him. He skidded to a stop.
“Pull it with two fingers and throw it away,” I ordered. “Do it now!”
He did it. Four other agents were closing on us, the closest nearly fifty yards out. I kicked the Surfer in the nuts, then knotted my fingers in his short hair and used him as a shield while I backpedaled to my Explorer.
I spun Surfer-boy around and gave a palm shot across the chops that would put him in a neck brace for a week, and as he crumpled I popped the lock on the Explorer and dove behind the wheel.
From the time I dropped my human shield to the moment I roared through the exit of the cemetery they had maybe six separate opportunities to take a good shot at my vehicle or me. They didn’t.
I found that very interesting.
Chapter Six
The Jakoby Twins-over Arizona airspace
Saturday, August 28, 8:18 A.M.
Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 42 minutes E.S.T.
Hecate Jakoby sat naked on the edge of the bed and stared out of the jet’s window at the rolling mountains of clouds below. She loved the contrast of purest white and ten thousand shades of gray. It was a kind of mirror for her.
Her brother, Paris, stood in black silk boxers that were a much sharper contrast with his snow-white skin. Paris always dressed in dark colors to highlight the albino richness of his lean and muscular body. Hecate preferred softer colors; she was less comfortable with her white skin than he was, though in truth both of them were absurdly beautiful. Even the people who hated them thought so.
The woman on the bed moaned and turned over in her sleep. The drugs would wear off in an hour or so, but by then the jet would be on the ground in Arizona and the flight crew would take care of the girl. She’d be fed and paid and given all of the proper instructions. If Hecate and Paris liked the report from the staff, maybe they’d treat the girl to another round of play on the flight back. If not, the bitch would be ferried to the closest town and given enough cash for a bus ticket.
The digital recording of their sexual encounter would be burned to disk and added to the Twins’ library. The library was indexed by gender, hair color, race, and number of partners. There were three-so far-disks in elegant black cases. Those were special-records of encounters in which their lovely playthings had been cremated and their ashes scattered over the ocean. Not for ceremonial purposes; it was simply an efficient disposal method.
“That was fun,” murmured Paris. “She was spirited. Do you want a martini?”
“Please,” said Hecate. “A double.”
Paris glanced at her from the wet bar, saw that she was staring down at the sleeping woman. “What’s with you? You falling in love?”
“No… just admiring the architecture,” said Hecate distractedly. “Two onions in the martini.” The girl was twenty, buxom, tan, with foamy masses of curly red hair. She had freckles and several ornate tattoos-Chinese characters and Celtic knots. She was everything Hecate was not. Although Hecate was beautifully made-tall and slender and ice pale, with snow-colored hair and eyes as dark as ripe blueberries-she wasn’t a California blonde. Her own breasts were small, her nipples the color of dusty roses. The only mark on her otherwise flawless skin was a small scar in the shape of a starburst that was the same dusty rose color as her nipples. That… and a small tattoo on her left inner thigh of a caduceus on which two fierce dragons-not ordinary serpents-coiled around the winged herald’s staff. The scales of the dragons and the symmetry of their bodies suggested a double helix.
Paris had an identical tattoo on his left upper calf and the same starburst scar on his chest. The scar was their personal mark. A bond in the flesh, as their father often called it, a sign of their greatness and a reminder of what Dad called their celestial heritage. They had been marked at birth when the doctors performing the emergency C- section on their mother had discovered twins locked chest-to-chest in an embrace, their blood-smeared cheeks pressed together. At first the doctors had feared that the twins were conjoined in some surgically challenging way, but as they were carefully lifted out of their dying mother’s womb and laid in the incubator the infants rolled apart, an action that tore the fragile skin over their chests. That had been the only conjoined point, and it did them no harm except to leave a star-shaped scar on each child’s chest. The star never faded.
The delivering doctor, a deeply Catholic obstetrician at the Cancun hospital where their mother had been rushed following a collapse at a Christmas party at one of the bigger resorts, saw the mark at the moment when the delivery nurse announced the official delivery time. Twelve-oh-one on Christmas morning.
“
The story made the papers worldwide. Twins, albinos with shocking blue eyes, born at the stroke of midnight as Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. The first birth of the holiday, and each child was marked with a star like the Star of Bethlehem. The story, nonsensical as it might be, was picked up by wire services around the world. The death of their mother and the coincidence of her name-Mary-fueled the story into one of beauty from tragedy. Before the Jakoby Twins were a minute old they were already legends.
Hecate touched her scar with one hand and with the fingers of the other traced the smooth and unmarked valley between the sleeping girl’s breasts.
Even deep in her sleep the girl felt the touch and moaned again. Hecate bent and kissed the smooth place between the girl’s breasts, paused, and then licked the skin, tasting the olio of sweat, perfume, and natural musk. Hecate wondered what her flesh would truly taste like if she could ever work up the nerve to bite. She wondered how blood would change the taste.
“Good God,” said Paris as he came over with the drinks, “are you
Hecate raised her head and smiled. Her brother never quite understood her, and that was okay. There were plenty of things about her she didn’t want understood. She accepted the martini and sipped it.
“Mmm, perfect.”
Paris sipped his drink, set the glass down on the deck beside the bed, and began pulling on his clothes. He put on black slacks, a charcoal shirt, and loafers without socks, his clothing choice conservative to suit the occasion. This was the second of their twice-monthly visits to their father’s laboratory in Arizona. It was really a prison, but they’d sold their father a line of propaganda stating that he needed a safe haven to protect him from the mud people and the government-or at least those parts of the government that weren’t sucking on the Jakoby tit. Cyrus appeared to be convinced of the necessity for a hidden base and they’d coddled him by allowing him to design it according to his “vision.” The base he created was in the shape of a dodecahedron-which Cyrus said was a crucial form in sacred geometry-and became familiarly known as the Deck. The Twins had built hundreds of security and surveillance devices into it, some of which they let Cyrus know about-they were sure he didn’t know about the others.
“I wish to hell we’d built his lab somewhere closer,” Paris complained. “Fucking Arizona? In August? Besides, it lacks style.”
“Style?”
“C’mon,” he said, “it’s a secret lab with an actual mad scientist. We missed an opportunity to be cool.”
“Secret lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes are so five minutes ago.” Hecate sniffed. “Besides, Dad’s hardly Dr. No.”
“He’s smarter. And eviler. Is that a word?”
“No. But it’s true, Daddy certainly puts the ‘mad’ back in ‘mad scientist.’ ” She and Paris laughed and clinked glasses.
“What have you heard from him lately?” asked Hecate, sipping her martini and continuing to stare at the woman she had shared with her brother for the last three hours. She could still smell the woman, still taste her, despite the vodka. The girl had tasted like summer and freedom.
“His man Otto’s called me a dozen times in the last week. Hmm… I wonder if Otto qualifies as an evil assistant or henchman?”
“Evil assistant, definitely,” decided Hecate.
