“I’m going to give Chief Cambridge a call.” MacRyan continues, retrieving his black cell phone from his pocket. He dials and waits. It goes to voicemail. He tries again. Still nothing. “I’ll send him an email. You will all wait here until the agents arrive with your things, then you’ll be driven fifty miles away from my branch. I’m deeply disappointed in you, Demetrius, and Chief Cambridge’s granddaughters. I don’t know what I was expecting from you, but this certainly isn’t it…”
“Don’t expect anything out of me or my sister.” I retort bitterly. “We may be Chief Cambridge’s granddaughters, but we’re not heirs to the family business—we’ve never met him because our mother kept everything from us. We don’t even know our family’s names.”
“Well,” MacRyan shrugs apathetically. “your family problems aren’t my problems, are they?”
I huff through my nose, just like Jo does when she’s mad or annoyed, and I stand, so sudden that the bottom of the chair screeches against the floor.
“We’re not leaving with your agents,” I state. “we have a jet. Where are our things?”
“They should be here any second now,” MacRyan looks at the time on his phone. Just then the door opens, and three agents wearing all gray are here with our luggage. I snatch my backpack from one of them. “Get your things, guys. We’re leaving.” I order before leaving the room.
* * *
Joanna, D, and Skye meet me outside FBI Branch 109’s bunker, luggage in hand. “Does anyone remember where we parked the jet?” D says.
“I remember when we got off the jet, the bunker was forty feet northwest.” Skye says, turning around herself. “This way.” She begins to trek through the high grass, and we follow her.
Thankfully, the jet is still right where we’d left it. We wait a few yards away from it while I retrieve the key from my backpack.
D’s phone vibrates in his back pocket. But before he can answer it, I hear rustling in the grass. Then gunshots.
Bang—bang—bang . Three bullets whizz past us and hit the jet’s door, and three figures emerge from the grass, holding handguns. They wear bulky black pants, black T-shirts, black boots, and black beanies. One breaks the door with his gun and enters the jet. The other two grab Joanna and take her inside too. I yell and try to run to her, but something—someone—holds me back. Two more men in all black appear, one has a grip on my upper arm, one is fighting Skye. I hear a high-pitched scream from inside the jet. “ Jo !” I cry, trying to get out of the man’s hold, but it’s no use. I wrench my arm the opposite way, and pain shoots up my arm and shoulder. “Let go of me!” I hiss, but I am thrown to the ground, which only hurts my arm even more.
“D! Let’s go!” one of the men peers out the jet’s door and yells to D, who’s standing in the middle of it all, shocked-still.
“ Gold ? What’s going on?” D says, hood off. I look behind me to see Skye still fighting with one of the men. He punches her right in the stomach, and she falls. The man then grabs D and urges him into the jet, and D lets him take him. I realize that the jet is is slowly inching forward. I try to get up, but every time I move, an excruciating pain surges through my body. I cry out in despair; Jo is on the jet…
The jet is taking off. And all I can do is lay still in the grass and watch it leave.
Joanna is gone. D is gone, too.
I can only think of one plausible explanation: D betrayed me.
TO BE CONTINUED
TURN THE PAGE TO READ A SNEAK PEEK OF THE SEQUEL:
INCOGNITO
1
Harper
I don’t know how long I’ve been sobbing, but soon enough my voice is gone, and I cannot cry anymore.
I’m in full panic-mode. Joanna is gone. She’s not here with me. I don’t know where she is or where she’s going. I can’t get to her. She’s just gone…
I was stupid enough to trust D—Demetrius—whatever his name is. Part of me knew he was going to abandon us when the moment was just right. He had a vague reason for helping us, and I was stupid enough to let my guard down and let Jo out of my sight when he was with us. I vowed to stay by her side and protect her at all times to ensure that I would never come close to losing her, and now she’s missing. This is all my fault.
I lay curled up in a ball on the asphalt, defeated. I’m crying and pleading for my twin sister to come back, even though I know this is all useless. Joanna isn’t coming back. “Harper?” Skye questions after a while.
“ What ?” I say bitterly, still curled up but not crying anymore. I realize then that maybe I shouldn’t be so mean. This isn’t Skye’s fault, she has nothing to do with any of Scorpion’s or Genesis’s problems. I need to be grateful that she’s here; she has ETP experience, she can help me find Joanna and get all of us to safety. I try to sit up, but the pain in my left arm is suddenly unbearable. I cry out in pain and lay back down on my back. The sky is a cloudless baby blue, fogged by my tears. I blink to clear my vision, and Skye sits close beside me. She watches me quietly, tending to her own wounds from her fight with the nameless enemy. There is a small rip in her leggings on her thigh, her tank top has a streak of blood and dirt. There’s an ugly bruise on her cheek, her nose bloody but not too bad. A frigid wind blows past us, and she shivers, putting on her jean jacket.
“I saw what happened—you definitely broke your arm.” Skye says. “Where does it hurt the most?”
“Just below my shoulder. It got twisted backward by that Scorpion guy.” I reply angrily.
“Okay. Sit up and tell me how it feels,” Skye grabs my left hand and my right arm, and she slowly pulls me upright. A shooting pain goes through my left arm and I wince, but I manage to get in a sitting position.
“It was, like, pain just shot through my arm. And it feels sore already. I don’t know how else to describe it.” I say.
“You probably tore the muscle that runs through your shoulder, I think it’s called the deltoid. Your arm might be broken, but I don’t want to go to a hospital and bring attention to ourselves—there’s probably not a hospital for miles anyway. I’ll bandage it so it won’t get worse…” Skye retrieves her jeans from her clear bag that lies a few feet away, and she begins to bandage my shoulder and part of my arm with it. I wince and try to wriggle out of her grasp every now and then out of reflex, but I’m really glad Skye knows what she’s doing. When she’s finished, she ties the jeans in a knot and confirms, “This should be good enough until I find the right materials. But we should get going, we have to find shelter before dark.”
“Thanks,” I murmur. I wish I could help Skye somehow, her fight was no doubt worse than mine. I guess the least I can do is not take out my anger on her. “What about you? Are you okay?”
Skye shrugs. “I’m okay, I’ve fought people in training before. Right now I’m focused on getting you to safety…” She says the last part under her breath: “…You’re more important than me.”
“That’s not true,” I start, but she doesn’t choose to hear me. Skye is already on her feet and putting our luggage in a pile: Joanna’s and my backpacks, her tote, her satchel, and her clear bag. That makes five bags total. There’s debri on our luggage from when the jet took off, and Skye wipes it all off. She then gets her cell phone from her tote and starts to type.
“I need to save Jo,” I whisper sadly, more to myself than to both of us.
But Skye shakes her head. “ We need to save her, together. And we will. We just need to make a plan of action.”
“What do they want with her ?” I say, my mind reeling. “Why did they take her and not me, or all of us? How did they even know we’re here, at an FBI branch that’s off grid?”
“Simple: D told them. We’ll probably never know why, but we’ll deal with him after we find Joanna.”
Anger surges throughout my body. Half of me is angry at myself for putting my trust in D, and the other half of me is angry at D himself for abandoning us. “Who were those people that ganged up on us? Where are they going with the
jet? Do you think they’re going to Scorpion’s hideout?”
“I have no idea, their faces were masked. But apparently D knew one of them. He called him…Gold?” The wind blows stronger then, even more colder than the previous one. I shudder. The weather is most likely in the thirties or forties, but at least it’s not snowing. “We have to start looking for shelter. I’ll help you up.” Skye says. She puts her phone in her jean jacket pocket and helps me stand up. It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. Hopefully that means my injury isn’t that bad.
“Where are we going to go? MacRyan kicked us out and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to let us back in after what we did.” I say.
Skye puts the contents of her satchel inside her tote bag, puts it over her shoulder, and hands me my backpack. “What’s in these backpacks?” she asks.
I shrug. “Our phones, chargers, D’s letter, money. Stuff like that.”
“Alright, you can bring those. I’m just bringing my tote. The rest will be left behind.”
“Okay.” I haul my backpack on my good shoulder, and we start to walk in the direction of FBI Branch 109. “What were you doing in the database, anyway?” I ask. “You said you were looking for your birth mother, right? What kind of stuff were you transferring?”
“Just my parents’ identification cards, which are harmless. If a normal citizen saw an agent’s ID card, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But…” She hesitates. “…there was an article about my mother’s death in the database too, and I transferred it.”
“Really? What did it say?”
“I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing yet, but it said she died in some politician’s mansion three weeks ago—killed, most likely.”
“Seriously? Was your mother an assassin, like you?”
“I guess she was…”
“I’m, uh, sorry you never got to see her.” I reply. “Do you think she was trying to assassinate someone? Who was she working for?”
“I don’t know,” Skye shakes her head. “can we talk about something else?”
“Sorry.” What feels like centuries later we finally stop at the familiar bunker door. Skye knocks the sequence, and we wait. Nothing. She tries again. Still nothing. I groan. “Now what?”
“Hold on.” Skye takes out her phone. “I have an idea. Sit down, it might take a while.” I groan again with protest, but I sit and lean my back against the ice-cold bunker door. Sky sits down next to me. realize that I didn’t think to pack one of my nice fur coats before leaving Reddings Mill. Skye starts to type, her phone screen’s brightness turned down to the lowest setting. A few minutes later she explains in a hushed voice, “There are five Elite Training Programs in the U.S. They’re all run by the CIA except for the one Genesis has, which is FBI-based. But, there are three groups referred to as ‘resistance clans’ of people who escaped the new version of the program, like me. They share one off-grid database so they can communicate from whatever technology they have, and somehow only trainees’ emails can connect to them. I can get into the clans’ database and ask them to help us.”
“Wait, you’re not the only one who escaped the ETP?” I ask.
“No. I found out about the resistance clans in Genesis’s archives, about a week before I escaped. It was covered up by having its file name as ‘Missing Trainees,’ but I had a feeling something was up. Trainees don’t just disappear , especially with the kind of guards and surveillance the other ETPs have. Nobody involved in the FBI or CIA simply disappears without a cause.”
“Wait…how did you and D meet?”
“He was outside Genesis’s building when I escaped. He introduced himself as ex-agent Xi, and he said he had an offer for me, and I took it. The offer was to help you get in touch with your mother without Scorpion tracing it.”
“Scorpion and Genesis were the same thing at one point, right? FBI projects?”
“Yeah. The Scorpion Project had the same purpose as the Genesis Project: to create the best agents that could work for the CIA, FBI, or even agencies in foreign countries at as young as eighteen years old. Some classified info got leaked out, and your grandfather had to shut down Scorpion completely before deciding to start over and create Genesis.”
“Well, what did my grandfather do that made the Scorpion agents want to rebel so bad?”
“He banished all one hundred Scorpion agents along with their families, that way he could successfully terminate the project. If you didn’t comply, you were simply forced to leave anyway, and you were never heard from again. Most families didn’t survive in the locations they were sent to, and the ex-agents thought Ronaldo was trying to kill them rather than send them away and take their identities.”
“How can a hundred people just…disappear?”
“Well, agents are supposed to keep low profiles anyway, and seventy-five percent of them didn’t have spouses or families, so I guess it was fairly easy for them to leave. But citizens noticed the remaining twenty-five percent of the agents with families; they lived in your town and surrounding places, and their kids attended public school with fake names. A whole cul-de-sac was even abandoned in one neighborhood.”
“Wow…how do you know all this?”
“I liked to read archives in my spare time. And I learned about some of Genesis’s history in my training.”
“What did people do when they noticed the families were gone?”
“Not much, I don’t think. But there was one columnist who wrote an article for Reddings Mill’s Sunday paper. It was about the families who suddenly disappeared, and he linked it to the leaked information.” Skye’s face brightens then. “Okay, I just sent a message to the resistance clans. Now all we have to do is wait.”
THE ABANDONED CUL-DE-SAC: HOW THE MISSING FAMILIES FROM REDDINGS MILL ARE LINKED TO THE FBI FIELD OFFICE SCANDAL
⎯
by: Dan Oswald
What happened after classified information leaked from the City FBI Field Office on November 2, 2001? An entire six-house cul-de-sac in Reddings Mill, Pennsylvania was reported missing just two days after the leaked documents provoked intense CNN live discussions——5 inconspicuous families from Reddings Mill were reported missing on the morning of December 1, 2001, and families from surrounding areas were mysteriously reported missing as well.
“The Auburn family was always so paranoid, in my opinion,” Reddings Mill resident, Samuel Scott, said during an interview with Channel One News. “They never let their kids play with the other kids in the neighborhood, they never put Christmas decorations in their yard. Heck, I forget what they look like. And I mean, what kind of last name is Auburn ? That has to be some kind of fake identity. I don’t think they just disappeared…”
“Their kids were the sweetest things, but they never participated in school plays or extracurricular activities,” Samuel Scott’s wife and president of the Reddings Mill Elementary PTA, Jana Scott, added during the interview. “They didn’t even dress up for the school’s annual Halloween parade that we do around the school.”
“Sarah Auburn was nice, but her clothes were always boring, and she took everything too seriously.” Callie Scott, Samuel and Jana’s seven-year-old daughter, said. “But I hope she’s okay.”
What was the leaked information, anyway? Why did it cause a heated national discussion? And how were the missing families involved?
It was a case file from an unnamed FBI agency, explaining a mission to expose the popular millionaire, actor, and politician Dom Pike. The file claimed that Pike, CEO of Pike Enterprises (a U.S. military weapons manufacturer and distributor) is “secretly selling its products to foreign governments for illegal use.” But there was no evidence to prove this statement. Does Dom Pike have any alternative motives with his company? If so, where’s the evidence? Where are the witnesses to these products being shipped off to addresses outside the U.S.?
Pike Enterprises is currently worth $20 billion. It invents, makes, and distributes latest-generation, high-tech military and d
efense weapons, and right now 95% of their products go to the U.S. military and troops stationed abroad, as stated by the New York Times in 2002.
The leaked FBI agency case file claims that Pike “gives 5% of his products to foreign countries for unknown and undocumented use”, “his latest product was seen being used by a leader of a war-torn village in Africa for a fear tactic, and there are no U.S. troops currently stationed there” and “PE products are supposed to be for U.S. military use only, but the products were seen on ships going to different countries absent of U.S. troops.” The case file also claims that Dom Pike is “empowering corrupt leaders instead of bringing them to justice.”
Of course no one believed that Pike could be doing such a thing; he was a governor for a decade, just married the famous actress and activist Antonia Smith-Pike, and is donating five percent of his profits to needy children and building new schools across the country. No one believed that Dom Pike was giving off weapons to corrupt governments for no given reason because an FBI agency case file provided no evidence or witnesses.
So, what do the missing families have to do with this?
Their last names were on the leaked case file——some were given assignments to seek proof of Pike’s wrongdoings on the exact date they’d disappeared, and the rest of the families were ordered to, quote, “follow protocol.” And when the Reddings Mill Police Station released the names of all the missing families, it was the exact same list as the leaked file:
Missing Families:
Rogue (The Genesis Files Book 1) Page 8
