(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon Book 1)

by PJ Manney

  Chang, Carter, and Amanda. All traitors. How much more of his life was a lie? What about Ruth? She seemed loyal, but then they all had. She was also the one who had enabled him to create the technology and augment himself. And that’s what the club needed for their plan, even if Carter was conflicted—or pretended to be. Was she involved in the club’s machinations as well? He had approached her about Prometheus, not the other way around. Ruth was lots of things, but given her unusual wiring, was she capable of such deceit? If she was a traitor, then every important person in his life since entering Stanford was not what he or she seemed. Only Pop and Nick had loved him. Or maybe not even Nick? Who knew? The notion was so enormous, it seemed insane. One’s entire life could not be a lie. Could it?

  But one question stabbed at him under it all: Why did Talia keep him away from here for so long?

  She must have known.

  His mind was so preoccupied running betrayal scenarios, he didn’t notice how he got back, although a few riders glanced at him strangely on the MUNI. He must have forgotten he was blind. So much for the Hippo 2.0.

  While he fished out the keys, Talia flung open the apartment door. She grabbed his coat lapel and pulled him inside.

  “Oh, thank God . . . where were you? I was crazed!” She tried to pull him into a kiss, but he slipped out of her embrace to take off his raincoat.

  He tried to control his voice. “You were?”

  “Of course I was! You weren’t here.” She tried to kiss him again, but he sidestepped away. “What’s wrong?”

  “Why did you hide Amanda and Carter from me?”

  She went very still, eyes wide. “What?”

  “Did you want us locked at the hip before I found out? Did you think I wouldn’t want you if she was alive, even if she was a traitor?” He backed her up against the recently closed sofa bed.

  “Amanda’s alive?”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “No . . . No . . . that’s ridiculous. I didn’t know she’s alive . . . and I had no idea we’d sleep together . . . I did everything to stop it . . . and I never thought I’d tell you about me. None of this was a plan . . .”

  “She’s living with Carter, right in his house, in plain sight of everyone!” he yelled. Her knees buckled, and she sat hard on the couch. “You shouldn’t be in the revenge business. You suck at contingencies. Or you knew. Oh, her hair’s chopped off and dyed blond, but you of all people would have seen through that!”

  “But I checked. Several times. Only he was there. Or his housekeeper. No one else. Not even hustlers. She never turned up . . . She was dead . . .”

  “She’s. Fucking. Carter.”

  Her eyes watered, and she twitched momentarily like Ruth.

  “And when were you planning to let your pathetic creature know who he was modeled after?” gesturing dramatically to himself.

  Talia buried her face in shaking hands.

  He bent to her ear. “You can see why I find it hard to believe you.”

  She peeked out, tears on her cheeks. “Please . . . I know you don’t . . . but you have to . . .”

  “What did you imagine I’d think when I found out I was Ricardo Gonzales’s ghost . . . zombie . . . avatar . . . golem . . . none of the words are quite right in this case, are they?”

  Her father’s name made her gasp, as though he spoke the unutterable name of God. He supposed for her it was.

  “Puts a whole new spin on the Electra complex. Maybe Freud was right about something.” Disgusted, he stood to leave.

  She grabbed his wrist with her left hand, then placing her right hand on her heart, softly moved her left to the center of his chest. “I swear, on you, on me, on my father, on God, on anyone you want, I only wanted you to be safe. I worked with what I had. I didn’t plan on . . . us . . . I mean . . . you looked like my father! I did everything in my power for it not to happen! And if that makes me horrible, I’m sorry.”

  He stared unblinking at her, making her muscles writhe in discomfort and her breath shudder until she held it. Would she pass out before she dared breathe again?

  Had she created him for her own revenge, risking him instead of herself? Was she still holding back important information? Analyzing all the possibilities, he decided the questions were moot. He needed her help to accomplish his goals. And if he examined his motives, he needed her for more than that, but he was rarely that introspective anymore.

  He knelt in front of the sofa, encircling her in his arms to hold her close. She gasped for air, shivering in relief, and melted into him.

  His kisses started slowly at her collarbone and worked their way up her neck to her earlobe. His breath tickled her ear, and she moaned softly.

  “If you betray me, I’ll kill you,” he murmured. “Like I’ll kill Amanda. And all the others.”

  Then he kissed her lips. Her fingers clenched his hair, and she kissed him back hungrily.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Eight blocks from Carter’s college house on Stanford Avenue, Yale Street was quiet. Teachers, administrators, and students who lived in the neighborhood of tidy homes southeast of campus were asleep at 3:00 a.m. The lights inside a particular house went out at 11:00 p.m. sharp, as they had every night for the last three weeks. The owner was obsessive-compulsive about many things, including bedtime.

  Tom dressed for stealth. His hands covered in black nitrile-rubber gloves; feet in black smooth-soled shoes curled up at the edges, leaving no hint of size and covered in nitrile-rubber that left neither a footprint, nor a specimen; his body covered in a black nano-pored paper biohazard jumpsuit. He would leave no particles behind and take none with him.

  He accessed the property through the back fence of a small, two-story apartment building on Williams Street. The fence was broken, and the untrimmed backyard trees protected him from curious eyes and made it easy to case the house during the day while the owner was at work. According to Talia, club security on Prometheus employees was not as heavy as it was on members, but it was there. The club might have almost-infinite resources, but not infinite patience to monitor needlessly. There was an alarm system, easily circumvented with an electronic patch delivered from the telephone line that generated an all clear, as opposed to a breach signal. The mobile security detail covering local Prometheus homes, confirming occupants were snug in their beds, had already made its nightly rounds. The GO/HOME bugs were set for content retrieval, not surveillance. There was no need for further security with so little to fear from the scientist. The club trusted her naïveté.

  Tom still remembered the entire interior vividly. He had spent a great deal of time there, since Nick Chaikin expected him for Shabbat dinner every Friday night, which was weird for a lapsed Catholic the first couple of times, but he adapted, learning the blessings and how to behave properly in a devoutly Jewish home. But above dietary laws and Shabbat edicts, you didn’t contradict Nick on his turf, unless it was about work, and then you had to really know your stuff and prove the master wrong. Which didn’t happen often.

  Nick was a classic Jewish paranoid. His favorite quote was Henry Kissinger’s: “Even a paranoid has some real enemies,” which might have been the only time the scientist agreed with Kissinger about anything. Given Nick’s experience as a Jewish scientist in the USSR and his protracted and painful emigration with his wife and young daughter to the US, as well as the whole of Jewish history, he had good reason. He made sure his most trusted students had keys to his home, office, and lab or knew where to find them, in case something suspicious should happen to him. He had always expected it. When he died in his bed from a heart attack, it was tragic, but strangely anticlimactic for a man so sure he’d be murdered by one government or another’s stooges for his research.

  Only now did Tom recognize Nick Chaikin as a political, as well as scientific, Nostradamus.

  Standing on the back steps, Tom lifted the end of a wooden plank in the floor of the back porch. The old emergency keys were still in a little plas
tic baggie where Nick had left them over a decade ago. He unlocked the back door and stepped silently inside.

  With neither the money, nor the inclination, Ruth had left the interior unchanged since her parents’ deaths. Her mother’s passing from cancer had preceded her father’s by only a few months. Everyone assumed Nick had died from stress-induced cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as broken heart syndrome, just like his own father. That was over a decade ago, but you’d never know it by the house. The remnants of the elder Chaikins were everywhere. A place for everything and everything in its place. Polished wood floors in every room so you could scrub them and keep the allergens and pollutants at bay. Simple pull-down shades, modern furniture of the Bauhaus school—lots of wood and chrome and easy-to-clean leather.

  The stairs were noisy, with no carpet. He crept on hands and knees to distribute his weight over as wide a space as possible to minimize creaking. Upstairs were only three rooms: the parents’ room, left like a memorial, undisturbed, as though they’d be back from vacation any day. The bathroom. And Ruth’s room. Her door was open.

  Tom hovered over Ruth’s body in her twin bed with the faux colonial frame, star and moon stickers still clinging to the headboard, their phosphorescence long gone. The bed was pushed into the corner, and Ruth shared the cramped mattress with a lineup of stuffed animals along the wall. In the opposite corner stood the leather, cloth, and metal hugging machine.

  He withdrew a syringe from an inner pocket, uncapped it and bent over.

  Ruth’s eyes snapped open. Wide.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but Tom was quick. He stuffed a well-worn Snoopy into her mouth and sat on her chest, pinning her arms to her torso. She screamed into the stuffing, his physical proximity more terrifying to her than any notions of assault, rape, or murder. Struggling in hysterics, Snoopy almost popped out, forcing Tom to shove it in just short of choking.

  He jabbed the needle into her upper arm and pushed the plunger steadily, until it was empty. Then he waited the forty-seven seconds it took for her panicked movement to cease.

  He pressed her limp hands to a letter he pulled from a ziplock baggie. The file was on her hard drive, printed on her paper with her printer and ink in her own house from a previous foray. And now her fingerprints would be on it, confirming she did it herself. For a bit of drama, he even added a bit of her own saliva that had escaped from the corner of her slack lips so they’d have a nice clean DNA sample, confirming she’d handled it.

  He ran downstairs and placed it on the desk in the front parlor, Nick’s old study, where he was sure the authorities—and the club—would find it. Before leaving, he took a last look around. Ruth was tending Nick’s flame here, too. He never knew how she could keep the study so immaculate, when her own office was a disaster. There was his Nobel Prize diploma on the wall, along with photos of the Chaikins meeting a scientific Who’s Who of the last few decades. On his way back upstairs, he passed another copy of the photo Ruth had taken from her lab to Prometheus’s offices: Nick hugging Carter tightly and Peter less so, with Ruth hovering to the side. The photo had much more meaning to him now.

  In Ruth’s room, he wrapped the body in a black plastic tarp. His burden was as light as a feather. However, before leaving the house, he neatened the bed and left everything just so. Best to think like Ruth would have.

  An hour later, Ruth’s old Honda Accord was parked at the Golden Gate Bridge’s southwest parking lot. The driver got out into the damp, foggy night, wearing khakis, a ratty turtleneck, and a worn trench coat, her gray-brown hair in frizzy disarray. She pulled an old woman’s bike, complete with white wicker basket, out of the hatchback and bicycled to the pedestrian gate. Ruth rode it to her office every day. She waited for security to buzz her into the bridge path that was locked only at night to prevent walkers after dark. It was the walkers who tended to be the jumpers, not bicyclists. She cycled to the middle of the bridge quickly. The guard was busy with the comings and goings at the gates in the dark hours of the early morning and would miss her completely.

  She climbed off the cycle, leaning it against the railing, and scaled the four-foot barricade, never raised higher because of San Franciscans’ aesthetic and financial concerns for the famed landmark, regardless of the bridge’s reputation as the most famous—and oft-used—suicide spot in the world.

  A handful of witnesses rushing by in cars and on bikes saw the woman disappear into the inky darkness beyond the orange steel before they could stop her. Like many jumpers before her, she timed her jump with the neap tide, her body dragged down to the bottom of the current and out to sea, never to be found.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The one-story log cabin was tucked into a pine-covered property on Sequoia Lake, with the only other lakefront-property owner a YMCA camp empty for the season. Talia arranged for the cabin’s availability through one of her sympathetic anticlub contacts.

  It was clean and spartan: a small living/dining/kitchen with an old leather sofa, a rustic wooden table, and four similar chairs; a bedroom with two double beds, a bureau, and a small closet; and a bath. A handful of old black-and-white photos from the cabin’s early days of fishermen and hunters escaping their big-city responsibilities. And the ubiquitous HOME, even here. It uncomfortably reminded him of the club’s encampment, but it would suffice.

  Tom had stripped off his protective gear and destroyed it in a ranch incinerator outside of Tulare. Once settled into the shack, he cleaned up and made himself presentable and nonthreatening. A blue button-down shirt and Levis. Sneakers. To pass the time, he stretched out on the too-soft double bed and watched cable news on the HOME. President Stevens spoke at the unveiling of a brand-new robotic tank, telling the nation they had to “dig deep for the fortitude necessary to fight the enemy at home. It could be their neighbor, their friend, a member of their family . . .”

  Fools, thought Tom.

  He knew it’d be at least another day before news of Ruth’s death was publicized. Given both her father’s and former employer’s notoriety, the press would at least grant her a small headline, a few sentences about a brilliant career cut short, a woman deeply influenced by both a Nobel laureate and a terrorist.

  On the other bed, a plastic sheet covered the entire mattress. Ruth Chaikin lay gagged and bound on top of it, still unconscious; the army duffel he had carried her in lay at the foot of the bed.

  By the time the news broadcast churned enough stomach acid to fill his mouth with its bitter taste, Ruth moaned and tried to move. He gratefully turned off the HOME. She struggled to clear her head as she slowly realized the extent of her restraints. Tom waited patiently until she saw him. The gag muffled her scream.

  He rolled off his bed and sat on the edge of hers. She flinched and twitched uncontrollably at his closeness, but he wanted her uncomfortable. Concerned the drugs might not be out of her system enough to understand, he spoke slowly and clearly. “I’m going to take out your gag, and we’re going to talk. Don’t bother screaming. There’s no one to hear. I’ll ask questions, and you’ll answer and behave. Or the gag goes back in and we start again. If you’re good, I’ll answer any questions you have after. Understand?”

  She nodded furiously. He removed the stuffing.

  Taking careful aim, a wad of saliva hit him below the left eye. “Gai tren zich!” she yelled.

  He stuffed the gag back in, then wiped his face with his sleeve. “Shut that potty mouth. You’re alive because I’m a fair man and I need information. Don’t push it.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Even with her foggy, enraged brain, she realized he understood Yiddish.

  “If we establish good communication, I’ll untie you, and you’ll be free to go. That is, if you want to go. You may not by the time we’re done. Shall we try again?”

  The frightened animal nodded her head. He pulled out the gag.

  “Kish mir en toches,” she muttered.

  “I’m glad your mother can’t hear you.”

  She tried to read
into that, but the drugs made her eyes unfocused. “What did you give me?”

  “Ketamine and Valium.”

  “You w-w-want I should be an imbecile? How dare you mess with neuroreceptors like that!”

  “Who knows? Might straighten you out.” He loosened the buckled nylon web straps around her, and she shook in fright at his hands on her body. She couldn’t get away, but could shimmy around. That’s all he needed. He could have made a basic lie detector to read changes in galvanic skin resistance, i.e. sweat, from any simple electronics around. The archaic alarm clock on the bureau would do. But he didn’t need any scientific instruments, even homemade ones. Ruth was her own giant polygraph.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer to the best of your ability,” he said.

  Still shaking, she stuttered, “Wh-wh-who are you? You knew my m-m-m-mother?”

  “Did you ever suspect that Chang Eng was a 10/26 conspirator?”

  She said nothing, staring him down. When she realized after thirty seconds that resistance would get nowhere, she barked, “Nein.”

  “Never?”

  “Only when he ran away. And into FBI bullets.”

  “Did you ever suspect Peter Bernhardt was a 10/26 conspirator?”

  “N-n-n-o! He wasn’t!” Her body twitched up, but the straps held her.

  “I appreciate your vehemence. Do you suspect any other colleagues were or are 10/26 conspirators?”

  Ruth twitched under the restraints. It took a few moments for her to answer. “Not sure about Chang. Didn’t know him well. But I know Peter. He would never. Never. They are liars. All of them.” Her body went quiet.

  “Who are liars?”

  “Carter. Government. News. Papa was right! They all lie!”

  “About what?”

  “P-P-Peter!”

  “Why do you think so?”

  She rolled twitchy eyes. “He swore!”

  “What did he swear?”

  “To work with me f-f-forever . . .”