Apprentice

Ardath Rekha


9. Jarvis: Regret

Lieutenant Reginald Jarvis had informed his secretary that he was to receive no calls or interruptions. Ordinarily, this would have meant that he was working feverishly on some aspect of the Project, but today he found himself simply staring at nothing. Occasionally his eyes would move to the files on his desk. Two dossiers and a coroner's report lay in an untidy pile.

The Kowalczyk girl was dead. Her body had been discovered two days ago in the bowels of Seti Station, after she'd been missing for almost a week. Her erstwhile protector had caught up with with her and tortured her to death.

He didn't need to open the file at this point. The images and the coroner's descriptions were burned into his brain.

_My fault,_ he thought with anguish. _All my fault. Never should have put the tracer in her._

Somehow Riddick must have detected the chip. It had been cut out of the girl's arm and put in her mouth, in the age-old traditional warning against people who turned State's Evidence. And that was probably the gentlest thing that had been done to her.

The body had been barely recognizable as human when it was found, but the dental and tissue type records had matched almost instantaneously. The authorities on Seti Station had been on the lookout for Audrey "Jack" Kowalczyk already. The whole time, that damned chip had been signaling that she was somewhere on the station, but it took a drunken janitor to find her.

_It wasn't supposed to go down like this,_ he thought again futilely. Riddick should never have been able to detect the tracer, for one thing. The fucking device was supposed to be invisible to all available scanners! But there it was in a little baggie on his desk, still smeared with the girl's blood.

She'd been raped repeatedly, according to the report. Semen samples had shown a positive match with Riddick's DNA. Worst of all, the free histamine tests had shown that every single wound had been inflicted while she was still alive.

_He wasn't supposed to be this unstable,_ Jarvis protested mentally, his eyes moving to the thick dossier that covered the life of RIDDICK, RICHARD B. _They said his psychosis had passed!_

There was no denying, however, the animal savagery of Riddick's latest and cruelest transgression. The poor kid had been devoted to him and he'd gutted her like a fish. It was a crime that surpassed even his earliest atrocities as a teenager.

Had the psychosis returned? If it had, the whole Project was in jeopardy. There were eleven operatives who might be similarly ticking time-bombs.

He wished he could just order the kill, but the Board was still adamant, even in the face of this latest debacle. The Kowalczyk girl was nothing to them, just a disposable tool that might have led them to their quarry, but hadn't.

He was the one who had to live with the guilt. He was the one who had to cope with the knowledge that he'd sentenced her to live out her final months in a flea-bitten dive before her life was snuffed out in an ordeal of terror and pain.

She'd been an amazing person, really. He'd desperately wanted to recruit her, to give her the training such sharp intelligence deserved. In time, he would have brought her into the Project, revealing the hidden truths about her old friend and the Tribunal's plans for him. Jarvis was sure that, once she'd been given full disclosure, she would have wholeheartedly assisted him in bringing Riddick back in...

It would never happen, now. She was dead and the "truth" about Riddick was in question. But the board wouldn't let him hit the purge button, not yet.

He cursed himself for authorizing Saunders to forward Mason's job offer to the girl. It had seemed ideal at the time -- they'd let her hook up with a shady character, then catch her in the act of committing a smuggling offense. She'd be trapped in their web, finally, faced with either hard time in a real prison or the deal they kept trying to hand her.

But she'd never made it as far as Mason. Riddick had found her first.

Did she run to him? Was she happy to see him at first? When had her joy at their reunion been dashed aside by his animal cruelty? Had she even understood why he'd turned on her?

Jarvis was amazed to realize that his face was wet.

He picked up the small, woefully-thin file on Audrey Jacqueline Kowalczyk and leafed through it, perusing the photos. There was one that had always stuck in his mind... where was it?

Here. It was a candid shot, taken a month before her release, while she was on a field trip with some of the other well- behaved girls in the shelter. Even though it was only a picture of her face, he knew the whole story behind it.

She'd been at the zoo, walking from exhibit to exhibit. Finally she had found the Jaguar paddock. There had been trouble a few hours earlier -- one of the keepers had been injured. The male jaguar was now confined in a tiny cage, chained and muzzled.

She'd watched him for three hours. When their hidden observer had snapped her picture, he'd caught her mood perfectly. Such compassion and empathy in her face, unlike the careful deadpan she usually wore. Such feeling for the suffering of a caged, restrained, supremely dangerous beast.

Had she seen Riddick in the jaguar?

Had she found the jaguar in Riddick when they were reunited? Had it found her?

He pulled the photo out of the file and spent several minutes gazing at it. Then he turned and opened a little-used drawer in his desk. He'd put his ex-wife's photo, frame and all, into the drawer when she'd left him six years ago and hadn't bothered to look at it since. Now he removed the photo from the frame and slid Jack's picture in. He set it on his desk.

From now on, her mournful eyes would watch over him.

Tossing his ex-wife's picture into his wastebasket, he made himself a solemn promise. Approval from the Board or not, he would never let another opportunity to kill Richard B. Riddick go by unused.

Even if it destroyed his career, he was going to avenge the death of Audrey "Jack" Kowalczyk.

 

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