A Stand-In for Dying Read online

  “And that was no ordinary man,” he concluded. “Strong and resilient like me. Another immortal? Perhaps.” The only thing of which Ray could be sure was that the assassin, whoever he was, would be back.

  When Ray turned the corner onto his street, the front of the house was illuminated with flashing lights. Through the wrought iron fence he could see Corinne pacing in the yard, while uniformed personnel swarmed around the premises. When she saw him come through the gate, she came running toward him and threw her arms around him. He returned her embrace.

  “Thank God you’re home,” she said breathlessly. “I was so worried. You weren’t answering any of my calls.”

  “What’s going on?” In the midst of his altercation in the park, Ray had been aware of a signal in the periphery of his consciousness, but his linkage to Marcus’s MELD chip was too new to identify the source. By the time the fight was over, the signal had stopped and he never retrieved Corinne’s messages.

  “Someone has been watching us,” she said. “I noticed a car circling the block a few times. Then it parked across the street. I didn’t think much about it until a man got out just after dusk and was looking through the fence. He was holding something and pointing it through the posts.”

  “A gun?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a gun. Maybe a camera. But when I saw the red dot on the window, I called for help.” Corinne was sobbing. “You’ve never ignored my calls. When you didn’t answer, all I could think of was that you were dead.”

  Ray considered telling her about the attack, but thought better of it. He held her closer until her breathing slowed to a regular pace. From his first encounter with Corinne, he’d been impressed with her composure. She was not a woman he expected would be easily rattled.

  “When you took the position with the Ministry, I wish you’d accepted their offer of protection. I hope you’ll reconsider,” she paused, looking into his eyes, “for Natasha’s sake.”

  Ray understood why Marcus might have rejected a Secret Service detail. He had secrets to protect, secrets perhaps more dangerous than any enemy. Too many eyes and those secrets could be blown, with perhaps fatal consequences for his family. And now Ray had inherited Marcus’s secrets along with his life. And the secrets he brought with him to this life were even more perilous than Marcus could have imagined.

  33

  RAY MATTLER’S AGING body, as challenging as it was to Marcus Takana, was the least of the problems that came with living his life. The scourge of HibernaTurf had left an indelible scar on the population and indelible memories of the damage done to individual lives. Marcus still despised him for the havoc it wreaked on his family’s farm and on his parents. He’d yearned for vengeance for his father’s death.

  Ray had led a reclusive life, occasionally venturing outside his home at Lena’s beseeching and usually only in her company. People had tended to be respectful of her presence and seldom became aggressive toward Ray when she was around.

  Marcus couldn’t tolerate such confinement. His excursions to the fitness center were discreet and his workouts private within the virtual reality booths. He avoided the exposure of the locker room. But Ray and Lena’s condo made him stir crazy. When he looked out over the city from the huge glass window, he longed to be walking its streets, climbing its hills, and enjoying the aromas of its ethnic cuisine.

  When he finally couldn’t stand it any longer, he discovered the intensity of the hatred that had rained down upon Ray in the aftermath of HibernaTurf. Walking down the street for the first time, he was bumped so roughly by a passing stranger that he nearly lost his balance. A few minutes later, he felt a splash of something wet on his cheek and when he turned around was greeted with an obscene gesture. Several people stopped him forcefully, regaling him with their stories of how he’d ruined their lives. And when he emerged from his building on another day, a soft impact between his eyes, accompanied by a crunching sound was followed by slimy egg dripping down his nose and face. There was no anonymity for a villain as well-known as Raymond Mettler. No peace was to be found in these outings.

  Marcus hoped that as he changed the shape of his body, he would become less recognizable. He grew a full beard and tried dressing like a vagrant, but his disguises were easily defeated by the augmented reality through which most people perceived their world. The beard irritated his face and the grubby clothes felt like sandpaper on his body. When he finally shaved the beard and his head, the slickness of his face and scalp were soothing, making him feel more like himself. But with all the drastic changes, Lena became alarmed.

  “What’s gotten into you, Ray?” she asked. “You’re behaving like a stranger. At first, I thought the weight loss was healthy, but it’s become an obsession. And I figured the beard was a passing fancy. But now I’m getting worried.”

  “I’m tired of being a pariah, Lena,” said Marcus. “No matter where I go, people treat me with contempt. I thought if I changed the way I looked, I could move around in the world without being harassed. But it’s futile. Nothing I do can shake it.”

  “Maybe people are attacking you because you feel deep down that you deserve it. You keep taking and taking it and don’t push back. So they keep dishing it out.”

  “And why wouldn’t I deserve it?” asked Marcus. He’d wanted as much as anyone to see Ray punished. It had never occurred to him that there might be another way to look at it.

  “Because you’re a good man, Ray,” said Lena. “That’s why I’ve stayed with you through all this. We both know that your intentions were honorable. You were trying to combat a drought that was threatening to starve the world. And it was moving so fast that there was no time to think through every detail. I watched you work without sleep for days on end to finish the project in time to head off famine.”

  Marcus took in Lena’s words. He’d been so enraged at Ray for the outcome of his work that he’d never considered that his intentions might have been noble or that he’d worked tirelessly toward the intended goal.

  “What if Ray had never created HibernaTurf?” thought Marcus. “Would the drought have rendered the world barren and lifeless?” In that moment, the intensity of his rage subsided. Now that he was walking in Ray’s shoes, he found compassion for the man he’d longed to punish, a man whose day to day existence had been punishment enough.

  “Tell me, Lena,” Marcus said. “Was there ever a time you thought I should give up the quest?”

  “It crossed my mind,” said Lena, “but you wouldn’t have listened. You were laser focused on the problem and determined to solve it even if it killed you. And if you had given up…” She paused to consider the consequence. “Then Takana Grass might never have been created and the world might have been doomed.”

  “So it took both of us to fix it,” Marcus thought aloud. “Without HibernaTurf there would have been no Takana Grass. And without Takana Grass, the change in climate might have rolled past the tipping point to end civilization.”

  “So you solved it together,” said Lena. “You and Marcus Takana. It was just an accident that you took all the blame and he got the credit. In different circumstances, it might have come out the other way around.”

  “Little does she know that it did,” thought Marcus, appreciating the irony of Lena’s words. “He gets to be the hero now while I take the fall.”

  Marcus wished he’d had the power to rehabilitate the reputation of the man whose identity he now inhabited. HibernaTurf had been a colossal accident, the unintended consequence of a worthy endeavor.

  But Ray’s blamelessness was not so clear. His response to the accident, stripping his company of its assets and avoiding the consequences of his creation’s effects settled his role as villain. He’d profited from something that had caused innumerable others harm. And the public had no idea that he’d used his ill-gotten gains to rob Marcus Takana of his identity and his life.

  34

  WHEN RAY AWOKE the next morning, Corinne and Natasha were sitting in the kitchen over b
reakfast. Corinne was talking and smiling at Natasha, who was nodding and smiling back. Ray felt the corners of his mouth spreading up and out along with an unexpected wave of warmth washing over his body. Corinne turned her face to him and returned his smile. As odd as these feelings felt to Ray, Corinne seemed to find his reaction a matter of course.

  “Good morning, Marcus,” said Corinne. “I was just explaining to Natasha about the people who will be watching over us for the next few weeks. The morning detail is outside the gate. She wanted to offer them breakfast.” Corinne giggled at her daughter’s sweet innocence.

  Ray joined with her laughter, then felt another rush of warmth. He looked at Natasha, who grinned at him. As extraordinary as the prior night’s events and his discovery of the unusual powers of his body had been, he was even more unsettled by the unfamiliar feelings of pleasure that this sweet child’s face aroused. Not his child, but yet an odd sense of connection, of belonging.

  “Good morning, Corinne,” said Ray, grinning. “The two of you are quite a picture. I wish I could join you for breakfast, but there’s lots going on at the Ministry and I need to get going.”

  Corinne stood and gave him a light peck on his lips. He put his arm around her waist. She raised her face again to his for a more lingering kiss, then brought her lips close to his ear.

  “See you tonight,” she whispered, her breath arousing his anticipation with three simple words.

  He looked again at Natasha.

  “See you tonight, Nat,” he said.

  “See you, Daddy,” she replied. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Her words echoed in his head as he walked out the door.

  “Daddy,” he thought. The word fell gently upon him and at the same time pierced his heart more painfully than the assailant’s knife had pierced his hand the night before.

  At the Ministry, his research team was already hard at work on the project. The next challenge would be to teleport a living object. When Ray arrived in the lab, a small patch of green sat in the middle of the sending port. They had selected the object in his honor: a tuft of Takana Grass.

  One of the technicians set the process in motion as he watched. The air above the grass shimmered and the object dissolved before his eyes. When they walked down the hall to the receiving port, the object had materialized on the platform. It was no longer green and healthy, but wilted and brown.

  Ray was relieved that the experiment had failed. The value of the technology to a clandestine organization depended upon its ability to transport living things without killing them in the process. He would have a reprieve of indefinite duration before his handlers would call in his debt. And there was small satisfaction in watching a sample of his rival’s creation die.

  A knock on his door after lunch brought an unexpected visitor. When the door opened, he recognized the Vice President of the United Commonwealth of North America. Juliet Hauer had recently announced her candidacy for President and was considered a frontrunner. Everyone was wondering who her running mate would be.

  “Please come in, Madame Vice President,” said Ray, standing and extending his hand.

  “Juliet, Marcus,” she replied. “There’s no need to be so formal. We’ve known each other a while, now.”

  “Sorry,” said Ray. “Old habits die hard. What brings you here?”

  “As you know, I’ve always trusted your judgment...and your discretion. Something very disturbing has come to my attention. As Minister of Discovery, I thought it would be important to read you in. This is a matter of utmost secrecy. So far, only the President, the head of the NSA, and I know about it. You would be the fourth.”

  “Of course you can trust me,” said Ray. But he wondered if that were true. He’d always been fiercely loyal to his country, but now he had secrets to protect and had no idea how Terra and her organization would use that to compromise him.

  “There was once an elite intelligence agency so top secret that it was known only to the President and the National Security Advisor. Even they didn’t know the identities of the operatives or of the Director. It was tasked with neutralizing despots and effecting regime change in the nations that were threatening our security at the time.”

  “What does this have to do with the Ministry or with me?”

  “They weren’t only crack operatives, but also brilliant scientists. They pledged to develop innovative approaches to accomplishing their mission. Decades ago, a dictator rose to power in a small Asian nation that was developing nuclear weapons. Regime change was a complicated ask. Successors stood in line who were all as ruthless as he was. Rather than remove him by force, a plan was developed to kidnap him.”

  “How would that help?” asked Ray.

  “So they could replace him with an imposter.”

  “With a double?”

  “Not exactly a double. I told you they were brilliant and creative. They’d devised a way to exchange consciousness between bodies. They planned to implant someone else’s identity in the dictator’s body so they could take apart the regime from within.”

  Ray felt a knot forming in his gut. This was sounding all too familiar and he had an idea where the conversation was heading.

  “So what happened?” asked Ray. “Did the plan work?”

  “It did...at first,” said Juliet. “If you remember the history of the early 20’s, a brutal dictator had a change of heart and agreed to a treaty. He began destroying his weapons and called for elections. But before completing the job, he suddenly took back power and nearly started a nuclear war.”

  “I do remember that. It was a terrible double cross. He should never have been trusted.” Ray tried to put the pieces together. “So does that mean that the exchange didn’t work? That he was just faking the change of heart?”

  “No, Marcus. The exchange worked exactly as it was supposed to. The dictator’s consciousness inhabited our operative’s body and he was eventually executed.”

  “Then what went wrong?”

  “We underestimated our operative’s thirst for power. Once he had all the trappings of a head of state, the temptation to consolidate his power became irresistible. He lost sight of his mission and his loyalties and became our enemy. He turned out worse than the man he’d replaced.”

  “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” mused Ray aloud. “So what does all this have to do with the present?”

  “Have you ever heard of Ganymede?” she asked.

  “No, what’s Ganymede?”

  “After the mission failed to accomplish its objective, the clandestine agency went rogue and went underground, rebranding themselves as Ganymede. Having developed the power to replace one person’s identity with another’s, they sought to use this tool for their own purposes. We believe that they’ve been experimenting with civilians in order to refine their technique.”

  Ray’s heart sank. He was squarely in the middle of this struggle with no way out. He was the experiment. And he was firmly in Ganymede’s grip.

  “To what end?” he asked.

  “To seize the reins of power, not in a foreign country, but in our own. We think they’re seeking to replace someone high up in our government. And we need the Ministry to find a way to neutralize their technology.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to find them?”

  “God knows we’ve tried. But they’re ghosts. We don’t know who they are or what they look like. They could be walking among us for all we know. And the Director is the most elusive of all. It’s rumored that even his own operatives have never seen his face.”

  They were indeed ghosts. All except for Terra. Ray and Marcus were the only people on earth who could identify one of Ganymede’s agents. And there was nobody either of them could tell.

  35

  MARCUS WASN’T READY to forgive Ray for stealing his life, but it remained in his interest to restore his reputation so that he could move more freely in the world without fearing abuse from strangers. One possible way of doing this was to ret
urn Ray’s ill-gotten gains. But return them to whom?

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said to Lena over coffee one morning. “Perhaps it’s time to give the money back, the profits from HibernaTurf.”

  “Back?” said Lena. “To whom? Who do you think has a right to it?”

  “I haven’t thought it all the way through, Lena. A lot of people were hurt. But some of the people who suffered most were the ones who sued the company and were left high and dry when I dissolved it. If I’m going to make reparations, it should start with them.”

  “It sounds like a noble idea, Ray, but may be more complicated than it looks.” She picked up her cup and paced a bit. “You never really told me. How much did the company make?”