“We will test it now,” the President said, his tone flat and emotionless, and yet somehow indisputable.
Alexei ducked as if trying to avoid a blow. “Of course.”
The young man took a capped syringe from the pocket of his lab coat, and started toward the examination table. Julie held back at the edge of the room, staring at Peter with cool indifference. He would get no help from her.
“So how is this going to work?” Peter asked. If he stalled long enough, maybe the President would accede to Alexei’s obvious desire to postpone the test, or perhaps Julie would have a change of heart. “You stick me with that and then…what? Dose me with radiation and wait a few weeks to see if I die?”
Alexei tittered nervously, but it was the President who answered. “I won’t let you die, Peter. You are family.”
“You’re correct, of course,” Alexei said, taking a step closer and cautiously removing the safety cap from the syringe. He held the hypodermic as he might a poisonous snake, keeping his fingers well-clear of the business end. He depressed the plunger until a drop of amber-colored liquid oozed from the tip of the hollow needle.
“We won’t know how effective it is against radiation for several days,” he continued, taking another tentative step toward Peter and lowering the syringe toward Peter’s arm. “What we’re really hoping for is to overcome the electromagnetic saturation reaction. We can test that right away. If you don’t blow, we’ll know we’ve made a breakthrough.” He paused, then affected a guilty expression. “I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud.”
Peter jerked away instinctively, but the leather restraints allowed almost no movement whatsoever. “Julie! You can stop this.”
She might have been a statue for all the emotion her face revealed.
“Please,” Alexei said. “Try not to move. I don’t want to injure you accidentally. This is going to hurt bad enough, as it is.”
Peter did the only thing he could. He didn’t think Alexei would take the chance of wasting the precious Firebird serum by trying a blind stick, so he started thrashing his body, as if in the grip of a seizure.
The President reached across Peter’s body and clamped a hand down on his left forearm, pinning it to the table. His other arm went across Peter’s throat and gripped the left shoulder, completely immobilizing Peter. “Do it now, Alexei.”
The young man hesitated, his eyes full of inexplicable fear. “Maybe someone else should—”
“Do not be afraid Alexei. He cannot hurt you.”
Peter struggled against the vise-like hold, determined to sow doubt about the assurance, but his tormentor was unbelievably strong.
Alexei swallowed nervously, and then moved in with the syringe, lowered it to Peter’s arm and then with excruciating slowness, drove it in.
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King hugged the ground, grateful to at last have something under him that wasn’t pitching back and forth. He allowed himself exactly one long deep breath, exhaling it as a sigh of relief, before pushing himself up to his knees and getting a look at where his desperate mad scramble from the crumbling concrete slab had taken him.
The collapse of the floor and walls had opened a new, albeit uncertain, path of escape. In the split-second he had to consider his options, anything that didn’t end with him plummeting to certain death in the chasm seemed preferable.
He was in a large room, though in the dimness it was difficult to say for certain how large. It bore a passing resemblance to the room where he and Bishop had almost caught up to Catherine…Julie…whatever…and subsequently encountered an army of humanzees, but there were differences. Instead of pens, the walls held enclosures made from chain-link fences. They were cages, meant to hold something bigger and stronger, and perhaps a bit harder to control than the human-chimpanzee hybrids they had fought. The cages, thankfully, were empty.
He turned around and saw the empty space where the wall and a portion of the floor had been. He took a cautious step toward the edge of the abyss. Volos was down there in the darkness, still alive and mad as hell, and probably on his way back.
“Queen, what’s your status?” Not is everyone okay? or Did you guys make it out? He kept the request vague, making an effort to avoid tempting fate with optimism or specificity.
No answer.
“Queen? Bish? Anyone copy?” Still nothing. “Deep Blue, this is King. Do you copy?”
When there was no reply, he dug into his pocket and took out the quantum ansible unit, or rather, the pieces of the high-tech device. It had been crushed during his mad scramble to avoid a similar fate. “Guess I’m talking to myself.”
He discarded the fragments and edged closer to the chasm, peering out at the ruin Volos had wrought. The slab had not completely collapsed, though what was keeping it up, King could not say. The portion with the reactor containment building was still there, though the pipes leading into it were mostly gone. Steam was billowing from the holes where they had been. Without water to bear the heat away, the reactor was heating up, rapidly building toward a critical event.
To his left, he spied the staircase, suspended out over nothingness like the end of a fire escape. It was too far away to jump to, and even if he managed to make the leap, it looked like it might collapse if he looked at it wrong. He thought it might be possible to climb out to it, but it would take time, something that was in short supply.
The stairs weren’t an option, but he was in the research facility now, and there were other ways out of it.
Before setting out to find a better exit, he did a quick equipment check. He had lost the rifle and the comm unit, but he still had his pistol. He also had thirty rounds of ammunition to put through it and the bayonet. Not much, but at least he’d wouldn’t go down without a fight.
He picked his way through the dark room and to an ascending stairwell. A door at the top opened into the familiar corridors of the research facility. The hall was littered with debris, and the walls were spider-webbed with stress fractures. There was no sign of activity whatsoever. The place looked completely abandoned, which given the level of damage and impending reactor meltdown, made a lot of sense.
He quickened his step, trying to keep his internal compass oriented away from the shattered wall separating the old giant city from the modern facility. He passed locked doors and a few that were standing ajar or blown completely off their hinges.
He knew where he was now. He was near the hallway where Queen had fired the RPG to break the humanzee charge during their first escape. The hangar was just ahead. He made a cursory examination of the open doors, just to make sure that nobody would attempt to ambush him as he passed by, but each room was as deserted as the rest of the place.
And then he heard voices.
“You can stop this.”
King froze. Dad?
Of course it was his father. Peter was looking for Julie; it was inevitable that he would have found his way here.
“Please,” another voice said, likewise familiar. Not Julie, but the mad scientist, Alexei. “Try not to move. I don’t want to injure you accidentally.”
Injure? King could still feel the spot of pain in his hip where Alexei had drilled into him to harvest his bone marrow. It was merely a nuisance; he had endured much worse. But whatever was happening to Peter almost certainly was much worse. He started forward again, trying to pinpoint the source of the voices.
A scuffling sound came from behind a wall to his left, and then there was another shout. “Do it now, Alexei.”
King, his pistol at the ready, moved to the edge of the door and began slicing the pie. Just a glimpse was enough for him to recognize the room, the same room where he had been held and violated just a few hours before.
And now it was his father strapped to the table.
Alexei mumbled something, and then the Russian President spoke, urging him to carry out whatever diabolical new experiment they had devised. King fought the urge to charge into the room prematurely. He wouldn’t be able to help
his father if, in a fit of tunnel vision, he charged into the room and got blown away by a squad of soldiers with nothing better to do than watch the door.
But there weren’t any soldiers. Just Alexei and the President, hovering above his father, and off to one side, Julie, looking on with complete detachment.
King stepped forward. “Get away from him!”
All eyes turned toward him, but his focus was drawn to the syringe protruding from his father’s arm, and Alexei’s pale finger poised to depress the plunger.
“Do it, Alexei!”
The President’s shout startled the young man. He looked away from King, looked down at the needle and his finger started to move.
But King’s finger moved first.
49
A single 9-millimeter bullet from King’s GSh-18 punched into the back of Alexei’s head. It entered near the base of the skull, deforming and exiting in an eruption of bone, blood and brain matter that sprayed the Russian President’s face. Along the way, it obliterated Alexei’s brain stem, severing the connection between his autonomic nervous system and his body. That not only killed him instantly, preventing him from consciously depressing the plunger on the syringe, but it also ensured that he would not be able to do so as an involuntary death reflex.
The cruel young man slumped over Peter, his hand falling away from the syringe, the needle still embedded in Peter’s arm.
King moved the front sight of his weapon a few degrees and centered it on the spot between the President’s eyes. There was no need to utter an assertive command or a victorious taunt. King telegraphed his intention with stark clarity.
Move and it will be your brains splattered all over the room.
But it was a bluff. No matter his crimes or ambitions, the man was a head of state. Short of launching a full nuclear strike on Moscow, there could be no more provocative act. King was trying to prevent a war with Russia, not start one.
Maybe the other man recognized that as well, or maybe he simply didn’t care. Whatever his motivation, the rage simmering behind his blue eyes and the mask of gore on his face, spiked to a boiling point. Heedless of the weapon aimed at him, he leapt over the table and launched himself straight at King.
King had only a moment to brace himself for the charge. At the last instant before contact, the President shifted to the side, grasped hold of King’s shoulders and spun around, turning King’s forward lean into forward momentum. Before he knew what was happening, he was flying backward, through the open door and across the debris-strewn corridor. He slammed hard into a damaged cinder block wall with enough force to dislodge several of the bricks.
King flailed for a handhold, the pistol clattering to the floor, his brain still racing to catch up with what had happened. Eyes ablaze with raw fury, the Russian stalked toward him in a familiar low fighting stance. His fists were cocked at his hips, and with a harsh bark, he pulled his left hand back. In the same motion, he unleashed his right directly into King’s chest, punching him completely through the broken wall.
King felt rough concrete scouring his body for a moment, and then he was falling—falling much further than the two or three feet that should have separated him from the floor.
Falling into a vast darkness.
As he fell, a random memory flashed through King’s head like a stray cat. He recalled that the Russian President was known to have advanced black belts in Taekwondo, judo and kyokushin karate. Unlike most western politicians, who preferred a soft moneyed life of luxury, the Russian had cultivated the hyper-masculine public image of a warrior-leader, to include a regime of physical fitness and martial arts training. Foolishly, King had been so concerned with the threat he posed to the world leader, and by extension, world peace, that he had not considered that the man might actually pose a real and immediate threat to him.
The fall ended with King crashing into something that gave a little beneath him, just enough to cushion the blow, but not ward off the rain of broken cinder blocks that followed him. His grasping hand encountered a cold steel mesh, like a net. As his head cleared a little more, he recognized it as a chain-link weave. In the corner of his eye, he could just make out the emptiness where the opposing wall ought to have been. The distant but all too familiar growl of an animal—a gigantic animal—rolled in through the gap.
He was back where he’d started, in the room with the animal pens, lying atop one of the cages. The Russian President stared down at him through the hole, a bright spot in the dark wall, twenty feet above his head. Then the man was moving, crawling through to finish what he had started.
King heaved himself to the side, rolling out of the way a fraction of a second before the man landed, feet first on the chain-link. The flexible mesh bowed like a trampoline and rebounded, catapulting King out over the edge. He crashed down on the floor, the wind knocked out of him. His mind raced like an engine, but the transmission of his body was stuck in neutral.
Volos’s grunts of exertion were louder now. The beast was close, close enough that King expected to see a great hairy hand reaching in to crush him. But his human foe struck before that could happen. The President descended on him with a knee drop aimed at his chest. King just managed to roll to the side, so that the knee glanced off his ribs—painfully, but not fatally—and the Russian, off-balance, spilled onto the floor.
King kept rolling, putting some distance between himself and the other man, then he sprang to his feet. He felt a little vertiginous, still not quite able to draw a breath, but he knew how to fight through pain and disorientation. The Russian’s decisive attack had put King on the ropes, but ultimately, the man’s martial arts accolades were no match for King’s many lifetimes of training and experience.
The Russian assumed the fighting position known as a ‘cat stance,’ and then started toward him. His movements followed the rehearsed choreography of a simple taekwondo form or karate kata, but much, much faster.
King was faster still.
He blocked the incoming punch, sweeping it aside with his forearm, then blocked the follow through. He delivered a lightning fast front kick that knocked the Russian off his feet. As the man flew through the air, arms windmilling in a futile attempt to catch himself, the rage fueling him slipped a little. It revealed the astonishment of someone whom, despite years of training for a fight like this, had never really been hit by someone who meant it. He crashed down on his tailbone and went sliding across the floor.
King leapt after him, seized the Russian’s shirtfront even before the man had stopped sliding, lifted him up and then shoved him away again. The Russian collided with one of the mesh cages, then bounced back, right into King’s fist. Blood and broken teeth exploded from the Russian’s mouth as he fell back against the cage. Amazingly, he did not lose consciousness.
Some of the fury returned to his eyes, though. He spat out a gobbet of blood, and rasped, “You killed that precious child.”
The statement caught King off guard, not because it was said in Russian but because it took him a moment to realize the man was talking about Alexei.
“You killed him,” King countered in the same language, “when you told him to inject my father with that shit.”
The Russian glowered at him, but the fury did not abate. “I will hunt down and kill everyone precious to you. Father. Mother. Wife. Everyone you love.”
King took a menacing step forward, balling his fists, but the Russian remained uncowed. “Will you kill me, then? What are you waiting for?”
“I’m wondering the same thing myself,” King muttered, and he threw a roundhouse that probably broke the other man’s jaw.
Nothing had changed, of course. Killing this man would be a mistake of epic proportions, but kicking his ass? King couldn’t see a downside to that. In fact, with the man’s monumental ego, he would probably never admit to having been beaten.
A roar shook the room. King whirled to find the gap in the missing wall filled by an enormous simian face. Volos had arrived, and Volos was
an enemy King could not defeat.
The creature’s hand appeared, reaching into the room, reaching for him. He backed away quickly, and caught a flash of movement. The Russian was back on his feet, running for the steps leading out of the room.
King ran too, as much to catch the Russian and stop him from making good on his threat, as to escape the rampaging beast-god behind him. The floor quivered underfoot as the monster slammed his arm in, trying to enlarge the hole, cracking the research facility open like the world’s biggest coconut.
King barely made it to the stairs before the floor collapsed completely, the pieces tumbling away into the abyss as Volos, gripping the walls with his powerful hands, climbed inside. As King bounded up the steps, taking them two at a time, one of those hands came after him. It obliterated the stairwell like a stack of Jenga blocks. King slipped twice as the steps vanished beneath his feet, but he caught himself on his hands, emulating Volos’s primate cousins.
The tumult died away as he reached the corridor, a few steps further behind the Russian President than when he’d started, but it grew louder again as he neared the hole in the wall opposite the room where Peter was being held captive.
As the other man neared the examination room, King reached down into his reserves for one final burst of speed, but it wasn’t enough. The Russian disappeared inside, and it seemed to take an eternity for King to make the three-second-long journey to the same destination.
This time, he did not approach with caution, slice the pie or do any of the other things that he had been trained to do. Instead, he rushed inside, stopping only when he saw Julie and he realized that she had retrieved the pistol he had lost earlier. She had the muzzle pressed to Peter’s head.
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Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8) Page 31