"So you decided to come back. Very brave of you." Anna moved into the room where Alpha was already sitting as in their previous encounter. His voice held a hint of amusement.
"I didn't find that I had much choice, really," she replied, settling herself on the opposite settee. "I imagine you know what that's like." She straightened her skirt, pulled out her data pad for making notes, and met his gaze, hoping her manner showed more confidence than she felt.
"One always has a choice," Alpha replied.
"Then I supposed I've chosen to be your doctor." Alpha glared at her.
"I don't need a doctor!"
"Your friend the Commander thinks you do. He said he'd heard you talking to yourself. To other people." She paused, unsure how far to take it; but she'd never learn anything if she didn't start taking a few risks.
"Talking to Blake?" Alpha continued to stare at her. His eyes, cold and hard, revealed nothing.
"Blake is dead," he said flatly.
"The Commander told me that you talked about trying to find him, that you weren't sure--"
"I'm sure," Alpha hissed at her. "I killed him!"
"Is that why you're here? For killing Blake?" Unexpectedly, Alpha let out a laugh.
"Hardly. If it had been anyone but me, she probably would have given them a medal." Anna sat forward and made a note on her pad.
"She who?"
"What?" He looked at her as though he'd just awoken from a trance.
"Who is 'she'? You mentioned her yesterday too."
"She... is never far from my thoughts."
"You asked where 'she' had found me." Alpha didn't reply. "Well, I can tell you, I was recruited for this job by a man. I haven't met any women whatsoever who know that I'm even here."
"She wouldn't have met with you herself. She would have let someone else do the dirty work." He smiled. "No offence."
"But who is she, Alpha? What is her name?" She watched him closely as his eyes began to unfocus again.
"Servelan," he said finally in a hoarse whisper. Anna wrote the name down.
"And I remind you of her?" she prompted. He snapped back.
"You wouldn't thank me if I said you did. No. You remind me -- reminded me -- of someone else from my past."
"A friend? An enemy?" He smiled.
"All that and more."
"What was her name?"
"Anna."
Anna jumped. She stared at him, dumbfounded, but he did not notice. He seemed lost in thought, staring at his hands. Anna began to write down her own name, but found that her hand was shaking too much.
"I suppose it wasn't her real name, after all, but she was only ever Anna to me." He looked up and his eyes began to calculate. "What's wrong, Doctor?"
"I -- nothing!" she stammered unconvincingly. "What is it that reminds you of me -- of her!"
He smiled. "You look just like her, actually. Your face, your hair... It's like looking into the past." He paused, scrutinizing her face. "Except your eyes... Your eyes..." He frowned. Anna shivered. He was staring at her so intensely. She felt the weight of the signal in her pocket and resisted the urge to flee. "Hers were light," he said finally.
"That's why I can't really trust you, Doctor."
"Because I look like an old friend?"
"Because you look too much like an old friend. It can't be a coincidence. Nothing is a coincidence with her." Anna's face must have betrayed her confusion.
"She wants you here, Doctor, and one way or another, she always gets what she wants." He stood up abruptly.
"I think we're done for today." He turned to walk from the room. "I trust you can show yourself out."
Anna exited the room feeling more shaken than before, though she hadn't thought it possible. The Commander was waiting for her, his kind eyes betraying his concern. He obviously wanted her to tell him what had happened, but she was afraid. Alpha was right: her appearance, her name -- it couldn't be a coincidence. And now, she didn't know who to trust.
She hurried back up to the small apartment she'd been assigned in the Central Compound, ostensibly to type up her notes, but sitting down and her computer terminal, she had another far more important task in mind.
It took her only a few moments to disable or bypass the security functions on her computer; there was no way to know who might be watching her, and all her communications from here had to be untraceable. Using a few tricks she'd picked up from friends in school, she quickly rerouted her communiqué, bouncing it off several remote transponders, one as far away as the Mars colony, before finally deciding it was safe. She punched in a code and waited. After a few moments, a face appeared on the screen.
"Central Intelligence. Anna! Is that you? You look awful! Where are you? Everyone has been looking--"
"I don't have time to explain, Peter, but I need a favor." The man looked slightly surprised but nodded.
"Anything you need."
"I need you to do a little digging for me. Quietly. There's a prisoner housed in an underground cell here at Central Command."
"What are you doing at Central Command?" Anna shook her head wearily.
"It's too long a story. And you wouldn't believe it. I'm not sure I even do."
"OK. A prisoner. What's his name?"
"That's what I need you to find out. All I have is the code name Alpha." Peter made a note and nodded to himself.
"Anna, are you all right?" She stared at her friend, wondering how she could possibly answer that question. "If you're in some kind of trouble..."
"I'm not. Not yet, anyway." She smiled weakly. "Please, just find out anything you can about Alpha." He nodded.
"I'll let you know as soon as I can. Where can I reach you?"
"You can't. I'll reach you. This time tomorrow, OK?" Peter looked as though he were about to ask more questions, so Anna quickly cut him off. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Pete." She switched off.
She sat back in her chair, her heart pounding heavily, but she wasn't done yet. Quickly she made her way across the apartment to the closet where she'd stashed her medical kit. Unceremoniously, she withdrew a sample vial and plunged the needle into her arm, drawing out a thick vial of blood. After bandaging herself up, she slipped the vial into her pocket and headed out.
By following the maps posted on the corridor walls, she was quickly able to find the Central Compound Medical Center. She had summoned up her most officious voice and annoyed face demanding that the nurse show her to a free lab with a DNA database connection. The nurse had been offended, but had contacted a superior. Anna hoped her bluff would work.
She drummed her fingers loudly on the desk in front of her, hoping her impatience would lend her the credibility she was so desperately trying to convey. Finally a voice buzzed on the nurses' intercom.
"Give her what she wants," a man's voice said.
"Yes sir, but--"
"Whatever she wants." The nurse looked up at Anna, obviously embarrassed.
"Please follow me." Anna followed the woman down a long white corridor to a small room near the end. The nurse let her in, and Anna slammed the door in her face. Shaking slightly, she sunk into the chair in front of the computer terminal, amazed that her bluff had worked.
Quickly, she went through the motions of disabling the security monitoring protocols on the terminal. She'd never studied computers, but her knowledge of them came naturally. Their logic just made sense to her, so she'd never had any trouble finding her way around them.
Once she was satisfied that her actions wouldn't be recorded, she set to work. She quickly prepared her blood sample to be tested and set the machine to work on extracting and comparing the DNA from her blood to the Federation database. The process took only minutes, but she found herself pacing the tiny room and watching the door, afraid that at any minute she would be caught. Try as she might, she hadn't yet come up with a good excuse for her presence there if she were caught.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the computer beeped, indicating that the program had run its course. Nervously, she called up the results. The first record she had expected, as it was her own. The other two, however were not what she expected; both records had been classified double x, much higher than her clearance would allow. Tentatively, she started trying to work around the security clearance, but what she found puzzled her even more.
Suddenly, there was a soft knock at the door. Anna stood up and turned around, effectively blocking the screen from view. The nurse from the front desk, no longer belligerent, poked her head around the door.
"I just wanted to see if you needed--"
"If I needed anything, I would have asked for it," Anna snapped. The nurse made a face, then seemed to think better of it, and disappeared.
In a panic, Anna grabbed the vial of her own blood and dumped it into the medical waste repository. She quickly copied down the numbers from the two classified files, and then hurried out of the medical center.
Anna's thoughts tumbled over and over one another as she made her way back to her apartment via an unnecessarily long route. Somehow she, or more specifically her biological parents, must have been connected to this man Alpha, and someone very high up in the Federation knew about it. But she didn't, and she didn't think Alpha had deduced the connection yet either.
When she finally made it back to her apartments, she locked herself in the bathroom, where she could be fairly certain there were no surveillance devices, and sat down to think. She ran the water in the bath loudly, but didn't even think of actually getting into the bath.
She tried to recall everything her parents had told her about her biological parents. She'd never really been curious about them, and so she'd never really paid much attention, but now she was cursing her lack of curiosity.
She knew that her adoption had not been through official channels. Her father and mother had arranged it with someone her father worked with quietly, off the books. Worked with or worked for? she asked herself, Concentrate!
Her father had been made captain shortly after she was born, and before that he had been a pilot. Could his promotion have had anything to do with her? Anna stood up and shut off the bath water. Not caring about her appearance, she went out into the main room and sat at the computer terminal.
She quickly checked that her handiwork with the fail safes was still in place before using her medical security clearance to call up her father's personnel record. Within seconds, a much younger version of the man she knew smiled back at her from his service identification. Pouring over the entries, she went back 25 years. Just months after she had been born, her father had been promoted to captain and given his own ship but before that he had been a pilot for a High Council member's personal ship. Councilor Chesku. She continued to search her father's records, but there were no other clues that she could discern, until she came to the notes section.
In the year before she had been born, it seemed her mother and father had applied three times for a permit to have a child, and their application had been thrice denied, the third only months before her birth. Anna sat back in her chair, her mind working furiously. Only someone as highly placed as a member of the High Council could have overridden such a decision. But what could Councilor Chesku possibly have gained from doing her parents such a favor?
Quickly, Anna did a search for the Councilor and pulled up his picture. He was a stoic looking man whose eyes looked deeply afraid as they stared back at her from the screen. He had been killed in a rebel attack on a Presidential palace almost twenty years ago. Anna sighed as she sat back in her chair. Quite literally, a dead end.
Without thinking much about it, she quickly typed up her notes from the day's session, thinking that, if questioned, she could present them to account for her time using the computer. She hadn't been able to find any monitoring devices in the apartment, but she didn't trust them not to be there.
Before long she found herself lying in bed, completely unable to sleep. Alpha's face haunted her with those cold ebony eyes every time she tried to rest. Something about him unnerved her to her very core. She was more determined than ever to find out her connection to him, and figure out who was playing her for a pawn.
Anna tried to calm herself as she walked down the sterile white corridor the next day towards her appointment in the cell. She hadn't slept much. Her thoughts had ricocheted around her head until the early morning hours when mercifully she'd managed to doze for a short time. Now she was trying to collect herself, trying to decide what she should ask, and whom she could trust.
The Commander was waiting for her at the end of the corridor. He smiled at her, but she found herself unable to return the gesture.
"He's waiting for you," he said as he and the other man went through the dance steps for opening the door. Anna said nothing. She did not trust herself to speak until it was absolutely necessary.
The heavy metal door swung open and she stepped into the cool white room. Alpha was waiting for her as before. He was, for the third day in a row, dressed entirely in black. Anna suspected it was a self-imposed uniform rather than one mandated by his captors.
She settled herself onto the couch as before and took out her notes. He said nothing.
"Good morning," she said finally.
"I really think we're past pleasantries, Doctor."
"Fine, then I'll come straight to the point. Tell me about Anna." The name had an instant effect on him. He flushed slightly and leaned forward.
"Why do you want to know about her?"
"Because you say I'm so much like her. I'm curious." He smiled ruefully.
"I think you're a bit more than curious. Have you found the connection then?" She tried to look nonplussed.
"I don't know what you mean."
"The connection between you and my Anna." She realized that this man was no mere patient. The Commander had said he was a genius, and she was beginning to think his powers of observation and deduction could certainly be thus categorized. She wondered if she were a match for him.
"No, I haven't found it. Why don't you explain it to me?" He sat back again.
"I haven't the foggiest idea," he replied casually. "But I know that there is a connection. And now I know that you want to know what it is as much as I do." His manner abruptly changed. "So why don't we stop playing games and get to the point!" He stood up suddenly, his cold black eyes burning.
"We both want to know why you were sent here. Concern for my health is a poor excuse, concern for my sanity, only a slightly better one." He paused, as if calculating. Anna took her chance.
"Fine. What do we know? What are the facts?" He looked at her suddenly, mildly shocked by her interruption.
"Follow me." He strode to the doorway at the opposite end of the room and reluctantly, Anna followed.
The Commander had not been exaggerating in calling the cell a mansion. The main room sprawled out in front of her expansively, dotted here and there with the odd bit of furniture: a reclining meditation chair, a large table littered with electronic components, a tall cabinet with many bottles of wine and what looked to her like copious amounts of adrenaline and soma. Alpha led her across the room to a second doorway that opened into a smaller chamber, more like a study. The walls were lined with bookshelves, each completely full of books of all size shape and genre. A single chair was arranged in the corner near a small drafting table littered with papers.
Alpha strode purposefully to stand before a section of the wall that had been left free of book cases. Anna gasped at what she saw.
A small portrait done in charcoal hung in a frame by itself on the wall. The woman could have been Anna herself but for a few minor differences. The woman in the picture looked to be slightly older, her hair was worn in a different, more old fashioned style, and her eyes, as Alpha had said, were light. These differences were minor, however compared to the overwhelming similarities.
"This, is Anna," the old man said. His voice was softened by sadness, or possibly guilt. Anna knew she had to tell him. She turned to face him, suddenly overcome by the sadness in his eyes.
"My name is also Anna," she said quietly. She watched him struggling with the revelation, his features contorted in confusion. "So you see, it's more of a coincidence than even you could have deduced." Alpha turned away from her and sunk into the chair.
"Who are you?" he demanded, angrily! "If you're lying I swear..." He did not have to finish the threat.
"What would I gain by lying to you? I can tell that you are an observer of the human race. You've observed me. Have I been lying to you?" She pointed at the portrait of herself, yet not herself. "Was my reaction to that a lie?"
He shook his head slowly. "Then why?" he growled. "What is the point of this farce?"
"I'd like to know that as much as you would," she replied, her voice sounding cold even to her own ears. "I've pulled in a favor from a friend," she said slowly. "I wanted to know who you really are. Maybe you can spare him the trouble." Alpha looked up at her, his face calm and impassive again.
"If I tell you my name, you'll be in this deeper than you can imagine," he said simply.
"I'm already in it," she replied. "Who are you?"
"My name is Avon..."
"I didn't find that I had much choice, really," she replied, settling herself on the opposite settee. "I imagine you know what that's like." She straightened her skirt, pulled out her data pad for making notes, and met his gaze, hoping her manner showed more confidence than she felt.
"One always has a choice," Alpha replied.
"Then I supposed I've chosen to be your doctor." Alpha glared at her.
"I don't need a doctor!"
"Your friend the Commander thinks you do. He said he'd heard you talking to yourself. To other people." She paused, unsure how far to take it; but she'd never learn anything if she didn't start taking a few risks.
"Talking to Blake?" Alpha continued to stare at her. His eyes, cold and hard, revealed nothing.
"Blake is dead," he said flatly.
"The Commander told me that you talked about trying to find him, that you weren't sure--"
"I'm sure," Alpha hissed at her. "I killed him!"
"Is that why you're here? For killing Blake?" Unexpectedly, Alpha let out a laugh.
"Hardly. If it had been anyone but me, she probably would have given them a medal." Anna sat forward and made a note on her pad.
"She who?"
"What?" He looked at her as though he'd just awoken from a trance.
"Who is 'she'? You mentioned her yesterday too."
"She... is never far from my thoughts."
"You asked where 'she' had found me." Alpha didn't reply. "Well, I can tell you, I was recruited for this job by a man. I haven't met any women whatsoever who know that I'm even here."
"She wouldn't have met with you herself. She would have let someone else do the dirty work." He smiled. "No offence."
"But who is she, Alpha? What is her name?" She watched him closely as his eyes began to unfocus again.
"Servelan," he said finally in a hoarse whisper. Anna wrote the name down.
"And I remind you of her?" she prompted. He snapped back.
"You wouldn't thank me if I said you did. No. You remind me -- reminded me -- of someone else from my past."
"A friend? An enemy?" He smiled.
"All that and more."
"What was her name?"
"Anna."
Anna jumped. She stared at him, dumbfounded, but he did not notice. He seemed lost in thought, staring at his hands. Anna began to write down her own name, but found that her hand was shaking too much.
"I suppose it wasn't her real name, after all, but she was only ever Anna to me." He looked up and his eyes began to calculate. "What's wrong, Doctor?"
"I -- nothing!" she stammered unconvincingly. "What is it that reminds you of me -- of her!"
He smiled. "You look just like her, actually. Your face, your hair... It's like looking into the past." He paused, scrutinizing her face. "Except your eyes... Your eyes..." He frowned. Anna shivered. He was staring at her so intensely. She felt the weight of the signal in her pocket and resisted the urge to flee. "Hers were light," he said finally.
"That's why I can't really trust you, Doctor."
"Because I look like an old friend?"
"Because you look too much like an old friend. It can't be a coincidence. Nothing is a coincidence with her." Anna's face must have betrayed her confusion.
"She wants you here, Doctor, and one way or another, she always gets what she wants." He stood up abruptly.
"I think we're done for today." He turned to walk from the room. "I trust you can show yourself out."
Anna exited the room feeling more shaken than before, though she hadn't thought it possible. The Commander was waiting for her, his kind eyes betraying his concern. He obviously wanted her to tell him what had happened, but she was afraid. Alpha was right: her appearance, her name -- it couldn't be a coincidence. And now, she didn't know who to trust.
She hurried back up to the small apartment she'd been assigned in the Central Compound, ostensibly to type up her notes, but sitting down and her computer terminal, she had another far more important task in mind.
It took her only a few moments to disable or bypass the security functions on her computer; there was no way to know who might be watching her, and all her communications from here had to be untraceable. Using a few tricks she'd picked up from friends in school, she quickly rerouted her communiqué, bouncing it off several remote transponders, one as far away as the Mars colony, before finally deciding it was safe. She punched in a code and waited. After a few moments, a face appeared on the screen.
"Central Intelligence. Anna! Is that you? You look awful! Where are you? Everyone has been looking--"
"I don't have time to explain, Peter, but I need a favor." The man looked slightly surprised but nodded.
"Anything you need."
"I need you to do a little digging for me. Quietly. There's a prisoner housed in an underground cell here at Central Command."
"What are you doing at Central Command?" Anna shook her head wearily.
"It's too long a story. And you wouldn't believe it. I'm not sure I even do."
"OK. A prisoner. What's his name?"
"That's what I need you to find out. All I have is the code name Alpha." Peter made a note and nodded to himself.
"Anna, are you all right?" She stared at her friend, wondering how she could possibly answer that question. "If you're in some kind of trouble..."
"I'm not. Not yet, anyway." She smiled weakly. "Please, just find out anything you can about Alpha." He nodded.
"I'll let you know as soon as I can. Where can I reach you?"
"You can't. I'll reach you. This time tomorrow, OK?" Peter looked as though he were about to ask more questions, so Anna quickly cut him off. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Pete." She switched off.
She sat back in her chair, her heart pounding heavily, but she wasn't done yet. Quickly she made her way across the apartment to the closet where she'd stashed her medical kit. Unceremoniously, she withdrew a sample vial and plunged the needle into her arm, drawing out a thick vial of blood. After bandaging herself up, she slipped the vial into her pocket and headed out.
By following the maps posted on the corridor walls, she was quickly able to find the Central Compound Medical Center. She had summoned up her most officious voice and annoyed face demanding that the nurse show her to a free lab with a DNA database connection. The nurse had been offended, but had contacted a superior. Anna hoped her bluff would work.
She drummed her fingers loudly on the desk in front of her, hoping her impatience would lend her the credibility she was so desperately trying to convey. Finally a voice buzzed on the nurses' intercom.
"Give her what she wants," a man's voice said.
"Yes sir, but--"
"Whatever she wants." The nurse looked up at Anna, obviously embarrassed.
"Please follow me." Anna followed the woman down a long white corridor to a small room near the end. The nurse let her in, and Anna slammed the door in her face. Shaking slightly, she sunk into the chair in front of the computer terminal, amazed that her bluff had worked.
Quickly, she went through the motions of disabling the security monitoring protocols on the terminal. She'd never studied computers, but her knowledge of them came naturally. Their logic just made sense to her, so she'd never had any trouble finding her way around them.
Once she was satisfied that her actions wouldn't be recorded, she set to work. She quickly prepared her blood sample to be tested and set the machine to work on extracting and comparing the DNA from her blood to the Federation database. The process took only minutes, but she found herself pacing the tiny room and watching the door, afraid that at any minute she would be caught. Try as she might, she hadn't yet come up with a good excuse for her presence there if she were caught.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the computer beeped, indicating that the program had run its course. Nervously, she called up the results. The first record she had expected, as it was her own. The other two, however were not what she expected; both records had been classified double x, much higher than her clearance would allow. Tentatively, she started trying to work around the security clearance, but what she found puzzled her even more.
Suddenly, there was a soft knock at the door. Anna stood up and turned around, effectively blocking the screen from view. The nurse from the front desk, no longer belligerent, poked her head around the door.
"I just wanted to see if you needed--"
"If I needed anything, I would have asked for it," Anna snapped. The nurse made a face, then seemed to think better of it, and disappeared.
In a panic, Anna grabbed the vial of her own blood and dumped it into the medical waste repository. She quickly copied down the numbers from the two classified files, and then hurried out of the medical center.
Anna's thoughts tumbled over and over one another as she made her way back to her apartment via an unnecessarily long route. Somehow she, or more specifically her biological parents, must have been connected to this man Alpha, and someone very high up in the Federation knew about it. But she didn't, and she didn't think Alpha had deduced the connection yet either.
When she finally made it back to her apartments, she locked herself in the bathroom, where she could be fairly certain there were no surveillance devices, and sat down to think. She ran the water in the bath loudly, but didn't even think of actually getting into the bath.
She tried to recall everything her parents had told her about her biological parents. She'd never really been curious about them, and so she'd never really paid much attention, but now she was cursing her lack of curiosity.
She knew that her adoption had not been through official channels. Her father and mother had arranged it with someone her father worked with quietly, off the books. Worked with or worked for? she asked herself, Concentrate!
Her father had been made captain shortly after she was born, and before that he had been a pilot. Could his promotion have had anything to do with her? Anna stood up and shut off the bath water. Not caring about her appearance, she went out into the main room and sat at the computer terminal.
She quickly checked that her handiwork with the fail safes was still in place before using her medical security clearance to call up her father's personnel record. Within seconds, a much younger version of the man she knew smiled back at her from his service identification. Pouring over the entries, she went back 25 years. Just months after she had been born, her father had been promoted to captain and given his own ship but before that he had been a pilot for a High Council member's personal ship. Councilor Chesku. She continued to search her father's records, but there were no other clues that she could discern, until she came to the notes section.
In the year before she had been born, it seemed her mother and father had applied three times for a permit to have a child, and their application had been thrice denied, the third only months before her birth. Anna sat back in her chair, her mind working furiously. Only someone as highly placed as a member of the High Council could have overridden such a decision. But what could Councilor Chesku possibly have gained from doing her parents such a favor?
Quickly, Anna did a search for the Councilor and pulled up his picture. He was a stoic looking man whose eyes looked deeply afraid as they stared back at her from the screen. He had been killed in a rebel attack on a Presidential palace almost twenty years ago. Anna sighed as she sat back in her chair. Quite literally, a dead end.
Without thinking much about it, she quickly typed up her notes from the day's session, thinking that, if questioned, she could present them to account for her time using the computer. She hadn't been able to find any monitoring devices in the apartment, but she didn't trust them not to be there.
Before long she found herself lying in bed, completely unable to sleep. Alpha's face haunted her with those cold ebony eyes every time she tried to rest. Something about him unnerved her to her very core. She was more determined than ever to find out her connection to him, and figure out who was playing her for a pawn.
Anna tried to calm herself as she walked down the sterile white corridor the next day towards her appointment in the cell. She hadn't slept much. Her thoughts had ricocheted around her head until the early morning hours when mercifully she'd managed to doze for a short time. Now she was trying to collect herself, trying to decide what she should ask, and whom she could trust.
The Commander was waiting for her at the end of the corridor. He smiled at her, but she found herself unable to return the gesture.
"He's waiting for you," he said as he and the other man went through the dance steps for opening the door. Anna said nothing. She did not trust herself to speak until it was absolutely necessary.
The heavy metal door swung open and she stepped into the cool white room. Alpha was waiting for her as before. He was, for the third day in a row, dressed entirely in black. Anna suspected it was a self-imposed uniform rather than one mandated by his captors.
She settled herself onto the couch as before and took out her notes. He said nothing.
"Good morning," she said finally.
"I really think we're past pleasantries, Doctor."
"Fine, then I'll come straight to the point. Tell me about Anna." The name had an instant effect on him. He flushed slightly and leaned forward.
"Why do you want to know about her?"
"Because you say I'm so much like her. I'm curious." He smiled ruefully.
"I think you're a bit more than curious. Have you found the connection then?" She tried to look nonplussed.
"I don't know what you mean."
"The connection between you and my Anna." She realized that this man was no mere patient. The Commander had said he was a genius, and she was beginning to think his powers of observation and deduction could certainly be thus categorized. She wondered if she were a match for him.
"No, I haven't found it. Why don't you explain it to me?" He sat back again.
"I haven't the foggiest idea," he replied casually. "But I know that there is a connection. And now I know that you want to know what it is as much as I do." His manner abruptly changed. "So why don't we stop playing games and get to the point!" He stood up suddenly, his cold black eyes burning.
"We both want to know why you were sent here. Concern for my health is a poor excuse, concern for my sanity, only a slightly better one." He paused, as if calculating. Anna took her chance.
"Fine. What do we know? What are the facts?" He looked at her suddenly, mildly shocked by her interruption.
"Follow me." He strode to the doorway at the opposite end of the room and reluctantly, Anna followed.
The Commander had not been exaggerating in calling the cell a mansion. The main room sprawled out in front of her expansively, dotted here and there with the odd bit of furniture: a reclining meditation chair, a large table littered with electronic components, a tall cabinet with many bottles of wine and what looked to her like copious amounts of adrenaline and soma. Alpha led her across the room to a second doorway that opened into a smaller chamber, more like a study. The walls were lined with bookshelves, each completely full of books of all size shape and genre. A single chair was arranged in the corner near a small drafting table littered with papers.
Alpha strode purposefully to stand before a section of the wall that had been left free of book cases. Anna gasped at what she saw.
A small portrait done in charcoal hung in a frame by itself on the wall. The woman could have been Anna herself but for a few minor differences. The woman in the picture looked to be slightly older, her hair was worn in a different, more old fashioned style, and her eyes, as Alpha had said, were light. These differences were minor, however compared to the overwhelming similarities.
"This, is Anna," the old man said. His voice was softened by sadness, or possibly guilt. Anna knew she had to tell him. She turned to face him, suddenly overcome by the sadness in his eyes.
"My name is also Anna," she said quietly. She watched him struggling with the revelation, his features contorted in confusion. "So you see, it's more of a coincidence than even you could have deduced." Alpha turned away from her and sunk into the chair.
"Who are you?" he demanded, angrily! "If you're lying I swear..." He did not have to finish the threat.
"What would I gain by lying to you? I can tell that you are an observer of the human race. You've observed me. Have I been lying to you?" She pointed at the portrait of herself, yet not herself. "Was my reaction to that a lie?"
He shook his head slowly. "Then why?" he growled. "What is the point of this farce?"
"I'd like to know that as much as you would," she replied, her voice sounding cold even to her own ears. "I've pulled in a favor from a friend," she said slowly. "I wanted to know who you really are. Maybe you can spare him the trouble." Alpha looked up at her, his face calm and impassive again.
"If I tell you my name, you'll be in this deeper than you can imagine," he said simply.
"I'm already in it," she replied. "Who are you?"
"My name is Avon..."