AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I shook my head. Wrong. That made no sense.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Doc Savage was an only child.”
“No,” said Kira, looking straight at me. “Doc Savage was a twin.”
CHAPTER 58
I STARED AT the two pictures side by side. Out of nowhere, a new branch of my family tree had just been added. Suddenly, I had a great-uncle.
“Why didn’t I know about this guy?” I asked.
“Because your family was really messed up,” said Kira. She took the pictures and put them down on the table. She pulled out a ledger and opened it to a middle page. It was filled with anatomical stats—heights, weights, muscle measurements—along with nutritional data and athletic performance records. Running, swimming, hiking, boxing, marksmanship. All noted in painstaking detail, like lab notes.
“Doc Savage was a human science project,” Kira said. “He was part of a twenty-year experiment conducted by his father. The goal was to create the perfect physical and mental specimen—a man who was the best at everything. The twin brother was the control. Their father turned one brother into a superman and let the other brother fend for himself. That’s why you’ve never heard the name Calvin Savage. Nobody has.”
She walked over to another row of shelves and came back with a thick leather binder. The title stenciled on the cover was “Sunlight.” She handed the binder to me. I opened it. Stuck between the cover and the first page was a photo of a man in a lab coat. Bursting out of it, actually. Because his build was almost as big as Doc Savage’s.
“John Sunlight,” I said. Who else could it be? I looked for any similarity to Kira. Definitely not the hair. Her great-grandfather was totally bald.
“Let’s sit,” said Kira. She cleared off two leather armchairs against the wall. The chairs looked like they belonged in a men’s club. They even smelled like cigars. I sat down. The leather was soft and worn. Pretty comfortable, actually. I felt like I should be wearing a smoking jacket. Kira tugged her chair around to face mine. Our knees were almost touching.
“Listen,” she said. “My great-grandfather was a genius. Close to Doc Savage’s level. But he was twisted. Delusional. Probably a sociopath. He had all these insane theories about how to reorder the world. He even managed to steal some of Doc’s technology and weapons. But he realized that to getallthe secrets, he needed an inside man. So he reached out to Cal, who didn’t have much going for him. He and Cal made a pact. That’s how John Sunlight got his hands on the manual for Doc Savage’s training.”
“There was amanual?”
“Absolutely,” said Kira. “The full regimen, from fourteen months of age to twenty-one. It was all written down. Physical training. Mental challenges. Martial arts. Languages. Science. History. Music.”
“So after Sunlight stole the manual,” I asked, “what did he do with it? Use it to train his mercenaries?”
“No,” said Kira. “He used it to start a school. With himself and Cal in charge.”
“A school?” I asked. “Like what? A college?”
“A secret academy,” said Kira, “based on the Doc Savage methods. Strict discipline from infancy on, every minute programmed, no outside influences. My great-grandfather took the Doc Savage training and corrupted it, turned it into something else.”
“Turned it intowhat?” I asked.
“Into something that would help him extend his influence and take over the world,” said Kira. “Espionage. Infiltration. Psyops. Murder.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. “How can you possibly…?”
Her look stopped me in mid-sentence.
“Because I was raised there,” said Kira. “I was trained there. In eighty years, I’m the only student to leave without authorization. I escaped when I was a teenager.”
I leaned back against the wall. Suddenly a lot of things were adding up. But not everything.
“Wait,” I said. “So you mean you put up with that evil shit for all those years and then decided to run away? Why? What changed? Did you suddenly grow a conscience?”
Kira’s eyes dropped. Her voice got soft and low.
“I can’t talk about that,” she said.
Something in the way she said it told me to leave it alone.
“Okay,” I said. “But where did you go? You’re not a teenager anymore. Where have you been all this time? What were you doing—kidnapping innocent college professors?”
“I promise,” she said, “you’re my first. I’ve been all over the world. Made plenty of money. I’ve been lots of different people, and I’ve covered my tracks pretty well. But the school is still operating, still pumping out graduates. They’re getting better, and smarter, and more dangerous. You cannot believe the amount of evil they are responsible for. It’s everywhere.”
