confirmation of Reza’s citizenship after returning from the Empire, and had been in favor of the radical psychotherapy procedures demanded by Dr. Deliha Rabat, another of Jodi’s personal favorites.
But there was something else. She had seen that name earlier this evening, during her research. Running another search on Borge, Strom Anaguay, she excluded all references after the crash and before Markus Thorella was born, limiting the search to the first fourteen or so years of Thorella’s life. In but a few seconds, she had her answer.
“Jesus Horatio Christ,” she breathed as the information scrolled up on her screen. Borge had been on the starliner with the Thorellas. He had been a friend of the family for some years, or so the records indicated, and he was frequently to be found in their company. Along with his son, Anton Borge.
Twenty minutes more of digging through increasingly compartmented files in the research center’s data network for Anton Borge’s DNA fingerprint confirmed what she suspected: “Markus Thorella” was Strom Borge’s biological son.
She sat back, imagining to herself what must have happened. Borge, an aggressive and ruthless politician, had received the support and friendship of the Thorella family, who themselves had much to gain from Borge’s rapidly growing political influence in the defense sector, since the Thorellas owned one of the largest shipbuilding firms on Terra.
But the genial relationship between the parents was not shared by the two boys, who apparently loathed each other. Not surprising, since psychologically Anton Borge was the complete antithesis of the Thorella boy: while they were in fact similar physically, Anton was arrogant and hateful, never failing to make those around him miserable. Arrested on a dozen charges ranging from petty theft to sexual assault against a seven year old boy, he always managed to avoid punishment because of his father’s influence.
When the collision occurred, Strom Borge probably acted with his noted ruthlessness to take advantage of the situation. As evidenced by the hospital records, Borge’s son must have been hideously injured in the crash. The question then, was what really happened to the Thorellas? Did Emilio and Augusta Thorella die outright, or did Borge murder them? Their bodies were never recovered. And what happened to the real Markus Thorella? If Strom Borge was able to somehow put the Thorella boy’s clothes (what was left of them) and his identity card on his own mutilated son, Markus Thorella’s body must still have been on the ship and more or less intact. Again, was he already dead, or did Borge kill him, perhaps tossing the body into a blazing compartment on the ship to hide the evidence of his crime?
Another thought nagged at her: how had Borge and his son managed to keep their true relationship a secret? Borge had obviously gone to great lengths to conceal the true identity of “Markus Thorella” by somehow destroying or confiscating all of the Thorella boy’s medical records (and, she found out, the records of his parents, too, to prevent any DNA tracing). Not surprisingly, the official investigation into the disappearance of those records ended rapidly and prematurely, no doubt under the shadow of Senator Borge’s influence.
But aside from all the possible paper trails that he had deftly covered up, how had his son reacted to suddenly becoming someone else? The boy was certainly old enough to know that he was not Markus Thorella, and all it would have taken was for him to call Borge “Dad” in the wrong company and someone might have become suspicious.
The answer was in a name that Jodi knew all too well: Dr. Deliha Rabat. Jodi reviewed the medical records again. She was looking for some clue as to why no one had suspected that Strom Borge and Markus Thorella were really father and son. Borge’s wife wasn’t part of the equation, since she had been killed in a Kreelan attack on a colony world not long after Anton was born. But then Jodi discovered that “Markus Thorella” had undergone psychotherapy at the hands of the young and ambitious Dr. Rabat, who treated him for emotional trauma. The reports showed that the newly reconstructed Thorella boy was having delusions that he was actually the son of Strom Borge.
While she did not understand all the technobabble in the reports, she did see the effects of Rabat’s treatment: the “delusions” rapidly disappeared. In the end, the boy retained all the awful traits of his true self, but came to believe that he was the sole survivor of the Thorella family and heir to all its wealth, and whose best friend in the galaxy was Strom Borge.
Not surprisingly, the young Dr. Rabat soon left the hospital for her own research lab, funded entirely by the Thorella estate and endorsed by Senator Borge, the estate’s executor until Markus Thorella’s coming of age.
“How very, very convenient,” Jodi muttered. She hated Thorella, despised him, but she saw now that whatever evil had been in him before had been twisted even more by his scheming father and his sycophants. With the unwitting help of the hospital and the conniving of Dr. Rabat, Borge had transformed his own son into an incidental fortune that had financed his own interests. By the time Markus Thorella was handed the papers for the estate, he was already two years in the Marine Corps and safely out of Borge’s hair. The good senator was left to oversee matters while the “son of his dear, departed friends” went off to war.
“Fucking bastard,” Jodi hissed as she continued her scanning.
She discovered that their relationship did not end there, by any means. Reading over the official military records that mentioned Markus Thorella – she had not been able to gain access to his actual Marine Corps personnel files – she soon came to see that he had acquired a reputation as a hatchet man, as ruthless or more so than his secret father. And the enemies he was sent to fight did not have blue skin: not one single time in his career was the unit in which he was serving sent into the line against the Kreelans. Instead, he spent his service time engaged in police actions on various worlds, bashing in human heads in places like Erlang that had somehow earned Borge’s ire.
That information, in turn, led her to discover the connection Borge had with those places. Millennium Industries – which originally had belonged to the Thorellas, but had long since come under Borge’s control – had holdings or interests on every one of the planets where Thorella and his goons had been deployed: Erlang for precious and strategic minerals; Kauchin in the Outer Rim for cheap, undisturbed, labor; Wilhelmstadt for high tech items; the shipyards around Manifest. And a dozen more. From what Jodi could tell, every ship, weapon, or defense system built in half the Confederation contributed to the senator’s coffers. If he wanted, Jodi did not doubt that he could build his own battle fleet; he already owned a sizable portion of the merchant marine. But all of it fell under the ownership of Millennium Industries, and any investigation short of the outright data penetrations that Jodi was conducting (which were completely illegal) would show Borge only as a minor shareholder and acting chairman of the umbrella company.
Jodi shook her head in wonder. Borge was using both his political position and his influence with the military – she hoped unwittingly – to boost his own power, employing his biological son as an agent any time he needed a dirty job done. And he was getting away with it at an untold cost in terms of human lives and suffering.
And in the case of Erlang, she discovered, President Belisle had not only been a tyrant, but he had also received kickbacks from Millennium Industries, presumably as a payoff to keep the Mallorys in line and ensure that Millennium got its cut of Erlang’s mineral production. But, according to the figures she saw here, Belisle had not only failed to keep production at an acceptable level, he had lately been demanding more and more money from Millennium for his cooperation and silence. But when Reza appeared, soon assisted by Melissa Savitch, the role of Millennium – and Borge – in the rape of Erlang and the Mallorys could have become public. Borge had not sent Thorella there just to bring the Mallorys to heel and take care of Reza; he had been sent to kill Belisle, and had murdered Savitch because she happened to be in the way.
“They set you up, Reza,” she murmured. That was the only way Thorella could have gotten any valid imagery of Reza killing Belisle, because Reza would have killed the good colonel, too, had he had the chance. Thorella had known what Reza would do, and he had set a very good trap for him, using Belisle as bait. In one stroke, Borge and Thorella were able to both get rid of Belisle and frame Reza for murder. And now, even though the Mallorys, who were now legally in charge of Erlang, insisted that the Confederation government not only drop the charges against Reza but give him a medal for what he had done, Borge somehow had bought enough influence to make the charges stick.
But they could not try him until he had recovered from his coma. And that was where she began to run into real problems. While the worm program she had been running was more than a match for the basic security codes that had been put on the older files, the more recent ones having to do with the Erlang incident and its aftermath were much better protected. In her last half hour at the research center, she had only been able to gain access to one document: the list of medical personnel who had participated in Reza’s care over the last six months. And she
