DNA

by Laurence Dahners

  Zage had posed the question to Shan, but Shan was looking questioningly at Ell.

  Ell gritted her teeth in frustration. How could she have been so stupid as to forget she was done up as Ell when she came to see her son! Sure, the past hours had been stressful and she was excited to see Zage, but she’d been doing these identity switches so often, for so long, that they’d become second nature. She hadn’t made a mistake like this in years, how could she have done it with her own son?

  Looks like the jig is up, she decided. Besides, Zage certainly seems smart and mature enough to handle the knowledge and keep the secret. She hugged Zage and ruffled his hair, “Yeah kiddo, we’ve been keeping it a secret, but I guess you’re old enough to know now.”

  Zage turned to stare at her, “But… I’ve wanted to meet you for so long…!” he said wistfully.

  Ell looked at him wistfully. “You already had, kid,” she said. Her voice breaking, she repeated, “You already had…”

  “But…” Zage said plaintively, his eyes darting around her face, “How…” He turned to look accusingly back at his dad, “Did you know about this?!”

  Eyes twinkling, Shan nodded, as if trying to look solemn, but he’d caught his lips between his teeth to keep a big smile from breaking through.

  As if his strings had been cut, Zage suddenly sat down breathlessly on the floor. He looked back up at his dad and said, “I looked up ‘rock stars’ when you said that I wanted to meet Ell Donsaii like she was a rock star. Did you mean like a famous musician?”

  Shan nodded again.

  “And some people really want to meet famous musicians?”

  Shan nodded and said seriously, “They really do.”

  Zage turned his head back to his mother, “I guess that is the way I’ve felt about Ell Donsaii. It’s pretty hard to believe that I’ve been living with her all along.” He frowned, “Wait a minute… Is that why we live right behind her house? Do you sneak through the woods to her house so you can leave from there when you’re going to work as Ell Donsaii?”

  “Actually, there’s a tunnel from here to Ell’s house.”

  Zage’s eyes widened, “A tunnel!” He looked back and forth from his father to his mother, then frowned, “How many secrets do you guys have?!”

  Ell shrugged, “A lot, unfortunately.”

  “Why?!”

  Ell tilted her head curiously at her son, “What just happened to you?”

  As comprehension dawned, Zage looked like a light had just come on. “Oh… You’ve been trying to keep people from knowing where we really live so they won’t try to kidnap us?”

  Ell nodded, “And, trying to keep them from knowing you even exist…” She turned to Shan, “Can you start explaining some of this stuff to Zage? I’ve got to try to deal with the FBI and the police.”

  Shan nodded.

  Ell left the room muttering to her AI while Zage and Shan got out food for sandwiches. While they were doing it, Shan started explaining to Zage how many times Ell had been kidnapped and why they’d decided to keep Zage’s existence a secret. He explained about the tunnels and about the period of time when Ell had been on the lam from the government, trying to answer all of Zage’s questions as honestly as possible.

  “But, I don’t understand… Well, I do understand the wig and the skin coloring, but Mom’s face is different from Dr. Donsaii’s!”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a big part of the reason so few people catch on. Here, watch this,” Shan said. He mumbled briefly to his AI, then his face changed right in front of Zage’s eyes.

  Astonished, Zage drew back, “What! What just happened?!”

  Shan explained about the small graphene balloons that were glued to their teeth to change the shape of their cheeks. “Your mom has a way to put things under the skin without incisions. So, I have some small graphene balloons under the skin behind my ears. When they’re inflated, they push my ears out and forward.” He mumbled to his AI again, and his ears settled back into their normal location. “Your mom used to put a little silicon bump on the surface of her nose and cover it with makeup, but a while back she put a balloon underneath the skin of her nose that she blows up so she has a little hump on her nose when she wants to be Raquel.”

  Zage frowned, “And that doesn’t hurt?”

  Shan snorted, “Yeah, it hurts. It hurts quite a bit when the balloon’s put in and it’s a little uncomfortable each time you inflate it, but it’s not awful.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Trying to keep her mind off of what might be about to happen, Calder thought about the rest of the operation as the box she was riding in bumped along the surface of the dock. They actually had her in a cheap cardboard coffin on a hand truck. The second agent was maneuvering a hand truck with a child’s cardboard coffin on it. That one only had sandbags in it to give it weight. The lid on Calder’s coffin was only secured with Velcro, so if it sounded like there was a confrontation, she’d be able to push the lid off and enter the dispute. She had a few flash-bangs and her personal weapon with extra clips.

  The ideal situation would be for Wang and his associates to open the lid of the coffin and find themselves staring into the bore of Calder’s weapon.

  Having something turn out right would certainly be sweet. Donsaii had delivered the audio video record from her son and his nanny, but the one from her son cut off when the kidnapper hit him in the head during the capture. Donsaii claimed that the blow made the kid’s connection to his AI intermittent. Suspiciously, it cut out during any of the periods that Calder had really wanted to look at. Whether there was really a record or not, Calder was pretty sure that there wouldn’t be a record by the time she could subpoena the AIs. Besides, it could be notoriously difficult to enforce a subpoena on the records of a victim. So, if she didn’t capture this Wang character, she could still come out of this smelling pretty bad.

  Wang peered out the curtain of the boat they’d moored at slip fourteen, watching the man trundling a long box along the dock. The man looked like he had on a white dress shirt and suit pants, not something Wang would have expected from an associate of Jamieson’s. However, he was followed by a similarly dressed man trundling a smaller box, presumably the kid and that was the dress Wang had been told to expect.

  The two men stopped in front of slip fifteen and looked about. Wang cracked the window and whispered, “Jerry.”

  The two men turned abruptly and looked towards Wang’s boat. After a moment, one of them said, “Can.”

  Wang stuck a hand out the window and waved them closer, then he turned to Hao and Cho. In Chinese, he said, “Keep your weapons on them from inside the cabin here. Don’t let your muzzles show.” He waited for the two men to nod, then continued, “If in doubt, shoot. If I say ‘Kaiser,’ shoot.”

  Wang stepped out of the cabin, leaving the door cracked open enough for his men to shoot through the gap. He said, “We appreciate the delivery. Can you help us load it on board?”

  Surprisingly agreeable, the two men helped Wang and Chow move the big cardboard boxes onto Wang’s boat. “Where’s the woman I negotiated with?” Wang asked.

  The bigger of the two men who delivered the boxes said, “You said only two people for the delivery, so she decided to send someone with a little more muscle. Where’s our money?”

  Wang indicated the boxes stacked in the corner, “Four million, right there. You open and check that while I confirm your delivery,” he said leaning down and pulling the lid off the big coffin. He had to pull pretty hard because the lid was held on with Velcro.

  There was indeed a woman inside.

  She didn’t look like Ell Donsaii.

  And she had a gun pointed at Wang’s face.

  Wang slowly stood, lifting his hands and, without looking away from the woman, tried to take in the situation with his peripheral vision. The men weren’t even near the boxes of cash. One of them was heaving Chow overboard into the water. The other was hiding behind a stanchion and tossing something into the
cracked door of the cabin. He slammed the door shut.

  A flash and a loud bang came from inside the cabin.

  The two men jerked open the door and stepped into the cabin.

  The woman in the box said, “Mr. Wang, you’re under arrest…”

  ***

  Unusually, when Zage came down to breakfast, his mom and dad were sitting with Amy at the table, though there wasn’t any food set out. He rushed to Amy, giving her a big hug. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes, thanks to you,” she said with a big smile, hugging him back and ruffling his hair. She stood, “I guess I’d better be going.”

  “Aren’t you taking me to school?” he asked.

  “Your parents have other plans,” she said mysteriously, heading for the door.

  Zage turned to his parents. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  His dad said, “We thought—after what happened yesterday—we ought to take the day together as a family.”

  “But… it’s a Tuesday,” Zage said, feeling surprised.

  “So,” Shan shrugged unconcernedly, “we’ll play hooky.”

  “Hooky?” Zage asked, then waved off the answer as Osprey put the definition up on his HUD. He gave them an eager look, “you’re going to let me stay home from school?!”

  His mom, now looking like Raquel again, said, “Yeah. Like that day we went out for breakfast to celebrate the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the whole day instead of just the first hour. We figure that we need to explain to you why it’s important that you keep your identity secret. We ought to show you the tunnels and how to go places in them… You know, in case you need to escape or something someday in the future. Hopefully nothing like this is ever going to happen again, but if it does…” his mother shrugged helplessly, “You’re old enough to help protect yourself, as you so eloquently proved yesterday.”

  His parents took Zage downstairs where twisting a bent nail behind a can of paint on one of the shelves let a wall swing open. Beyond the wall, Zage was astonished to see an enormous scientific laboratory.

  Zage had been aware of a tiny little laboratory in the basement, because his mother often spent time down there. However, it turned out that she never actually did anything in the little lab he knew about. Any time he started down the stairs, she’d always come out of the main lab and into the little lab before he got down close enough to see her.

  To Zage’s intense disappointment all the equipment in the big lab was oriented towards physics. For a moment, when he’d first stepped in there, he’d felt sure that some of the equipment must be stuff he could use for some of his biologic research. In truth, he supposed some of it actually could be. There were some centrifuges and microscopes after all, but nothing that would let him manipulate DNA or amino acids. He wouldn’t be able to culture cells, much less do anything with animals like he was doing through Dr. Turner’s lab.

  They took the tunnel over and poked around “Ell Donsaii’s” house. Zage met Bridget, who lived there as Ell’s “roommate.” Bridget had stayed home from work just to meet Zage, and apparently to cook omelets for Zage’s parents, something Ell claimed Bridget was famous for. She’d made pancakes for Zage.

  They took the tunnels over to the little neighborhood west of Ell’s farm where Zage met Steve again as well as the rest of Ell’s security team. The men and women in the team seemed vaguely familiar, which apparently was because they hadn’t hidden from him when he was really little.

  They took the electric car in the main tunnel over to see the place where it came up underneath D5R, but didn’t actually go up into the entrance the tunnel made into the closet in Ell’s office. Then they took the car down to a house in Pittsboro. Zage vaguely remembered that house as well.

  On the way back to their current house from Pittsboro, Zage said, “Mom?”

  She’d been thinking of something else, so Ell distractedly said, “Umhmm?”

  “Remember how when they first kidnapped to me, I wondered why they didn’t take a kid from a really rich family?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m thinking that the kidnappers did kidnap me because you guys actually are pretty rich?”

  “Uh,” Ell said, uncomfortable about the question. However she’d decided, as much as possible, to answer Zage truthfully, “That’s true.” She hoped he wasn’t going to ask just how wealthy they were.

  “Could you buy me a DNA sequencer… and some other stuff? Or does all that lab equipment in the basement really belong to D5R and you just have it on loan?”

  Ell snorted, “Yes, we can buy you a DNA sequencer and some other stuff.”

  Worriedly, he said, “They’re pretty expensive.”

  “We can buy them… But, you’re gonna have to tell us what you’re doing with them.”

  “I really think it would be good if you enrolled me at the University. That way I could be learning more at my own level and… hopefully I’ll have some supervision to keep me out of trouble…”

  Ell barked a laugh and looked at Shan with chagrin on her face, “That kidnapping’s created a monster! Will the demands never end?”

  ***

  Ms. Binder looked out at the kids in her classroom. Zage was back and she had mixed feelings about it. She felt relieved, of course, that his illness hadn’t been serious. A little frustration always washed over her when she looked at him, because she didn’t feel like she’d ever taught him anything. She felt a little guilty about her relief that the boy was back, because having Zage in the classroom made it easier to deal with the rest of the kids. Sometimes she thought he was a better teacher’s aide than Jordan Burke, her official aide. He explained things to the other kids—so well that they frequently asked Zage rather than her or Jordan. He organized games on the playground that the kids liked, weren’t dangerous, and somehow left all the kids happy with the outcome rather than having winners and losers.

  When she got to his chair, she stopped, “Are you feeling better now Zage?”

  She got the impression he looked a little bit startled by the question, but then he nodded, “Yes, much better, thank you.”

  “What were you sick with?” Binder didn’t feel like she was prying. She actually needed to know what it was in case some of the other kids started showing symptoms.

  “Oh, I just had a really bad headache.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re better,” Binder said as she moved on. A headache didn’t sound contagious, unless it was meningitis or something terrible like that. On the other hand, a headache shouldn’t keep a kid out of school for two days—unless it was something really terrible, should it? She stopped and went back, “What kind of headache was it, that it lasted two days?”

  “I, ah, got hit on the head. I was better pretty quick, my parents just wanted to keep an eye on me to make sure there weren’t any… problems.”

  “Oh,” Ms. Binder said, wondering how a five-year-old had come to be hit on the head. She decided not to quiz him about it, but to be on the lookout for any further incidents. After all, child abuse could rear its ugly head in families of all social strata. “I’m sorry to hear that. Glad you’re okay.”

  ***

  Jamieson sat sullenly while his court appointed lawyer arranged a few screens to her liking and sat down across the table from him. Finally she looked up at him. Jamieson had been thinking that it would work in his favor to have a woman defending him in a child kidnapping case, but now he realized it might not if the woman despised him for what he’d done. She said, “Okay, the prosecutor’s case looks pretty much open and shut. The audio and video record from Ms. Reston’s AI, as well as from the boy’s AI, show you dragging them out of Ms. Reston’s car.”

  “We were wearing masks!” Jamieson exclaimed before he realized he was blowing his opportunity to claim innocence before even his own defense attorney.

  The attorney’s expression showed her distaste. She said, “On the audio, the voices sound very much like yours. Besides, you and Mr. Aycock were captured weari
ng the same kinds of coveralls and masks that you were wearing at the scene of the kidnapping.”

  Roger’s last name is Aycock? Jamieson thought, I wonder what his first name really is.

  The attorney was continuing, “Aycock was arrested in the house where the captives were being held, and you were found handcuffed to the wheel in the vehicle that had transported Dr. Donsaii.” She threw her hands up, “It’s going to be pretty pointless to try to claim that you didn’t do it. Do you have any extenuating circumstances? Someone you might give up in a plea bargain?”

  Sourly, Jamieson said, “I could turn state’s evidence against Wang. He’s the guy that hired me to do this…” Suddenly he had an idea, “Maybe we could get Donsaii to drop charges. We could threaten her with telling the world that…” Jamieson’s eyes widened as Donsaii spoke in his right ear.

  Ell’s AI had been listening to Jamieson through the portal she’d implanted in his skull behind his ear. Right after she’d knocked him out when she’d been breaking free, she’d gripped his head and used the one way port in her finger to cut a little hole in the bone of the mastoid process and pop a port into it. When Allan told Ell what was going on, she’d simply spoken to Allan, having him send her voice into the portal she’d implanted where he heard it through direct bone transmission. “Mr. Jamieson, you don’t want to tell anybody anything about me, or the boy, or Ms. Reston.”

  Jamieson twisted wildly in his chair. He wasn’t wearing an AI, or headphones, and there certainly wasn’t anyone else in the room with him. Wondering if he’d just had a hallucination, Jamieson said, “We could tell…”

  Jamieson heard Donsaii in his ear again, “Mr. Jamieson, surely by now you realize that I know exactly what you’re doing at all times? No one would have even blinked if I’d just killed you when I was escaping. You could still die.”