Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller

THE STORY SO FAR

Richard Ridley was a megalomaniac with twin dreams: immortality and ultimate power. His multi-billion dollar genetics company, Manifold, was poised to give him both, when he discovered the historic resting place of the Lernaean Hydra — on the Nazca plains of Peru. Combining Hydra DNA with humans, Ridley hoped to create invincible regenerating soldiers and to gain his much-coveted eternity.

A crack squad of Delta operators, known as Chess Team — King, Queen, Bishop, Rook and Knight — orchestrated by the US President, defeated Ridley, his security forces and the unintentionally resurrected Hydra in a desperate battle. Along the way, the team had help from a mysterious man named Alexander Diotrephes — the legendary Hercules, alive, well and immortal. But in the chaos of the battle, Richard Ridley escaped.

A year later, nearly the entire population of the Siletz reservation in Oregon was exterminated. The only survivor, 13-year old Fiona Lane, the last living speaker of her native language, ended up in the custody of Jack Sigler, callsign: King, field leader of Chess Team.

The following year, King’s parents unexpectedly revealed they had led a secret life as former Russian spies. Then Richard Ridley returned, murdering the last living speakers of the world’s most ancient languages and deciphering the mother tongue—an ancient protolanguage, otherwise known as “the language of God,” which bestowed its user the ability to animate inanimate objects. With help from Alexander, Chess Team kept Fiona safe and defeated Ridley once again. But when the smoke had cleared, King’s parents were missing and presumed on the run back to Russia. Ridley was presumed dead, but had, in fact, become the prisoner of a man who had no qualms about torture.

Attempting to take some time off, King went repeatedly toe-to-toe and wits-to-wits with a criminal mastermind named Graham Brown, aka Brainstorm, and in their final battle, he stopped a black hole forming in the Louvre from destroying all of Paris. He fought side-by-side, once again, with Alexander. Unseen by King, Alexander pocketed a small round piece of rubble in the aftermath.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, discovered an old Manifold facility and faced off against Richard Ridley’s brother, Darius Ridley. In Norway, Stan Tremblay, callsign: Rook, took some unauthorized time off that led to him discovering a former Nazi laboratory. Erik Somers, callsign: Bishop, was horribly experimented upon by Ridley in their initial clash. Although cured, he still bears the emotional scars. Shin-dae Jung, callsign: Knight, faced the horror of the resurrected Hydra alone in the team’s first fight against Ridley. Hoping for some of his own down-time, he wound up facing another genetic monstrosity in an abandoned city in China. Also in the aftermath of the mother-tongue skirmish with Ridley, Tom Duncan stepped down from the US presidency to assume his Chess Team duties as callsign: Deep Blue, full time, running the team from a captured Manifold facility in New Hampshire, and rechristening the expanded Chess Team organization as Endgame.

Most recently, the team faced a world-wide threat of annihilation that resulted in a frantic battle in Norway and the capture of otherworldly technology capable of opening portals to different dimensions. Rook’s Russian ally, Asya Machtchenko, turned out to be King’s sibling — the result of his parents’ double lives in the mother country. Asya claimed their parents had been abducted, and she asked the team to help find them.

At the end of the fight in Norway, when the team returned to New Hampshire, a laptop containing the designs for the dimensional technology was mysteriously lifted from their headquarters, and a note was left behind explaining that Alexander needed the designs and that he was holding King’s parents hostage. King was warned to stay out of the way, but instead, he vowed to take the fight directly to the legendary immortal — and if necessary, to the death.