“Inside voices, boys,” he said. “Thanks for the ride, greatly appreciated.”
“No problem, we were headed there anyway,” said Mark. “My daughter, Ruthie, is out for pizza with her little friends. You know which fields your boys are playing on today?”
They were headed to a vast open field of ten acres along Pouncey Tract Road that had been developed into a soccer complex dotted by different soccer fields with the occasional refreshment stand. Both men knew better than to try and start a conversation in front of their children. It could place the boys’ lives in danger even under normal circumstances and after the warnings Mark was getting he was taking every precaution.
“I think our fields abut each other,” said Robert. “We can stand in the middle and cheer for both.”
Once the boys were settled along the various sidelines the fathers took up camp between the two fields where they had a clear view of both matches. Mark took out his phone and scrolled through the screens, quickly turning on the low level white noise.
“How are things these days?” he asked, as his son waved to him from the center of the field. Mark smiled and waved back at him.
“Not good. I suppose you’ve wondered about my wife’s death.”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
“Carol was not only an expert at sailing, she was also a strong swimmer. My wife was murdered.”
“What did the autopsy show?”
“That she had drowned.” Robert looked down at his shoes. Mark let a little time pass, watching his oldest in the soccer game as the two younger ones ran up and down the sidelines.
“Do you know anything more than that?” asked Mark.
“There was no toxicology report, no blood tests done. Her lungs were filled with water and they stopped at that. But, there were also no signs of a struggle. There was nothing to indicate that she fought like hell to stay alive.”
“Why would they have wanted your wife dead?”
“I’m hoping that I don’t really know the answer to that. If it’s what I suspect we are all in a lot more danger and it’s only a matter of time before I turn up as an accident as well. My wife was an orphan of sorts. She grew up on an orphanage, anyway. Did you know that most of the children who have ever grown up on an American orphanage were only social orphans? They had a close, living relative but not one who could take care of them, or maybe wanted them. That was Carol’s story. Her mother died and her father couldn’t take care of Carol or her two younger sisters. They all ended up at an orphanage.”
Robert’s son scored a goal and was doing a small dance that resembled a chicken. Robert smiled and yelled, “Good job, son!” Mark waited patiently for him to go on with his story.
“Her father dropped all contact when Carol was nine and went on with his life but refused to sign away his rights as a parent. That made Carol and her siblings’ part of this vast, lost generation that had no family to speak of but couldn’t be adopted. That’s when she was taken into the Schmetterling Project,” said Robert, looking up at Mark.
“What are you talking about?” asked Mark, a little too loudly. “That idea was dropped,” he hissed, “a long time ago.”
“No, it was put into action but all references to it were dismissed and then destroyed, or so we thought. One Holocaust was enough.”
Mark remembered the idea from when he first came into the Circle. Even then it was already just a legend of something that was bandied about but eventually discarded as too risky.
“Then how do you know about it?”
“Carol’s maiden name was Baumann. Her father was one of the original twenty.”
Mark glanced back at Robert. “That explains a little bit about why the Circle wants to protect you.”
“So you got an order? I’m not surprised. I know a lot about the grand scheme to collect as many children as possible worldwide. The Circle looked for children who were either tangled in social services or left to fend for themselves and helped them eventually get placed at orphanages. These would become the new recruits to infiltrate every aspect of governments, Fortune 500 corporations, large non-profit organizations. It was devised as a vast web identifiable only by where someone started out in life.”
“But why wouldn’t the Circle want to keep you quiet?”
“Because they don’t know if I left a record and because in some cells murder is still seen as a sin.”
“Lucky for both of us.”
It was a vague reference to the continued influence of both the Anglican and Jewish hierarchy.
The Schmetterling Project was supposed to beat Management at its own scheme but it had also become a lesson in humility.