The Force (The Kingdom Chronicles)

by Alexandra Swann

  Two blocks away, Ambani’s vehicle screeched to a halt as a sniper fired multiple rounds through the windshield, killing its only occupant—Ambani’s driver/assassin.

  ψ

  Luis Carlos was having his breakfast alone on the terrace off his bedroom at his palace outside Madrid. Patricia had gone to the South of France without him and taken the girls. She often left him alone now. She had always been understanding of him and his frequent dalliances, but lately she, too, seemed to have grown weary of him. He was a man living in isolation—without family, without his son Carlitos, without Ines. He thought he would like to kill them all.

  The houseboy serving him was the newest addition to the palace staff. The boy, Pablo, was very attentive and served the king’s breakfast and then waited silently for the monarch to begin eating.

  After a few bites, Luis Carlos began to feel ill. The day was not hot, but he was sweating profusely, and he felt a tightness in his chest he had never before experienced. It was as though someone had wrapped an iron band around him and was squeezing it until he could not breathe.

  “Boy,” he summoned Pablo, “I am ill. I need help. I need a physician, immediately.” The boy moved obediently toward the wide double wooden doors that connected the suite to the rest of the palace, but, instead of going for help, he closed and locked the doors and then barricaded them from the inside with a piece of furniture.

  “Boy, what are you doing?” gasped the king. “I told you, I am ill. Call for my physician. I need a hospital. I am having a heart attack.” Pablo did not respond but stood watching with his arms folded as Luis Carlos’ pain and terror increased. Within half an hour the old man was lying motionless on the floor where he had fallen with his eyes still open. Pablo left the doors locked but removed the piece of furniture with which he had barricaded them, and then, jumping over the balcony into the soft black dirt of the garden below, he fled the estate on foot and hitchhiked into the city. It was early afternoon before one of the maids discovered the grotesque scene in the bedroom.

  ψ

  It was noon on the campus of Harvard. Kevin Leeds had just finished his morning lecture and was heading out of the building toward the cafeteria when he heard a rifle crack. He stopped and listened. For the past twenty years Harvard had employed trained armed guards on campus to deter shooters. Sure enough, through the windows he could see the armed security running toward one end of the campus. More shots—followed by loud screams and panic. “It’s a sniper! There are two of them!” Students and faculty began running for cover as fast as they could as the armed, masked men continued firing. Their strategically-placed accomplice, who had positioned himself on the roof of the building overlooking the Bioethics Research Plaza, monitored the open radio frequency through which the campus security communicated. From his vantage point he easily eliminated each armed target who appeared. The men on the ground shot random students with amazing precision as they made their way to the entrance of the Bioethics Building.

  Leeds saw them coming and scrambled down the hall. It never occurred to him that he might actually be the target; Leeds imagined that this was an act of terrorism or a political statement. He had locked the lecture hall door before exiting; now he fumbled desperately with his keys to reopen it. Just before they entered the main corridor, he managed to throw open the door. Frantically, he locked it behind him and hid behind the podium while he waited for the terror to pass.

  He could hear muffled voices at the door; they almost certainly had seen him flee into the hall. Their faces were masked so he could not identify them, and there were many running, screaming targets on the campus; they had no reason to pursue him. In the corridor he could hear more screams and more shots being fired. He cowered behind the podium and listened.

  To his horror, light was filling the room. The door was opening—the door he had locked from the inside. It was not being broken down; it opened gently as if the intruder had a key. The lights came on, and he could hear footsteps. Leeds was shaking so hard that he felt as though he might break into tiny pieces. He held his breath. Surely they weren’t looking for him. Surely this was a random act. He could still hear shots—still hear cries of pain and terror. Why had they entered this room? The room was empty—except for him. The footsteps stopped directly in front of the podium where he had drawn his lanky form into the smallest ball possible. When the podium was kicked aside, he let out a barely perceptible whimper. The last sound Professor Leeds heard was the rifle crack that drove the bullet into his brain.

  The masked men exited the building and signaled to their compatriot on the roof that they had completed their mission. With expert speed and precision, he fired two kill shots that ended both their lives. Then he removed his mask, re-entered the building from the roof and took his place among the other armed security guards.

  ψ

  Two days after Ambani’s execution-style murder, Ishan Pai’s private jet landed in London. With Hemraj and Vasana both dead, he was the majority stockholder of Ambani Global. The law firm that represented him had released a cover story that Ishan and Vasana had been in an auto accident in the Swiss Alps, and Vasana had died. Ishan had actually escaped the burning car but had developed amnesia and so did not remember his true identity. Due to another fiery auto accident which had taken place the same night on a nearby stretch of road, the Swiss authorities had confused the corpses and mistakenly listed both Vasana and Ishan as dead.

  Ishan would attend Hemraj’s funeral. If Ramita stayed out of his way, she would be allowed to live though he would exile her to a secluded estate at the opposite end of the country. He would not have extended even this courtesy except that she had been on a world cruise during the time that he and Vasana had been enslaved on her estate, and Ishan had determined that she did not have any knowledge of what had taken place there. Were it not for that, she would have perished along with her husband.

  Hemraj was dead; the shrill, nagging Vasana was dead; Ishan was rid of the entire family. His father and older brother had died several years before of natural causes. For the first time in his life he was his own man—liberated of familial and matrimonial constraints. He had always wondered how it might feel to be free. Now he knew—it felt wonderful.

  A car with a driver was waiting for him on the tarmac. He was being driven to the splendid Claridges Hotel where he would spend the night. In the morning, he would travel to the London office of Ambani Global where he would preside over his first meeting as the new chairman of the board. To keep stock prices high, Ishan needed to convince the world that he was capable of continuing on with the company just as Hemraj had, but this was a challenge he was ready to accept.

  The driver stopped at the entrance to Claridges. As Ishan stepped into the magnificent lobby, replete with its majestic columns, intricate woodwork, gleaming black and white marble floors, and sparkling chandeliers, he paused to drink in the splendor. This was his first stay at Claridges since his ordeal, and he was seeing the world through new eyes. A stunning young woman of no more than twenty-two with turquoise blue eyes and long blonde hair cascading around her shoulders watched him from a chair in the lobby. Slowly she rose and walked toward him. Her black silk dress accentuated her perfectly proportioned figure; her five inch black pumps showed off her long toned legs to their best advantage.

  “Mr. Pai. I am Maya, a gift to you from Nikolai Sokol. I think you are expecting me.”

  “I certainly am, and I must say, you are even more exquisite than I imagined. I would like to buy you a drink in the hotel bar.”

  “I would be honored to have a drink with you,” Maya smiled coyly, and then whispered, “but in your room.”

  By the time he had finished his drink, Ishan was weak and sweating profusely. Maya took his personal communication device and sat on the edge of the bed watching him gasp for breath and beg for help until finally he had breathed his last. Then she walked out of the room and downstairs through the hotel lobby. The car and driver that had brought Ishan to C
laridges was waiting for her at the entrance, and she and the driver sped out of London hours before Ishan’s body was discovered.

  Chapter 31

  Fred had been sitting in Josef’s private office in his apartment in the Burj Khalifa since mid-morning. It was now a little past 10:00 P.M., and he had not even made a dent in the huge volume of information stored on carefully-labeled smart chips and orders neatly written on the lined yellow pads recovered from the apartment’s various wall safes. In one of the safes, Fred had found personal effects of his victims—among them a carved pipe and an intricate bracelet—personal reminders of the lives he had taken. He knew that all serial killers keep souvenirs of their victims so that they can pull them out and touch them, and smell them, and relive the experience. He had believed that Josef would keep souvenirs of his victims so that he could relive his part in the gross experiment in which he had been involved for the past fifteen years. He was, however, completely unprepared for the magnitude of human trafficking that he had uncovered.

  It was all there. Detailed accounts of the thousands of copies he had provided for the privileged classes from every corner of the world. Fred was especially fascinated by the account of a European financier who had no heirs and was unwilling to leave his wealth to distant relatives. He had married four times but had no children. Then, at the age of seventy-four, he had married a twenty-two-year-old law student whom he had met when he attended an event for the university where she was studying.

  The girl, Angelica, had been smitten by him. She had admired his intelligence and wit and had stood spellbound while he told her stories of his youth. As he had looked into her gray eyes he had seen something that he had never found in any other woman. He had felt as if he were a schoolboy, and suddenly he had blurted out, “If I were forty years younger, I would invite you to dinner.”

  She had replied, “If you were forty years younger, you would not fascinate me as you do.”

  Godfrey Marshall was hooked. Six weeks later they were married, and three months after that Angelica had announced that she was pregnant.

  Godfrey had been ecstatic. Tests revealed that the child she carried was a boy. What more could a man want—a beautiful devoted wife and a son. Godfrey had finally gotten everything he had ever desired.

  Then, when she was in her second trimester, Angelica had been speeding down the country road that led to his summer house when she had lost control of her small car and crashed into a tree. At the hospital both she and the child were pronounced dead on arrival.

  Godfrey was inconsolable, but on the day the cremation was to have taken place, he received an anonymous message delivered by a courier: “Your wife and child can live again. Reply through courier.” Godfrey was astonished because he had kept the deaths out of the media. No one at the hospital would have dared leak the news. Anyone at his organization would have known the penalty for divulging the information.

  Godfrey had taken the message and scrawled a one-word reply at the bottom—“yes!” and then he had signed it and returned it to the courier.

  A few days later Godfrey met Josef Helmick in Gstaad where, without Godfrey’s knowledge, Josef collected a DNA sample from him. Godfrey agreed to Josef’s terms—five times his normal fee to clone Angelica and their unborn child.

  At the end of three months, Josef presented Godfrey with an Angelica copy whose pregnancy had advanced to the precise point where it would have been if she had lived. Complete with the original Angelica’s memory bank, the copy was, in every respect, exactly as she had been prior to the accident. In spite of the unsettling aspects of the account, it appeared to be a rather touching love story.

  Josef, however, was not one to miss an opportunity. He had immediately recognized the existence of all the right conditions for future blackmail if he chose to exercise that option, and so he did a little investigating that turned up some fascinating information. First, with a simple DNA test he verified that the child was not Godfrey’s; then, he discovered that the beautiful law student with her mane of red hair and penetrating gray eyes did not exist. Angelica was, in fact, Carey Williams, a dancer at a club in London who had met Godfrey’s young assistant Bill O’Grady a year earlier and had been sharing an apartment with him until Bill could find the perfect opportunity to arrange an “accidental” meeting between Godfrey and her. Bill knew the old man’s taste in women, and he had handpicked Carey to seduce him.

  Bill had been careful during that year to make certain that Carey did not become pregnant, but as soon as she and Godfrey were married, he had made impregnating Carey his first priority. When the child was born, he and Carey would be set. She would funnel money to him from the various accounts—Godfrey would deny her nothing—and he would be in a perfect position to marry her and take over when the old man died. Godfrey would never suspect a thing. He was in love, and, even if he were to become suspicious, his vanity would prevent him from admitting, even to himself, that his darling Angelica could ever be unfaithful.

  Bill did not have long to wait. A little more than a year after Godfrey junior’s birth, the old man died of a massive heart attack. There was no foul play; everything was as it appeared to be. And so Godfrey’s wife and his fortune passed to another man and another man’s child. And, with Bill O’Grady as the new chairman of the board, Josef received a sizable check from the organization each month for “consulting fees.”

  Fred rubbed his eyes and walked to the window. It was dark and still. He knew that during the daylight hours, if one were to climb to the top of the tower, he could see a section of the earth’s curve, but now all he could see was vast darkness dotted with the lights that defined the city. Beyond the city lay only blackness and sand.

  ψ

  The next morning Fred was up early and was once again examining the information on the smart chips. The account of Peter Kessler and his son Dieter was there. The copies of the starlets who were sold as sex slaves to Prince Abdul were carefully accounted for. It was overwhelming and sickening. After a couple of hours Fred felt queasy.

  The magnitude of Josef’s operation was almost beyond comprehension. Some of the copies had been used for the sadistic pleasure of his clients, but most were attempts to restore loved ones. Husbands, wives, children, parents—these made up the greater part of Josef’s business. It was a testimony to how far a man will go to give those he loves eternal life and to gain eternal life for himself.

  Fred opened his attaché case and scooped the smart chips into it. He had all the evidence that Josef had left. If one of these smart chips contained an account of what had happened to Alexander and Kathleen Sinclair, it might take many hours to find it. If that information were not on those drives, then it did not exist.

  Harold Baker had been working all night compiling information, but he stopped to say goodbye to Fred. “He had an amazing operation here. Nothing was connected to any on-line electronic device at any time. All orders were placed on old-fashioned, lined yellow note pads. Even the data stored on the chips was accessed through an old laptop that had never been connected to the Internet. In the modern surveillance age, there was no way to get surveillance on his operation—absolutely nothing to hack. The only way he could be stopped was through old-fashioned detective work. If you had not come here and spent months collecting evidence, he would have never been stopped. Looks to me like Josef was actually right about one thing—sometimes the old ways really are best.”

  Fred shook his hand, and said “Thanks for all your hard work, Harold. I’ll see you in New York.”

  Fred climbed into the limousine waiting for him at the curb and closed the partition between the driver and him. Leaning his head back against the seat he sighed deeply. “Dear God,” he said, “why are people willing to do anything to ensure eternal life except the one thing that will give it to them? They’ll spend any amount of money, they’ll perform the most heinous acts, they’ll sell their own souls trying to get it. The only thing they won’t do is accept you as their Savior and ta
ke the free gift of eternal life that you provided for them two thousand years ago on the cross. You are as close to them as their own heartbeats; yet, they refuse to come to you. Dear Jesus, please send revival to these people. Let those who have sat in darkness all these years find you. Please send your Holy Spirit to sweep across this land like a raging fire and stir their hearts and help them understand that you are the only way to eternal life.”

  Chapter 32

  Jarrod and Joshua had divided the smart chips between them, and each searched the labels of the ones in his pile for a clue that one of them might contain information about their parents. Eventually they would examine each smart chip to glean all pertinent information about Josef’s clients, the clones he created for them, and the purposes for which they were used. For now, however, they were looking for answers to how their parents had died. The labels contained number sequences which were meaningless to anyone not privy to the cataloging system, but Joshua suspected that the first three numerals on each label indicated into which group the information contained on that particular smart chip fell—one sequence for clones of family members, one for domestic workers, one for sex slaves, etc. Thus, he began separating his pile into smaller piles according to the first three numerals on the label. As he sorted the chips, he turned one over that contained only the date 09/05/2021.

  “I found it!” he shouted, and his heart was pounding as he held it up for his brother to see. Both men were on their feet, and within seconds they covered the distance between the communication device and the table where they had been sitting. September 5, 2021 had been their twenty-first birthday, and it was the day their parents had died at Doppelganger. For more than twenty years they had searched for answers; now, they could hardly believe that their search had ended.