by David Berko
And just when the two cadets thought they were free to exchange sensitive information that’s when the spies caught the spies. Men of the night rolled up fast and furious, cordoning off the only exit. That same voice Azriel and Esther heard address them the other day after a failed simulation mission cracked like a peal of thunder.
“Take her to the brig! He’ll come with me.”
A pair of sturdy thickset men waiting to collar someone who nearly told Azriel everything, readily snatched Esther away upon hearing their boss’s order. She protested and struggled until one of the agents strong-armed her into compliance.
Azriel for the first time felt fear. They had supposedly reprogrammed his brain to forget the emotion. But as the intimidating agency head Malach Kemper got closer and coarsely said, “Son?” That’s when he knew what Esther would have told him.
--
Everyone associated with Scorpion knew about the Ozarks facility. A privileged few were even acquainted with the underground tunnels going in and out of the penitentiary. Howard’s previous secretary, Heather, knew enough to be helpful to her rescuers.
“There’s an old tunnel no longer in use by Scorpion. It’s much smaller than the one the subway runs through. It’ll be very dark though. And we’re gonna have to walk a ways,” Heather communicated to the group.
Josh nodded. “I’m familiar. That’s where I was taking you guys before we backtracked.”
After hearing those words Heather felt her stomach drop. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have come back for me then.”
Damion immediately disagreed with her. “What? And leave you here to die?”
“You’ve already wasted precious time,” she argued.
“You’re not a waste of time,” he said with finality.
Christophe snorted. “Ah, this is love.”
Josh reached behind his back and drew a small weapon. “Know how to use one of these?” he asked Heather while extending it to her.
She took it right away, thankful to wield her own protection. “My dad taught me.”
“Good.”
Josh resumed his leadership duties, directing traffic back across familiar territory. Damion did one more over the shoulder to make sure no more bad guys were attempting to flank them while their backsides were exposed. The image of the jailer josh had killed earlier pollinated in his brain all over again after seeing the grotesque body one last time.
He wondered how many more would end up that way before they were free.
Their leader took them through some abandoned offices, passing crooked cubicle walls, overturned waste bins with crumpled scrap paper overflowing onto threadbare carpet. The group ended up in an equally shabby conference room. Everyone scattered around the particle board table waiting for Josh to make something happen.
The Viper agent went back in his memory to what his handlers had told him about this part. They weren’t as specific as he needed them to be because even they didn’t know. Hypotheticals and best guesses were all he had to go off of. There had to be something in the conference room to cause the false wall to open.
Heather knew what Josh was looking for. It surprised her he didn’t already know. “Good thing you came back for me,” she said to the struggling leader.
--
Neither Friction nor gravity would be enough to halt the forward progress of two vehicles hell bent on wreaking havoc against the roads and buildings in their way. The lumbering stretch limo with its high-hardened ballistic steel and thick opaque polycarbonate windows bored through the street-facing exterior wall of a sandwich shop.
The business about to get smashed didn’t have a breakfast menu. The minute hand would have to tick thirty more full cycles ‘round the clock before the kitchen even began to prep for the lunch crowd; lunch didn’t start prior to eleven at the establishment either.
Casualties would be at a minimum on the ground level of a mixed-use building absent of customers or employees. The same thing however couldn’t be said for the heavily populated one hundred yard collateral damage zone of the outlying area.
The restaurant’s natural gas main ruptured right after the outer wall got breached. The still-churning combustion engine and flaming hot exhaust of the wrecked limo ignited the buildup of natural gas. Therefore immediately following the interior minister’s several ton Audi A8 State Car slamming into the facade, secondary explosions shook the whole block like a 6.0 magnitude earthquake.
A fireball surged out of the restaurant kitchen with the ferocity of a flaming belch generated from the bowels of a provoked dragon. All the windows on the floors above the sandwich shop shattered instantly during the catalytic event.
Oblivious pedestrians who walked straight into ground zero had to contend with a glass shard shower from above. However far worse than that even were the flying chunks of masonry that went airborne after the natural gas detonated.
Prior to the devastation there were the two guilty cars that stuck to each other like glue, a three-way intersection fast approaching, and a sidewalk guarded by a curb which fronted the side of a sandwich shop. The limo traveled straight as an arrow and jumped the curb to continue through the intersection into a vulnerable restaurant supplied by natural gas for its kitchen appliances.
The SUV formerly going sideways in its bond with the government limo separated upon impact of its tires’ sidewalls with the curb. It flipped. While still upside down and suspended mid-air, it collided with the cornice of the building. Agent Alfonso Marcello who sat on the passenger side instantly died. The driver, Tyrone Banks, was as good as dead in a vehicle that careened off an immovable object. Merely the neck-snapping inertia of the speeding SUV striking a motionless, fixed landmark could’ve taken his life.
--
Chapter 13
“How else did you think it would end?”
Seth’s last words to Tyrone struck him with the full force of an airbag deploying which consequently was happening in real time.
The corner of the building drew the vehicle in like a magnet at first. It wasn’t a mutual attraction as it turned out. Bricks and metal collided like the diametrically opposed elements they were. There wouldn’t be winners: only destroyed vs. more destroyed.
The nanotube reinforced brick building that could handle earthquakes and hurricane force winds repelled the incoming SUV.
A roll cage would’ve been particularly useful for the driver still alive but barely after the vehicle struck the intersection’s stronghold. Cushions of air blew up all around Tyrone Banks, separating him from the mangled crunch zones of the vehicle as it bounced and somersaulted into a ricochet.
...
A column of darkness like an empty vacuum with a distant faint light at the end of it seemed to be Tyrone’s new consciousness. The darkness receded gradually, gradually replaced by blinding radiance which he travelled towards. Was he in his body still? Somehow he saw, albeit there were no sounds or smells.
...
Tyrone had read about people with out of body experiences who lived to tell--genuine testaments to the lazarus syndrome.
When resuscitation doesn’t work, a clinically dead pronouncement swiftly arrives. The medical examiner records the time of death. Eventually the corpse ends up in the morgue in a black cadaver pouch. However unlike most other people’s stories, there is no funeral. Lazarus came back to life, leaving the grave behind to walk the earth once again, as do the people in these special cases.
His vitals returned. A heartbeat. Tyrone’s sojourning soul rejoined with its vessel. It was time to wake up.
The shades to the windows of his soul struggled to stay open, choosing to flutter instead. He didn’t see any light this time but at least he could feel. Maybe that wasn’t such a privilege though for his body’s nerves sent messages to the brain of being on fire. Tyrone suffered many fractured bones along with second degree burns on his arms and legs.
He had to think about breathing and the need to. Baby steps. Tyrone told his brain it was time
to walk. Yet he couldn’t. Paralysis? No. He was literally trapped and feeling claustrophobic.
For the first time since the crash he heard a noise. A zipper was working. A line of light got bigger, longer. A refreshing current of air entered the bag nearly depleted of its oxygen supply.
--
Heat lightning bolted across the sooty black night sky. No clouds were burdened with a load of water needing to be let out; they merely floated around like moving screens for the lightning to reflect off of.
Esther’s piece had already been taken off the chessboard. Azriel felt like a king nearly trapped in a checkmate. The security forces not tasked with taking Esther to the brig stayed behind to intimidate Azriel with their guns and brawn. Thankfully the muzzles weren’t aimed at anything living.
The head of the Kidon branch used a belittling tone and repeated, “Son?”
When Azriel still didn’t answer for himself, even after the second invitation to explain his actions, he could tell it irritated “dad” to no end.
Ephraim Markov sat where Esther once was. He said nothing, instead, only rotated a ring on his right hand. In between revolutions of the diamond-shaped signet the diabolical man premeditated what he would say. It didn’t take long for the tongue to loose itself.
“Who am I?”
“Sir?”
“Say it!”
Azriel’s took a breath. “Who am I?” he said as told.
“You are a Junior Cadet at Masada. But you’re my son first.”
Wow, he really says it like he believes it, Azriel thought as he listened.
In an ironic twist, Malach Kemper (Ephraim Markov) believed his own lies more than Azriel did the ones surgically programmed into his mind.
For once the young man had someone else to thank for helping him to see something. The self confident, independent soul rarely depended on anyone for discernment or a second opinion. Blame it on the female pheromones...something Esther gave off reminded Azriel he had another life.
The deception in his head confused him with messages that seemed hardly logical (ala Esther being his sister). She couldn't possibly be blood. The chemistry he had with her was stronger than anything in a test tube from a lab.
Azriel may have been young in any other culture, but in Israel at fourteen you were considered to be a man. The way he thought and some of the things he could see himself doing hardly came from a boy’s mind.
“You’ve been thinking again,” Ephraim pontificated. “What have I told you about that?”
Resentment for Ephraim’s authority bounced from a six to an eight tonight. This man very likely wasn’t who he said he was. An imposter. Esther had told him before the security forces dragged her away that Azriel was different. That would make sense.
The gentler facade Ephraim wore around his son slowly stripped away to reveal a dark maleficent grim reaper. “At some point you have to nod your head, grunt, fart...anything. Are you hearing me?!”
“Yes.”
“No more midnight rooftop meditation sessions then?”
Azriel found humor in this question even though he knew it required a serious answer. He also found it easy to lie in this instance.
“Yes.”
A wicked smirk shone through Ephraim’s features at Azriel.
“You and I aren’t done here.”
For the first time a real clap of thunder sounded. The timing of the boom juxtaposed with the juncture in the confrontation on the rooftop sent a chill down Azriel’s spine. Brilliant white zigzagging lightning illuminated Ephraim and his henchman as they left to go.
The pretend dad wished his son a good night and pleasant dreams. Azriel may have just imagined it, but he could’ve sworn he heard an evil laugh before Ephraim and the other two men stepped off.
--
There was no conceivable way even a Viper agent knew where the backdoor was into a very secure Scorpion blacksite. Such sensitive information couldn’t be found in public records or redacted declassified white papers even. Only the insiders knew.
Scorpion’s sitting director-general’s ex-secretary, Heather, learned many close-to-the-vest secrets. Things people openly talked about as conspiracy theories on the internet? She once lived in them on a day to day basis. That’s why any knowledge she possessed had to be locked up in a jail cell in the Ozarks. Or forever silenced by a lethal injection.
Someone of her caliper from the underworld organization turned to the other side (the Free Republic of North America) could potentially yield deadly consequences to Scorpion’s worldwide regime; which is why it shocked Heather how her employer failed to tie off a loose end like her, especially since they purposefully framed her for aiding and abetting the “enemy” who assassinated the last director-general to ultimately make room for Howard to occupy the highest office.
There had to be another agenda at play other than a promotion at Heather’s expense. The multi-faceted endgame strategies of the dark side would confuse the world’s smartest artificial intelligence even.
In the meantime Heather and everyone with her ran free through the secret tunnel that technically didn’t exist. No one pursued the escapees. It didn’t all add up. Things that weren’t readily apparent before were about to be however.
...
A little earlier
“What seems off about this room?”
Heather meant the question to be left for Josh, the confused Viper agent who still thought he could lead the expedition. But Damion answered instead. He couldn’t help himself. He still had a thing for the beautiful British woman, even in the midst of a tense quagmire.
“The interior decorating. It’s held captive by the early 2000s,” said Damion.
Christophe appreciated the jail-themed personification his friend used.
Heather however doomed her not-so-secret admirer’s efforts by blowing him off; instead she helped the Viper agent prioritize what to look for in the room.
“The pyramid in the wall over there?”
“It seems to be missing something…” Josh demurred as he traced the imaginary line her pointing finger made directly across the head of the table to the incomplete shape situated above a four-foot high wooden buildout in the wall. In its hollow cavity on many shelves were black manuals bearing the resemblance and thickness of timeless literary tomes butted up against blue three ring binders that cracked at the edges from being fed too much paper. Gray dust blanketed all the manuscripts which nearly filled up all the cubby holes in the feature wall.
Heather deliberately ate up the distance between her and the unfinished symbol above the bookcase. Her right hand verily climbed the levels until it landed on the uppermost reaches, a mere twenty-four inches from the pyramid under construction. She was close to the final building material it needed to finish its zenith. What she sought dwelt within a false bottom of a book.
She noticed many titles in league with a square and compass trademark stamped onto the spines of their volumes. The library in front of her for this reason transported her back to a masonic lodge memory she vicariously experienced through an anecdotal told by a male friend at Scorpion’s Central Command.
All of the underworld agency’s major controllers, especially those who worked at Central Command itself were required to be thirty-third degree masons, the highest honor in masonry. Money didn’t buy the degree for all who owned it. From initiation in a blue lodge and onward through the rite of passage...this elect upper crust citizenry of Scorpion were not only de facto freemasons but more importantly vested partakers in a vision of one world government.
Of all the sacred texts she could’ve pulled off the shelf a Bible left the bookcase firmly in her grasp. It fell open to Daniel 7 almost by a ghostly hand’s will. Two words in verse eleven differentiated themselves from the sea of monochromatic typeface they were surrounded by. To Heather’s eyes “fourth beast” glowed like a lively fire.
Her transfixation soon died down though.
“Fourth beast,” she said out l
oud.
Everyone packed it in close in a huddle--Heather being the playcaller. Even Josh deferred to her now.
The biblical reference to the New Babylon Heather uttered did one of two things: spook all the humans within earshot and physically unlock the secret compartment in the Bible. The Old Testament half of the book contained an apex which looked to belong to an unfinished pyramid. The Eye of Providence that dwelt in the pyramid’s top section literally winked at Heather who fingered the relic from the hollowed out section of the Bible.
No telling how long it had been there.
The ancient triangle’s terra cotta cast possessed a heart of alloy, giving it a heft greater than one would estimate. Its fragility wasn’t any less diminished though even with a strong core because the edges began to shed bitty earthen flakes in Heather’s open palm.
The pictorial representation of the all-seeing eye of God with rays of glory depicted all around it actually emanated an ethereal projection that could be discerned within the visible spectrum of light without any aids.
Heather was involuntarily forced to squint when she held it up. Her fingers suddenly bent backwards against the strain. She had to let it go. The incomplete pyramid on the wall received its all-seeing topper in a magnetic embrace.
The three-sided union took a nanosecond to initiate. A golden band of splendor traveled up and down and around the outer edges of the pyramid a total of three times. The blonde streak of dazzling photons went faster with each successive pass of their starting point from the bottom right corner. After the third lap the brightness factor exceeded the pain of looking directly into the sun.
One more passphrase was needed to have access granted to the tunnels.