Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

“It’s easier to talk to a stranger about who you really are.”
    Sydney’s face caught. “You’re absolutely right, Danny. I guess it’s time for me to tell you who I am, or more specifically what I am.”

Chapter 51
    What else could there be?
    Danny could tell from the look in her eyes Sydney was about to blow his mind. Again.
    “Have you ever heard of the eugenics movement?” she asked him.
    Danny thought for a moment. Movements were political. He thought back to his freshman year in college, to Political Science 101. He could recall everything: seeing his professor at the front of the room, hearing the ancient air-conditioning unit cranking out mildewed air near the windows, smelling Becky Johnson’s hairspray and wanting to feel every curve beneath the tight sweaters she wore. But his photographic memory could not recall any of the lessons to which he didn’t care to remember. He broke down the word eugenics and took a shot at an answer. “It’s got something to do with genetics, right?”
    Sydney nodded. Then something Danny wasn’t ready for happened. A lone tear crept down her cheek.
    Danny reached out to her. “Hey,” he whispered. He touched her shoulder, and she embraced him in an awkward sideways hug constrained by seat belts and rattled nerves. “It’s okay.”
    Sydney straightened and wiped away the tear. “I’m sorry. It’s just …” She stared into Danny’s eyes and didn’t need to finish.
    “I know, Sydney. All this … I know it’s hard. Take your time.”
    Sydney stared out of the windshield for a long moment and then sighed. “A British scientist named Sir Francis Galton was obsessed with human characteristics, more specifically how to perfect human characteristics. He studied the bloodlines of prominent members of Victorian-era British society, including members of the royal family. He concluded that he could manipulate the genes that gave them their higher than average intelligence and physical qualities such as their above-average height and empirically attractive features. He believed that if he could manipulate genes from a relatively small group, genes from whole populations could be altered as well.”
    Sydney paused. Her eyes swelled again, and she looked away from Danny. He knew where she was going.
    “Who I am, or more specifically what I am.”
    Danny only needed to look at her to confirm her explanation. Sydney Dumas was over six feet tall and had used her brilliant mind to ascertain a high station in life. Then there were her “attractive features.” Her skin glowed with unblemished perfection, her teeth resembled navy officers standing at attention in their perfect dress whites. Her green eyes loomed with a quiet confidence that could only be backed up by her superior intellect. As Danny analyzed each part of Sydney and then wrapped her up into a whole person, it was easy for him to see that the creation of Sydney Dumas hadn’t been left up to random chance. She had been a science experiment.
    “My biological father was Knobby’s … that was my nickname for Colin, Knobby. He was Knobby’s assistant before becoming a full professor himself. Years later, they both were initiated into the Bilderbergers as academic advisers. At that time, my father was asked to take part in one of their experiments, which was eugenics. He agreed, and a woman handpicked by a Bilderberger doctor was inseminated with his sperm. My father was never told who would be the mother of his child, but his curiosity got the better of him. He was able to track her down. She was also a professor, at Cambridge. She taught English there after she graduated on a full athletic scholarship.”
    “Let me guess,” Danny interjected, “swimming.”
    Sydney nodded. “It was the seventies, and women’s liberation was in full swing. My mother wanted a baby and didn’t feel she needed a man to help her raise it.”
    “So what happened after they met?”
    “My father had already begun having ill thoughts about the Bilderberger agenda. He and my mother became friends, and he told my mother about his feelings. She persuaded him to tell the world what he knew. But he never got the chance. They were killed in a car crash made to look like an accident …”
    Her voice trailed off. It didn’t take a cop to figure out the obvious. “The Bilderbergers.”
    Sydney nodded again as a second tear plunged down her cheek. “Knobby was also concerned with what the Bilderbergers were doing, but he