“Think about it,” the man at my feet encouraged me. “Our group as well as our competitors had rewards out for the identity of anyone who bore that tattoo before you were born. No one was ever found and the hype died down. Imagine our surprise years later when we discovered that there was a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been identified as baring the mark we had been already searching decades for. A daughter of one of the most prolific agents in history was identified as the chosen one bearing the famous mystery tattoo on her body.”
The woman took up the conversation.
“We believe your mother knew who the tattoo belonged to because she’d possibly conceived a baby with him. We believe he gave that baby his mark. At some point, even your mother, whether it was maternal instinct or guilt, decided to keep you away from that man. She couldn’t tell the government who you were and she couldn’t leave you to become what she had spent her career tearing down. There would be chaos on both sides of your life, all the days of your life. So, she found a clever way to keep you away from all of it.”
I had nothing to say. Though they were speculating, the information was too intricately woven to be a lie, and I feared there was truth in the details.
“Let’s flip her over,” one of the men suggested, causing my heart to pick up the pace. They unstrapped and flipped me like a piece of chicken in a hot skillet. If they did as thorough a search as they had done on my front side, they were going to find my tattoo.
It hadn’t taken them but a half hour before one of the men chuckled after wiping at the sight where my tattoo was located. They all congregated at the area, touching, whipping, and spying at it through their hand-held magnifying glasses.
One produced a camera and had snapped so many photos of it from so many different angles, I had lost count. What were they going to do with me now that they had found my tattoo?
Based on their conversation so far, I believed they couldn’t care less about the million dollar amount for locating and confirming my tattoo. They were after the motherload, the billion for information on how to take down the syndicate. Why else would they go through this much trouble, sacrificing men, and taking great risks to capture me alive?
“I’m taking another vile of blood,” the woman announced. There was too much information churning in my brain for me to even acknowledge her words. Apparently, I was a clue in a mystery that they had been struggling to solve for decades.
I didn’t believe anymore that they were feeding me a bunch of bullshit. They had already confirmed that they were the ones who had put that original award out for the tattoo, and it was becoming obvious that their organization had been selling secrets for many years.
I had more questions than I had blood cells. Had my mother found a way to make me the clue to finding secrets about how to take down one of the biggest crime syndicates in the world? Was my father really still alive?