Julie likes going fast. She always has. She is where she is, right here, right now, because of a line from an old movie about—what else?—fighter jet pilots. He can still hear her chanting that line:
“I feel the need...the need for speed!”
If she is slowing down, it can only mean…
He grips the base of his seat a heartbeat before the F-14 rolls over and remains inverted as it races forward. The acceleration holds him in his chair—that and the five-point restraint system. But aside from the stomach-churning suddenness of the maneuver, he has no sense of being upside-down. The only real difference is that, instead of blue eternity, he now sees where the sky ends and a different kind of infinity begins. The endless blue-green of the ocean stretches out in every direction, as far as the eye can see. Somewhere behind them, there is solid ground, but back is the one direction he cannot look.
The aircraft rolls again, but instead of returning to an upright position, the plane begins corkscrewing through the air. All he can see is the light blue sky, the dark blue ocean…sky…ocean…light…dark… Blue eternity flashes so fast that he has to close his eyes or be driven mad.
“Don’t lose your lunch on me, Sig!” Julie shouts, playfully. “You know how hard it is to get the smell of puke out of these things?”
The twisting stops, and he feels acceleration again. His stomach is no longer lurching. It feels like it has been completely ripped out of him. He can see both sky and ocean now, the dividing line directly below, and he knows what this means, too.
A vertical dive.
He tries to shout, but no sound comes out. He pounds on her seat, his brain about to burst with the intensity of the words his mouth cannot form.
Pull up! Please, Julie. For God’s sake, pull up!
But she is not there.
The front seat is empty.
His sister is gone. Evaporated.
The canopy is still intact. She didn’t punch out. She’s just not there anymore.
It’s as if Julie Sigler never existed.
The endless sparkling blue resolves into cresting waves, rising and falling. Close. So close.
A loud hiss fills the cockpit. Alarms sound, warning of imminent impact. He tries to reach out for the ejection handle, but his arms won’t work. All around him the sounds grow louder, deafeningly loud, as the blue ocean reaches up and…
1
Ashburn, Virginia
Jack Sigler started awake, clutching for the handle that would, when pulled, trigger a series of explosive bolts to first blow the canopy and then propel him, chair and all, away from the doomed fighter jet.
Except there was no handle, just as there was no jet.
The vehicle in which he sat was not a Grumman F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, but a rented 2015 Toyota 4Runner. Instead of plummeting toward the ocean at nearly five hundred miles an hour, the vehicle was stationary. It was parked on the roadside in the industrial zone of a Virginia town, surrounded by non-descript warehouses.
There were similarities though. He was in the passenger seat, and the person sitting behind the steering wheel was his sister. Not Julie, but Asya Machtchenko, a younger sibling that he had not even known existed when Julie Sigler’s plane had drilled into the Atlantic Ocean two decades earlier.
Asya’s orange-brown eyes, so much like his own, seemed to be peering into his very soul. “You are having dream again?”
Raised in Russia, Asya had lived in the United States for only about three years. It was not nearly long enough to lose her thick Slavic accent or to perfect the nuances of English grammar.
The dream, he thought. Not a dream, but The Dream.
He shook his head, a dismissal rather than a denial, though perhaps the distinction was lost on Asya.
“It doesn’t matter.” He rolled back the cuff of his black knit turtleneck to expose the black and silver face of his vintage Omega Speedmaster wristwatch. 2028 hours. Eight-twenty-eight p.m.
Close enough. “Go time. Let’s do this.”
After making sure the interior light was switched off, he opened the door and got out. The area, sparsely occupied during normal working hours, seemed deserted now with the fall of night.
Asya appeared beside him, hefting a backpack—black to match her attire—onto one shoulder. Sigler carried a similar pack, which combined with hers contained all the equipment they would require to infiltrate the target, and a lot more he hoped they would not need.
The target was not a hardened military installation or an ultra-secure government facility, but a sprawling 150,000 square foot, concrete warehouse. Presumably it contained endless rows of computer servers for off-site data storage. There might be some form of security—cameras, alarms, maybe even a rent-a-cop or two, armed with a flashlight and walking a patrol route—but nothing that would require the fullest expression of his skill set.
Or maybe they would not even find that. The building was new, and it was possible that the new tenants, a mysterious entity called TSAR Data Solutions, had not even moved in yet. The only way to know for sure, the only way to know if the answers he was looking for were there at all, was to get inside.
He and Asya were there for the same reason that he had started having The Dream again: Julie Sigler.
Julie’s accident had happened when Jack Sigler was just a teenager, but for many years afterward, he had dreamed about the last moments of her life. He had relived the crash as if he had been right there with her. At first, he had wondered if there might be a supernatural explanation for The Dream, a psychic bond between himself and his beloved older sibling, similar to what identical twins reportedly shared. The dreams, or flashbacks or whatever they were, often came when he was experiencing a high degree of stress. Given his subsequent life choices, high stress was pretty much part of the daily routine.
Following Julie’s death but inspired by her life, Jack Sigler had made the decision to enlist in the United States Army, a decision that culminated with him leading Chess Team. The five-person team had been assigned unique operational identifiers—callsigns—taken from the pieces of a chessboard. He was King. Asya had recently taken up the mantel of Bishop. While the rest of the armed forces had spent more than a decade fighting terrorists and insurgents, they had fought monsters.
Literal, actual monsters.
Somewhere along the way, the dreams—no, The Dream—had stopped. Maybe the old adage about time healing all wounds was true. But the mystery of why he had stopped having The Dream did not concern him. What did concern him was the mystery that had brought The Dream back.
Seven months earlier, a different kind of monster—this one a very human political beast—had slammed its fist down on the table, knocking over all the pieces and utterly changing the game forever. Senator Lance Marrs, an ambitious lawmaker with aspirations for the Oval Office and absolutely no scruples, had exposed Chess Team as a rogue paramilitary operation. While that was not entirely untrue, he had accused their handler, former President Tom Duncan, Marrs’s longtime political rival, of treason, which was a lie. Duncan had allowed himself to be arrested in exchange for amnesty for the team. But letting their leader languish in prison was not Sigler’s idea of an acceptable outcome. Chess Team had vowed to win Duncan’s freedom by any means necessary, no matter the cost, but before they could embark on that new mission, something extraordinary had happened. King had discovered that his older sister Julie was still alive.
Or so it appeared.
All he really knew for sure was that a woman, who looked exactly like his deceased sister, had appeared on the podium behind the current President of the United States on national television. The woman might simply have been Julie’s doppelganger. Everyone had a lookalike, and given the amount of time that had passed since he had last seen Julie, his memories were suspect. Yet all his efforts to identify the woman had yielded no information. No person or database could identify her.
She was a ghost.
But was she Julie’s ghost?
Sigler had turned his attention to the matter of Julie’s deadly accident. There had never been cause to question the official findings, but when he scratched the surface, he discovered unusual discrepancies. Julie, an Air Force pilot, had been flying a Grumman F-14 Tomcat, at the time, the primary air superiority fighter of the US Navy—not an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle. She had been alone in the cockpit, and alone in the sky. There was no Radar Intercept Officer in the back seat, and no wingman. King’s request to have Julie’s remains disinterred had yielded another unpleasant surprise: there was an empty coffin in Julie’s grave.
There was a plausible explanation for any one of these irregularities, but all at once? It seemed unlikely. And explanations were not answers.
Somewhere along the way, King had started having The Dream again. Only now, Julie was no longer in the plane when it arrowed into the Atlantic.
As the weeks turned into months, the team continued to search for leads, both to the identity of the mystery woman and to the location of the secret prison where Tom Duncan was being held. There were dozens of secret—and not exactly legal—detention facilities scattered around the globe. They were nicknamed ‘black sites.’ The odds were good that Duncan was being kept at one of them. But because of their secretive nature, the only way to determine whether Duncan was present at any of them was to put boots on the ground.
They had infiltrated eight sites so far without success.
Lady Luck was a fickle mistress however, and after seven months of spurning them, she had done an abrupt about-face and supplied them with actionable leads to both objectives.
Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, had taken the rest of the team, Stan Tremblay and Shin Dae-jung—Rook and Knight—north to check out a possible black site location above the Arctic Circle. King and Asya had come here.
Solving the mystery was not just a personal indulgence for King. The woman had been standing next to the leader of the free world. The fact that she had evidently gone to great lengths to hide her identity was cause for concern—regardless of whether she was Sigler’s sister. If she actually was Julie Sigler, back from the dead, then it was imperative that he learn the truth.
The team’s technology guru, Lewis Aleman, had undertaken the tedious task of piecing together all the video and CCTV footage he could get his hands on for the twenty-four hour period surrounding Julie’s appearance. Then he had subsequently tracked her movements across Washington, to Dulles International Airport. She had both arrived and departed aboard a Global 8000 private jet aircraft. That was where he lost her. Several false flight plans had been submitted for the aircraft, leading him down one dead end after another. The names on the passenger manifest turned out to be aliases. The aircraft itself was owned and operated by a private corporation—TSAR Data Solutions, Inc.—headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, America’s shell-company capital. It had seemed at first like another dead end.
TSAR Data Solutions, Inc. appeared, at first glance, to be just one more phony shell company, but that did not stop Sigler or Aleman from trying to crack the shell. After weeks of relentless digging, they had caught a break when TSAR purchased a warehouse property in Virginia, ostensibly to establish a computer server farm. The purchase had been handled by someone named Genrikh Ludvig—another alias, and a curious one at that, since Ludvig was the name of an obscure Russian scientist from the days of Josef Stalin. Whatever its true purpose, the warehouse was their only lead. It was a loose thread that King hoped would lead him back to Julie…or the woman who looked exactly like his dead sister.
They stayed in shadows, skirting the edge of the empty parking lot until they reached the southwest corner. Their intended point of entry was a fire exit one hundred yards away on the south wall. To reach it, they would have to traverse open ground under the glare of parking lot lights.
King donned a Bluetooth earpiece, linked to the smartphone in his pocket. “Deep Blue, this is King. How copy, over?”
Deep Blue was the operational callsign for the Chess Team’s remote intel and data analyst, and general all around handler. Up until seven months ago, Tom Duncan had been Deep Blue, but just before his arrest, he had handed the reins over to Lewis Aleman.
It still felt odd calling Aleman ‘Deep Blue.’ His old handle—more of a nickname than a callsign—had been ‘R2D2,’ a reference to his technical prowess, not his stature. There was nothing stubby or truncated about the lanky, six-foot-two, former track athlete, and there was no one better suited to managing Chess Team from the op center. Aleman himself had suggested they temporarily shelve the Deep Blue callsign, but the team had voted down the suggestion. Continuity was essential for optimal operational efficiency. When they were in the field, they used callsigns, and those callsigns did not change, no matter who filled the role.
He was King. Asya was Bishop. Aleman was Deep Blue.
Period.
“Read you, Lima Charlie,” Deep Blue replied in his ear. “Wish I could tell you the coast is clear, but that warehouse is a tough nut to crack. I’ll keep monitoring local emergency channels. That way, if you trip a silent alarm, I’ll be able to give you a head start.”
“Roger. I’ll keep the channel open.” He turned to Bishop. “Move out.”
With King watching her back, Bishop started forward, moving at a determined but leisurely pace. A casual observer—someone driving by or even a bored security guard watching a CCTV monitor through half-lidded eyes—would be more likely to take note of someone hunched over and sneaking like the villain in an old Bullwinkle cartoon, than they would someone walking normally and purposefully. In fact, the latter might not even register in an onlooker’s conscious mind.
Whether or not the approach went unnoticed, Bishop reached the fire door a few seconds later and immediately went to work. She took a small device about the size and shape of an electronic stud finder from her pack, and moved it along the door frame. The device—they called it the ‘skeleton key’—could pick up electromagnetic fields, such as those generated by the current passing through an alarm system. It then generated an induction field to bypass the alarm, so the door might be opened safely.
As useful as the skeleton key was, it was rudimentary compared to some of the equipment that had been at their disposal when they had operated out of a secret underground facility in New Hampshire, before things went completely to shit. Now, instead of a sophisticated quantum computer network, integrating comms, video, night-vision, weapons targeting and a host of other functions, they had to make do with smartphones and other devices. While some of those were ingenious, they were far from state-of-the-art. Such were the limitations of the fugitive life. Aleman was working on a new version of the quantum computer, but their operating budget and resources, while not inconsiderable, weren’t what they once had been. Acquiring the necessary materials discreetly was proving a challenge.
The tools however were not as important as the soldier skills that each team member brought to the table. Those were as sharp as ever. In addition to the ongoing searches for Duncan and Julie, the team had taken on a few special jobs, including a recent jaunt to Mongolia, where they had tangled with some run-of-the-mill terrorists, and some decidedly not-run-of-the-mill Mongolian death worms. The burrowing creatures had been the size of subway trains and sprayed corrosive acid. Even without quantum computers and fancy apps, they had neutralized the threat, because that was what they did. When they ran into an obstacle, they didn’t let it stop them. They just blew through and kept going.
Bishop’s voice broke through King’s reverie. “We have problem. This door is…well, it is not a door. We can’t go through.”
2
Ellesmere Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada
“Okay, I have three questions. One. What the hell kind of name is ‘Alert’? Two. Who even names an empty swath of ice?” Stan Tremblay—callsign: Rook, the Chess Team’s heavy weapons and demolitions expert—waved at the featureless expanse of ice that stretched out in every direction. “And Three. Don’t yo
u think, ‘Holy Shit-Balls, It’s Cold as Fuck Here,’ would be a more accurate name?”
“They named it for the HMS Alert.” Zelda Baker—callsign: Queen—did not look up. She lay prone on the snow, peering through the lens of the night vision monocular strapped around her head. Beside her, and also lying flat on the ground, Shin Dae-jung—callsign: Knight—did the same. Though instead of a handheld lens, he had his night vision scope mounted to his M-21 rifle.
Rook also wore NODs, albeit without the addition of magnifying lenses, but he suspected that his teammates were seeing the same thing he was. Everything was the same sickly pale shade of green, or so it appeared in his night vision display. In reality, everything was white. The binoculars, the rifle, the custom-made environmental suits the three of them wore and everything in every direction, as far as the eye could see. White whiteness, everywhere. Somewhere underneath the blanket of ice and snow, the barren land transitioned into water—the Lincoln Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean—but this far north and at this time of year, it was impossible to tell the difference.
“HMS Alert,” Rook echoed with a laugh. Though only a few feet away, he was facing the opposite direction, watching their six o’clock. Although given the lack of terrain features, there was little chance of anyone sneaking up on them. “That’s a ship, right? British? Let me guess. They got stranded here trying to reach the North Pole. Froze their asses off and had to eat each other when the food ran out.”
“Are you asking me?” Queen replied, with just a trace of irritation. “If you want to know, look it up on Wikipedia, like I did.”
“Look it up on Wikipedia,” Rook said, doing a sarcastic impression of Queen. “I think I’ll do that, and then update the name to ‘The Land of Perpetual Boredom and Endless Ice that Can Freeze a Deuce Solid in the Time it Takes to Leave Your Sphincter and Hit the Ground.’”
Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8) Page 3