The Russian stood to one side of the exam table, hands resting on his knees, breathing heavily after the mad dash. He looked up as King burst into the room, his eyes now fully ablaze with raw hatred. Then he turned to Julie. “Kill him! Kill both of them!”
Julie did not move.
“Do it!”
She flinched but did not pull the trigger. “We need them to finish the Firebird.”
“There is no Firebird,” the President snarled. “Alexei is dead.”
“Alexei was nothing.”
Judging by the lethality of the stare the Russian now directed at Julie, it was evident that was absolutely the wrong thing to say. Judging by her reaction, it was evident that Julie recognized it as well.
“The Firebird was your creation,” she said, taking a softer tone in an effort to clarify her meaning. “Alexei was the instrument of creation, but it was your genius at work, not his.”
The attempt fell flat. “There is no Firebird,” the Russian repeated, his voice taut, like a wire about to snap. “My precious Alexei is dead. What do I care if the world burns? Kill. Them. Now.”
King straightened and raised his hands. “Julie, you don’t need to do what he says anymore.”
Her eyes met his but her expression was utterly unreadable. The gun did not move.
“I’m here. Dad is here. It’s time to come back to your family.”
He did not dare to hope that she would simply melt into a puddle at the invitation. He half-expected her to meet the offer with hostility. Her loyalty to the Russian President was like a classic case of the Stockholm Syndrome. Julie’s reaction however did not seem to come from anywhere on that spectrum.
She tilted her head sideways, lips pursed together in an expression of consternation, as if King had failed to grasp a childishly simple concept. “Why on Earth do you think I would want to do that?”
He had no answer except the obvious. “Because we’re your family. We love you.” He glanced at Peter, who was still trussed up like a sacrificial offering. “Tell her.”
She shook her head before Peter could speak. “You keep going on about family, like it’s so important. It’s nothing. It’s a set of biological imperatives reinforced by environment. We’re all related here.” She pointed with her free hand at the President. “Him. Me. You. Your father. It’s completely irrelevant.”
King was momentarily speechless. He did not know if it would be possible to reason with her, but this certainly was not the time or place for it. “Just come with us,” he said. “Trust me, you don’t want to stay here.”
As if to reinforce his point, Volos let out a thunderous roar. The facility shook again, as yet another wall crumbled beneath his relentless assault. With his hands still raised, King took a step toward the table.
Behind him, the Russian President started to laugh. “You speak to her of family. You know nothing about her. I am her only family.”
“Look around, Julie,” Peter said. “You know what he wants. What he’s planning. Is that what you want? War? A world in flames?”
“What I want,” Julie said, “is for the Children of Adoon to take their rightful place as rulers of this miserable world.”
“You’ll rule over ashes.”
Now a smile cracked her icy visage. “There won’t be a war. It’s all theater. A pretense. Symbolic military posturing. The America that could have stood against us ceased to exist long ago.”
“If you truly believed that, you wouldn’t need the Firebird.”
Before she could answer, a bestial roar shook the room, followed almost immediately by an impact that collapsed one wall of the room. Julie staggered back a step. King took advantage of the distraction to move closer, but Julie quickly reasserted control, aiming the gun directly at his chest.
“Do it!” The Russian President hissed again.
King did not know why she had not already done it. He wanted to believe that it meant something, that the real Julie was still in there somewhere, fighting for control. But when he looked deep into those eyes that were so like his own, he saw that she was going to pull the trigger.
“They are of the line of Adoon,” she insisted, as if this was the only salient point.
“He killed Alexei,” the Russian said. “I can sire more offspring, but Alexei can never be replaced. Kill them and be done with it.”
“Julie,” Peter implored. “He’s your brother.”
“He’s not my brother,” she snarled, her finger tightening on the trigger. “And I’m not your daughter.”
Peter’s face contorted with grief, as if those words were more hurtful than anything Alexei might have intended, but then his hand moved, as fast as lightning, and he struck her in the chest.
A cry of surprise tore from her lips, rising in pitch to a shriek of pain or terror or perhaps both. As she staggered back, the gun fell from her fingers. King saw the syringe protruding from her chest, the needle embedded next to her breastbone, the plunger fully depressed. Peter had just injected the contents directly into her heart.
51
“No!” King heard the shout, but did not immediately realize that it had come from him. Even though he knew the woman was not really Julie, not really his sister, he felt as if the needle had stabbed through his own heart.
Peter, unencumbered by the leather restraints despite all appearances to the contrary, had rolled off the table, landing cat-like on his feet. His expression was utterly blank. Remorseless. He was no longer Peter the father of Julie and Jack and Asya, but Peter the spy. Peter the killer. He had somehow managed to slip out of his restraints, probably while Julie had been following the battle between King and the President, and he had secreted away the syringe as a weapon of last resort.
With practiced efficiency, he now delivered a knife hand blow to the Russian President’s throat with such force that King actually heard a popping sound, as the man’s larynx was crushed. In almost the same motion, Peter whirled around, seized King’s biceps and propelled him toward the exit.
They emerged from the room to find the hallway almost completely reduced to rubble, and Volos the giant ape was forcing his way into the research facility. Peter faltered, staring in disbelief at the monstrosity. Now it was King’s turn to take the lead, pulling his father along, racing down the battle-scarred hallway toward the hangar.
He did not allow himself to dwell on what had just happened. There would either be time to deal with both the emotions and the consequences later, or there would not. Survival was the only thing that mattered now, escaping the wrath of Volos and getting as far from the doomed research facility as they could before the reactor went critical.
He did not know what waited for them at the end of the passage. A troop of humanzees that would tear them apart? A squad of Spetsnaz, ready to blow them away with automatic weapons? Either option seemed preferable to the hell they were desperately trying to escape, but he nevertheless slowed to a jog as they neared the exit.
The hangar was completely empty. There were no hostile forces waiting for them, and no helicopter to bear them to safety. Above, the retractable doors were wide open, revealing a cool morning sky that seemed impossibly far away.
King drew to a stop and surveyed the area anew, searching for some other means of egress, and he found it. In the far corner, next to the control booth, a metal maintenance stairway rose up to a suspended catwalk that ran along the perimeter of the hangar doors. At one end of the walkway, a metal ladder continued up to the ceiling and what he could only assume was a trap door to the surface.
“There!” He pointed to it and broke into a run, charging across the vacant platform and mounting the stairs. The proximity of salvation was a stronger motivation than even the prospect of a gruesome demise.
As they neared the top of the staircase, King heard a familiar roar. Not the growl of the ape creature, but the harsh mechanical noise of a jet turbine and the persistent chop of rotor blades. He quickened his step, seeking the relative cover of the catwalk. He hunkered dow
n there with Peter at his side, as the source of the sound—a Mil Mi-8 helicopter—descended into the hangar.
Even before it touched down, several men armed with automatic weapons emerged from the cabin and moved toward the mouth of the passage.
“Think they saw us?”
Peter shook his head. “They’re here for him.”
“Hopefully King Kong has already disposed of the evidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“You killed the Russian President, Dad. That’s kind of a big deal.”
Peter let out a soft rueful chuckle. “I wish. He’s not dead, Jack. I don’t think it’s possible to kill him. He’s immortal, just like Alexander.”
King stared at his father. “Still full of surprises, aren’t you.”
“His real name is Genrikh Ludvig. He was a scientist from the Stalin era—”
“I know about Ludvig,” King said, cutting him off. “Are you sure?”
For a moment, he felt something like relief at the revelation, but then he saw its place in the big picture and knew that it would have been better if Peter actually had killed the man.
Peter nodded, and then added in a distant voice. “He’s my father. Your grandfather.”
King managed to keep his emotions in check as the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
“Family, huh?” Peter said. “It can be a real bitch sometimes.”
The catwalk swayed under them, rippling with the seismic waves of Volos’s ongoing destruction of the facility. Maybe the problem would solve itself after all.
“Let’s move.”
They crept the remaining distance to the ladder. King climbed it and threw back the trap door. A sprinkling of snow fell down on his face and in spite of everything, he smiled as he climbed up into the daylight.
“King!”
He turned and saw Knight emerging from behind a nearby tree, a look of naked relief on his face. “You made it. We thought you bought it.”
“Not today,” King replied, nodding. “The rest?”
“Bumps and bruises. The usual. They’re heading out. Getting clear before this place blows.”
“Yeah? Why the hell aren’t you with them?”
Knight grinned. “A little thing called hope.” He glanced down as Peter emerged from the trap door. “You found your dad in there?”
“Yeah.”
Knight hesitated a moment before adding, “Anyone else?”
Without quite knowing why, King glanced back into the opening. “No. That’s everyone. Let’s get out of here.”
They made it to the edge of the wooded area before the sound of the helicopter, rising from the concealed hangar, reached their ears. King crouched down, fully expecting the aircraft to begin circling above them, scanning the area for the escapees. Instead it sailed past without slowing. While he was grateful that fate had not chosen to throw one more obstacle in their path, he knew who was aboard the helicopter. He knew what its flight portended. Their mission to destroy the research facility had succeeded, but they had not averted the apocalypse. In fact, that eventuality now seemed more certain than ever.
“Let’s move,” he said, and as they hiked out into the open across packed snow, he turned to Knight. “Where do we stand on exfil?”
“Bishop’s working something out with a local bush pilot.”
“Something goes right for a change,” King remarked. He hoped it was the start of a trend.
Then, as if the universe was tuned in to his wishful thinking, the world lit up with a flash more brilliant than the sunrise. King barely had time to shout for them all to get down before the blast was upon them.
52
The first gasp felt like breathing chips of broken glass, but the pain helped the Russian focus as life returned to his body. He sat up and saw Alexei…beautiful Alexei…sprawled out on the floor beside him.
The boy’s face was gone.
Beautiful no more.
Tears bled through the mask of blood drying on the President’s face, but gradually, the sound of screaming penetrated the fog of his grief.
Julie’s screams.
The memory of what had happened burst through the surface of his resurrected consciousness like a breaching submarine. Peter Machtchenko, attacking him, stabbing his own daughter through the heart. Stabbing her with…
The Firebird.
He rolled over onto hands and knees, crawled around the end of the examination table and saw her, writhing, shaking, as if her bones were on fire. That probably wasn’t far from the truth. The serum had permeated her bloodstream, bonding with her cells. It would be spiking toward critical mass, despite the fact that she had not, to the best of his knowledge, received any long term exposure to nuclear materials or been subjected to EM radiation.
The room shuddered, reminding him that there were other immediate dangers. Volos had broken loose from his prison in the depths and was systematically tearing the research facility apart.
No matter. His work here was done.
There would be no going back to the drawing board this time. The Firebird gambit had failed, but the endgame was at hand. He might not win, but there was no way he could lose.
He would have his empire, or the world would burn. Either outcome was acceptable.
He got to his feet and made his way unsteadily across the pitching floor. He passed through the doorway as the walls to either side crumbled. He thought he saw Julie’s body tumbling away into the chasm with the rest of the debris, but before he could look to be sure, a voice reached out to him.
“Sir! This way!”
Through the rain of debris, he spotted the head of his protection detail, urging him toward the exit.
He had always tolerated having bodyguards because it was expected that someone of his stature needed protection, but now he was grateful for their presence. As he ran toward them, Volos broke through, overfilling the corridor with his bulk.
“Stop him!” The President cried out as he pushed his way into the protective circle they had created for him. “I must get away.”
The men exchanged a nervous glance, but then shouldered their rifles and began firing into the approaching simian visage, as the President ran for the hangar. As soon as he spied the helicopter, he raised his hand and made a circling gesture, signaling the pilot to take off as soon as he was aboard.
There was no reason to wait for the protection detail. The shooting had stopped almost as quickly as it had begun. His men were already dead.
He hurled himself through the open door, shouting for the pilot to take off. His voice was drowned out by the whine of the turbines spinning faster, and then he felt the deck lurch beneath him as the aircraft lifted off.
The ape exploded through the wall, showering the hangar with debris. Chunks of concrete pinged off the armored exterior like ricocheting bullets.
The helicopter rose. Fifteen feet. Twenty.
Through the open door, the President met the creature’s gaze. He saw the ancient hatred locked behind those animal eyes. Volos, the entity that had guarded the tombs of the Originators from times immemorial. He had been reawakened by the President’s early experiments with human-ape hybridization, transformed by an infusion of his own potent immortal genetic material.
“Do svidanya, brother,” he whispered, as the helicopter passed through the hangar doors and ascended into a bright morning sky, rising above even the creature’s long reach.
Volos was magnificent, but far too dangerous for this fragile world built by mere humans. Perhaps there would be a place for the creature in the future he would create.
Or perhaps not.
As the helicopter banked away from the city and headed south, a flash briefly illuminated the portholes, followed a moment later by the buffeting of a shockwave. After a few moments of riding out the disturbance, the pilot called back on the intercom to report a massive explosion behind them, but the President did not even bother with an acknowledgment.
The fate of Vo
losgrad no longer concerned him.
He had a war to start.
53
The air above instantly became furnace hot, a burning gale force wind that felt powerful enough to carry him away. The snow beneath him was whisked away and flashed into steam, depositing him on soggy tundra that lurched beneath him as the seismic wave raced to catch up with the wind. The wind fell off abruptly, and then just as suddenly, it reversed as the vacuum created by the shockwave sucked the air back into the center with a great gasp.
King felt someone grip his arm. Knight? No, it was Peter, but Knight was there, too. He was battered and slightly parboiled, but otherwise no worse for wear. Peter’s mouth was moving, but King couldn’t hear anything but a persistent ringing in his ears.
He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, then pointed questioningly at Peter, who nodded, and at Knight, who returned a thumb’s up.
Maybe our luck is holding after all, King thought, and then he regretted thinking it, as rocks and chunks of metal and concrete began raining from the sky.
“Cover up,” he shouted, or thought he did—he couldn’t even hear his own voice. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, and then curled into a fetal ball, trying to make himself as small as possible. He felt numerous impacts, pebble-sized pieces of debris that stung but did not penetrate his clothing, and then that too passed and the world was still again.
He raised his head cautiously, saw that his father and Knight were still with him and then looked out at the landscape. It had been utterly transformed. The wooded area they had just passed through was gone. The trees were flattened in a ring around a column of smoke that reached into the heavens before curling over like a mushroom.
The initial explosion had been mostly contained underground, the energy channeled upward by the cylindrical shape of the ancient giant city. That was probably why they were all still alive. It also had not been a true nuclear explosion, like an atomic bomb, but something more akin to a volcanic eruption, as the super-heated gases trapped in the reactor reached a flashpoint and ignited. King was a little surprised that it had happened so quickly, and he wondered if perhaps the rampaging ape-creature had somehow hastened the process. Or something else.
Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8) Page 32