Jesse’s huge frame filled the corridor that led to the door. “Want me to take care of ’em?” he asked.
Scott walked up behind Jesse. Nothing would be gained from fighting. He patted Jesse’s shoulder, cueing him to edge away. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll talk to her. Everyone else hang back.”
At the door, he felt Janis’s hold over the lock relent. He turned the bolts and pushed the door open. Agent Steel stood at the fore, eyes boring into his like ice picks. The two men flanking her wore thick ballistic armor, carbines to their chests. It was the first time Scott had seen Steel since she had been under suspicion for treason. She looked now as though she had a score to settle.
“Are the others with you?”
“We’re all here,” he replied.
“This bunker is to be used for emergency purposes only.”
“I think an imminent nuclear attack falls into that category.”
“Regardless of what may or may not happen,” she said, “it’s been de-authorized for use.”
“We’ll take that under consideration.”
Scott started to pull the door closed, but Steel stopped it with a boot.
“It is my duty to ensure that the Program is concluded quickly, quietly, and with all relevant pieces safely relocated. That includes you and your teammates. I will not tolerate insubordination.”
Scott felt echoes of their very first meeting, when Agent Steel had interrogated him in her temporary office at the high school. He remembered how he had sputtered and stammered, his formal jacket a sweat-sopping mess.
A lot had changed since then. He met her cold stare.
“Well, tough shit,” he said.
The men at her back shifted, but Agent Steel’s scarred lips remained set. Scott watched a mosquito land on her right temple, draw its fill, and whine off without her so much as twitching. He tried to read her eyes, but they appeared as sterile as ever.
“Just what are you planning?” she asked at last.
Scott deliberated over how much to disclose before deciding to be upfront. Just as fighting wouldn’t get them anywhere, neither would hiding their intentions. They were all adults here.
“To take out the Dead Hand system.”
“How many of you?” she asked.
“Me, Shockwave, and Titan.”
“What will the others do?”
“Remain here in a defensive role.”
For the first time, something in Agent Steel’s stare seemed to shift. An acknowledgment of some kind. Her voice remained cold and uncompromising, however.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked.
“Champions Program or not, it’s what we committed to.”
Steel gave a curt nod. “Then your request for transportation is granted.”
“Re-request?” Scott said, his composure faltering for the first time. “That went to you?”
“For the sake of deniability, I can’t be involved,” she said. “But you’ll have the use of the bunker and woods for planning and training. Reginald Perry is in Ukraine, preparing the ground for your arrival. I suspect he’ll be in communication with you shortly. The Champions jet has yet to be warehoused, but that situation changes in two weeks. Any flights you schedule will require at least one hour’s notice and should be requested through the same system.”
“Wait!” Scott said as she wheeled sharply on her heel.
Agent Steel stopped and turned back.
“Why all the theatrics?” he asked. “The bunker, the disk, you coming to challenge us … why bother with that if you were intending to help us?”
“Because your official duties as Champions have ended,” she answered. “As such, Director Kilmer felt it important that the decision be your own—not as assets of the U.S., but as individuals. No coercion.”
Scott almost didn’t follow up, but he couldn’t help himself. After all, Agent Steel’s actions went against everything he had come to understand about her: technocratic, detached, the hardest nut he’d ever met.
“And you went along with it?”
“I happen to agree with Director Kilmer on this one.”
The smallest warmth seemed to take hold in her eyes before the muscles around them tensed, and her pale-blue irises iced over once more. No one was immune to the dictates of love, apparently.
Scott felt a presence beside him and turned to find Janis. She had been standing back, listening to their conversation. He picked up a stirring in her mind, snatches of her final meeting with Mr. Leonard.
“I don’t know where your abilities come from,” he had told her. “I don’t even know how you were chosen. What I do know is it’s not about you, not to them. Remember that. No matter what they tell you, it’s not about Janis Graystone. It’s about your powers.”
And then Agent Steel had shot Mr. Leonard dead, his blood turning to ribbons in the creek that ran past them now.
Janis took a deliberate step toward their head of security. “Thank you,” she said.
Scott looked on in puzzlement for a moment before understanding what was happening. Whether Agent Steel knew it or not, she had just restored Janis’s humanity. All of theirs, in fact.
Scott nodded. “Yeah, thanks.”
Steel’s gaze moved between their faces. Without a word, she extended a hand to Janis, gave her a stiff shake, then did the same to Scott. Her grip was as dry as a bone and almost as hard.
“Good luck,” she said, and departed with her men.
41
Tuesday, July 1
12:31 p.m.
From a white leather recliner in the cabin of his luxury helicopter, Prince Khoggi cupped a goblet of champagne over his paunch and grinned. Beyond his window, the blue waters of the Pacific chopped and riffled as far as the eye could see, but he felt it in his soul. They were close.
Hooking his polarized sunglasses into the neck of his collared shirt, Khoggi peered up at a monitor that showed the view from the front of the helicopter. At the horizon’s center, a knuckle of land began to take hold—an island.
“There it is!” Khoggi burst out. He didn’t have to feign enthusiasm here. He turned to his traveling companion, who was seated in the recliner beside him, frowning at a book opened across her lap. “Do you see?”
Her sea-green eyes flicked up at the monitor. “Yeah, it’s nice.”
He adored Margaret Graystone, especially after everything she had done for him. Indeed, were it not for her, the Champions would surely have derailed his plans, his life-long ambition. But she could be so hard to please. Even so, the prince remained determined.
“It is more than nice,” he insisted. “It is the future!”
He returned his attention to the monitor, where the island was rising and spreading. Setting his goblet in a holder in his chair’s armrest, Prince Khoggi keyed a speaker beside the holder.
“Would you take a tour around the island before we land?” he asked.
“As you wish,” his pilot replied.
Minutes later, Khoggi wriggled in excitement as he felt the helicopter begin to bank left. The image of the island slid from the monitor and into view through his own window.
“Look, look!” Khoggi said. He reached over, closed Margaret’s book, and set it on the table where their plates of lobster salad had recently been cleared. Margaret relented with a sigh and leaned toward the window, the rose-pedal fragrance of her perfume breezing pleasantly past. But Khoggi scarcely noticed. He was admiring the island he had procured nearly two decades before.
“You would not believe, but until recently, all wilderness,” he said.
His eyes moved over the boat-lined harbor, the waters around it flecked with fishing vessels. A huge oil tanker was docked at the harbor’s far end, near his naval fleet. Though most of the island’s energy production was renewable—thanks to arrays of glinting solar panels—the 100,000-ton-capacity tanker would supplement their energy for the needed future.
Khoggi felt his smile grow broader. All money well spent.
Above the harbor, miles of farmland and pastures stretched away, the irrigation-lined squares dotted with agricultural buildings as well as tenement housing for the hundreds of workers.
“Yes, plenty of food,” he said, more to himself than Margaret. “Good, healthy food.”
His gaze traced the lines of rural roads, past energy hubs and a satellite station, to a great wall. Beyond the wall rose the island’s crown jewel: his city. Gleaming white houses, government buildings, monuments—beautiful, stately, splendid—all piling toward a picturesque acropolis, like one of the Mediterranean cities of antiquity he so admired.
Beside him, Margaret drew in her breath.
“Yes, yes,” Khoggi said, peeking over. “You like?”
“It’s … amazing,” Margaret answered, a hand to her chest.
Finally, something she found pleasing. Khoggi flushed with pride. “Why have so perfect an island, a country, if you do not have someone equally perfect to share it with?” he asked.
Khoggi had many people he would be sharing his island with: agronomists, architects, engineers, bureaucrats—experts who would help his city-state grow and prosper—not to mention scores of laborers and tradesmen. There would be women among them, too. But there was something about Margaret. Not just her special ability, which would bolster his rule immensely, Khoggi thought, but her exquisite beauty. She had been cool to his attempts to impress her thus far, but he was sure that would change once she beheld his power.
After all, he would soon reign over everyone and everything.
The helicopter circled the acropolis. The rocky hill was topped by a Roman-style palace whose white marble Khoggi had had delivered on cargo ships from Italy. An immense garden of exotic trees and plants fluttered as the helicopter began its vertical descent.
“What now?” Margaret asked, as they touched down on a helipad.
“Now,” Khoggi said with a smile, “we await the end of the world.”
42
Oakwood
Friday, July 4
5:59 p.m.
From her seat at the console in the emergency bunker, Janis listened to the seconds slap away on a flip clock inset in a panel beside the computer monitor. The look was deliberately retro, the idea having been that were someone to happen on this place, or any of the emergency bunkers that dotted the neighborhood, its homemade look would suggest lone nut job, not super-secret organization. Eyes closed, Janis continued the silent countdown in her head.
Three … two … one.
When the plastic leaves of the display slapped simultaneously, Janis opened her eyes.
6:00:00 p.m.
Add eight hours to make it two a.m. Moscow time and… “Scott and the others should be arriving at the Project site,” she announced to her teammates. She needn’t have. When she turned, she found Tyler, Erin, and Minion watching the clock just as intently as she had been listening to it.
They all nodded tensely.
Janis turned back to the flip clock beneath its plastic casing. More than five thousand miles away now, the team was far too distant for Janis to contact telepathically. There was no conventional communication linkup either, the risk of interception too high. The only message Janis would receive was the one she most dreaded—an emergency alert in the event of mission failure.
With a tight exhale, she pushed the thought from her mind.
Whether she liked it or not, the mission timetable was the only medium linking the two halves of the Champions team—and even that wouldn’t necessarily hold up. Scott had designed the schedule to be flexible, in the case of delays or unforeseen circumstances. He might already have switched over to one of the fall-back schedules, for all she knew.
The thought left Janis feeling more isolated, more helpless, than ever. She wanted to be there.
She touched a hand to her breastbone and tried to access the part of herself that resided in Scott. Though not a psychic connection exactly, she had used it before to tap into his emotional state, which often resonated with her own.
The bunker around her began to waver away, but instead of closing the distance to wherever Scott was, she found herself slipping back in time, to their goodbye that morning.
“It’s time,” Scott said, squeezing her hand.
They were standing on the edge of the landing field behind the Barn, the damp night sky just beginning to pale above the giant oaks. Behind Scott, the engines of the Champions jet droned quietly.
“I hate to be the nagging girlfriend,” she said, “but please take care of yourself.”
“Or I’ll have you to answer to, right?”
The way he looked in that moment, tall and solid in his black jumpsuit, laser helmet cradled under one arm, lips leaning into a smile—he looked more than amazing. He was the picture of a Champion.
“I’m serious, Scott.”
“I know.”
He leaned down. Before their lips met, she took the sides of his face in her hands and held him there. His brown eyes shifted behind his glasses in question. Her own eyes moved over his features.
“What are you doing?” he whispered after a minute.
She didn’t answer. She was framing him, absorbing every gentle line, every familiar color, committing them to memory. The premonition that had struck a moment before continued to tremble through her.
She was not going to see him again, not like this.
Shielding the numbing thought from Scott’s mind, she drew his face to hers and put all of herself into their kiss. The passion ran both ways. It wasn’t until they parted that she realized she’d teared up.
“Hey,” he said softly, “I’ll be okay.”
She nodded and recomposed herself. She gave him a parting sock on the shoulder. “Go get ’em, Champ.”
He nodded and backed away. One hand gripping her opposite arm across her body, Janis watched him climb the jet steps. At the cabin door, he turned and tapped his chest to indicate the place they shared. Janis inhaled against another wave of moisture. Her vision blurred.
By the time she blinked her eyes clear, Scott had disappeared inside the jet.
“He’ll be all right,” someone said.
Janis turned, startled to find herself back in the emergency bunker. Tyler was looking down on her, eyebrows bent in concern. Had she been crying again? She wiped beneath her eyes, but her fingers came back dry. Tyler gave the curve of her shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
“He’s a resourceful guy,” he said.
“Thanks.” She patted his hand.
At that moment, something vibrated in Janis’s chest. The sensation soon found resonance with her emotional body. Her eyes moved to the flip clock.
6:12:26
“A few minutes late, but they’re there,” she announced. Minion and Erin stirred on the couch behind her. “They’re at the Dead Hand site. The final phase of the mission is underway.”
43
Southwest Russia
Scott stole up behind a tall conifer on the edge of a forest and peered toward the site of the Dead Hand Project. The night-vision display inside his visor blurred, then zoomed in. Though the huge silo was globe-shaped, the bulk of it was buried. He took in the concrete dome, boxed in by concentric walls of fencing. Guard towers poked up at six points, with more guards patrolling the layers of fencing, some guiding leashed German Shepherds.
Scott’s legs wobbled. Ever since he and Janis had encountered that Rottweiler in the woods, he’d harbored a fear of large dogs. If all went according to plan, though, he wouldn’t have to deal with them or their handlers.
He scanned the land around the Project site: grain fields interspersed by stretches of forest. Much like the land they’d crossed to arrive here.
After landing in Ukraine, Scott and his teammates had been met by Reginald. True to Steel’s word, Reginald had prepared the ground, having hired a truck driver to smuggle them across the border. That part went smoothly. Reginald’s guise as the driver’s brother helped, but false document
s and rubles did most of the work, easing them past border guards and customs officials.
From the Russian-Ukraine border, the driver delivered them to within two miles of the Project site. Scott and his teammates proceeded on foot, Reginald remaining behind to ensure the driver wouldn’t become unnerved, that he’d be there to deliver them back across the border. The forested way had been mined with cameras and motion sensors, which Scott manipulated to hide their passage.
Now, concealed among the conifers with his teammates, he scanned the Project site again to ensure no alarms had gone off. All looked normal. He took a steadying breath as he turned to Shockwave and Titan.
“We’re clear,” he announced.
“Just show me where to blast,” Shockwave said.
“Back here.” Scott retreated with them to a small clearing. He checked his watch. “Two minutes.”
He removed a preprogrammed device from his duty belt. Part depth reader, part compass, it would guide them to the outer wall of the level that held the Project’s computer. Scott ran through a series of calibration tests. When he checked his watch again, it was almost time.
“All right, on my count.” He paused. “Three … two … one … execute.”
Pine needles and black soil flew up as Shockwave directed his disruptive powers into the earth at an angle. The initial blast sounded like a truck starting, but the volume muted quickly as the hole grew in depth. Shockwave descended, following his own tunnel. Scott stole back to the edge of the forest. Five hundred meters away, the guards at the Project site appeared not to have heard the disturbance.
Scott returned to the clearing. One foot planted inside the mouth of the tunnel, he turned to Jesse, their rear guard.
“Going to be all right up here?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about me,” Jesse rumbled. “Just focus on what you need to do.”
Scott nodded. “Remember, though. Radio silence unless there’s an emergency.”
“Got it, chief.”
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 22