Part 24 (2/2)

”Of course I am. And if I kept you hostage and tried to force it out of you, I'd be back where I started. Catch 22. So the only way I could get it is if I let you go and you gave it to the entire world.” He paused. ”And while this would, indeed, ensure I lived longer along with the rest of the ma.s.ses, I would lose the use of the most powerful lever in history.” He smiled cruelly. ”You see, I'm a little selfish. I want the secret all to myself. To use as I see fit.”

”I still don't see it,” said Kira. ”The Ebola cold-virus was a bluff. The explosive in my head was a bluff. The sterilization plot was a bluff. Why? How do they all fit together? And what did all of these machinations buy you?”

Her brother smiled broadly. ”As it turns out, Kira a everything.”

48.

Alan Miller took a sip of his drink, a delighted gleam in his eye, obviously reveling in finally being able to share his warped maneuverings with a rapt audience. He was savoring the telling of a story that would twist the knife in his prisoners over and over again. ”As I said, I knew with certainty that you couldn't be coerced. So I had to ask my unfathomably brilliant transformed self this question: under what conditions would my little sister give up her secret? Once I answered this, all I had to do was establish these conditions.” He rolled his eyes. ”A lot easier said than done, I must admit.”

”So what were the conditions?” asked Kira, but a sick feeling had grown in the pit of her stomach. She realized she had just given Desh the location of the flash drive. She knew exactly what combination of conditions this had taken. But for Alan to suggest he had orchestrated things from the start to bring about these conditions was preposterous. Besides, she had whispered the coordinates directly in Desh' ear, and no listening device was sensitive enough to catch that.

”First,” began Alan, ”you had to respect someone enough to trust them with your secret. If you were forever a loner and didn't have anyone to trust, no combination of circ.u.mstances would do.”

He turned to Desh. ”That's where you come in. You were handpicked for this role.”

”What are you talking about?” snapped Desh in confusion.

”Who do you think set you up in Iran?” he said smugly, a Ches.h.i.+re grin on his face.

”Impossible!” barked Desh. ”You're saying you expected me to team up with your sister even then?”

Alan Miller nodded. ”I wanted to ensure she had someone to confide in. Believe me, Desh, I know my sister's taste in men. I've met the guys she's dated and she's told me, in nauseating detail, the kind of man she's looking for. I studied the records of scores of Special Forces operatives before stumbling onto a ringer like you. You're her exact type physically. Brilliant in your own right. Personable. You studied philosophy for Christ's sake. You like poetry. Incredibly well read. Sickeningly righteous.” He grinned. ”You're catnip to her. The transformed me was convinced that if you two were thrown together under desperate circ.u.mstances, there's no way she doesn't fall in love with you.”

Alan gazed at his sister knowingly. ”Go ahead, Kira. I know I chose well. Tell him. You're in love with him already.”

Kira lowered her eyes but said nothing.

A startled look flashed over Desh's face, and he appeared totally dumbstruck. His eyes darted to the side as if desperately trying to read Kira's expression.

Alan laughed. ”I'll be d.a.m.ned!” he said, studying Desh. ”You're in love with her, also. I can see it in your face.” He laughed again. ”I should be a f.u.c.king matchmaker.”

Kira gazed at Desh and her eyes widened. She had been feeling like an idiot, desperately trying to hide her feelings from him, convinced that true love was something that happened over years rather than days. But she sensed her brother, evil as he was, had guessed correctly. Desh had fallen for her as well.

Alan s.h.i.+fted his attention back to his sister. ”I had hoped this would happen. When both parties can subconsciously pick up on each other's signals of infatuation, the effect is accelerated. My in-depth study of Desh suggested he liked girl-next-door types who were his match intellectually, but frankly, Kira, I was convinced your irritating personality would turn him off.” He raised his eyebrows. ”Despite not having a firsthand knowledge of Desh's taste in women, my brilliant, transformed self calculated there was a good chance he would fall for you too.” He shook his head in wonder. ”Ironic that a being of pure intellect could so accurately predict a largely irrational, involuntary response.”

”You should feel very proud of yourself,” spat Desh bitterly.

Alan looked back and forth between his two prisoners and smiled in delight. ”What's the matter, you two? You look angry and confused. Feeling manipulated? Feeling like experimental animals? Does the fact that I orchestrated your feelings for each other to serve my purposes taint them?”

At this, Desh's expression became thoughtful, and he shook his head ever so slightly, as though the moment Alan had voiced what he had been feeling, he had realized these feelings were misguided. ”No taint Alan. My feelings for Kira are my own. If you were responsible for allowing me to meet such a remarkable woman, than I thank you, regardless of your motives.” Desh paused. ”And if you predicted we would fall for each other,” he continued, ”so what? Someone might be able to predict my loathing of you, but that doesn't make it any less real.”

Alan Miller laughed. ”Your loathing of me is about to take a sharp turn for the worse,” he said icily. ”Allow me to continue. Once I knew you were the right man, I made sure you encountered tragedy, so you would be a wounded soul and would break all ties with other women. To make you more appealing to my sister. After all, what could possibly be more appealing than a tortured, unattached hero?”

”You really did set us up in Iran, didn't you?” whispered Desh in horror.

”Putnam arranged for that particulara”what do you grunts like to call ita”oh yeah a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k. He didn't have any idea why. Those stupid-a.s.sed terrorists were well paid to make sure you escaped alive, but they almost blew it. I needed you injured, but not as injured as you were.”

”You're saying they let me escape?”

”That's right.”

”Why did you need me injured? So I'd cut an even more sympathetic figure for Kira?”

Alan smiled. ”I'll answer that a little later. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. And I really do want to share with you how brilliantly you were both manipulated. After all, you're the only two people in the world who will ever have a chance to appreciate my mastery.” He paused. ”Shall I continue?”

Desh nodded while Kira glared at her brother hatefully.

”The optimized me figured there was a fifty-fifty chance Desh would leave the service. Either way, it didn't really matter to my plan.”

”If your plan was to get me to team up with Kira, why did you wait so long?”

”She wasn't ready yet. I wanted her harried. Chasing her; almost catching her; isolating her. Making her feel persecuted and alone. Crus.h.i.+ng her spirit. I needed her primed for the arrival of her white knight. When I judged she was at the end of her rope, I pulled the strings to have you come in.”

Kira knew this is exactly what had happened. She had recruited David because she was lonely and fatigued. Alan's execution had been flawless.

”Are you saying you could have captured her earlier?” said Desh.

Alan shrugged. ”Possibly,” he said. ”If I had made more b.a.l.l.s-out attempts. I tried to capture her in the early days, but failed. My enhanced self had calculated that if I captured her, tortured her a bit, and then let her find a way to escape, this would accelerate her readiness to seek out an ally like you, and I could move up my time table.” An annoyed look came over his face. ”But she was a lot better than I thought she'd be. And when I got close she would take bold risks with her own life to elude capture, which I couldn't have. So I changed gears and made hara.s.sment my primary objective.”

”How did you get me a.s.signed?” asked Desh.

Alan grinned. ”With the powerful people Putnam and I have in our pockets, it was laughably easy. I had an influential politician with plenty of skeletons in his closet arrange for it all with Connelly's bosses. And I had long since made sure the ident.i.ties of all of the agents sent after her were recorded in a database I knew she could breach.”

”Because you knew she would study them,” said Desh. ”You needed her to study them.”

He nodded. ”She studied others that were sent after her without effect, but I knew if she was properly primed and studied your photo and history, she would try to recruit you.”

Kira Miller felt bile rise in her throat. This thing pretending to be her brother was distilled evil. What twist of fate had led to her parents giving birth to two mutant children: a daughter with unequaled genius for molecular biology and a son born entirely without a conscience.

”She took the bait just as I knew she would,” boasted Alan. ”I had planned on having the two of you captured by my Black Ops dupe, Smith, and held together as prisoners for a few days to allow love to blossom. But you kept eluding him.” Alan shrugged. ”Served my purposes anyway. In fact, your escapes from the motel and woods probably cemented your relations.h.i.+p.” A content, self-satisfied expression came over his face. ”Then all that was left to do was have Putnam capture you both and pretend to be me, initiating a perfect storm of circ.u.mstances that would cause Kira to tell her lover-boy her secret.”

The helicopter banked, reminding the prisoners they were tearing through the air at great speed to an unknown destination, something easy to forget given the near perfect stillness of the opulent, enclosed cabin. ”How did you know you would be able to find us when you needed to?” asked Desh.

”This is where the need for you to get seriously injured in Iran comes in. We ordered a military surgeon to add a few implants in addition to fixing you up. The orders came from the highest military channels. He was told this was being done because you were a known traitor.” Alan smirked. ”He was even told you had set up your own men.”

Desh lunged forward in fury, his neck catching enough of the wire in front of him to draw blood, if only shallowly. ”You sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d!” he screamed, his rage finally spilling out.

Alan Miller continued calmly as if Desh's outburst had never happened. ”The surgeon implanted a tiny, remote homing device on your elbow, just under the skin. The device was designed to lie completely dormant until pinged by a coded signal, upon which point it would activate. You could scan for bugs all you wanted when it was dormant and it wouldn't register. While the bomb in Kira's head was a bluff, the advanced receivers Putnam told you about are very real. As Kira well knows, when you've taken one of her pills, improving electronics becomes child's play.”

”So you could have captured us at any time David was with me?” said Kira in shock.

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