So yeah, Kato and Karl had gotten jobs as mercenaries, given their skill set. Fuck, the way the world was now, they were probably paid up the wazoo to head out to war zones, the ability to tote a gun, hunt shifty prey, shoulder a combat load, these were attributes valued by various governments, all on the sly of course. Most likely if they were captured, they’d be disavowed, unacknowledged, corpses burned, left in the desert to die.
So not the right guys to piss off on a good day. But I had my own bomb to drop as well.
“That’s funny because I’ve been hired by Halliburton as well,” I said smoothly. “You know, confidential shit.”
And the twins’ jaws dropped.
“What the fuck?” asked Karl, disbelieving. “You’re royalty, no way they’d take you.”
That was true, a lot of military outfits were reluctant to accept anyone of fame or notoriety because it’d draw attention to whatever squadron they were in, making it doubly or triply vulnerable. But that was only the beginning of my bomb.
“I gave up the crown,” I said without a blink. “Call me Kristian now, no ‘Highness’ needed.”
And the twins positively fell on the floor then.
“You … disavowed the throne?” Karl muttered with disbelief, exchanging glances with his brother. “Is that even possible? Who’s the Crown Prince then?”
I shrugged, disinterested.
“Fuck if I know,” I said. “Fuck if I care.”
And it was the truth. I realized I’d never been interested in being Prince, certainly not the ceremonial kind. And that’s what my duties had been, those of a dilettante, always dabbling but never really getting in deep, skimming the surface but never knowing what was really happening. And I was through with that shit, just over it. I wanted in on the good stuff, leveraging myself in whichever way was most effective, my contribution to the world meaningful, with real ramifications and follow-up.
And so I’d joined an American defense contractor. It was twisted, I admit, Halliburton doesn’t exactly have a great reputation as a moral, upright corporate citizen, but at the same time, we weren’t fighting a straightforward, simple war. Shit was twisted these days, the unbelievable now a reality, the enemy a dark, shifty, shadow that could scatter into a thousand cells before coagulating once more into a coherent being, even more lethal than imagined.
But Karl and Kato couldn’t believe it, that we were on the same team.
“Halliburton doesn’t hire non-Americans,” Kato ground out. “How the fuck did you work that?”
I gave them a cold smile.
“Halliburton doesn’t hire non-Americans within the United States,” I said smoothly. “Elsewhere, anything goes. Besides, how’d you get hired? You gave up your American citizenship, as far as I remember, to become Legionnaires.”
“That’s right,” said Kato slowly. “But we were reinstated by the State Department when the company petitioned for expedited naturalization.”
WTF? What was expedited naturalization? I’d never heard of that and it sounded mighty shady.
But Kato just shrugged.
“Anything goes, brother, in war anything goes.”
And that brought home his point because it was true, anything could happen in this fucked up place. From the circumstances of our birth, to discovering that we were brothers, to the fact that we’d been living a lie of sorts this entire time, our world filled with the depths of poverty, the heights of unimaginable wealth, and finally the machinations of the Rothschilds, the Venetians, Violet, Georg, and finally, the Sterlings. Because where was Tina? Our calls to her parents had been frustrating, to say the least.
“Stay away from our daughter!” shrieked Lady Sterling into the phone. “Stay away! Christina was our only hope and now, now! Robert, get over here, I’m going to …!”
The phone dropped, probably because of the woman’s overwrought hysterics. But the receiver crackled once again and a man’s voice came on.
“Leave my daughter be,” Lord Sterling snarled into the phone, “If only she’d never met you. We never should have put her into Miss Carroll’s, we should have kept her right here with us, kept an eye on her.”
And I’d just shook my head silently, disgusted. Tina was a grown woman, my encounter with her had been the best of my life and I was positive she’d felt the same, even if everything was different now.
“Sir,” I said into the receiver courteously, careful to keep the impatience out of my voice, maintain an even tone. “Where is your daughter? What do you know?”
But the voice of the screaming woman grew louder in the background, making any reasonable conversation impossible, Lady Sterling’s wails like a banshee, and a couple hard thumps rang out, like she was banging her head against a wall.
“Mary, stop, stop!” called Lord Sterling, trying to halt whatever his wife was doing. But suddenly his voice dropped to a low growl.
“Tina’s in Cambodia,” he spoke quickly into the phone, under his voice. “Siem Reap last I heard.” And then the receiver went dead.