by Jillian Dodd
“Viktor, I want you to stay at the very end of this wall. Peter, stay where you are for now, but, ideally, you’ll move to what’s left of that doorway over there. You’ll have a better line of sight. I’ll be exposed for a moment. Try to give me cover. We’re a team. And don’t forget, this is all the fire power you have.”
“In other words, save a bullet for yourself?” Viktor says grimly.
“And don’t forget to watch your back.” I nod.
I can’t downplay the seriousness of our situation, particularly when a grenade is launched in our general direction. It doesn’t hit but does provide me with cover.
I close my eyes and repeat the words, I’m the firestorm.
The dean used to tell me to think of myself as the firestorm in situations like these. A hailstorm of chaos and bullets, punches and explosions. An unstoppable force with an impenetrable armor that can’t be beat.
I rise up out of the smoke as time slows down.
I can’t tell you exactly what happens next.
It simply becomes a series of well-executed moves—running, pivoting, firing, killing; rolling, ducking, firing, killing; climbing, aiming, firing, killing.
I move quickly, not stopping to think, purely functioning on the instincts built into me from years of training.
Soon, five out of the eight are dead.
The three who remain will become more cautious. They expected this job to be easy.
Their training will kick in now, more than likely skills learned in the military, which teaches precision and preplanned responses. Covert agents are taught to survive in a more creative way.
I carefully climb a small pile of rubble, praying it won’t collapse under my weight, in an attempt to get a bird’s-eye view of my opponents’ locations. I spy two of the men working their way around the edge of the ruins, trying to sneak up on Peter and Viktor. I take aim and fire at one after the other, quickly dispatching them.
The minute I’m ready to turn around to locate the last man, I hear a noise near me and know it’s too late.
The remaining man is at my side.
His gun is trained on me.
And he’s getting closer.
“Don’t move,” the man yells in German-accented English as a red dot, one I recognize, targets his forehead. I know what it means.
“Don’t even flinch—”
I drop to the ground, knowing there is a shooter hidden in the hills, who was just lining up his aim at the back of my head.
My would-be-captor’s face explodes, and he crumples over dead before I hear the sound of the suppressed long-range rifle.
I roll down the pile of rubble, seeking cover, and then peek around a wall, hoping to see the sniper. I’ve got to figure out a way to kill him, or we’ll be the sitting ducks in a carnival shooting game.
What I see surprises me.
The sniper reveals himself, standing up and giving me an unusual two-fingered salute. I can’t make out his face or tell based on his clothing.
But it’s not possible that he’s here.
In the middle of the desert.
When he is dead.
Regardless, I stand up tall—tears streaming down my face as I remember how my dad used to salute me as opposed to waving good-bye—and return the gesture.
“Holy shit, Huntley,” Peter says, he and Viktor running up to me. “You killed them all.”
“I guess all those hours spent playing video games paid off,” I reply with a chuckle, momentarily losing sight of the sniper. When I look back to the hills, he’s gone.
“Plus, you’re a girl. They probably didn’t see you as a threat.”
“They didn’t have a chance to see me as a threat because I snuck up on them.”
I don’t have time to search the hills further because the sound of vehicles approaching fills my ears.
“More are coming. Hide!” I pull the boys behind a wall. “There’s no way we can take on more.”
“So, we die?” Viktor asks.
“I was thinking we hide. Maybe we can bury ourselves in this rubble until they leave.”
“THIS IS THE UNITED STATES ARMY,” is shouted over a voice amplifier in two languages. “PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR.”
They say curiosity killed the cat, and in this case, I’d probably be dead for peeking out and giving away our location, but when I do, I see a rescue team of American soldiers from the nearby base. They are moving through the ruins, clearing the area.
“It’s the Americans!” Viktor yells.
“She’s safe,” The Ghost says, calling Black X headquarters from Iraq. “They’re headed back to the base.”
“How’d she do?” the leader of Black X inquires.
“I wish I’d had a video camera, so you could have watched her. As I’ve said before, you need to give the old man some credit. She’s incredible. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Combine the military precision of an elite soldier and the creativeness of an artist with the grace of a ballerina, each step in sync and fluid, like a choreographed dance only she knows. She killed one of the mercenaries by shooting the top of the doorway he was standing under. The whole thing came down on him in a heap. He never saw it coming. For another, she used parkour to go up the walls of the ruins, got above him, and shot straight down through his skull. She picked them off one by one, moving through the battlefield with ease.”
“She didn’t make any mistakes?”
“Only one. When there were three men left, a pair of them was attempting to sneak up on the boys. While she was killing them to protect her friends, she forgot to protect her six.”
“That’s going to be her downfall. She’s forming friendships and falling in love despite her training. What happened next?”
“I had taken up location in the hills above the ruins with my sniper rifle.”
“And?”
“I shot him.”
“You were told to follow, not interfere!”
“I wasn’t going to let her die!” The Ghost argues.
“Did she think you’d accidentally killed your own man and come after you?”
“No, I, um, sort of let her know that I was on her side.”
“And just how did you do that?”
“A simple gesture. No big deal. Shall I follow her to wherever she goes next?”
“Absolutely, but just like Omaha, the Stones, and DC, don’t let her know you’re there.”
Once back at the base, I suggest departing for London immediately. The base will be glad to have us gone, and the boys are still pumped up. I’m pumped up, too, but not because of the shoot-out. My mind is racing, trying to put all the pieces of this puzzle together.
It’s one thing to see a vault filled with more gold than you could have ever imagined. It’s another to possibly have been saved in a shoot-out in Iraq by your supposedly dead father.
“Did you know that modern-day Iraq is considered the cradle of civilization?” one of the crew members says as we board. “It was the former home to the Sumerians and sits on the thirty-third parallel north at the junction of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Some even believe that is where the Garden of Eden was located.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.” Peter takes his seat, getting buckled in. “Although the Sphere was cool, I have no desire to come back here.”
“I suppose not,” Viktor says, giving him a playful shove in the shoulder. “You have some dirt under your nails.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a simple technical malfunction?” the leader asks.
They are sitting in Ares Von Allister’s living quarters in the TerraSphere, his second-in-command hunched over a computer that he had hooked up to the locking mechanism on the vault.
“This shows the vault was open for nine minutes and forty-two seconds. Same as the alert shows.”
“Is anything missing?”
The man shrugs, holding his hands upward. “Who knows? There’s a full inventory, but it would take months to go thro
ugh. I will say though, nothing looks out of place. If someone was in here, they took the first thing they saw, or they knew what they wanted and exactly where to find it.”
“What do you think happened?” he asks, pouring them each a drink.
“I have a few theories, as I suspect you do.”
“You go first,” the leader says.
“I hope it was a simple glitch, but if it wasn’t, I have a lot of questions. First being, who accessed it? You said all the rings but Dupree’s are accounted for, but did you ask each member if they’d used it? If they had been here?”
“I didn’t, but unknown to anyone but the current leader, part of the verification process includes a time stamp as well as a location tracking of the incoming text,” the leader explains. “No one was in the vicinity. Someone has to have Dupree’s ring.”
“And I think it has to be McClellan.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because he expected to get your role after Hillford died. McClellan, Hillford, and Dupree were close, and remember, it was McClellan who originally suggested threatening the world with nuclear holocaust. He could be trying to undermine your power. Or he might be planning a mutiny,” he says and then pauses before continuing, “The other option is, when British intelligence recovered the bombs, Dupree wasn’t dead and betrayed us.”
“I can’t imagine him doing that. Besides, if British intelligence had been here, they wouldn’t have left,” the leader counters. “They would have called in allied forces and taken over the place immediately. If history tells us nothing, it’s that they aren’t opposed to stealing national treasures. Also, how would they have gotten into the Sphere?”
“Undercover, one would assume,” his second-in-command says with a laugh.
“Let’s say it wasn’t them. Could anyone else have figured out the treasure was here? Have we received a list of everyone who was on site?”
“Security was pulling that together. Let me check my email.” He presses buttons on his computer. “Here it is. We have a total of thirty-three companies, each averaging ten employees, a staff of thirty-seven, sixteen round-the-clock security personnel, and a few family members for a total of five-hundred-and-three inhabitants. Aside from the dwellers of the Sphere, there were prescheduled supply deliveries for four of the companies and a prescheduled tour from Prescott Industries in preparation for the upcoming Von Allister board meeting. What I’m worried about is who got in that isn’t on the list.”
“Prescott Industries?” the leader asks. “Should we be worried about Malcolm?”
“Until today, I would have said no. He and Ares were so close.”
“Is there a list of those on the tour?”
“Yeah, it’s on a different page. Let me …” The man stops. “It wasn’t Malcolm. It was his son, Peter, along with Aleksandr Nikolaevich’s son, Viktor, and get this … Huntley Von Allister. We know the other rings weren’t here. Could she have accessed the vault with his ring?”
“She didn’t even know her father. How would she know about the vault?”
“Maybe Ares left something in writing about it along with his ring.”
The leader shakes his head. “If he still had his ring, that could be an option, I suppose.”
“Are you saying his ring is missing, too?”
“No,” the leader says. “He gave it to me six years ago for safekeeping.”
“Why?”
“He thought he was under surveillance by the government and was nervous. You know how he could get.”
“What if he gave you a fake?”
The leader pulls two old boxes from his breast pocket. “I brought Ares’s and John’s rings just to make sure. You remember the story of how these were made, correct?”
“Yes, ten pear-shaped emeralds cut from the same stone with identical steel-hardened gold overlays to ensure the keys would stand the test of time. Originally worn as a pendant but later crafted into rings to make them easier to turn in the lock. Passed down for generations within the elite families of the world.” His second-in-command laughs. “It’s no wonder it’s been kept a secret all these years. It sounds completely bogus.”
The men move to the Arcadia symbol and try each, both working.
“Let’s see if McClellan contacts me,” the leader says. “I didn’t tell him I was coming here.”
A few moments later, he gets a call, which he puts on speaker so that his second-in-command can hear.
“The vault was accessed again,” McClellan says in the same frantic voice. “Twice in a short amount of time.”
“It was me,” the leader says. “Checking on things.”
“Well, thank goodness,” McClellan says with an audible sigh of relief.
“I didn’t get a report from you regarding the recovery team you activated,” the leader adds. “I take it, they didn’t see anyone suspicious?”
“Um, so I just got word that our men were all killed, apparently in a shoot-out.”
“Are you telling me they found and went after the perpetrators?”
“The last report I got said they were set up near the abandoned palace, waiting to search every vehicle that went by.”
“And they are all dead?”
“Yes. My sources on the base say they received a distress signal, responded, and took out our men, who had pinned down … some friends of ours.”
“Friends?”
“Yes. It turns out that Peter Prescott, Viktor Nikolaevich, and Huntley Von Allister were there to tour the Sphere before the Von Allister board meeting. The visit had been planned months in advance. They happened to be driving back to the base when our men attacked them. They had a two-man security team who put up a fight until the soldiers got there. Sounds like the kids were pretty shook up. Thank goodness the idiots didn’t kill them.”
“As our sergeant at arms, you ultimately would have been responsible if they had. And you know the punishment for a betrayal like that.”
“Yes, sir. Death. But hear me out. In situations like this, information comes in from multiple sources. My source at base aviation mentioned that a black Bombardier jet owned by the Montrovian government had recently landed, which was a little odd, considering what’s about to happen there. I quickly called my informant at the top of the chain of command in the Montrovian military to inquire about it. He told me I should be very worried. That an Israeli spy, who was a friend of King Giovanni, has been a frequent guest of the country. The source concluded the agent was on the plane. It was only after further inquiry did I discover that Huntley Von Allister is in the process of buying the plane—apparently, it became the property of the royals when it was lost by a Russian billionaire at their Royal Casino—and it had arrived via Washington DC. By that time, I was unable to reach my team.”
“I suggest you hire a more skilled group of men next time. And quickly,” the leader says, ending the call.
“If you ask me, we should kill him anyway,” the second-in-command says. “Do you think we should make provisions to move the treasure?”
“No,” the leader says. “This took too long to put into place, and we’d have to close down the Sphere to do it. Besides, all the treasure was secretly tagged. If someone tried to smuggle anything out of the Sphere, all sorts of alarms would have gone off, but put out word with our antiquity dealers on both sides of the law just to make sure nothing surfaces.”
“We’re getting closer. Do you think we’ll be able to pull this off?”
“We will not fail.”
“And how do you feel about that? Any second thoughts? A lot of people will die.”
“That’s the point, right?” the leader says. “Our world can’t continue like this. I’m not without feelings. Of course, I don’t want people to die, but it’s the responsible thing to do. We will reduce the population so that we can reboot and use our technology to do things right this time. Live as one with nature. Have one world government, so our inhabitants can live in peace with abundance. It’
s going to be incredible.”
“It’s going to be Arcadia,” his second-in-command teases. “Does that mean we can leave this dusty place, go back to London, and prepare for the Von Allister board meeting?”
“Absolutely.”
We plan to spend the night at Peter’s townhouse in London, which, no surprise, is beautiful and well-appointed.
We’re met at the door by his mother, who rushes Peter like a linebacker and practically tackles him. I also notice she’s in tears.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Peter asks.
“What’s wrong?” she screeches. “My son was in Iraq, involved in some kind of shoot-out, and could have been killed.”
“How do you know about that?” Peter asks, looking sheepish.
“I’m your mother. That’s how.” When he finally wriggles out of her grip, she hugs Viktor and me. “And you two,” she says in a way that causes Viktor to respond with, “It’s not our fault.”
“Your mother would like you to call her.”
Viktor rolls his eyes but does as he was told, moving into another room to do so.
“I can’t believe all this happened, and none of you bothered to tell anyone,” Mrs. Prescott chastises.
“We just wanted to get on the plane and get to London, Mom,” Peter says. “We were probably a little in shock. It was quite the ordeal.”
“That’s true,” I add. “They both slept the whole way here. Adrenaline crash probably.”
“Tell me everything that happened,” she says.
“How did you even find out?” Peter asks, looking bewildered.
“First Lady Amanda Spear called. Did you think you could get rescued by the military and the president wouldn’t know?” She suddenly grabs my hand and studies my engagement ring. “That’s beautiful. Congratulations. And I would suspect your fiancé and his parents are a wreck over this, not to mention your brother.”
“He knows, too?”
“I thought he should know,” she says simply.
“Mom, we were there on business. Top-secret business. We’d better not see this on the damn society page, or Dad’s going to be pissed.”