The Force (The Kingdom Chronicles) Read online

  Available Titles from Frontier 2000 Media

  Non Fiction:

  No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master’s Degree at Age Sixteen

  Writing for Today

  Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother

  Adult Fiction Series:

  The Planner

  The Chosen

  The Kingdom Chronicles

  The Fourth Kingdom

  The Force

  Other Adult Fiction:

  The Twelfth Juror

  The Warrior

  Children’s Fiction:

  Tales of Pig Isle

  The McAloons: A Horse Called Lightning & A House of Clowns

  Cover Design: Stefan Swann

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Scripture references from The Living Bible, copyright ©1971 are used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Wheaton, IL 60189. All Rights Reserved.

  The Force copyright © 2013 by Alexandra Swann and Joyce Swann. Published in the USA by Frontier 2000 Media Group Inc., El Paso, Texas.

  http://www.frontier2000.net

  Prologue

  One cold January afternoon long before the great fire had destroyed Doppelganger, long before Josef and his father had visited Cornucopia, long before the twins had suffered their great loss, Alexander Sinclair sat dozing in his big leather chair while snowflakes the size of goose feathers filled the sky and floated softly to the ground.

  As the logs crackled in the fireplace and Alexander dreamed contentedly, two little boys ran down the stairs, scrambled onto his lap, and wrapped their arms tightly around him. Before Alexander’s eyes were fully open, the boys began to talk excitedly, “Daddy, today our Sunday school teacher said that the devil is powerful, and if we don’t be good he will get us. We’re scared!”

  “What?” their father replied, drawing them closer to him. “No! That’s not right. You’re Christian boys. The devil can’t get Christian boys.”

  “Are you sure?” Jarrod asked.

  “Of course, I’m sure,” his father replied. “And I’m going to tell you something else: the devil is not powerful; all power belongs to God and to Jesus. The devil uses force, but he has no power.”

  Joshua looked worried, “It’s the same thing! Power and force is the same thing!”

  “You’re wrong,” Alexander assured him. “God’s power is unlimited. He created everything there is in heaven and on earth. He has the power to protect us and to help us in every situation. There is nothing that is too hard for God because His power can both destroy and create.

  “But the devil is different. He cannot create anything. He likes to destroy things—especially people’s lives, but he has never created one single thing because force cannot create.”

  “I’m still scared!” Joshua exclaimed.

  “Don’t be,” Alexander continued. “Lots of things have force: floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, but they are only able to destroy. Tornadoes have destroyed many towns, but you will never hear of one passing by and creating a town. The earth is filled with destructive forces, but those forces are nothing compared to God’s power.

  “Now I am going to tell you something else that I want you always to remember: As long as you have the power of God’s Holy Spirit in you, the devil can never defeat you, and you never need to fear him. One day God will call you to take a stand against the forces of Satan. When that day comes, remember this: Whenever power and force collide, power always wins the fight.”

  The Force

  SWANN

  Alexandra & Joyce

  Chapter 1

  Peter Kessler awakened to the sound of someone pounding on a door. The sound seemed to be coming from a long way away, and Peter’s foggy brain had a difficult time processing it. He heard his housekeeper’s voice and two male voices that he did not recognize, but the words that floated up to his bedroom were muffled and unintelligible.

  Peter turned to face the clock on his bedside table: “1:23 A.M.” A jolt of fear and dread surged through his body that instantly rendered him fully awake. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, waiting for the sound of Liesel’s footsteps in the hallway.

  Within seconds Liesel had reached the bedroom door. Knocking softly she said, “Herr Kessler, the polizei are here. There has been an accident.”

  Although the night was warm, Kessler’s hands were cold, and they shook as he opened the door. “Tell them that I will be right there,” he said before shutting the door in the housekeeper’s face.

  As he pulled on his clothes, he remembered the day twelve years earlier when his wife and daughter had been killed in an automobile accident. The sole survivor had been his four-year-old son, Dieter. Six days after the funeral, Dieter was sent home from the hospital, and since that day Peter had done everything possible to protect him. Dieter was all that he had—his only reason for living. Now, in the middle of the night the polizei had come to his door to tell him that there had been an accident.

  Peter refused to ride with the police to the morgue. He followed in his Bugatti Veyron, the most powerful, most expensive, and fastest car in the world. Dieter had been thrilled the day that it was delivered to their country home, and when Peter had seen how much his son admired the magnificent piece of German engineering, he had promised to give him one for his sixteenth birthday.

  True to his word, Peter had ordered the automobile and arranged for it to arrive during Dieter’s birthday party which had been held the previous month. Just as Peter had anticipated, the magnificent gift had delighted Dieter and inspired envy in his friends. Peter had planned every detail of the party so that all eyes were constantly fixed on Dieter; it was a celebration of his son and of the extent to which Peter was willing to go to ensure that Dieter lived a long, happy life.

  Now, as he followed the police car to the morgue, Peter felt everything he had worked for slip away, as if someone had silently slit his wrists, and his life’s blood were draining from him. Tomorrow headlines all over the world would read, Billionaire German Industrialist’s Only Son Killed in Automobile Accident.

  As Peter stood with the police officers waiting for the body to be uncovered, he gripped the back of a steel and vinyl chair for support. His knees felt rubbery, and it took all his strength to remain on his feet. When the sheet was pulled back revealing his son’s face, he spoke, “It is the second time that I have identified my son’s body in less than a year. No more,” and he turned and walked from the room.

  After a quick exchange speculating what Herr Kessler could possibly mean by his remarks, the younger of the two police officers hurried after Peter and asked if they could drive him home; he did not speak but simply shook his head and continued walking to the parking lot where he climbed into his car and sped away.

  Twenty minutes later Peter Kessler walked into the library of his country home, pulled his luger from his desk, and shoved it into his mouth. The sound of the explosion brought Liesel running to investigate.

  Chapter 2

  Fred Kowalski was less than one week away from retiring from the New York City Police Department. For the past twenty-five years of his career he had been a detective, and although the job could be both interesting and challenging, most of the time it was simply gory and exhausting. He had witnessed hundreds of scenes that made the acts depicted in horror movies look like child’s play. Fred knew from years of first-hand experience that viewing real bodies mutilated by real murderers was neither exciting nor frightening; it was hideous and heartbreaking, and he had ne
ver been able to get past the sense of sadness and waste that stayed with him during these investigations.

  Today he and his partner were on their way to Fifth Avenue to gather evidence. The mutilated body of a young woman had been discovered in an alley in the heart of New York’s most exclusive shopping. Fred thought that was a little curious; the area was well-patrolled and kept as safe as possible for the world’s most privileged shoppers. He wondered why anyone would choose to dispose of a body there where it was certain to draw more attention than it would in most of the city’s other locations.

  Fred saw four police cars with their blinking lights parked at the curb, and he pulled his unmarked vehicle in behind them. One of the officers on the scene recognized him and signaled for him to come forward.

  “So, what have we got here?” Fred asked the officer.

  “Caucasian female, early twenties, multiple stab wounds, possible asphyxiation. Doesn’t look like she’s been here more than a couple of hours. She was probably a call girl; she looks like she was a real beauty. Maybe one of her customers got off on torture.”

  As Fred stood looking at the body, he noticed that there was something familiar about her. She was badly bruised and bloodied, but her platinum hair and pale yellow halter dress stirred a memory. He was certain that he had seen this young woman before. “Any ID?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did she have a purse or a shopping bag—anything like that?”

  “Nope.”

  When the photographs of the scene had been taken, Fred squatted to view the body more closely. “Beck,” he said to his partner, “she’s a dead-ringer for Marilyn Monroe.”

  Beck, who had just celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday, replied, “I don’t know nothin’ about those old movie stars. She could be Monroe, and I wouldn’t know it.”

  “Well, she’s definitely not Marilyn,” Kowalski answered. “If Marilyn were still alive, she’d be over a hundred years old, but she sure as heck looks like her. My dad was a big fan. He had every movie she ever made, and he collected her posters. Growing up I probably saw more pictures of her than she saw of herself. Check with all the celebrity look-alike services and see if anyone hired a Marilyn look-alike. After we run her prints we might know more.”

  ψ

  The next morning Fred visited the medical examiner to see if he had found anything useful.

  Dr. Marvin March was obviously puzzled. “She’s gorgeous,” he said. “No doubt about it, but she’s a little too gorgeous. She’s perfect. She doesn’t have a single life marker.”

  “Life marker?” Fred was puzzled.

  “Yeah, you know, the kind of stuff everybody’s got. Babies are born with perfect complexions—soft, smooth, blemish-free, but right away they start to get life markers. A kid falls and has a little scar on his knee. All of the scuffs and scrapes leave little scars and blemishes on the skin. Most of us never notice them because they’re small and insignificant, but they’re there. Then there’s sun damage. Even someone who uses sun screen his whole life has some sun damage that causes little discolorations, or a little thickening of the skin in certain areas. A person will have a little patch of freckles on his shoulder that resulted from a sunburn that he got as a child. As we age—and by age I mean pass infancy—we develop moles, freckles—all sorts of life markers—but this vic doesn’t have a single one. What I want to know is how does a woman get to be twenty-something and not have a single life marker?

  “But that’s not even the best part,” Dr. March continued. “When I examined her organs, I found that none of them had any life markers either. Her lungs were like a newborn’s—no damage from twenty-plus years of breathing polluted air, or smoking, or having any illness that might have put some scarring on the lungs. Her heart is in perfect condition—no signs of any stress, ever. Every organ in her body is in pristine condition.”

  “So, how do you account for that?”

  “I don’t account for it. I’ve never seen anything like it. I just don’t know.”

  “We ran her prints,” Fred told the examiner. “They didn’t turn up in our records, but we’ve asked the FBI to run them through their data base. Friday is my last day so I won’t be working this one, but I’ll be checking back to follow up. I have a feeling that there’s a lot more to this than anyone suspects right now.”

  Chapter 3

  On the Monday morning after his retirement, Fred and his wife Annie put their suitcases into the trunk of their new Ford and began the drive to Chicago to visit their only son, Brian, and his family. Although Chicago was only eight hundred miles away, they had gotten a late start and were planning to stop for the night somewhere around the four hundred mile mark.

  Fred felt really free for the first time in his adult life. He and Annie had married young, and Brian had been born fourteen months later while Fred was still in college. To help with expenses Annie had worked at her parents’ bakery until shortly before Brian’s birth, but afterwards she had to stay home to take care of him. During Fred’s final year of college, he had been forced to take on a second part-time job to support his family. He had never forgotten how thoroughly exhausted he had been during that time, working long hours, attending classes, and studying far into the night to earn his degree in criminal justice.

  Police work had also taken a toll. Fred was good at what he did, and when he became a detective, he ate, lived, and breathed his cases. He spent many of his off-duty hours following up on leads and tracking down new ones. He could never rest until he was satisfied that he had gathered the evidence needed to put away one of the bad guys.

  Now, at age sixty, Fred found himself with no bad guys to put away, no leads to follow, no cases to crack. He and Annie were headed down US-20 with no schedule, no motel reservations, and no reason to hurry. They would eat when they were hungry, sleep when they were tired, and stop to investigate any interesting sights along the way. He reached for Annie’s hand and pressed it against his lips. When she smiled in response, he could still see a hint of that blonde-haired blue-eyed girl he had fallen in love with more than forty years earlier.

  Late Tuesday afternoon when they finally pulled into Brian’s driveway, Fred was relaxed and ready to enjoy himself. When Brian’s wife Taylor opened the door she was holding the baby on her hip. She smiled widely and told them that Brian had called to say that he would be home late because he had just been called out on a homicide. It was almost midnight when Brian arrived, and Fred and Annie had already gone to bed.

  The next morning at breakfast, however, Brian began telling Fred about the homicide he was investigating. The body of a young woman had been found in an alley on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. “It’s really weird,” Brian said. “She had been stabbed multiple times, but there was no ID, no purse, nothing.”

  Fred felt a tingling sensation at the back of his neck. “Did you see the crime scene?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Well, that’s the really weird part. She looks like Forever Marilyn, only real and in miniature.”

  “Was she wearing the halter dress?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you run her prints?” Fred questioned his son further.

  “Yeah. If her prints are on record, we should be able to ID her this morning.”

  “I had leave time approved for the next two weeks, but I need to go in today for a while to follow up. You want to come along?”

  “I sure do!”

  Fred stepped outside and called Beck at the precinct in New York. “Did you get the ID on the homicide vic from last week?”

  “Which one?”

  “The blonde in the halter dress.”

  “Yes and no,” Beck answered. “The prints matched the ones that the FBI has on file for Marilyn Monroe. Like you said, this girl’s not Marilyn, so we told them they made a mistake and to run them again. They did, and they sti
ll came back as a match for Marilyn Monroe.

  “The FBI has a big file on Monroe because she was sleeping with the president. When she died of the OD, they took blood samples, which they still have. We asked them to do a DNA comparison to see if she’s a match for our vic and get us the results ASAP. I know there’s no way they’re a match, but it’s spooky, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know. Listen, Beck, I might have something for you here. I’m not sure yet, but I’ll be in touch later today.”

  Fred ended his call just as Brian stepped through the door. “Can I see the body?” Fred asked.

  “Sure. We’ll swing by the morgue.”

  An hour later the men were viewing the body and talking to the Cook County medical examiner. “Was there anything unusual about the victim?” Fred inquired.

  Consulting his notes the medical examiner read, “White Caucasian female; approximately twenty-two years of age; five feet, five and a half inches tall; one hundred eighteen pounds; blue eyes; bleached platinum blonde hair; forty-eight stab wounds, none of which was fatal; cause of death, asphyxiation. Nothing unusual, but I can tell you that she was gorgeous. A girl like that—you’d think a guy would want to keep her around.”

  “What about life markers?” Fred inquired.

  “What?” the medical examiner responded.

  “Life markers.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the medical examiner replied.

  “Life markers,” Fred persisted, “moles, scars, freckles, sun damage, calluses—the stuff that documents that we were alive.”

  The medical examiner looked puzzled and then examined the body more closely. “No, there’s nothing. She’s perfect. Even her teeth show absolutely no signs of wear.”

  Fred and Brian left the morgue, and when they were outside, Fred took hold of Brian’s arm. “You won’t find her prints in your data base,” Fred advised. “Run them through the FBI data base; they’ll have a match.”