The Sleepless Stars (21 page)

He grabbed the man in a chokehold and drove the box cutter as deep as it would go into the space between the man’s skull and the top of his spinal cord. Then he wrenched the blade back and forth until the man went limp.

The whole thing took less than three seconds—it was over before the other man even had time to mount a defense. Hell, it was over before the guy’s brain had time to register that he’d lost control of his body. The guy crumpled to the ground, a whoosh emerging from his lungs with the movement, eyes wide open. If Rossi was here, she’d tell him he wouldn’t truly be dead for another few minutes, until his brain ran out of oxygen, but Rossi wasn’t here.

Ryder was glad of that. Never wanted her to see him like this—methodically taking a life as if it was nothing. Logic and ethics and even the law were on his side, but he’d just erased a person, someone unique who’d never lived before and who would never be created again, an entire existence banished forever from the universe because of Ryder’s actions. He’d considered trying to take the man alive, restraining him and questioning him, but there simply was no time and it was much too risky. If Ryder didn’t make it out of here alive, there was no one who could warn Rossi and the others.

He stripped the man of everything useful: his ballistic vest, weapons, parka—not his boots, they were too small—and a cell phone connected to a private VoIP server. First call he made was to Rossi, but it went straight to voice mail.

“They’re coming for you. Tell Price and get out of there. There’s at least eleven men, highly armed, including explosives, and I’m not sure how many more. ETA thirty to forty minutes if you’re lucky. I’m on my way to help. Love you. Be safe.” Then, just in case she missed it the first time or thought he didn’t really mean it, he added, “I do love you.”

Next, he called Devon Price. Thankfully, the other man answered. Ryder gave him a quick rundown, keeping his words as vague as possible using the unsecured phone. “I’m not sure exactly what they have planned, but if you stay, you’re sitting ducks.”

“Maybe they want us to leave? Easier to catch us when we’re vulnerable.”

Ryder appreciated Price’s dilemma. Wrangling all those kids and their families, all civilians and unaccustomed to stealth or able to defend themselves, it was a tough call to make: stay where they had some security behind the locked doors of the tunnel bunkers but also then could be trapped? Or try to sneak past Grey and Tyrone’s men, make it to another location where they might end up facing the exact same problem?

“Your call. You don’t have much time, so sheltering in place might be the answer—all those civilians, next to impossible to move them on such short notice.” As they spoke, Ryder was scouting the entrance to the mine—no signs of any other guards. A single pickup sat unattended a few yards away.

“They might not even find us—it’s a maze down here. You could wander lost for days.”

Ryder thought about that. Along with other Gestapo tactics. Despite the fact that there was a man dead, maybe this escape had been a bit too easy? “Get your people organized, but don’t do anything until I get there.”

“But—”

“Have your father’s security expert,” Ryder cut him off, “meet me where we first met—where the dog played with the kids and we had ice cream. I’m on my way.” He hung up, hoping Price figured out his cryptic message. They’d first met at Good Sam’s where Ozzie had been keeping the kids at the Advocacy Center company. He hoped the ER was busy—he needed the cover.

No sense delaying up here any longer. If it was a trap, he’d done his best to warn Rossi and Price. If not, he’d be there soon to help.

IN MY OTHER
fugues, all of my attention had been focused outward as my senses became hyperacute. Being able to hear, smell, feel things beyond my normal perception had saved my life and others’, including Ryder’s, making my fugues both a blessing and a curse.

But now, with nothing to stimulate my senses, all my energy focused inward. Sensations of past events swirled around me as I was caught in a maelstrom of memories. Not just from my life, but the lives of all of the people whose memories I’d collected. The impressions, captured moments important and trivial, of six lives in addition to my own, now including Daniel’s. I did the math. It was two hundred and eighty-nine years’ worth of memories.

Caught in the vortex of time, it felt as if every moment of those two hundred and eighty-nine years whipped through me, slicing into my consciousness, fighting for attention. How had Daniel done it? Reached into my mind and grabbed what he’d wanted without being suffocated by the weight of all those myriad fragments?

Somehow he’d lasered right in on Leo’s data...and my own memory of my father’s death. I tumbled through the void, sights and sounds and smells bombarding me, no gravity to orient me, no sense of time to guide me. Vertigo tossed me about like a leaf caught in a hurricane; if I’d been in control of my body, I would have been seasick by now.

Focus. I knew what I wanted: Leo and Tommaso. When did they first meet? What had they been working on besides the PXA formulations? I concentrated, and slowly a world built itself around me.

At last there was solid ground beneath my feet. I watched two men talk over coffee as they sat at an outdoor cafe, sunshine warm against my back although I cast no shadow, their voices clear despite the fact that I was several feet away. It was Leo’s memory. I wasn’t inside his head, but not quite outside it either. Instead, I faced the direction he faced, the air around me wavery as his focus and gaze shifted.

The man he was with was Tommaso Lazaretto. The scenery wasn’t anywhere in Cambria City. Somehow, it felt more like the memories Daniel had shared of his time in Italy. I listened to the ambient noises: traffic horns a little sharper, higher pitched than I was used to, and a foreign language murmuring around the two men. Definitely Italian. Either Leo or Daniel must have spoken it, because the more I listened, the more I understood. Just as I understood they were in Florence.

I turned my attention back to Leo and Tommaso. “I analyzed the compound you brought me,” Leo was saying. “Very interesting. You say your family originally developed it from venoms?”

Tommaso nodded. “Insect and viper venom. The formulation evolved over the centuries. We created several variations, including some using psychedelic mushrooms and herbs, others that required more exotic venoms...my family has made quite the study of useful organic compounds.”

“Your family? Who are they, the Borgias?”

“Actually, we trained Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. But we aren’t interested in killing—”

“No, I can see that by this chemical structure. This compound has the potential to bind with neuroreceptors that control pain, sensation, and pleasure. With the right formulation, you could turn this into a drug to brainwash someone, control their mind, torture them—or provide them with ecstasy beyond imagining, so much so that they’d become catatonic and die from sheer pleasure while their body wasted away. The possibilities and commercial potential are outstanding.”

Tommaso smiled indulgently at Leo’s excitement. Leo wasn’t stupid. He detected the other man’s condescension but considered it a small price to pay to be able to work with the compound he’d already begun to think of as his own.

“Yes, we know,” Tommaso said. “Which is why we want to hire you to create a family of easily replicated artificial variations to suit our many requirements. We want it to be efficient, fast-acting, with reproducible and predictable effects. And we need an easy-to-administer reversal agent.”

Leo leaned back and made a show of his skepticism. “Tall order. It will take time, research subjects, money...”

“All of which are no problem. But we require a trustworthy researcher who can tackle the problem discreetly. Given our families’ historical alliance, we of course came to you first.”

“Then you’ve found your man.” They shook hands. “It will help me to focus my research if you can explain exactly what you want to use the end result for.”

“I can do better than that.” Tommaso stood, throwing some euros onto the table. “Let me show you.”

The scene dissolved to flickering black and white. It took me a few moments to realize that Leo and Tommaso were now in a darkened room, watching old movie footage on a widescreen TV. An old man appeared to be sleeping as the camera approached him. The date at the lower corner read June 3, 1989.

“Is that—” Leo asked, leaning forward to scrutinize the man.

“Ayatollah Khomeini, yes. He was poised to break Iran’s cease-fire with Iraq, which would have cost our family billions. We needed to stop him, but we also needed vital information on where he had hidden assets pilfered from the Iranian government’s coffers.”

A young girl appeared at the edge of the frame. The camera shook as an adult’s hand guided her to the Ayatollah’s sleeping form. She couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old. Even more interesting—she looked exactly like pictures of me at that age. A cousin? Maybe a half-sibling? If my biological mother wasn’t really Patsy—a fact that still made my brain stutter—but rather Francesca Lazaretto, then anything could be true.

The girl knelt beside the man, turning her head and opening her mouth as the adult holding the camera placed a drop from a small glass bottle beneath her tongue. A few moments later, her face went slack. The girl placed her hand on the Ayatollah’s just as her body froze. She was in a fugue.

“I don’t understand,” Leo said. “How did you get past security?”

“Please. We’ve been doing this for over six hundred years. Our family has infiltrated every major government, religious dynasty, and financial organization on the planet.”

“And this girl, she took the compound—did it produce her catatonia?”

“No. That comes from the Scourge. A rare genetic disease caused by prions. Usually, it leads only to a horrific death in the victim’s third or fourth decade. But occasionally a child will be born with a special gift. They are what we call Vessels.”

“Vessels?”

“When they enter a fugue—enhanced by the compound as you saw here—they are able to touch the minds of others in similar fugues and access their memories.”

“Wait. So you poisoned the Ayatollah, put him in one of these—”

“Fugues. In people not of our family, the compound creates more than a fugue. It’s a coma that becomes fatal. The Ayatollah will never awake again. But the girl will retrieve his memories and recite them to us before she herself dies in a few days.”

I could feel Leo’s excitement at the myriad possibilities of both the compound and the prion disease Tommaso’s family had inherited. “You people, your family—if you’ve been doing this for centuries, then you must...”

“Be privy to wealth and power beyond imagining? Yes. Unfortunately, our family is threatened. Recent global upheavals have placed us in a precarious position, and this girl was the last Vessel produced. We are masters of genetic manipulation but have been unable to reproduce her gift.”

“No drug will re-create it either,” Leo cautioned.

“What we want isn’t just a drug that can create the fugue states needed to facilitate their gift, but we are also working on perfecting a prion disease that can infect others outside our bloodline.”

“You want to produce more of these children, these Vessels.” Leo didn’t sound horrified. Rather, fascinated. “How many memories can they hold? Does it matter how old the other person is?”

“No correlation with age, but most Vessels die soon after their first memory retrieval. Vessels show symptoms of fatal insomnia before puberty and die young, even if they never use their gift.”

“Not only rare but short-lived. Yes, I can see your problem. Very interesting. I think I can help. Perhaps with both the pharmaceutical compound as well as the prion disease and a delivery system. Have you considered creating a form of vaccination? Only, instead of introducing immunity, it will introduce the prions, start the abnormal proteins forming?”

Tommaso smiled at Leo’s insight. “Yes, exactly. There is a breakthrough in genetic editing we developed several decades ago that is beginning to show promise.”

“You mentioned wanting to establish a lab in my hometown. Is that because Kingston Enterprises is based there?”

“Your father suggested Cambria City as a testing center. We are in the process of establishing cohorts located around the world, trialing different combinations of our prion DNA. But Cambria City is of particular interest to me because there’s someone there I’ve always wanted to meet.”

“Who?”

“My sister. My father stole her from the family, abandoned my mother as well as generations of tradition.”

Anticipation surged through Leo as he parsed Tommaso’s words and expression. “You’re not looking for a happy family reunion, are you?”

Tommaso’s smile was half grin and half grimace, but his eyes were filled with hunger for vengeance. “Family first. Family always.”

“
Omnes nominis defendere.
Above all, defend the family,” Leo recited the family motto Daniel had hammered into him all his life.

“Exactly, my friend. Exactly. Her father is no longer around to pay for his crimes, but Dr. Angela Rossi is. And pay she will, with her very blood.”

DEVON HUNG UP
from updating Flynn with Ryder’s intel only to glance up and see that Randolph’s mother, Veronica, had approached along with several other mothers, all with frightened expressions clouding their faces. Two of the mothers were in their early twenties, the youngest of the group, but they also appeared to be the least cowed by their experiences.

It was clear they’d overheard his conversation. Louise, sensing something was going on, emerged from Randolph’s room and joined them.

“They’re coming here?” one of the mothers demanded. “I thought you said we’d be safe. Isn’t that why we left the Tower?”

“Who’s coming? How many?” the other asked. “Are we leaving?”