Hero of the Republic: (The Parasite Initiative, Book 1)

by Britt Ringel

  The door opened ominously. A large security official in an elaborate uniform stomped his way to the table. He yanked out the empty chair but, having second thoughts, did not sit down. “Your name. Now.” The man had a hoarse wheeze that accompanied a thick, French accent.

  Covington shifted her eyes to the tabletop.

  Two more men entered the room noisily and she watched them take positions on either side of her.

  The security chief demanded again with his raspy voice, “You will tell me your name.”

  Covington felt her body trembling but stubbornly remained silent.

  “Fine. Hold her.”

  The flanking men each grabbed an arm. She did her best not to resist as the man on her right wrenched her arm up and onto the table. He pressed down hard to secure it.

  The chief extracted a small, black box from his pocket. One end of the box had an opening.

  It’s an identification module, Covington recognized. They used them at C-POE.

  The man placed her right index finger into the box and Covington felt a familiar pinch. The chief grunted satisfaction and withdrew the box, handing it to an assistant. “Leave us,” he barked.

  After his henchmen left, he sat slowly down and stared at her. Covington refused to meet his gaze, instead focusing on her ragged breathing.

  “We will know your identity shortly,” he boasted. “You may as well tell me your name.”

  Covington met the question with silence and stared at the table. Not word one.

  Giant fists beat the table’s surface. “You will talk to me, you bitch!” He leaned across the table and grabbed her hair, forcing eye contact. “I’ll hook you up to a T-DAAM machine and pump so much thioamobarbittoral through your body it’ll fry your brain!”

  Covington closed her eyes. She was in danger of hyperventilating. In her mind, she pictured Melissa Barrington screaming obscenities at her. The recollection of her hair being pulled by her ancient nemesis during their fight helped replace her current terror with anger.

  The man shoved her. He shot from his chair, causing it to fly backward. “You’ll be a mental vegetable by the time I’m done interrogating you,” he promised. The man drew back his fist for a haymaker.

  A voice from the doorway stopped his wind-up. “Mr. Bonnet, you have a comm request.”

  The giant swore in French while glaring at Covington. He pointed to her. “Better breathe through that pretty, little nose while you still can.” He turned and stormed past the shorter man near the door and stomped out of the room.

  The petite man did not follow him. Instead, he looked at Covington and smiled. “Wow,” he said, casually walking into the room. “You’ve really ticked off Amaury.” His smile widened. “I like you already.”

  The man bent over to collect the fallen chair and walked it back to the table. He placed it gently down and sat. Extending a friendly hand over the table, he greeted, “I’m Robert.”

  Robert let his hand hang over the table until he finally withdrew it. “That’s okay,” he soothed. “I understand that this must be very frightening. I’m afraid Amaury doesn’t appreciate subtlety. He worked under the old guard when Malatech broke a lot of the rules of espionage.” He looked almost embarrassed at the admission. “I’ll never understand how he was promoted over all of us.”

  The man risked a nervous glance behind him, at the open door. “Look, Miss…” He trailed off, waiting. After several seconds, he continued, “Miss, you have to understand that Amaury means what he says. I worked on your side of the field for seven years but Amaury never did. He takes corporate espionage very personally and he will use a T-DAAM machine on you.”

  Robert leaned low, over the table, trying to make eye contact. “You will answer his questions; you won’t have a choice. Miss, thioamobarbittoral works by numbing the parts of the brain that create deception. In low doses, all it does is numb but with the concentrations that Amaury will use… It will damage you, severely. Please don’t allow that to happen.”

  The man waited in silence before sighing. “I should go. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you but if you decide to save yourself, tell Amaury that you want to talk to Robert.” He smiled as he rose. “Not only will it make Amaury mad but it will help me. In return, I promise to do my best to help you.”

  He hovered near the table, waiting for an answer. Finally, he took a long, sad look at Covington and disappeared through the doorway.

  * * *

  Covington waited again, this time for over an hour. Every second was a battle to stop from calling Robert’s name. She struggled with her abandonment, questioning the point of resisting when they would simply burn out portions of her brain to force a confession. In the gloom of the dim light, she battled her inner demons.

  She thought of her family. Would her brother even learn what had happened to her? On the Wall of Heroes back on Seshafi, thirty-one simple AmyraCorp logos accompanied the hundreds of names emblazoned on the hallowed, pewter wall. As a child, she had visited the wall several times with her family.

  “Daddy, what are those?” she had asked her father while pointing to the logos.

  “Those are our greatest heroes, my darling,” Joshua Covington had explained. “Those represent the men and women who sacrificed everything and did so anonymously.”

  “How can we know them if they don’t have names?” Wide, innocent green eyes had looked to her father.

  Ancient eyes had looked back. “We know them through their sacrifice, Aoife. Their actions spoke louder than a single name ever could.”

  Covington was not sure if she had understood her father back then. She understood now. A tear had found its way down her cheek. She swiped at it angrily.

  The door suddenly burst open and Amaury Bonnet darkened its threshold.

  “Time to play, little girl,” he said menacingly as two assistants walked toward her. One of them was Robert. He carried a blindfold.

  Covington was lifted from her chair, blindfolded and handcuffed behind her back. The cuffs were heavy-duty alloy that would magnetically lock to an interrogation chair. She was guided out of the room and down a long hall. As she was escorted through another door, Robert’s voice whispered, “Last chance, Miss. Please don’t make me watch Amaury wreck you.”

  Covington nearly choked out submission but forced herself to swallow instead.

  They passed down a second hallway and entered another chamber. Her footsteps began to echo. She could hear an aircar’s turbines idling and the echoes of voices that suggested a large garage.

  “Where’s the standard paddy?” Bonnet asked. His voice was easily recognizable from his wheeze.

  “Maintenance,” came the answer. “We’ll transport her with a regular squad car. What do you want us to do with her?”

  “Just place her in isolation once you’re at the station,” Bonnet ordered. “I’ll be down after her identity check is complete. And warm up the T-DAAM, I’m going to run juice through her until she’s so imbecilic that she’s confessing her deepest, darkest secrets.” The two shared maniacal laughter. Bonnet’s earlier anger seemed replaced with an almost gleeful anticipation.

  A rigid hand grasped Covington around the arm. “Into the car,” a voice snarled while the unyielding hand guided her forward.

  She heard a door open and then felt the hand push her head down as she did her best to enter the rear of the police vehicle blindfolded. Once seated, she lifted her feet into the car and heard the door slam shut behind her.

  “Hi, Aoife,” a familiar woman’s voice greeted. Delicate hands lifted the blindfold off her head.

  Covington stared, dumbfounded, into the dark eyes of Innocencia Soto.

  Soto grinned widely before laughing. “Surprised to see me? Lean forward so I can get those cuffs off you.”

  “H-How?” Covington stammered.

  “Let Kyle explain, he’s almost done with Mr. Chuckles out there,” Wills said from the driver’s seat. “Right now, let Inn get the cuffs off you.”


  The door beside Soto opened. “Scoot over, Inn,” Joab ordered darkly. The small woman slid to the middle of the seat, still working on Covington’s handcuffs.

  Covington looked blankly at Joab. He wore a uniform labeled Ardea First Response. The giant winked at her.

  The front passenger door opened and Danzy, similarly uniformed, took his seat.

  “Can I run the lights now, Kyle?” Wills asked playfully. “Let me sound the siren.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Danzy said.

  The aircar’s siren squealed before Wills extinguished it. As the car lifted off the ground and began to move out of Malatech’s garage, Danzy turned to face Covington. “You did great, Aoife. Hell, they said you didn’t utter a single word to them.”

  “That’s my girl,” Joab complimented from across the bench seat.

  The handcuffs finally relinquished their grip. Covington brought her hands forward and massaged her wrists. “Can someone explain to me what’s happened, please?” She looked around, still bewildered.

  Danzy smiled. “Sorry but think of this as your initiation. The less you knew, the less you could tell them.”

  “You mean this was all fake?” she asked.

  Danzy shook his head. “Oh, no. This was very real. That man was going to extract every detail of your life from you while turning your brain into mush. The initiation part was us not explaining Sacrificial Lamb.”

  Covington gestured toward Soto. “She wasn’t the lamb, running for her life while we got the information?” She looked at the hacker and smiled. “I’m happy you’re still alive, by the way.”

  Soto touched the side of her shaved head and rubbed. “Barely. They traced me all the way back to the room and burned out the terminal but my firewall held while I unplugged.”

  “Sans decorative hat,” Joab noted. Soto punched Joab lightly in the arm in response.

  “You,” Danzy said as he pointed at Covington, “were the sacrificial lamb. Nobody was going to get out of the building until Malatech caught its thief. We needed to sacrifice you so you could smuggle the data out.”

  “But they confiscated my datapad,” she protested. “And they’ve got my DNA. My cover and the fake company on Niven have both been blown.”

  Danzy wagged a finger playfully. “They don’t have Aoife Covington’s DNA and the Niven shell company is well worth the price for Seshafi to get its hands on the research.”

  She leaned forward until her face was mere centimeters from Danzy. “They took my DNA in an interrogation room, Kyle.” She held up her index finger to him.

  Danzy’s face contorted into dread but he quickly followed the mockery with a smile. “They have your DNA but the moment Aoife Covington was admitted to an ATAC team, the records of her DNA back in Seshafi were completely replaced. Sure, your true records are still there but safely ensconced in a secure location away from prying eyes. Malatech isn’t going to match your DNA to Aoife Covington because your DNA doesn’t match any known identity in the galaxy.”

  “But…” Covington trailed off. A beep sounded from the panel in front of Danzy who twisted back around to face forward. “Well… Okay then,” she relented. “But I didn’t get the information out of Malatech. They took my datapad.”

  The aircar was flying swiftly now, traveling not to the local police station but to Orleans’ largest spaceport. Covington replayed their heist in her mind from the server room forward as she watched the ground race beneath them. “Swallow, don’t chew.” Wills’ words echoed in her mind repeatedly. “The breath mints!” she blurted out in epiphany.

  Soto nodded enthusiastically. “Once Alden docked your datapad, I downloaded the research onto it and then streamed a second copy from your datapad into an itty-bitty backup drive that you then swallowed.”

  “It’s a mean trick,” Wills admitted, picking up where Soto left off. His grin was anything but apologetic. “When you walked through the security arch, it not only detected your datapad but also the drive you ingested. However, the guards weren’t expecting two copies.” His eyebrows pressed together to offer something a little closer to remorse. “Sorry but there really wasn’t a lot of time to explain all this to you. Plus, it wouldn’t have been as much fun.”

  “So, we’ll recover the research from you in a day or two,” Danzy stated.

  “I’m not getting it, man,” Joab promised.

  “Let Aoife do that herself,” Wills suggested from behind the wheel.

  “Uh… yuck,” Covington said. She looked around the interior of the police aircar. “How did you get this?”

  Joab flinched and his elbow jostled Soto. “Inn was already hacked into emergency services so she simply reported a fight at our location right before Wills docked your datapad.” The giant thought in purposeful consideration for a moment. “It wasn’t really a lie because those two officers had a heck of a fight when they got to our room.”

  The car’s turbines were whining at full throttle now, offering a throaty note as the vehicle began to descend. “We’ll be landing in about two minutes,” Wills informed.

  Danzy was typing on the panel in front of him. “The ambassador’s shuttle is ready. Once we step aboard it, Ardea can’t touch us.”

  Wills shot Covington a look before facing forward again. “Seshafi’s ambassador to Ardea was just informed that his aunt on his mother’s side has passed suddenly and he’s being recalled to Seshafi for the service.” He shook his head in exaggerated sympathy. “It’s a tragic non-accident that means his diplomatically protected schooner will be leaving the Ardea system immediately.”

  “Wave goodbye to Ardea, Aoife,” Soto said merrily. The hacker turned and waved enthusiastically out the rear window.

  Danzy reached his hand over his seat and toward Covington. “And say hello to your new team. Welcome aboard. You can ask me any question now, and not just one.”

  Chapter 39

  Faith Lawson scrambled to keep pace with her boss. She pointed animatedly at her datapad to various fiscal charts. “As you can see, Councilman Sandoval, these three graphs reveal just how insidious Pied Piper is. You should lead with these charts right here when organizing your speech. The data is irrefutable. Mr. Wright has been secretly feeding me information for months now.”

  Sandoval looked to her with a faint smile. “Do you really think you’re not going to be with me at Bree, Faith?” He chuckled and wagged a finger at her. “Clear your calendar because you’re coming with me to the General Council meeting next month. You don’t think I’d risk my entire political future without the woman who discovered this duplicity by my side, do you?”

  Lawson’s heart skipped a beat. I’m going to Bree? To the Council meeting?

  “I’ll also need you to write that speech,” Sandoval instructed. “You know the details better than anyone. You’re best suited to compose a speech with enough gravitas to grab the General Council’s attention but simple enough so that non-financiers will understand just how sinister Pied Piper is.”

  He stopped his headlong pace toward a conference room, nearly causing Lawson to trip over him. The statesman looked at her gravely. “We’ll only get one shot at exposing this and the Council floor at Bree is the place to cast a bright light on those who would control the Republic from the shadows.” He placed an unsteady hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. “Make it the most compelling speech you’ve ever written, Madam Secretary.”

  * * *

  “I’m surprised, Minister Fane,” Alexander Green confessed while looking slightly away from the silver-haired woman. “And I’m marginally ashamed to admit that I was dreading this meet-and-greet with the Minister of Intelligence since taking my new position but this has been pleasant.”

  Fane wrapped a delicate hand around the man’s arm in a rare display of physical contact. The fingers constricted as she said, “Let me once again express my sympathies regarding Zhen Peng’s illness. I understand it was very difficult at the end.”

  Green nodded solemnly. “He
’d battled the illness for years but his final months were torturous. When he finally resigned his council seat, he was already in extraordinary pain.” Green lowered his voice and looked at her guiltily. “He actually warned me about several ministries… including yours.”

  Fane’s slender fingers tightened further. “I hope this meeting has alieved any concerns, Mr. Councilman.” A brief flash of ivory teeth preceded her reconciliation. “While Peng and I never saw eye to eye on many matters, we always held the Republic’s trust in our highest regards. Either of us would willingly die to protect it.” Her eyes searched the new council member. “I only hope that his passing might mark a better relationship between myself and Ariel’s new representative.”

  Green patted the woman’s hand at his elbow. “I can assure you of just that, Madam Minister.” He smiled charmingly. “Your offer to downgrade the classification of domestic political reliability reports is a strong step toward a more open and supportive relationship with my office. That topic has been such a taboo that my aide actually thought she misunderstood your own assistants when it was first mentioned.”

  “Well,” Fane confessed as she guided Green to her door, “times change and I must remember that measures taken decades ago may lose their prudence over time. Besides, your assurance to support my needs promises that this new spirit of cooperation will benefit the Republic.”

  They had reached the threshold. Green pried delicately at the woman’s surprisingly strong fingers. “It was a true pleasure to meet you, Madam Minister. I look forward to seeing you at the General Council meeting shortly.” He glanced down at his elbow and the hand that still remained there. “I must be off to prepare for the meeting.”

  He exited the darkened chamber only after Fane relinquished her grip. She withdrew back into the office and around her desk, settling into her padded chair before activating her datapad. “Green is gone,” she announced without introduction.

  “I know you too well to ask if you were successful,” answered the voice on the other end. “President Matthews has guaranteed me the proper sequence of bills will be forwarded during the meeting.”