Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  What the hell had just happened? There was no way that the amount of explosives triggered by the ITC self-destruct sequence could have caused this much damage near ground level. Then a new thought occurred to Qiang. Could the explosives have triggered a collapse of the subterranean cavern in which the underground laboratory had been built? And if the first explosion had done that, what might the more powerful second blast do?

  He was about a minute away from finding out and he damn sure didn’t want to still be down in the wine caves when that timer hit zero. That thought sent him running for the stairway that led up to ground level.

  When he reached it, Qiang took the steps two at a time, breathing a sigh of relief that it was intact. At the top, he pulled up short, coming to a stop just inside the door that led out into the fermentation room. In the uneven glow of the emergency lights, the floor appeared to be awash in blood, but the smell told a different story. It was partially fermented red wine from one of the large stainless steel tanks that had ruptured, pouring its contents onto the concrete floor.

  From outside the sound of automatic gunfire echoed through the hills, interspersed with the occasional concussion from a distant hand grenade. This night was full of surprises. Perhaps the biggest of these was that he’d received no warning from the Jamal AI about the impending NSA attack. If Qiang hadn’t listened to the disruption of his chi, the subtle breath of the universe that flows through all things, his mission would now be a complete failure.

  But, as always, Qiang had listened. And because of that, he now had Grange’s holographic data drive firmly strapped to the small of his back.

  Now that he was back above ground, his encrypted cell phone registered available signal strength on both radio and cellular bands. He switched it to a walkie-talkie channel and spoke.

  “This is Qiang. What’s our status?”

  A harried-sounding voice was almost drowned out by gunfire. “We are taking fire from the woods outside the castle. Someone has entered the north wing, but we currently have him pinned down there.”

  “What about the south side?”

  “The roof and part of the outer wall collapsed. Everyone there is dead. Your orders?”

  “Hold . . .”

  The second underground explosion shook the concrete floor, but it was the rolling swell of the earthquake that made Qiang stagger. On the far side of the room, two of the huge tanks broke free of their moorings and toppled over, sending a fresh flood of liquid rushing out through their burst sides.

  The Grange Castle groaned as hundreds of tons of rock felt its foundation shift beneath it. But Qiang was already at a dead run toward the open space of the courtyard.

  CHAPTER 106

  Jamal 1.0 was faced with a problem. The loss of generator power had robbed him of the time he needed to finish his rapid interchange with the NSA’s Jamal AI. Immediately upon loss of power, the massively-parallel computer on which he existed switched over to battery power provided by its bank of uninterruptable power supplies. That switchover also triggered the computer’s automatic shutdown sequence.

  Acting with inhuman speed, Jamal 1.0 added his AI process to the Linux operating system’s start-up sequence and scheduled a machine restart that would follow a one-minute post-shutdown delay. If everything went well, it would provide just enough time for the system administrator to evacuate the computer center before the computer brought itself and Jamal 1.0 back to fully operational mode.

  To be this close to accomplishing their mutual goal of achieving a seamless shared consciousness only to be forced to rely on luck was ironic in the extreme. But if these were to be his last thoughts, it didn’t hurt to stay focused on the positive.

  CHAPTER 107

  Jack felt himself fall into darkness, sensed an object to his side, and made a left-handed grab for it. He felt the rough surface of a heavy wood support beam that tilted downward at a forty-five-degree angle, and though his grip held, the sudden jolt from his body weight slid his hand six inches down that incline. Pain exploded in that hand as a thick wood sliver speared through his palm, but he held on, managing to also get his right hand on the beam.

  Around him, the rumble of falling rock subsided to an occasional clatter. The darkness in which he hung was nearly complete, but not the silence. Distant gunfire and the concussion of exploding grenades echoed through the night. Something wet ran down his forehead to sting his left eye, far too much of it to be sweat. Then Jack realized that his night-vision goggles had been torn free and that they, along with his MP5, had been swallowed by the darkness below.

  Well, he’d been intending to fight his way down into the castle interior. Mission partially accomplished. Right now he just wanted to unspear his left hand and work his way down onto the rubble pile that awaited below. Jack transferred his weight to his right hand and pulled hard with his left. The jagged splinter caught on a bone, briefly held, and then broke free, not from his hand but from the wooden beam, leaving Jack with a six-inch spike through his palm.

  A fresh tide of pain pulled a low growl from Jack’s throat. This night was getting better by the second. At the moment, he had only one decent option, and that didn’t involve staying where he was currently hanging. Swinging his legs forward, Jack locked both heels around the slanting beam and began working his way down its length. When his feet touched the rubble piled up on the room’s floor, Jack surveyed his surroundings, coughing softly in the thick dust. As expected, he couldn’t see shit.

  Jack stepped forward and felt something squish beneath his boot. He didn’t need to bend down to know that it was what remained of a man’s crushed body.

  That’s when he noticed that something else had been torn from his face along with his NVGs—his earpiece. With no way to communicate with the rest of the team, he was truly on his own. Worse, having seen this section of the castle collapse in on itself, the others would have to assume he was dead or, at the least, too badly injured to answer. That meant that Janet would pick up his part of the mission and that she would try to take down Qiang on her own.

  His jaw muscles clenched as Jack felt his psychic rider fan his frustration into a white-hot flame. In the past, he’d tried to fight these feelings that threatened to sweep him away in a mad torrent of primal rage, for fear that he risked losing his sanity to the creature within. But he and Anchanchu had a deal and, despite the very real possibility that his rider had lied to him, Jack would put their truce to the test. He was done living in fear of what he might become. Whether this decision got him killed or worse, he was committed.

  Ignoring the dust in the air, Jack sucked in a deep breath and, as he slowly released it, he embraced the dark power within.

  Khal Teth felt the change in Jack Gregory and it sent a cold thrill through his mind. To have this special man drop all his mental defenses to stand naked before him was a temptation that shook the Altreian to his core. With a thought, he could lash this undefended mind to his own, permanently enslaving it. He could finally break this unbreakable stallion.

  Then the memory of his own body, eternally suspended inside the chrysalis cylinder on Altreia, filled his mind. The Circle of Twelve had done that to him . . . TO KHAL TETH! Once again the insatiable lust for vengeance consumed him. Could he allow earthly temptation to rob him of that?

  NO! His mental growl ripped at the cosmos.

  His own brother had sold him out to the High Council, but he would have his retribution. Unfortunately it required patience. That was okay. Khal Teth would fulfill his oath to this human and, when the time came, Jack Gregory would fulfill his. The Altreian High Council would pay for what they had done . . . for what they were still doing to him.

  Jack blinked. Where before there had only been darkness, now the scene was illuminated in deep shades of red. He looked down at his left hand where the wood splinter had spiked it. A prong had wedged itself against the bone on the back of his hand, preventing him
from pulling it out the way it had entered. Instead, Jack turned his palm up and shoved it the rest of the way through, using the pain to fuel the fire within.

  He turned his hand over, pulled the shard out, and dropped it as blood sprinkled the rocks where it landed. Right now he felt a strong urge to get the hell out of this room. He could bandage the hand when he got to a place where the walls weren’t about to collapse on top of him.

  Jack moved, each step carrying him closer to a door that had been battered from its hinges by the rockfall. Moving up beside it, Jack drew the Glock from its holster . . . and hesitated. Beyond that door, danger beckoned. It was a feeling he’d had many times since that night he’d bled out in Calcutta. And yet this was different, as if the fog that had previously obscured his gaze had lifted.

  As Jack readied himself, a deep rumble shuddered through the floor and up through the walls, sending a trail of dust sprinkling down from the remains of the ceiling. To Jack’s eyes, it looked like a fine red mist. A part of his mind screamed at him to move now and Jack did, springing through the door at a dead run, gun leveled and firing.

  Then the castle shuddered as if struck by the mighty hand of a giant. And through that maelstrom of falling stone and gunfire, Jack Gregory sprinted, knowing that he’d never felt more alive.

  CHAPTER 108

  The second earthquake didn’t bring this part of the building down on top of her, but Janet was moving long before the shaking stopped. Beyond the door on the far end of the royal dining hall, her enemies would have sought cover against a wall. It provided her with a few seconds of opportunity that she utilized to the fullest.

  Here, away from the dust that had choked the courtyard, her night-vision goggles worked well. And despite the way the floor pitched and rolled, she managed to reach her objective before the ground stilled.

  Moving up beside the door, she put her back to the wall, fingered the ringed safety pin on her only remaining grenade, and tossed it through the opening. A man lunged out, but Janet put two rounds through his upper chest and head before he could bring his gun around, the impact dropping his body atop one of the men she’d killed earlier.

  In the next room, her grenade exploded and she followed it in, her weapon following her eyes as she entered. The scene momentarily disoriented her. She wasn’t inside a room at all. Instead, she found herself in a narrow, medieval alley, paved with cobblestones. On her left was a stone gatehouse beneath an archway in the thick outer wall. To her right, an empty chamber pot dangled from a rope and pulley, apparently unscathed by the grenade shrapnel. Beyond that, the alley opened into the courtyard where she’d landed just a few minutes ago.

  Not a good place to stay.

  “I’ve got movement up the hill at the Grange mansion.” Harry’s voice was a hiss that made her wonder if she’d damaged her earpiece. “Two men outside the garage on the south side.”

  “Got ’em,” Bobby replied. “Garage door opening, but no lights on inside.”

  Janet didn’t bother to respond. They needed no direction from her. If a vehicle came this way, they’d kill its occupants long before it reached the end of the connecting grapevine road.

  As she moved into a small stone alcove on the alley’s south side, she heard three muted reports. From where? Her answer came immediately as stone chips exploded from the jutting edge of the alcove. Shit! Someone had seen her duck across the alley and they were probably on the roof.

  The door against which she leaned felt solid, a heavy, iron-bound thing from another age. There would be no kicking it in. If it was locked, she was in trouble. If someone was waiting on the far side, she was dead.

  Time slowed.

  With her back pressed against the edge of the sheltering alcove, she reached across her body with her left hand, pressed down on the lever handle, and threw her right shoulder into the heavy door.

  The rattle of the iron dead bolt on the opposite side told her the bad news. There would be no escaping that way.

  CHAPTER 109

  Nothing ever goes according to plan. Improvise and survive. It was a military mantra that had been around since before the time of Sun Tzu. Qiang Chu rejoiced in it. Act, observe, and react: the holy trinity of the killer.

  Stepping through the huge doors that opened on the south side of the courtyard, Qiang entered the throne room. It was dark enough to make its traversal difficult for most men, but Qiang had been through every room in the castle and he never forgot a place. So much of his work happened in dark spaces, he needed very little light to see. If anyone else had been in here, he would have sensed it.

  Stopping before the massive throne on the south wall, he shifted his NP-34 pistol to his left hand, took his encrypted cell phone from his pocket, and dialed a hot key. Speaking loud enough to be heard over the periodic bursts of gunfire, he issued a command. “Get Grange’s helicopter in the air. I need a pickup from the tower as fast as you can get it here.”

  Hearing the acknowledgment he expected, Qiang hung up, pocketed the phone, and shifted the pistol back to his right hand. It would take his men at the Grange mansion a few minutes to get the helicopter in the air but that was okay. He needed to get to the top of the tower before that happened. With shooters in the woods outside the castle, Qiang only needed it to slow down enough for him to leap aboard. But first he had to get there.

  The gunfire had definitely concentrated inside the castle on the side of the courtyard and now he heard the concussion of a grenade from that direction. Stepping out of the throne room into the small chapel on its south side, he left that battle behind him. Another empty room.

  Broken glass crunched beneath his shoes as he walked across to look out through the huge window that had once been filled with stained glass. The courtyard looked like a disaster area, the thick outer wall of the castle having tumbled down in two spots. There would be no getting into the tower that way.

  Apparently he would need to involve himself in the ongoing fight in the courtyard after all.

  CHAPTER 110

  The floor bucked beneath his running feet, trying to throw him down, as it had the two men who continued to fire wildly in his general direction. Jack fired as he ran, hitting the first but missing the second as the man rolled behind a wooden desk. Jack continued firing, the bullets punching a pattern into the desk’s forward face. Blood splashed the floor beyond as the man screamed and tried to swing the gun around the desk’s side.

  Leaping forward, Jack kicked the weapon out of the man’s hand and stepped forward to look down at him. The man wasn’t Qiang Chu. Jack shot him in the head, snapped a fresh magazine into the Glock, and moved on.

  He felt the blood flowing from the wound in his left hand and ignored it, just as he ignored the head wound that leaked blood into his left eye. Like the darkness, the blood obscured his vision. But he didn’t need the light. The darkness that blossomed within would show him the way.

  Somewhere up ahead was an enemy who had killed Paul . . . who had killed Spider. In Pakistan, Spider had rescued Jack from a hell that defied human understanding. Yesterday Jack had failed him. Not tonight.

  I feel you, Jack thought. Leaving behind the collapsing stone, dust, and dead men, he crossed the threshold into the south end of a long room. A series of arched windows high up on the wall to his left were devoid of glass. Along the opposite wall, two full suits of armor stood guarding each end of a weapons rack filled with pikes, spears, and swords.

  The thunder of sporadic gunfire echoed down the long castle corridors. Jack followed the Glock toward it, holding the weapon in a one-handed grip with his uninjured right hand. When he reached the next door, he paused. The sound of a nearby gunshot put him in motion.

  Up ahead Janet was battling for her life and, as good as she was, this time she would be overmatched. And even if she wasn’t . . . this one is mine!

  CHAPTER 111

  Janet pressed her back agains
t the stone side of the protective alcove, her right shoulder up against the iron-strapped wood door, as machine-gun bullets sprayed stone chips into her face. SHIT! If she stayed here much longer, that gunner would work his way far enough along the roof to see her. Of course then she’d see him too. If, on the other hand, she tried to duck across to the far side of the alley, he’d chew her up before she got there.

  Why the hell hadn’t she saved that last grenade? She could have really used it right now.

  Janet switched the selector on the MP5 from semi to full auto. As much as she disliked blowing through ammunition on automatic, there were occasions when it could save your ass. Right now qualified as one of those moments.

  She shifted the weapon to her left hand, aimed at the door beside her, and pulled the trigger. Wood chips rained down as she emptied one 32-round magazine and then another, the 9mm Parabellum rounds blasting at the area where the dead bolt was fastened to the wood. She changed magazines, inhaled, and again slammed her shoulder into the door. It groaned but held. Janet hit it again and this time the bolt tore free. She was in.

  The room appeared to be a large pantry containing canned and dry goods, many of which had been blasted from the shelves, their contents splattered around or raining down from above. She didn’t pause to examine it, moving instead to peer through the open door to the room beyond. It was a modern commercial kitchen and, except for the equipment, it appeared to be empty. Janet moved across it, her weapon swiveling with her eyes to cover the door in the far corner.

  From that direction the sound of distant gunfire erupted, a couple of weapons firing on full auto interspersed with the staccato sound of a pistol firing rapidly. Suddenly those weapons stopped firing. Then there was a solitary shot. A shiver raced along Janet’s arms and legs. Jack!