“And what happened to the surrogates?”
“At the time,” Marta says, “we believed they were volunteers. We were told these women signed up to be in the program. They were being paid quite a bit of money to give up nearly a year of their lives, away from their families and friends.”
“What do you mean, away from their families and friends?”
Eli shifts his weight leaning on the car, lighting another cigarette. “It was part of their contract. They stayed at the facility twenty-four-seven. They had their own rooms. They had TV, books, magazines, music, whatever they wanted. The only stipulation was they couldn’t contact their families or friends. No phone calls. No letters. Nothing. Only until their part in the project was complete, when they were done and the babies were delivered, could they leave.”
“They were prisoners?”
A hesitant glance between Eli and Marta.
Marta says, “As it turned out, they were. In fact, we all were, though none of us knew it at the time. But we-the doctors and scientists-we were free to come and go as we pleased. We had houses and apartments. We had boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives. Some of us even had children of our own. We all were required to sign nondisclosure forms. We were forbidden to discuss the project even with our families.”
“So what happened?”
“One of the girls,” Eli says, “one of the first girls we ever treated, came back to us. Maybe three years had passed. She looked … different somehow, but I knew it was her.”
“How did she look different?”
“Tired. Exhausted. Scared. You see, most of the girls we saw at first were young and so full of life. They knew what they were getting into, but they also knew the money was worth it, so they put up with the secrecy. So what if they couldn’t see or talk to their families and friends for nearly a year? Once they left, they would have more money than they would ever know what to do with. For them, it was worth it. At least, it was until they realized it was all a lie.”
“What was a lie?”
“The girl, the one who had come through before. I recognized her immediately. Her name was Beth. She acted like she had never seen me before. Actually, she acted like she wasn’t even allowed to speak. She hardly answered any of my questions during her first checkup besides nodding or shaking her head. But I knew she knew the drill, so I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
“I was in the room, too,” Marta says, “and I sensed the same thing. It just seemed … odd. Truthfully, I didn’t think girls could be in the project more than once. I even brought this up to Eli, who went and asked Matheson the next time he was in.”
Eli nods distantly. “I asked him, and he nearly tore my head off. The thing about Oswald Matheson, he’s a genius, and like most geniuses he never liked being questioned. It’s something we all came to learn pretty quickly. Even in his office, he had this quote hanging on the wall from the poem ‘Ozymandias’-‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ He always joked he liked the quote because his name, too, was Oz, but I believe he truly thought he was unconquerable. He was quite possibly one of the most brilliant men in the world. But here I went and questioned him and he didn’t like it one bit. He even went so far as to threaten to throw me off the project, which, as you can imagine, was the very last thing I wanted to have happen. Not with all the money I was making. The work, to be honest, was easy, once we had everything squared away. The girls came in, we did our manipulation of the genes, performed checkups every week, and then waited nine months to see the results.”
Ashley speaks for the first time. “Were they all clean births?”
Eli drops his cigarette to the ground, right on top of the other one. “No, I’m sorry to say they were not. Sometimes we lost a few of the babies. Only twice did we lose one of the mothers, but in those instances we managed to save the babies. For the most part, they were all clean, and both the girls and the babies were healthy.”
“Except for this girl who had been there before,” I say.
Eli nods again. “It took a while, but we finally got the story out of her. Actually, it was Marta who got the story out of her.”
“Yes,” Marta says, “it took a few months before she finally confided in me. She was scared. More scared than she seemed that first day we had seen her after all this time. As Eli said, nearly three years had passed. She told me after the first time they hadn’t let her go. Instead she had been taken to another facility somewhere across the country. There she had been made to go through the same process. The promise she had been given before-all the money-was a lie.”
“Jesus Christ.” A slight churning starts in the pit of my stomach. “Who are these people?”
“Bad people,” Eli says, lighting himself another cigarette. “Evil people.”
“But when these girls signed up to be in the program, wouldn’t at least one friend or family member know about it?”
“You would think. But as it turned out the girls were runaways. Matheson and his people picked them up off the streets, fed them, clothed them, made sure they were healthy, then asked if they wanted to partake in an important scientific study for a lot of money. Of course many of the girls were skeptical at first, but they all ended up agreeing. And those that didn’t agree, well, in the end I believe they ended up in the study anyway.”
“So what happened?”
“We found out the truth,” Marta says. “It took a while, and it took quite a bit of investigating, of looking into files we were forbidden to access, but Eli and I soon learned the truth. How these rich couples were not just any rich couples, but all part of something called the Inner Circle. We have to assume the group still exists, and if so, it’s a very wealthy, powerful group that controls much of our global economy. And this isn’t just in our country, but all over the world. It seems like they want to build a new Roman Empire. Which I guess explains, then, why our project was renamed what it was.”
Ashley steps forward, just a little, no longer keeping herself apart from the group. Speaking for a second time in a long while, she asks, “What was the project named?”
Eli blows smoke from the corner of his mouth, staring straight at me as he answers her question.
“Legion.”
thirty-six
Ashley folded her arms across her chest. It was cold out, yes, but the true reason was a chill had suddenly raced down her spine. As outrageous as this story seemed, she knew it was true. She felt it deep in her bones. Otherwise how could so many of the deaths today be explained?
“If what you’re saying is true,” John said, “it’s been over thirty years. How can something like this remain secret for so long? Some nut job shoots up a school and the next day conspiracy theories run rampant all over the Internet.”
“These people,” Eli said, “are more powerful than you can even imagine. Believe me, we tried bringing this to the press several times. Each time the reporters we contacted ‘accidentally’ died.”
John raised an eyebrow. “Say what?”
“Over the past thirty years we’ve been in contact with three reporters from top newspapers. One died in a car accident right after speaking with me. Another had a brain hemorrhage and died in his apartment. The third died from a food allergy-a food allergy, I should add, which some family members later claimed the reporter didn’t have, or at least wasn’t even aware of. Don’t you see? These people control everything.”
“But what’s the point? It’s been thirty years already. If these people are so powerful, why keep it such a secret?”