Winter's Storm: Retribution (Winter's Saga #2) (22 page)

Creed nodded and flipped open the in-flight phone console. He typed in a code before passing the receiver to Alik. “Go ahead. Make the call,” he said.

39 Love Story

In an effort to stay busy, Margo returned to the lab. Watching the car drive away with the three most precious gifts she had ever known was enough to make any mother sob silently. Knowing they weren’t just leaving her, but beginning a journey that was going to unfold painfully made Margo sick with fear for them. To control her anxiety, she found if she kept her hands busy, then at least she could try to distract herself long enough not to go insane with worry.

“
Can I get you something to eat?” Theo asked. Knowing Margo must be exhausted with worry, Theo had come to check on her in Paulie’s laboratory.

Margo’s soft brown eyes were completely obscured by the powerful microscope in which she peered. She was mumbling something.

“
Margo? Are you hungry?” Theo tried again.

Her simple and beautiful short dark hair was tucked neatly into a protective blue cap. With as much time as she had been spending in the lab these days, her scrubs had become like a second set of skin. Perched on the edge of a stool he saw she was even wearing blue booties over her shoes. Ever the scientist, she followed protocol for a sterile environment to the letter, though their patient was no longer in the room. She probably did everything automatically after all these years.

Theo thought to himself how much he adored this woman. He loved her passion for science just as much as her love for her family. All he wanted was to live out his days beside her, basking in the glow that was her aura. But keeping this love of his life safe had been terrifyingly difficult. Most men only have to worry about their love leaving them for another man—maybe someone who made more money or had more hair. Theo had to worry about another man taking his Margo away by snuffing the life out of her.

As he stood in the laboratory doorway watching her enveloped in her research, he couldn’t help himself but remember how close to death she already had been. A year hadn’t passed, and she was still weakened by the long-term effects from her extensive injuries at the hands of Williams’ henchmen.

His beautiful Margo, small-framed and delicate and fiercely devoted with the strength of a lioness; her spirit made him want to drop to his knees and beg for her hand in marriage. His eyes slipped to watch her tiny, gloved hand move to adjust the view in her scope. He stood in awe of her and for a moment allowed himself to imagine that beneath that size small latex glove was a band of gold wrapped around her finger. And engraved words inside pressed against her warm skin, two simple words of devotion: Love Story.

“
This can’t be right,” Margo muttered to herself, still unaware of Theo’s presence.

“
Margo?”

She spun in her chair and said, “Theo, I need you to see something. Scrub in, quick!”

“
What did you find?”

“
You’re not going to believe me. I don’t even know if I believe me. Hurry so you can see for yourself,” she said and spun back to look into the microscope again.

“
Okay, be right there.” He couldn’t think of anything a microscope could show her to make her sound so excited right now, but he wasn’t going to argue. Instead, he hurried to put on his blue scrubs, cap and booties. With his teeth, he ripped open a sterilizing scrub presoaped package and began vigorously cleaning his hands.

Within minutes, he was sitting in the same stool that had been occupied by Margo and peering into the same microscope. “What am I looking at, Margo?”

“
Remember the blood samples I took from Creed when he offered to donate for Meg?”

“
This is Creed’s blood?”

“
Yes.”

“
Okay. It looks like the children’s blood. I assume the increase of plasma and white blood cells is a standard meta thing.”

“
Right. I believe it has to do with their rapid regeneration, clotting, healing and so on.”

“
Makes sense.”

“
I ran a standard workup on it and found nothing unusual, for a meta. So I went further. Paulie happens to have one of the few forensic DNA testing facilities on the island right here,” she said waiving toward a complex machine in the far corner of the room.

“
You ran a DNA test on Creed’s sample? Why?”

“
I really was just fishing. I thought maybe, being a more recent creation of Williams’, his DNA might hold some information I hadn’t thought of before.”

Theo looked at her incredulously.

“
I know. I told you I was just grasping at straws. I really didn’t think I’d find anything of interest.”

“
But you did?”

“
Boy, did I. Look at this,” she said excitedly waiving a computer color printout under his nose.

“
Margo, you’re going to have to help me here. I’ve been an ER doctor for more than a decade. It’s been a long time since we were in medical school and studied how to interpret forensic DNA strands.”

“
The first three lines are Alik’s, Evan’s and Meg’s.”

“
Okay,” he said looking at the jagged lines on the page trying to compare them but not really sure what it was he was supposed to be comparing.

Margo put a second sheet of paper next to the first. “And this is Creed’s.”

“
Okay,” Theo said and began looking among the three Winter children’s DNA data and Creed’s. It only took a moment for him to realize Margo’s find. “What in the heck?”

“
So you see it, too?”

“
A match?”

“
It sure looks like it.”

“
Seven out of a possible thirteen bases including the Y-chromosome!”

“
That’s a 99.9 percent accurate result, Theo.”

“
How could that be?”

“
What are we going to do?”

“
Do we tell them?”

“
How do we explain this?”

“
And that means…”

“
Yes, the data is pretty conclusive.”

“
They share the same genetic pool.”

“
They’re brothers.”

40 A Well-Oiled Machine

It looked, at first glance, to be a well-maintained military college campus located outside a small, rural town in Germany. The Facility covered thirty-seven acres of rich, green land. Clusters of evergreen and deciduous trees were encouraged to grow throughout offering not only aesthetic appeal but coverage from both aerial and land surveillance. A fifteen-foot electric fence surrounded the entire compound. The original architects of The Facility spent a lot of time and care to be sure they created the most efficient infrastructure.

At the center of the thirty-seven acres were the buildings. There were six main buildings all surrounding a magnificent courtyard. The first building a visitor (not that there were ever very many visitors) would come to would be Headquarters. It stood three stories tall with walls made of black, one-way windows.

The building to its right was the woman’s barracks. It was a one-story building sectioned into three parts. Each section housed a different age group of female metasoldiers.

The next building was a three-story, state of the art training facility and gymnasium. In this building, the metas had every possible indoor physical activity available to them including weightlifting equipment, basketball courts, three Olympic-size swimming pools, gymnastic equipment and a martial arts dojo, just to name some of the options housed inside. The metas also attended classes in this building. They were schooled in the art of combat, weaponry, tactical strategies and conditioning. This was one of the busiest buildings in the entire complex. It was open all day and all night and was in constant use.

Continuing counter-clockwise around the center courtyard, next to the training facility is the “mess hall” and commissary. This building opened at 4am and closed at midnight. Meals were served every three hours. The commissary wasn’t like a standard military commissary. Nothing had to be purchased, only inventoried. If a meta needed a shirt or a pair of socks, he or she just went to the commissary, checked them out from the stockers and left with them. No soldier had money because they didn’t need any. Everything was provided for them.

To the west of the “mess hall” was the campus’ Research Hospital. This hospital was a mystery to most of the metas on campus except the first floor which held the triage and emergency room. In their line of work, visits to the first floor were inevitable. The building was three stories tall and was rumored to have a basement, but the metas on base didn’t question what they didn’t know. They only did as they were ordered. Period. If there were things happening on the other floors of the hospital, it was on a need-to-know-basis. Most soldiers on campus didn’t need to know.

The last building is the men’s barracks. It too was sectioned into three parts. Each section was home to a different age-group of soldiers. The youngest were age five to eleven. The next was twelve to fifteen. The oldest group was sixteen and up.

All meta instructors lived in the barracks with the cadets in all three sections. Male instructors resided with the male cadets and female instructors with the female cadets. It was all very orderly, regimented and disciplined. There were never any problems with impropriety because it was made very clear what would happen to rule breakers.

Forming a large rectangle around the outside of the buildings and courtyard was a road that doubled as a race track. At the southeast corner of the compound was a shooting range. The Retribution Arena was in the northeast corner. A pleasant stream cut across the northwest corner of the campus and sported two bridges that allowed the jogging trail to flow uninterrupted around the inside perimeter of the entire campus. The south west corner of the compound was designed around a meta-worthy obstacle course.

Commander Oldham stood looking out the window of his office in the Headquarters building, gazing at the majesty that was the Facility. This day was like any other on the compound, and that’s just the way Oldham liked it. He watched as two platoons ran in formation across the courtyard, no doubt heading toward more exemplary training. Even through the thick, plate-glass window he could hear them grunting a familiar cadence to keep their rhythm. He smiled approvingly; through to anyone else, Oldham’s smile looked like a pained grimace. His facial muscles weren’t meant to smile.

From the opposite side of the courtyard, a group of more seasoned cadets was carrying huge boxes of supplies into the side entrance of the hospital. A service truck lumbered into view and stopped by the Mess Hall with a squeal of breaks in need of attention. Immediately, meta soldiers were on hand to begin unloading the goods. Unquestioned synchronicity. That’s what made this place run like the Shangri-La it was.

Every meta was conditioned to be exactly who and what he told them to be and the Facility was run like a well-oiled machine. He ordered the senior ranking metas and they disciplined their underlings. There was a tremendous amount of synchronicity required when scheduling which platoon would be where and learning and doing what, with and for whom.

There were all the shipments of food and miscellaneous supplies to arrange. The hospital needed constant deliveries kept completely quiet. Then there was the concern about the acquisition of new metas. There were always “new-recruits” being brought in and the Director just expected them to be vigorously trained and “brought up to speed” on how things were done at the Facility. Then there were always the concerns about what the Director was going to want from him beyond his standard duties.

Oldham was completely against Dr. Williams’ tampering with how he handled his soldiers. The Young boys should have been disciplined immediately, with no mercy and in front of the entire meta campus so any other young gun with a miniature thought in his or her thick head would stop to smell the dead bodies before they decided to act on their own volition. Instead, Williams put both of those boys on undercover assignments where they were out among regular people.

To a man like Oldham, who respected only those who gave and obeyed orders, these two rotten apples were exactly the wrong kind of soldiers to trust. And though he had tried to express his concerns to his Director, he was immediately put in his place. All he could do is wait and hope that he was wrong about the Young boys. But in his gut, he knew it was just a matter of time and he was furious at the thought of what two rogue metas could do to his perfectly maintained world.

Oldham’s body was tight with anger as these thoughts coursed over him like fumes from rancid meat. Instinctively, he began to formulate a plot for self-preservation; a plot that would mean knocking some sense into Dr. Kenneth Williams.

That gruesome smile etched its way across his meaty face, again. Everything he had worked for to make this Facility the exemplary product it was depended on its leaders modeling the restraint and obedience they expected of their cadets. Anything less than model behavior from anyone in this Facility required immediate and uncompromising punishment. Commander Oldham returned to his desk and picked up his telephone. He had a few phone calls to make.

41 The Brothers Grim