Synarchy Book 2: The Ascension (10 page)

When those beautiful, expressive
aquamarine eyes went blank, for a moment, Marcello was deathly
still. When reality swiped its cold, feral claws through his heart,
he wanted nothing more than to join her, because surely, he
couldn't live with this pain. “Mari?” he whispered, and heard
nothing. Gripping her to him tighter, Marcello’s silent tears
became a heart-wrenching scream.

§

June 22, 1974 - 12:12 AM

Alcyone Island

Farmhouse of Marcello and
Marilyn

The silence was thick. It’s presence a
weight, staining the air. Marcello sat in his wife’s drawing room,
facing the garden. She loved sketching. When he built the house, he
had filled up that room just for her. Her drawings were everywhere.
He could almost still feel her; see her curled up in her chair in
front of the window with pad and pencil in hand.

Fourteen years ago, he had learned a
few truths about the world. Those truths weren’t all about the evil
that thirteen men and their alien masters did. Some were spiritual
in nature and fascinating in their concepts. Some had amazing
potential to be scientifically proven one day. One of them
concerned death. Death was not the absence of life; it was a
transformation of form. It sounded great. Until they took Mari away
from him.

Marcello closed his eyes against the
fierce, painful assault that thought brought. The reality of it
crushed his heart; an intense, choking pressure from which there
was simply no escape. The Brotherhood had done this. He knew it was
Them. Marilyn Terenzio was not a woman with enemies. The strike had
been personal.

He was not young, anymore.
He was sixty-one years old. They had been married for thirty-one
years, and it wasn’t enough. He didn’t want to hear
at least you had that long
. If anyone said that to him, they were going to eat a bullet.
He shouldn’t have to live without her. It felt… wrong. He
didn’t
want
to
live without her. How could he walk the line that he had to walk
without her there to keep him from the darkness? How could he be a
father to their children, look into the eyes and faces of the lives
that carried a very tangible, visual piece of her, and not fall
apart?

Marcello’s hand clenched into a fist
that he pressed against his chest. He had spent the last fourteen
years collecting information; learning what They controlled, how
They controlled it, where their weak points were. It hadn’t been
that difficult, once he knew where to look. For fourteen years, he
sat on that information, allowing his uncle to play the game as his
father instructed, biding his time because Matthew DeMarco had told
him that his was a higher purpose.

A higher purpose that, right now,
Marcello didn’t give a fuck about. They were sorely mistaken if
they thought that he would just accept this transgression without
consequence. Marcello shot to his feet, went into the darkened
living room and snatched up the phone. He stabbed the
buttons.

“
Joey, Marcello. Meet me in
my office first thing tomorrow morning-“

A scream pierced the silence of the
house. Marcello’s eyes jerked to the ceiling.

Kayla.

“
Tomorrow morning, Joey,”
Marcello said before he dropped the phone back into the cradle and
went jogging up the stairs. He pushed open the door to Kayla’s
room. Mari’s daughter was sitting up in her bed, her hands clenched
in her long, blonde hair. Kayla frequently suffered from
nightmares. The things the Brotherhood had done to her had left
their mark, the demons of the past given free rein in the shadows
of her dreams. Mari had been the one to calm her when this
happened, but Mari wasn’t here anymore. Heart twisting, Marcello
snapped on the dim light on her nightstand, and sat down on the
edge of her bed.

Kayla wasn’t his daughter. She was an
enemy sent to kill him. But the only thought that filled Marcello’s
head as he looked at her tortured face was that she was Mari’s
daughter. “Shh, Kayla, I’m here.” She was trembling. Marcello found
her hands and pulled them away from her hair. Kayla jerked when he
touched her, snapping frantic eyes up to his own. She stared at him
in the silence, uncertainty written across her features. Slowly,
Marcello drew her against him, wrapping his arms protectively
around her.

At first, she resisted. After a moment,
she sank into him, burrowing into his chest, and let her tears
come, open and ragged. They soaked into his shirt. “They got Mom.
They got Mom,” she whispered, barely audible.

Marcello heard her. He wondered if
Kayla had any idea what she was whispering, or if she was still too
caught up in the scary place between a bad dream and a reality that
might have been no better. Swallowing back the lump in his throat,
he kissed the top of his step-daughter’s head, and simply held her.
“I’m here, Kayla. I’m here.” He wouldn’t tell her it was all right,
because it wasn’t. But, one way or another, he’d make it
even.

Chapter 5

“
We Terenzios are always
pushing. Sometimes, we go too far.”

-Liliana Terenzio

June 22, 1974 - 7:44 AM

Alcyone Island

Dion Corporation
Headquarters

Marcello, stop and think.” High above
Alcyone on the 52nd floor of the Dion Corporation building, Joey
“The Mouth” Terenzio stood in front of Marcello’s desk. “It’s not
time to start the war. That isn’t your job.”

Marcello stood with his back to his
younger cousin, staring out at the island paradise below. “They
killed, Mari, Joey.” His voice was sharp. Anger hid the nearly
overwhelming pain.

“
Yeah, yeah, I know they
did.” Joey’s voice gentled. “But if you start this tit for tat, you
know what’s gonna happen. It aint time yet.”

“
They took something from
me, Joey. Something very precious.” Marcello slowly turned around.
“I will not let that slide.”

“
Marc, you do this now you
fuck it up for the future, and you know it.” Joey frowned, albeit
gently at him. “You’re pivotal. What we are doing right now is
pivotal for your grandchildren. You gotta think about them,
too.”

Rational thinking led him to the truth
of Joey’s words. His purpose was simple; prepare his family for the
Ascension. Stay off the radar, move the pieces into place so when
the time came, checkmate would be inevitable. Except, he didn’t
feel rational, because a short thirty-six hours ago, his wife of
thirty years had died in his arms.

“
Vengeance won’t bring her
back. And it won’t take the pain away,” Joey said.

“
No, it won’t.” His eyes
darkened. “But it will make me feel better.”

Joey frowned. Marcello wasn’t going to
let this go, and to be honest, he truly couldn’t blame him. Nobody
got away with fucking with family, period. “I think I’ve got
something, then. It won’t take you to Mari’s killer, but if you
want to take a swing at them, this is it.”

“
I’m listening.”

“
I think I found Dr. Joseph
Mengele.”

Dr. Mengele was the man who had
programmed Kayla against them. “Where?”

“
Ridgecrest, California. And
it just so happens I’ve got to be in LA anyway to stick my foot in
Jimmy Regace’s ass.” Jimmy Regace was the crime boss in LA. “How
about you tag along and get some aggression out?”

Marcello nodded once. “We’ll go after
the funeral.”

“
You got it,
boss.”

§

June 26, 1974 - 10:10 PM

Ridgecrest, CA

Home of Joseph Mengele

Marcello sat at Dr. Mengele’s desk.
Around him, three SVT Security Agents swept the house, making sure
it was empty. He didn’t want to be interrupted when the good doctor
and his wife came home.

Marcello flipped open the planner,
scanning the appointments listed in it. Finding nothing he wanted
in there, he pushed the chair back and looked down at the drawers.
A small label, in the upper left-hand corner on the bottom drawer
read: Mannequin. Mannequin was the program Kayla had been a part
of. Apparently, Mengele was not concerned about his wife becoming
curious and rifling through his desk. Marcello went to pull open
the drawer just to find it locked. He stood up, motioning one of
his agents over to him. “Open it. The other two drawers
too.”

“
Yes, sir.”

It took the agent two minutes to pick
the lock. Marcello sat back down in the doctor’s chair and started
pulling out folders. Mengele was extremely organized. His notes on
the Project were incredibly detailed—and horrific. Project
Mannequin was started by the NSA on underground bases in Britain.
The objective of the Project was to create a better kind of
espionage agent and assassin; one that would last longer mentally
and not be plagued by issues of conscience. They experimented in
creating these agents by using forms of mind control and genetic
manipulation programming. Joseph Mengele was an expert in
trauma-based mind control.

The ideal patient was five years old or
younger. To properly program the mind, first, it needed to shatter.
This was done by systematically traumatizing the child, using such
means as burying them alive with snakes, or taking them to the edge
of death, just to revive them. Once the mind shattered into
fragments, each child could then be programmed for a different use.
Sometimes, an electromagnetic grid was incorporated into the brain
to assist with programming. It was called the Mengele
Grid.

The more Marcello read, the
more nauseated and furious he became, until his hand nearly shook.
That a government that claimed to be a democracy would do that to
children—to people—who, ninety-nine percent of the time, were not
willing participants, was as disgusting as it was infuriating.
Forcing himself to calm, Marcello set the doctor’s general notes
aside and moved to the section marked
Patients
, organized by month and
year. He selected the date Kayla would have been involved, and
found her folder to be one of the thickest in the
drawer.

Like most of the other
folders on the doctor’s “patients
,
” there were tape recordings,
photographs, and pages upon pages of notes. It was an envelope
marked
From Deucalion
that made Marcello catch his breath. Deucalion was Kayla’s
biological father, the man who had raped and then drugged Marilyn
so that she had forgotten it ever happened. That bomb had been
dropped on their world nearly twenty years ago, and Marcello had
tracked Deucalion down and killed him. Deucalion’s head was sitting
in the cellar underneath the Governor’s Mansion on the Island, next
to a few of Marcello’s father’s enemies that had pushed SVT too
far.

February 17st,
1957

Doctor Mengele,

I hope you are still finding
America to your liking. We are very pleased to have you as the lead
scientist of a program that is so important to the future of the
world. We’re not so much different from Hitler, are we?

I have learned that your
blood testing shows despite my rendezvous with Marilyn
Pearl–Terenzio, I was unsuccessful in impregnating her. This would
lead us to conclude that unless Marilyn was a whore, and I don’t
believe she was, Marcello must be Kayla’s father. Considering our
plans for our subject, I find her true heritage almost poetic.
Regardless, I want you to proceed as planned. I never really
thought of her as my daughter anyway, just a means to an
end.

Keep me updated on your
progress.

Regards,

Deucalion

“
Ghost Team, come in.”
Joey’s voice came in through their two way radios. “Subject has
left the restaurant. They’re on their way to you.”

The answering response from
the Senior SVT Agent was a distant buzz compared to the sudden roar
in Marcello’s head. Kayla was
his
daughter. For moments, Marcello couldn’t get his
breath.

Kayla’s appearance on his
and Mari’s doorstep had put such a strain on their marriage. He had
been distant and moody for the first few months, and when with his
family, he had worn the veil that he had never shown his wife. Mari
had always been able to look at him and really see him; not so,
those first few months with Kayla. He’d worn it because he was a
man, not a saint, and Kayla had been a constant reminder of an
enemy, even one that had been killed, despite the fact that she was
his wife’s daughter. She hadn’t been
his
daughter.

Slowly, he’d begun to get around that.
His wife had demanded it in her own firm but gentle way, and she
had a habit of bringing out the best in him. So, he’d stopped
ignoring and gotten to know Kayla. There was still a child
underneath all that programming, and Marcello had come to care
about Kayla more than he would admit.

After all that, to now find
out that Kayla really was his,
theirs
, Marcello felt the world give
out beneath him for the second time in his life. He tunneled the
fingers of one hand back through his hair and continued flipping
through her file. Kayla didn’t just have her mother’s fiery spirit,
but a Terenzios, too. According to Mengele’s notes, she had been
resistant to her programming. Hence, it had taken fourteen instead
of twelve years for her to appear. A single tear slipped down
Marcello’s cheek as his rage overwhelmed him. They had taken his
daughter and programmed her against him. They had committed
unspeakable acts against her for fourteen years, things no child
should ever have to endure. Marcello saw red. He felt like he was
going to snap, slip into the darker side of his nature and never
come out. Terenzios played the game so effectively because they
walked that proverbial line between good and evil. They could dance
over to either side at any point of their choosing. Sometimes, the
darkness called louder than the light, and it was important for a
Terenzio to have someone in their lives to pull them back. Aunt Lil
had had Kyle for example. He used to have Mari.