Double-life Well Lived

Chapter 3

Clara sat in the darkness of her home office, only a single lamp lit in the room with the glow of her laptop screen echoed off her specialized glasses. Having access to some of the most incredible technological advances and the smartest people in the world was a great perk to running her grandfather’s company. The glasses she wore looked normal in appearance but when she wore them, they instantly read her biometrics through a digital eye scanner and then from there the encrypted email in front of her, received from a very dark corner of the web, could be decrypted, and read. Once she turned her glasses off however, the email would disappear forever. She had one chance to read it, memorize and then action it.

She had only been seventeen in her senior year of high school, still reeling from the kidnapping not even a full year before when she’d had an anonymous email arrive to her titled “we know it was you” accompanied with the photograph that had been all over the news of her being rescued by local law enforcement. The news outlets had reported that one of the three captors had turned on the other two before killing himself after he had changed his mind about being involved with the potential murder of two young girls. He had set her free to escape while he fought the other two and they all died. Her grandfather had paid hefty amounts of money to buy off anyone who suspected or tried to prove differently, and, in the end, the story died off as some other rich and famous person got into trouble. When her grandfather’s security team had arrived to rescue Clara, she had already killed three men and was making her way through the old, abandoned apartment complex to escape.  Disguised as local law enforcement they whisked her out and the story had stuck.

Initially she had been alarmed by the email and considering that she was very tech savvy and used top-of-the-line equipment with state-of-the-art security protection she was stumped when she couldn’t track the email and when she tried it vanished from her inbox. It had disappeared as if she had deleted it from the universe. A week later, she got a similar email and the same thing had happened with it deleting as soon as she tried to track it. After four weeks and four emails she had been frustrated and intrigued and angry with whoever she thought was trying to blackmail her. Then there had been nothing in the fifth week and she tossed and turn more in the seven days that followed that than when she had first got home after the kidnapping. On week six, the exact anniversary of her escape, she had an invite from the same email address to participate in a trial for physical fitness and martial arts training and it took her seconds to reply.  She wanted to know who was cyberstalking her and she agreed to the meeting.

A black car with tinted windows had picked her up and delivered her to a nondescript building in a shadier part of town. She had never seen the driver but as she went to leave the car and the doors locked keeping her in, a female voice had come over the speaker telling her to leave all weapons in the back seat or she could go home right then and there. After deliberating for what felt like a long time but was likely less than a minute, curiosity had gotten the better of her and so she left her throwing knives and switchblade in the car and had exited and made her way into the front door of the building. Walking down a long-darkened corridor had her heart racing and her palms sweating her PTSD had reared its ugly head.  Her breathing grew shallow and quickened considerably, she felt weak and panicked and grabbed onto the wall for support, fear of fainting in an unknown place surrounding her. But that disconnected voice from the car was suddenly overhead, reminding her to breath, to take ownership of her triumphs in her own freedoms and to finish that march down the hall.

So, she had gathered her wits, fought the emotions that were suffocating her and made it to the end of the hall and shoved the big black door open. To say she had been surprised to see a woman no bigger than herself sitting at a desk with a wall of multiple monitors behind her had been an understatement.

“Welcome Clara. My name is Naomi. I have a proposition for you.” Naomi had swung her hand towards an empty chair opposite the desk. “Please sit and I will explain. At the end of our interview, if you choose to leave, we will let you go. You will never hear from us again. However, if you choose to be part of our collective, it is a lifetime of a rewarding career ridding the world of misogynistic and sadistic bastards that prey on the weak and the helpless.” As Clara had made her way to her seat and was sitting, Naomi questioned. “Why did you kill those men?”

She answered before she had thought better of it, forgetting for a moment to stick to the story her grandfather had crafted. “They threatened to kill my little sister. They had poisoned her. I heard them say she was getting better in hospital so they would have to finish the job. I wasn’t going to let that happen.” She sat in the chair with her back straight and rigid, her hands on her lap sweating and trembling.

“You were very brave.” It didn’t seem like a compliment the way Naomi said it and her next statement erased any consideration that it could have been. “It was stupid to act rashly and without considering all your options. We will train you to remove that emotional response and to seek all the options in front of you. You ended up with a broken nose and a pretty big scar on your face.” Naomi said nothing as Clara touched her fingertips to her cheek, the scar still bright pink against her fair skin. “I can’t promise you’ll never be hurt in a mission, but I can promise you’ll never be alone, and you’ll always be valued.”

Clara leaned forward her grey eyes wide with wonder. “Who are you?”

“We are Bellona. A collective of extraordinary women put on this earth to protect those who need our help. We will not rest until the evil  that men cause to women is eradicated, which I’m afraid, means we will be here forever.” She placed her palms on her desk and pushed her chair backwards, raising to her feet “you see Clara, there will always be men who will consider a woman less than property, an object to be abused or toyed with.” As she saw Clara’s mouth open, she held up a finger. “While I won’t say we don’t care about little men who occasionally slap their wives, I mean, we have dealt with those as well, however our focus remains on the animals that run forced prostitution rings, s*x-traffickers, serial killers and rapists. We rescue those whose governments have failed and we take on the cases that others have forgotten.” She pushed a button on her desk and the screens behind her immediately lit of and closed off, faces upon faces of women, girls, children flitting on and off the screens in random movements. “All of these individuals you see are currently in danger, missing, kidnapped, pimped out or at risk.” She leaned a hip on the desk and stood immediately in front of Clara. “Yes, before you ask the question, we do rescue men and we do take out women. It does seem however that the bulk of our work revolves around the opposite.”

She reached out a hand and pulled Clara into a standing position. They were easily the same height, a mere five-foot-two inches but where Clara felt too curvy in her own skin, Naomi was athletic and sleek. “If you choose to work with us, it won’t be easy. You will need to train and train hard. You also must not give up your life that you have now, and you must never waver from your current path. You need to merge your two worlds seamlessly. That means, you will someday take over your grandfather’s company.” She held her hand as she led her out of the room. “You must complete your studies and make him proud and be the protégé he has dreamed you to be. You may even marry and have children if that is what you’ve always desired, although most of us don’t.” She laughed lowly at Clara’s surprised expression. “Clara, we’ve been watching you for awhile now. In fact,” her laugh was a bit louder now, “you were supposed to be a rescue mission for us and just as our team was preparing to infiltrate and get you out, you took matters into your own hands. You rescued yourself with much more gusto and panache than we would have. You impressed us. Since then, you have been on our radar. We gave you time to heal. We think you’re ready to train now.”

“I was a rescue mission?” Clara had asked incredulously. “Then why let me go through all of that? I could have gotten killed!” She ripped her hand out of Naomi’s. Angry at the possibility that someone else could have saved her.

Naomi’s dark eyes fixated and stared deeply into Clara’s.  She sighed deeply and placed her hands on her shoulders, never letting their gazes unlock. “You didn’t need us, Clara. Yes, you got hurt but you learned, and you did what you needed to do to ensure that those men never hurt anyone ever again. It was good for your mind, your soul if you believe in that stuff, to handle that situation on your own. You are made of the kind of strength and passion that makes you the perfect candidate for our collective.” They stood in front of two doors. “To your right is the door outside. A car is waiting to take you back to your campus and to your room. To your left, is the door to a future you never dreamed of that includes a team willing to train you, work with you and help you develop the skills that already innately thrive in you.”

That afternoon Clara had chosen the door to the left. She found out later that the door to the right was a bathroom and they never actually believed she would turn down the offer to do vigilante work.  Now as she sat in her office and read the file of a twenty-three-year-old woman who had gone on a blind date three days ago and had disappeared off the face of the earth, she felt the energy rise in her chest. She finished reading the file, removed her glasses and watched as her screen went dark. This was a local job, here in her home state. She would have the job done by midnight, the woman delivered to a local hospital by one in the morning and she herself would be back at her desk at Draxton by eight a.m. Her team was already assembled and waiting. She stood and reached for her black leather jacket and moved to the door. She pushed her ear bud into her ear as she exited her office and made her way to her car. Being a billionaire heiress had afforded her a lifestyle that she could do whatever she wanted when she wanted. She entered the car in her underground parking and drove the half-mile under ground to a side road north of her property. Pulling the car out of what appeared to be the side of a mountain but was in effect a strategically built garage, she left her estate and headed to the helicopter pad ten minutes down the road.

All the land was hers here. She had bought it all, in effect catering to the notion she was a billionaire recluse who shunned the spotlight after being abducted as a teenager. Her team jokingly called her Batman, and she couldn’t help but agree at the similarities. In her opinion, the main difference, apart that he was a fictional character and Gotham was nowhere near as cool as New York, was he was an orphan, and her parents were very much alive and a pain in her ass. She would have lived remotely just to avoid those two on their own, let alone the hordes of paparazzi her mother surrounded herself with. As she parked the car and walked to her helicopter, she considered having an Alfred would be nice though; someone to warm up the copter or make her tea. Instead, as she began the checks to initiate flight to rendezvous with her team, she was very much aware of how alone she was, in the middle of nowhere, with nobody but herself, her therapy dogs and the drone of her machines. She connected to her earpiece and spoke into the darkness of night to her team, “Who’s ready to kick some ass?”