Chapter 123: Chapter 123
"Yeah," Jack answered with a sneer and intense annoyance. "But I don't think it was to help her if Mister Michaelson here is telling the truth," he added. He was still glaring at Leandro. But when he saw the confused look on the old man's face, Jack sighed and turned his eyes to Andy. He felt a weird feeling that the latter was staring at him intently. He realized Andy was indeed all eyes on Jack. So he asked. "What..?!"
"What's your name again?" Andy squinted his eyes. His body moved to lean on his lap to get a closer look at the young man.
"Jack Foster," Jack answered as he leaned forward to do the same with Andy. He gave the military man an equally sizing look.
"Who is your father?" Andy asked again. He was even more piqued to realize that the young man was not intimidated by him.
"I have no father. If I had one, I don't know who he is. No one was there when I grew up with my mom; even when she was on her deathbed, I had no one for a father. But Charles Anderson took me in. I was not as brilliant for a child in the field where he wanted Brianna to be cultivated, so I did not get to train as her. I was sent to a different training to enhance my knowledge in Information Technology to be useful to him even from a tiny room, accessing files and breaking into firewalls to help Brianna and the rest of the team do their jobs. I was starved and punished for helping Brianna get fed and nursed her wounds when she gets injured during her training, even after each mission she had been. She was younger than me, but she was already there when I arrived to join the pack under Charles Anderson."
"Do you dare to deny that this man..." Andy pointed at Charles Anderson's face on the laptop screen, "...is your father?"
Jack gave Andy a fierce-looking face. As if he was deeply offended.
"He is not my father! I hate him to the very core of my being. I feel so offended that you seem to insist he is who you think he is to me when he is not. And he will never be!" Jack spoke with so much anguish that he had turned awfully red, and his chest was almost to burst in great fury. His voice did not go up, but every word that left his mouth between his clenched teeth and flaring nose.
"DNA does not lie, young man," Andy reached out to the empty glass which Enzo handed Jack earlier.
Jack scoffed and leaned back to the backrest of his chair.
"Be my guest. I may not have the freedom to choose whose sperm I can be born from, but I have the liberty to accept, honor, and love whoever I deem deserves to be my family. As well as to deny who claims to be who they are to me, but not acting like it," Jack spoke with confidence. "I have learned in my short life that blood alone doesn't make you a family. Respect, loyalty, expressed concerns, and having each other's back all the time is a stronger bond that connects one another and makes you declare them as family. Not by words alone. Not by labels or papers or DNA results alone," Jack spoke with so much emotion. He paused to fill his lungs with air and breath out loudly. Then he continued.
"Brianna is by far an incomparable family to me than anyone else. I hate who she hates, I respect who she respects, and I love who she loves. Because she was the one who always fought for me being too weak, physically. I have a weak heart like my mom. And other people would hate me for not being forced to train like everyone else, even when they have witnessed how I almost died after an extraneous exercise. And even when they knew I helped them in other ways, they did not accept and acknowledge it. Only Brianna would defend me. They are all gone now, to my best relief. They died one by one during missions. Brianna's team is a new set of men she had saved during her missions and decided to follow her. We are like brothers and sisters; we take care of each other. We protect and fight for each other in ways of our own. So please forgive me if I hate you like I do," Jack turned to Leandro. "She was told, and I even heard it myself, that you are the reason she became an orphan at a very young age. Even when she decided to let his anger go and give up, Charles still threatened her and mocked her that if she died, you would still be living freely in this world, and her parents' death would never get justice. I even wanted to kill you myself, but I knew how Brianna longs for that day when she could avenge her mom and dad's death. I didn't want to steal that chance away from her. Well, part of the facts is my incapability to execute whatever plans my limited mind could ever conceive." Jack admitted.
Andy, Leandro, and Enzo could not deny that they were fully convinced the young man wasn't lying at all. He was also confident when he said he didn't care if the DNA test would result in him being related to Charles Anderson.
"You can do whatever you think I deserve if that DNA test comes up with me being Charles Anderson's son, but I suggest you do it before Brianna wakes up and realize what you did. I might be wrong. She will say the same lines I did, proving my words to be right, but if I am right, she might not forgive you," Jack suggested with indifference. "We will all die one day, and I am not afraid if it happens today or tomorrow. But I am happy to believe that if I get wronged, and my dear sister finds out about it, she won't rest until I get my justice, just like her dead-set goals to avenge her parents' tragedy," Jack added.
Silence filled the whole room. The three men across from Jack Foster's seat looked at one another.
Leandro and Enzo were somehow certain his words to be accurate, based on Anna's character and personality. Andy was puzzled about this young man's connections with Lawrence Duncan. But before he could shoot a question, Leandro's confused queries were heard.
"Why would he even do that? I don't have any connections with the Peters, no matter how I recall, so why?" Leandro frowned as he leaned to give Jack a closer look. Jack shrugged, so Leandro turned his head to Andy, then to Enzo. The latter was speechless as he did not know anything about the Peters, nor had Leandro mention anything about such a story if anything happened before he came along. But Andy was in deep thoughts.
"I have tried to dig anything I could find to help B meet her goals. I was not sure if the Michaelson's just used power to conceal everything that happened, but I could not find anything that connects the two families, even for a simple dispute or anything, like anything at all," Jack sighed with annoyance and frustrations.
"Maybe you should have checked on families with the names Michaelson's and Duncan's," Andy stated with a deep frown.
Hearing Andy say so, Jack's hands quickly moved to use the laptop on the tea table to search for anything about the two families the military man, whom Jack did not know his name yet, said.
"There is no file about them either," Jack helplessly sighed.
Leandro also butted in.
"I don't remember any encounter with a Duncan, Andy," he uttered. Leandro tried to recall. "I agree I am getting older, but that name doesn't ring any bell at all," he added. "Who is he? Do you know anything about this man?"
Andy turned his body a bit twisted to his side to face Leandro.
"I am not sure what connections, good or bad, you have with each other but this man, whom you all seemed to call, Charles Anderson, if I am not mistaken, is Lawrence Duncan," Andy's eyebrows formed a single line as he was so confused himself. "He was also a Marine just like Leith Peters, but Lawrence Duncan was given a dishonorable discharge for doing a crime declared confidential by the higher authorities."
"I think it's time we start digging and dig deeper. I have a big hunch we are just getting started to unveil whatever mystery was behind the Peters family's tragic death," Andy stated. His words were too slow as if he was seeing a vision of something only he could see, and he himself was unclear on how to define it.
"What do you mean?" Asked Leandro.
"We have to dig, not just going straight deep into the bottom. Check every connection and every direction. Every little detail counts. If Duncan had to change his name, the others might have done the same to drive anyone who would investigate into a wild goose chase and end up with nothing," Andy replied.