“We still aren’t sure,” Marta said. “But from what we’ve been able to piece together over the past two decades, they’re working toward something. What that something is, we have no idea, but it’s something big. Something massive.”
Eli sighed, blowing smoke through his nose. “I strongly believe that at the beginning Matheson had his heart in the right place. But then someone caught his ear and he got involved in … whatever this whole thing turned out to be. Making babies wholesale for couples who couldn’t have their own children was one thing. But making babies so that they could eventually be mainstreamed into the general population was another.”
“Wait,” John said. “Back up a sec. What are you talking about babies being mainstreamed into the general population?”
Marta said, “What we learned is that there are other facilities around the country, around the globe, where many of these babies went. There they were raised to be soldiers, brainwashed into following this idea of Roman culture. It was almost cult-like. No-it was cult-like. When they became young men and women, some even in their late teens, they were placed in schools, or colleges, or the military or navy, or even into the general workforce.”
“How many?”
“We don’t know. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Your guess is as good as ours.”
For a long time nobody spoke. The sky was beginning to brighten more and more, the dark purple off on the horizon giving away to dark pink.
Eli was staring curiously at John. “You get it now, don’t you?”
John said nothing.
“Isn’t it obvious now why we kept you kids apart? Why your mom kept moving you around the country? Why Marta and I divorced?” Eli laughed. “Of course, we weren’t even legally married in the first place.”
“Who was she?” John asked.
“Who was who?”
“My real mother.”
“That surrogate I mentioned-Beth? She was nearly eight months along when Marta and I learned the truth of what Matheson was doing. We enlisted the help of another researcher, a man named Cameron. If I remember correctly, Marta had him wrapped around her finger.”
Marta didn’t even smile. Her eyes grew glassy at the name. “He was a good man,” she said quietly. “A good, kind man. I’m sorry what happened to him.”
“What did happen to him?” John asked.
Eli said, “He was killed. The night we tried to break Beth and a few of the other surrogates out of the facility, he was shot to death, along with the rest of the women. We only managed to escape with Beth, and she had been shot in the leg.”
There was another long beat of silence, and then John asked, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you do it? It sounds like you both had a real cushy job. Were making a ton of money. Why did you get involved?”
Eli and Marta exchanged another glance, this one lengthier, deeper, what could have been mistaken for regret but which Ashley sensed was resolve.
“Because,” Eli said finally, “it was the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do?” John stared off into the valley, shaking his head. “You lied to us.”
“What would you have had us do instead? We kept the truth from you for your protection. Christ, everything we did was for your protection.”
“You could have told us. We would have understood.”
“By telling you we would have placed you in even more danger. As we saw it, ignorance was the only option.”
Standing with his back to them, still staring off into the valley, John asked, “So what happened to her-my real mother?”
“She died giving birth to the six of you,” Marta said.
John turned around, almost too quickly. “But there are only five of us.”
Ashley could see it hit him a second too late that he had used the present tense, not the past tense.
“One of them died within minutes of being born. In fact, you were not too far behind. For the first couple hours Eli and I thought we were going to lose you, too. You were so … small and frail, so much more so than the others. That was why, when we eventually assigned you all names and birth dates, we made you the youngest.”
John’s lips had gone tight.
Ashley, having already found the nerve to speak two times, decided to speak again.
“How were you able to assign them birth dates?”
Eli took a deep breath. “It wasn’t easy. But it helped that we had a lot of money to play with, the money we had transferred to offshore accounts when we realized what we had to do. We found the right people, people who could fake documents that looked more real than real documents. We got the kids social security numbers, birth certificates, all of it. We knew we couldn’t have all their birthdays be the same day, that that would raise too many questions, so we spread them out over the years. Melissa we made the oldest.”
“Why Melissa?” John asked.
Eli shrugged. “Why not?”
Marta said, “But we couldn’t spread your birth dates too far apart, as you were all basically the same age. So after Melissa, we made Valerie and Paul twins, then a year later, David, then you. Five children born over the course of four years seemed believable enough.”
“So how old am I really?” John asked.
“Thirty-two,” Eli said. “All of you kids are really thirty-two.”
John turned away again, staring off into the valley. Ashley watched him, wondering what he was thinking right now. Before she realized it, she found herself asking another question.
“Why are these people still looking for you?”
Eli asked, “What do you mean?”
“You said it’s been thirty years and that their power has been growing. That they’ve been working toward something. Why spend time and energy coming after you?”
“Matheson,” Eli said. “He wants revenge for what we did to him. He was always a proud man. He loathed disrespect. What Marta and I did to him cut deep.”
“Well,” Marta said, a faint smile on her face, “that’s not all you did.”
Eli smiled himself. “Yes, those top secret files we mentioned? In them were the locations of many of the other facilities all across the country. After we made our escape and the children were born and Marta and I had our fake divorce, I went looking for those facilities. Some of them had already been shut down, but others were still operational. I was just one man, though, so it wasn’t like I could raid an entire facility, especially since more guards would have been added after our escape. What I did instead was wait until the babies were transported out of the facility, and then I stopped those vehicles with any means necessary.”
John turned back around, a frown on his face. “What do you mean, any means necessary?”
“I killed the driver and the other men guarding the babies. Yes, John, I’ve murdered before. I’ve taken life. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve done it. I’m not proud of myself for what I’ve done, but make no mistake-those people I’ve killed were not good people. They were not innocent.”
“So then what?” John asked. “After you killed these men, what did you do with the babies?”
“I took them to a safe location where I knew they would be protected.”
“Where?”
Eli said nothing. Neither did Marta.
John took a step forward, an edge to his voice. “After everything you’ve just told me, you can’t tell me where you took these babies?”
“It’s best you don’t know.”
“Why?”
Eli said nothing again, and Ashley saw understanding fill John’s eyes.
“Oh, I see,” John said. “You don’t want me to know in case I get captured and tortured for information, is that it?”
“All you need to know is the babies were taken someplace safe.”
“How many times did you do this?”
“Over the years I managed it four times before I nearly got killed myself.”
“Why didn’t you take us there,” John asked, “me and the others?”
“At the time Marta and I weren’t positive it was a safe location. Having just escaped, we didn’t want to invite trouble elsewhere if we didn’t have to.”