Cretaceous Conspiracy #3 and Ancient Ice Apocalypse #4(on kindle)

A Friend For An Assassin

Her name this month was Sierra, like the desert mountains. Smiling, she stood over the dead physicist she had been sent to dispose of. The poison worked perfectly and would be undetectable to tox screens. It would seem the eighty-nine-year-old man simply expired from a heart attack in his chair. Old people died all the time. She carried the drugged coffee cup into the kitchen, and took a clean one from the cupboard, filling it halfway with cold coffee and pressing it in his hand, before she set it back by his book. She would take the poisoned cup with her; the dried liquid toxin was flavorless but etched itself into the glaze making the cup too dangerous for future use. Her lord taught her about death, and if it appeared to be natural causes, it was easier to get away with. He was centuries old and perfected ‘his craft’ as he called it. She was his most devoted pupil, nothing like those stupid, pandering shills at his school.

The other students were being trained like monkeys to do certain jobs or play specific roles, but she was special, she could choose who she was and what she would do on any given day. She was smarter than even her roommate Matilda, whom she despised. Her lord laughed when she told him of Matilda’s schoolgirl infatuation with him. She giggled when he told her Matilda reported her for ditching classes and staying out all night partying when she was on assignment. At twenty, the schoolmates were college students, but Sierra’s medical school studies had nothing to do with becoming a doctor and everything to do with becoming a better assassin. She thought about switching to botany again. Plants offered so much potential as conduits of death.

Sierra stood in the dead Ph.D.’s workroom, but something was wrong. She read and reread the chalkboard scribbled with notes. Her Lord would be happy to have his research, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she was missing something.

Dr. Weizmann has Parkinson’s disease, there was no way he wrote these equations, she thought as she photographed the boards carefully.

She knew the physicist had a live-in research assistant and thought, Perhaps his student wrote the equations on the boards for him.

As she looked around for any notebook or journal, she heard a noise upstairs. Someone came into the kitchen, Sierra glanced up at the ceiling as the light footsteps went into the living room.

“Allister!” She heard a girl’s voice cry out in anguish, so Sierra used a potion to make herself disappear.

Upstairs, a small, brown-haired young woman wept, as she knelt in front of the old man, holding his dead hand to her cheek, then the girl ran to the kitchen and made a frantic phone call. “Weizmann farm on F.M. Route 3, please hurry!”

Sierra slipped past her and snatched the cup unnoticed, there was a second cup filled with coffee next to it. She shrugged, watching the girl crying into the cordless phone, as she tried to do CPR on the corpse. Sierra quietly drifted out the front door like a ghost, then she jogged to where her motorcycle was hidden.

Once in town, she made a call from her cell phone. The devices were everywhere, and her lord would be listening on his new network.

“It is done, my lord.”

“Did you get all the information?”

“Yes, I gathered the research.”

“Good, bring it to me as soon as you can.”

“Yes, my lord, I will get it to you next week at the school assembly.”

“I look forward to seeing you then, my pet... Good work.”

“Thank you, my lord... goodbye.”

Sierra stopped at the Dairy Queen and ordered a mint chocolate candy Blizzard. She watched an ambulance scream through the town and turn down the farm-to-market road which led to the physicist’s house. There would be no defense array advancements unless they bought it from Neimad Global. Crushing the mug in a bag, she tossed the shattered toxic coffee cup away with her trash before she drove out of town. Another assignment was completed.

<^><^><^>

Nine weeks later, the assassin was standing in a four-star hotel room taking pictures of a drunk man, passed out next to an unconscious, under-aged prostitute. The congressman would have no choice but to do her lord’s bidding now. She wished she could just kill him, or the girl, murder made for better blackmail, but she was under orders, no one would die today. Her phone chimed, she checked it. She left quietly out the service entrance. Her name this month was Savannah, and she had a new assignment.

Jerry was standing near her lord giving her a smug smirk. Lord Damien was angry. The pictures she took in the physicist’s home were spread on a table and it appeared Neimad Global’s best mathematicians had made little progress.

“Sierra, my darling, can you please explain to me how Dr. Weizmann’s research is being finished so quickly?” A salt-and-pepper haired Damien demanded with red eyes glowing angrily.

“Savannah, my lord,” she corrected him.

“What?”

“My name this month is Savannah… And I do not know. The mathematics were only partially done, and none of the engineering was begun,” she stated calmly.

“But General Ty Taylor tested the prototype yesterday,” he announced.

She was surprised. She closed her eyes and went over everything she saw in Dr. Weizmann’s home in her mind palace. She leaned against the table, arms folded, pulling at her earlobe. Suddenly she inhaled. She knew what she missed.

“My lord, I think I know who is finishing Dr. Weizmann’s work.” She held up one of the photos of the chalkboards covered in equations. “Only it wasn’t Dr. Weizmann’s work, it was his assistant’s. The good doctor had a disease which caused his hands to tremble, he could not have written the boards. I said in my first report I believed she wrote for him. I was wrong. The math is beyond all his earlier published works, perhaps his student surpassed him.”

“His assistant did earn a Ph.D. in mathematics and physics before her eighteenth birthday,” Jerry revealed.

Damien scowled, nodding, “Find her, my pet Jaguar, find her and bring the work to me.”

Savannah rose and bowed, “As my lord commands. And then what?”

“We shall see if there is anything to be gained by keeping her alive. If not, Savannah my pet, you may do with her whatever you like,” Damien decided.

Savannah smiled and inclined her head. She enjoyed doing whatever she liked with her victims.

Two weeks later, it was a new month. Darcy walked down the barren white halls of a mental institution in slippers, PJs, and a robe. She ran her hand through her short mousy brown hair and wished she could shave her head again, but she needed hair to look like the teenager she was supposed to be. The only color was the numbered red doors. She was supposed to be eighteen-year-old Charlotte Darcy Weber, a congressman’s bi-polar niece, the real Charlotte Weber died of an overdose in her sleep. Her quarry was sitting at a table, scribbling on the top with a broken crayon. Daisy Cullen seemed interesting.

“Would you stop writing on the tables!” Snarling, the orderly took the crayon away from Daisy and berated her.

“Give it back, I have to finish!”

He grabbed her arm to drag Daisy back to her room when the tiny brunette turned suddenly, punching him in the throat, then flipped him across the floor. She fought them as though she had extensive hand-to-hand combat training. Darcy watched in amazement as it took four large men to subdue her and realized it was only Daisy’s petite size and some muscular weakness allowed them to do so. Daisy screamed about having to finish her work while a nurse sedated her with an injection. As they carried her past, Darcy could hear her mumbling in math.

Later that night, slipping into Daisy’s room, Darcy observed her. She was nearly a foot shorter than Darcy and so thin Darcy worried Daisy would die before she could get the information. Darcy slipped out and got a bag of I.V. fluids from the medication room and gave Daisy the bag with nutritional supplements. Darcy knew how old Daisy was, but she was the size of a much younger teenager.

Two days later while the patients were allowed outside, Darcy sat on a bench near the young woman. Daisy was writing in some sand she sprinkled on the sidewalk.

“Hey, do you want to use my journal?” Darcy offered, “It’s better than writing in the dirt.”

“I’ll get in trouble, and I’ll get you in trouble, I don’t want you to get in trouble,” whispered the lavender-eyed girl, she rocked herself slightly as she drew in the sand with her finger.

“What are you writing?” Darcy asked, even though she recognized the equations.

“I was working on using high-frequency energy to create a scanning array for extra-atmospheric studies, but I forgot to eat... I forgot to sleep... Dr. Weizmann died but I needed to finish... Tim is in the hospital and Ty doesn’t understand so, he put me in here before I could finish the math, and now I can’t get it out of my head until it’s done, and he doesn’t understand. I have to finish,” repeating herself, she sounded so lost as she started a new section of sand.

Darcy smiled inwardly, but said, “So they think you’re crazy, but keeping you from working is making you crazier?”

The girl nodded, “I just need to write it down.” She sounded desperate.

Darcy smiled, offering, “Like I said, you can have my journal, it’s for dreams but I don’t dream anything good.”

Daisy looked up at her, eyes unfocused as if she didn’t understand, then she whispered, “Really? But they’ll get mad at you if they catch me.”

“I’ll make sure they don’t catch us,” Darcy offered, holding out the comp book and pencil. Daisy snatched it and stuffed it under her robe.

Darcy saw the orderly come out the door and grabbed Daisy, pulling her onto the bench next to her as she rubbed her foot over the math. They both watched the orderly pass; he still carried a black eye. He muttered a curse word under his breath about her as he glared at the small nineteen-year-old.

After he moved on, Darcy smirked, “You dotted him pretty good. I’m Charlotte Weber but call me by my middle name Darcy.”

The girl smiled shyly, “Thanks, I’m Daisy.”

“So, you’re in here because of math?” Darcy smiled back, it was going to be fun to have a friend for a while, and she was going to get the research and not even have to break into a government facility to do it. It would be like a vacation.

“Yes, I forget to take care of myself when I am working on the Box. Why are you here?” Daisy didn’t look at her as she scribbled.

Darcy realized her reason of being in the mental hospital wouldn’t do because Daisy would easily figure out the behavior she pretended for the staff was fake. Oddly, she also wanted Daisy to like her. Suddenly, she knew how she could get away with shaving her head and a reason to keep it that way until her lord had her kill the brilliant mathematician. She developed a strange kind of leukemia when she was sixteen. Her lord cured her, but it was as miserable to be healed by magic as chemotherapy sounded.

She let herself feel the suffering of that time again. “They say I am bipolar, but I am not. I am just so angry because I keep having cancer and I don’t want to go through the treatments anymore, so I tried to kill myself after attacking my uncle.” Darcy picked at her sleeve, hoping she seemed in despair. “I hate being sick; I hate the treatments but since my parents died, my uncle insists I have them since I am his only family. I don’t have a reason to live, but he won’t let me die.”

Daisy’s pencil paused. She dropped the notebook and pencil off her lap as she leaped on Darcy, hugging her fiercely. At first, Darcy thought she was being attacked then she realized Daisy was trying to comfort her.

“Oh Darcy, I’m so sorry. I’ll pray for you and be your friend, and if you can get me your medical records, I’ll try to figure it out when I finish my math.”

“Really?” Darcy asked in surprise, as she wiped away a real tear.

“Yes… Just don’t kill yourself, if you kill yourself you won’t get to go to heaven.” Daisy held Darcy’s face in her hands. “If it gets too bad, I’ll help you die and say penance for killing you later.”

Darcy could only nod. It was so unexpected.

“Daisy? Daisy Cullen?” They looked up at an elderly voice.

“Hilda!” Daisy cried out happily and jumped up to hug the elderly cleaning lady.

Darcy picked up the notebook and pencil as Daisy made the introductions. Darcy decided to arrange for her and Daisy to share a room. After lunch, the custodian, an elderly lady who seemed to know Daisy, asked Darcy if she had any interests. Hilda was sweet, telling Darcy how Daisy was first hospitalized at ten and was proved to be a mathematical savant with obsessive-compulsive disorder and not a schizophrenic. She laughed about how her grandfather put the doctor and administrator back on their heels. Daisy was a bonified genius and which meant she wasn’t crazy, just eccentric.

That night, Darcy wrote a postcard.

Dear Uncle,

Today I made a new friend, her name is Daisy Cullen.

She knows a lot about math and special space stuff.

Your pet, Charlotte Darcy

P.S. I need more comp books and pencils.

A week later, Damien grinned reading the card. In a few hours, he was frustrated again. There was almost no information on Daisy Cullen beyond the story she was one of the children in an illegal adoption scam and was a ward of the state mental hospital before custody of her was given to Dr. Weizmann, who helped his protégé earn a doctorate in mathematics by age eighteen.

He wondered who this girl was and how he could use her genius for his purposes. His brother was awake again. Damien could feel him, and he wondered if Karstien was suffering the same amnesia he had when he first awoke. It didn’t matter. In another decade or less, the whole world would be his kingdom. Neimad Global would own the food and water and energy of the world and Karstien would not have the resources to take down the politically powerful corporate giant. Over the centuries, Damien built a new kingdom and his brother would find himself in a hostile world.