of an approaching jet. His future was riding on his ability to find that young Amazon girl and this was his only lead. He knew there was a possibility that the Omega Group agents in that plane weren’t going to rendezvous with the others, but what options did he have?
None of his computer geeks had been able to locate a single property that might be owned by Omega Group. They searched every private and public database from Savannah to Orlando and came up empty. Maybe the nerds needed some of Daedric’s brand of motivation, he thought. His best opportunity to grab the girl had been earlier today at their headquarters, and he’d blown it.
So, all of his eggs were in this one basket.
It was a clear summer night with an almost full moon and it reminded Grainger of his old life. Sitting in a car, stargazing, with Meghan in his arms. God, she was beautiful. Smart, too. She was way out of his league and he knew it. She was his high school sweetheart, and they married right after they graduated from college. He joined the officer’s program in the Army and Meghan became an elementary school teacher. Even though they were never blessed with children, Grainger considered himself the luckiest man in the world and pinched himself daily to ensure it wasn’t all just a dream.
Looking back, that was exactly what it felt like—just a dream. The thought of never having that life again, of never holding Meghan in h
is arms, constricted his chest in a now familiar and painful way. This is how a broken heart feels, he thought.
A red, blinking light in the eastern sky pulled him back to the present and the job at hand. It was definitely a plane, but that didn’t mean it was the one Grainger was waiting for. The Jacksonville International Airport was only a short distance away and could very likely be where this flight was headed. A few moments later, the flashing red light made a sweeping turn north, lining itself up with the only runway at this private airport.
Keeping one eye on the approaching aircraft, Grainger checked his equipment one last time. His 9mm was holstered at his waist, and his LR-300 was lying on the passenger seat, both locked and loaded. Night vision and infrared goggles were in his satchel, along with an array of electronic spy gear; trackers, bugs, and jammers. Although his mission tonight was to observe and report only, after his failure earlier, he wanted to be ready for anything.
The jet made a smooth landing and Grainger checked his watch. A customs official would be waiting for their plane, so it wouldn’t take long for them to clear and be on their way—hopefully to his target.
A few minutes later Grainger watched as headlights bounced off the trees lining the airport’s only road. As their car slowed to a stop at Butler Boulevard, a passing car’s headlights illuminated enough of the interior for him to make out two figures in the front: one male and one female. Signaling their intentions to turn right, they waited for a break in traffic and joined the rest of the vehicles driving toward the beach.
Crossfire (Book 1) (The Omega Group) Page 10
