The Monarch

by Jack Soren

  “If there’s nothing else—­”

  “Actually, I’m missing a bunch of animal tranquilizers. You don’t know anything about that, do you? Or is that need-­to-­know too?”

  Lara turned and headed out of the lab. She got halfway to the door this time.

  “He’s self-­medicating, you know!” Sophia yelled after her.

  Lara only hesitated for a moment before using her pass card to open the door. Thankfully it worked on the first swipe from the inside. She’d known about Nathan giving himself shots of the serum for weeks. How the creator and keeper of that serum could only now be noticing was beyond her. As the door shut, Lara heard a muffled “Fuck you too.”

  That was new, she thought with a smile. She’d been treating Sophia the same way ever since Sophia had returned to the island with her precious master’s degrees, but Sophia usually just took it in her own self-­deprecating way. Even though it was through a closing door, that was downright aggressive for Sophia.

  Before she could think about it anymore, Lara realized what time it was. If she didn’t hurry she’d be late for her moonlight swim, one of the few pleasures she had.

  Well, that and counting down the hours her father had left.

  AN HOUR LATER, Lara stood naked in the moonlight on her favorite stretch of beach, her bronze skin glistening from her swim. She turned her face to the moist, warm wind, her eyes closed, and listened to the ocean.

  “Beautiful,” Thomas’s Australian voice crooned as he stepped from behind the scant foliage. Lara’s breath caught and she felt something run through her body, heating and moistening as it went. She turned around to see that he too was naked, though not as tanned. He was twenty years her senior, but still the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  “Baby,” she said. She hated that when she spoke to him she always sounded so fragile, nowhere near the alpha creature she was with everyone else. Hated it and loved it. She fought the urge to run to him, feeling her breath deepen and her heart pound.

  He was across the sand in the blink of an eye, his mouth hard on hers, his fist firmly gripping the hair on the back of her head. She kissed him back harder, almost hungry. She didn’t know who she was when she was with him, but she didn’t care. She raised one long leg around his powerful buttocks and then they were lost in each other, slamming to the beach.

  When they were both sated and exhausted, he rolled off her onto his back and she quickly took her place at his side, every inch of her pressed into him and her head on his powerful chest as if she were afraid he’d get away. It was always like this right after. It would pass. For now, she enjoyed the moment. No expectations or demands. No father, no disease.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were back?” Lara finally managed after several minutes.

  “I didn’t know I was coming back,” Thomas said. She understood. It was typical of her father to give someone a task and then change it at the last moment to keep them off balance. Even so, when it happened now, she was always afraid it had another meaning. She wasn’t sure what her father would do if he found out about her and Thomas, but something told her if he did she’d never see Thomas again. And neither would anybody else.

  “Wait here,” Thomas said abruptly, getting up and trotting over to his pile of clothes. She watched him move in the moonlight and felt herself wanting him all over again. A moment later, he came back with something in his hands, plopping himself back down beside her.

  “What is it?”

  “I wanted you to have this,” he said, holding out a knife in a sheath. He pulled the blade out. It sparkled in the moonlight. He turned it over a few times and then resheathed it and handed it to her. “Just in case.”

  She understood what he meant. She examined the gift.

  “It goes here,” he said, taking it back and sliding his hands up her leg. He wrapped the sheath’s straps around her thigh and secured them. Caressing the knife, he leaned down and gently kissed her inner thigh before rolling back on his elbows beside her.

  “It’s perfect,” she said, fingering the hilt. Then after some time she said, “When do you—­”

  “Dawn. He wants my arse back in New York before the press conference,” Thomas said. Then he raised his head so he could look her in the eye. “Come with me.”

  “Thomas—­” she said.

  “I’m serious,” he said, raising up on his forearms. “We’d have at least five or six hours on the flight. We could add supersonic to our mile high club status.” He smiled that smile that made Lara feel like she could do anything. Just drop the responsibilities and be—­normal. But she knew it was just a fantasy.

  “You know I can’t,” she said, rolling onto her back and resting on her own forearms. She loved him, but with that burning need fed, she could stand to be more than a few inches away from him again. She could tell by the look in his eyes he recognized the shift too.

  “Sorry, love. Just got carried away,” he said. He was neither angry nor hurt.

  The phone in Lara’s pack rang. Without a second thought, she sprang to her feet and padded over to it. She took the phone out and returned to the grass beside Thomas, ignoring his resentful stare.

  After listening for a moment, she said flatly, “I’ll be there,” and snapped the phone closed. “He wants me to chopper him to the mainland for this ridiculous meeting.”

  “You? What about Dieter,” he said, referring to Nathan’s personal pilot. “Or Sophia? Why is he making you do it?” Thomas asked. Both sisters had been taught how to fly years ago. Lara knew it was so her father would always have someone to do his bidding.

  “Because he can,” Lara said, lobbing the phone toward her pack.

  After a long silence of watching the stars, Thomas said, “He says this plan can cure him. Is that true?” Thomas had known about her father’s illness before she had, but it still made her uneasy to talk about it. She kept her knowledge about it to the basics. It was called kuru and it put him in the wheelchair—­without Sophia’s serum, that is.

  Lara could hear the worry in his voice. He would never say it, probably not even to himself, but Thomas was ready for it to be over too.

  They interlocked fingers, rested their heads together, and watched as the Earth spun through space in silence. Several minutes later, Lara made up her mind.

  “There is something you can do for me.”

  IT WAS ALMOST 3:00 A.M. by the time Nathan finished with his video conference and left his office. At this hour he could risk wandering the halls of the complex without having to answer any annoying questions. It reminded him of earlier times, when they’d come to the island for vacations. There were no guards back then, or even a staff. It was just him and the girls. And Thomas, of course. He’d had Thomas by his side even before the girls. But times had changed.

  The girls had grown into women; Lara deliciously resembling her long-­dead mother. Then Nathan’s time had run out and the disease he’d known was coursing through his veins reared its ugly head and took hold of him. Though that’s what Sophia was for, but she was as moody as she was brilliant. And Lara hadn’t helped when she’d found out the truth—­or part of it, anyway. Making her second-­in-­command was the only way to have even a modicum of control over her again. That, and letting her leave his bed for good. It had been a high price, but in the end it would be worth it.

  Nathan lighted one of his Cohiba cigars and blew plumes of expensive smoke as he strolled, making the most of his hands while he could use them. This time tomorrow he’d be back in that damn chair. The headaches and a persistent nosebleed told him he’d pushed the medication enough. He had to take it easy or he’d be dead before they reached zero hour. That kind of irony he could do without.

  Originally headed to his vault to luxuriate in his few remaining treasures, he somehow found himself crossing the catwalk that joined the complex with the immense hangar behind it tha
t now served as the data center. It was the only room big enough for the expansive server farm. The hangar was the size of a football field. Rows and rows of servers purred as they prepared for their sole purpose in life; some redundant, some masters, and some slaves, just like with any ordered society.

  Giant monitors mounted in a semicircle overhead relaying world data in real time cast hypnotic shadows onto the hangar walls. Nests of wires ran up from the server farm and the control center, joining up in the rafters as a kind of web, all blue and gray and black.

  He exited the catwalk and surveyed the room. As he’d expected, his head tech Randy Li was the only one at the controls. It disappointed Nathan a little that his staff wasn’t there burning the midnight oil, but he supposed everyone couldn’t be like him. Even with his illness he had very little use for sleep, sometimes going days with only naps.

  “How’s our crop doing, Mr. Li?” Nathan bellowed as he descended the stairs leading to the control center.

  Randy spun around, obviously not expecting anyone at this hour, especially not his boss. Nathan loved the look on ­people’s faces when they saw him walking around without his wheelchair. Even if they knew he spent time out of it, as Randy did, they still stared as if he were Christ crossing the surface of a sea.

  “Good evening, sir,” Randy said with his German accent. Nathan had rescued Randy from the Bundeskriminalamt, the German federal police. The BKA had Randy on cyber terrorism charges and were about to lock him away for the rest of his natural life. It was hard to believe that had been almost two years ago. Nathan had always found gratitude a much better motivator than a big stick, though he wasn’t averse to either.

  “Is everything ready?” Nathan said as he came to rest before the short techno whiz.

  “Oh ja. All is prepared,” Randy said. “But again I must warn you that our time is limited. Once Cyclops detects us and kicks us out, we won’t get back in. We need to be precise with our timing.”

  “Cyclops. How could they give such a sophisticated system such a sophomoric name?” Nathan said. It wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned it.

  “I like it,” Randy said. “I think it truly captures the essence of their system. What would you call a system that merges all of New York’s video surveillance systems into a single point?”

  “Expedient.”

  “Yes, well—­”

  “Until Monday morning,” Nathan said, tired of their repeated discussion. “Let me know if there are any problems.”

  “As I’ve asked before, if you could let me know the source of the image, we could probably—­”

  Nathan’s stare disintegrated the rest of the words in Randy’s mouth. He’d warned Randy about such inquiries. He held his eyes until Randy nervously went back to work.

  Nathan looked up at the main display high overhead. A face-­shaped image glowered out at the room, like an overlord, as it had for the past few months. But not the same image, exactly. Over time it had been enhanced, spun, inverted, and sharpened. Parts had been softened, brightened and colorized. Other parts had been pixelated and even others interpolated.

  Sometimes Nathan wondered if they’d gone too far. If enough of the original remained to be true and useful. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in his global search for any information on The Monarch, it had finally paid off. A single image, of a sort, existed. Captured years ago by a security camera in Prague after The Monarch hit another one of Nathan’s private collector brethren. But not a direct image, merely a reflection in the glass of a display case. Nathan was confident, with Randy on the case, that it would be enough. It had to be.

  Nathan watched as grids appeared and disappeared over the image, sections exploding out, the predictive software looking for any pixel it had missed in the previous thousand passes. They hadn’t found anything new in weeks, but Nathan refused to let Randy shut down the process. Randy had explained that the intense mathematics required to process each digital pass over the image occupied a huge portion of the server farm. Data collected over the past six months filled another segment of the farm.

  That left just less than half of the data center for the upcoming operation. Their estimates determined it was sufficient. If it wasn’t, everyone involved would pay with their lives.

  Including Nathan.

  18

  Unknown

  EMILY DREAMED OF paradise. Water as blue as the sky. A white sandy beach. And a warm, tropical wind playing in her hair. It was heaven. And as the fog lifted from her brain, she realized it was also real.

  She shook her head and sat up. She was sitting on a beach lounge chair. Twenty feet in front of her the ocean lapped at the white sand in a constant, unstoppable rhythm. The beach ran as far as the eye could see both left and right, and she was the only one on it. Behind her it ran up an incline until it met the ferns, bushes, and palm trees that blocked the view of whatever was beyond.

  Emily got up and almost fell back down. She steadied herself, removing her coat and scarf as she sweated in the tropical sun. Her head pounded and there was an odd sensation in her ears. She remembered getting out of the cab for the book signing her agent had set up and the limo pulling up, but then nothing.

  No, wait—­ She remembered pain. Something in her stomach.

  She pulled up her blouse and saw two red marks on her skin. That hadn’t been a dream. Someone had Tasered her. She looked around and spotted her bag under the lounge chair. She grabbed it and checked the contents. The book was gone. And so was one of her cell phones. The one the masked Nathan had given her. Then out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man approaching. He wore a black suit with a white shirt and a thin black tie—­and a mask. Her breath caught.

  Nathan.

  He strolled toward her, smiling. She saw he was carrying her book and that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Had he been here the whole time? She wasn’t sure. It was like he’d materialized out of nowhere. She looked around to see if they were alone and they seemed to be. Feeling defenseless, she hooked her bag over her shoulder and picked up her coat and scarf, holding them over her arm in front of her. She faced him as he approached but stood her ground, unmoving.

  As he drew closer, she saw he was tall. At least six-­four. His body wasn’t muscular but lithe. His step was steady and strong. Confident. He stopped a few feet away and seemed to just watch her. Emily found it unsettling, like he was picking her apart. But more unsettling was the book he carried in one hand.

  “Hello,” he said. His voice was deep and contained a slight accent that she couldn’t quite identify. “I trust this is to your liking,” he said, gesturing toward the beach and the ocean.

  “I . . . I don’t understand. How did I get here? Where are we?” Emily asked, trying futilely to sound indignant.

  “Well, now, that would be telling. And we both know how you like a mystery,” he said, gesturing with the book. Then she recalled that it had been late afternoon when she’d approached the limo. She looked at her watch. It said it was 10:00 P.M. in New York. But here, the sun was low in the sky. And rising.

  “Why am I here?” Emily asked. For some reason, she was calming down. As if she was safe.

  “Why, because you asked to be. And thank you very much for the gift. You have no idea how much I appreciate it,” he said, once again waving the book. “Of course, I had your little device removed from the spine. I’m a little disappointed. Not that you tried—­I expected that—­but you used the same shop you did when you were working on your book. Haven’t you surmised by now how well I know you?”

  He’s mad as a hatter. All she wanted to do was go home. It was like her first ride in the limo all over again, but this time he could reach out and touch her if she wasn’t careful. But unlike the limo, she knew things now.

  “My mistake. Old habits and all,” she said. She realized why she felt safe now. He needed her. At the very least, for the press c
onference. She touched her temple as her head throbbed again.

  “I am sorry about that,” he said. “But I thought drugging you was preferable to having you Tasered over and over again. I think you’ll agree.”

  “Ta,” she said, surprised at her cheekiness. “What makes you think I won’t scream?” She reached in her bag and took out her remaining cell phone. “Or call someone. The police. Anyone. You could be in serious—­”

  “Who exactly would you call? The FBI? Your friend Agent Wagner? Go ahead. He has no jurisdiction here, even if you could get a signal. Cell ser­vice down here is dicey, at best. A small price to pay, in my view. And as far as screaming, go ahead. Here, let me help you,” he said before he bellowed out over the water. “Hmm. I guess the fish police are busy. I do feel foolish, though. When you said a gift I had no idea it would be so special. I feel as if I should give you something in return.”

  “Take off your mask,” she said, tossing her cell phone back in her bag.

  “Oh, not yet, I’m afraid. But I will answer three yes or no questions.”

  “I can ask you anything?”

  “Anything,” he said, motioning for them to sit down. Emily obliged him and sat. He sat on the lounge chair opposite her.

  “Tell me about David Jordan,” she said, hoping to surprise him with the name of the man involved in the final New York killing. If she did, he didn’t show it.

  “That’s not a question.”

  “All right, did David Jordan kill all three of the supposed Monarch victims?” she asked.

  “No. Next question.” He said it like he was acknowledging that the grass was green. He’s playing with me. She needed a hard question. Something that could tell her if he was being honest or not. But she had only two chances left.

  “Was David Jordan murdered?”

  “Yes. I have to say I’m surprised at these questions. You seem obsessed with Mr. Jordan. Be that as it may, one question left.”