Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (23 page)

37

Cerberus Headquarters

Almost being devoured by toxic carnivorous plants was not, it turned out, the lowest point of an already very bad day. After sparing her life, Tyndareus had sent two of his goons—both wearing hazmat suits—in through a concealed door to retrieve her. Fiona wondered if one of them had been in the exosuit.

If she had known what would follow, she would have opted to stay in her cell. The men took her to a tiled room where they stripped her, sprayed her with a fire hose, and scrubbed her with stiff-bristled brushes.

Following that violation, she was allowed to dress in a pair of hospital scrubs. The two men dragged her into another examination room and strapped her to a table in five-point restraints. She was then checked over, head-to-toe, by a sneering, wretched woman. As she was poked and prodded, her blood drawn, Fiona retreated into her mind, blocking out the ongoing physical assault.

She felt Nurse Wretched fumbling with her insulin pump and tried to cover it with her hands. The leather restraints stopped her, but the reflex earned her an immediate rebuke from the nurse.

“Stop. Moving. I am refilling the reservoir. You want your insulin, don’t you?” The woman had a harsh eastern European accent, similar to Rohn’s.

What I want
, Fiona thought,
is to smash your face with a baseball bat. It would improve your looks
. But she relented, allowing the woman to finish the procedure.

The insulin recharge was welcome, though it did little to improve her physical condition. She needed to eat—real food, not college dorm crap—and she needed sleep. Most of all, she needed to be somewhere else, any place, as long as it was far away from the Nazi mad scientist who now called himself Tyndareus.

“There you go,” the nurse said, as if expecting Fiona to be grateful.

“How can you work for that monster?”

The woman harrumphed then moved away without another word. Fiona expected to be released from the restraints and ushered to yet another prison cell, but instead she found herself alone once more.

The solitude, while not entirely welcome, was all too brief. A door opened and Tyndareus rolled into the room, sitting in his motorized wheelchair. Fiona rolled her head to the side and glowered at him. “I thought you guys—Nazis, I mean—hated cripples.”

Tyndareus appeared unruffled by the barb. “Tell me more about what you saw on the map, child.”

Fiona let her head drop. She had bought her life—a few more minutes of it, at least—with a promise to cooperate. While she had no intention of helping her captor, she knew that she would have to give him something, or else the opportunity to turn the tables on him might never come. The biggest problem was that it was all a bluff. She did not really know that Kenner was on a wild goose chase in the Amazon, because she did not actually know for certain what he was looking for. Tyndareus was too canny not to know that she would attempt to play him, but if he suspected that she was unable to deliver, that would be the end for her.

“I need to see it again.”

“Dr. Kenner has the original, but I can provide you with photographs.”

“He’s in South America, right? And my Aunt Gus…Dr. Gallo, is with him?”

The old man pursed his lips. “You said that he was wrong about South America. Explain.”

“First, you tell me what it is you’re really after.”

“That is not your concern.”

Fiona shrugged. “If you don’t want to share, I can’t help you.” She rolled her head forward and closed her eyes, as if trying to grab a catnap. Her heart immediately began pounding so loud that she was sure he would be able to hear it. If she was wrong about this…

“Release her,” Tyndareus said, but not to Fiona.

She had to struggle to hide her relief as the two goons came into the room and unbuckled the straps that held her down. When she was free, they stepped aside, saying nothing.

“Come with me,” the old man said, fingering the joystick controls for his wheelchair.

The chair swung around and rolled from the room so fast that Fiona would have had to jog to keep up. She decided not to try, and instead adopted a leisurely pace that forced Tyndareus to wait for her. His men followed, matching her pace rather than his, ready to intervene if she attempted anything, but clearly giving their boss plenty of space in which to do his own thing.

He led her from the room and down a hallway identical to the others she had passed through. They all looked the same to her, and it was not until he ushered her into his private gallery of horrors that she knew where she was. She tried not to react to the macabre displays, and Tyndareus did not seem interested in showing any of them to her. Instead, he brought her to the trophy case.

“You are a remarkable young woman,” he said. He did not turn to face her, but after a moment, she realized he was staring at her reflection in the glass. She gave an involuntary shudder when she realized he was smiling.

Great. Ten minutes ago, he was trying to kill me. Now, he’s hitting on me.

“I was hasty in dismissing you because of your mixed bloodline. Old habits, you know. The Amerindians are descended from Asian stock, as were the original Aryans, so it’s little wonder that you manifest such extraordinary intelligence.”

He might have meant it as a compliment, but Fiona had no answer for him. After an uncomfortable moment, he extended a hand, pointing to something in the display case. Arranged on a swatch of red velvet, like precious gemstones, were several small ivory-colored objects that Fiona recognized immediately as bones. The way they were assembled left little doubt that they were a human hand and a foot.

“This is my brother,” Tyndareus said. Despite his wheezing delivery, there was a note of reverence in his tone, as if he was sharing a sacred mystery with her.

Fiona did not recall if Josef Mengele had any siblings, but she sensed something more than just familial affection. The old man confirmed this with his next statement.

“My twin,” he continued. “You were wondering, I’m sure, how I was able to fool the world into believing that I was dead.” He gestured to the bones again. “Castor died and was buried in my place.”

“You had a twin brother?” Given his infamous obsession with twins, Fiona felt certain that, if Mengele really did have a twin, she would have heard something about it. But it was the name that got her attention. She had been wrong about his motives for choosing the name Tyndareus, the father of twins. In Greek myths, Castor and Pollux were often called the Tyndariads. Tyndareus was meant as a family name. “He’s Castor. I suppose that would make you Pollux. The immortal son of Zeus and Leda, who begged the gods to make his human twin brother immortal, too.”

As soon as she said it aloud, more of the pieces fell into place. “You think you can bring him back. That’s what you’re really after.”

The strange blue eyes narrowed until they looked like mismatched sapphires. “As I said, remarkable.”

He drew in a raspy breath. “You will have heard stories I imagine, fanciful tales of how I planned to clone
der Fuhrer
and establish a new Reich.” He snorted. “Ridiculous. Why would I want that when the post-war world had so much to offer me?

“Of course, I did continue my research, and slowly I built my fortune, but as the years passed, I focused my efforts on the one thing that I did not have in sufficient quantities. Time.

“I was not the only one doing research into artificial gestation and replication—cloning, in the common parlance—but I had the freedom to pursue the matter unfettered by tedious ethical considerations.” He spat the last two words out like a curse. “The practical application for such a technique was obvious. If I could produce clones of living humans, it would solve the most troublesome side effect of tissue transplants.”

“You wanted to clone yourself so you could have an endless supply of organ donors. Replacement parts to extend your life indefinitely.” Fiona spoke without emotion. Given the man’s past crimes, it was almost exactly what she would have expected from him. What surprised her was the fact that he was being so forthcoming. Did he actually believe that she would just forget that he had tried to kill her? Or that she would be impressed by these revelations?

Of course he does. He’s a narcissist and a sociopath.

Tyndareus nodded, but his expression was subdued. He stared into the glass, looking past the reflection, gazing at the skeletal remains. “That is what I believed, when I began. The procedure was successful. The embryo was created in the laboratory and transplanted into a surrogate. After the child was born, however, I began to feel differently toward him. You see, he was not only my offspring—and a far better son than the ungrateful spawn of my own loins—but also my genetic twin.

“In my early research, I had mistakenly attributed the bond between twins to shared experiences in the womb, but as time passed and the child grew to maturity, I recognized that it is a genetic bond. A bond that I shared with Castor.”

Fiona gave a nod. “Must have really sucked when you finally had to cut him up for spare parts.”

“I did no such thing.”

The admission surprised her, not because it seemed the likeliest explanation for Mengele’s longevity—he was at least a hundred—but because it was hard for her to believe that there was a line he wouldn’t cross.

“Even before he reached adulthood, it became apparent that something was wrong. Castor was aging.” Tyndareus tapped the joystick, swinging the chair around to face her. “Tell me, child. Are you as well versed in the sciences as you are in other areas? Are you perhaps familiar with telomeres?”

“Telomeres. That sounds Greek. ‘End parts?’”

The word felt familiar, but before she could search her memory, Tyndareus went on. “Telomeres are nucleotide sequences found on the end of chromosomes. TTAGGG, repeating thousands of times on each and every chromosome in each and every cell of the human body. They serve as buffers, protecting the genetic code of the chromosomes from damage during the process of cellular reproduction. It may help you to think of chromosomes as shoelaces, and the telomeres as the plastic wrapped around the end to keep them from fraying—”

“They’re called ‘aglets,’” Fiona murmured.

“In complex life forms, every time a cell divides, and the DNA code is duplicated, the telomere chain loses a link. After a lifetime of cellular reproduction, the telomeres eventually break down completely, after which genetic damage begins to occur.”

“And the shoelace frays.”

“That genetic damage is what we call ‘aging.’ The role telomeres play in the aging process was only discovered a decade ago, far too late to be of any use to me in my research.”

Fiona was able to guess the rest. “When you cloned yourself, your telomeres were already getting pretty short. Castor was already an old man when he was born.”

“The rapid cellular growth of early childhood and puberty intensified the process, causing him to age even faster. The decay, both physical and mental, accelerated with each passing year, until his death. He knew the fate that awaited him, and so he drew off the Jewish agents who were pursuing me, while I built…” He gestured around the room. “All of this.

“I wasn’t able to save him,” he continued, his voice showing more emotion than she would have believed possible. “I have labored for nearly forty years to find a way to bring him back to me.”

“And that’s what Kenner promised you.”

“In the old days, we learned many things about the ancient world. The so-called mysteries. And we heard rumors about the man remembered in legend as Hercules. We knew that there was a group working to erase all evidence of his existence. When Dr. Kenner approached me with information about the Herculean Society and the possibility that he might be able to uncover its secrets, I wondered at his ability to deliver, but I never doubted the veracity of his claims.”

Fiona could only assume that ‘we’ meant the Nazis. “If he told you that he can bring the dead back to life, then you should. Even Hercules was never able to do that.”

“The bond I share with Castor did not end with his death.” Tyndareus gave a patient smile. “Dr. Kenner believes, as do I, that the creatures Hercules fought in his so-called Labors, were the product of genetic experimentation, made possible by a source. A mutagenic agent that allows the DNA of two or more different creatures to be combined, producing something greater than the sum of their parts. The ancients knew where the source was, though they did not comprehend how to use it or control its creations. They called it Echidna.”

“The Mother of All Monsters.” If what Tyndareus said was true, given what she knew about the chthonic monsters, then how would that help Tyndareus bring his clone back to life? The answer came to her a moment later. “You want to combine your DNA with…” She nodded to the bones. “His.”

Tyndareus’s smile was answer enough. “Echidna will allow me to create a new form—Gemini—reuniting me with my twin, and modern genetic engineering techniques will allow me to overcome the problem of telomerase deficiency.”

Fiona thought back to her conversation with Gallo on that particular topic. “Echidna lived in the Underworld. Kenner isn’t going to find anything in South America. All that map will do is take him to the Amazon city.”