Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📕
They had to have heard about my dad's death, but I hoped the word hadn't gotten about regarding my ill-gotten gains. It shouldn't have; I didn't tell anybody. Still, if everybody knows, I'd need to hire a bodyguard just to hold off the ironic requests for loans. I tried to imagine how much bodyguards cost; I remembered reading somewhere that a legitimate executive security firm charges about a thousand dollars per day. I could get a bodyguard for 500 days, and then I wouldn't need one anymore. Spending all your money to keep people from getting your money -- that should have been a Twilight Zone episode. Hell, it probably was. By the hundredth episode they had to have been rep
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- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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“How was Vienna?” Bremer asked with a grin once I’d sat down.
I opened my mouth slightly and darted my eyes in my mom’s direction.
“She knows,” Bremer said.
Rubino, having just finished his phone conversation, said, “We told her everything.”
I looked over at my mom, noticed the redness in her eyes and the tears drying on her face. I looked back at Bremer. Rubino sat next to him.
“And what does ‘everything’ include? Because I’m not exactly crystal clear on everything myself,” I said.
Rubino glanced at Amy, then back at me. “Looks like you’ve answered that question at least,” he said.
Bah, more question talk. “Which question?” I asked, very near losing my patience. I wondered how easy it would be to flip this table over.
“How to tell if a girl likes you. I thought you were joking at the time.”
I glanced at Amy, grinning and shaking her head, her face leaning into her hand propped up on the table.
“I was joking,” I said, “but I really need you to tell me what’s going on here. I’ve had a very tedious week and haven’t gotten much in the way of answers.”
“She’ll have to step out,” Rubino said, indicating Amy.
“What? She already knows everything here,” I said.
“It’s adorable that you think that,” he said, “but she’ll still have to be outside the room for this.”
Amy looked over at me, I shrugged at her. She shrugged back, then got up and exited the room. My mom watched both sides of the exchange.
“You said you were in Quantico this morning,” Bremer started, “We assume you were there to get Schumer to tell you. About the program, I mean.”
“You know about the… program?” I asked.
“Well, yes. We always have.”
I thought I felt my jaw twitch. “You knew, this whole time, and you didn’t tell me? God, if you’d have told me about this last week I wouldn’t have had to go through all of this!”
“We weren’t sure that you didn’t already know yourself,” Bremer said. “We couldn’t tell you about it if you didn’t know, and we couldn’t ask you if you knew without telling you. So, we just asked if you had any questions. We figured, if you knew or didn’t, the fact that somebody tried to kill you last Saturday, or that you managed to kill him amazingly, might make you just a little bit curious.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t tell me if I didn’t know? That would be the main reason to tell me, so I wouldn’t have to go trekking across the globe and scare the hell out of my pretend principal to find out.”
Rubino spoke up. “It’s not exactly something you can just go up to somebody unsolicited and tell them.”
Then Bremer said, “And it was important for us to know how you found out. If you’d already known, that meant that your father told you before he died. If not, we needed you to track down the information from its source.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Bremer said slowly, “we needed to use you as a source to get the information for yourself so we can get the rest of the story.”
“Still not making any sense,” I said.
“We don’t know exactly what Schumer did and we don’t have enough evidence to take him down for it. We were planning on approaching you just before your birthday and tell you, hopefully get you to wear a wire for when he or one of his stooges tells you that he just has to say a few words and you’ll wake up as a fully trained soldier or whatever lie he was going to tell. We wanted you to be able to find out naturally, so we could track the information organically until we had enough evidence.”
I sat silently, contemplating. I still hadn’t had any caffeine today so my brain was slow to process all of the new information.
“Were you two the ones on my dad’s case before he died? Is that how you knew him?”
Schumer said that the FBI was who found out that my dad tried to sell secrets, and that it was an FBI sting operation that lead to his death.
“Yes, we were dealing with him. We hoped he would get us enough information about the program to be of any use to us, but he died before we had enough.”
“Wait, what are you talking about? ‘Be of any use to you’? I thought it was enough that you had my dad trying to sneak out the information. Why would you care about the program itself?”
Bremer furrowed his brow. “I don’t follow,” he said.
“And neither do I,” I replied.
“All right, look,” Rubino cut in, holding his palms up, “the relevant information here is that we need to know about Schumer’s little project and you’re in the best position to help us.”
“And with no motivation for me to do so–”
“Your motivation is that we and the entire Bureau are the only people holding the police back from locking you in a cell. We had to tell them that you’re an asset to us last week when they had you for a dead cop and John Doe in Lorton, and today we had to tell them a similar lie when they wanted to know why neighbors heard shooting at your house and then watched out their windows as the place exploded.”
“Exploded?”
“Since all of this may be our fault for not approaching this correctly and putting you in harm’s way, we’re keeping the heat off of you. When the Austrian government or Interpol or Europol call to ask us about whatever havoc you probably caused there, we’ll be holding them back too. All of this is still on the condition that you remain an asset, and continue to provide us with information about the program or whatever else we ask for.” He shut up and folded his arms.
“I guess that means I play ball,” I said through my clenched teeth.
Bremer and Rubino stood up in unison. “Good,” Rubino said.
“We’ll leave you to deal with each other, and we’ll take care of the police report on the fire so your insurance will cover it. One of us will call you in a few days when we need you.”
The two walked to the door, which Rubino opened and walked through. Bremer followed, and then stuck his head back in the room.
“Oh, I thought you should know,” he started, “that Doe you left in Lorton. We tracked down his identity. Name’s Carl Dingan, he had a file at the Bureau as a hitter and I guess we’ve been looking for him for a while now. So, nice work on that one.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said with a feigned smile as Bremer disappeared out the door.
“So,” I said, cutting through a thick silence in the police station conference room where I sat with my mother; the first time I’d been able to sit quietly and think for about 12 hours, “I was a test tube baby?”
My mom looked up from the table.
“I guess you could say that,” she said.
“Any reason you never told me?”
“When you were younger it would have been too hard to explain,” she said, “and after a while it just seemed like it’d been too long to bring it up out of the blue. It’s not an unusual thing. It’s not as though you were adopted or grown in a jar. You grew inside me, and I gave birth to you.”
“And Dad never said anything about it? About genetic… whatevers?”
She was silent for a while, and then said, “No.”
“Nothing?”
“No. We had talked about having an in-vitro. I’d seen my doctor and he said I was a candidate, but the procedure was too expensive. Your dad said that he could have them done through his coverage at work, so we did that.”
“Nothing about training regimens or hypnosis?”
“No, nothing like that ever came up. He did always seem protective of you, trying to keep you away from danger. I just thought that he was trying to protect his only child.”
It was still too weird to think about. I couldn’t be sure how much of what Schumer said was the truth, after all, and parts of it still didn’t make sense. If I were being hypnotized every day at school, it seems like I would be able to tell that the time was… missing. He said I always had one class that wasn’t real, but if that were the case how can I remember all my classes? How can I remember everybody in all my classes? They couldn’t have me make up fake students during hypnosis, that would take just as much time as whatever they were teaching me. They couldn’t have made me have false memories of real classmates, because I might have one day said I’d see him in whatever class and he’d ask what I’d meant.
There had to be more to this, I decided. The information I had now just didn’t add up. If the only thing about me was that I was part of some training experiment and had boot camp squirted directly into my brain, it didn’t explain the growing number of people who seem to want me dead.
Even though it was less realistic, I could almost believe the clone theory. If there were a fleet of me’s running around, it would explain how someone who looks like me was apparently in Vienna two years ago killing a guy. There can’t be clones, though, it’s just silly.
Though, they could have designed me from scratch and whenever someone comes in for an in-vitro, they end up with a me. That could be how they’d do it.
Still, though, no clones.
If there were clones, though, it would be cool to meet one. I bet clones of me would all be jerks, though.
Amy came back with three cups of coffee from a machine. She set them down on the table, and the three of us each took one.
“You really went to Austria?” my mom asked me a bit later.
“I did, yeah, last week,” I said.
“How was it?”
“It was nice, I think. I was in a kind of mood the whole time, not really paying attention to the culture.”
“I went to Europe when I was in college. Never went to Austria, though. We spent most of the time in Italy.”
Amy cut in, “Did you guys go over the part about your house burning down while I was outside?”
“Oh, shoot,” I said, “I was going to ask Bremer or Rubino if they had any idea who those guys were.”
“What guys?” my mom asked.
“The guys who broke in and burned the place down.”
My mom didn’t seem to be handling this well.
“Have you called the insurance company yet? We have fire insurance, don’t we?” I asked.
“Fire. Yeah, it should be in with the homeowner’s policy. I haven’t called yet, I was told to wait until the police report was taken care of because they wouldn’t cover it if it looked like you burned it down on purpose.”
“I didn’t burn it down at all,” I said.
She nodded, slowly.
I was getting restless and anxious, but I knew things would be like this for a while. I had no leads, no trails to follow to Europe or havoc to create. I began to worry that this was it, that this was the
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