Shadow Tyrants

NINETEEN

Carlton was quite pleased at how his plan had played out. He knew that all he’d had to do was pander to Mallik’s need to be on the winning side.

The Library guards took out their weapons and moved toward Mallik and Torkan. Torkan tensed, ready for a fight that he couldn’t win. Mallik didn’t stand. Instead, he held up one hand with some kind of object in it.

“Stop right there,” he said. The guards hesitated and looked to Carlton, who rolled his eyes.

“Please, Romir. Don’t make this more pathetic than it already is.”

Mallik opened his palm and revealed a glass vial with red writing on it below an orange and black biohazard symbol.

“Volanski knows what this is,” Mallik said, looking at the Russian arms trader. “If you try to keep me from leaving the Library, I will drop it. Then all of us will die.”

Boris Volanski suddenly jumped to his feet in alarm.

“Novichok!” he yelled. Carlton could feel Natalie Taylor’s hand on his shoulder. His assistant knew as well as he did what Novichok could do.

“That’s right,” Mallik said. “This is a pressurized vial. If it breaks, the nerve agent will be propelled throughout the room. It will kill us in seconds.”

Carlton slowly got to his feet.

“Nobody leaves until Torkan and I do,” Mallik warned.

Carlton nearly sneered, “You haven’t got the guts.” But then he realized Mallik did have the guts and that he had nothing to lose. His wife was gone, he had no children, and he seemed to be fanatical about stopping the Colossus Project.

“How did you know it was me?” Mallik said.

Carlton said nothing. Mallik looked around the room until Jason Wakefield spoke.

“Carlton has a video of your man Torkan at the Moretti Navi shipyard,” he said, nodding at Mallik’s bodyguard. “He sent it to all of us before the meeting and suggested the ruse to get you to admit your involvement. Some of us didn’t initially believe it, particularly me because of the ‘kidnapping’ attempt that you now obviously set up. But I went along with it because I thought you would prove him wrong. Instead, Carlton was right. I don’t like being played for a fool.”

“How could you, Romir?” Melissa Valentine said, shaking her head. “We thought you were one of us.”

“I tried to warn you before we started,” Mallik said, “but you wouldn’t listen. I thought the project was a boondoggle until we established the Jhootha Island facility. Then I knew Colossus was no pipe dream. I was the only person who could stop you. That’s why I ramped up the Vajra project so quickly. It cost me even more than Colossus has cost us together, but now I see that it was worth it.”

He stood, the vial held between his fingers. “Now, I’m going to leave here with Torkan. I expect that you’ll try to prevent me from completing my satellite constellation. Go ahead. I’m ready for you. Whatever you can come up with won’t work. In the end, you’ll see that I’m right. I hope someday in the future you’ll thank me for what I’m doing.”

“Thank you?” Carlton spat. “For destroying our vision for a better world?”

“For saving the world.”

Mallik backed toward the doorway behind him. Torkan was behind him, his eyes on the motionless guards.

When Mallik was through the doorway, he stopped and said, “You’ll never stop coming after me, will you? The Nine has to end here.”

Then he tossed the vial into the room and sprinted out of sight.

Carlton saw the vial arc in the air toward the center of the room and turned to run, but Taylor was already hauling him backward. He stumbled after her, pushing Gupta through the arch with him. They’d rounded the corner when he heard the vial smash against the stone floor and the screaming begin.

They kept running. Carlton turned to see Wakefield stumble through the arch behind them with one of the guards. Wakefield’s terrified eyes pleaded for help, but there was none coming. He and the guard seized up as their muscles froze, and they both keeled over like statues, their heads smashing into the hard floor.

Gupta paused at the horrifying sight. His own man had been left behind to die.

“Come on!” Taylor shouted. “You can’t do anything for them! This way!”

“Who is this woman?” Gupta said to Carlton. “How does your assistant know we can’t do anything?”

“Because she was in British Army Intelligence,” Carlton said. “She’s not just my assistant, she’s my bodyguard. Much better than yours, I might add.”

Taylor shoved Gupta into motion, and they kept going until they found one of the remaining Library guards at Carlton’s exit.

“Find the rest of your men,” Carlton said to him. “Romir Mallik just killed the other members of the Nine. Stop him before he can leave the Library.”

The guard looked at him in shock, then nodded and ran off.

They descended into the tunnel as Gupta said in stunned disbelief, “Why would Mallik do that?”

“Because he’s insane,” Carlton said. He didn’t add that the video of Torkan had been doctored by his media people to insert the Iranian’s face into the scene. It was just Carlton’s hunch that Mallik had been the one behind the sabotage of the Colossus 5, but he’d needed something concrete to push the others in the Nine to turn on him.

“Two thousand years of waiting and planning,” Gupta said with a whimper, “and then the Nine is destroyed in an instant by one of our own.”

“We don’t need them anymore,” Carlton said. “You and I can complete the project ourselves. We have everything we need to finish it.”

“What about the other members? They’ll be missed by their own people.”

“You forget that I own a news organization. We’ll figure out a way to make their absences go unnoticed or explained until we can activate Colossus. After that, the announcement of their deaths will just be a tragic addition to the news cycle, and we can shut down any subsequent investigations.”

“Does Mallik know where the Colossus ships are right now?”

Carlton shook his head. “No, I made sure to keep that information from him. There’s no way for him to find them. I even convinced Saidon to move the Colossus 5 to an undisclosed location to install the replacement satellite dish.”

“And you’re sure Jhootha Island won’t lead back to us?”

Carlton grinned. He wasn’t upset at all about what had just happened. In fact, Mallik did him a favor by culling his partners.

“I wasn’t lying to Mallik when I said that I issued the code for the self-destruct protocol. Jhootha Island will be but a distant memory by the end of the day.”

“That was bold of you,” Torkan said as he led Mallik to their own exit tunnel from the Library.

“Eliminating the other Unknowns will give us some breathing room,” Mallik said, still surprised at his own impulsive act.

“I think Carlton made it out with his assistant. Gupta, too.”

“Even if they aren’t all dead, it’ll take them time to regroup from that mess.”

When they reached the opening to the exit tunnel, the anxious guard stationed there asked Mallik and Torkan what the screaming had been about, but he didn’t get an answer. Torkan viciously chopped him in the throat and took his weapon. The guard fell to his knees, his windpipe collapsed.

“The other guards will come after us,” Mallik said, looking at the dead man. “Even you can’t kill all of them. They’ll catch us before we get off the Library property.”

“No they won’t,” Torkan replied. He took the guard’s guns and removed two wicked-looking knives from his belt and said, “Let’s go.”

Mallik didn’t ask what Torkan had in mind. Strategic thinking was Mallik’s skill, tactical creativity was Torkan’s. Mallik simply followed him into the passageway, where they took off at a trot.

As they got close to the end of the long tunnel, the sound of footsteps pounding behind them echoed off the stone. Torkan let loose a volley from his gun while Mallik activated the lion heads control. The barrier slowly lowered, and they dove to the ground to avoid the guards’ bullets that were pinging off the corridor walls.

By the time the barrier reached the floor, Torkan’s ammo was gone. They’d be chased down outside long before they got to their waiting car and executed on the spot.

They stepped across the barrier as it started to close with the rising water. Torkan turned and shoved the blades of each knife he’d taken from the dead guard into the narrow gap between the barrier and the wall.

The hardened steel of the knives squealed as the barrier came to a stop. The knives acted as wedges to keep the barrier from rising to seal off the passageway. Water began to gush over it. The temporary dams holding back the water from the canal were already starting to drop.

They ran up the steps and out onto the dry path. Mallik looked back, and the dams had disappeared from sight. Water was now flooding into the tunnel at a fearsome rate. The guards behind them would almost certainly drown before they could make the quarter mile back to the Library.

“Quick thinking,” Mallik said as they headed back to their car.

“Carlton will come at us with everything he can,” Torkan said.

“I know. Now we’re in a race against each other.”

Torkan silently nodded, his expression somber. He knew the stakes. Whoever won would change the course of civilization forever.