Rogue Faction Part 2: A Cyrus Cooper Thriller: Book Three Page 21

  “Alight,” she said finally. “I’m sorry.” After taking a few moments to choose where to begin, she decided how to properly frame her story.

  “After you left, I stuck it out…I stayed in school for a while,” she explained. “But I just wasn’t happy. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I ended up coming back here. It turned out to be the best thing I could do for my family. My father was working around the clock on a new project, and Anna had just begun training for professional competition. Gretchen had just come on board as her coach and trainer, and I ended up being her training partner. That actually brought us closer than we’d been since we were children.

  “Still, as much as being home felt good, Father was working far too much. I didn’t get much of his time. All of mine was spent with Anna and Gretchen—which was great—but there was still something missing. And for the first time in years, I found myself thinking about my mother.”

  Natasha looked away, just before mentioning her mother. She was plagued by a myriad of complex emotions specific to that subject. They were emotions she had locked away throughout her teenage years. Now, fast-forwarding to adulthood when she was forming complicated and deeply personal relationships of her own, she felt there was unsettled business with a woman she knew surprising little about. Added to all of that, more than a little guilt due to her own inability to face her feelings for the first two decades of her life.

  “Anna was born a year and a month after me,” Natasha continued. “But my mother died only six months after Anna was born.”

  Wiping a tear from the corner of her eye, she met Cyrus’s gaze once more. “I never knew my mother,” she explained. “I have no memory of her. She was gone before I turned two-years-old.”

  Cyrus squeezed her hand. It was a small effort but she felt her heart beat stronger at his silent gesture of support.

  “Anyway, with her on my mind and Father not terribly accessible, I set out to learn more about her the only way I could. We don’t have any extended family on either of my parent’s sides. Or, at least if we do, they’ve never been a part of our lives. So that wasn’t going to help. But then I remembered seeing some old stuff in storage. I came across it when we were reorganizing the subbasement and getting ready for Anna’s training regimen.”

  Natasha fell silent again, taking nearly two minutes to decide how to explain what came next. Her mind was awash with the countless documents and files she’d found in storage. She wanted to explain what she’d discovered, but to do that she needed to focus on only those facts she thought were relevant.

  “When I was born, my mother and father worked together,” Natasha explained. “Mother had an office at the company headquarters, but she traveled a great deal. As a matter of convenience, she also kept a small office at home. After she became pregnant with me, she began working from her home office more and more frequently. She continued the routine after my birth.”

  Seeing Cyrus’s brow furrow, Natasha realized that part of her story wasn’t making sense to him, and stopped.

  “You seem to have all of this on good authority,” Cyrus offered. “Were you able to contact a family friend for the information?”

  Natasha offered a smile that was positively beaming. “No,” she shook her head. “Even better. I found her journal. She’d been meticulously maintaining it for nearly twenty-five years!”

  While she expected a shared sense of excitement from Cyrus, what she saw on his face was something that moved between relief and concern.

  “Ok, out with it,” she said flatly. “What’s wrong?”

  At first it looked like Cyrus was going to play dumb and pretend he didn’t know what she was asking. But that idea quickly passed, evidently because his look changed entirely to one of concern.

  “I think that’s fantastic,” Cyrus said. “A journal like that could offer rare insights into the mother you never had a chance to know. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t give their right arm for that kind of discovery.”

  Natasha waited for the proverbial, but. “But?” she finally asked. She could tell he was making great efforts to properly phrase his next words…she just didn’t know why.

  “While I’m sure the journal offers some powerful insight into the mother you never knew, I’m afraid there might be portions of it that you might find upsetting—even disappointing, on a personal level.”

  Natasha’s eyes narrowed on Cyrus in an accusatory manner. Once more, she felt her blood pressure rise.

  “I’m just saying,” Cyrus said, raising a pacifying hand. “She was your mother, but she was also a woman. It’s easy to forget that our parents are human. When reading something like that, it’s important to realize that you’ll be reading about her greatest triumphs as well as her most horrible mistakes.”

  Exasperated and out of breath with frustration, Natasha wasn’t sure how to respond. On the surface, everything Cyrus said made a great deal of sense. It was the sort of advice she would expect from a world class shrink, actually. But he wasn’t a shrink. If anything, it sounded more like he’d already read the journal. And after everything she’d just learned about him, she couldn’t help suspecting that he had. She didn’t know how, but it was the only explanation.

  “You know!” she accused, her glare cutting into him. “But how?”

  Leaning away from Natasha, Cyrus seemed genuinely concerned. “Know what? Please, take it easy.”

  “This isn’t funny, Jonn— err, Cyrus. You promised to be straight with me. You know what she did, don’t you? You know what she wrote? Have you read the book?”

  “No,” Cyrus said flatly. “This is the first I’ve heard about the journal. But it could answer some important questions, especially if it explains more about Lamplighter. But first, you’ve got to give me a hint. What is it you think I know?”

  Natasha took a moment to assess his body language. She believed him. She knew she wasn’t being entirely rational. Just the same, he did know things that he shouldn’t, or couldn’t. Why not this?

  “Her affair,” she said so quietly that it was almost a statement to herself.

  After taking a long look at her, Cyrus only nodded.

  “And me,” she concluded. Her eyes rested in her own lap. This was the closest she’d ever come to discussing the subject with anyone.

  Releasing an audible sigh, Cyrus quietly cleared his throat. “So you know that Dargo is your father?” he asked in a voice just a quiet as hers.

  When Natasha’s eyes found his, she felt her own brimming with tears. But even at that point, she wasn’t sure why. She’d been aware of the fact for more than two years. Even she didn’t know why she was getting this choked up over it now. Maybe it was admitting the facts out loud. Maybe it was admitting the facts to someone she cared about.

  “If you haven’t read the book, how did you know?” she asked.

  Cyrus shrugged, reluctant to speak.

  “Let me guess,” she accused. “It’s a spy thing?”

  He grinned. “No. It’s a genetics thing. Earlobes, specifically. Your mother, father, and sister all have attached earlobes. You don’t. Yours are free, just like Dargo’s.”

  Natasha felt breathless. She had earned a double major in school, chemistry and biology, but the simple truth had never occurred to her. She understood the dominant and recessive genetic traits that Cyrus was referring to. Attached earlobes were the type that swept down and attached the ear evenly to the corner of the jaw. Alternatively, so-called ‘free’ earlobes described those that had a tab of skin protruding from the lower slope of the ear, right before it joined with the side of the face. Free lobes were a dominant trait while attached lobes were recessive. It meant that if either parent had free lobes, the child would have free lobes as well. Since both Eleanor and Rutger Voss had the recessive attached lobes while Natasha had the free lobes, it meant that her father had to be a man who had the dominant free earlobes.

  The logic had been staring her in the face for the whole of her life. N
atasha bit down frustration at her own inability to see the obvious. “That genetic trait only tells you that my father was not my father,” she said somewhat clumsily. “How did you know it was Dargo?”

  “That was easy,” Cyrus smiled. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. A father’s pride is hard to disguise. That, and once you’re looking for it, there is a distinct resemblance around your nose and the set of your eyes. But to be fair, that part could just be a spy thing.”

  Natasha laughed, self-consciously hiding her smile behind an upraised hand. It was a subconscious gesture she was prone to making when she was nervous or emotional. But as her eyes threatened to overrun with tears, she couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of comfort at the thought.

  “Oh,” she gasped, suddenly becoming deathly serious. “You have to promise me—you can never tell my father about this. Dargo is like a brother to him. I can’t imagine how he would handle something like this.”

  With a grin and a shake of his head, Cyrus leaned back on his hands and took a long look at Natasha. “You’re something else, you know that?” he marveled. “I’d expect someone in your position to be upset with the situation or worried about what her father will say to her when he learns of something like this. But you’re worried about Dargo?”

  Natasha responded by rolling her eyes. “I’m not worried about my relationship with my father—not at all. I just don’t know how he would react to this news. Dargo works here, but in many ways he’s family.”

  Her smile brightened, the literal sense of what she’d just said striking home.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Cyrus offered. “I won’t say a word about this. As we’ve already established, this is really none of my business anyway. But as an interested and committed third party, can I make a suggestion?”

  When she didn’t object, he continued, “Worry less about how your father will deal with this news. While you’ve only recently learned of it, the secret’s been out there for twenty years. That’s more than enough time for a sharp guy like your dad to work things out for himself. Consider giving him the benefit of the doubt. There’s a real chance that while you’re worried about talking to him, he’s worried about talking with you.”

  Since Cyrus was never one to offer unsolicited personal advice, she couldn’t help feeling suspicious at his suggestion. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  He shook his head. “Only that we sometimes get caught up in problems and only see them from our own perspective. When you look at the same issue from another person’s point of view, things can change in unexpected ways. Sometimes it’s enough to solve an issue entirely.”

  Thinking about it that way, Natasha had to agree that it made a great deal of sense. It wasn’t the sort of advice she would’ve received from him three years earlier, and she realized for the first time that more than just time had passed. Clearly a lot had happened to him in that time. He’d grown in ways she had yet to fully explore. But with that realization came another. For the first time, without reservation, she knew that she wanted to know Cyrus Cooper as well, or even better, than she had known Jonny Webb.

  ————

  “Alright,” Cyrus said. “Back to Lamplighter. Tell me what you know.”

  He felt like he’d dodged a bullet with Natasha’s questions about her mother’s affair with Dargo. While he knew a lot more than he’d admitted, it wasn’t his place to share it. Plus, if she’d found Eleanor Voss’s journal, there was a good chance she knew more about the affair than any living person on the planet—including Dargo. It had been Cyrus’s experience that people were willing to commit thoughts and feelings to paper in ways they wouldn’t share with friends or family. The experience could be therapeutic, even cathartic. And depending on what Eleanor Voss had recorded in that journal, it could hold the key to resolving a mission that had become complicated and dangerous.

  “My mother was a corporate attorney for a company called Onyx Gander. She handled all types of legal cases for them, all over the world,” Natasha explained. “My father worked for Onyx, too, but in a very different capacity.”

  “Your father was heavy into the scientific end of the business as I understand it,” Cyrus said.

  “Absolutely. Father didn’t go to board meetings or deal with shareholders. In fact, for years it was all Mother could do to get him home from the lab most nights. That’s what was so unusual about Lamplighter.”

  “I don’t understand,” Cyrus admitted. “What does any of that have to do with Lamplighter?”

  “It’s like you said, my parents worked for the same company but in entirely different areas. They weren’t likely to interact. Lamplighter was the only project that directly involved both of them at the same time.”

  Moments of silence stretched as Cyrus considered the implications. His first exposure to the project code came from the reports describing the operation to infiltrate Voss’s stronghold. It wasn’t until the previous day when he had once more gained access to the Coalition computer network that he’d been able to retrieve that file and load the supporting resources. To his surprise, the core of what they’d originally told him had since been altered. The seemingly ancillary inclusion of the word ‘Lamplighter’ had been removed. Had it not been for his confidence in his own total recall, he would never have known it had been there in the first place.

  He went further and searched the Coalition database while logged in with the Red Queen’s credentials, digging for additional mentions of Lamplighter. There were none.

  This made Cyrus all the more curious, since he was absolutely certain the term had once been included in a document he’d held in his hands a while ago. For it not to appear in a server wide search meant that whoever had purged it from the original information had also done a thorough cleansing of the Coalition’s most secure database.

  Thanks in no small part to a fortuitous typographical error in a command prompt, Cyrus found a hidden directory located in the primary root of the server. The hidden directory contained a single file, a symlink that, once activated, dropped his terminal session into an entirely different portion of the network. Since the server root was only available to select company personnel and was highly restricted, Cyrus couldn’t understand the need for the additional security—let alone an entirely hidden part of the fileserver. Something new caught his eye. Not only was the symlink hidden, it was only accessible from the Red Queen’s user account.

  He’d found a hidden server that was her private domain.

  The first thing Cyrus did was search for the term ‘Lamplighter’. Where the primary Coalition server had been a barren wasteland for that search term, the secret server returned thousands of documents. There was far too much information for Cyrus to digest in his limited time online. But prior to logging off, he managed to learn a few valuable details. First, whatever Lamplighter was, it was directly tied to Onyx Gander. Second, Lamplighter had been in operation for years. Some of the records he’d found were audio and video surveillance feeds dating back over two decades. Lastly, numerous executives and scientists working for Onyx Gander were subjects of surveillance. Rutger and Eleanor Voss ranked prevalently among those most closely observed.

  While Cyrus had hoped that the Coalition database would prove the key to understanding what Lamplighter was, he’d been buried under a deluge of information instead. Unfortunately, the longer he remained connected to the remote network, the greater his chances of being detected. In the end, he’d been forced to download as much as possible before disconnecting.

  His new hope was that the contents of Eleanor Voss’s diary would help fill in many of the blanks that were left after accessing the Red Queen’s secret files.

  “Wait a minute,” Cyrus said. “I know that Lamplighter was a project or an experiment of some kind. It was conducted at Onyx Gander. And I’m pretty sure that, whatever it was, it dates back at least twenty-five years. But you’re saying that whatever the project was necessitated involvement from both the science a
nd legal teams at the same time?”

  Natasha took a moment to consider the statement. “I’m not certain of the timeframe, but yeah. They were both working on it. My mother was involved with the project shortly before she died. She was working from home a lot at that point, like I said before. I was a baby, and she’d just become pregnant with Anna, that’s why I found it odd. Whatever the project was, I got the impression it was a big deal for the company. They were pretty upset that my father was spending more and more of his time at home. I think they were pressuring him and my mother to come back to work.”

  “Wait a second,” Cyrus said. He stopped Natasha before she could continue. “Your mother said all of this in the journal? She actually described the company as pressuring them? Did she use that word?”

  “More or less,” she admitted. “I don’t have perfect recall like you.”

  Natasha slid from the end of the bed and disappeared through the door to the walk-in closet. She was gone for nearly a minute. When she returned she held a thick, battered, worn leather-bound book that was tied shut with two lengths of cotton cord.

  Releasing the knot holding the book closed, Natasha quickly leafed through the pages. She scanned them with practiced ease, clearly well-versed in their contents. Finding the correct passage, she handed the book to Cyrus.

  Accepting the journal, Cyrus felt more than a little reluctant—like he was treading on the family’s private space. It was an odd sense because he’d done much worse, many times in the course of his work, and had never once felt conflicted about it. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  Natasha shrugged. “You might be onto something. If showing you this helps us figure out who keeps coming after us, I’m all for it. Plus,” she said with an edge to her voice. “I like to think I can count on your discretion.”

  Cyrus grinned. If you only knew…