“Copy. Twenty minutes.” As she said it, a small group of soldiers came up over the rise in front of her. “Better make that twenty-five.”
SIX
Luqa Airport, Malta
King stretched his lower back as he stood in the immigration line next to his sister. He was still getting used to the idea after all these months that he had another sister. He had grown up with his American sister, Julie, who had joined the service and died in a plane crash. But after he discovered that his parents had led double lives as Russian spies, he had met Asya, a sister he never knew. She had been raised in Russia, but had been aware of him.
His emotions were mixed about Asya. She was wonderful, and he was learning to love her as a sister, but she also brought up painful memories for him over the death of Julie, and the betrayal he felt over his parents’ deception. Each time he thought he had learned all there was to know about Peter and Lynn Machtchenko, the more they felt like strangers. But through all his feelings of hurt over their keeping secrets from him, his thoughts quickly came back to the fact that they were being held by Alexander Diotrephes. The circular train of thoughts, from Asya to Julie, to their parents, and back to Alexander, made it easy for King to keep his mind off his bizarre family tree and on business. Asya, with equal parts determination and typical Russian stoicism, seemed fine with that nature to their relationship. She had been thrilled when he had told her of his engagement to Sara, but within minutes, she was back to business, discussing this latest lead with him.
After a Maltese official in uniform, who looked no older than seventeen, stamped their passports, King turned to Asya and handed her a thick wad of US hundred dollar bills. “Why don’t you get us some Euros, and I’ll go talk to the guy at the information desk.”
She took the money without a word and strode over to an HSBC bank counter.
King walked toward the front of the airport arrivals area. He had no baggage to collect, just the small carry-on North Face duffel bag he carried. Near the front of the hall, he found the circular information counter, with one man seated behind it. The man had a square jaw and a hard look to him. King pegged the man as British immediately, even before he spoke.
“Can I help you, sir?”
King approached the counter. No other passengers were in the area, most still back collecting their bags from the conveyor-belt carousels.
“I was wondering if you could tell me how many tourists Malta gets in a year,” King said with a grin.
“One point two million a year,” the man replied immediately.
“I was hoping for something closer to five,” King replied, sounding disappointed.
The man stood and slid a small cardboard box across the counter toward King, on top of which he placed a tourist map. As he pointed to the map, he said, “I think you’ll find nine is a better number.”
King thanked the man, took the box and the map, and turned to walk toward Asya, who was just returning from the exchange counter.
“I have money,” she told him.
“I have something better. Let’s go get a car.”
They quickly arranged for a rental car, dissuading the attendant of his notion that they would need a driver. Once they reached the privacy of their rental car, King opened the box, and removed two MP-443 Grach pistols. He recognized these as the modern Russian 9mm sidearm. They were more commonly called Yarygins. He handed one to Asya, and she quickly chambered a round from the seventeen in the magazine. He did the same. Then he chuckled.
“What is funny?” Asya asked him.
“You know this weapon?”
“Yes, Pistolet Yarygina. Why is this funny?”
“Also called a Grach. Or Rook. It’s Deep Blue’s way of making a joke about how we are on this wild goose chase for our parents and not out helping the team.” He started the engine of the gray Mercedes sedan. The car barely made a noise.
“Blue is…a complicated man.” Asya turned away from him slightly as she spoke, but King saw her cheeks flush. Realization dawned on him.
“Oh my God, you have the hots for him,” he laughed.
“I do not have hots,” she said, still facing the window.
King laughed harder as he brought the sedan out into traffic on the main road, passing a McDonald’s. They would need to drive about five miles to get across the main island of Malta, to reach the capital, Valletta. He opened the windows on both sides of the car, letting the warm Mediterranean air wash over them. He was looking forward to getting to the coast, so he could see the brilliant blue hues of the sea, which had looked so stunning from the air.
The traffic was thick, but they made it to Valletta in good time. After a twenty minute search, King found a place to park the car. They walked along Republic Street to the plaza in front of the library, which was packed with tourists having lunch at the many umbrella-shaded tables. King wore his signature outfit: jeans and a simple black t-shirt with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, showing his back to the audience, and holding a microphone in his hand. King guessed he now had close to a hundred different Elvis t-shirts. It was the only thing he collected, besides scars. Tucked under the shirt, in the waistband of his jeans, he carried the Yarygin.
Asya walked next to him, her long dark hair up in a ponytail. She wore a light blue blouse and a tight black pair of jeans. King didn’t know where she carried her gun, but he knew she had it on her somewhere. Maybe in the small purse-like backpack she wore.
The white umbrellas over the tables all read Café Cordina on the flaps, and the chairs were a strange mix of plastic patio furniture and woven wicker backs. A long aisle had been left down the center of the plaza, leading to the statue of Queen Victoria in front of the library’s doors. Currently, the statue’s head was mobbed with about five white and gray pigeons, all jostling each other for the best perch on the Queen’s noggin. Above it all, high on the roof of the library building, the Maltese red and white flag flapped loudly against its flag pole.
Above the doorframe, the word BIBLIOTHECA was carved and inlaid with gold. King also noted a ridiculous number of CCTV cameras clustered over the arch, but most pointed outward toward the crowd in the plaza.
“Ten cameras is excessive,” Asya stated, and once again, King was startled to find how similar he was to this woman that had grown up on the other side of the world from him.
They passed through the stone columns and in through the library’s main entrance. King’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the lower light. The floor was a zigzagging pattern of green and white marble. He spotted what he was looking for as soon as he entered the room.
Asya looked at the long tables and the walls lined with wooden bookshelves. The main chamber was a huge rectangular room, running to their left and right, the length of the building. Although several windows allowed light to pour into the space, he and Asya both had pink spots in their vision from having been outside in the brighter sunshine.
“Where should we begin?” Asya asked.
King pointed down to the floor, just inside the door, where the green and white marble had been laid in the H symbol of the Herculean Society.
“I’m going to say we should look for stairs to a basement.”
SEVEN
Endgame Headquarters, New Hampshire
Tom Duncan stood by the open hangar door, as he always did when the team returned from a mission. He would be present to greet them unless there was a dire situation somewhere that required him to be in operations, where his computers and a connection to the world waited for him. He knew that King and Asya would have only just touched down in Malta, so as the morning sun streamed in the massive hangar door, he smiled warmly for the returning field team.
They came roaring up in a black Land Rover, driven by the team’s new head of security, Quinton Saunders. Saunders was yet another steal from the 10th Mountain group at Fort Drum. Duncan had sent the man to collect the team from Laconia airport, where their transport plane would slip in and then be hidden away in a private han
gar. Although the vehicle had VTOL capabilities, there was nowhere near the Endgame Headquarters, which was built in sections under several mountains, to keep the plane. The hangar in which Duncan stood normally housed two Black Hawk helicopters—both of which were being upgraded at Fort Devens, down in Massachusetts.
Rook was the first to emerge from the vehicle, and Duncan was surprised to see the month-long growth of blonde beard on the man’s face. Combined with Rook’s bulk, the overall effect made him look like a wild mountain man.
“Rook, good to see you. If that really is you past all that hair,” Duncan said.
“It’s coming off today. I’ll be glad to have a proper shave.”
Bishop, Queen, Knight and Saunders, the new callsign: White Zero, all stepped out of the vehicle, and onto the concrete floor of the wide hangar.
“You could have shaved in the field, like I did,” Bishop said.
“I’m just wondering how come we never saw Knight shave,” Rook replied.
“I’m Korean. Our hair is trained to grow only where we want it to.” Knight smiled, then headed off toward the far end of the hangar.
“Queen, anything you want to tell me?” Duncan asked.
“We were lucky. A small patrol stumbled up on us, just as Knight was moving in to take his look. He’ll tell you all about the interior from the look he got, but the intel was righteous. Bishop took it down, and we got the hell out of there. Better intel would have made a month-long stakeout an afternoon takedown.” She shook her blonde hair out of a ponytail, and a long swath of it fell across the branded scar she bore on her forehead, covering it.
“Sorry about that. Sometimes we have to go on what we have. I’m glad it turned out alright.” Duncan replied. He put his hand on her shoulder. “You were wounded?”
“A scratch,” Queen dismissed it. “How are the North Koreans taking it?”
They turned to walk toward the far end of the hangar as they talked. Bishop and Rook had gone on ahead, and Saunders had taken the Rover back out to handle another matter.
“As you might expect. Saber-rattling at both China and Russia, because they don’t know who did it. They’ll turn their venom on us by tomorrow, whether they have any inkling it was us or not. They always do. They’ll threaten to nuke us, and the UN will level more sanctions at them, and it’ll blow over. But there will be one less chemical plant in their hands.”
“And how long will it take them to build another one?”
Duncan sighed. “Estimates are one month.”
“That’s not a good ratio. One month to take them down and one month to build them?”
“I know. Some days I feel like we need ten Chess Teams.”
A shrill alarm rang out throughout the base, with a red light circulating on the hangar ceiling. The steel door to the hangar began to close on its hydraulic pumps. Five soldiers wearing woodland-camouflage battle dress uniforms (BDUs) raced past Duncan and Queen toward the guard shack on the side of the main hangar door.
“What’s this now?” Queen asked.
Duncan touched a Bluetooth earpiece. “White Zero, what’s going down?”
“Sir, we have footage of three intruders on the perimeter of the base. Just down the road from Central. We’re looking for them now. Teams are reporting in from Labs and the Dock, but it looks like it was just the three guys.” White Zero sounded out of breath.
The base was a sprawling underground affair in three sections. On a map, the three main sections of the facility formed a capital letter A. High speed trains, hidden underground, connected each section of the appropriated base. This section was designated Central, and it contained the hangar, the computer rooms and surveillance equipment that Duncan would use to orchestrate Chess Team field operations and a variety of smaller labs and offices. Central sat at the top point of the letter A. The lower left of the A was a section designated Labs, because it mostly contained those. That was the section of the base the team had first encountered when the whole base belonged to the megalomaniac Richard Ridley. Finally, the lower right leg of the A-shape was the Dock, because the team kept a captured submarine there—the same Russian Typhoon class the team had used to escape North Korea. The sub reached the New Hampshire sea coast through a series of massive natural flooded tunnels and caverns.
The base had initially caused Duncan no end of headaches, because he first needed to get the Army to help clear it of chemical and biological weapons. After Chess Team had begun to move in, they had fought off an incursion of hostile forces and mutated creatures, while Duncan had been trapped inside and his security forces had been trapped outside. Since then, he had been continually beefing up security. Now three men had just sauntered up to the front door of his top-secret base. Duncan wasn’t happy.
Queen reached over to a nearby desk and picked up a radio earpiece. She placed it in her ear and listened in on the conversation.
“Zero, who are these guys?” Duncan asked, irritation creeping into his voice.
“No idea, sir,” came the reply. “But, they looked pretty weird.”
“Define weird.” Deep Blue was racing for the main computer operations room, and Queen was at his side, her firearm out. Once in his chair, Deep Blue could use the vast security systems as his disposal to find the intruders faster than White Zero could on foot.
“They look the same. Three guys in white business suits,” came White Zero’s reply.
Queen and Duncan exchanged glances as they reached the door to the central computer lab.
“They all have bald heads too. In the footage I’m seeing, they look like triplets.” White Zero’s voice sounded confused.
Deep Blue opened the door and then stopped dead. The room was mostly dark, but the lights had been on when he left. Queen read his body language and had her pistol up in front of her. She stepped in front of Deep Blue, motioning for him to remain shielded at the side of the doorway. Unarmed, he complied.
Queen began to enter the mostly darkened room. There was one recessed light in the ceiling, dimly lit, and shining down on the central computer chair in the room. A tall man with a bald head sat in the chair. He wore a fine white linen suit, and a huge shit-eating grin on his face.
“Richard Ridley,” Queen said, her gun trained on the maniac’s face.
“Not quite who you were expecting, eh, Ms. Baker?” The man’s grin grew wider. Two men stepped out of the shadows behind the chair to stand on either side of Ridley. Each man looked exactly like the other.
They were all the same man.
They were all Richard Ridley.
EIGHT
Valletta, Malta
King was ready to give up. The dreary basement of the library held several hundred cardboard boxes of books, and rows and rows of dusty metal shelving. He felt like he was looking through a haystack and wasn’t even sure he was after a needle.
“There must be something,” Asya said. He could tell she was losing her patience too.
They had been in the basement for over an hour, looking at the boxes, the walls, the ceiling and the floor, for any sign that the Herculean Society had been here, or that they had at least stored something here. But short of going through all the boxes, King had no idea what his next move was.
“Should we open boxes? That assistant librarian might be back at any moment. If she’s looking for something further from the stairs next time, we will have nowhere to hide.” As usual, Asya was thinking what he was thinking.
“It won’t be in the boxes. It’ll be something more secretive, and it’ll probably be marked in some way, like the floor upstairs—” King stopped and he squinted, thinking hard about the layout of the building, as he had viewed it since he entered.
“You only squinch your nose like that when you have idea,” Asya told him.
King turned to her and smiled. “Squinch?”
“I am trying to sound more American.”
“Let’s go back upstairs. I might have an idea.”
Asya followed King up a s
piral metal staircase to the main lobby of the library. They slipped quietly through the door and wandered back into the larger part of the hall, as casually as if they were just returning from the restroom.
King scanned the long hall, then turned his eyes up to the second story balcony that ran around the entire room. There were more shelves up there, and several small windows that let golden sunlight stream into the echoing chamber. Asya watched him look, then turned her own eyes up. She pointed to the spot on the balcony directly above the front door—and above the Herculean Society symbol on the floor.
“Was up, not down,” she said.
“Yep. Up,” King moved to another circular staircase. This one was in the corner of the large hall, and the ironwork along the railing was far more ornate than on the stairs to the basement, with small sections painted in gold leaf.
At the top, they navigated past the occasional book browser, along the carpeted floor of the balcony to the spot above the main hall’s doors. King glanced around the space. It was a small reading nook with a chair and a low table. Nothing fancy. He leaned over the balcony’s rail and looked down at the H on the floor below. Then he looked both ways along the balcony. No one was on this side of the second floor. He quickly turned and started searching every inch of the wall behind him, sliding the chair aside, and looking behind the table. Asya casually leaned on the rail watching him. Finally he stood straight and faced the wall, scratching his head.
“I don’t see it,” King said.
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller Page 4