Chapter 13

Years before the saga that was going on in the Ford's lives another tragedy was about to play out another saga was playing in Portland for another family.

"Hey darling where you off too today?" Grant Sadiski asked his wife.

"Oh you know…" She said smiling at him. They played this game every morning, he would ask, and she would avoid, she could not tell him because her job was classified and he knew it and it was not as if he was trying to get information out of her because what he did was also classified.

"Oh yes of course." He said pulling her into a tight hug. "Just be careful my love."

"I always am." She smiled at him and then pulled away and called out for their son to come downstairs as he was going to be late for school.

"Mom don't forget I have soccer today." Richard said as he walked into the kitchen to join his parents.

"Your dad is going to pick you up this afternoon, I have some errands to run." She told him.

"Ok…" He said grabbing his lunch bag and stuffing it into his backpack.

"Love you darling." Lisa Sadiski said as she kissed her husband goodbye and then her and Richard left.

Grant smiled and told her he loved her as well and then said goodbye to his son before heading back upstairs to get himself ready for the day ahead, it was to be a day that would change his life forever, a day that would lead to the deaths of many people and the destruction of more than one family.

Lisa Sadiski worked for the CIA, well not for them directly and as far as she knew she did not, but she worked in a lab that was sponsored by them and tasked with doing some particularly unethical and very dangerous things in a highly classified wing of the building. Lisa was a lab technician for the army who did not work directly with the people involved in the projects but shared the same floor as them in the lab. That day at around three o'clock there was a leak in the containment unit of the lab. No alarm was sounded though and not one worker was evacuated from the building, if they had been an investigation would have taken place and that would expose certain people and certain activities, the decision was taken on the advice of the main leader of the research party that it be kept quiet.

He assured his bosses and others that the contagion had not escaped their specific lab and that there was nothing to be concerned about, which in was in fact true, the contagion had not accidently escaped, it had been stolen, or at least some of it and to cover their tracks the culprit had released some of the pathogen stating it was an accident. The lab was not shut down and no report was made of the incident.

Lisa had been at the vending machines when she saw the man leave the secure section carrying a canister which she recognised as a freezing canister in which pathogens were kept. She called out to the man and asked him what he was doing, he informed her to mind her own business and he was under instructions to transport the contents to their other lab for further analysis. Lisa was not convinced but before she could say any more her boss called to she and the man disappeared out the door. She reported the affair to the head of the lab and her superior officer, who told her it would be investigated.

Two weeks after the incident Lisa got extremely sick with a pathogen which the doctors could not diagnose, she was in and out of hospitals and all the pathogens that she was working with in the lab were examined to determine if she had been exposed to something there. Grant worked day and night in his own labs trying to find something that could help her. Nothing was found and when she asked her commanding officer about the suspicious man with the cannister she had seen weeks earlier, he acted as if he knew nothing about it, but when pressed he said that it was a harmless drug that he had been transporting to another facility and would say no more. Lisa pushed and pushed and so did Grant who was also in the military, a researcher at a different facility.

Then exactly two weeks and four days later Grant was driving her and his son to the hospital when their car was hit by a supposed drunken driver, the force of the impact killed Lisa instantly and Robert was left in a vegetative state. Grant was in a coma for over four months before he awoke, and it took him a long time to be able to function properly again after the accident. Grant was honourably discharged from the army and put-on medical pension, while his son still lingered on in a twilight world in the hospital. Finally the doctor convinced him that it would be best for his son if he let him go, took him off life support and end his suffering and let him go to a better place. Finally Grant had agreed, and the priest was called to give the boy the Last Rites to ease his way into the next world before the machines were disconnected. He buried his son a week later.

Grant had returned home angry and heartbroken after burying his son beside his wife, his life was over he thought to himself, he just wanted to be with them, and he had considered taking his own life, but then the anger overwhelmed the despair, he would find out what happened and he would make the people responsible pay, he convinced himself what had happened had not been an accident and his investigation into the accident confirmed his suspicion, but he needed to know why, why his family had been taken away from him. He started to go through everything that had happened, he spent all his money and all his time as well as using all his contacts he still had in the military to research what had happened in that lab. He hired the best hackers he could find and eventually he discovered the truth. The truth was his wife had been silenced and in the process his son had died, and he had died, or at least he should have, he had died inside, and he would never live again. But he had a need to punish the people responsible for this, he needed vengeance.

A year later he had a plan, he would get his revenge and he did, making a man do something he did not want to do, placing his wife and son in danger, making him take an innocent life, like he had taken his son's, or that was the way he had seen it, he had been driving and his son and wife had died, if he had been more vigilant…if he had been a better doctor and found the pathogen and the antidote to it…there were so many ifs, but in the end he could not ever forgive himself and he could never forgive them. So he took his revenge, then when it was done, when the man who had covered it all up and his wife and another no-name man in an hotel lobby were dead, an innocent sent to a better place to be with God who would welcome him as he had his son the innocent in his own story. He had used the same methods, pathogens and then forcing them to take an innocent life, to feel what it felt like to be responsible, but he could not let them live, they had to die, and one of their loved ones had to die along with the innocent. After the third one he had perfected the art of doing it, he had developed the perfect toxin, one that he was sure that nobody would be able to counteract, he had a good team which he paid well to assist him, and he knew he could not stop, he had to continue because it made him feel alive, something he had not done in a long time, all those years just waiting for his son to die had robbed him of any feeling. Now he felt powerful, he felt alive and Nathan Ford was not going to take that away from him. The police had dubbed him a serial killer, someone who took lives for no reason, they were idiots and he had sent them notes, showing them that he was better than them and they would never stop him, but they had not understood, they never would, and they would never catch him.

Then he had sent a man to a Brewpub, and he had done what he had to do, but the man he had chosen, the innocent who had been chosen to die, he just refused to die, just like his son he had held on, he had not wanted to take that next step. Well he would help him to see and to accept, Nathan Ford had defied him just as Lisa had defied her boss and that had cost her, this would cost him, he had to die.