One of the police officers at the facility, a rugged former Golden Gloves boxer, took an interest in Welch and became his mentor. That relationship changed everything. Welch stopped acting out and got serious about school, where he learned, for the first time, he was not dumb like many had told him, but rather he had an above-average intelligence. He was also a gifted athlete. Much to his previous foster families’ surprise, Welch not only graduated from high school, but did so with a 3.98 grade point average and an academic and sports scholarship.
That summer, Welch was in his third year of studying criminal science. His scholarship only covered tuition and books, so he got a job delivering pizzas. He’d worked for the pizzeria just three months before the evening when he subdued the vandal at the Elgen building.
* * *
Patrick, the Elgen’s head security guard, had been accused of hiring his guards by the pound, and Welch was no exception. But it soon became clear to him that Welch was more than muscle; he was a quick learner and ambitious, and within just six months he was promoted to head of the graveyard shift.
Welch liked the work and the pay but found it a little lonely. He would patrol the dark, quiet halls of the Elgen building at night, sometimes hoping someone would break in just to liven things up. Oftentimes he would look in through the glass windows of the fifth-floor laboratory and watch the scientists at work, wondering what they were doing. He didn’t know them, at least not personally, but he knew the pecking order.
The main scientist was a man known as Dr. Coonradt. It seemed to Welch that Coonradt had no life outside of his work, as he was always there. Many times it was only the two of them in the building.
One night Coonradt called Welch over to the laboratory.
“Yes, sir?” Welch asked, wondering what the scientist wanted.
“Come in for a moment, please.”
“Yes, sir.” Welch stepped into the laboratory.
“What’s your name?” Coonradt asked.
“Welch, sir.”
Coonradt smiled. “I can read your name tag. What’s your first name?”
“David.”
“Well, David, have a drink with me.”
“Thank you, sir, but I can’t. I’m on the job.”
Coonradt still poured two crystal glasses half full from a bottle of champagne. “I’m giving you permission. A sip of Dom Pérignon won’t jeopardize our security. It’s a special occasion. I’m celebrating a breakthrough.” He extended the drink to Welch.
Welch just looked at the glass. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t drink alcohol.”
Coonradt looked at him in surprise. “A teetotaler, that’s refreshing.” He set down the glass, walked over to a refrigerator, and brought back a bottle. “Then have a Coke.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Both men sat down.
“Why don’t you drink? You a Mormon?”
“No, sir. My biological father was an alcoholic. I figured I inherited his genes.”
“You’re a smart man,” Coonradt said. He took a drink.
“What kind of breakthrough are we celebrating?” Welch asked.
“A big one. It has to do with a variation of the standard magnetic vector created when a polyatomic ion is covalently bonded—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Welch said, raising a hand. “You lost me way before polyatomic zions, or whatever you said.”
Coonradt laughed. “Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.”
Welch took a swig from his cola. “You’re always here.”
“It would seem that way. My work is my life. It’s my wife, my family, my religion.” His voice fell a little. “It’s the only thing I have left.” Welch thought he saw a flash of pain in the scientist’s eyes. Coonradt sipped his champagne, then put his glass down. “What about you? Do you have anyone you can’t live without?”
“I had a girlfriend for a while, but we broke up about six months ago.”
“Was it mutual?”
“No. She dumped me for a med student.”
“I’m sorry. Are you pining for her?”
“Pining?”
“Sorry, it’s an old-fashioned word. Do you miss her?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coonradt lifted his glass again. “Then we’ll toast lost loves.”
Welch lifted his drink. “To lost loves,” he said as they clinked the glasses together.
Welch drank, then looked at the scientist. “Do you have lost loves?”
Coonradt looked down for a moment, finished his drink, then lifted the one he’d poured for Welch and took a drink from it as well. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft.
“Yes. Two loves. My mother when I was fourteen, my wife eleven years ago. I lost both of them to cancer. Technically, I lost three, I guess. My wife was three months pregnant when she died. I lost my child, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
Coonradt took another drink. “Me too.”
“Did you ever consider marrying again?”
“No. Not seriously. I suppose that I feel cursed. I couldn’t bear another loss. But life has a way of figuring itself out. It’s why I’m where I am right now. I decided to dedicate my life to revenge.”
“Revenge? On who?”
“On cancer. It’s a living organism, and I am going to kill it, just as it killed my loved ones. Turnabout is fair play, right?” He took another drink.
Welch looked at him with admiration. “Yes, sir. I think that’s pretty awesome.”
“Thank you. And if I succeed, I will save millions of lives and make the Elgen Corporation billions upon billions of dollars.” He sighed deeply. “Well, I better get back to work and let you get back to yours. Thank you for celebrating with me.”
Welch quickly stood, taking the comment as his dismissal. “Thank you, sir. For the drink and the talk. Congratulations on your breakthrough. Maybe someday you’ll win a Nobel Prize.”
Coonradt smiled. “That would be nice. Not so much for the prize, but because it would mean that I had accomplished something.” He stood. “And it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Welch. I wish you a long future and much success at Elgen Incorporated.”
Coonradt’s breakthrough in magnetism didn’t cure cancer or win a Nobel Prize, even though he was nominated for one. It did make the Elgen Corporation hundreds of millions of dollars.
During the apex of their growth, the Elgen’s CEO, a man named Briton Hill, died unexpectedly, and the board immediately set to work searching for a new leader. They ended up hiring away the CEO of an upstart pharmaceutical company, an ambitious young MIT graduate named Charles James Hatch.
Eight months previous to the change in leadership, Welch’s boss, Patrick, had retired and Welch became the acting head of Elgen security.
Welch never forgot the first day he met Hatch. He was called into the new Elgen CEO’s office for an introduction.
“Come in. Sit down,” Hatch said forcefully.
Welch sat down uncomfortably in one of the two leather chairs in front of the CEO’s desk.
“So you’re our head of security,” Hatch said, staring at him intensely.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do we need security?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hatch smiled. “I would expect you to say that. In fact, I would have been disappointed if you’d answered to the contrary.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“No, sir. I don’t drink.”
“We’ll fix that,” Hatch said.
He stood and walked over to a decanter filled with an amber liquid and poured himself a glass. Then another. “And why is it that we need security? Industrial espionage?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Seven years, sir.”
“And during that time, Mr. Welch, have you stopped anyone from stealing our patents?”
“I don’t know, sir. Deterrence can’t always be measured.”
r /> “Good answer,” Hatch said, smiling. “Good answer.” He stood in front of Welch and stared at him for nearly a minute without speaking. Welch had never met anyone like Hatch before. He was already starting to dislike his new boss.
“David L. Welch. You’ve had a rocky childhood, in and out of foster homes, bad friends, delinquency and crime. Still, you somehow turned your life around and went to college to study criminal science. I can see why. We often become what we hate in order to take away our fear of it.” He took a drink. “But then you dropped out to work here. Good career move?”
“I thought so at the time,” Welch said.
“And you don’t now?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether or not you’re going to fire me.”
Hatch looked at him for a moment, then laughed. “I’m not going to fire you. There’d be a mutiny. You’re beloved here—practically an icon. And yes, of course, Elgen Inc. needs security. And, as we grow, that need will grow. And you, Mr. Welch, your salary and your future will grow with it.” He leaned forward and looked intently into Welch’s eyes. “If you are loyal.” He held out the second drink. “Now drink with me, sir.”
Welch just looked at the glass.
“It’s not polite to turn down a gesture of friendship. That wouldn’t be loyal, would it?”
Welch took the glass.
“To your future with the Elgen,” Hatch said. “I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a wild ride.”
“To the future,” Welch said. He lifted the glass, paused, then took a drink. The ride had begun.
Hatch was an expert at manipulation. He was continually grooming Welch, testing his loyalty and rewarding or punishing him accordingly. After the disaster with the MEI, when Hatch was fired as CEO, Welch was the first person he called into his office.
“I want you to hear this from me first,” Hatch said bitterly. “I’ve been removed as Elgen CEO. They’ve replaced me with an Italian jester named Giacomo Schema.”
Welch was stunned by the news. “Why?”
“The malfunction of the MEI. The board is terrified that if the word gets out and the deaths are linked to us, it could cost us billions.”
“Where will you go?” Welch asked.
“Nowhere. I’m staying here. As director.”
Welch was even more surprised. “With all due respect, sir, they’re not firing you?”
Hatch grinned. “Fire me?”
“That seems to be the standard corporate procedure.”
“No,” Hatch said. “They can’t.”
“Why is that?”
Hatch smiled. “Precisely because the board is terrified that if the word gets out and the deaths are linked to us, it could cost us billions. I let them know that if they fired me, there was a very good chance that word would get out. Not from me, of course. But via an anonymous source.”
Hatch reached into his desk drawer and brought out a large manila envelope. He handed it across the desk to Welch. “Keep this somewhere safe. If anything happens to me, I want you to take this envelope to the Wall Street Journal. The precise contact information is inside. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you. I knew I could depend on you.” He looked at Welch for a moment, then said, “Be assured, this is only a temporary setback. I will run this company again.”
“I believe you, sir.”
“I know. You’ve been loyal from the beginning, and trust me, your loyalty will be rewarded. Until then, I will see that you retain your position. However, I would like to broaden your responsibilities.”
“How so, sir?”
“I want you to gather information on each member of the board, especially Schema. I want to know the skeletons in their closets, their loves, their affairs, their thought crimes, their every vulnerability. Everything. Can I count on you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to forget what you know about corporate security and start running the Elgen guard like an army, with you its general.”
Welch nodded, excited at the prospect. “I can do that.”
“One more thing. And this must never leave this room. Schema is talking about silencing some of those who are potential leaks.”
“By ‘silencing,’ you mean . . . killing ?” Welch said.
“Exactly.”
“Who in particular is he considering silencing?”
“Carl Vey, the research manager from the Pasadena Hospital; his assistant, Anna Ferguson; and our own head of research and development, Dr. Coonradt.”
Welch’s chest froze. “Dr. Coonradt?”
“Yes. Those are the main names. And if Schema’s making a list, you can bet that I’m on it as well. That’s why I gave you the envelope.”
“Yes, sir.” Welch looked down at the envelope, then back up at Hatch. “Do you think it will come to that?”
“I don’t know,” Hatch said. “But billions of dollars are at stake. You’d be surprised at what people will do for a little money.”
Everything Hatch predicted, with the exception of his own murder, came true. Carl Vey and, presumably, Coonradt, were terminated. Vey’s assistant, Anna Ferguson, went into hiding.
It was only a few years after that that the existence of the electric children was revealed. It was Hatch who learned about them. He was looking into the children who had survived, to see if any of them had subsequently died of MEI complications, when he discovered, from confidential state and medical records, that the survivors had been affected in peculiar ways.
The first electric child discovered was Nichelle. She’d been in foster care from the time she was very young, and state records showed that she had been in and out of an unusually high number of homes—sometimes only lasting a day or two before being transferred to a new one. Foster families she’d stayed with reported that she was an unusually challenging little girl, and several of the homes she’d lived in had burned down, typically due to damage to the electrical systems.
It was the note about damaged electrical systems that piqued Hatch’s interest. The next afternoon he arranged to have Nichelle kidnapped from the backyard of her latest foster home, where she was found uprooting a bed of flowers.
It took the Elgen a few days, but after running her through a series of tests, they determined that she was essentially an electrical ground wire. From that point on, Hatch was motivated to find the other electrical children, and one by one they were brought into the Elgen, where their powers were discovered and developed.
* * *
As Elgen director, Hatch continued to work as if he ran the company. He also began steering the Elgen on a new course. Shortly before his “death,” Coonradt had demonstrated to the Elgen board how the MEI could electrify rats. While initially Schema considered the discovery nothing more than a curiosity, Hatch recognized the potential for a new source of electrical energy and, with board approval, launched the Starxource Plant Initiative (SPI), turning the Elgen into a massively profitable corporation and setting them on a trajectory to someday become the richest company in the world.
Internally, Hatch took draconian measures to guarantee that his mandates were followed and his power protected—measures that included spying, wiretapping, murder, and extortion.
The first person Welch killed was a man named Paul Wang, a former Elgen scientist who was caught trying to sell Elgen secrets. Hatch convinced Welch to kill the man the same way he’d gotten Welch to take that first drink of alcohol—a simple, quiet request. After Welch had blood on his hands, he was much easier to manipulate. And no one was better at manipulation than Hatch.
* * *
Once the Elgen, under Schema’s guidance, moved their operations from the United States to international waters, it became relatively easy for Hatch to launch his takeover of the Elgen by force. The coup was organized and carried out on the command ship Ampere by Welch and his two senior Elgen commanders. By that time, Hatch had turned th
e Elgen security into an active personal army solely under his control.
Hatch and Welch together created the complex hierarchy of the Elgen guard. Hatch was named supreme commander, general, then admiral-general, while Welch became his chief EGG and right-hand man. That is, until Hatch sentenced his most loyal and enduring friend to death.
Kaohsiung, Taiwan EGG Welch’s Escape
Welch and the brig’s guards were in a cab in the bustling center of downtown Kaohsiung, Taiwan, just three city blocks from the docked Faraday, when Tara’s power wore off. Suddenly Welch looked like himself instead of the Taiwanese prisoner the guards thought they were escorting off the ship. The guard in the backseat with Welch was the first to notice.
“What the . . .”
Quentin had disarmed the guards before they left the boat, and Welch, who was waiting for the moment, lifted the guard’s own gun on him. “Not who you expected?”
The guard looked at him in fear. “EGG Welch.”
The guard in the front turned back, his eyes wide with surprise. “No. It’s impossible.”
“Enigmatic, perhaps, but clearly not impossible. Unfortunately, you’ve just aided the escape of Admiral-General Hatch’s most prized prisoner. He’s going to be so unhappy with you. I would wager good money that it’s the rat bowl for both of you.”
The guard next to Welch stammered, “But—but—we didn’t know it was you.”
“Come now, man. You really think that will matter to Hatch?”
The guards knew the answer.
“What are you going to do with us?” the backseat guard asked.
“Nothing,” Welch said. “It’s catch and release. You’re no use to me now. In a few minutes I’ll let one of you off; then I’ll let the other one of you off a few miles later. Now empty your pockets. Give me all the money you have. Hurry.”
The men pulled out their money and handed it to Welch. In all it was less than two thousand yuan, not as much as Welch hoped or needed, certainly not enough to get him out of the country.