The Atlantis Guard
Page 16
“So where are we going to look?”
“We have some clues. I’m not the historian for this mission, but my colleague can tell you more. We have various places in the desert we need to check out. With your senses, you’ll be of great help. You’ll like the team. They can answer many questions you have about our people. It’s sad that you grew up without a family, but you aren’t the only one. Many of us are orphans, given up for our own safety. You can find a family among us.”
A family. Winston sounded like he meant it. Despite his nervousness and the haste, they managed to get off of the street before getting spotted by the law again, his words came out gentle, caring. This guy knew what she had been through, and he had known her parents. She had a million questions to ask him.
But she already knew the two most important things—they had loved her, and they had believed in her.
“Almost there now,” Winston said. “Once we meet the team, we can get out of Timbuktu and make straight for the Gambia, a few hundred miles south of here. That’s the first place we need to look.”
Jaxon stopped in her tracks. She was barely listening to Winston. Instead, she was thinking about what her parents had given her. She had thought that no one else had ever given her these things, but now she realized she was wrong.
Winston turned and called back to her. “Come on, we have to hurry. We can be in the Gambia by the end of the week. We’ll be far away from all this trouble.”
Jaxon slowly shook her head. “We can’t go there. At least not yet.”
Winston walked back to join her. “Why not?”
“You need to take me somewhere else first.”
“Where?”
“Take me back to the Atlantis Allegiance,” Jaxon said and paused. And when she said her next words, she knew she spoke the truth. “Take me back to my family.”
Chapter 18
AUGUST 20, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
* * *
General Corbin sat in his hotel room in front of the television, laughing his head off at CNN. He used to hate watching television news. It was so superficial, so inaccurate. When you had top-secret access, you knew a lot more about what was really going on and realized that television news coverage was ninety-nine-point-nine percent wrong.
But now it was getting its facts wrong, according to his dictates.
The first phase of Operation Bicker had been a resounding success. That senator in Texas couldn’t shake the KKK story Corbin’s team had cooked up and had been hounded by questions and protests for weeks now. At a news conference, the senator had been interrupted by some Black Lives Matter protestors, and his patience had finally snapped. He’d called them “subhumans” and stormed off the stage.
Beautiful. No one remembered the fact that the senator had called a white guy on death row in Texas “subhuman” too; all the press covered was a rich white politician calling a bunch of black protestors less than human. His career was over.
So was the presidential bid of that congresswoman from New Hampshire. CNN had just aired that fake photo of her with the Russian mobster for the millionth time. The excuse this time was to analyze it on air to see if it was fake or real. It had been doctored well enough that CNN’s “expert” said the results were inconclusive. Not that the journalists at CNN cared. They knew that showing the photo was good for ratings, and people would go right on thinking what they were already thinking.
After that segment, they had a few talking heads babbling about her chances to secure her party’s nomination for the next presidential election. General Corbin already knew the answer to that one. While she was putting on a brave and defiant face, the grapevine had told him that several rich donors had decided to withdraw their support from her campaign. She was sunk.
Operation Bicker was working like a charm. Now he could shift it into high gear and cause some real instability. He needed to get the two political parties into so much turmoil they would be paralyzed when he took power.
Project Poseidon was working like a charm too. Isadore’s field report told him that Brett had become more independent and creative just before his death. So had good old General Meade, who had become enough of his former self again that he could resume his duties at the Pentagon. Of course, now he was still under Corbin’s mental control. He would make a perfect spy in the Pentagon.
General Meade headed a team that oversaw operations in North Africa, so one of his first missions was to find out why the Russians were so interested in old Atlantean ruins. If the Russians were interested in any aspect of Atlantean history or culture, he had better check up on it. He would also have Meade check up on the reports that Mauritania had rounded up all the Atlanteans. Could the Russians be behind that, or some other group? If someone else was recruiting an Atlantean army, that could be a serious threat to his plans.
But for the moment, he could leave that in General Meade’s capable hands. He was busy with the next phase of his plans.
The general chuckled at the news once more and turned it off. Although he wore his uniform, he was not in his office but rather in a hotel room in Los Angeles. He’d taken a couple of days of vacation to work on his own little side project. Leaving his room, he knocked on the door of a room down the hall. Dr. Jones came to the door carrying a medical bag. They hopped into a rented sedan with tinted windows and drove to a bad area of town for their appointment.
They pulled into the parking lot of a large church. It was an ugly thing, cheaply built, but clean, unlike most of the buildings in this trashy neighborhood. That showed self-respect and dignity, something so many Americans sadly lacked. Behind the church were two large prefab buildings. Teenagers lounged in the parking lot, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes. They stared at his uniform as he got out of the car. As he and the doctor walked to the front door of the church, they were followed by snorts of derision. He knew those were directed at his uniform.
He felt like snorting back. These kids didn’t look like they had an ounce of respect in their bodies—not for him, not for their flag, not even for themselves.
He’d change that pretty quick.
The priest came to greet them at the door.
“Father Ryan, good to meet you,” the general said, shaking his hand. The priest was an older man, his hair mostly turned to gray and his body a bit soft around the middle, but his handshake was firm and his eyes sharp. “This is my colleague, Dr. Jones. He’s very interested in your operations as well.”
“Ah yes!” Father Ryan said, shaking the doctor’s hand. “I must thank you both for your generous contributions to Redemption House.”
“We’re only too happy to help,” General Corbin said. “I’ve read fine things about your organization, and I’m always glad to support anyone who helps disadvantaged youth.”
“The youth are the future of our nation,” Father Ryan said.
You have no idea how right you are, General Corbin thought.
“So let me give you that tour I promised you on the phone,” the priest said. “As you know, we accept any runaways who come to us, if they are under twenty-one. We don’t ask questions, and we don’t ask for identification. If we did, many would rather take their chances on the street. These kids have been hurt before, the system has failed them, and they want to remain anonymous. We respect that, feeling that the first priority is to get them away from the dangers of the street. Once they’ve settled in, we gently try to get them reintegrated back into society.”
He led them through the church and to the dining hall, then to the separate boys’ and girls’ dorms. The priest introduced him to various members of staff, mostly volunteers, and explained that the kids could stay here as long as they liked if they followed the rules—no fighting, no drugs, curfew at nine p.m.
“Sadly, most drift away,” Father Ryan said with a sigh. “Even this small amount of structure scares them off after a week or two. Most are chasing some sort of dream. Many come to Los Angeles thinking they’ll get into the movies. That doesn
’t happen for most of them, of course, and those that do get into the movie industry don’t end up in the kind of movies they were thinking about.”
“What happens to the rest of them? Where do they go?” General Corbin asked.
The priest gave a tired shrug. “If they tell me, it’s usually a lie. At least we give them a place to rest for a while, get cleaned up, and a chance to get off the streets. We’re fighting against the tide here. Thousands of teenagers run away from home every year.”
They entered the games room, a small room in the back of the church. A few teenagers were playing ping-pong, while others were busy with a game of Scrabble at a corner table.
“That ping-pong table looks a bit dilapidated,” Dr. Jones said. “We’ll have to fix that. And no Foosball? The kids need a Foosball table.”
Father Ryan gave him a grateful smile. General Corbin smiled too. The good doctor was playing his part well.
“Shall we go get lunch and discuss what else we can do for Redemption House?” General Corbin asked.
“Oh, that’s most kind,” the priest said.
“I’ll drive,” General Corbin volunteered.
They went back to the parking lot. General Corbin got behind the wheel while Dr. Jones took the back seat, where his medical bag was hidden. Father Ryan took the front passenger’s seat.
The doctor didn’t wait long. As soon as they pulled out of the parking lot, he took a hypodermic needle from his bag and jabbed it into Father Ryan’s neck.
“What the—” the priest managed to say before his eyelids hooded and his head slumped back on the seat.
“I do believe he was about to say ‘hell,’” Dr. Jones said with a smile.
“Very unpriestly,” General Corbin said. “So how long will it take to get him presentable?”
“We’ve improved the serum. Dr. Ziegler is waiting back at the hotel to give him an initial hypnotic session, and he’ll stay here in LA to do follow-ups. We can call in to the church that he’s taken ill and bring him home. He’ll be ready to resume his duties in a couple of days. No one will be any the wiser.”
“Good,” the general said. “And once he’s settled in, we’ll have a steady supply of recruits.”
“I’ll get the team ready to open an LA office. We can start processing them by the end of the month.”
“Get as many as you can, doctor. And once the system is up and running, give a few local physicians the same treatment we gave Father Ryan here. Then we can open branch offices in other places runaways gather—San Francisco and New York, for example. After that, we’ll spread to other cities.”
General Corbin had finally hit on the solution to his recruitment problem—teenaged runaways. There were thousands of them, and virtually no one gave a damn about them. Plus, since they were already missing, no one would notice if they disappeared. Illegal immigrants would be a good source too. He’d work on that later.
General Corbin smiled as he drove along the Los Angeles freeway back to his hotel. Things were looking up. Now that they had a workable serum, there was nothing to stop him from his rise to power.
As he drove up onto an overpass, the sprawl of Los Angeles stretched out to his left, reaching to the horizon. All that would be his one day—the city, the state, and eventually the country. And after that, who knew?
It would all be his.
Read The Atlantis Ascent, the explosive final book in The Atlantis Saga. General Corbin is close to dictatorship of the United States—and possibly the world—but the Atlantis Allegiance is still a thorn in his side. Now there are a shadowy group of Atlanteans with special powers and deadly Russian spies thrown into the mix. His hired guns, Agent Isadore Grant and the psychopathic McKay twins, are outnumbered in Africa. He must go there himself, with two soldiers injected with the Atlantean serum, and take care of business once and for all. Read an excerpt at the end of this book!
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About the Author
S.A. Beck lives in sunny California. When she’s not surfing, knitting or daydreaming in a hammock, she’s writing novels.
Drop her a note about what you think of her books at sabeckbooks@gmail.com
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All Books by S.A. Beck
The Atlantis Saga (7-book series)
Book 1: The Atlantis Girl
Book 2: The Atlantis Allegiance
Book 3: The Atlantis Gene
Book 4: The Atlantis Secret
Book 5: The Atlantis Origins
Book 6: The Atlantis Guard
Book 7: The Atlantis Ascent
* * *
The Mage’s Daughter Trilogy
Book 1: Blood Magic
Book 2: Angel Magic
Book 3: Demon Magic
Excerpt from “The Atlantis Ascent”
AUGUST 17, 2016, THE DESERT 30 MILES EAST OF TIMBUKTU, MALI
7:30 P.M.
* * *
It had all been going too fast for Jaxon Ares Anderson. As the sun grew red and swollen over the sand dunes to the west, she felt like she had been living these past few days forever.
She had been in a gunfight on the outskirts of Timbuktu, nearly lost her life more than once, saved her boyfriend from kidnapping, and had seen a good friend of hers die with her own eyes.
Brett Lawson was already supposed to have been dead. Her old classmate and partner in crime fighting had come back from supposedly being murdered in Los Angeles and tried to kill her with the speed and strength of an Atlantean. Instead he was the one who got killed, taken down in a hailstorm of bullets fired by her companions in the Atlantis Allegiance.
They had made it out of Timbuktu one step ahead of the law before she ditched them to go back and see the Atlantean community there.
And now she was in a car speeding across the Sahara Desert with a team of Atlanteans, or People of the Sea, as the locals called them, although the people with her were not locals. While they spoke English and came from several different countries, they all had the broad Asian faces, black skin, and sparkling blue eyes typical of her people. Those same features had set her apart for so long, but now she felt right at home. She had found a whole community of Atlanteans.
They called themselves the Atlantis Guard and said they were part of a global organization fighting to protect their people. The four of them came from various countries and were all in their late twenties.
She had told them to take her back to her friends. She felt bad about leaving them and knew they must be worried sick about her. The problem was, she had only a vague idea where they were, and since they were trying to avoid the cops, they sure hadn’t stayed put.
Had it only been a few months ago that she was a messed up kid flunking every subject at school and talking back to her foster parents? The chain of events that had brought her to this point were incredible. She’d discovered she was part of a hidden race from a lost continent, a race that a secret faction in the United States government wanted to use as guinea pigs. And now the Russians were after them too. She’d spent seventeen years being ignored and put down and now suddenly she was the center of all this attention, none of it good.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said the Atlantean sitting beside her. His name was Winston Chambers, from England. He had plucked her off the streets of Timbuktu and probably saved her from getting arrested.
He had also dropped the biggest bombshell of this entire trip—he had known her parents. They had lived in London, like Winston, and had fled because a criminal gang wanted to use their Atlantean powers for its own ends. Her mother and father had settled for a time in Portland, where Jaxon had been born, but the gangsters caught up with them. Jaxon had been given up for adoption at the last minute, just before her parents got killed.
And if she wasn’t careful, she’d join them.
Winston chuckled. “If only I knew how to fix all this myself.”
“Tell me more about my parents.”
“In time, we have a getaway to perform.”
“No, now. If I’ve learned one thing on this trip it’s that I can die at any time. I’m not going to die without finally finding out about my parents.”
He looked over at Trisha, an Atlantean from the United States who sat on the other side of Jaxon in the back seat. Two more Atlanteans sat in front. They hadn’t been introduced yet. There hadn’t been time. It seemed like there was never enough time.
Trisha nodded and Winston began to speak.
“As I mentioned to you in Timbuktu, your parents were Keepers of the Texts. Like the griots of the Sahara, they are the guardians of heritage and learning. Your mother and father knew some of the original knowledge of our lost continent. Not just anyone can become one of the Keepers of the Texts. I can’t, and no one else in this car can. It runs in the blood, passed from parents to children since the days of the sinking of Atlantis. You are the only one we know of, which is why we have been searching for you for so long. You are special. Besides the individual power each Atlantean enjoys, you have an additional power. You can sense the old places of learning and magic.”
“Yes, but what were they like?”
“Your parents? Scholarly, intelligent, kind.”
Jaxon laughed. “All the things I’m not.”