The Meridian Gamble Read online

  The Meridian Gamble

  By Daniel David Garcia

  Text copyright © 2012 Daniel David Garcia

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover design by Stirnkorb Design

  Special thanks to my good friend, Amy Stirnkorb, Founder/Publisher of Chefs Press, for lending her valuable knowledge to the creation of this book. And for all the cupcakes. Also thanks to Dawnea Adams, for her insight and great advice.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Meridian

  Chapter Two: Adam

  Chapter Three: The Cottage

  Chapter Four: The Tower

  Chapter Five: Marion

  Chapter Six: Caroline

  Chapter Seven: The Elders

  Chapter Eight: Saga

  Chapter Nine: The General

  Chapter Ten: Roland

  Chapter Eleven: The Decision

  Chapter Twelve: The Luminos

  Chapter Thirteen: The Paris Vampires

  Chapter Fourteen: Nikki

  Prologue

  “Omnicom is a global corporation with vast resources, and facilities that are on the cutting edge of technology,” the pretty Asian woman said. “You can’t find a more ideal setting for your work.”

  “But the facilities here at the university are perfectly suited for my research.”

  “Yes, but we have the kind of funding available that can allow you to expand your research to whatever degree you may please. And, of course, the financial incentives will be quite appealing for you, too,” she added, with a smug smile.

  “In case it escaped your attention while you were undoubtedly checking up on me, I’m thought to be something of a genius,” the Professor said. “And I’ve invested my money quite well, so your ‘financial incentives’ hardly impress me. I suggest that if you’re going to try to dazzle me with your presentation, you get to something that will, in fact, dazzle me. Otherwise, we’re all just wasting our time.”

  Professor Lawton was a wretched man who talked down to everyone around him, but in this case, it was more than amusing. And Abigail was grateful for the lifetimes of training that allowed her to maintain a pleasant smile, because it was difficult not to laugh at the way the Omnicom executive’s face screwed up as she tried in vain to bury her disdain for his abuse.

  The Professor was right about one thing; this wasn’t going anywhere. He would never make a deal with them. Abigail would make sure he didn’t. But in the meantime, if she had to sit through this meeting in the small university conference room, it wouldn’t hurt her to size up her opponents, in case they proved to be troublesome.

  They weren’t vampires, none of the telltale signs were there, so at least there was that. And had they been, she might have been tempted to leap across the table to kill them all.

  The Asian woman was clearly the leader of the vile little group. She was doing most of the talking so far, and had a vague air of superiority her two co-workers seemed to cower under. Her features were pleasant enough, with hair cut above her shoulders and a cute button nose, and she wore a blue suit that was suitably nondescript. She tried to seem pleasant or at least professional, but Abigail had far too much experience studying others to fall for that facade. She could tell the woman was nothing more than a greedy little climber, even worse, one who bullied those around her to push her way to the top. It was something in the way she clenched her jaw just a bit too tightly, and tried to hide her contempt for others, her rage at being forced to meet on Professor Lawton’s terms. The woman had barely looked Abigail in the eyes when she shook her hand, no doubt dismissing Professor Lawton’s assistant as someone insignificant. But, wouldn’t she be surprised to learn that Abigail could snap her neck with one smooth move before she could even blink.

  Not bad for a 55 year-old woman.

  The man next to her was your typical alpha male, with blonde hair and a face that was handsome, and a smile he offered just a bit too readily, no doubt thinking it was the only thing he needed to charm others. But Abigail didn’t think the vampires were truly interested in him. He wasn’t quite beautiful enough to join their ranks, and she doubted very much he had the kind of intelligence or special gifts that would be of use to them.

  The last one was a balding lump who weighed at least 40 pounds too much for his frame. It was actual weight, flab and not muscle or a cleverly padded disguise. Of course, it could all be an act to fool her. He could be the real brains of their operation. But she suspected he truly was their subordinate from the way he deferred to the others, and handed his business card out last, as his associates passed theirs so proudly.

  Omnicom. Abigail remembered the name and the logo from back in the 50’s, when she was a spy in the war, even though she was fighting a more important war on the side. In fact, she had investigated the company herself. She remembered the chill it gave her to see that logo, a triangle in the center of a circle, and wondered what sick significance it held for the vampires. It must have been something important, because they hadn’t bothered to change it in subsequent years.

  Out of boredom, as the Omnicom woman droned on fruitlessly, Abigail went over the kill order in her mind; the blonde man first, because he seemed the most fit, then the woman, who might try to put up a fight, and could even have some martial arts skills she had learned at the gym, Krav Maga or basic self-defense. The bald one would be last, finished with the palm of her hand slamming upward to his nose, splintering it into his brain as he stared back at her with a confused expression. Of course, it wouldn’t come to that, the executives were harmless enough on their own. But Abigail had to admit that one thing about them frightened her; their being here was the first time the vampires had made their presence known to her in this lifetime. And she found it unnerving, that it was on the eve of her greatest triumph.

  Abigail broke from her reverie as the woman came to the end of showing some slides, and seemed desperate to make one last effort to sway the man who was her boss.

  “Professor Lawton, we’re so disappointed that you wouldn’t let us fly you up to New York in our corporate helicopter for lunch. Perhaps if you would reconsider visiting, you could truly see what Omnicom has to offer.”

  Of course she would want to get him to New York, so one or more of the vampires could manipulate his mind, Abigail thought. In fact, it was surprising that they hadn’t sent a bloodsucker along, which seemed to indicate they had no idea how far his research had progressed.

  Professor Lawton shook his head in disdain, barely looking at her.

  “I’m far too busy with my work to fly off for meetings I don’t want to attend. If anyone is disappointed it’s me, that I have to waste these precious moments which could have been far better spent.”

  “But don’t you think that with a greater staff and a larger budget you could accelerate your research far more quickly? Find more diverse applications for it to benefit mankind?”

  “My research is accelerating quite nicely,” he said. “And what I feel is that your company is far more interested lining its pockets than they are in how my research might benefit mankind.”

  “But you could …”

  Professor Lawton sighed in disgust, and cut the woman off.

  “The university may have strong-armed me into taking this meeting, but they know they can’t auction off my work to the highest bidder without my approval. Rest assured, I have no interest in selling out to your company or any others.”

  And Abigail smiled inside. The woman looked shocked. No doubt few people ever rebuked her offers. She slowly leaned over, and she and the blonde man traded words in Japanese, in a tone that was low, but not so low that Abigail couldn’t hear.

  She stared forward blankly, pretending she d
idn’t understand, even though she had learned the language long before any of them were born.

  “We can’t go back to the board without securing his work,” the blonde man said.

  “Don’t worry, this is just the opening of our negotiations. The university has more influence over this than he thinks,” the woman said. “We’ll get what we want, eventually. Everyone has a price.”

  For a moment, Abigail thought they were testing her, but they had no reason to suspect she was anything more than just a plain, older woman with a P.H.D. in Microbiology. They couldn’t possibly know who she really was; a member of the Luminos, their employer’s greatest enemy, someone who had the ability to remember all the experiences and abilities of her past lives. And it was a talent all of her people possessed, one they had used to wage war against the vampires since the beginning of time.

  But even worse for the executives at Omnicom, they didn’t realize that Professor Lawton’s research was more than just a promising notion, that it had reached a breakthrough. Otherwise, their eyes would have held a look of panic for fear of what the board might do to them when they came back empty-handed.

  Because Professor Lawton had reached his goal; he had finally managed to clone a human blood cell.

  After the meeting, Abigail found herself driving home, hurling obscenities at the snow that fell in her path. It constantly snowed here, what felt like all year around. She had always hated cold places, and had refused when they asked her to move to Sweden or Iceland or Switzerland, anywhere that sounded chilly. But living back East was a necessary part of the plan she had created for this lifetime, a plan that was working. And now that her schemes were drawing to a close, she could think about moving away.

  Luckily, the streets had been cleared that day, and she’d had the foresight to pay one of the neighborhood boys to shovel the snow from her driveway. When she got home, she was able to click the garage door opener and quickly pull inside. Once the car was parked, she hobbled up the front steps of her tiny house, and clicked the remote another time, to close the door behind her. Abigail always entered through the front door, no matter how bad the weather or how much the neighbors mocked her. They thought she was crazy, but how could she explain that the front door offered a better defense, because it gave a clear view into the living room and a good chunk of the rest of the home?

  How could she explain that an older woman might have an assassin waiting for her inside? That it had happened before, in other lifetimes.

  The house seemed undisturbed when she went in, and Abigail set her things down on the couch, and kneeled at the fireplace. It was difficult to crouch; she felt a stiffness in her knees that annoyed her. This body was growing old too quickly, but at least she’d been born without disease or underlying illnesses. She’d lived more than one life where too much time had been spent fighting such afflictions, and it was never fun.

  She threw a log onto the fireplace grate, the kind that you bought at the supermarket, whose wrapper you could light to get the fire going, and added a few sticks she had collected on her own. When the flames started to crackle and burn, she went to the kitchen and dropped a frozen lasagna in the oven. It wasn’t much, and she really should have had some fruit and vegetables with it, but who cared at this point? She was old. Let the Luminos dietitians worry about her health when she finally rejoined them.

  With a smile, she took a bottle of wine from the cupboard, a very nice one she had been saving, and grabbed a chipped mug. And she sat in front of the fireplace in her favorite easy chair, wrapping an old blanket she left hanging on its back over her shoulders. Before she poured herself some wine, Abigail opened the drawer of a nearby end table and pulled out a strange little device that looked like the grip from a bicycle’s handlebars. It had a latch at the end that revealed a red button, like one from a video game controller. But she wasn’t playing games; this would be her quick escape, in case of emergency.

  She finally relaxed and opened the bottle to enjoy a sip of the precious crimson fluid. And it was absolutely delicious.

  This was Abigail’s victory celebration, of sorts. But she didn’t rejoice over the fact that Professor Lawton had created his blood cell, or that he had refused Omnicom’s offer. Abigail had always known he wouldn’t sell out. But weeks ago, she had convinced Dr. Lawton to publish an article on his research in a major scientific journal, despite the fact that it would enrage the university. And today was the day the issue had gone to press. If she couldn’t find the Luminos again, if she couldn’t get the discs to them, at least they would have the information they needed.

  Maybe she was making a mistake, staying here. Now that the vampires had made their presence known in her life it was time to leave. Abigail kept a packed bag in the closet at all times that was filled with the essentials; fresh clothes and money, fake papers and a gun. Perhaps the smart thing would be to simply throw it in the car, and drive away right now. But she couldn’t leave until she got her hands on a copy of the magazine, just to make sure it hadn’t been compromised. She couldn’t leave Dr. Lawton until she knew she wouldn’t need him anymore.

  It was better to make her escape the next morning. The snow would have stopped by then, and she could outrun the next storm. Her one regret would be abandoning the tiny house, which had given her the only joy she’d known in this life, though its value was nothing compared to the millions she had stashed away in a foreign account, money she had yet to touch in this incarnation. Abigail had enjoyed restoring the cottage to pristine condition. It made her feel like she had reclaimed a bit of the past, a memory of better times. Abandoning it almost seemed like a betrayal.

  She chuckled, thinking how the neighbors would panic when they finally found the canisters of gasoline in the basement, the ones that had been carefully sealed to mask their scent from keen noses. What would they think when they saw the explosives that were packed around the gas main? But by then it wouldn’t matter, because she would be long gone with a new identity that would be impossible for them to trace.

  Outside, night was quickly falling, and the sky had already turned a dark shade. Just looking at it sent a chill down her spine. Abigail could see her reflection in the window that overlooked the front yard, and it made her just a bit sad. The woman who stared back at her was a stranger. Her hair was grey and stringy, darker in patches where it struggled to hold onto her youth. The skin around her neck and jawline had started to sag. She had been attractive once, or at least somewhat pretty. But she had downplayed those features, and had allowed life to pass her by while she devoted herself to academia. The woman in the glass looked nothing like the warrior she knew herself to be, the one who had been locked in battle since the dawn of time. And she missed the thrill of the fight.

  This life hadn’t always been her goal. At a very early age, she had thought of finding her people. Abigail was one of the lucky ones, and the memories of past lives would start flooding back almost as soon as she could walk. For others, it could be more confusing, for a while. But she was born in Minnesota this time around, where the Luminos had no major cells, and she was forced to bide her time.

  Which in turn gave her the chance to think.

  The war with the vampires had changed in the modern era. Gone were the days when they could stumble upon a young one and fight hand to hand to the death. It was rare, if ever, that they came upon an inexperienced foe by itself. The vampires had become more cautious and more clever. They were getting older, and they rarely went out alone, not even the most powerful among them. And they never, never allowed themselves to be caught.

  Even worse, they had become masters of hunting her people down, and would sometimes cut through whole hives of the Luminos, keeping enough of them alive to fill up their tanks.

  She could see it in the eyes of her brethren; the war was taking its toll. The Luminos were growing weary of dying and being tortured to death. And even worse, the vampires were perfecting the technology of keeping them in a limbo state in their vats, where t
hey slowly drained their blood. Their leaders argued that perhaps they should stay hidden until they rethought the war. Others said they should embrace modern technology, perhaps use it to find a weakness in their foe’s physical structure, a disease that might kill them.

  And their leaders set out on a daring plan, to acquire a sample of the vampires’ blood.

  And Abigail made a decision, as she grew of age in Minnesota. She realized she could help her people in a different way. She chose not to return to them, to keep herself hidden, so she would be a difficult target for the vampires to track. And she devoted herself to her studies.

  Languages came easy to her, she was fluent in almost all of them, from being born into different parts of the world. Math, History and Geography were all simple, as she had absorbed knowledge of this nonsense before. Abigail knew how to get top grades, yet not do so well she would drawn attention to herself.

  Though science had never been her favorite subject, Abigail forced herself to get a degree in Biology, and then a Masters and P.H.D. She finally settled on a teaching position at just the right university, where a professor was doing pioneering research in cell replication. Abigail worked her way into his good graces, and found a position on his team. And though she might not have been the smartest of his students, he was impressed with her dedication, and the long hours she would put into aiding his research, well beyond any interest in her personal life.

  Professor Lawton wasn’t of the Luminos, which was almost too bad. But Abigail would take his research into her next life, even if it didn’t pan out. But the Professor had been even more brilliant than she had hoped. It almost seemed like destiny that she had found him, because she thought he had finally created a weapon that would help them to defeat the vampires, forever.