The Conduit: Chapter 20

Chapter 20

The room, lit by candles, and with a majestic view of the city, was nearly empty except for Daniel Deacon Reddick. Daniel was one of the key developers of the project and a principal owner of the tower development. As he got comfortable on the leather sofa sitting in the center of the room, sipping a glass of bourbon and enjoying a cigar, Daniel listened to the soft music playing over the speakers. He couldn’t remember being so relaxed, and yet he was filled with an anxious excitement he hadn’t felt in ages. Daniel believed he had inked the deal of a lifetime, and the deal was about to be finalized.

Joe Mazucca stood and watched Jane as she prepared herself. She took great care, rubbing lotion over her entire body. From head to toe she her skin glowed in the soft light of the bedroom. She admired the giant king-sized bed that would be hers if everything went according to plan. The accommodation was far more that she’d enjoyed since her liberation from the dusty confines of the cave system she’d been trapped within. She chose an enticing ensemble to wear, consisting of a lacey pantie and a silk robe that showed plenty of her upper thighs as she modeled it for Joe.

“What do you think?” asked Jane.

Joe, intentionally being stoic, maintained his guardian like stance, simply nodding his approval of her outfit. Joe was envious, but he chose to serve rather than attempt to succumb to his desire for the girl he’d heard in his prison cell. He still didn’t understand their connection, or how she was capable of coming to him in his dreams, but she had the power that would take him places he never imagined. He simply had to serve as her guardian and counsel when she needed him.

In their time together, since escaping the Oceanic, Joe came to realize Jane needed him. She needed the guidance of someone more worldly, someone who could guide her through the modern world of man. Listening to her, when he dared ask, Jane knew little of the modern world. She was trapped, unable to remember most of her life, and only cognizant of what he believed were stories of the past. But as he heard them, a little more developed with each new story, even Preacher Joe began to think they were more than just stories. Joe had begun to believe that Jane had lived these stories, these memories, of a world he knew nothing about.

That was where her power evolved from. Jane was something older than his understanding of time. She had lived many lives, until being captured and punished, somehow finding herself locked away in a hidden world in a mountain, thousands of feet into the air. No, he didn’t understand it, but as he began to believe it, he knew the power it would take for someone to live for such a long period.

In part, it attracted him to her. The strength of any being to live for such a long time was impressive. He didn’t care what she truly was, but Joe recognized she was more than she appeared. Jane was more than a human. And in part, it frightened him. The things he already witnessed were ghastly by even his standards. He’d spent years in a violent prison, witnessing untold torture. As jaded as that left him to man’s depravity toward his fellow man, it was the actions of Jane that scared him the most. He feared that soon he would be called upon to clean up another one of her decisive actions.

Jane loosely tied her robe at the waist, leaving plenty of herself visible as she kissed Joe on the cheek and dismissed him. Joe walked from the bedroom of the penthouse to the main door. He looked at the gentleman on the sofa, silently wishing the man would get up and leave. He equally wished that Jane would pay him the attention she paid other men. As he left the room, he locked the front door from the outside.

Daniel heard the clicking of the lock as he sipped from his drink. It unnerved him enough he went to check the door. As he found it locked, and was unable to unlock the door, he nervously feared something was amiss about the whole situation. He didn’t know Jane or her personal assistant, other than from the mixer, and suddenly felt he was in over his head.

“Going somewhere?”

Daniel heard the sultry voice behind him as he fiddled with the door lock. He turned, stunned to see the beautiful young woman coming out of the bedroom. She seductively stood at the doorway, waiting for him to answer. He stammered a bit before finally finding words.

“Your man locked us in,” he stuttered.

Jane coyly smiled, sauntering closer to Daniel. She stopped at the bar and poured a drink before telling him she’d hoped they could have some time alone to close the deal on the penthouse. Jane was sending signals she was interested in much more than closing the deal for the property.

“Um…alright then, I suppose that’s a good idea,” stuttered the excited older man.

Max Shepherd, Jensen Shaw, and Shelly Hammers were taken from a secure location by helicopter and flown to a remote location. In the air, at the halfway point, they were allowed to remove their blindfolds. General Atwood sat across from Max and his team, a stack of files on his lap. As they flew over a shoreline Max recognized some of the terrain. They were held in one of the offshore sites in the Atlantic. He presumed it was off the coastal area of Menara Island, close to the Airforce operations center.

As their eyes adjusted, Max thought about tossing the general out of the bird. Atwood and he weren’t friends, and they never could be. But he was the one with the intel to find Jane and recapture her. And he was the one that was going to set them all up with equipment, transportation, and money. He knew that meant he had to play nice, at least for the time being.

“These are the rest of the files on the Jane Doe project. And it’ll explain why she’s such a high valued target of interest,” promised General Atwood.

Max opened the file as soon as it was handed to him, while Shelly and Jensen were a bit hesitant. As Max flipped through the remainder of the information, he looked up at General Atwood with a sense of disbelief. What he was reading was an old legend, a legend he’d heard before. The file made it seem real, or more plausible. As he looked back and forth between the file and the general, Jensen and Shelly opened their copy and began scanning the pages.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” mumbled Jensen.

Shelly merely looked at General Atwood and to her two friends before closing the file. What they were holding on the Oceanic was as old as time, if their information was correct. She had questions, questions that weren’t in the file.

“What was she doing in the mountain?”

General Atwood nodded at Shelly, admitting it was a good question. He explained that researchers indicated she was taken and held there, until someone could figure out another way of dealing with her. Considering her origin, they believed it would be complicated.

“So, by researchers, you mean the Vatican?” asked Jensen.

General Atwood wasn’t allowed to share information on other members of the group, or people and organizations with ties to the group. He told Jensen and the others he could neither confirm nor deny the involvement of the Vatican in the hunt for the girl. Everybody involved was kept compartmentalized.

“But you revealed yourself,” said Max.

“The incident on the station, the loss of life, and the girl being set free on an unsuspecting world forced me to come out of the shadows and get more involved. Trust me, none of my associates are happy about me having to work so closely with you and your team.”

“Then why are you?” Shelly asked.

Before he could answer, the pilot announced they were getting ready to land. From the air, they appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. From the ground they were in an old clearing at the end of a private airstrip. It was dilapidated, but the concrete had been kept up. Shelly admitted she was glad they were landing, because she needed to pee.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to find a friendly bush, Ms. Hammers. There isn’t running water out here for five miles, and that port-a-potty has seen better days,” the pilot informed her.

Once they were on the ground two black Suburban utility vehicles roared up to where the chopper landed. General Atwood stepped out of the chopper long enough to tell them one of them was theirs. Inside the Suburban, they would find fifty thousand to get them started, communications packages, three assault packs, three sidearms, and bullet proof vests. They would also find identification for each of them that would get them into any building, security area, and crime scene.

“You thought of everything,” admitted Max.

“Why the arsenal?”

General Atwood looked at Jensen. He reminded the three of the practice of having it before you need it, rather than waiting until you need it and not having it.

“Besides,” admitted Atwood. “You’re not the only ones looking for Jane. You just need to be the ones that find her first.”

They all nodded, each of them with a reason to find the mystery woman. If she was who the group feared she was, Max wanted to know why they were keeping up with the code name, Jane Doe.

“Why are we still calling her Jane? If she’s who you think she is, why not call her by name?”

General Atwood turned and looked at the three team members. He shook his head, a slight smile on his face. The general hoped the group was wrong. If Jane Doe was who they feared, the world would be in more trouble than it knew.

“Call her what you will. Just find her, and fast!” he yelled as the motor on the chopper sped up and the craft began to raise.

Jane had the penthouse secured, and a deal for most of the building to be put into her name. She needed a real name to use for the paperwork, a name someone could look up and find financials, a work history, and a credit history. When she signed the contract, she hesitated, then signed Susan Patterson. The doctor was either dead or locked in a secreted facility in the middle of nowhere, as she had been just weeks ago.

“So, Ms. Patterson,” her companion sighed, “How about we get back to getting to know one another better?”

Jane smiled wickedly at the bulbous bodied man in the fancy clothes. She placed her hand on his thigh, cooing in his ear as she rubbed her hand up and down. As she moaned slightly, getting the man excited, Jane tipped her glass, spilling her drink behind the leather-bound furniture. With a flick of her wrist, she broke the glass from the top of the stem. As she played with the man, she turned the bottom into her hand, and an evil look began to loom in her eyes.

“A deal is a deal,” she sighed as she stuck the glass stem of the glass into his eye socket, holding her hand over his mouth so his moans couldn’t be heard.

As the blood poured out of his skull and slowly over the black sofa, Jane ran her tongue up his cheek, drinking in his essence. He was rich, and spoiled, but not as tainted as most humans. She liked the taste of cleaner, less spoiled prey.

When she was done, and he stopped flinching, she sauntered to the main door and tapped on it twice. Preacher Joe walked back into the penthouse, seeing that she’d had her fun with the property developer. He watched as she went back to where she was sitting, still lavishing in her conquest.

“Things went as they were supposed to?”

She smiled at Joe, holding up the contract in her hand, “Of course they did. I’ll need you to file this with the county clerk’s office in the morning. And do me a favor, get rid of this for me. I’d finish him, but he’s a little too portly for my appetites.”

She got up and entered the bedroom of the penthouse, leaving Joe to clean up her mess, and hearing her say home sweet home as she closed the doors. With a smile, Joe went to work serving his mistress. He would dispose of the body before getting some sleep. In the morning he’d have the paperwork filed and they would be the new landlords of the Marquette Heights Properties. She’d been right, and soon, they’d both be richer than he could imagine. All he had to do was keep her happy and feed her appetite.

Max, Jensen, and Shelly stood in the clearing as the helicopter flew away, disappearing in the distance. The men that delivered their new wheels and supplies disappeared without as much as a word. Jensen looked at Max with concern.

“What is it?”

“Where do I start?” asked Jensen. “Should it be with the shadowy cabal we’re now beholden to, the bizarre General that you seem to be friends with, or our target?”

“I get it, they’re a lot.”

Jensen yelled. The idea they were just a lot seemed to downplay the significance of their situation. Shelly added how screwed they all were. They were free on the condition of finding Jane Doe, the two reminded Max.

“You don’t think I’m aware of that?”

“Were you aware that Jane Doe might be an immortal, and the first woman to walk the planet, and the first evil ever, in all of history? Were you aware of that?” demanded Jensen.

Max was still swallowing the story about Jane being thousands of years old, and an immortal, made by God himself. He shook his head, asking the two what they wanted to do. Their options were simple, they could complete the mission and be free of their past, or they could run for it and hope for the best. Max promised he’d understand.

“So, what do you want to do?”

Jensen looked at Shelly and nodded. They both announced they were with Max. The three of them all looked at each other and laughed. Max shook his head, admitting that they were crazy.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“I don’t know,” Max hesitantly admitted. “But there is a lot of effort and resources, not to mention multiple people's interest, being put into finding her and the truth.”

“Great,” sighed Shelly. “Well, what are waiting for. Let’s go find the serpent in the garden.”