“But you did?”
“Boy, did I. Look at this,” she said excitedly waiving a computer color printout under his nose.
“Margo, you’re going to have to help me here. I’ve been an ER doctor for more than a decade. It’s been a long time since we were in medical school and studied how to interpret forensic DNA strands.”
“The first three lines are Alik’s, Evan’s and Meg’s.”
“Okay,” he said looking at the jagged lines on the page trying to compare them but not really sure what it was he was supposed to be comparing.
Margo put a second sheet of paper next to the first. “And this is Creed’s.”
“Okay,” Theo said and began looking among the three Winter children’s DNA data and Creed’s. It only took a moment for him to realize Margo’s find. “What in the heck?”
“So you see it, too?”
“A match?”
“It sure looks like it.”
“Seven out of a possible thirteen bases including the Y-chromosome!”
“That’s a 99.9 percent accurate result, Theo.”
“How could that be?”
“What are we going to do?”
“Do we tell them?”
“How do we explain this?”
“And that means…”
“Yes, the data is pretty conclusive.”
“They share the same genetic pool.”
“They’re brothers.”
40 A Well-Oiled Machine
It looked, at first glance, to be a well-maintained military college campus located outside a small, rural town in Germany. The Facility covered thirty-seven acres of rich, green land. Clusters of evergreen and deciduous trees were encouraged to grow throughout offering not only aesthetic appeal but coverage from both aerial and land surveillance. A fifteen-foot electric fence surrounded the entire compound. The original architects of The Facility spent a lot of time and care to be sure they created the most efficient infrastructure.
At the center of the thirty-seven acres were the buildings. There were six main buildings all surrounding a magnificent courtyard. The first building a visitor (not that there were ever very many visitors) would come to would be Headquarters. It stood three stories tall with walls made of black, one-way windows.
The building to its right was the woman’s barracks. It was a one-story building sectioned into three parts. Each section housed a different age group of female metasoldiers.
The next building was a three-story, state of the art training facility and gymnasium. In this building, the metas had every possible indoor physical activity available to them including weightlifting equipment, basketball courts, three Olympic-size swimming pools, gymnastic equipment and a martial arts dojo, just to name some of the options housed inside. The metas also attended classes in this building. They were schooled in the art of combat, weaponry, tactical strategies and conditioning. This was one of the busiest buildings in the entire complex. It was open all day and all night and was in constant use.
Continuing counter-clockwise around the center courtyard, next to the training facility is the “mess hall” and commissary. This building opened at 4am and closed at midnight. Meals were served every three hours. The commissary wasn’t like a standard military commissary. Nothing had to be purchased, only inventoried. If a meta needed a shirt or a pair of socks, he or she just went to the commissary, checked them out from the stockers and left with them. No soldier had money because they didn’t need any. Everything was provided for them.
To the west of the “mess hall” was the campus’ Research Hospital. This hospital was a mystery to most of the metas on campus except the first floor which held the triage and emergency room. In their line of work, visits to the first floor were inevitable. The building was three stories tall and was rumored to have a basement, but the metas on base didn’t question what they didn’t know. They only did as they were ordered. Period. If there were things happening on the other floors of the hospital, it was on a need-to-know-basis. Most soldiers on campus didn’t need to know.
The last building is the men’s barracks. It too was sectioned into three parts. Each section was home to a different age-group of soldiers. The youngest were age five to eleven. The next was twelve to fifteen. The oldest group was sixteen and up.