Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller

TWENTY-THREE

The thing before them could barely be called human.

Richard Ridley’s cell was a 20x20 room, and humidity was almost completely absent from the space. It was baking hot, as if they had all crawled inside an oven set to 400 degrees. In the center of the room, two cages were suspended by chains. The top cage was a rusted metal box formed from crisscrossing bars, like some kind of oversized death metal Christmas ornament. Attached to the outside of the cage was a device that looked like a gerbil’s water dispenser, but larger and connected to a hose that ran into the ceiling. Hung a few inches under the top cage was a larger rectangular cage suspended vertically, and made from the same rusted iron bars as the first.

Inside the top cage was Richard Ridley’s head.

Inside the bottom cage was the man’s limbless torso.

But it was what was in the four-inch space between the two suspended cages that had prompted Queen’s disgust and Rook’s admiration.

Ridley’s skin was cracked and gray, all over what remained of his body. The places where his limbs should have been were darkened stumps. But the places at the bottom of his head, and the top of his torso, where his neck should have been, were alive with pink flesh. Tendrils of nerves and blood vessels dangled down from the severed head or stretched up from the headless torso. The tendrils wavered slightly in the air, each struggling and reaching to meet their counterparts on the opposite side of the deadly gap. Only three tendrils had been successful so far, but Queen could see that they were struggling to maintain contact with each other. The spinal cord was a grayish orange stump.

The man was in a constant state of failed regeneration.

As Queen stepped closer, she could see that the eyes were gray and lifeless, sunken back into the sockets, like ill-fitting rubber balls that had been placed into their holders, like toys on a shelf. The mouth hung open, and the tongue was shriveled and black.

“It is worse than I had feared,” Seth spoke from behind the group.

“Ridley or not, this is inhuman. Get him down.” Queen ordered.

Rook and Bishop moved to the cages and began opening them. They were not locked. There was no need. Knight stepped into the room with the three duplicates, keeping an eye on them, his submachine gun raised.

Seth turned to Knight and Queen. “May we assist in removing Him? I suggest we lay him on the floor and allow the head to rejoin with the torso. Water might also be good.”

Queen hesitated, but nodded. Ridley wouldn’t be speaking any time soon.

The three clones moved over to help. Rook gently pulled Richard Ridley’s head up and away from the cage. The tendrils that had managed to grasp those reaching from the torso snapped. Rook winced.

“It’s okay,” Seth told them. “Just get the torso out quickly, so He may heal.” Seth took the head reverently and laid it on the floor, holding it with his hand, so it would not roll to the side. Bishop pulled the torso out of its cage, swung it around and laid it on the floor below the head. Jared and Enos gently slid the torso up, until the tendrils reaching from the head touched with those of the torso. They moved the chest up further until the parts of the neck touched. Instantly the skin began to repair itself.

Bishop pulled a plastic tube from his armored shoulder, and offered it to Seth. The clone lowered the tube over Ridley’s mouth and squeezed the plastic bite valve with his fingers. A stream of water from the reservoir hidden under the armor plates on Bishop’s massive back dripped into the open mouth. Immediately, the blackened shriveled tongue began to thrash from side to side in the mouth, and color returned to it. Then it swelled closer to the size of a normal tongue.

“That’s enough,” Queen said. “Everybody step back and give him some room.”

Bishop stood up and leaned on the far wall, next to Rook. The duplicates stood and backed away, toward the door where Knight remained.

Already, the damaged body’s odd gray pallor was slipping away to a mottled yellow and white. Queen watched as the veins on Ridley’s forehead inflated, pressing away from the skin. Nubs pressed out from the man’s blackened shoulders, no larger than a peanut at first, but they quickly grew to the size of a pear.

His arms, she thought. I’m actually watching a man grow arms.

She had, of course, seen Bishop regenerate from grave wounds, back when he had his Manifold-inflicted abilities, but she had never seen anything like this.

She knelt down by Ridley’s side, watching the amazing transformation. Femur bones were extending out of the gaping openings under his hips. Then a trail of blood vessels and nerves swirled down the length of the bone, and muscles began to form in patches. Queen looked back up to the man’s head, and saw his mouth was healed entirely. Where the nose had been little more than two vertical slits, more resembling a skull than a human face, the full nose had regrown.

His eyelids moved and jittered, his eyes under the flesh darting all around, as if the man were in REM sleep.

Then he took a deep breath in and slowly exhaled.

The breath took Queen by surprise, as if up until now she had been watching a strange science video about the body, but now she was forcefully reminded that she was kneeling next to her worst enemy. And he was coming back from the dead.

His eyelids flicked open. Richard Ridley’s pale blue eyes stared at Queen. He spoke in a whisper. “Ms. Baker. Not the first face I thought I’d see upon waking, but a pleasant one, nonetheless.” Sweat had popped out on his forehead, from the strain the regenerating was taking on him.

“Hey asshole. You can speak again,” she said. “Does that mean you can use the mother tongue to finish healing yourself?”

“I could, but why—”

Queen stabbed his chest with the injector she had slipped out of a pocket on the outside of her armored leg. The serum pumped into Ridley’s heart and spread to the rest of his still-regenerating body in a flash. The growth ceased.

“What are you doing?” Seth screamed.

“Shaddap,” Rook threatened, raising his MP-5 at Seth and the other two duplicates. Knight, who was still standing near them, pushed Seth back against the wall with his free hand.

“Relax, Ridley,” Queen said to the panicked eyes below her. “Just removing your chemical regenerative abilities. The serum alters your DNA, stripping the bits that you got from the Hydra. You don’t need them to get back into shape. Once you’re healed, if you cross me, I shoot your damn mouth off, and your ability to regenerate is lost forever, without a tongue to use your magic language. Are we clear?”

“Hmm,” Ridley said. “I’d nod, but I don’t have the musculature back yet. What exactly is it that you want, Queen?”

“I want you to help me kill Alexander Diotrephes.”

Richard Ridley laid on the floor, his extremities suddenly stopped from returning. He smiled broadly, showing sparkling white teeth. “That…would be my pleasure.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Queen stood and moved toward the three duplicates. She pulled out another auto injector.

Seth’s eyes grew wide. “What is in that?”

“Same thing he got,” Queen answered, motioning to Ridley.

Seth looked confused, but the attention turned away from him when Ridley chuckled. “They’re golems. Earthen men. They cannot regenerate flesh they do not have.”

Seth looked a little disappointed to hear this, but tried to hide it.

Knight held Seth with one hand and pointed his MP-5 at the man’s temple. “I’m sure you won’t blame us for not taking your word on that.”

Queen jabbed Seth with the injector and moved to the other two clones. Jared looked as if he might fight.

Rook spoke up from across the room. “Don’t even dream it, Captain Kangaroo. I got you covered from here, and she could kill you thirty ways with that injector and another eighty with her bare hands if she wanted you gone.”

Jared offered his arm up, pushing up the sleeve of his linen suit jacket, but the fire never left his light blue eyes. Enos offered his arm meekly. Queen wondered at the differences she saw in personalities between the dupes, but she recalled what Seth had said about each of them gaining new experiences. They really are becoming different people. She wondered if any of them had a chance at redemption. Could they change from what the original Ridley was — or would she need to kill all three of them?

The serum injected into all four Ridleys, Queen moved back to the man regenerating on the gray concrete floor. A thought occurred to her. “Do you know how you were being imprisoned?”

Richard Ridley moved his head, while mumbling a chant in the mother tongue that was completing his regeneration. His eyes fell on the cages. Queen could see him working it out in his mind. When a dark frown fell on his face, she knew he understood.

“Look at me,” she said.

He turned his head toward her, with far less effort than it had taken for him to look over at the cages, still swaying on their chains. His face was neutral now, all signs of the frown gone.

“If you try to screw us, Rook and I will think up something worse than this hideous shit. Do you believe me?” Queen slid the bandana off her forehead, revealing a nasty brand she had received at the hands of an enemy in the past. “I’m no stranger to torture.”

Ridley nodded slightly. He paused his chant. “I believe you.”

“Good,” she said. “I want intel. Describe this facility. Tell me what its purpose was. I want to know every secret fucking panel in this place, and I want to know where Alexander is likely to be held up.” She glanced down at the legs Ridley was growing. The feet looked like deformed baby’s feet attached to the ends of withered adult legs. “We’ve got a little time before you’re ready to walk.”

“I need some water,” Ridley said.

Queen looked up at Bishop. The big man stepped over and kneeled, pouring water again from his plastic hose, directly into Ridley’s mouth. The regenerating man swallowed in huge gulps, like a man who had just crossed a desert.

“Thank you. This facility was for genetic research initially, but it eventually became a storehouse for archeological finds and artifacts as well. It has three levels, which you would have seen some of to get here. We are on Sub Level 3, which consists of this cell, the outer security room, a loading dock, storage, and a lounge. There’s also a natural cavern that predates the Roman occupation. That’s at the end of the hall. Second floor is all offices and a meeting room. Plus my office. Oh yes, there’s a little kitchen up there too. Sub Level 1 is the labs, and living quarters for the staff. Two ways in and out of the facility: the loading dock and the secret door through the janitor’s closet at the back of the bio lab, on Sub Level 1.”

“We came in that way,” Queen nodded. “What else?”

“Well, from that closet, you might have come in one of two ways: the stairs from the amphitheater, or the tunnel that leads to the parking garage. The garage connects with the loading dock also. From the garage, you have two ways in or out. The vehicle tunnel takes you to the American Cemetery. There’s an emergency ladder from the garage to the unused fountain on the surface, next to the mosque’s parking lot.” The man no longer had sweat popping out all over his head. Queen noticed that his body appeared nearly whole, although he was hardly as muscular as he used to be. Still, he looked like he might be able to walk again soon.

“We didn’t know about the fountain. Nice to see you’re telling the truth,” she told him.

“Why wouldn’t I? I want what you want right now: Alexander.” Ridley pushed his torso up with his newly formed arms. He didn’t have quite enough strength to sit up fully, so he rested on his elbows, looking relaxed and assessing the growth of his legs.

“May I?” Seth asked Knight, attempting to remove his linen jacket. Knight gave a grim nod.

Seth stepped forward into the room, and removed his cream colored linen jacket, gently draping it over Richard Ridley’s exposed genitals.

“Thank you, Seth,” he said. The duplicate nodded, and stepped back.

“How can you tell them apart?” Queen asked. She had only been able to remember Seth based on his being the only one who spoke and by keeping mental track of where he was in the room.

“I created him. And the others. I know them.”

“How many more are there?” Queen asked, pointing to Jared.

“Sadly, these three are the last, but they are my favorites.”

Suddenly, the door to the room opened, and Knight quickly swiveled his weapon toward it. On the other side of the room, Bishop had his weapon up and trained on the door as well. Rook kept his weapon trained on the three duplicates, despite the sudden intrusion into the room. They had discussed close quarters strategies like this on the plane. They each knew their jobs, and Rook’s was to never take his eyes off the duplicates.

Queen swiveled her head toward the door, then stood up and away from Ridley on the floor.

Standing in the doorway was Asya Machtchenko. Pawn. The team had come to know her and love her as family, since discovering that she truly was King’s sibling. Originally attaching herself to Rook on a ship in the Barents Sea, she had proven herself a worthy ally, first with Rook in Norway, and later in a pitched battle involving the whole team. In the year since then, she had been constantly helping King look for their parents. On the few times when she had been back at headquarters, Queen had seen the woman bonding with King’s girlfriend, Sara Fogg, and his foster daughter, Fiona Lane. Asya had very quickly become an unofficial part of Endgame, but a well liked and well loved part.

The woman stood in the doorway with tear-streaked mascara on her cheeks, looking distracted and surprised to find the whole team in the room with four Ridleys.

Queen walked quickly to the woman. “Pawn? Are you okay?”

Asya stood silently, her eyes wide, clearly in shock more than surprise, now that Queen was close enough to the woman.

Queen gently placed a hand on Asya’s shoulder. “Asya?”

Asya blinked, twice. “King is dead.”

TWENTY-FIVE

King and Alexander smashed into the wall of the cavern, a halo of electric blue light dancing around the ceiling of the space. The men slid down the rough stone wall, and the crackling light winked out, plunging the entire cavern into darkness.

Lying on the floor, King groaned, his ribs having been spared a direct impact, but still protesting from the fall to the floor. “Son of a bitch.” King’s will to fight disappeared with the light. Wherever Alexander had taken him, the way back was closed. His only chance of returning to his family was to stay calm and use his brain before his brawn. The latter wouldn’t do much when it came to a man who could heal from nearly any wound.

Alexander laughed good-naturedly in the dark. “Actually, my mother was kind of a shrew.”

“Alcmene?” King asked, cradling his chest with an arm. He had studied ancient history extensively, and Hercules especially.

Alexander grunted. “You can’t believe everything you read in modern history, Jack. Things get distorted over centuries. Sometimes by accident, but more often by design.”

A brilliant light flared in the dark.

King shielded his eyes for a moment, and then saw that Alexander held a small LED flashlight in his hand. It was tiny — like a keychain light.

“Take me back.”

Alexander smiled. “I need your help to save a woman, Jack. She desperately needs help, and I can’t do it alone.”

Despite his anger, King felt Alexander was being forthright, and his natural instinct was to want to help save a life, but he remained skeptical.

“Where?”

“We are still in Carthage. In the very same cavern.”

King looked around the echoing space. The shape of the room looked similar, but the machinery was all gone, the floor of the room was rough and unfinished, and he couldn’t see the doors in the distant shadows.

“Bullshit.”

“Listen. What do you really know about that technology you appropriated in Norway? About quantum tunneling and dimensions?”

“We didn’t have much time to study that tech before you stole the plans and left your threatening note.”

“Sorry about that. The note did serve its purpose, though. You are here with me, as intended.” Alexander chuckled.

King’s patience waned. He pulled the Sig Sauer pistol and pointed it at Alexander. “I saw what was on the other side of that portal in Norway, and I watched globes of energy destroy entire cities. I’m not going to let you do the same.”

Alexander waved casually at the handgun. “You know that can’t kill me.”

“I can make you hurt,” King countered.

“You might want to conserve your ammunition,” Alexander said. “It’s going to be a long time before you have a chance to find more.”

King, deflated, lowered the pistol to the cavern floor and slumped with his back against the wall. The AK-47 dug into his back, and he pulled the strap off over his head, wincing a bit as he did, but appreciating the fact that the ibuprofen was finally kicking in some.

“Let’s start with Einstein. You know his theory of relativity?” Alexander asked, sitting on the floor cross-legged in front of King. His posture was completely non-threatening now, so King relaxed his guard.

“Math isn’t my strong suit, but I get the basic gist.”

Alexander nodded. “Time and space are joined, but movement faster than the speed of light theoretically allows forward travel in time — or through vast distances in space, yes? The dimensional portal technology in Norway functioned this way. The energy the device used was not only powered by the ocean currents, but also by a special element that came from the other side of that dimensional tunnel — a kind of miniature black hole. A stable one. Infinite power. Enough to punch a doorway to a different dimension.”

“How?”

“Imagine two flat sheets of paper, separated by an inch of air. One paper is this world, the next is…someplace else. The machine, and the black hole, essentially pushed on the outside of both sheets of paper until they ruptured and formed a tunnel between the two.”

“You’re talking about an Einstein-Rosen bridge, right? A wormhole?” King asked.

“Yes, exactly.” Alexander smiled like a schoolteacher enjoying that his pupil was keeping up. “But imagine instead that you don’t need to travel far; it’s not like a ship going through a long tunnel, like in Star Trek. Because the Einstein-Rosen bridge doesn’t form between the surfaces of the planes or dimensions, leaving a long funnel-shaped tunnel. Instead, it draws the edges of the planes together to where they nearly touch. Travel between the dimensions was instantaneous, right? Like passing through a waterfall or even a thin membrane?”

King recalled the feeling from the previous year. “Something like that, yeah. So what?”

“So take away one of the pieces of paper. Fold the remaining paper over on itself in the shape of a sideways letter U, maintaining that inch of distance between the sides of the paper.”

“I don’t follow. Isn’t the paper flat? Doesn’t it have to stay that way?” King asked, interested in the discussion, now that it was beyond his understanding. He frequently looked at learning new things as a challenge to be overcome.

“Einstein’s theory suggested that any mass could curve space-time. Instead of paper, think of a sheet of plastic wrap. If you hold it tight from all four corners, but drop a heavy marble on it, it will bow and distort in the center of the wrap, correct?”

“Okay,” King said, understanding the reference, but not how an entire dimension could curve into a U shape. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Now, what if you used a larger infinite power source — say, another black hole — and you punched a wormhole from one side of the paper to the other. What would you have?”

Thinking he understood, King replied immediately. “Teleportation.”

Alexander let a small smile show. “Close. Remember that the wormhole is faster than light. It’s actually a distortion in space-time on both ends of the tunnel, right? Each side having been pushed inward until they meet. Or, in this case, pushed from one side until the tunnel blasts through the other side. In fact, imagine that instead of a black hole, you have a small ring of collapsing micro-stars that have yet to become black holes. Now picture them rotating and glowing, like the ring around Saturn.” Alexander drew a circle in the air with his finger. “Centrifugal force keeps it all from forming a singularity — or multiple micro-singularities. So there’s no gravitational force at the center of the ring, which would tear you — or anything — apart, as we saw in Paris. Instead, it’s just the opposite. A complete absence of gravity, like floating in space. Low friction. Easy to blast through the center of it, if you had a rocket or a faster-than-light drive of some sort. Keeping in mind the two sheet example, if the tunnel was only an inch thick, or less, even minimal force might be used to get from one side to the other. Theoretically, you would still be travelling faster than light once you entered the tunnel. Distances shrink, and space-time itself ceases to function as it would if you remained on the first sheet.”

“I think I get that,” King said, nodding. “So what happens? Where do you go?”

Alexander stood slowly, then offered King his hand. “Follow me.”

King snatched the AK, took Alexander’s hand and was pulled to his feet.

Alexander led them with the small keychain light to a broad opening in the wall and turned left, to a tunnel hewn from the rock itself. Twenty feet later, the tunnel dead-ended in a long sloping pile of rubble. Alexander turned to the pile and started ascending the slope of scree. King followed him up the loose rocks. Far ahead and above them, there was an opening to the bright blue sky. Alexander moved surely on the loose rock. He reached the top of the underground hill and the opening in minutes. King went slower, because of his rib, but he reached the surface shortly after the larger man.

At the top of the slope, they were outdoors. A brilliant cloudless blue sky greeted them, with a blazing yellow sun over head. King was relieved that it appeared he was still on Earth. Around them and behind them, the landscape was barren rock and sand. In front of them, twenty feet away, was a beautiful turquoise ocean, casting waves at an immense natural barrier of piled rocks that stretched over three hundred feet along the shore. King could see a more sandy beach to the left of the rocky barrier, and the land rose to larger rocks and boulders at the other end of the barrier.

Alexander turned around in a full circle, a broad beaming smile on his face. Then he looked at King and held his arms out to the side, encouraging King to take in the vista.

“The question, Jack, is not ‘where do you go?’ It’s when do you go.”

King looked at the man. He wanted to tell Alexander he was insane. Wanted to write off his claim as a delusion. But he couldn’t. How could someone who’d traveled between worlds believe moving through time was impossible?

Shit.

Alexander continued to sweep his hands around at the landscape. “Look around you, Jack. We are still in Carthage. We are standing outside the Omega facility, and what will one day be the ruins of Carthage. Except the buildings those ruins once were in our time, are not even here yet. Carthage has yet to be built!”

King looked at the shoreline. He had studied maps of the area before arriving from Malta, and he had looked at a map on the laptop with Asya all afternoon. He understood what Alexander was saying. He made mental adjustments for the slight alteration of the coast by time and erosion.

He was looking at the coastline of Carthage.

He drew in a deep breath. The mild pain in his ribs, dulled by the ibuprofen, assured him he wasn’t dreaming. He knew Alexander was telling the truth. They’d traveled backwards through time. It was ridiculous, but not impossible. In his mind, nothing was impossible. Not anymore. But one question remained unanswered. “When are we?”

Alexander looked him in the eye. “800 BC, give or take a year.”

TWENTY-SIX

“That’s…” King cleared his throat. “That’s a long time ago.” Even in the alternate dimension, he’d never felt so far from home.

“Actually, it’s now,” Alexander said, walking toward the breakwater of giant stones.

King followed him up the rise, taking in the view of the pristine Gulf of Tunis. He looked around again in a full circle. Untouched rocks and sand for as far as he could see, in most directions. Far north along the coast he thought he could make out a structure, but it would have to be only a single story building — possibly a rock. But the geography of the coastline was accurate. He tried to wrap his mind around it. He was seeing Tunisia before it was occupied. Then a history lesson caught up with him. “Wasn’t there a Phoenician city here before the Romans?”

Alexander was stalking around the breakwater, looking at rocks, and sometimes squatting down to peer closely at them before standing in a huff and looking elsewhere. He pointed absentmindedly behind him, at the large boulders to the south of the breakwater.

King walked over to the boulders and climbed them to the top.

South of the breakwater, spread out before him, was a small village. Several of the structures were wattle and daub, but a few were comprised of earth-colored stone. At a quick glance, King put the population at fewer than a thousand people. He saw several wooden boats with brilliant white sails tied to a long wooden pier. On the southern fringe of the town were dozens — possibly hundreds — of camels, tied to wooden posts, and in one case, walking aimlessly in a wooden corral.

King walked back down the boulder to where Alexander was still looking at the stones. He was acutely aware of the grenade, still in his pocket. The AK-47 strapped to his back and the Sig Sauer handgun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Even his garments and his wristwatch. Everything about him marked him as what he was.

A man out of time.

“That’s the mighty kingdom of Carthage?” King asked in disbelief.

Alexander stood upright and smiled. “First, Jack, remember what I said about taking modern history at face value. Second, you’re getting your years mixed up. Carthage, or Karkhēdōn, as the Greeks will come to call it, has existed as a city at this point only for a few years. Carthaginian hegemony doesn’t begin for another hundred and fifty years or so, when they strike out for the island of Ibiza. But trade is going like crazy right now, and it will help us in our mission.”

“And that mission is?” King asked.

“Hmm,” Alexander mumbled as he continued looking at stones.

“What is this mission you’ve shanghaied me for? I think it’s time you told me.”

Alexander looked up at King. “I’m sorry, Jack. You’re right. I’m just getting ahead of myself. We need to get to Rome. We are going to save my wife, Acca Larentia, from her untimely demise at the hands of my Forgotten.”

King was stunned. The man really was motivated by love. “You told me she had stumbled onto one of your labs, when you weren’t there.” King recalled the man’s admission when they had fought side by side under the ruins of Rome’s Lacus Curtius.

“Yes, she did. To my eternal regret. So we have come back in time to prevent that from happening.”

“How?” King asked. “Don’t we risk screwing up all of history if we change something in the past?”

“There are several theories about the issue of paradoxes, Jack. I believe only one of them: that whatever we do here in the past, has always happened this way. Whatever we do will not change history. It already is history.”

“But if we rescue Acca, won’t the younger version of you know? You told me you found her after the Forgotten had attacked her. They drank her blood, you said.”

“Yes. She was curious, and she had found the lab, and the Forgotten were behind bars. They hadn’t eaten in weeks. She held a cup of water out to them…” Alexander drifted off, lost in the memory.

“I’m sorry,” King said. “But how can we save her then without changing the past?”

Alexander’s head snapped up, a cheerful look replacing the distant look of loss. “I always have a plan, Jack.” He glanced down at the stone at his feet. “Ah! Here it is.”

He stepped back off the stone he was standing on, and King could see a very faint, and very rough letter H. This one did not have the typical circle around it. Alexander reached down and picked up the stone, setting it carefully aside. Then he pulled the three surrounding stones aside; each was slightly larger than twice the size of a basketball. He reached into the hole he had created in the top of the breakwater and pulled out a small wooden chest, six inches long by four inches wide and probably three inches deep — maybe less depending on the lid’s thickness. The outside of the box was ornately decorated with thin gold foil, and the hinges were hidden on the inside. Alexander handed the box to King.

It was surprisingly light.

What the hell is in this? King wondered.

He held the box in his hands and turned it over, looking at the ornate gold design, and trying to determine where it opened. Then he wondered if it was some kind of puzzle box, like in the Hellraiser films. “What is it?”

“What you hold in your hands, Jack, is the infamous Chest of Adoon.” Alexander beamed.

“The who of what?”

“Remember what I told you about history being manipulated by some and changed by others. That chest was a simple box of mine. It contains something very valuable. I was drunk one night in Palermo. This must have been around 100 BC, I guess. I was mouthing off, and I said some things about this chest and what it contains. But over the years, the rumors got a little out of hand.” Alexander took the box and depressed a hidden button on its backside. The lid popped open with a hiss as trapped air escaped.

“Airtight?” King asked. “How’d you manage that in this day and age?”

Alexander smiled. “I had my ways.” He opened the lid and showed King the contents of the box. A small handful of rubies and several dried herbs no longer than an inch in length. In a separate compartment inside the wooden box, were more herbs, finely chopped.

“You went to all that trouble to hide your pot?”

Alexander laughed. He pulled out one of the longer herbs and held it up for King. “This plant is a genetic sibling of Silphium. Have you heard of it?”

King shook his head.

“It was widely known for its medicinal properties. Cyrene even printed it on their coinage. The plant is extinct in your time. This one, though, was even more powerful than Silphium. This one, Jack, can grant immortality. This is essentially what led to the Hydra. This herb, will help Acca to live. And the rubies will get us to Rome.”

“So what were the rumors that got out of control?”

Alexander laughed. “It’s funny, you know. The contents of the box grant eternal life, but the rumor that got started was that the chest contained a powerful weapon of destruction and death. There are faint references to it throughout history, but even into your time, the rumors persisted. By the 21st century, the rumor about the Chest of Adoon, as it came to be known, was that it contained something with godlike destructive powers — like the Ark of the Covenant in that Indiana Jones film.” Alexander scooped out the rubies and dropped them in his pants pocket. Then he delicately placed the four long herbs into a plastic sandwich baggie that he pulled out of his shirt pocket. He took out another baggie and held it open, pouring the smaller herbs into it.

“What’s that one?” King asked.

“Green tea from China. You have no idea how hard it is to get in this part of the world, at this time.”

King tried not to smile. He didn’t want to. But it happened anyway. “Hold on, if your theory of time is correct, the irony is off.”

“How so?” Alexander raised an eyebrow.

“In the 21st century, the box won’t contain the herbs anymore, because you will have removed them. It will just contain air.”

“Exactly. I only thought of that when I was dealing with Ridley.”

King became serious. “What are you talking about? Ridley was—”

“My prisoner,” Alexander said. “Held just a few rooms down from the lounge where we talked.”

“You what?” King shouted, clutching his fists.“If he gets loose, Asya and my parents are still back there.”

“He won’t get loose, don’t worry about that. Your family will be fine. Besides, shortly before we went through the portal, the rest of your team arrived.”

King thought about the situation and knew Chess Team would protect Asya and the Machtchenkos. They would find Ridley, and if he was still a threat, they would simply end him. Still, it pissed him off that Alexander had kept so many dangerous secrets.

“All this time you had Ridley?”

“It took a long time to get what I needed from him. Eventually I had to offer him a trade.”

“Explain.” King was not pleased to hear that Ridley might have gotten something he wanted, which usually led to hundreds of people dying.

“Relax. I needed him to teach me one small phrase of the mother tongue. When I told him what it was, he seemed to think it was harmless enough, but he was a stubborn bastard and didn’t want to part with his secret words. I tortured him for a while, but he was too good at resisting. Eventually I offered him something he wanted. You see, he had heard about the Chest of Adoon too. Had looked for it for years. After becoming immortal and capable of regenerating, after learning the mother tongue, which granted him the power to bestow life, the only thing he still desired was the so-called godlike destructive power contained within the chest. He wanted it badly. So I told him where it was. I figured, the Chest was still in its hiding place in 2013, so he could have it — after all, he was already immortal. The herbs would do nothing to help him. I guess at the time, I was thinking only of taking some of these herbs from the Chest, but I see now it would be too dangerous to leave any of them, even though we only need two for Acca. And I’m not letting Ridley get my tea.” Alexander chuckled at his own joke.

King pointed at the hole under the rocks where the wooden chest had been hidden. “That’s not a very secure location. How do you know it was undisturbed all those years?”

“I come back eventually — the younger me does. I changed, or rather, will change, the location slightly. It’s plenty secure in the 21st century. No one ever finds it.”

“What about you, when you come back to move the chest? Won’t you open it and see everything missing?” King asked, trying to wrap his mind around the intricacies of paradoxes versus determined fate.

“No, I never opened it again. I just moved it. I was in a hurry that day.” Alexander seemed lost in thought again, the many years of his long life washing over his consciousness.

“So if Ridley gets free, he’ll go after the box?”

“Yes. But it will be empty. Actually the true irony is that the box was under his nose all along. Ridley had been searching for the Chest of Adoon for years. He ended up taking over a small place of mine on this spot and building his lab here for an entirely different reason. He had no idea he was practically sitting on top of the box. You should have seen his face when I told him where it was.”

Alexander was about to put the empty box back in the hole.

“Wait. No one ever opens that box again, right?” King asked, moving closer, and taking the box from Alexander.

“No. Why?”

“Let’s leave a little message for Ridley, in case he ever finds it.” King placed his message inside the box and carefully shut the lid. It hissed for a moment, some hidden mechanism once again removing the atmosphere from inside the box. Then he placed the box into the hole in the ground.

Alexander laughed heartily. Then he hefted the boulders back into place, careful to put the one with the H on top, exactly as it had been. “I like your sense of humor, Jack.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

King waited by the docks wearing the itchy robe and sandals Alexander had procured for him. He looked the part, except for the rifle, which he kept wrapped in a swaddling of fabric, strapped across his back. The Sig was tucked under a flap of cloth on his rope waistband. It didn’t feel very secure, and he kept unconsciously adjusting it, hoping the motion wasn’t giving him away, and then realizing he had nothing to worry about — people in the era had never seen a concealed carry, because there weren’t any guns yet, and wouldn’t be for another eighteen centuries.

The dock was crowded with men coming and going. Most wore similar robes and sandals. They carried loads to and from the waiting boats, and they haggled for prices in several different languages. King saw mostly North African faces, but there were enough seafarers from afar, and even white European faces, that he blended in with the crowd. King had even heard what sounded loosely like Latin being spoken.

He tried to stay vigilant, but then reminded himself he had no need to be. To everyone else on the crowded docks, he and Alexander would be just two more travelers or merchants.

“Jack!” Alexander came strolling down the pier, waving. The period clothes — a robe like his own, sandals and a small satchel made from an animal hide — seemed to fit the man perfectly. “I’ve arranged passage for us to Sicily.”

Alexander smiled broadly and pointed to a short shabby man with a scraggly goatee and dark skin. King stepped up to Alexander and the man slipped an arm around his shoulders like they were pals, and led him to meet the little shabby man. Alexander was acting overly casual. For a moment, King wondered if he was just happy to be back in a forgotten time, like visiting a childhood home. But then Alexander spoke quietly. “I’ve told him you don’t speak the language, but he still wanted to meet you. Just nod to him.”

King did as he was told, and the man nodded in return, smiling widely, showing just three blackened stumps of teeth.

“They’re pirates, but they should get us safely to our destination,” Alexander told him.

They followed the short man, who occasionally turned and beckoned them forward with his hand. He led them past most of the boats along the pier, finally arriving at a small, twenty foot long vessel. The square sail was a hundred shades of dirty. The crew looked in worse shape than their captain, with about ten men, all in various stages of scurvy to King’s eyes.

“Climb aboard, Jack. I’m just waiting on…ah! Here he comes.” Alexander looked down the pier to a small boy of about ten years, who was running toward them holding a wooden tray on the top of his head, a rag twisted to look like a turban keeping it balanced.

“What’s this?” King asked, but before Alexander could answer, King figured it out. As the boy got closer, King could see two small orange cups on the tray on the boy’s head, and a huge jug with steam rising out of the top.

The boy arrived and steadied the tray with a hand, then used both hands to pull the tray down and present it to Alexander. The immortal man took the tray, gave the boy a kind word in a language King did not know, and the boy happily scampered away. Alexander took the delivery and climbed aboard the boat, delicately balancing the tray against the swaying of the boat on the harbor’s blue waters.

“Is that what I think it is?” King asked with disgust, climbing over the gunwale from a small wooden plank. He sat next to Alexander on a hard wooden bench attached to the inner wall of the boat.

“Tea. Practically unknown in this part of the world. We must celebrate. And give prayers for a successful journey.” The man picked up the clay urn with one meaty hand and poured the steaming liquid into a cup. The tea was nearly translucent, with just a slight green tinge, but the bottom of the cup was murky, when King peered into it.

“I did mention I’m not a big fan of tea, right?”

“You’ll drink it now, Jack. The water in this time period would kill you if it wasn’t boiled. Your system has no immunity to the bacteria and viruses of these days. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a bottle of Sam Adams for another 2800 years.” Alexander handed King a cup. “Drink it fast. They don’t know how to glaze the clay yet, so if you wait too long, your cup will disintegrate in your hand.”

King looked at the brew skeptically, but then took a sip. It was better than the tea they had had in the lounge with his parents.

Alexander poured and drank from his own cup, as the last of the crew boarded and took their seats at oars. The sail was luffing as the crewmen, without orders or chants, began rowing the boat away from the pier. The lines were dumped haphazardly on the deck. No one had time for coiling the rope, King guessed.

The sky was patchy with white fluffy clouds, but there was no sign of a storm anywhere. King swallowed more of the tea and found the flavor improving. “This vessel doesn’t look particularly seaworthy. How long of a trip is it to Sicily?”

Alexander finished the rest of his cup of tea in one gulp, then looked at King with a raised eyebrow. “About twenty-five hours. Longer if the wind isn’t with us. Hence the prayers…and the tea. Unless you’d rather drink seawater.”

“I never thought you’d be much for praying — or do you pray to the old Greek pantheon?” King asked.

“Actually, I pray to them all. God, Allah, the Greek Gods, Buddha, Vishnu and whoever. I figure it can’t hurt on a sea voyage. We’ll use the time on the trip for me to fill you in on a few things about the way the world works in this time. Things you should and shouldn’t do.”

“Like burning my favorite Elvis t-shirt?” King asked, still feeling the sting of giving up his modern clothes.

“Exactly. We wouldn’t want some enterprising twentieth century archeologist to stumble across that AK-47. So you’ll need to keep track of it. If it breaks, there’s no way to fix it in this time, so you’ll have to dismantle it, destroy the pieces, and bury them in different places. Dropping the bits in the sea here…” Alexander pointed over the starboard bow, as the man in front of him on a bench continued to grunt as he rowed, “wouldn’t be a bad idea either. The point, as in all things like this, is to be as unnoticed as possible.”

About halfway out of the harbor, the captain spoke to the men in a long rambling speech. The oarsmen grunted and groaned, but stowed the oars and began pulling in the lines for the sails. A few men with red-stained gums produced small packets of something wrapped in large leaves that they sucked. King imagined it was the equivalent of a smoke break for some of the oarsmen. Only three men appeared necessary for manning the sail. The wind snapped the sail taut and the boat sliced neatly through the crystal blue waters, heading out of the harbor. Soon they were in open sea.

Moments later, an argument broke out between two of the sailors. King and Alexander watched, not really taking much interest. “The tall man says he’s due a greater cut of their haul, because he did more work last time. The shorter man says he always gets the dirty jobs,” Alexander told King.

The two sailors bickered and more men joined in the argument, their voices raising in volume. From the stern behind him, King could hear the captain feebly berating his crew, but they were past the point of listening. The men’s faces were flushing with blood as the argument heated up.

Suddenly Alexander leapt up and moved toward the throng of arguing men. King stood too, wondering why Alexander was leaping into the fray.

Is this about us? King wondered.

Alexander was turning to look at King. “Jack! It’s a distrac—”

He never got to finish his cry.

King felt a searing burn in the middle of his back, making his arms jerk outwards to his sides, and his head jerk involuntarily upward. His torso blazed with so much pain he couldn’t form a coherent thought. As his eyes fell downward, he saw something that shouldn’t be there.

In the middle of his chest, sticking out of the white scratchy robe, was at least seven inches of metal, coated in blood.

His blood.

He had been stabbed in the back so hard, that the blade had plunged clear through his chest.

As life left him, his only thought was that Fiona would be angry at him for breaking his promise.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The words hung in the air.

King…dead.

The room was silent. Queen looked sharply at Asya. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. There was an explosion. Alexander and King were at the center of it. There’s no way they could have survived. Not even Alexander. Their bodies…they’re gone. Dust.”

Asya all but fell into Queen’s arms. The two women latched onto each other in a strong embrace. When they had first met, Queen had attacked Asya and they had fought a knock-down drag-out fight that was oddly similar to her first encounter with King. Asya, surprisingly, had held her own in the combat. Since then, Queen and Asya had become friends, mostly through Queen’s acknowledged admiration for Asya’s fighting ability and for her connection to King.

Jack, Queen thought. Oh no.

“I know…that we were foes,” Ridley was in a full sitting position on the floor when Queen turned back to see him, “but I’d like to offer my—”

“Hey, Dick!” Rook called out, angry sarcasm dripping from his mouth as he uttered the nickname. He stalked over to squat in front of Ridley. “Do you know the only two parts of the human anatomy that are affected by radiation from a microwave oven?”

Ridley looked back at Rook, not comprehending the sudden shift in the conversation. “I…I really can’t say that I do.”

Rook scowled. “The eyeballs and the testicles. Unless you want me to put yours in a microwave, shut the fuck up.” Rook stood and walked past the three clones, throwing each dirty looks, before returning to his original post against the far wall.

Queen scanned the room after Rook’s outburst. Knight was looking at the floor, all memory of his mission to guard the door and keep an eye on the duplicates when Rook wasn’t, now forgotten. Bishop still leaned on a wall, and although his facial expression had changed just the slightest, in the form of a raised eyebrow, she knew he was reeling inside. Ridley wisely closed his mouth and looked at his left foot as its big toe formed a toenail.

The duplicates stood in place, although Queen noted that Seth was now closer to the door.

“Knight,” she called. The small Korean man’s shocked face stayed aimed at the floor. “Knight!” She shouted this time. The man’s head snapped up, irritation replacing his look of shock. “Stay sharp.” She motioned to the duplicates. “We’re not out of the shit yet. We’ll mourn King later.”

“Copy that,” Knight nodded, his eyes returning to a practiced focus, aiming directly at Seth. “I’m solid.”

Queen moved slowly away from Asya. “Goes for you too, Pawn. Your brother would want you to fight.”

Asya nodded, wiped her tears and stood up straight.

Queen moved to the center of the room where Ridley sat on the floor. She looked down at the man’s still forming toenail. “Can you walk?”

“Give me five more minutes,” he said, not looking up at her.

Queen turned to Asya. “Alexander is gone?” Then she clarified. “All of him?”

Asya stepped further into the room, still somewhat dazed. She nodded. “Like I said, dust. Vaporized. I have looked over what little is left of the wreckage. There is nothing left…nothing to bury.”

Queen hung her head.

She touched her tactical throat microphone. “Did you copy all that?”

After a few seconds pause, she heard Deep Blue’s voice in her ear. “I…I’m sorry, Queen. The embedded homing chip he had is gone from my screens too.”

“And…what do we do with these ass-clowns now that we don’t need them for Alexander?”

“They’re too dangerous to allow them to go free. Bring them back home. We’ll get them to a secure prison.”

“Are you sure that’s the way you want to play it?” Queen asked.

There was a moment of silence, followed by, “We’re better than that.”

“Just wanted to be sure,” Queen said, fighting to hide her disappointment, because right then, she really wanted to kill a bad guy…or four, though only one of them was truly alive.

Queen stood and walked back to Asya. She leaned in close, not wanting to share the information with the Ridleys. “Your parents?” she asked quietly.

“Safe,” Asya nodded.

“Good. We’ll get them, take these Ridleys back home, and figure out how to break the news to Sara and Fiona.”

“I will tell them,” Asya said, clenching her jaw. “I would not want them to remember you as the bearer of such bad news.”

Queen’s appreciation for Asya’s stoic Russian ways increased all the time. Here this woman was, having just lost the brother she had come to know and love, and the woman was thinking of others first. Queen patted her on the back.

Queen nodded and turned back to Richard Ridley. “On your feet.” She reached down, grabbed his arms and hefted him to his feet. The linen jacket slid to the floor, exposing his now fully reformed genitals and pubic hair, but he didn’t seem to care. His chest was hairy while his bald head gleamed under the bright heat lamps recessed into the ceiling. His skin, a sickly gray and yellow before, was now back in the full pink of health. His muscles had been rebuilding while the team had mourned the news of King’s demise, and now, with the exception of hair still growing on his legs, and the large toe, still looking shriveled, on his left foot, he was pretty much back to the way he had been when Queen had first seen him.

“You can stand even if you can’t walk,” Queen told him.

“Yes. It’s just the big toe yet. It affects balance, so I can’t—” Ridley began.

Queen threw a punch, landing the blow hard on Ridley’s cheek, shattering the man’s cheekbone, and sending him flying across the room. He smashed into the hanging cages, the impact ripping the chains from their moorings in the ceiling. Ridley, the cages, the chains and all sailed across the room in a tangle of whipping iron, careening against the floor and the wall.

Queen felt like she might have broken a finger bone on the punch, but it was simultaneously one of the best looking and most dynamic punches she had ever thrown, as well as being the most personally satisfying.

“Can I go next?” Asya asked.

Queen barked out a short laugh, her tension broken completely by the woman’s sharp dry wit.

Queen turned toward the three duplicates. They looked angry, but said nothing. Seth was still very close to the door, but Knight had his eyes fixed firmly on the duplicate. There was little chance the duplicate would make a break for it. If he did, it would be a very short run.

Richard Ridley sat up from the tangled cages and chains, rubbing his face with his hand and whispering something. Already, Queen could see the three places on the man’s face where the skin had split were healing. In seconds, all that remained to indicate an injury was a little bit of blood, which he pawed at angrily.

Queen stepped over to him, her MP-5 leveled at the man’s face. “Alexander is dead. We don’t need you any more. Please. Make a move. I dare you.”

Ridley said nothing. Just stared. Then his eyes darted to the left, looking over her shoulder, for just a fraction of a second. When they came back to her, he smiled. A huge grin. A winning grin.

Shit, she thought.

Queen turned to look back at the door. Knight had been distracted by her attack on Ridley. Seth had inched closer to the door. He stood in front of a control panel next to it. She had noticed it when she had first turned away from the horror of Ridley in the cages. A stainless steel panel, with an LCD display screen, temperature controls, an intercom, light switches and a large red button, which she assumed was a panic button. Seth stood in front of the panel now, his back to it. His eyes were directly on hers, and his face held the same malicious grin as Ridley’s.

Slowly, he leaned, until his back depressed the red button.

TWENTY-NINE

Jack Sigler became aware of two things when he woke. The ground was moving, and he didn’t feel dead. Long years of experience with precarious situations had taught him to take stock of his surroundings using his other senses when waking, before opening his eyes. He did so now.

He smelled the salty sea. The gentle rocking motion and wooden creaking noises told him he was on a boat. A new scent reached his nose. Something acrid and foul. He had trouble placing it for a moment, because it was masked by the smell of the sea, but then the familiar scent registered.

Blood.

Old blood.

Still, he kept his eyes closed. This time he listened. There was a complete lack of human sounds. No breathing, or shuffling feet, clunking oars or shouted orders. Even if the crew were sleeping, they’d be a noisy bunch. I’m alone, he thought. Left for dead. Perhaps adrift at sea or maybe tied to a dock.

He let his mind move from the environment around him to his personal wellbeing. He didn’t feel like a man who had been run through. In fact, his chest felt fine — strong and pain free for the first time since his ribs had been broken. He let his mind roam over his body, and he realized that every part of him felt okay. Better than okay. He felt as good as he did on the few times when he and Sara had taken a break, staying at some random bed and breakfast, waking to the rising warm sun instead of to an alarm clock. Strong. Relaxed. Refreshed.

He tensed his muscles, preparing to leap into a fight if need be, and slowly opened his eyes. He lay on his back in the middle of the boat, his feet pointing toward the bow. The gunwales and the deck were spattered with dried blood, but there was no sign of the crew. The sail luffed gently above him, on a soft breeze.

King twisted around and glanced to the stern. Alexander was slumped at the tiller, his head leaned back against the stern, his mouth open, his chest rising and falling. The man was asleep at the wheel. He also had a full, dark, curly beard.

How long have I been out?

King reached a hand up to his own face and felt at least a month’s worth of thick facial hair. I really hate the past, he thought, recalling the series of events that had befallen him — including being stabbed in the back — since being yanked out of his time. He stood up slowly and took stock of the sea around him. They were near a coastline of some sort, jagged hills of green with jutting white rocks no more than a mile away. The waters were an amazing shade of translucent greenish blue. When he looked over the side, he saw they were grounded on a sandbar — the water was no more than a foot deep. The gentle roll of the boat was not the vessel swaying on the water, but rather rolling on the sand in the shallow liquid. There was no sign of the other men, besides the blood spattered on the wooden surfaces of the ship. King found his Sig on the deck and picked it up.

He walked over to the sleeping man and called his name.

Alexander came awake immediately, clear eyed, as if he had been only resting his eyes.

“Jack. It’s good to see you up again.” He stood up and stretched his arms.

“How long was I out? What happened?” King looked around the boat, his unasked question about the crew obvious.

“They set us up.” Alexander glanced around the boat at the blood. “I might have gone a little rough on some of them.” Alexander looked sheepish, like a man that had gone on a full-on temper tantrum and now felt guilty.

“You killed them all?” King asked.

“In my defense, they were trying to kill me. And…” He set his eyes on King. “…they had already killed you.”

King looked down at his robe and realized it was not the same robe he had been wearing. He touched the spot on his chest where he had been stabbed, expecting to feel the welt of a thick scar under the rough-spun cotton. Instead his chest felt smooth.

“It was the tea. I hope you’ll forgive me, Jack, but I felt it might be safer for us both, considering the dangers of the present age. Turns out I was correct.”

“The tea?” King looked up. “You dosed me with one of your healing herbs? I thought I was dead. I didn’t realize those things were so powerful.”

Alexander smiled. “You were dead.”

“What?”

“The herbs are extremely powerful — similar chemically to the formula I used to heal you in Rome — but these can actually restore life. They alter the DNA in much the same way as Ridley’s Hydra serum. Your body healed all the damage from the sword strike, but the first full resurrection always takes a long time.”

King looked at his arms as if he expected to see something different, but they looked the same to him. “I died…and came back?”

“Congratulations, King. You’re immortal.” Alexander said the words casually, like he’d just proclaimed King the winner of a spelling bee. “Come on, let’s make for shore. You’ve been unconscious for twenty-eight days.” Alexander leapt nimbly over the side of the boat, his rope sandals in his hand, his feet splashing into the shallow water.

King felt sick, though not physically. He’d been kidnapped to the past, manipulated, and now, without his consent had been…altered. Into what? “What are the side effects of—”

“Side effects?” Alexander shook his head. “This isn’t some crude formula developed by Ridley. You’re not going to grow scales or go on a murderous rampage. You drank my original formula, Jack. There are no side effects. Other than not aging, the ability to heal from most any injury short of a nuclear blast, which, let’s face it, is a long ways off, and the resilience to handle some of my other…brews. If you ever need a boost of strength, we can—”

“Keep it,” King said. He had experienced Alexander’s strength-enhancing brew once before. It was like a nitrous-charged adrenaline shot that made him stronger and faster, but at the expense of his body. He tore muscles and ligaments, broke bones and landed himself in a coma. From what he understood, the strength-enhancing concoction caused significant injury to Alexander as well — he just healed immediately.

King pursed his lips, a thousand questions coming to mind. In the end, he decided to handle it like Rook might. “Fuck it.” King glanced around. “Where’s my rifle?”

“Lost at sea. In the fight. Let’s go,” Alexander called, as he began walking through the knee-deep water toward the distant shore.

King hopped the gunwale and landed in the water. “Are we swimming?”

“The water stays shallow like this all the way to the beach. We have to move by foot. Hopefully when we get to land I can find us some donkeys.”

“Donkeys? Where are we?” King splashed through the water, catching up with Alexander.

“Donkeys are miserable beasts, but they get us from point to point in Italy. I think we’re near what will be Naples.”

“That sounds like it’s going to take a long time,” King said. He’d seen enough time travel movies to suspect they would return to their present just seconds, maybe hours or days, after they left, making the departure a temporary discomfort for the people he left behind, but he didn’t relish the idea of spending a few months in the past. Not that he would age. Alexander had taken care of that. “Will it wear off? The immortality?”

“If it did, you wouldn’t be immortal, would you? We can reverse the effects later on. But for now, for this mission, you need to be strong, immune to injury and most of all, able to withstand the years. It will take us some time to get where we’re going and do what we have to.”

King ground his feet into the sand and came to a stop. “Wait.”

Alexander paused and looked back. King could see that the man knew what question was coming next. He didn’t even need to ask it.

Alexander sighed. He looked honestly apologetic. “Twenty-five years, Jack. Acca doesn’t die for another twenty-five years.”

THIRTY

Queen snarled as jets of gas sprayed down from the ceiling. She lunged across the room toward Seth while holding her breath, but she had already sucked in a lungful of the gas before realizing the true threat.

Her body flew through the air at the smiling bastard, but she could already feel an immense cough building in her lungs, and as her torso tightened, she could see Seth beginning to whisper. Alarm had registered on Knight’s Asian features, but his first response was to suck in a lungful of the gas, and he stood directly under a jet. As Queen reached her hands out to choke the shit out of the smiling duplicate, Knight’s body sank toward the floor. She heard a pistol fire from behind her, and then her chest shuddered and she coughed hard, whooping in a huge chest-full of the gas-laced air.

She smashed into Seth, the two of them toppling awkwardly to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Queen felt sleep taking over. It wouldn’t kill them, but she expected to wake in shackles. Or maybe not wake up at all.

She rolled on the floor. Her body felt heavy. She fought against her closing eyelids, but it was a losing battle.

Seth’s brow furrowed as he focused on whispering. Queen closed her eyes, promising herself she’d end Seth, the first chance she got. No more Ms. Nice Queen, she thought, and then she dreamed.

Thirty seconds after the gas stopped shooting from the nozzles in the ceiling, a ventilation fan in the wall behind Bishop’s slumped body activated. The vent sucked all the white gas from the room, while an air conditioning vent on the far wall pumped fresh air into the cell. The rubber seals around the sole door in and out of the room, which had activated when Seth’s body hit the large activation button, released. An audible hiss filled the room as the pressure equalized.

Jared was the first to stir, waking up and performing a perfect push-up, before springing to his feet. He moved to Richard Ridley, and checked the man’s pulse, his fingers touching his creator’s neck as delicately as if he were caressing eggshell-thin porcelain.

Satisfied that the man was alive, he stood from his squat and walked toward Enos. Something was wrong. Enos’s chest was not moving. The duplicate wasn’t breathing. Jared squatted down and rolled his brother over. In the center of Enos’s head was a perfectly round hole, just large enough for the tip of Jared’s pinky finger. Still in Jared’s grasp, the body softened and drooped. The color faded and the features that defined Enos fell slack. Jared lay the heap down and stepped away. Enos was now nothing more than a human-shaped mass of clay dressed in an expensive suit.

Jared growled. They had each been so focused on using the mother tongue to avoid the effects of the gas — a compound of Fentanyl altered by Richard Ridley to create a more effective and less potentially lethal type of knockout gas — that their self-defense lapsed long enough for a Chess Team member to squeeze off a single, but highly accurate shot. Jared considered using the mother tongue, taught to him by Richard Ridley before his incarceration, to animate the clay once more, but it wouldn’t be Enos. The memories and experiences that made him unique were gone forever. Enos was dead.

Jared stood and turned to see Seth stirring and disentangling himself from Queen’s limbs.

“The Creator?” Seth inquired.

“He is well. Enos is dead. One of them got a shot off,” Jared said with disgust.

“Regrettable,” Seth said, walking over to Ridley. “Help me get him up.”

Jared walked over, pausing only to kick the unconscious Bishop hard in the face, fracturing the man’s nose. Blood sprayed against Jared’s pant leg.

“Leave them,” Seth said.

“They will hunt us.”

“The Creator is our priority, and time is short.”

Jared nodded and helped Seth lift Richard Ridley up. They dragged him toward the door. By the time they reached it, Ridley was waking up.

Seth and Jared carried Ridley through the door, and he began to take some of his own weight. They guided him to one of the chairs in the room, easing him down. Ridley raised a hand and rubbed it on his forehead, as if he were waking from a long slumber.

Seth moved to a nearby locker, pulled out a black zip-up security jumpsuit and handed it to Ridley.

The man stood and stepped into the legs of the suit, then pulled it up on his body and yanked the zipper up to the middle of his broad, hairy chest. Then he started to lace up the boots Seth passed him. “Thank you, Seth. Where are our enemies?”

Jared pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the still open door to the room full of unconscious bodies. “What would you have us do?”

Ridley looked at his bare wrist, as if a lifetime of habit was driving him to check the time. Seth handed him the limited edition silver and black Rolex Submariner from his own wrist. Ridley smiled and donned the expensive wristwatch. “What’s the situation?”

Seth replied before Jared could. “Your brother Darius has amassed a sizeable force. He was poised to attack the facility any day now. We didn’t see him on the way in, but the last I heard from our informant, he was near. We’ve taken precautions. We used Chess Team’s resources to get to you, but King is apparently dead, as is Alexander Diotrephes. The rest of the building is empty.”

“And the Chest?” Ridley asked.

“We were unable to locate it, but we have some leads and—” Jared began.

“Never mind. I know where it is.” Ridley smiled at his two duplicates.

Jared flipped on three security monitors, adjusting the reception on the CCTV cameras hidden around the installation to show the large garage filled with vehicles heading down the ramp to the loading dock and armed soldiers stationed outside the amphitheater. There were men at the foot of the stairs leading to the surface as well.

Ridley’s smile evaporated. “Looks like they’re here already. Disappointing.”

“The timing could not be helped,” Seth said.

“We are so very close. Let’s leave Chess Team and Darius to squabble among themselves. I want the prize.”

Jared pointed at the monitor showing the stairs to the amphitheater, behind the secret janitorial closet door. “This way.”

Seth turned to the cell door and slammed it shut, listening to the lock tumble.

THIRTY-ONE

Peter Machtchenko held his breath. He raised his hand up to Lynn, behind him in the small supply closet filled with uniforms hanging on pegs and cardboard boxes filled with three-ring binders. She was already being silent though. They were out of practice, but training like theirs, despite being forty years old, was impossible to forget, even if the body wasn’t always up to the task. When the bio-seal door had begun to open, Peter obeyed the rising hairs on the back of his neck and had leapt into the security room’s closet with Lynn.

Now inside the cramped space, listening to the voice of the man he knew to be Richard Ridley, Peter was hoping desperately that his daughter was still alive. He had already lost one child this day, and two over the course of his lifetime. Losing the third would destroy him.

He overheard something about a chest, a sizeable force and a man named Darius. That was all Peter needed to hear to know things were going to go from bad to worse. After a minute, the voices receded on the other side of the door. Lynn reached around him for the handle. He grabbed her hand and held her there for a few seconds more, just to be sure. They might be ex-spies, but neither of them were armed, and Peter wouldn’t feel better until he had a 9mm in his hand.

He let go of Lynn’s hand and she turned the handle on the dark wooden door. It opened smoothly and slowly. No squeak. They stepped out into the empty security room and quickly scanned the area. Ridley was gone. One of the monitors on the desk showed a view of the nearby loading dock. Vehicles were pulling in, one by one, and an army of soldiers were getting out.

“Not good, not good,” Lynn said.

Peter moved to the locked door in the corner. He had tried to scope out the facility earlier in the week, when Alexander had brought them here, but the man was always unexpectedly around whenever Peter had tried to creep through the place unnoticed. Peter had made it down to this security room, but he hadn’t seen inside the closed door, which he assumed led to some kind of a holding cell.

They had come looking for Asya, only to unexpectedly see someone emerging from the locked door. Peter and Lynn had ducked into the supply closet just in time. But now all the old alarm bells were ringing in Peter’s head, and his hackles were on high alert. He didn’t know what was behind the door, but he guessed it was connected to everything.

Peter scanned the edges of the door quickly, noted the un-inflated rubber biohazard seals around the edges, and then ignored the threat they implied. Now was not a time for caution. Now was a time for action. And that meant opening this door, risks be damned.

Peter glanced around the room and saw a security officer’s belt hanging on a peg. The belt was glistening black leather with pouches. It held a radio and a ring of keys. More importantly, he found a variation of what he was looking for. He wanted a wooden police baton, but what he found was a 16” telescoping steel and chrome baton in a holster. It was better than no weapon, so he snatched it from the belt and turned back to the door. He knew Lynn was behind him monitoring both the door and the video feed of the loading dock.

He unlocked the latch as Lynn spoke, “Hurry. No time left.”

Peter whipped open the door and was ready to swing down with the baton.

Instead, a hand shot upward, restricting his downward thrust, as a blonde woman’s face plunged through the door.

Peter staggered back, dropping the baton, slipping and falling backward on to the floor. His head connected with the hard concrete and he unconsciously shouted out. “Fuck!”

The blonde woman’s hair was sweaty and plastered to her face as she staggered into the room. “Sorry,” she said.

Asya came out of the room next, supporting a beefy man with a blonde goatee. Asya looked ill as well, while the blonde man just looked weak.

Then came a small unhappy Korean man, followed by a mountain of an Arabian man with a broken nose and a bloodstained face. Each of them was armed with rifles and wore tactical battle armor. Peter recognized them as the rest of his son’s team.

“No time!” Lynn shouted, picking Peter up off the floor. “Must go now.”

Already the blonde man was at the outer door with Asya. Despite the fact that they were not armed, Lynn shoved Peter after the two, ahead of the rest of the team.

They turned right outside the door, heading past the door to the loading dock, Lynn shoving Peter the whole way, so that he was pushing against Asya and the blonde man.

The blond man turned around, annoyed. “What’s the rush?”

Behind them, the blonde woman and the other two men had just emerged from the security room. The door to the loading dock, now between Peter’s group and the stragglers, burst open and three metallic objects flashed into the air.

Peter saw the blonde woman recognize the aerial objects and turn about on her comrades, forcing them back into the security room. Lynn was shoving him through a door, as Asya pulled his shirt from the front. They all landed in the room with a split second to spare. A thunderous crack sounded, filling the corridor behind them with light and smoke as the door to the room slammed shut.

Peter raised his head, looked at the room they’d fallen inside, and smiled. “You chose the right place for a standoff, dear,” he said. The others turned their eyes from the door to the room behind them, taking in the rack after rack of military hardware, explosives, rifles, handguns and grenades. An armory.

“I think I just got a Manifold stiffy,” the blond man said, smiling, as he reached for a strange looking rifle with three barrels.

THIRTY-TWO

“You never said anything about lions, damn it!”

“True,” Alexander grunted, as he wrestled a four-hundred-fifty pound lion to the ground and then head-butted the creature. “But I did tell you the Oscans would eventually lose to the Samnites. You were the one that said we should help out the little guys.”

King stalked across the marshy ground in a slow circle, his crude iron sword up, the thick-maned brown lion snarling as it kept pace with him. He found himself wishing he still had the Sig Sauer — or the damn AK that Alexander had lost at sea four years ago, when they had first travelled backward in time. The lion stopped moving suddenly and leaned back, but King knew it was preparing to spring and not retreating. He squatted, making himself an easier target, the blade held close to his side, and the tip extending just past his hunched body.

Although Alexander had bestowed him with eternal life, pain was still pain, and being eaten alive created the very unpleasant possibility of being a long meal. Plus, while the larger Greek had an otherworldly strength in addition to immortality, despite King’s newfound healing ability, he still possessed only the strength of a normal man. Against an angry, underfed lion on a battlefield in rural Villanovan-era Italy, he stood only a slim chance.

The creature sprang at King, its mouth opening up in a toothy roar, ready to devour him, just as the invading Samnites had planned when they had fired bloody chunks of mutton at the Oscans from makeshift trebuchets. Once again, King had been surprised at the inaccuracy of historical accounts, as he had read that catapults and trebuchets hadn’t been common place until the third century BC. Once the bloody meat began to fall from the sky, the Samnites had loosed five lions as their vanguard. The starved beasts had wasted no time racing toward the crude defenses King and Alexander had helped the locals build around their village.

Now the deadly lion was airborne for King’s position, and he needed to time things just right. The creature closed the distance with its huge lunge, and at the last second possible, King shoved upward, throwing the full weight of his body behind the blade, and then sidestepping the incoming mass of fur and claws. King rolled over backward on the ground, landing in a crouched position on his feet, his balance having become much better after years of living outdoors and engaging in frequent hand-to-hand battles.

The lion impaled itself on the broad blade of King’s iron sword, landing without grace on its head and snapping its own neck in the process, as the full weight of its attack came pounding down to the ground. Even if the sword hadn’t ended the lion’s life instantly as it ripped through fur and flesh and muscle, the broken bones might have finished the creature off. King stepped cautiously toward the beast, but it was done. Its huge chest no longer moved. King could see the animal’s ribs clearly, and once again he raged at the thought that men had tortured and abused this majestic animal, training it for war against a mostly unarmed and peaceful people. King knew the history. He and Alexander had spent long hours discussing the ways things went down. He knew his actions wouldn’t change the historical outcome, but he intended to take as many of the Samnites with him as possible, before the fight was over.

He pulled the bloodied sword from the lion’s chest-wall, and bid the creature a safe passage to its next life.

When King turned, he saw Alexander extracting his meaty fist from the shattered head of the lion that had attacked him. Yellow fur was matted with blood and bone across his knuckles. King knew Alexander, like him, took little joy in killing animals, but sometimes it was the only way.

“That’s the last of them,” Alexander said, standing up and wiping his hands down the front of his already filthy robe. “The spears will come next.”

“We’ll be ready for them, then,” King said with a lopsided grin.

“Or we could just move on. We know the outcome,” Alexander replied, but from the smile on his own face, King knew the man was just playing Devil’s advocate and he had no intention of leaving the fight now. Over the years, they had found a common ground. Despite King’s continued anger at being temporarily trapped in the past — if twenty-five years could be called temporary — his painful longing for Sara and Fiona and his continued concern for the fate of his team and family, he could not turn away from people in need. And to King’s surprise, neither could Alexander.

“Who’s to say whether one of the Oscans we save today won’t go on to father someone important? If we stay and fight this losing battle, then we always stayed and always fought this fight. That’s your theory on time travel, right?” King walked back toward the crude wooden battlements he and Alexander had built. They had discussed their working theory on time travel dozens of times over the years, but without any further evidence of their actions from King’s time, and knowing the vagaries of inaccurate historical accounts, the issue was truly moot.

“Who is to say,” Alexander parried, “that we didn’t always leave this fight in the middle, abandoning the Oscans to their fate?” The big man followed King, and they put on jovial smiles for the worried locals, both of them knowing they would fight and both of them knowing that in the end, they would lose. But the locals — kind people who had sheltered and fed them, who loved songs and lived simple farming lives — had no such knowledge. So the men would show them brave faces and teach them radical battle techniques.

“Who is to say?” King grimaced. “My conscience.”

Alexander nodded. “Your conscience has gotten us into more scrapes…”

“Not just mine,” King said. Alexander had gone to extremes in his pursuit of time travel. He had put a lot of people in harm’s way. Maybe worse. But now that he was here, in the past, moving toward saving the woman he’d missed for thousands of years, his true self was showing. Hercules had been a hero, or at least, he was now. King decided to let Alexander off the hook. “Besides, it’s not like we have anything better to do. How is the practice coming along?” King asked.

Alexander frowned.

For months and months he had been practicing the simple phrase he had tortured out of Richard Ridley. A single expression in a nearly extinct language. The mother tongue. Alexander didn’t want the whole language. Just one sentence. The one that would allow him to create a lifeless human body out of inanimate clay. A body that would completely pass for human. The body of his wife, Acca. For five years, Alexander had been practicing the sentence, first in the safety of the Omega facility in 2013, and now creating inert bodies that the two men would leave buried all over Italy. With each attempt, Alexander’s work was more and more perfect, with one exception.

“I still can’t recall her face. It’s maddening, Jack. She was the love of my life, and I’ve spent centuries looking for a way to save her. Now that I nearly have it, I’m frustrated by the fact that I can’t remember her face clearly enough to recreate the corpse accurately.”

King had examined several of the faces Alexander had created over the years. Each was slightly different. Eyes spaced a bit farther apart than the last or a bit narrower. Brows higher or lower, mouth pursed slightly more or less. He understood the depth of Alexander’s love for Acca, and he didn’t fault the man. When he had first heard that Alexander was having trouble recalling Acca’s visage, he tried to recall the image of his dead sister Julie, and found it hard to picture just how her nose looked. Even worse, he was starting to have trouble picturing Sara and Fiona, who he hadn’t seen in years. He couldn’t imagine how tarnished his memory might have been after centuries.

King placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You’ll get it. And even if you don’t, we can always get a good look at her before you need to.”

Alexander smiled, accepting the advice. “You’re right.” He turned his eyes to the field ahead of him. Five thousand soldiers with long spears ran across the marshy ground, screaming incoherently. “We’re outnumbered four to one. Still like our chances?”

King grinned. “Of winning? No. Of making them work for it? You bet your ass.”

As a pair, they leapt past the defensive wall and rushed out to meet the enemy.

THIRTY-THREE

Jared, the more naturally militant personality of the three men, led his Creator and his duplicate-brother out of the stairwell and into the hallway of Sub Level 1. He moved slowly into the hall, glancing down its empty length, and peering cautiously at the doorways leading into the opposing Cold Lab and the Microbiology Lab. Darius’s forces hadn’t entered this level yet.

“He’s probably hoping to flush them from the loading dock upward. We’ll spring the trap behind the janitor’s closet before they’re expecting it,” he told Ridley and Seth.

He approached the door to the Microbiology Lab and opened it slowly, expecting a hail of gunfire. When none came, he moved in and the other two men followed. The lab looked untouched.

“They’ll be on the other side of the closet, or down the tunnel at the Amphitheater stairs. Either way, they have a defensible position. They’ll—”

“It makes no difference,” Seth interrupted.

Richard Ridley walked over to a security panel on the wall. It had a 6-inch LCD screen and a few buttons next to a numerical keypad. Ridley typed in a security code and the LCD came to life showing two soldiers stationed in the hall outside the janitorial closet’s secret door. They looked bored as they lounged against the tunnel walls, completely unaware they were being monitored by the camera in the security plate next to the door.

“Only two men,” Ridley said. “Hardly an obstacle.” He typed in another sequence on the keypad, and a locked metal cabinet on the wall sprang open. Inside it, he retrieved a satellite phone and a Browning 9 mm pistol. He handed the phone to Seth and the gun to Jared.

Seth stepped away from the other two men and began dialing a number. Jared cocked the weapon and moved to the janitorial closet. He carefully moved a mop aside, allowing Ridley to follow him into the cluttered space. Jared looked back to Ridley for confirmation. The man nodded, the overhead bulb shining off his bald head.

Jared turned back to the door, opened it and fired two shots. Both of the soldiers were caught completely off guard, crumpling to the tunnel floor without even raising their weapons.

Jared stepped into the tunnel, reached down and pulled a Glock 19 from the dead mercenary’s holster. He kept it and handed the Browning back to Ridley. Seth, finished with his phone call, stopped at the control panel and punched in a third sequence, then he joined the other two. “We’re ready,” he said. “Communications are jammed.”

Jared stepped over the two corpses bleeding on the tunnel floor and led the way into the dark tunnel. Ridley paused at the security panel on the far side of the door. He typed in a code and the tunnel filled with light from several caged lights lining the walls.

Jared turned back to Ridley. “Sir, they’ll know we’re coming…”

Ridley simply nodded and they moved on down the length of the tight tunnel. The pitted stone walls were just wide enough for the broad men to pass, but would make an excellent place for an ambush.

As they came to the end of the tunnel, they could see the stairs that led up to the amphitheater, but no mercenaries guarding it. Jared stepped to the foot of the stairwell.

He immediately jumped backward, his Glock raised, as a body tumbled down the stairs, rolling to a stop at his feet. The dead man’s throat had been sliced. There was no sign of anyone on the stairs above them.

“Trigger?” Seth called out.

Jared looked around at his brother in surprise. Whatever this was, his brother had kept him in the dark.

“That you, Seth? Sorry about that. He was a struggler, that one.” Daryl Trajan, callsign: Trigger, descended the steps, his sniper rifle strung across his back, and a bloodied Gerber folding knife in his hand. The slim man wore black BDUs. He bent to wipe the blade of his knife on the dead man’s clothes, then stepped over the body.

Jared lowered his pistol and looked to Ridley and Seth. They were smiling.

“Are we good?” Seth asked.

“All clear at this end. Carpenter will have the stairwell to the garage in a minute,” Trigger replied, folding up his knife and slipping it into a sheath on his belt.

“You have no qualms about switching sides?” Ridley asked.

“No, sir. Some mercs follow a code of honor. I follow a code of greenbacks. With as much money as Seth offered me for this job, I’ll be retiring to a villa in Honduras.” Trigger smiled a huge grin, clearly pleased with having chosen the correct side of the struggle between the Ridley brothers. “Darius and his forces are all inside the loading dock by now. Any men loyal to him on the surface have been eliminated.”

Trigger glanced down to a wrist-mounted two-way pager, which was gently vibrating against his skin. He depressed a button three times, then looked back up at the others.

“Gentlemen, this is Carpenter,” Trigger introduced the stocky man coming down the dark side tunnel from the second stairwell that led to the garage. As the man stepped into the light, Jared could see he wore black BDUs like Trigger, but he had thick pink scars on his brawny exposed forearms.

“Garage is secured. Everyone up top is loyal to us,” Carpenter said in a surprisingly soft voice.

Jared looked at the man and wondered about loyalty. He was irritated that Ridley and Seth had not confided in him about this part of the plan, co-opting some of Darius’s forces to work for Ridley.

“So,” he said, a little of his irritation creeping into his voice, “what’s next?”

Richard Ridley stepped forward, patting Jared on the shoulder as if to say Don’t worry about the small stuff, we didn’t tell you because there wasn’t time. He grinned at everyone. “Let’s go up top and get my Chest. Darius’s force should engage the Chess Team in the next five minutes. When they do, send in the second wave of soldiers to kill everyone.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Rook burst out of the door bringing up the MetalStorm rifle he’d taken from the armory. He rolled to the floor and fired down the hallway. MetalStorm weapons fired rounds straight out of the barrel, triggering each with an electronic jolt. The first three rounds exited the three barrels before Rook felt the kick. He’d been trained to fire in three round bursts, because each shot moved the barrel up just a little higher. With a MetalStorm weapon, all three shots would be accurate and the need to adjust for the next three was minimal. But Rook didn’t adjust at all. He held the trigger down and unleashed all thirty rounds in just under two seconds.

The small cluster of men that had already come in through the loading dock were greeted by a wall of bullets. They dropped in a heap, their limbs tangling. Rook stood on unsteady feet, the effects of the gas still making him woozy, but he shook his head with a grin. “Deep Blue has got to get me one of these.” Then he tossed the weapon to the floor, not knowing how to reload the thing. He brought up his MP-5 from his shoulder.

Peter and Asya followed him out the door into the hall, each armed with a newfound Manifold MP-5, also opting for weapons they knew how to use and reload. Lynn ducked her head out of the armory and looked at the bodies on the floor. The four men, each dressed in black BDUs, had motley looking hair and tattoo-covered skin on their exposed forearms. A pool of blood formed around their tangled bodies.

Rook took a tentative step further toward the loading dock doors, which were on the other side of the fresh pile of corpses. There was no sign of Queen or the others. Rook guessed they had successfully ducked back into the security room, the view inside of which was now blocked by a closed and bullet-riddled door.

Rook was about to take another step toward the dock, when the doors burst open into the hallway, and another four armed men rushed into the cramped space. He let loose a burst of fire from his MP-5, stepping back, but the sudden movement sent a wave of nausea through him. He slipped and fell backward. He tried to turn it into a back roll, but awkwardly smashed into the wall of the narrow corridor instead.

Peter raised his weapon to finish the newly arrived men, but Asya had stepped forward and already sprayed them with a burst of fire from her own weapon. Rook got to his feet as the newly arrived men fell. They looked just as unkempt as the first bunch.

“Mercenaries,” he said, thinking about who they might be working for and how Chess Team was going to deal with this new threat. He keyed his microphone, trying to reach Queen, but all he got in his earpiece was static.

Rook frowned. “Something’s blocking coms. This is going to suck donkey—”

The door to the loading dock inched forward again, and before Rook could put some bullets through the door and into whoever was on the other side, something came flying into the corridor. He knew this projectile would not be just a stun grenade.

He turned to tell the others to run, but they were already turning.

He turned his attention toward the end of the hall. A shadow moved across the stairwell door window. There were more of them. Rook’s group was about to be pinned down in a crossfire, and getting holed up in the small armory on the right would just make the slaughter go faster.

“Go left!” he shouted.

Lynn, the closest to the stairwell, was already moving in that direction. Asya was right behind her as they both slipped into the unmarked door across from the armory.

Rook took a huge lunging step, shoved Peter through the door and toppled into the doorway, his legs still not inside the room when the air was knocked out of his lungs. The clap of noise was deafening. Something — metal fragments most likely — sliced into his foot. His toes went numb. The doorway filled with smoke from the detonated grenade. Rook felt someone tugging his wrist, pulling him into the room. He twisted and looked back into the corridor, now choked with dark billowing clouds near the ceiling. At the floor level, from Rook’s vantage point, he saw what he had hoped for — a limp arm extending from the partially ajar stairwell door, lying in its own blood.

Then his feet were past the door, and his view was cut off as the door closed to the carnage in the hallway. Rook rolled over in his bulky impact armor and staggered to his feet. He was grateful for the suit. It had clearly protected him from the bulk of the grenade’s blast, despite the stab of pain in his foot.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“The viewing gallery,” Peter replied. Then a light came on and Rook could see the older man standing by a light switch on the wall. The room was twenty feet across but appeared to run the full length of the facility, paralleling the corridor they had just escaped. The ceiling was twice as high as that of the corridor, and there was a balcony rail up above the space, in the center third of the room, so those on the second floor could look down into the vast space.

Rook checked his ankle and saw a small trickle of blood. Then he saw several other pitted marks in his armor’s leg and chest plates.

Well, mostly protected me, he thought.

Rook looked to his left. The far wall appeared to be a darkened Plexiglas of some type. He jogged over to it, the small wound in his foot shooting pain up his leg with each step. He put his eyes up against the dark wall, but couldn’t see through it. He quickly realized how close the base was to the sea, and guessed that this was a giant Ridley-designed aquarium.

“Is there a door at the other end?” Rook asked, as he started down the long empty room.

“Only way out of here is up,” Peter said. The older man pointed up at the second floor balcony with the barrel of the MP-5.

“Stairs?” Lynn asked.

“No. We’ll have to climb up somehow.” Peter looked doubtful.

“Alright,” Rook said. “Pawn, take the door.”

Asya took up a position guarding the door they had just come through. She still looked a little pale from the gas, but she threw herself into the task without complaint.

Rook ran over to the wall and turned his battle armored back against it. “Up,” he said to Peter. Rook held his hands out. Peter quickly scrambled up onto Rook’s shoulder’s and reached the lip of the second story balcony, pulling himself up.

“We got one thing in our favor,” Rook said, as Peter left his shoulders and Lynn began to climb up his body to her husband’s waiting hands. “Their coms don’t work either — or they wouldn’t have blown the crap out of their own people in the stairwell.”

Lynn scampered up Rook’s body and was up on the balcony before he knew it.

“Pawn, you’re next.”

Asya turned to him. “But the door…”

“I’ll handle it.”

Asya wasted no time. She was looking better — less shaky. Whatever the effects of the gas were, she appeared to be dealing with them better than everyone else.

Asya lowered her weapon and sprinted to Rook’s position, placing one foot on his outstretched hands and springing lithely up to the second story. Rook immediately had his weapon up and trained on the door at the start of the long gallery. He spotted a small black wire at the bottom of the door — a fiber optic spotting scope. He opened fire on the door, blasting the scope and hopefully scaring whichever mercenary was so timid as to check the room out before throwing grenades in. Rook crossed the space to the Plexiglas wall. He opened a hidden compartment on the bulky thigh of his impact armor and extracted a large brick of C4 explosive, which he smacked against the wall. Then he affixed a detonating blast cap. The radio switch to detonate the explosive was on his wrist. He didn’t know if whatever was blocking his communication with the rest of Chess Team would block the signal to the explosive, but it was worth a try.

He was just about to race back to the wall under the balcony and make the climb himself, with some assistance from Asya, when the door to the room exploded off its hinges and into the room, knocking him to the ground.

THIRTY-FIVE

Queen paused by the door. She was getting no connection to Deep Blue back home and she couldn’t raise Rook either. Something was scrambling communications.

Two things, she thought in something like a prayer. That’s all I want. Active coms and Richard Ridley’s head back in a bird cage.

They were fools to have freed the man. Now with Alexander dead and no longer a threat, Ridley would go after the most powerful weapon he could find. She didn’t know what his long game was, but as soon as she saw Seth’s smile when he activated the gas, she knew it had been his plan all along. Not the duplicates’, Ridley’s. He had somehow planned the whole thing out himself.

A burst of gunfire in the corridor had her crouched by the door, ready to add her own bullets to the fray.

“Ready, Knight?”

The small man was deadly in a fight and as hardy as the rest of the team, but the loss of King seemed to have demoralized him worse than the rest. He didn’t respond to her.

“You want me to—” Bishop began.

Queen whirled on Knight, who was slumped against a wall. His face was paler than usual, and she knew it was the gas they had breathed. She moved over to the man and saw his eyes were glazed and unfocussed. “Knight?”

No response.

She shook him by the collar of his battle suit.

Knight didn’t respond to the shaking.

“Shin!” Queen shouted and slapped the man across his face.

His eyes startled and fluttered. Then he focused in on Queen and she saw an angry glare creep across his face.

“You awake? You with us? We need you, man.”

“I’m good,” Knight said. “Fucking gas. I’m a little guy, you know.”

Queen grinned. He was, in fact, a few pounds lighter than she was, though that was their little secret. “Good, I’ll open the door and cover you. You try to find the jamming device and disable it. I want Deep Blue’s support, and I want to put Ridley back in his grave. Can you handle that?”

Knight nodded.

She turned to look at Bishop. No longer looking like his normal serene and placid self, Bishop appeared to be dealing with King’s demise and their betrayal by the duplicates in his typical fashion. Rage. The kind she hadn’t seen on Bishop’s face since the days when he’d been infected with Ridley’s regenerative serum.

“You okay, big guy?”

His eyes darted to her, sharp, focused and burning. He didn’t need to say a word. He was ready to tear someone apart.

She moved back to the door, and cracked it open. She heard shouting in the hall and peered around the door frame, her MP-5 up and ready. At the end of the hall, she saw Rook’s armored form leaping into a doorway. Men were at the stairwell door at the end. Down on the floor, a grenade skittered to a stop.

Knight crouched next to her, about to leap out into the hall and run like hell toward the far end of the corridor, in search of the jamming device.

“No!” she shouted.

She threw her weight backward, blocking Knight from leaving the room, when the grenade detonated, spraying the hallway with steel fragments. Her left arm, although covered from shoulder to wrist in the impact absorbing battle armor suit, was perforated with projectiles. She pulled the numb limb back and saw blood trickling from several spots on the appendage.

“Motherfu—” she cut herself off, as she took in a deep breath when the pain kicked in.

Knight leaned in with an auto injector syringe and showed it to her. “You want this?”

Queen recognized the cocktail they each carried. It contained a mix of caffeine and 1000mg of Ibuprofen. The drug wouldn’t make her tired, but it would dull some of the pain.

Queen just nodded.

Knight placed the device against the side of her exposed neck and activated it. Queen inhaled sharply again, as the injector rammed the drug into her body.

“What now?” Knight asked.

Queen didn’t have an answer.

“I say we blow through the wall to the next room. If need be, to the one after that. We can’t fight them all in close quarters, and we need to not be where they think we are.” Bishop held up a small wad of C4 in his hand.

Queen nodded, then struggled to her feet. “Everyone back in the cell when it goes off.”

Bishop affixed the explosive to the wall just above a computer monitor on a desk, and the others fell back toward the cell. He placed a timed detonator for ten seconds, then rushed to the door to the cell, swung around it and hid behind it, while keeping a steel toed boot in the jamb.

Queen nodded at the move. The last thing they needed was to get locked in the hellish cell again.

The blast went off. Several chunks of rubble pelted the wall, filling the room with the scent of hot plaster dust.

Bishop moved into the room and coughed from the dust and smoke. Queen followed him and saw a nightmare of architecture. The wall behind the computer stations had been shattered, but the next room must have been a bathroom, because they had broken through into a crawlspace with water pipes that were now a tangled mess of jagged metal and spraying water. The far side of the space was another wall, still mostly intact. Water erupted across the exposed electrical wiring and damaged security stations, spraying arcs of spitting sparks across the whole side of the security suite. The hole they had blasted was probably large enough for them to get through — even with the bulky impact armor suits — but the tangle of jagged metal, spraying water and electricity made it a deathtrap.

“Gonna have to use more C4,” Bishop said.

Then Queen saw the door to the security room open just a crack at the end of the blasted room, a large piece of rubble stopping the door after just an inch.

“Quickly,” she whispered, and raised her weapon.

THIRTY-SIX

“Ostentatious much?” King asked.

Alexander frowned. “I admit I was a bit full of myself in those days.”

The men were looking across the lake to a villa built up on a hill that would come to be called the Mountain of Roman Rock, but which at present was unnamed. The villa resembled the medieval castles that wouldn’t come to the region for centuries yet. A round stone tower attached to the villa’s side rose up two stories. Other homes nearby were much smaller, and most were made low to the ground and from wood. The landscape was dotted with trees — absent in King’s own time — and he once again marveled at how different the landscape of Italy looked millennia before he would be born.

The building was their final target after almost twenty years of living in the past. They had fought countless battles, and even spent years as farmers and shepherds, living quietly, and waiting for the perfect time to save Acca from death at the hands of Alexander’s Forgotten wraiths. By this point, Alexander had practiced with the mother tongue so much that he had gotten the body perfect, including the withered nature of the corpse after the Forgotten had sucked her dry of blood. But he still needed the face. They had stayed away from the woman for fear of creating problems with the timeline, or from running into Alexander’s younger self. Now they needed to glimpse the woman, so Alexander could practice the face as well, before they needed to exchange her for a duplicate desiccated corpse, while the younger Alexander was away.

“You sure a five-years-too-young Acca will do the trick for practice?”

Alexander, who had on many occasions told King stories of the woman’s beauty, just smiled. He had that far-away look King had seen so many times, when the man thought of his wife. Then he nodded. “Yes. She changed little in those years, when our sons were grown men. And after the incident…” Alexander always referred to her death as ‘the incident’, “…her face was shriveled from blood loss. Nearly unrecognizable. But it needs to be perfect.” Alexander had rarely spoken of the twin sons he had had with Acca, but when he did, it was always obliquely and brief. King got the impression that Alexander didn’t like his sons much, so when the man mentioned them again now, he let the comment pass.

Alexander had long ago described the full scope of his plan. King ran through it all in his head again. They would surreptitiously contact Acca, explain about the details of her death and how Alexander had come back to save her. They would leave the pseudo-corpse for Young Alexander to find and mourn over, setting in action a course of events that would lead them back in time. While Alexander’s younger self grieved, they would use a machine in another of his laboratories to get home — separately. King didn’t know where or when Alexander considered home. They’d lived a lifetime as brothers now. But that was one secret Alexander had yet to reveal.

“This isn’t far from Rome,” King observed.

“You mean, from where Rome will be,” Alexander clarified and then shook his head. “Only about twenty miles. But there’s a village to the south where we can get rooms. They make great wine too.”

“Where are we most likely to spot her?” King asked, as they left the view across the lake behind and turned for the village. King’s body was now deeply tanned, his healing abilities strangely not affecting the pigment in his skin. His hair was longer now too, down below his shoulders, and to fit in with the era, he had grown a thick luxuriant beard. The few times he caught a reflection of himself in shined metal, he thought he looked more and more like Alexander. The robes and sandals helped with that image.

“Either in the village or we’ll make a call up at my villa at some point.” A wistful look came over the big man’s face. “We spent a lot of time there.”

“Let’s get some wine before you start crying.”

Alexander smiled. “You have a way with words, Jack.” The two had become close friends over the years, and King had long since forgiven him for the abduction that led to their travel into the past.

But King had yet to shake the pain he hid. He spent time every morning, sitting in the glow of the rising sun, eyes closed. To the observer, he was praying or meditating, but all he was really doing was remembering. He played the events of his modern life through his mind each morning, when his imagination was most fertile, and he watched his life like an ongoing TV show, watching key events repeatedly like reruns. He thought about Fiona and Sara most of all, but his parents and Asya were always present in his mind, as were Zelda, Stan, Erik, Shin and Tom. At first, he’d thought of them by their callsigns, but three years ago he had trouble recalling Bishop’s name. He’d had to ask Alexander. Knowing he and Alexander were closer to their goal filled him with an anxious tension that threatened to tear down the mental blocks he kept in place through hardened discipline. If those barriers ever broke and the full weight of the despair he felt from missing his loved ones washed over him, he would be useless. So he fought, and worked toward Alexander’s goal and the promise of home, in the arms of his girls, with the same passion as Alexander, who was near the end of his much longer, but similar struggle.

“I still haven’t seen why you needed me on this little adventure of yours,” King said, distracting himself from thoughts of home.

“As I’ve said before, I needed someone I could trust — and we have yet to face any real problems.”

“Real problems?” King asked with a raised eyebrow. “You nearly lost your head in Corsica.”

“How was I to know that arrogant bastard was a Prince?

“Prince or not, you didn’t have to urinate on him…”

“He was a ponce.” Alexander let out a guffaw.

The two joked as they wandered into the nearby village, which was a collection of low buildings and ramshackle wooden structures nestled between picturesque chestnut and olive trees. King watched a man walking toward them. Unlike most of the people he saw, this man looked like he was taking in all the sights around him for the first time, the way King felt he must look every time they traveled. But the man’s manner didn’t resemble that of a stranger to the region. Rather, he was nodding to himself at things he saw, as if he were ticking things off a mental checklist. King didn’t think of the man as a threat — hardly anyone was a threat to him and Alexander. Still, he found the man’s manner interesting.

The man looked to be in his forties, and had a graying beard, with a high tanned forehead and a receding gray hairline. His eyes were a pale blue, nearly gray. Small crow’s feet around the man’s eyes lent wisdom to his already intelligent face. Like King, he wore a robe and sandals. As the man neared, King was about to move his eyes away from the man, when something on the man’s arm caught King’s eye. The man had faded rope wrapped around his forearm like a bracelet, but underneath it, King could have sworn he had seen a glint of metal or glass. Circular…like a watch.

Before he could be sure, the man had walked past them. King turned to Alexander and put his hand on the big man’s bicep to stop him from walking on.

“Did you see that?” King asked.

Alexander whipped his head around and instantly noted the man to whom King was referring. He mumbled a name that sounded like, “David,” and added “Steer clear of that man, Jack. He’s nothing but trouble.”

With that, Alexander turned and strode on toward the village.

Shrugging, King followed. If Alexander didn’t come forth with a full explanation on something, no amount of cajoling would get it out of the man. King knew if the story was important enough, it would come out eventually — usually with wine.

Alexander found a place he remembered and told King it had the best bread he would ever taste, when suddenly the large man stopped in his tracks and grabbed King painfully by the arm.

King turned his head and looked. He quickly identified the man Alexander had seen. His hair was shorter, and he wore a thin cloth band around his forehead that looked like a kind of crown. His robes were far richer than those King wore — dyed fabrics, and elaborately stitched roses along the hem. The man’s bearing was regal, as if he thought himself far above the people around him. People stepped out of the way as the man moved through, as if they knew and feared him.

King was looking at Alexander. The young Alexander.

He turned and looked up at his friend, who had grown his hair and beard long, and who was dressed in a poor man’s robes, like King. King’s Alexander was over 2800 years older, but to see the man’s face, he was just ten or twenty years the senior of the man in the wealthy robes. The resemblance was there, but you’d have to know to look for it. The hair and disparity in appearance of wealth made a large difference. Anyone besides King was unlikely to link the two men, even if they stood near each other.

King looked back to the younger Alexander with the burgundy robe and took in the man’s bravado. King’s Alexander had certainly mellowed over the years. This younger man acted like a hoodlum, pushing into people who got in his way, talking loudly with shopkeepers, and bragging about everything. King had learned several of the Etruscan dialects during his years in the past, and this man, naturally, spoke with a wealthy, educated dialect.

They watched quietly as the younger, brasher Alexander wandered the market in the center of the village, almost as if he were killing time.

Then they saw her.

King did a double take when he saw the woman. He could not believe his eyes. He was looking at a woman that looked almost exactly like photos he had once seen — of his own mother.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“That’s her…”

Alexander spoke with a reverence that made King take note. He’d known his friend for years now, and heard the man in every kind of mood. But the sudden appearance of his lost love in the busy village market had taken the man’s breath away.

The woman, like Lynn Machtchenko in her younger years, had a slim build, but wider flared hips. Her hair was lustrous and dark, cascading over her shoulders in waves. High cheekbones and a subtle smile made her face come alive. Not a man in the market could keep his eyes off her. She looked to be about twenty-five, but Alexander had said she would be closer to forty. No matter which way you looked at her, Acca Larentia was a stunningly beautiful woman. If she didn’t look so very much like his own mother, King could see falling under the woman’s spell. Alexander had told him story upon story about the woman’s tenderness and generosity as well. Her beauty was only a bow tied around an amazing package.

“I thought my father was your descendant,” King said. The likeness to his mother left no doubt that she’d been the one to pass on Alexander’s bloodline.

“Actually,” Alexander said. “Both of them are.”

While Alexander’s bloodline had been thinned over millennia, having two parents descended from the man rather than just one made King’s and Asya’s blood a little more…Herculean…than usual. King wondered if that’s what had drawn Alexander to him, but he didn’t ask. It was ancient history now.

King turned to watch his friend admiring the woman. He felt an odd satisfaction at seeing Alexander’s eyes wide with wonder, where before there had always been something dark in them. In the future, when they had first met, King had taken that look for deviousness, planning and machination. Over time, he had come to know it instead as a look of dark bitter regret — regret at the life lost with his wife in the pursuit of eternal life for them both.

As King watched, Alexander’s look of hopeful joy turned sour. King reached out and whispered, “Your wait is almost over.”

Alexander turned and started away from the village, back toward the lake. King raced to keep up.

“That’s not the problem, Jack,” Alexander’s voice was almost a growl. “I screwed up the timing. We don’t have five years to prepare.”

“I’m afraid to ask. How much time do we have?”

“Closer to five hours. It happens tonight, Jack. She’ll return from the village on her own. She pokes around the house and stumbles onto my secret lab. She’ll find the Forgotten. They look famished. They haven’t been fed in some time. In those days—these days — I was lazy about such things. Left on their own, they go mad. But kept in herds and fed in captivity, they thrive.” Alexander’s face was lost in remembrance for a moment. King let him have the space instead of prompting him for more.

They kept up a fast pace, hiking along the trail back toward the lake. Just when King thought Alexander wouldn’t speak again, the man cleared his throat.

“You remember how it will happen?”

King nodded. “She’ll find them parched. Offer them a drink.”

“That has always been my assumption. I never saw it happen. When I came in, the cup and the water were on the floor, her body laid out of reach, but sucked dry and withered. She offered them a drink. They accepted. Tonight. We have to get there first. We have to stop her, and we have to create a perfect duplicate corpse — but I’ve had no time to practice her face.”

“Will the look you had tonight be enough for that?” King asked.

“It will have to be.”

They circled the lake in silence and the afternoon turned into evening. The sky filled with rich hues of deep blue and streaks of orange as the sun set behind the hills southwest of the lake. The few people in the area had already retired for the night, and the duo had the trail to themselves.

Alexander’s villa sat high up on the side of a hill, almost 1500 feet above the level of the huge lake, but Alexander led King away from the hill, and around to the north of it.

“There’s a tunnel entrance on the other side that leads directly to the lab. We’ll go in that way.”

They circled around the hill until the gloom of the oncoming night cloaked the forest in shadows.

Alexander led them closer to the base of a rocky wall, and they trudged through the forest until the going was so difficult, King thought he might trip over a tree root.

Alexander stopped suddenly, as if he heard something.

“What is it?” King whispered.

Alexander let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten exactly where the stone is. I think we have to go back a bit,” Alexander chuckled.

“I thought you were supposed to be a genius.” King smiled.

Alexander’s tension melted away slightly. “It’s not like that time in Poseidonia, you knew where you were going…”

“How am I supposed to know the difference between a temple to Poseidon and a temple to Hera, when they don’t even have any Doric columns yet?”

Alexander smiled. “I told you those wouldn’t come for another few hundred years. I’ve never seen a priestess so angry.”

King rubbed his cheek. “I can still feel that slap.”

They moved back the way they had come, Alexander mumbling to himself and running his hand along the rock wall as they went. King could just barely see the man moving his arm in the deepening dusk.

“Aha!” Alexander stopped and hugged the rock wall, stretching his massive arms around a huge protruding rock. The man took a huge breath and then struggled until King could hear a grinding sound. Alexander rolled the massive round stone to the side, revealing the dark yawning mouth of a cave.

“That’s a little Biblical, isn’t it?” King asked, raising an eyebrow. He was frequently amused, and sometimes disturbed, by Alexander’s stories of the hubris of his youth. He had certainly seen improvements in the man’s behavior over the last two decades, and he attributed the change to their friendship. Alexander himself professed to not having had nearly enough close friends over the years in whom he could confide.

“It was practical at the time. No one else around would have been able to move the stone but me.”

Alexander stepped into the darkened tunnel. King looked around and voiced his concern. “Should we close it up after us?” He couldn’t see how it could be done, but it went against his nature to leave his six unprotected.

“No need,” came the soft reply from down the tunnel.

King walked cautiously into the dark, feeling for the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, but they were broad enough to allow Alexander to move through them swiftly. Then something occurred to King, and he slowly pulled his sword from his belt.

“Why are you whispering?”

The reply took a second, and King knew he was about to receive bad news.

“I forgot to tell you something.”

Before King could ask, he heard a low snarling sound that rose in volume until the bass of the growl shook his bones, like amplifiers at a rock concert.

“I forgot to mention the dog.”

“The dog?” King asked. But then understanding dawned on him. “Please tell me it doesn’t have three heads.”

Alexander’s reply was drowned out by a robust growling that vibrated the stone under King’s feet. Three heads or not, the thing sounded huge and hungry.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The heavy door smashed hard into the Plexiglas wall, dislodging the explosive Rook had set, and knocking it to the floor against the aquarium wall, where the door promptly landed on top of it. Rook had been thrown backward by the blast and ended up on his back, struggling like a tortoise to get onto his legs.

Asya let a burst of bullets fly from her position on the second level, strafing the doorway. Rook heard her utter a Russian curse as a heavy mercenary fell through the doorway onto his face. Then he saw something arc down from the balcony, hit the door and bounce out through the open doorway and into the corridor.

Rook got to his feet and let out a grunt as he raced for the wall. Asya had tossed a grenade she had taken from the armory down the length of the gallery. It was a good throw. A deflection off the 45 degree angled door, and straight out of the room and into the waiting arms of the mercenaries was a nearly impossible shot. But with the door open, Rook could find himself on the receiving end of more metal fragments. He heard screams behind him and then the explosion. The shockwave sent him slamming face first into the wall. He missed Asya’s outstretched hand and slid down the wall to the floor.

“I feel like a pregnant kangaroo on a pogo-stick in this friggin’ armor. Doesn’t anyone ever use a handgun any more?” Rook pulled out one of his two Desert Eagle pistols and waited on the floor. As soon as he saw the forearms of the first man enter the room, he fired twice, the loud booming shots echoing through the long room. The first shot missed, but punched a softball sized hole in the wall. The second shot struck the mercenary’s arm — and took it off. The merc fell back, screaming in pain.

Rook looked up to the metal guard rail around the second story balcony. He saw Asya was rapidly tying a bed sheet to the rail, while nervously watching the door at the end of the gallery’s lower level. He holstered the Desert Eagle and scrambled on hands and knees for the dangling sheet.

“I can’t cover you and help you climb,” Asya said, as she finished tying and then swept her submachine gun up again on its strap.

Rook didn’t see any sign of Peter or Lynn. He assumed they had already left the upper room, looking for the way out. He couldn’t blame them. He would have done the same.

Rook quickly unbuckled his chest armor, removing the bulky plate and impact foam pieces around his arms and torso, dropping them to the floor. They offered protection, but they were stiff and added a lot of weight. He debated removing the leg armor, but the one now coated in his blood, was probably acting as a compression bandage for his wounded leg. He decided to leave it.

Freed of the weight of the chest armor, and wearing only a black synthetic t-shirt over his broad chest, Rook attacked the bed sheet, shimmying up the cloth, while Asya sprayed the door at the end of the hall with the odd burst of gunfire, hoping to dissuade further incursion. But Rook knew it was just a matter of time until they tossed in another grenade — or worse. He tugged his weight up and after two pulls, gave up on keeping his legs wrapped around the spindly sheet, relying instead on the raw strength in his beefy arms.

Once at the lip, he placed one hand on the concrete floor, and reached up with the other for the bar, pulling himself horizontal in the process, and then rolling under the guard rail onto the balcony. When he stood, Asya was again blasting down into the gallery, by the door. He took quick stock of his location — a large, swank, sparsely decorated office of some sort. Most likely Ridley’s, he thought. Potted plants dotted the space around a low leather sofa and a glass-topped coffee table. When Rook spotted the executive bathroom at one end of the office and the ajar doorway to a nice bedroom at the other end, he knew his guess was right. He could see the fitted sheet from the bed on the floor of the bedroom. Now I know where the sheet came from, he thought. One more exit led from the room to a lighted hallway beyond, the door left wide open. That’ll be where Peter and Lynn went.

“Can we run now?” Asya asked, stepping up to him.

“Cover me for just a minute,” he said, jogging over to the desk near the center of the huge office. The opportunity to learn even a little of what Ridley might have planned was too good, but he’d only sacrifice the minute. He knew Asya’s supply of magazines would run out, and he counted on the mercenaries downstairs to get crafty any second now. Plus, if they figured out he and Asya had ascended to the next level, they would try to flank him by taking the stairwell at the end.

Asya made it back to the rail just as a sustained burst of AK-47 fire strafed the balcony. Rook recognized the sound of the weapon, and knew the jig was nearly up. He altered course away from the desk before he’d even made it there, and instead he made for the far end of the balcony, where he saw a control panel on the wall, next to a large potted fern.

Rook opened fire on the gallery floor, and the AK stopped with a sputtering burst. Asya popped up at her end of the balcony and fired her own sustained burst of gunfire down at the mercenaries, who quickly darted back to the cover of the doorway. Rook caught a glance of the last guy — dressed in black BDUs and snakeskin cowboy boots with a big white ten-gallon hat.

“What a maroon,” he mumbled to himself. He raised one of the Desert Eagles and held his angle on the doorway down below at the end of the gallery. “Asya, go. Get with Peter and Lynn, then rendezvous with Queen if you can.”

Asya paused and looked at him sternly.

“I got this. Go,” he told her.

She turned and sprinted for the door to the hall.

Just then, Ten Gallon came back into the doorway. The sights on Rook’s barrel were already lined up. All he had to do was squeeze. The big Desert Eagle boomed once, and the white hat jumped, the brim of it splattered with blood and bone. The mess that had been Ten Gallon’s head actually stuck to the wall next to the door — hat and all. “Now that’s nasty,” Rook said before the hat fell with a wet thud.

“Bunch of amateurs,” he called out. “I got a bullet for each of you. Maybe you nut-twists should go home and get more guys.”

He glanced to the control panel on his left and scanned the controls. There was a button labeled Kliegs, so he pushed it.

Immediately, the massive dark Plexiglas wall came to life, as several enormous underwater spotlights on the other side illuminated the water. A bewildering array of fish were swimming just on the other side of the wall. Rook guessed the glass wall was maybe 350 feet long by 30 high. This isn’t an aquarium, he thought, it’s the fucking ocean!

The water was crystal clear, with a sandy bottom and a few bits of coral and tufts of sea plants. Sea stars and several dozen black spiny urchins sat on the sand.

None of those things held Rook’s attention though. The glass wall had been built for one obvious purpose. To view the monstrosity taking up ninety percent of the underwater view. Lying on its back was a giant statue of a man, measuring at least 300 feet in length. The surface of the statue was covered in barnacles and coral, and other sea life, but the massive figure, posed as though standing, was impossible to miss.

As soon as the thought of the statue standing entered Rook’s mind, his eyes grew wide. Remembrances of past battles with Ridley’s animated golems filled his mind. The thought of this monstrosity standing up made Rook’s stomach flip.

“Satan’s flaming taint! Why do I get all the fun?”

Just then the balcony erupted in sparks as bullets ricocheted off the rail, and Rook realized the shots were coming from behind him. He was pinned.

THIRTY-NINE

Knight shoved Queen and Bishop out of the way, hurling a grenade at the door to the security suite, and another toward the damaged wet wall. Then he pulled the door closed all the way. The grenades exploded seconds later, and the door’s automatic bio-hazard seals inflated, then quickly deflated. Knight guessed they had been punctured by a grenade fragment.

Luckily, the locking mechanism didn’t engage, even though the seal had. He swung the door all the way open and loosed a burst of MP-5 fire around the room. No one had made it into the suite, but the previously damaged deathtrap wall was now a gaping hole into the adjacent bathroom, with pipes and spitting electrical wires having been cleared by the grenade blast. Knight leapt through the opening, his weapon up and ready to fire in the direction of the parallel corridor. Then he ran for the hall before Queen or Bishop had entered the bathroom.

Knight whipped the bathroom door open and prepared to blast any mercenaries in the long corridor, but all he saw to his right was a long pile of black-clad bodies, stretching back to the loading dock doors and beyond to the stairwell at that end. The other end of the hallway was clear except for some stone rubble near the end. Knight sprinted in that direction.

He found a storage room on his left. Ran past. Just as bullets pinged down the hallway near his feet, he dove through the next door, into a lounge. He quickly scanned the space. Sofas, a table. Nothing he could use. Beyond the lounge was an open double doorway filled with debris. He crossed to the doorway and looked in on what appeared to be a natural cave formation, but the room was filled with mechanical wreckage and the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Above him, a few wooden cabinets and part of a tilted refrigerator hung out of the ruined ceiling. A kitchen, he thought.

He heard gunfire down the corridor. An AK-47. Queen and Bishop answered with a barrage of their own, spurring his climb up the rubble and wreckage, heading to the next level. Most of the kitchen floor was gone, but Knight managed to scramble into and out of the second floor kitchen. He pulled himself to a tottering standing position by the horizontal door handle. As soon as Knight stood, the handle of the door jiggled. The door opened inward. With nowhere to go but backward and down, he quickly leaned forward, straightening one arm above the door handle and leaning his weight against the shoulder. There was a tiny one-inch-square plastic catch at the bottom of the door designed to grab the stopper pin on the wall, so the door could be kept open. Knight placed the toe of one of his boots on the plastic box, and stepped up.

The door swung in abruptly, and Knight rode the back of the door as it swept him toward the wall. Two men rushed into the room only to find no floor on which to stand. They plummeted ten feet to the unexpected rubble below them. One man’s leg shattered on impact, and Knight could hear the sickening crunch of bones as he impacted a large piece of misshapen rock. Knight swung his MP-5 out in his left hand, firing two quick and deadly accurate three-round bursts before swinging around faster than most men can blink and firing twice more. The two men in the hall fell to the floor wearing matching surprised expressions frozen on their faces. One of them managed to squeeze off a single shot before he died, but Knight felt nothing. The quick spin and lingering effects of the gas stole Knight’s balance. He dropped the submachine gun knowing its strap would hold it in place. With his hand free, he reached out and snagged the front handle of the door, which was swinging closed. With a yank, he was upright again. Without people shooting at him, he slipped around the door and into the hall.

The two dead men dressed in black BDUs lay sprawled on the floor. One had a swarthy mustache, and the other man had tattoos of jigsaw pieces over one half of his face. Jigsaw man was still breathing, but unconscious.

There was no backup in sight. He looked right. The hallway ended at a T junction. He looked left. The hallway looked identical, but a woman suddenly appeared. He called to her. “Pawn!”

Asya ran up to him. “Are you alone?” He nodded and raised his MP-5, only to discover the weapon was ruined. The single shot fired by the merc had struck the MP-5’s barrel. The dent was small, but any imperfection could result in the weapon blowing up in his face.

He unlooped the submachine gun’s strap and dropped the weapon to the floor before drawing his Browning 9mm sidearm and pointing it down the long hallway.

“Everyone still alive?” he asked.

She nodded. “Queen and Bishop?”

“For now,” he said.

“Which way?” Asya asked.

“Your way. Up. Looking for a communications scrambler. Probably in Ridley’s office.” Knight said. He climbed to his feet, keeping a wary eye down the hallway.

“Just came from there. Nothing like that. Maybe in the labs upstairs?”

“Worth a try.”

He followed her around the corner to the stairwell. Distant bursts of automatic weapons fire echoed up from below. Asya opened the door to the stairwell and glanced down. No one in sight. She motioned for him to follow. Knight stepped into the landing and looked up. Finding no sentry, he raced up the concrete steps to the next level’s door, clearly marked Sub Level 1 in black letters. He peered through the chicken wire-reinforced glass window and found an empty hallway. He said a silent prayer for small favors and slipped into the hall. Asya was right behind him.

“Been in there,” Knight said, passing the initial lab doors through which he and the others had entered the facility. He started walking past the doors and down the hall.

“What about this one?” Asya asked. She pointed to a set of doors across from the Microbiology Lab. The sign next to the doors read Cold Lab. Beside that was a small stylized icon of a seven-headed dragon.

“They have tissue samples of the hydra in there,” Knight said, and he kept walking, quickening his pace. The hydra had been reawakened after its long, petrified sleep in a Manifold lab, just like this, while he traded bullets with Manifold’s security force. He wasn’t eager for a repeat.

“Are you sure?” Asya asked, joining him in his long strides down the hallway.

“Pretty sure.”

Asya smiled. “Last Crusade. Love that movie.”

“Indy never had to face a multi-headed regenerating nightmare. I would have taken the snakes.”

Further down the long hallway, they came to two more sets of doors on opposite sides. The room on the left was labeled Data Lab, the room on the right, Sequencing Lab.

Knight popped his head into the Data Lab. The room was dark, but the acoustics inside told him it was large. He found the light switch on the wall, and flicked it with an audible snap. Long rows of overhead lights flickered to life, revealing desk after desk of computer stations, reminding Knight of Hollywood versions of NASA or NORAD headquarters. At the far end of the room was a radio station with a long, thick rubber-coated black antenna. Although all the other computers in the huge lab had been turned off, this station was alive with green and red LED lights.

“Is that—” Asya began.

Knight raised his pistol and fired off three shots, shattering the equipment in the corner and throwing a shower of sparks into the air.

Knight tried his throat microphone. “Queen? You read?”

He heard a burst of static and then Queen’s voice came through. “Thank fuckery. Where the hell are you?”

“Sub Level 1. You still on 3?”

“We’re pinned down in the bathroom. You got out just in time.”

“Blast through the next two walls. You got a storage room, then a lounge. Access up to the next level through a caved-in kitchen.” Knight walked back to the hallway as he talked and Asya was right by his side.

As he stepped out into the hallway, bullets raced past him from the stairs he had used. He ducked back into the Data Lab. “Shit. You’re gonna need to try for the South stairwell when you get on Two, Queen. North is now hostile.”

“Crap,” he heard her say. “Hold on.”

Knight heard a distant booming noise from the bowels of the facility.

“We’re gonna try to circle around to the south side of the loading dock and pin these bastards down,” Knight said into his mic.

Knight looked at Asya and she gave a curt nod, indicating she was ready to rush out into the fray again. She was a lot like her brother.

“‘We?’ Who have you got?”

“Pawn. Give us five. Then make for the south stairs.”

“Got it. Where the fuck is Rook?”

“Haven’t seen him,” he said.

“Rook is on Level 2,” Asya said, intuiting Queen’s line of question. It wasn’t hard. She knew Rook and Queen were an item. Generally inseparable. She would never admit it, but Queen’s concern was personal as much as it was tactical.

Knight relayed the message and turned to Asya. “Ready?”

“Go,” Asya said from behind him.

Knight yanked the door open in one hard pull.

Standing on the other side of the door was a huge man dressed in black and wearing a camouflage Vietnam-era infantry helmet. His AK-47 was raised at Knight’s heart. As the man’s finger began to squeeze, Knight closed his eyes.

FORTY

“What…is that smell?”

“That…would be puppy,” the voice came floating back softly. King could just barely make out the man’s silhouette in the dark tunnel. They were coming up on some kind of light source in the distance, but it was faint.

“You called Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound guardian of Hades, ‘Puppy?’ Really?”

“I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the creature. He was…cute once. When he was small. Also, I have yet to weave the Cerberus story into the ancient religions. It started on its own, really, after puppy got free one night.”

“You’re telling me that the fabled twelfth labor of the mighty Hercules was basically catching your loose dog?”

“Actually, that’s probably the most accurate telling of the story I’ve ever heard,” Alexander whispered. “I found him in a cave. Brought him home.”

As more light filled the tunnel, King could finally make out the stone wall of the natural cave. Alexander’s form was fully visible ahead. The tunnel ended at a huge round arena-like space, all carved from a naturally formed cavern. King could see where stone ledges had been fashioned as seating, but there were also natural stalactites that connected with stalagmites, forming thin columns that supported the roof far overhead. Across the floor of the giant space was a thick iron chain. Each link looked large enough for King to crawl through. One end of the chain was pegged to a rock wall. The other end of the chain was out of view to the right of the tunnel entrance.

Alexander held a hand up, preventing King from entering the arena. “‘Hellhound’ was a bit of an exaggeration, although he is large.”

“How big are we talking here?”

“Ever seen a rhino up close?”

“You’re kidding.”

Alexander’s grim face said he wasn’t. “That’s how big he was when I got him.”

King’s jaw fell slack. “You said he was small when you got him.”

“Comparatively speaking,” Alexander said with a shrug. “And we can’t kill him, either.”

“Why not? And won’t he recognize your scent?”

“I’m afraid he might not. My body chemistry might have changed since the inclusion of the herbs and serums that give me my longevity and strength. But the reason we can’t kill him is more complex.”

King understood immediately. “The time-stream. He saves your life at some point?”

“I told you he was a good pup.”

Alexander strode out into the arena. King followed. Almost immediately they heard another rumbling growl that shook the stone on which they stood.

King looked to his right, down the length of the arena. A few torches burned along the walls of the broad expanse, but the thing he desperately wanted to see at the end of the chain wasn’t there. The end of the chain was a big iron ring and a bolt that went through it. There was no sign of the beast.

“He’s loose. Great. I hate you, you know that, right?”

Alexander turned to look at King, but his face angled up and above the tunnel entrance, far over King’s head.

“He’s behind me, isn’t he? I really hate you.”

King turned as the beast growled again, and this time he had a visual to go with the epic rumbling. He wasn’t disappointed. The creature stood crouched on a ledge above the tunnel entrance. It was probably twenty feet tall if it hadn’t been crouched. King expected a three headed dog to have three necks as well, but it didn’t. All three heads grew out of a single thick neck, and one of the three had grown at an odd angle, as if it were a genetic mutation. King could only count five ears on the creature. Where the other should have been, two heads were fused. Thick black fur covered the creature. Its tail had been docked like a doberman’s, but the overall shape of the beast reminded him of a terrier crossbred with a huge Labrador retriever for the shape of its body and a Saint Bernard for the shape of its heads.

One of the three heads appeared to have been sleeping but was rousing now. The other two were snarling, with lips pulled back and long ropes of slobber as thick as King’s arm drooling down to the ground like the cave’s stalactites.

“Distract him!” Alexander called. Then the man ran off to the side of the arena.

King looked around desperately. “With what!”

The hellhound stepped down to the arena floor with one massive paw, effectively blocking retreat down the entrance tunnel. The paw and foreleg were, by themselves, as tall as an African elephant, but in all other ways besides size, looked just like a dog — with hair the thickness of twine.

King turned and ran for the nearest cave column. The ground shook as the giant animal pounced down from the rock ledge and gave chase.

King got to the column and glanced back. Just in time. The gaping maw of the central head was inches behind him. He threw his body to the side, behind the column. The three-headed beast’s momentum carried it past, but the left side head turned in time to snap at him, spraying a long rope of frothy saliva at him. The moisture smacked into King’s face like a soaking wet towel.

He rolled on the floor and swiped at his face with the sleeve of his robe, hardly penetrating the thick coating of saliva. He ignored it after that. Had to keep moving. He had correctly guessed that the hound wouldn’t damage the delicate columns in the arena, so he planned to use them as shields, at least until the beast lost its patience and decided the cavern could lose a column and not collapse.

He got to his feet and ran for the next column. The slathering creature was right behind him. He heard metal grinding across the stone floor of the cavern. When he looked, he saw Alexander hauling on the giant chain like a sailor pulling in a simple rope. He hoped whatever Alexander had planned, he would do it fast.

As he ran, one of King’s rope sandals broke and went flapping off his foot. He shook his leg as he ran, flinging the broken sandal away. The thought flitted across his mind that if he was lucky, the three-headed monstrosity giving chase would fetch the slipper. The loud growl behind him disabused him of that notion. He kicked off the other sandal with a hop and sprinted as fast as he could across the cool stone floor.

Just as King reached the column and was about to make his jump, he felt his left arm painfully wrenched behind him, when he was pumping his elbow back. Then his whole arm was on fire and tugging him to a halt and upward. His body swung in the air and twisted.

Then he saw it. His entire left arm was in the jaws of the creature’s central head. King was lifted up, hanging from the thing’s jaws.

Then the hellhound violently thrashed its head from side to side, and King screamed.

FORTY-ONE

The scream echoed around the arena until King’s limp form flew across the room and landed on the floor in a heap.

After a moment, King opened his eyes and looked at his arm — or what was left of it. The flesh had been torn just above the wrist and peeled off up past the elbow where the jagged skin and torn muscle dangled down from his shoulder. He could see his radius and ulna bones in his forearm, stripped clean of muscles and tendons. Yellowish-white ligaments were all that held his elbow joint together. His hand was still whole but looked grotesque now, like a Mickey Mouse glove on a stick figure.

His head fell back onto the stone floor with a thunk, and his eyes closed. He tried to scream again, but no voice came. The overwhelming scent of his own body’s blood and meat filled his nostrils, churning his gut. But he didn’t panic. He’d gone through this before. Not the giant three-headed hellhound, but he’d survived mortal wounds on a few occasions. He knew what would happen next. With his eyes still closed, he turned his head. Then he opened his eyes and watched the impossible. The jagged flaps of skin at the shoulder stretched and grew as snakes of musculature slipped out from below it like alien tendrils probing for a meal. The flesh at his wrist grew upward toward the elbow. In a minute, the tendrils of muscle had joined and were filling out. The sensation was pure fiery agony. It sucked the air out of his lungs, but he fought against the building scream and remained calm. It would be over in moments.

Just a few more seconds of world class torture, he thought, then I’ll—

Movement across the arena caught his eye.

Alexander stood on the monstrous dog’s back. He held the massive chain wrapped around the creature’s single throat like a garrote. The hellhound snapped its three sets of jaws and thrashed its heads from side to side, but Alexander refused to let go. He looked like some kind of insane rodeo rider on a dog that weighed more than a tank.

The creature ran from side to side, then forward and stopped suddenly, like a maddened bull. Alexander struggled behind the beast’s neck, then cried out in triumph and leapt off the animal. He landed nimbly on the floor and raced for the side wall and the tunnel entrance.

Is he leaving me here? King wondered.

Cerberus chased him toward the wall. The massive chain sprang up off the floor behind the beast.

The chain pulled taut. The center head snapped up, and the giant animal’s momentum suddenly came to a complete stop. Its legs slipped up out from under it into the air, and the massive beast’s body slammed back onto the ground. The chamber shook from the impact. Dust cascaded down from the ceiling.

Alexander had successfully chained the dog. He smiled from the doorway of the tunnel, then began edging his way around the arena, as the giant creature got to its feet and began barking at him — each vocalization sounding like a peal of thunder in the enclosed cavern.

King looked down at his arm and saw that it had nearly finished knitting back together. He just needed a few more layers of skin. The process felt like a severe sunburn, but in reverse. The healing also left him ravenously hungry.

He rolled to his side and gingerly tested putting some weight on the arm. The muscles were as strong as ever. Like new…because they were. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, then stood.

Alexander ran around the perimeter of the stone arena. Cerberus kept pace at the end of its tether, barking at him in three distinct voices, each taking turns to create an unceasing wave of sound.

“You’re not out of the—” Alexander was yelling.

King looked down at the ground, then at the oncoming beast-dog. He wasn’t out of the radius of its arc.

Crap!

He turned and sprinted for the wall, his bare toes finding little crevices and impurities in the stone floor as he ran and gripping them, propelling him faster. At last he slammed into the stone wall at the far side of the cavern, just as Alexander zipped around the back of him and the massive dog passed him, hot on Alexander’s tail. The wash of air that swept over King reminded him of standing on the edge of a subway platform when a train slammed past without any plans of stopping at that station.

King edged around the circumference of the stone wall, scratching his itching forearm. He saw his sword in the arena. It was bent to hell and too far inside the arc of the hellhound’s tether.

Another lost blade.

He made his way to the opposite side of the arena from where they had entered. There was an identical tunnel mouth. Alexander stood there waiting, as though nothing exciting had happened. The giant dog barked twice more and then ran off toward the far side of the arena.

“Not a word about its bark being bigger than its bite. I nearly lost my arm,” King said.

“But your clever distraction worked. I was able to leash him.”

“Clever distrac—? Did I mention that I hate you?”

“Once or twice,” Alexander replied.

“Today?” King prodded.

“I think we’re up to three. Come on. The lab is this way.” Alexander led them down a long dark tunnel. King ran a hand along the dark wall until it flared away, leaving him only with Alexander’s dim silhouette to guide him forward. “Next, we will deal with the Forgotten. Then the creation of the body.”

Suddenly, the shape of Alexander’s body disappeared in the darkness ahead.

“Right. The Forgotten. But they’re all locked up. Hey, where did you—”

Something smashed into King’s body from the left, throwing him against a wall, hard. He rolled with the impact, and came up on his feet. He could hear a scrabbling in the dark and wished he had nabbed one of the lit torches in the arena.

Something hit him low in the gut, but through long years of rigorous exercise, King’s abdomen was like a rock. The blow still took air out of him, but it did little damage. He thrust down with two balled fists, hitting his attacker before it could retreat and launch a second assault from the gloom. The impact was hard and brittle under his fists, like he had just punched a wooden board encased in bubble wrap.

King could hear Alexander struggling in the dark. Then a match flared brightly. Matches wouldn’t first see widespread use in China for another twelve hundred years, but Alexander and King had agreed to make and use some modern amenities at times when others were not around. Matches were one of their creature comforts.

The match lit a torch sconce on the wall, casting orange light in all directions. They had entered a wider room at the end of the tunnel. Like the parking garage in Tunisia, every surface — floor, walls and ceiling — was covered in wraiths. There were hundreds of them chittering in the dark.

The Forgotten were free.

Unlike in Tunisia though, this time they attacked all at once. King watched as a swarm of the creatures mauled Alexander. Then they turned on King, a chaotic mass of fast, nimble bodies moving with the ravenous excitement of hungry lions who have just spotted a baby zebra. He tried to fight them, but it was no use. They moved too fast, and more often than not, his punches struck only their cloaks.

In just ten seconds, King was overwhelmed, buried beneath a mass of hungry wraiths reaching for his skin — and the blood beneath it.

FORTY-TWO

The sun would not rise for another hour, but the dark heavens were already lightening. Pale blue leached up into the Arab sky on the horizon.

Richard Ridley smiled.

It was all coming together. That bastard Alexander was dead. King was dead, too — both unexpected gifts. His rebellious brother, Darius, had walked into a trap. Chess Team was cut off and unable to contact support. Although they had robbed him of his genetic immortality, it made little difference. With the mother tongue, he could repair damage to his body and give himself longevity by forcing his cells to age slower, perhaps not at all. And now…the Chest of Adoon. The power it contained was said to be without comparison. A civilization destroyer.

His company, Manifold Genetics, was in ruins, like the landscape around him, to which Trigger and Carpenter had led him. But that made little difference. He had many holdings and subsidiary companies. He had the wealth, even without the labs. Soon he would have a destructive power to correct all the wrongs done to him. Combined with his superior intellect, the mother tongue, and a lot of money, he would be an unstoppable force.

No more toying with these people, he thought. It was time for real power. World changing power.

He slowed his pace, allowing Seth and Jared to walk ahead of him. At first, Jared kept glancing back, afraid he would miss something. Seth continued on ahead, secure in his role. They walked through the dark ruins, Trigger lighting the way with a flashlight. Carpenter fell back to the rear to protect their small group.

They crossed La Goulette Road and headed into the trees on the opposite side, next to a house. Ridley still found it amusing that the wealthy Tunisians had built estates nestled in between the standing ruins. If they had been in a Western nation, the entire area would have been a World Heritage site, but here, the wealthy had managed to get every scrap of land that didn’t have an ancient rock on it.

They passed through a small copse of trees that ran along the backside of a house, and then they were in the necropolis. Beyond the tombstones lay another small forest, and then the ruins called the Antonine Baths. Beyond those, the Gulf of Tunis.

Richard Ridley looked around at the small stones of the darkened necropolis. He smiled again. The necropolis was as good a place as any. He raised the silenced pistol Trigger had provided him, and shot Jared neatly in the back of the skull. The sound the weapon made was like someone spitting in the dark. Jared’s body collapsed to the ground, draping over one of the low stones that acted as markers for ancient graves. Without time to prepare to use the mother tongue to heal himself, Jared was dead. His body went slack as it reverted to clay.

Seth turned at the act, shocked.

“Don’t worry, Seth. I know you are loyal to me. Jared dreamed of independence. From the moment I gave you life, you were all individuals, with personalities and emotions all growing further away from mine, based on your experiences. I didn’t like the direction Jared was going. Sooner or later, we would have butted heads. Or he would have gone to our enemies. That’s no good for business.”

Trigger and Carpenter looked unconcerned. They knew they were getting paid — and extremely well — to do their jobs. As long as they performed, they wouldn’t be getting bullets to the head. Besides, Ridley thought both men most likely imagined themselves capable of drawing their weapons on him faster than he could gun them down. Little did they know, in a few moments, he would no longer require their services.

“Let’s move,” Ridley said.

Trigger led the way into the trees on the opposite side of the necropolis, and the group unceremoniously left Jared’s gray corpse draped over the stone.

“Once we have the Chest,” Seth said to Ridley, “what do you intend to do next?”

Ridley shook his head. “That depends on the nature of the destructive force contained within the Chest. If the weapon is easily used, perhaps I’ll test it out on Tunis. But in my experience, ancient weapons with this kind of destructive power most often turn out to be biological. It might require study.”

“Destroying Tunis would be simple, even now with just the mother tongue, but perhaps not the statement you want to make to the world for your first assault. Maybe something bigger? The destruction of an entire nation, perhaps?” Seth spoke hesitantly. Ridley figured he was no doubt wary of getting a silenced bullet in the face. But it was a reasonable suggestion.

Ridley smiled at the idea. “Maybe China. I would like to have my own tea empire.”

They came upon the ruins of the Baths. The third largest Roman Bathing Ruins in the world, Antonine was something special. In its heyday, it would have been like an aquatic gymnasium, with pools of differing sizes and purposes. An amazing place to while away a Roman-era day. The complex faced the sea. An incredible view. It was also architecturally clever, lying at the base of two sloping hills, allowing water to flow down to it. Ridley considered having the baths reconstructed once the whole of North Africa was his. His only problem with North Africa was all the people. Nothing a little genocide can’t fix.

With the power he would soon possess, nothing would be impossible.

That’s what he told himself, but there were lingering doubts. Despite all of his research into the Chest supporting the idea that it contained a destructive power beyond imagining, he had to remember that it was placed there by ancient people who had yet to conceive of the atomic bomb. That said, he’d read texts comparing it to natural forces like typhoons and earthquakes, as well as mythological forces such as Zeus’s lightning bolts and the fires of Hades. Even by modern standards of destruction, those comparisons gave him hope that the weapon inside the chest would give him dominion over the human race. The mother tongue — the language of God — made him divine. The power inside the Chest would allow him to enforce his divinity world-wide.

The ruins, now little more than stumps of rock, walls, arched doorways and the occasional cave, had one other major benefit, unbeknownst to most. He had built his Omega facility under the baths at gigantic expense, and the process had required the continual hiring of architects and builders, who were quietly murdered later on. Bribing government officials had nearly bankrupted him at the time. But he had known of the mother tongue even then, and he had known it would only be a matter of time until he acquired it.

With the mother tongue, the prize under the Gulf of Tunis was invaluable. How ironic that two powerful weapons had been concealed here.

Building the aquarium wall had been maddeningly difficult with no less than twenty architects telling him it was an impossible feat, and five eventually designing the thing. They were all dead now. But in the end, he had it: one of the world’s most amazing offices with an unparalleled view of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

He had stood at that railing, lusting to control his secret find for long years, while his people scoured the globe for antiquities, secrets and power. The Hydra had blown up in his face, with the involvement of the Chess Team, first at his Peru facility, then again in the Atlantic and finally in New Hampshire. But those defeats were minor compared to the advancements in genetics he had made, and the serum he had designed to give himself regeneration. It occurred to him that he still had the formula. A smile slipped onto his face. He could make more, and ensure he could always regenerate from injury. Better yet, he would build a loyal army, unable to be killed. Visions of unkillable soldiers marching on Washington D.C., supported by living stone golems filled his imagination. The possibilities were endless.

And distracting.

The others paused where the ruins met the shoreline. Ridley walked past them, and strode into the lapping waves of the Gulf of Tunis. He knew that the shallows ran twenty feet out before the shelf dropped 80 feet. He had SCUBA dived here on several occasions, exploring the area well.

The others hung back, still unsure of why it was necessary to make haste for the shoreline.

The sun would soon be peeking over the eastern horizon across the sea. The sky grew lighter. Ridley checked his watch. 4:00 a.m. on the dot.

Showtime.

Richard Ridley raised his hands into the air, facing the sea. He began shouting commands into the air. As usual, when he used the mother tongue, his mind heard the commands in his head in English, but what came from his mouth sounded guttural, strange and distorted.

A Bible verse flitted through his mind and brought a smile to his face.

Up, Ridley thought. I bringeth thee up!

FORTY-THREE

Queen leapt nimbly over the rubble and scrambled up Bishop’s body onto the second level, through the shattered kitchen. She checked that the hallway was clear, then helped Bishop work his massive frame — made bulkier by the impact armor — up into the hallway of Sub Level 2.

They both sat panting on the floor. Queen kept her weapon trained on the length of the hall, while Bishop focused on the nearby turn toward the north stairwell.

It had been a long hard slog, first blowing a hole through the wall into the storage room, and then again into the lounge. Then they had found the collapsed kitchen in what looked like a cave. In each room except the cave, they had needed to exchange gunfire with the mercenaries in the hall. The men seemed to be pacing them. Queen didn’t know if the mercenaries knew about the collapsed kitchen, but if they didn’t, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that their prey had fled upward.

She keyed her throat microphone. “Deep Blue? You read?”

Still no answer.

Although Knight had gotten the internal communications working, she couldn’t reach further afield. She had tried Domenick Boucher at CIA too, but hadn’t been able to get a long distance signal.

Probably interference from the structure. We’re pretty far underground.

They’d need to get topside before she could call in reinforcements. Queen had tried Rook too, but she couldn’t raise him. She tried not to think about it. If King was gone and Rook bought it too, she didn’t know what she’d do. She still had a hard time wrapping her head around King being gone — just like that.

It seemed impossible.

King had always been there. His skills in the field and casual attitude had been the glue that held Chess Team together. Each member of the team would have willingly died a dozen times over for King. He never asked for their respect, but he had earned it just the same. He never backed down from any threat, and his maverick, hare-brained approaches to getting things done had continually impressed.

She just couldn’t believe he was gone.

“If we’re gonna go…” Bishop started.

“I know,” Queen said. “Let’s go.”

They both stood, and not a moment too soon. A door just down the corridor opened as a man stuck his head out, followed by the barrel of an MP-5.

Queen took aim, but stopped her trigger finger just in time. “Mr. Sigler?”

Peter came rushing out of the room with Lynn close on his heels. The two aging spies were out of breath from their quick sprint down the carpeted corridor.

“Have you seen our daughter?” Lynn asked as she turned to keep an eye on the hallway behind her.

“She’s with Knight. Let’s go. This way.” Queen started for the south stairwell.

Lynn held up a hand. “CCTV in the office. The stairwell is full of men below and above. Can’t go that way.”

Queen turned to Bishop and nodded. The big man turned toward the nearer end of the corridor, and the right angle turn that led to the north stairwell. When he got to the corner, he placed the barrel of his weapon at the edge of the wall, then darted his head around it. The others followed him without a sound when he pushed forward.

He paused at the door.

“Knight and Pawn are on the floor above us,” Queen said. “Rook’s out of touch.” Not having to mention King’s status felt wrong. She filled the gap with the obvious. “Whoever is below us is hostile.”

Bishop opened the door and threw his last grenade down the stairwell, then stepped back, allowing the door to close. A few seconds later, an explosive roar shook the stairwell. Smoke rose up past the small window in the door. “That was my last.”

“I’m out too,” Queen looked to King’s parents. She couldn’t imagine what they must be going through. “Lynn: you’re my Pawn. Peter, you’re with Bishop. Stay by our sides, and we’ll try to get you out of here alive.”

Lynn’s only response was to hand Queen two extra magazines for her MP-5.

Peter nodded.

Bishop led the way, spraying the upper stair landing with a hail of bullets as he lunged into the stairwell. His legs pistoned up and down as if he were a track star, instead a of a mountainous war machine. Queen nudged Peter to follow Bishop, then Lynn was next, and she took up the rear, keeping her eye on the lower flight of stairs. They encountered no resistance.

At the top of the stairs, Bishop lurched out of the door, throwing himself to the smooth floor of the corridor. He fought the instinct to just spray bullets into the hallway, which was what he might have done if he had one of his chain-fed machine guns. But spraying and praying was just a quick way to waste ammo with a submachine gun. Instead, he fired controlled bursts at the small group of men fifty feet away. He picked his targets one by one, dropping them with accurate gunfire. Knight would be proud.

Queen took the lead with Lynn at her side. They moved into the Microbiology Lab, and made for the janitorial closet. By the time she had the door open, Peter was with them. Bishop ducked inside the door to the lab, as gunfire ripped through the corridor again. One of the mercenaries at the end of the hall must have survived. Either that or more of them had arrived.

They’re like cockroaches, Queen thought. If we can just leapfrog our way out like this…

But the long tunnel beyond the janitor’s closet could be a killing field, the perfect place for an ambush — and this mission had already cost them too much.

“Knight, Rook, if you can hear me, Bishop and I are bugging out with Peter and Lynn, I suggest you do the same.”

There was no response.

Fuck.

“Lynn, you’re a good shot, right?”

“Pretty good.”

“Cover our six. Bish, up front with me. Anyone in our way is hostile. Shoot until you’re out of bullets.”

Lynn gave a nod. The same kind she’d seen King give a hundred times before rushing out to face an enemy.

Queen flung the door open and crouched. Bishop took a stance next to her. No gunfire came. The tunnel was lit. There was a small pile of bodies just beyond the door. Someone had already exited through this route. She didn’t know who, but she was glad for the lucky break. “Go.”

The group sprinted down the tight tunnel, with Queen and Bishop’s armored bodies acting as a shield for King’s unprotected parents. Although the lights were on now, Queen couldn’t see to the end of the tunnel. Still, what she could see looked promising — an empty run until the curvature of the tunnel’s incline obscured her view of the stairs.

They ran until they reached the stairs. More bodies lay at the foot of the stairwell, and for the first time, Queen got the idea that the forces attacking her were not directly under Ridley’s command. They made their way up the stairs to the amphitheater door, only to find it unlocked and ajar. The outer gates were not locked either.

They emerged into the Tunisian pre-dawn twilight, and the smell of the nearby salt water filled her nostrils. Bishop scanned the ruins and the trees that ringed the amphitheater with a small set of night-vision goggles.

“That way,” he said.

“You see tangos?” Queen asked.

“No.”

“How could you know they went that way, then?” Peter whispered.

“Some tree branches are disturbed, bent and broken.. Also, about 2000 feet through the trees that way is the sea — and a helipad. Ridley likes helicopters.”

Queen started for the tree line. “Somebody paid attention during the briefing.”

“He’s not getting away again,” Bishop said. “This time we’ll take care of him permanently.”

Queen let that comment wash over her. Bishop had more reason to loathe Ridley than the others. He’d been turned into a monster and had nearly killed Knight as a result. While the rest of the team fought Ridley and licked their wounds afterwards, Bishop had struggled with the physical and psychological fallout of being turned into something inhuman. She clapped Bishop’s shoulder. “This time, we’ll end him.”

As they crossed the road and slipped into the trees, Queen contacted Deep Blue. Now outside the confines of the Omega facility, she had a clear link to New Hampshire.

“Queen, what the hell is going on over there?” Deep Blue’s voice was modulated only to protect his identity — the emotional stabilization program that removed all trace of his state of mind wasn’t activated. He sounded extremely worried.

“Everything’s gone tits up. I’m with Bishop and two new Pawns. Pawn Zero is with Knight. Rook is MIA…” she paused. “Blue…King and Alexander are down.” Her voice trembled slightly. She squashed the rising emotions back down and said, with more authority, “Repeat. King is down. Ridley is loose with two of the Three Amigos.”

She paused.

“I…want…you…to…bring…the…fire. You read me Deep Blue? This man does not escape us this time. The Grim Reaper is waiting for him with open arms.”

There was a pause on the line as she entered the necropolis. She saw one of the Ridley duplicates draped over a stone marker. She walked up to the body and confirmed it was dead, reverted to an inert clay form. “One of the Amigos is down. That makes Ridley plus one. Copy?”

“I copy, Queen. Stay your course.”

Queen couldn’t tell if Deep Blue had activated the emotional stabilizer or if he was bottling things for later, but he sounded cool and in control.

“I’m showing four heat blooms near the water,” Deep Blue added. “Straight ahead.”

Ridley, Queen thought, and started forward.

“Help is on the way, Queen.” Deep Blue said.

“The fucking fire, Blue. Make it happen. Out.”

She moved into the trees on the far side of the necropolis. Bishop ran beside her, Peter and Lynn following close behind.

One more try, she thought. One more. Please be there.

She keyed her microphone.

“Rook?”

“Queen!” Rook’s voice filled her ear, loud, desperate and fouled by static. “For the love… God… don’t… outside.”

“Rook! You’re coming through patchy. Say again. Say again!”

“Don’t let Ridley… tongue… For fuck’s sake! This… crazy…massive!”

She burst through the trees into a clearing — the baths.

The shoreline was just a hundred and fifty feet away And he was just beyond, wading in the shallows.

In the lightening sky, she could see Richard Ridley in a dark jumpsuit, his arms raised to the heavens. Three other men stood nearby — one of them was the last remaining duplicate, whose white linen suit glowed in the pre-dawn twilight.

The air filled with a rumbling sound like thunder, and she realized it was caused by Ridley, shouting out at the sea.

“Don’t let him use the fucking mother tongue outside! No matter what!” Rook finally came through clearly, but his warning was too late. The sea was writhing.

FORTY-FOUR

“It’s already too friggin’ late, isn’t it?” Rook rubbed a hand over his blond hair and then raised it back into the air as he’d been commanded to do.

Queen didn’t respond.

Three armed men stood in the doorway of the office. They wore black, but the odd assortment of accoutrements each man wore, besides the basic black BDUs, revealed them as mercenaries. One man wore a Braves cap. Another had three blue bandanas tied over one thigh. The third man was tall and slim. He wore a green jungle hat. Each was armed with an AK-47.

Rook glanced down into the gallery and saw five more black-clad mercenaries rush into the space and cover his position from below.

“Don’t even breathe fast, gob-shite,” the tall mercenary said. “Or we’ll turn you into Swiss bloody cheese.” The accent was Lancashire.

Probably ex-SAS, Rook thought. Wonderful.

Rook let his eyes wander to the illuminated glass wall holding the ocean at bay. As he looked out at the enormous submerged statue, a school of small black fish darted over its face, then abruptly changed direction and fled off to the right, past the edge of Rook’s view.

“Just so you know, the sarcastic humor, witty nicknames, and creative threats are kind of my thing,” Rook said.

“Too bloody bad,” the SAS man said, stepping closer, weapon raised. Rook made an easy target.

But Rook didn’t take his eyes off the glass wall. “Course, colorful language ain’t gonna save you from Jolly Green over here.”

“What do you—” the SAS man started, but then stopped when a grinding noise filled the gallery.

Even through the several-inch thick wall of Plexiglas, every man inside the space heard the loud crunch and rumble of grinding stone. The remaining fish lazily swimming near the statue turned and fled. The massive head outside the window slowly rotated, until the face was turned directly toward the viewing gallery wall. Seaweed was wrapped around the long tines of the statue’s crown, the elongated spikes reminding Rook of a demonic statue of liberty. But this statue was male. The face was bearded.

As the SAS man lost his voice, the gigantic head stopped turning.

Then it opened its eyes, and the screaming began.

Hardened men of war started shouting in the gallery below. They ran for the door, gripped by fear. No amount of training could prepare a soldier for such a sight, and no amount of money could provide that much courage. The enormous statue peered through the aquarium wall, raw unbridled anger filling its solid eyes. Immense eyebrows furrowed and frown lines appeared at the mouth, which was larger than the upper office in which Rook and his three captors stood.

Rook turned to look back at the men by the office door. They had each let the barrels of their respective weapons droop, as they stared at the huge moving head with slack jaws.

“I’m guessing you boys weren’t in on Ridley’s plan. We’re all gonna be chopped sushi.”

Bubbles exploded from the ocean floor surrounding the statue. Silt and sand billowed in massive clouds as the statue pulled away from its long-time resting place and began to sit up. Its huge arm twisted toward the wall. Each fingernail was larger than a man. The face turned to a vicious scowl, and the tips of its stone fingers touched the Plexiglas.

“Sweet mother of God…” the man with the leg bandanas said, as his bladder let go and a puddle of acrid beer-smelling urine stained his pants.

Rook brought his raised hands together, fingers resting on his wristwatch. The remaining mercenaries still weren’t looking at him as he slipped one battle-armored leg through the metal railing of the balcony and held on tight. He took one last look at the rising stone monstrosity beyond the viewing window and then leaned toward the metal control panel on the wall. Moving slowly, he bumped the light switch with his shoulder. The office went dark, but the giant statue awakening from the sea bed remained illuminated like a Neptune-themed Christmas tree.

“What the—” the SAS man started, but never finished as Rook depressed the radio trigger on his wristwatch.

The block of C4, still hidden under the metal door on the floor of the gallery, exploded. The door spun through the gallery, but posed no real threat. That came next. The immensely thick aquarium wall shattered right up the center with a hideous shriek. The crack spider-webbed faster than a sneeze, and the wall gave way. The Gulf of Tunis — just a small portion of the mighty Mediterranean Sea — gushed through the now nearly 300-foot long open window into the subterranean base. The pressure-driven salt water instantly filled the gallery, blasting down the Sub Level 3 corridor. A tidal wave of white frothing fury swept over the balcony rail, and a second after Rook grasped the rail with both hands, it hit.

The impact was like getting punched in the face and chest by a gaggle of heavyweight fighters, but Rook clung to the rail, his armored legs firmly locked in place around the metal. The tsunami of water plowed through the office space, crushing furniture across the room, and slamming the three mercenaries into the wall, pinning and drowning the shocked men.

Rook had taken a huge breath before he detonated the C4, and he had closed his eyes against the wall of water, but the second he felt the initial surge of terrifying pressure leave his face, he couldn’t help but open his eyes to take in the sight.

He wished he hadn’t.

The Colossus was rising.