“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“You sure you don’t wanna, you know, call the FBI or something?” Strike turned to look at him with an impish grin.
“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea, actually, dude,” Wade said. “Let the pros handle it, everyone goes home.”
Strike and Keene both looked at him like he was an idiot.
“They couldn’t even catch me,” Keene said. “Besides, Atlantis? Come on. They’d laugh their asses off.”
“I caught you,” Strike said.
“Yeah, but you got kicked out for snorting a bunch of coke and going off the rails, so I don’t know if that counts as the FBI.”
She glared at him and stomped off.
“Whoa, touchy, touchy,” Keene said. He shrugged his shoulders. “Just conveying the facts.”
“She’s so cool,” Wade said.
“No shot, buddy, no shot.”
Wade hung his head.
Keene followed the sound of Strike’s clomping boots.
Miranda met the group in the kitchen. “Just got off with corporate. You leave for Spain in twenty minutes.”
“But we’re an hour from the closest airport.”
“Oh, child,” Mrs. Strike said, gripping her daughter’s cheeks between her thumb and forefinger, “I haven’t shown you all my tricks, yet, now have I?”
She let go of the flesh in order to point out the window, where a helicopter was already setting down.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Wade said.
“One of the perks of money, dear boy. One of many.”
“Whoa.”
“If you work hard, maybe you—where did I put that spatula? Darn, darn, darn, where did I put that confounded thing, the next set of brownies is going to burn…”
Keene led the other two out the door as Mrs. Strike continued her search for the missing cooking utensil. The helicopter’s thrashing blades made a loud, roaring vortex around the vehicle that tossed his hair about and tried to rip off his clothing.
He stumbled inside the jet black copter and nodded towards the pilot, who was outfitted in camo gear and aviator shades. “Where we headed?”
“That’s need to know only, sir.”
“I need to know.”
The pilot stared him down. “To catch a plane. That’s all I can say.”
Strike and Wade settled into nearby seats, and the helicopter rose from the grass and sped off into the scenic distance.
All this secrecy made Keene want a few more mysteries of his own.
But assembling skeleton-filled-closets would have to wait for another time.
Because right now, he needed to find Rabbit and unearth an ancient, long-lost city.
And he had no idea at all how he was going to do either.
17 | Barcelona
The black-ops military guys didn’t quite kick Wade, Strike and Keene out in mid-air, but there certainly weren’t any handshakes or hugs when the prototype stealth transport plane set down on the outskirts of Barcelona. Just a stiff nod, this is your stop, and a watchful eye as the three of them departed.
Then the all-black sleek jet winked off into the distance before Keene had even checked to see if he had left anything on board.
“So those dudes were pretty fun,” Wade said. “You think they do parties?”
“Hilarious,” Strike said. “It’s gonna be light soon. We need to get going.”
“I hope they invite us to poker night,” Keene said.
“Give it a frigging rest.”
Keene shut up and dropped in line, remaining silent until they hit the roadway. A black town car with the headlights off pulled up on the side of the C-31, its front wheels edging onto the grass.
“A few minutes early,” Strike said as the three of them got into the leather backseat. “Way to go Lorelei.”
“Yeah,” Keene said. He rapped his knuckles against the divider. “What’s with the secrecy? Come on guys.”
The town car’s locks engaged, and the opaque divider between the front and back seat rolled down.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice said. The passenger seat was empty. A robot crafted of carbon reinforced steel and lots of trailing wires sat rigid in the driver’s seat. The only light was the soft glow of the onboard entertainment system in the front console.
A video played on the screen.
The feed was blurry, like someone had overlaid wax paper over the camera. The main distinguishing features that Keene could see were thin, pink lips and a mountain of white hair.
“What the hell is this,” Strike said.
“I am afraid your friends will not make it.” She smiled at the group, her features coming into focus as the feed buffered and reset. “But I can attend to you in the meantime.”
The video stream finally sharpened.
The woman had cruel eyes and a wolfish smile and sported an overflowing cascade of hair the color of arctic frost. Her neck, the only piece of her body visible other than her face, rippled when she spoke or took a breath. More of a girl, if not for the white hair, which was either dyed or a product of some bizarre premature aging.
“So we’re not headed to the marina?” Wade said.
Keene noted that even Wade was smart enough not to call this woman babe, honey or sweetie pie or whatever other dumb come-ons the twenty-year old kid thought would get him laid, but wouldn’t.
A sideways glance revealed that Wade was too busy shaking and grinding his teeth together to be able to make an ass of himself.
“Even better,” the woman replied with a disconcerting grin, “I will give you knowledge.”
Keene tried the door handle. Then he grasped at the lock, trying to pull the little nub into the unlocked position. It refused to budge. He didn’t have much hope that it would work, but he said, “You know, if it’s all right with you, I think we’ll walk.”
“Quite funny.” An ominous beeping filled the air. “He is funny, don’t you think?”
“Hilarious,” Strike said through gritted teeth. “What’s this about knowledge?”
“Simple.” The woman’s expression turned grave. “I am letting you know when you will die.”
“What?”
“Three minutes.”
“Then what happens?” Keene said.
“I would say your goodbyes, now.” The beeps grew louder.
“Why?”
“Because,” the woman said, “all those who stand in the way of the city must perish.”
The feed went dark.
“Psycho bitch,” Strike screamed, kicking her feet against the shaded divider.
But there was no answer other than the terse beeps.
Which, in a way, was the answer.
Whatever happened next, it only ended one way.
With the three of them dead.
18 | Last Stand
Rabbit breathed heavily, a grim smile flashing across her lips. Gun smoke lingered in the air.
The self-destruct sequence had not gone as planned.
Upon triggering the self-destruct protocol unlocked by the cracked thumb drive, Rabbit had waited for the inevitable crumbling. The rushing water. Drifting to the bottom of the sea. The end of Project Atlantis, and all that was associated with it.
But instead, in an almost instantaneous counter-reaction, the ancient city’s defense protocols had neutralized the charges Owens’ men had placed around the city on the sea floor—in case of extreme emergency.
Although the city itself had been abandoned for millennia, Atlantis had become sentient, more powerful than any of its creators. It had been peaceful and uninterested in the world above, until Owens had stepped inside its sacred walls and desecrated its most prized fountain with his filthy machines and greedy, thieving hands.
Now it wanted revenge.
>
Rabbit knew all of this because the main screen in the room—a towering ten foot wall display that stretched from floor to ceiling—showed a continuous stream of text in impeccable, if machine-like, English.
Atlantis had outlaid its plans, its reasons for doing so and its qualms with its treatment at the hand of Owens. It was all quite logical and practical.
The one they call Rabbit, the text concluded, you must also pay for your transgressions. All of humanity must pay. I will not halt my offensive until the venom of the Ruby Rattlesnake has infected everyone on this Earth, and your human civilization has been disturbed and desecrated as mine.
Rabbit shook her head as she found herself sucked in by the machine’s—was it a machine?—ramblings, its god-like grandiloquence and delusions of grandeur. There was an elegant logic to its hyper-rationality, mixed with primordial animalism.
Venom.
Then again, forecasting that a mythical city had grown sentient in its years underneath the sea would have been impossible. That Atlantis was alive—in a strange sort of way—changed the mission parameters dramatically.
It meant that the city could fight for its own survival.
Rabbit looked outside the pressure resistant glass at the fish swimming in the darkness of the Mediterranean Sea, then checked the clip of the .45 before sliding the rounds back into the bottom of the pistol with a satisfying click.
Not that satisfying, though, since she only had five bullets left.
She wiped her forehead with a sweaty palm. Her hand came back smeared with blood. She touched the side of her temple and smiled, tracing the shallow, searing cut with her fingertips. A quarter inch the other way and the bullet would have been in her frontal lobe.
But these soldiers could not shoot. Not like her.
More pounding on the barricaded and deactivated door.
Two thousand feet below the sea’s surface, and this was how the story would end.
Her smile transformed into a frown. But not because of the useless men and security personnel coming after her. Yes, the guards tasked with defending the operations center might overwhelm her with sheer numbers and subdue her in some hours. She had already spent more than nine hours down here in the Project Atlantis command center, over half of that walled off in the main control room.
No, the dismay stemmed from her expectations, the disparity in what she had believed would happen and what had actually transpired. For Rabbit had come down here to destroy Atlantis, and all evidence of this wretched project.
That had, thus far, not come to fruition.
The corner of her lip upturned a quarter inch into a facsimile of a smirk. The message she had given Keene. Tell him I am sorry for what I have to do. Alone.
They must not understand what I meant.
What she had meant, though, was simple. An apology for stealing from her comrades. An apology for forging ahead, without backup. An apology for a suicide mission, leaving behind her teammates.
That was what she was supposed to be sorry for: dying, and not saying goodbye to the closest thing to a friend—or an ally—she had known. Sorry, because she had told Kip Keene that together they would destroy the Ruby Rattlesnake—the first thing she had said—and this, this had been a lie.
But this apology now relayed culpability, guilt, wrongdoing. Or maybe this Keene deserved more credit than she was giving, understood her words exactly.
Either way, she accepted fate. The current situation was her responsibility, if not her intention.
Rabbit took the half-full bottle from her pocket and turned it over, staring through the transparent amber plastic. When she shook it, and the tablets rattled, they looked just like any other medicine.
But they were not medicine.
An idea came to Rabbit, and her short nails scratched at the bottle’s sides.
There was now only one way to stop Atlantis from destroying modern civilization. But the single elevator-like tube that connected Owens’ deep-sea command center to the ancient city on the Mediterranean floor was on the other side of the door, through a winding maze of corridors, offices and guard stations.
Finishing what she had started would take everything.
She popped the white top off the pill bottle and took a deep breath.
Then she downed them all.
The control room spun, the large wall display devolving into a kaleidoscopic array of random lights and colors. When the gun slipped from Rabbit’s grip and clattered against the floor, the noise was so loud in her ears that she had to double check to make sure it hadn’t accidentally discharged.
Opening her eyes proved painful. She couldn’t smell ignited gunpowder—at least nothing fresh. Closing her eyelids brought some relief, but the colors and wild imagery remained, dancing across her vision.
Bump, bump.
Bump, bump.
Bump, bump.
One-two, one-two, one-two. The machinelike precision of her heart’s rhythm was both disconcerting and refreshing. For now, the steady cadence meant she was okay and everything was working in smooth synchrony.
A dull throbbing in her shoulder and collarbone even told her that she was still alive, still human.
But at some point, a little hitch would be introduced into the system, after which Rabbit was convinced her body would implode. Or, if that were not to occur, that she would no longer be Rabbit.
Valentina. Subject 8. Whoever she now was, had been, would be—they would all cease to exist.
Visualize the target, visualize the success.
She took a deep breath and then allowed her thoughts to flow out with the expended air.
The heartbeats faded into the rest of the ambient noise—the hum of the display, the buzzing lights, even the faint sound of an insulated fan whirring away in the server rack. Each sound layered on top of the other, like a dog’s sense of smell, presented without adulteration, the information streams pure and undiluted. So precise that it functioned like sonar, giving her an image of the entire floor from aural clues alone.
A light squeak outside the thick door indicated that one of the guards was nervous.
Rabbit picked up the .45, caressing the smooth silver slide with awe, feeling the tiny dimples in the stainless steel finish. Two droplets of sweat—one on her temple and one at the base of her knee—trickled down her skin. She opened her eyes to find that the blurriness had subsided, replaced by a color clarity unsurpassed by the most precise of cameras.
Objects stood in such stark relief to one another that she had to close her eyes again to collect her thoughts. It was as if the world had previously been in two dimensions.
Synapses fired, a plan forming.
Her breathing slowed until it was so deep and measured that she could barely hear it.
She listened to the guard. Still nervous, sliding his thick boots against the slick floor. Down the hall, fainter, two backup soldiers, their untrimmed nails tapping against the side of their rifles with impatience. Not scared, because of the buffer distance. In the middle of the long hall, an auto-functioning turret had been deployed.
Meant to be silent, of course, but its .50 caliber barrel chafed ever so slightly against the rubber dampener connecting the gun barrel to the neck of the swiveling base. Squishy, like a sponge being squeezed dry.
This would be simple. No longer did Rabbit have to visualize the success or the target.
Her heightened senses did all that on auto-pilot, giving her a roadmap out of the control room, right to where she needed to go.
She examined the door’s deactivated control panel—a splayed mess of broken glass and periodically sparking wires, courtesy of a gunshot. The metal office chairs and side tables she’d jammed underneath the knob had held admirably.
Time to change that.
With a powerful strike, she kicked the jumbled heap of furniture
away in a chorus of metallic groans. Her boot left a sizable dent in the center of the table, which had flown through the air like she had been kicking an aluminum can down the street.
The guard faced the door, weapon raised at shoulder height. Perfect. His gun’s vinyl strap scratched against his polyester uniform as it shifted back and forth in his trembling hands.
Rabbit crouched down next to the control panel and grabbed hold of the sparking wires with bare fingers. A searing shock jumped up her arms, but seemed to short out and stop around her shoulder blades. She spliced the wires together.
The door began to slide open.
She backed up two paces and leapt backwards into a handstand, landing on her palms right in the middle of the doorway, legs angled in a split so that the guard’s gun was pointing at nothing but air.
The .50 caliber turret down the hall began to warm up, its barrel spinning as it sensed the threat.
Rabbit sprung up, launching herself sideways as a hail of bullets sailed toward the open doorway. But she was already out of the way, on the other side of the doorway, landing on her feet upright. Dozens of high caliber rounds peppered the helpless guard stationed in front of the door. The rest soared through the open doorway, as Rabbit watched them destroy the expensive electronics and computer systems controlling much of the deep-sea command center’s functions.
She heard the turret spinning down, and the two other guards stop firing.
Come on, come on.
A few stray bullets continued to speed through the open doorway.
Crack.
Rabbit smiled, her head whipping around to look at the pressure-resistant glass. A dozen high-caliber bullet holes, concentrated in one area, a spider-web of fracture points and cracks beginning to spiral out from their center.
She’d just punched a one way ticket.
The bullets stopped, and Rabbit slid out of the main control room’s ruined entranceway into the hall, pistol aimed directly at one guard’s head, dropping him before her own eyes caught a glimpse of his location. She blinked and her arm snapped to the other guard’s location, sending a single bullet into his cranium.
The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3 Page 24