She whispers to me, “What made you think to say RixoTray when he asked you who sent us?”
“Follow the money.” We reach the stairwell, cautiously start down the steps. “Where there’s a twenty-million-dollar investment, there’s a lot at stake. Behind every dollar sign there’s an agenda. RixoTray has a dog in the hunt, and I took a stab that our guy would know that.”
“A stab.”
“Bad choice of words.”
Obviously, Charlene knew that our shows in Las Vegas and Atlantic City were by no means financial failures and money wasn’t a big concern for me. Over the years I’ve made some sizable investments, and I always keep an eye on them. After all, unless your income is in the stratosphere, you don’t throw millions of dollars, or in this case, tens of millions, into a project and then fail to monitor its performance — even if that means doing so in unorthodox ways.
We reach the lower level, the other end of the hall from where we first entered.
“But Jev”—she’s been thinking about what I said—“it’s just as likely that he was sent by a competitor to find out what the research was about. In fact, that might even be more likely.”
Hmm. “True. Come to think of it, all he did was repeat ‘RixoTray’ when I told him they’d sent us. He could’ve just been muttering that because it gave him information he didn’t already have.”
“Exactly.”
Near the exit I see a small waiting area with six chairs and an end table just outside a door with Dr. Tanbyrn’s name on it. We quietly leave the building and pick our way through the woods until we reconnect with the trail that leads toward our cabin.
I’m worried about her arm, about nerve damage, but I’m also thinking about our assailant, wondering who he might’ve been, what he was looking for.
And why he’d brought a knife like that along with him into the building.
Wound for Wound
Riah and Cyrus finished passing through the last of the three security checkpoints to RixoTray’s R&D facility.
An ultramodern fortress of steel and glass, the building was surrounded by razor-wire fence, a myriad of electric sensors, even a fifteen-foot-deep moat that was made to look like an innocuous, landscaped stream.
This was where RixoTray researched the effects of its experimental drugs and developed new strategies for pushing out pharmaceutical products faster than their competitors. It was here where their biggest secrets were kept, here where they coordinated placebo tests for their drug trials, and here where they were close to a breakthrough in developing a commercially available telomerase enzyme to reverse the effects of aging.
In this building, tens of billions of dollars could be generated by a single discovery or lost by a single miscalculation.
Cyrus strode beside Riah through the main corridor on the east wing. The hallway was high-ceilinged and bright, with pictures of scientists and plaques of patents decorating the walls. The conference area they were heading toward was at the end of the hall, next to the renovated research rooms that served as a two-bedroom office apartment for the twins when they were in town.
It was just down the hall from Riah’s lab. She was involved with electrical brain stimulation, specifically deep-brain stimulation (DBS), which had most often been used for treating people with Parkinson’s disease, although it had also been used to help people manage obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and even the symptoms of epilepsy and Alzheimer’s.
Primarily she used an EEG to scan specific areas of the brain involved in speech production, then, by identifying the sounds or syllables those brain waves represented, she was working toward translating those signals into actual audible messages.
A pair of guards stood sentry at the terminus of the hallway.
“We’re here to see Daniel and Darren,” Cyrus told them.
The broad-shouldered, shorter man nodded. He tapped his fingers subconsciously together, which Riah took to be a sign of nervousness. She wasn’t surprised. When people close to the project found out what the twins had done, uneasiness was the natural reaction. Especially if you were going to be alone in a room with them. “Okay, sir. Yes. I’ll get them.”
He left, and as she and Cyrus waited for the twins to arrive, she found herself reviewing what she knew about them.
The best way to describe the two brothers was that they were practitioners of death — apparently two of the most effective ones the Army’s Delta Force had ever trained.
As identical twins, Daniel and Darren shared something fundamental that so many twins share — the ability to communicate on a seemingly subconscious level in ways that defy typical categorizations. Of course, since she was the principal investigator on the team, part of Riah’s job was to find out what those ways were.
According to the information she was privy to, the twins had been born to a teenage girl who’d been raped and decided to give her sons up for adoption rather than abort them.
Because of a clerical error, Daniel and Darren were separated at birth, adopted by different families, and raised separately in New Jersey and South Carolina, respectively. They never met until they were in their twenties, yet the similarities between their lives were striking.
They both lettered in soccer and wrestling in high school, both had girlfriends named Julie with whom they had their first sexual encounter, both tinkered with cars in their spare time, both worked in fast-food restaurants — not unusual for teenage guys, but both were fired for spitting on the hamburger bun of a female patron. Who was wearing a blue dress.
Yes, a blue dress.
The stories were astonishing, and when Riah first heard them, she’d thought they were manufactured to create a sense of awe or amazement at the two men. Or even that they were simply an honest mistake, an inadvertent misrepresentation of the facts, but after reading more identical twin studies — some dating back to the nineteenth century — she’d found herself believing the seeming inscrutable coincidences between Darren’s and Daniel’s lives. In truth, the similarities weren’t nearly as incomprehensible as many of those found in the rest of the literature.
Both Daniel and Darren joined the Army.
Which is where they met.
A colonel visiting Fort Bragg saw Darren at the shooting range and mistook him for a soldier he’d seen the previous day at Fort Benning. After some inquiries and a bit of deciphering, Colonel Derek Byrne made the serendipitous connection. Some people might call it chance. Or fate. Or coincidence. Cyrus once told Riah it had to do with quantum entanglement, but whatever the reason, the colonel was able to reunite the two brothers.
They both made it onto the Delta Force and eventually moved into the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command.
Some people think that the CIA is responsible for the majority of the United States’ political assassinations carried out abroad, but over the last few months, Riah had found out that those people are wrong.
After a little research of her own and some frank and astonishingly forthcoming conversations with the twins, she’d learned that the military’s covert operatives were happy to work in the shadow of the CIA and let the spooks take the brunt of the media’s scrutiny and Hollywood’s ever-watchful eye.
Daniel once mentioned to Riah that he and his brother had “found their niche” in their new line of work. She could see that they were patriots through and through, and could only guess that they did as they were told by their supervisors without question, without reservation, without hesitation.
A month ago, out of curiosity, she’d asked Darren straight-out how many people he and his brother had killed. “None,” he’d told her evenly. “But we have eliminated certain targets when necessary.”