Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  “Doctor—”

  “You didn’t hurt her, did you?” Kirsch demanded, his features flaring. “Tell me you didn’t hurt her!”

  “I didn’t hurt her. I played a hunch and it led me here.”

  “A hunch? It would have taken far more than a hunch to lead you here. Then again, your father…”

  “What about my father?”

  “As I recall, he mentioned something about your hunches.”

  Max explained to Kirsch how he’d made the connection with the figurines.

  Kirsch nodded, appearing impressed. “Are you police?”

  “Military. With plenty of retired friends who know which stones to turn over and how to find them.”

  “Just tell me my daughter’s okay.”

  “She was when I left her.”

  “Because we had a call scheduled. She didn’t pick up.”

  The anomaly tugged at Max, but he let it go. “I can have someone check on her, if you’d like,” he offered, wondering if he should have asked Weeb Bochner to put a man on the brownstone too.

  “Yes, can you do that? Please.”

  Max reached into his pocket, Kirsch tensing until his hand emerged with only a phone. “I’ll text my friend, Doctor. The process will take some time, give us the opportunity to talk.”

  “If anything’s happened to her, if something you did…”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Max said, even though he wasn’t.

  “I haven’t seen her in ten years, not even once. Too risky.”

  “Ten years is a long time, Dr. Kirsch.”

  “I’m not a doctor anymore and my name is Farrell now. For all intents and purposes, Franklin Kirsch really did die in that explosion at CyberGen.”

  “You know who was behind it.”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  “I’d like to hear them.”

  “We’re a long way from that. You need to prove you really are Ben Younger’s son first. If that’s who you really are, you’ll know how.”

  Max held up his palm, featuring the mark identical to his father’s. “This good enough?”

  The color seemed to drain from Kirsch’s face. He nodded, the motion slow and drawn out.

  Max fought to maintain his calm. The farmhouse’s interior had a stale, musty odor to it. He noticed a vein pulsating along Kirsch’s temple, evidence of his blood pressure running in the red.

  “My father came to you because he was sick, dying.”

  “Thanks to what happened in Mexico in 1990.” Kirsch looked at Max closer, perhaps trying to gauge his age. “Not long before you were born, I imagine. He told me your conception was supposed to be impossible, that your mother had been judged infertile by the best experts in the city. He came to me once his symptoms became pervasive. Other experts had diagnosed it as a rare blood cancer. Well, it was rare all right, but it wasn’t cancer. At least not any cancer any expert, including me, had ever seen before.”

  “You’re right about my mother being unable to conceive, Doctor. Then my father and his partner struck oil in Mexico, and when he came back the whole world changed. Like he dragged something back. Or maybe it followed him.”

  Kirsch’s expression flattened, the edges in his plump round head softening, his eyes losing a measure of their suspicion. “Keep talking.”

  “He told you this.”

  “Keep talking,” Kirsch repeated.

  Max flashed his right palm before the man instead, making sure he angled it so enough of the light would reveal the birthmark that looked more like a tattoo. “He came back from Mexico with an identical mark on the same palm. Then, around nine months later, I was born with this.”

  Kirsch was still staring at Max’s palm, transfixed by it, looking almost hypnotized.

  Max lowered his hand. “Something in his DNA,” he resumed. “Something in my father’s DNA must’ve passed the mark to me. But that means what happened in Mexico altered his DNA. That’s why he got sick. That’s why he came to CyberGen.”

  “No,” Kirsch said, looking away now toward the uncovered window. “He knew it was too late for him. He came because of you, because he was afraid the mark wasn’t the only thing you’d inherited from him. He wanted me to check your DNA, compare it to his, see if you were headed down the same path. He had taken a sample of your hair for me to analyze. But I remember distinctly he didn’t want anyone to know about his sickness, especially you—he was adamant about that. He wanted to protect you. That was always foremost on his mind.”

  “What else, Doctor?” Max asked, feeling his heart hammering against his rib cage. “What else?”

  Kirsch turned his gaze toward the staircase. “Let’s go upstairs. To my office.”

  * * *

  Kirsch’s office, as he called it, was nothing like Max expected, although he really hadn’t known what to expect. An assortment of mobiles normally churning over an infant’s crib hung from the ceiling, battling for space and shifted about by an unseen breeze.

  The office was otherwise unremarkable. The wheeled, leather desk chair matched a Chesterfield sofa tucked comfortably against a wall beneath an old window with a built-in seat before it. Max counted three computers, a pair of printers, and a scanner amid the cluttered confines—all gathering dust. There were beautiful built-in bookshelves but Kirsch’s library was in neat piles set before them instead. Spines turned out in alphabetical order so he’d have no trouble pulling whatever title he needed from the stacks set on the floor.

  “Mexico,” Kirsch said, after steeling himself with a deep breath. “You mentioned Mexico. What did your father tell you about it?”

  “Not much. Almost nothing. Just the fact that’s where he made his first fortune, the basis for the company he and his partner founded.”

  “Nothing about a cave? A stone he found down inside it?”

  “Stone?”

  “The mark on your father’s hand, the mark he passed on to you. He grabbed hold of the stone and that’s how he got it. He came to CyberGen because he blamed the stone for what was happening to him, what the doctors he’d been to mistakenly labeled cancer. Because it wasn’t an ordinary cancer. It wasn’t like any cancer they’d ever seen before at Sloan Kettering, didn’t respond or react according to any existing parameters and specifications for that time or this one. Utterly unprecedented and, unfortunately, untreatable. And that, young man, was just the beginning.”

  FORTY-SIX

  British Columbia, Canada

  “To tell you the truth,” Kirsch continued, “I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

  “Because of my DNA. Mine was altered too, wasn’t it? Just like my father.”

  “Altered, but not like your father, not at all. Your father’s DNA was altered by an external stimulus. Yours was what you were born with. You inherited it from him, like hair or eye color. Brains, body shape—it’s all connected.”

  “What was wrong with my father’s DNA?”

  “After his encounter with that stone, simply stated, it was killing him. Slowly and methodically, but killing him all the same. What do you remember of your father from those days?”

  “He was hot all the time, like he had a fever.”

  “Because his body wasn’t compatible with his evolving DNA. It was trying to change him, but his body wouldn’t go along. Activated antibodies to fight it, but those antibodies had no better luck finding a disease to kill than his oncologists did because there was no disease. Your father wasn’t sick per se. His affliction was symptomatic of going through a radical physiological metamorphosis. You never noticed the pain he was in?”

  “No,” Max said, through the clog that had formed in his throat.

  “I imagine it must’ve been excruciating at times. I offered him prescriptions, but he refused to take them. Didn’t want to live his final days in a fog, he said.”

  “This cave, this rock,” Max concluded. “That’s how he was exposed, wasn’t it?”

  Kirsch nodded. “It all goes back to the mo
ment he touched it; he was certain of that. He believed the rock was somehow behind your birth. How else could you be born with the same mark? Show it to me again, please!”

  Max held up his palm.

  “Identical in every respect,” Kirsch nodded.

  “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’ve squirreled myself here, why I pretended to be dead, because I don’t know. I have no phone, no Internet, no television. No signals coming into the house, no wires, and with good reason. Because I believe, I’m convinced, that CyberGen was destroyed so all trace of the records associated with your father would be lost forever. He insisted they not be backed up, forbade me from entering anything onto the computer. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s back up a bit. It’s a well-known fact that environmental factors such as food, drugs, or exposure to toxins can cause epigenetic changes by altering the way molecules bind to DNA or changing the structure of proteins that DNA wraps to. These structural alterations can result in changes in gene activity, and these changes can be passed on from parent cell to daughter cell within the body, and from parent to child.”

  “So I inherited my father’s altered DNA,” Max concluded. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “But that in itself doesn’t explain the identical mark on your palm. That suggests something else entirely, outside the bounds of rational, scientific thought, something that cannot be explained.”

  “Like what?”

  “Energy. Quantum fields capable of changing the organic nature of those exposed to them. Your father was dying because he was becoming something else, something different. You were born as whatever that is. Your DNA doesn’t match up to any existing models, thanks supposedly to your father touching the stone in that cave. If I’d had more time, if your father’s life hadn’t ended so tragically, maybe, just maybe, I would’ve been able to help him—and you.”

  Max considered Kirsch’s words in a different light, one cast against the backdrop of his own experiences growing up that carried over in the military. The feats of strength, speed, and endurance he was capable of when agitated. The visions he got of things he always seemed capable of changing, like he could alter the future and, with it, fate itself. How those abilities had continued to expand through his tenure as a SEAL. How each time they surfaced represented an escalation of sorts, a progression he’d always accepted but never understood.

  But the mark on his hand had never bled until recently. That suggested something else was happening.

  “That stone my father touched in the cave,” Max heard himself saying, feeling detached from his own mind, “the one that left its mark on his palm and set me down this road—what was it, Doctor?”

  Kirsch frowned, then shrugged, suddenly reluctant to meet Max’s gaze. “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do, suspect something anyway. You wouldn’t be living like this if you didn’t have your suspicions.”

  Kirsch nodded, speaking so softly Max could barely hear him. “Do you believe in evil?”

  Max thought back to Yemen, and dozens of other places that might as well have been the same. “More than you can possibly realize.”

  “I’m not talking about evil as in the deeds that men do, I’m talking about evil as an entity in itself, a force of nature. A dark energy we can’t see, measure, or quantify, similar to that which was involved in the creation of the universe.”

  “You mean in a religious sense, like the devil?”

  “That’s for you to decide. I’m talking purely in scientific terms here, not religious ones,” the old man said, as much excited as anxious now. “That’s the problem with a world that constantly creates false, diametrically opposed categories of thought when such things are and always have been intrinsically connected. Like science and religion in this case, as impossible as that seems.”

  “A scientist who believes in the impossible?”

  “We call impossible what we can’t explain or comprehend, ‘impossible’ only within the limits of our understanding. And your father’s experience challenged those limits. I don’t know what that stone was your father touched or where it came from,” Kirsch resumed. “But maybe it was waiting down in that cave where it had been for millions and millions of years, waiting for someone to take it in hand. And maybe it was written in the cosmos that your father would pass whatever touching that stone did to him on to you. I know that doesn’t sound very scientific; in fact, it sounds crazy, because it is. According to the Old Testament, there are no coincidences in the Universe. Everything happens for a reason. And the fact that I’m not religious doesn’t change the fact that all of this is crazy and inexplicable, but that doesn’t make it any less real. And what your father experienced was just the beginning, I suspect, of something far greater and more ominous. He was an unwitting accessory to a chain of events that, once triggered, cannot be stopped.”

  “What chain of events?”

  Kirsch looked away. “I’ve said enough.”

  “No, you haven’t. Not even close, Doctor.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m a farmer now, way out here where the world might leave me alone.”

  “Then who are you hiding from up here?”

  Kirsch looked away, as if suddenly reluctant to meet Max’s stare. “About a month after your father’s death, a man came to see me at CyberGen. Offered me a fortune to give him the files I had on your father and his inexplicable condition. I asked the man who he was working for, and all he said was it was someone I didn’t want to risk disappointing.”

  “Did you give him what he wanted?”

  “Of course not. But I knew he’d be back. Whoever he was working for didn’t sound like the kind of man who took no for an answer.” Kirsch suddenly looked terrified, the memories returning in force. “I was afraid to go to work the following day.”

  “The day CyberGen was destroyed…”

  Kirsch nodded, even though Max hadn’t posed it as a question. “All my co-workers killed, for no reason,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. “Not being there is all that saved my life. But the blast was so massive that not all the bodies could be positively identified.”

  “So you decided to disappear,” Max concluded. “You came up here, so they couldn’t threaten you again.”

  Kirsch swiped a sleeve across both his eyes and sniffled. “As a scientist, I believe in cause and effect, not coincidence. And the timing of the blast, so close to that man showing up at my office, couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t hard to figure what they’d do, if they learned I was still alive. My daughter’s the only one who knows. But she was raised by her mother and has a different last name, so she must’ve escaped their radar screen. I had decided to quit the day CyberGen was destroyed, was planning to tender my resignation. That’s why I wasn’t there, what my off-site meeting was all about. The explosion likely saved my life, allowed me to fake my own death and disappear. Live out the rest of my life up here, safe from the truth.”

  “And what truth is that, Doctor?”

  Before Kirsch could respond, Max spotted an all-too-familiar red dot on his forehead, an instant before his skull erupted in a spray of blood and bone.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  British Columbia, Canada

  Max hit the floor, not far from Kirsch’s fallen body, feeling a whip of cold air sifting through the window just shattered by a sniper’s bullet. He had no idea of how many more were out there, what weaponry they were carrying.

  Since he wasn’t carrying any himself, that didn’t seem to matter, but it could also be remedied.

  Once he slipped outside to confront the attackers.

  * * *

  Max had never seen a night as black as this, the sky moonless and a ground mist combining with the dank, fetid air to create rolling blankets of utter pitch. He knew the attackers would have come with night-vision goggles, so he unscrewed the dim porch bulb for good measure. But a few lights still burned ins
ide Kirsch’s farmhouse, enough anyway for the goggles to make use of.

  Should have turned those off too.

  No sense in considering his omission further. A tall shape was slinking Max’s way, motions awkward, rifle barrel struggling to shimmer in the thin patches of light sprayed from the farmhouse. Max slid behind the shape, mirroring its steps, until he jerked a hand over the figure’s mouth.

  “Down,” he whispered in Teek’s ear. “And give me the shotgun.”

  The young man did as he was told, ducking down behind the cover of a thick fence post in the hog pen. The motion disturbed the napping animals, kicking them into motion, their snorting breaking the silence of the night.

  Good, Max thought, which gave him another idea.

  He crouched down, until he was even with Teek. “I want you to get to the barn. Hide in there until I come get you. But first I want you to do something for me.”

  * * *

  Max realized the birthmark on his palm was throbbing again and could feel the moist soak of blood oozing from it. Its coppery scent permeated the air, setting him on fire inside, as if it were molten steel rushing through him instead of adrenaline. He knew these attackers were pros by what he didn’t see, rather than what he did, just like the mercenaries who’d come after him at Creedmoor. Two black-garbed figures wearing neoprene commando masks followed the line of the drive forward toward the house, clinging to the darkness. Max knew they were decoys, meant to draw him out, expose his position for the other gunmen who would’ve already taken up positions closer to the barn and farmhouse. Max wondered how much they’d been prepped, if they’d been made aware of the prowess of their opponent.

  He did a rough count in his head, picturing the enemy force out there in the darkness, invisible for now. He was sure of the sniper who’d fired through Kirsch’s office window at the rear of the house, and the two decoys approaching now. Beyond that, he expected another five or six, although it could be more. Coming in numbers any more superior to that would’ve likely allowed for a full frontal assault.

  Max counted down the seconds in his head, picturing Teek in the barn, just as he heard the first of the horses neighing. The sound stirred the hogs even further, sending them careening about their pen as if aware something was awry. A half dozen horses burst from the barn in the next moment, Max using the flash of their motion and disruption caused by the pounding of their hoofs to spring.