Elite 2: The Wrong Side of Revolution (21 page)

“He’ll be in in a few minutes,” Eva told him, a heinous grin on her face. She then turned and started for the door.

“Wait,” Daniel pleaded. “Eva!”

The slender female agent stopped in her tracks. She turned slowly and gave a warning glance to Daniel. “Agent Stone,” she stated. She appeared to also be attempting to send some sort of urgent telepathic message to Daniel.

“Agent Stone…” Daniel repeated, growing ever more curious of the agent.

When she was satisfied all was settled, she whipped her dark hair around and exited the small interrogation room, slamming the door behind her.

Daniel smiled. There was something about Agent Eva Stone that he liked very much. She was quirky—the name change thing had proven that. She reminded him a bit of a female version of Charlie. It must have been an FBI thing. He couldn’t help but want to know more about her—why she was the way she was.

It also didn’t hurt that she was incredibly beautiful.

“I think I’ve got a thing for her,” Daniel said aloud to the two men guarding him, never removing his gaze from the door.

“Stone?” one of the guards asked cynically. “Pssh, no way man. That’ll never happen, trust me.”

Daniel turned his attention to the guard to his right, pleasantly surprised by his willingness to turn Daniel’s inappropriate comment into a conversation.

The guard was a bulky white guy with moppy brown hair that began to curl when it reached ear length. Everything about his head was very wide, from his chin to his nose. He looked to Daniel like a lineman on a college football team.

“And why is that?” Daniel asked the guard in an overly curious tone.

“Agent Stone doesn’t go for the brawny…manly…field agent type,” he replied with a shrug, as though he had recently browsed through her online dating profile.

Daniel raised an eyebrow at the man. “I’m not an agent.”

“Yeah,” the other guard responded with a laugh, “Not yet anyway.”

Daniel turned his head obnoxiously toward the other guard. He was leaner than the first, but close to the same height. Where the other guard’s face was square shaped, this guard’s was more rectangular, and rather than a moppy hairdo he was sporting a buzzcut. Daniel also noticed small traces of stubble on his cheeks.

He must be the quarterback,
Daniel thought to himself.

“What does that mean?” Daniel questioned. “What do you know?”

The guard opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off by a “Tsst tsst,” from his partner.

“We shouldn’t be telling him stuff,” the wider framed guard said through his teeth.

The thinner guard nodded sheepishly and regathered himself. “You know,” he said, raising his hand palm-up toward Daniel, “you just look like you could be is all.”

Daniel smirked, not sure whether he should take the comment as a compliment.

“I don’t think I quite have the wherewithal to be an FBI agent,” he confessed. “But thanks.”

The bulky guard let out an audible breath that suggested he disagreed.

“What?” Daniel inquired.

The guard rolled his eyes and turned to Daniel. “It’s not like it’s complicated. You just run around solving crimes and shooting people. Nothing so special about that.”

Daniel leaned back in his uncomfortable metal chair as if insulted by the guard’s evaluation of what it was to be an FBI field agent.

“I think there’s probably a little bit more to it than running around solving crimes and shooting people,” he refuted.

“No…that about covers it,” the thinner guard said in complete seriousness, turning his head and nodding toward his partner in agreement.

Daniel laughed quietly and dropped his head. He hadn’t a clue why these two knuckleheads had been assigned to guard him or even how they had made it this far in their particular field, but he was glad. These guys were entertaining.

“Well in that case…” he conceded.

Daniel used the lull in the conversation to familiarize himself with his surroundings. Looking around the small, square room, there wasn’t very much to it. The floor was some sort of white tile, the ceilings were a generic white drop ceiling, and the walls were covered in some kind of grey paneling. The only objects in the room were the table and two metal chairs, one on each side of the table. Unlike Daniel’s, the other was not bolted to the floor.

The fluorescent lighting reflected off of the white floor, causing the room to feel much brighter than Daniel would have expected out of an interrogation room. There was also something else that seemed to be missing.

Daniel turned his head to ask the thinner guard a question. “Shouldn’t there be a two-way mirror in here or something?”

“No, we don’t actually do that here,” he replied. “We have cameras instead.” The guard lifted his right index finger and pointed to a security camera in the front left corner of the room.

“Huh,” Daniel responded.

“Yeah I know, kinda weird,” the guard added.

Daniel nodded out of politeness and began scanning the room again simply because he had nothing better to do. There was now a somewhat awkward silence filling the room, and Daniel was becoming more anxious to meet with the director.

“You ever wondered why the call them
two way
mirrors?” The stockier guard asked to no one in particular.

“What’s that?” Daniel responded, turning his attention to the guard.

“Why
two way
?” he repeated. “As far as being a mirror, it only goes
one
way. And as a window it only goes
one
way. Why call it a
two way
anything?”

“Yeah, that’s a good point,” the other guard responded, staring at the floor as if he had just made some groundbreaking discovery.

Daniel responded by simply scrunching up his mouth and brow as if thinking deeply about why that might be. He had to admit, it was a good point.

The question was not met with an answer, but rather a few more moments of awkward silence. Then, randomly, Daniel remembered an earlier part of their conversation.

“So wait a minute then,” he began his thought, pausing a brief moment so that the guards could finish their own thoughts and join in his, “are you guys not FBI then?”

“Well…” the bulky guard started.

“No,” the thinner guard cut in, turning to his partner for approval.

“Well, yes,” the bigger guard countered, returning the thinner guard’s glance. He then continued his explanation. “You see, we’re not really…”

The guard was suddenly cut off by the door to the room flying open. Both guards immediately jumped to attention.

Into the room walked Agent Eva Stone, and she was led by a tall, lengthy African-American man with a pointy and very shiny bald head. He was wearing the traditional black suit with a white shirt and thin black tie that most people associated with the FBI.

The man held the door open while Agent Stone walked through, bringing her own chair along with her. Once she was inside the man dismissed the two guards.

“I never even knew their names,” Daniel commented as the man gently closed the door behind them.

Eva set her chair in its place on the side of the table to Daniel’s left. The thin man in the suit then walked over and dropped a file folder onto the table.

“Mr. Hart,” he said, preparing to introduce himself as he removed his jacket and hung it up on the back of the last remaining chair.

“Well I prefer
Doctor
Hart, but seeing as I don’t have a Ph.D. or a medical license I suppose mister will have to do,” Daniel replied, unsure of his sudden need for sarcasm.

The man sat down across from Daniel, folding his hands in front of him and staring intently at the man he held in custody. His nose and mouth were narrow, and the whites of his eyes stood out against his dark skin.

“Sorry,” Daniel said in shame. “I make jokes when I get nervous.”

The agent chose to disregard everything Daniel had said to that moment and instead carried on with his own agenda. “My name is Deputy Director Tom Harvell.” He reached down and opened the file in front of him. “Agent Stone tells me we have a lot to talk about.”

Daniel nodded his head in affirmation. “I suppose you already know that Gordon Demérs shares my abilities.”

“Indeed,” Director Harvell confirmed.

“Then maybe you can explain to me why it is that he needed Horchoff’s experiment to work on me when he already had everything he wanted,” Daniel said in a disgruntled tone.

“Because,” Harvell began, “Gordon Demérs was born with his abilities. His father—Doctor Joseph Horchoff—spent his entire childhood trying to determine what it was that had caused his son to be born with such extraordinary abilities, but he was never able to isolate the gene that led to the production of his extra neural pathways.

“Once Gordon grew older and the Birthright discovered the young man’s abilities, they saw him as a sort of savior—their chosen one, so to speak. They saw an opportunity to grow in physical power—enough to put into action a revolution which they had spent generations planning. They demanded that Horchoff find a way to create more like his son, and after spending years trying to unlock the genetic secrets within his own son, he deduced that it would be far easier for him to develop a way to install the physical components that made his son unique into an already developed mind.
You
are the product of that work.”

Daniel sat in silence, staring at the handcuff around his right wrist. After his recent encounter with Demérs and Horchoff, Harvell’s story made sense.

“So how did Gordon end up with a different last name? And how did they manage to fool Richfield? And how did Gordon Demérs end up the leader of the…you called it the
Birthright?”

“I think…” Harvell paused for a breath as he stood up from his chair, “…we should start at the beginning. How much do you know about who you’re fighting?”

Daniel stared blankly at the closed door in front of him as he pondered for a moment. “I guess I never really considered myself as
fighting
anyone. I was trying to stop Gordon Demérs, who I understand works for a group of extremely rich people who believe they are entitled to rule the country.”

Harvell bobbed his head up and down as he paced around the opposite side of the table from Daniel. The story clearly went a lot deeper than that.

“The group of rich people you are referring to calls themselves ‘The Birthright of the Elite,’” Harvell explained.

Daniel perked up at the sound of the last word in that sentence, which rang in his ears like a gong.

“We’ll get to that later,” Harvell told Daniel, noticing his reaction.

Eva Stoned sat silently, her eyes occasionally moving from a fixed spot on the table up to Daniel, and then back down to the table again.

Harvell continued his narrative. “The Birthright was formed just after the colonists defeated the British in the American Revolution. Believe it or not, not everyone who lived in the colonies wished to be independent from the British Empire, and that was especially true for a group of British nobles who had moved to the colonies seeking a position of power. In Britain they had been just minor nobles—though still given preferential treatment over any commoners—but in the colonies they were considered the elite. There was no class higher than their own.

“Throughout the period leading up to the revolution and the revolution itself, these nobles had chosen to lay low. They expected, like many, that the colonies had no chance of winning their independence, and decided rather than openly oppose their subjects, they would help the British military discretely, and then reclaim their positions of power when the dust had settled, all the while lending a false sympathetic shoulder to those colonists who had gone up against the greatest military power in the world and paid dearly for it.”

Harvell took a moment to lubricate his throat, and Daniel leaned forward on his forearms. He found early American history fascinating, especially when it involved secrets that had never been revealed to the public.

Harvell continued, “As we know history took a different course, and the American colonists defeated the British, claiming their independence from a monarchist government. Naturally the British nobles still in the colonies did not appreciate this, and began plotting their revenge. They still believed the Americans would fail—that their new elected government would collapse beneath them and when it did they would be ready to pounce.

“And they were almost right. They early government under the Articles of Confederation did fail, but our founding fathers were more resilient than the British nobles could ever have imagined. After the establishment of our current constitution the nobles began to realize that if things were to reverse back to the way they were, they would need to take matters into their own hands, and so the official organization of the Birthright of the Elite was formed in secret.

“But as we’ve learned already, the Birthright continually underestimated the early Americans, and the congress soon learned of the Birthright’s intention to overthrow our freedoms. They therefore created a secret task force to thwart their every attempt to reclaim power.”