“That’s where I got my antibodies, then? China?”
“Yes,” Amanda admitted. “More than likely.”
Devlin sighed heavily, dropping his chin to his chest. Amanda had truly believed the CIA liaison to be the Hidden Hand’s mole. It had all fallen into place. No one else in the facility was healthy. Everyone was either dead or was staring down death on the near horizon.
“How about you untie me, then?” Devlin asked.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Amanda said as she knelt down, starting with his feet.
To her surprise, Devlin chuckled. “Just glad to know you aren’t a traitor, either.”
“So you aren’t going to hit me over the head with a phone once I untie you?”
“No,” Devlin said. “Definitely not.”
“Amanda,” Dr. Henderson said as he entered the conference room. “What are you doing?”
She stood, feeling silly, guilty, and downright stupid. “Devlin gained his immunity naturally. He wasn’t vaccinated.”
“I know,” Henderson replied as he pulled a gun on them. “Because I am.”
* * *
Ronnie paused as Zach opened the door to the Hidden Hand’s dining hall. They had made it across the courtyard without incident. As she had hoped, Lino had put the bulk of his men on the wall and the courtyard. A show of force. A force that was now unconscious.
The three rushed inside as Zach closed and barred the door behind them. Ronnie wished she could make the sound of her footfalls disappear. In the cavernous hall, each step echoed off the high, stone walls. Even after seeing the massive dining hall on the 3-D image, nothing could prepare her for the actual room. It truly did seem right out of the fourteen hundreds.
Row after row of thick, wooden tables and benches stretched on for what seemed forever. Thick, woven tapestries covered the walls. Each one depicted a scene from the Bible. Clearly not the part of the Bible that talked about turning the other cheek. No, these wall hangings were the hellfire-and-brimstone kind. Demons ate the heart out of nonbelievers, and God was portrayed as um, kind of a jerk.
Above their heads flew banners with angelic coats of arms for each table.
Ronnie drew in a slow breath, trying not to let the stillness overwhelm her. She’d almost rather be fighting off an army rather than walking through this dining hall, seeing the hard-core preparations the Hidden Hand had made. This wasn’t just some “hey, let’s destroy the world” plot. These people had thought this through. They had seating arrangements already figured out for their new world order.
She typed a command into the air, switching her focus back to her cracked lens. The screen was fuzzy and fritzed every two seconds, but gave her enough information to know that the entire castle’s surveillance was down. Which on one hand was great. The enemy couldn’t see them. On the other hand, they couldn’t see what in the hell Lino was up to.
Sure, they had knocked out over thirty men in the courtyard. That still left well over two dozen guards who could be lurking around every corner. Ronnie didn’t realize how nervous she was until Zach’s hand found hers. He gave it a squeeze. Which was helpful, since they just walked past a full suit of armor. Each time they passed one of them, Ronnie held her breath, half expecting it to jump out at her.
Quirk, on the other hand, would have been admiring the Game of Thrones vibe of the dining hall. More than likely, he would have talked the pilot into trying on one of the suits of armor. But Quirk wasn’t here. And who knew what happened to the pilot? They had planned on radio silence until the vaccine chamber was breached. So as long as her KeKe-G glasses were interfaced with her laptop, she held onto hope. It could be a false hope, but it was a hope, nonetheless.
“Isn’t it strange that we have gotten this far unmolested?” Francois asked.
Zach looked at her as well.
Ugh. Didn’t they know you didn’t jinx something like this? There were times during a cyber breach that you just strolled along. Of course, that usually meant that they had something nasty waiting for you on the other side.
“My guess?” she said. “They never expected their shell to be penetrated. Which is why I angled us toward the more social areas of the castle. Away from their security hub.”
Zach frowned. “Really? That’s what you are going with? That the Hidden Hand didn’t want to get the dining hall messy with our blood?”
Damn Zach and his intuition.
“Or…” Ronnie said as they neared the large, thick wooden door that led out of the dining hall.
“Or?”
Even Francois seemed interested in her answer. Great time for him to tune in.
“Well… or there are twenty men on the other side of that door armed with automatic machine guns?”
Cocking his head to the side, Zach asked, “And which one do you think is more likely?”
“Oh, the twenty armed gunmen. Totally,” Ronnie replied.
* * *
Zach gripped his weapon. One gun against twenty? Francois had picked up a spear and still had on Ronnie’s super special bulletproof vest, but still. Neither of them would last ten seconds once the door was opened.
Ronnie had to have a plan, didn’t she?
“Hon?” he asked as she slid her gloved fingers over a statue set in an alcove. It was hard to pay attention to what she was doing, given the fact that Zach could practically see the gunmen on the other side of the stout door. Waiting for him to throw the crossbar up and step into the kill zone that was the hallway. He had a few flashbang grenades. However, he was hoping to keep hold of those for an emergency.
It truly was sad when twenty armed gunmen just didn’t quite seem like the emergency like it used to. That was, of course, until the door opened.
“Babe?”
“Got it,” Ronnie said pulling the statue of a monk off its pedestal. Beneath the wood carving sat a very sophisticated-looking keypad.
That was the Hidden Hand. All medieval on the outside, and all techie on the inside.
“And that opens…?”
“Give me a second, and I’ll show you,” she said as she typed into thin air. Zach knew that the keys were motion activated, and she could see the results of her efforts in her glasses, but it was still a little freaky to watch.
Francois went to open his mouth, then closed it again, eyeing beneath the door, where shadows definitely moved. It seemed the natives were getting restless. He glanced to Ronnie who was busy biting her lip. Zach didn’t bother to ask the ETA on her project. She would be done when she was done.
He backed up, putting the automatic weapon to his shoulder. The Frenchman too retreated from the door. Soon, the option to toss a flashbang would be gone.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the grand dining hall as if a thousand candles blazed. Thunder rumbled, shaking the stained glass windows in their frame. Even the weather seemed impatient with their progress.
Zach flexed and unflexed his fingers. A loud clunk sounded. Zach braced, ready for the horde to come through that door.
“Well?” Ronnie asked. “Did you want to get out of here, or what?”
He checked over his shoulder. Sure enough, a passage had opened behind them. “How?”
Ronnie shrugged. “They tried to hide it, but you know, I’m me.”
From anyone else, that would have been pure arrogance. From Ronnie? Just the facts, ma’am.
“They’re opening it,” Francois said, pointing to the metal spike peeking through the crack in the dining hall door, lifting the crossbar.
“Then let’s not be here,” Zach suggested.
Zach made sure that Francois and Ronnie were through the door before he entered the narrow passageway. The hidden door smoothly and silently closed behind them.
“Could you smash that?” Ronnie asked as she pointed to the control panel.
Zach was more than happy to use the butt of his assault rifle to demolish the circuitry. A loud crash came from the dining hall, and then the unmistakable clatter of gunfire.
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“This way,” Ronnie urged him to the staircase…leading up.
“But I thought we needed to get down to the vault.”
Ronnie indicated the door. “Be my guest to try and get down that extremely well- protected stairwell. For me, though, I’m going to go up to see what the hell they spent so much tech to hide, then follow the secret passage up and over the dining hall and come down behind all those armed men.”
Good thing he knew that she’d say no to a kiss right about now; otherwise, he would have planted one on her right this second.
* * *
Amanda felt her strength seep away as she stared at Dr. Henderson, the director of the Plum Island zoonotic disease research facility. Make that the Hidden Hand’s mole.
“How?” she choked out.
The elderly man smiled like the gentleman he was not as he picked at one of his boils. Only it wasn’t a boil—it was a fake. He lifted up the boil, revealing perfectly normal skin beneath it. Henderson took in a deep breath with a single rattle.
“That is how you fake the plague,” he remarked, seeming surprisingly chipper. Why shouldn’t he, though? He’d just won. “And I already warned our Northernmost Province of your friends’ arrival. They were more than ready for them.”
Amanda’s heart rate accelerated. As much of a lying bastard as Henderson was, he still gave away some truth. So Quirk and Ronnie had made it to a vaccine stronghold. And since Henderson only implied that they were dead, Amanda believed very much that they were still alive.
Which meant there was hope. Which meant she needed to find a way to stay out of that gun’s way.
Unfortunately, Henderson leveled the weapon at her. “It truly was amazing watching you work, Amanda. I should have shut you down long ago, but you were just so brilliant. I suppose you won’t join us?”
As much as she wanted to lie, Amanda knew he would never believe her. Better to go out with her conscious intact.
“No,” she answered.
“Too bad,” Henderson said as he cocked the gun.
Amanda flinched, waiting for the shot, when Devlin hurled himself over in his chair, knocking into Henderson.
“Run!” the CIA liaison screamed.
She bolted to the side, angling for the door. Henderson righted himself and shot at Devlin. Blood gushed from the side of his head.
Without prompting, her feet got moving, streaking past the director and out into the hall. Shots zinged past her as she made for the stairs. Head pounding, lungs burning, and her muscles complaining, Amanda ran for her life.
* * *
As the trio went up the staircase, the noise of the calamity below subsided. The gunmen in the dining hall must not have known about the passage they now fled. Which only inflamed Francois’ curiosity. What could the Hidden Hand hold so dear they did not tell their own men about it?
Francois’ foot stumbled on one of the steps. The near dark conditions were not very helpful to aged eyes. The FBI agent grabbed his elbow, steadying him.
“Just a few more.”
Ahead of them, Ronnie opened a door, but did not go through it. “Oh my…”
Zach rushed forward with his gun up, yet even he stumbled to a stop. “What the…?”
Francois cautiously took the next three steps to join his companions. Now he could understand their shock. He might have been equally stuporous had he not had this scene drilled into his head since childhood.
Before them lay what seemed to be the perfect recreation of the Khan’s great tent. Silk lined the walls and ceiling, making it seem as if they were out upon the Steppes. Rugs covered the stone floor, so thick they made you believe that there was grass beneath the wool. The attention to detail, though, was not why the others had faltered.
It was the mummified bodies positioned around the tent. On the throne sat the great- grandson of Genghis Khan. His serving women huddled in the corner. The only two bodies standing were the Hidden Hand’s master, and, standing before the Khan’s throne was, of course, the boy who killed the world, Travanti. Even now, in death, his pale, pale blond hair shone against his withered features.
The Hidden Hand sanctified this moment—when they sealed their first victory by convincing the Khan to throw his infected dead over the fort’s walls. An act that set human civilization back centuries, if not millennia. But their plan had worked—perhaps better than even they had imagined. The devastation that the Black Death wrought took its toll on even the Hidden Hand.
They did not seem to notice the irony that the boy-man Travanti actually died of the plague. Their medieval attempts at vaccination were somewhat rudimentary at best.
Francois was ashamed to say he did not denounce and reject the Hidden Hand when he learned of their plan to scourge the earth with the Black Death. Or when he learned they would take the coward’s way out and receive the inoculation themselves. No, it had been when he discovered that Travanti had died only a few weeks later of the plague. As a matter of fact much of the Hidden Hand leadership fell.
The news had struck Francois like a bolt from the sky. As if God himself had shaken Francois to bring sense into him. The Hidden Hand had unleashed hell on earth, yet it had consumed nearly all of them. Their attempt to create a new world order was shattered by the very plague they let loose to destroy the old world order.
Suddenly, in that moment of realization, the Hidden Hand’s power seemed so very petty. Children playing at a game best left to God. The width and breadth of the Hidden Hand’s cruelty and delusion became crystalline. From that spark of clarity, Francois had spent every waking second, and many in his dreams, working to undo the Hidden Hand’s scheme.
And here he was—standing within the recreation of the cult’s most sacred moment.
Francois took his spear and slashed viciously at the silk.
“How could I guess you would come to defile the womb?”
The sinister sweetness told Francois who spoke the words long before the curtain parted to reveal the latest golden-haired child of the Hidden Hand.
Lino.
* * *
Zach’s gun went up, but Ronnie knocked it back down. “No.”
Lino cocked his head. “How did you know?”
Ronnie had absolutely no idea what the guy was talking about, but every minute they were debating, they were alive. Normally she would have had faith Quirk was listening and researching what in the hell Lino was talking about, but now, she was on her own.
“You wouldn’t have walked in here if you didn’t have countermeasures,” she answered, trying to exude a confidence she did not have. Not while her mind whirred. Out of all the places in this damned castle, how did he find them?
The man who wanted to kill off three quarters of the world’s population smiled that really obnoxious smile of his. “The lightest element, yet so very effective.”
Zach clutched his gun. “What is he talking about?”
“Hydrogen,” Ronnie answered at least reasoning through one of the variables. “Hydrogen gas, to be specific.”
“Wouldn’t we smell it?” Zach pressed, clearly itching to shoot the man who stood before them.
Ronnie shook her head. The Hidden Hand were deranged, but had some serious scientists on their side. “No. It is an odorless, colorless gas that is possibly the most explosive in the world.”
Lino, almost graciously, nodded. “It started leaking into the room when you overrode the lock.”
Damn it. Of course the freaking Hidden Hand would have physical countermeasures. This was, after all, their freaky secret shrine featuring mummies.
“One shot,” Lino stated. “Actually, one little spark will set off an explosion even greater than a grenade.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Not in the least. Even at 4 percent concentration of hydrogen in the air…
“Who does that?” Zach asked.
Well, um, Ronnie didn’t bother to voice that Quirk had installed such a system into their latest safe house in Micronesia. Of course, theirs wou
ld only have incapacitated the intruder.
“If it’s odorless and colorless,” Zach said slowly through his clenched teeth. Not shooting Lino seemed to be taking its toll. “How in the hell do we know that he isn’t bluffing?”
Lino, however, did not seem to be bluffing at all. “Look at your fingernails.”
Since Zach wasn’t about drop his stare from Lino, Ronnie glanced down at his hand.
Sure enough, the tips of his fingers were blue. There was adequate hydrogen in the room’s air to start dislodging oxygen from their red cells. Forget about not being able to fire a gun—or even risk metal hitting stone that would throw off a spark that would ignite the room. Soon, they would get dizzy and disoriented, and then suffocate. Hydrogen caused death about ten times faster than carbon monoxide.
Zach, though, had a distinctly different take on their predicament. “Then the prick can’t come after us, either. A kind of hydrogen stalemate.”
“Ah, but I have a way out,” Lino grinned as the door behind them latched closed. “I wanted to stay to watch you slowly suffocate. To watch God take from you his gift and sanctify our mission.”
Ronnie’s head was spinning, but she didn’t think it was from the hydrogen.
“I say we take the chance,” Zach suggested, finger on the trigger.
“Um, remember the Hindenburg?” The FBI agent’s eyes flicked over to her as she continued. “Now imagine that explosion contained by stone.”
Zach was a bright enough guy to realize that wouldn’t be good. At least not yet.
The entire surface of her glasses, even the cracked parts, displayed every fact regarding hydrogen. She’d never missed Quirk more. He would have had this data down cold. Come on, the gas that exploded on the Hindenburg? That was Quirk’s wheelhouse.
* * *
Zach noticed Ronnie’s fingers stop their frantic air-typing as her face clouded over. Then, like a binary switch, those digits flew again.
Encrypted: An Action-Packed Techno-Thriller Page 33