Savage

1

It was a day like any other in the Arbaeen district of the canal port city of Suez. Cars moved about on the streets, in a hurry to get wherever they were going. Pedestrians ambled about less purposefully on the roadside, or when necessity dictated, risked a mad dash through traffic to reach the other side. People idled in coffee shops, purchased kebabs from street vendors, and perused the wares of merchants. Only a few of those meandering about were locals. At the canal’s end, the population of Suez fluctuated daily with tourists, sailors and passengers debarking for a day ashore, while they waited for their vessels to make the long passage through to the Mediterranean Sea or to meet a ship heading south, toward the Red Sea.

The locals barely even noticed the appearance of five more strangers.

They did not arrive together, nor did they appear to even be aware of each other. There was the young couple. European tourists. He spoke halting English with lapses into German, and she spoke halting English with lapses into French. Most of the Arab merchants spoke a smattering of English, so communication was not that difficult. The man, who was broad and tall, had close-cropped blond hair with a long goatee, and he wore dark Oakley sunglasses. He looked like he might belong to an American motorcycle gang. The woman was quite a bit shorter, and very shapely. It was difficult to tell if she was beautiful, because she was mostly covered up by a hijab and sunglasses that matched her boyfriend’s. It was a bit unusual for a Western tourist to wear the ceremonial head scarf, but not enough so to make the locals take note. The pair bought some food and bottles of Orangina at a shop. At another, the man bought his girlfriend an Egyptian cartouche pendant.

Then there was the Chinese photographer, or at least everyone assumed he was a photographer, because he was lugging around a huge camera case. He also spoke halting English, and asked everyone he met whether they knew a good place to take photographs of ships entering and leaving the canal. When the question was answered, he would stare back, uncomprehending, through his dark sunglasses. Then he would wander off in the wrong direction, leaving the locals to scratch their beards in amusement.

The last two strangers appeared to be Arabs. They had swarthy complexions, thick dark hair and beards, and spoke perfect, if slightly old-fashioned, Arabic. The smaller of the pair did most of the talking. Smaller, in this case was a relative term, because at just over six feet in height, he was taller than most of the locals. Nevertheless, he was dwarfed by the other man, who was a good head taller and built as solidly as the pyramids. The two men did not attempt to question the locals or strike up conversation, but merely sipped their coffee in the shadow of an awning. From time to time, the smaller man would check his wristwatch — a closer look would have revealed a vintage 1967 Omega Speedmaster Professional — while the larger man mostly looked straight ahead, almost statue still. Like most Egyptian men, they eschewed traditional Arab attire for modern trousers and cotton shirts. The big man’s muscles strained the fabric of his. Curiously, both were wearing dark sunglasses just like the others.

The sunglasses connected the five visitors in more than just a symbolic way. In addition to concealing their eyes, each pair of Oakley Half-Jacket 2.0 sport frames also hid a miniature Bluetooth wireless device that was linked to a next-generation quantum smartphone. The superior processing and data transfer speed of the quantum computers, which were an order of magnitude faster than anything commercially available, meant that each member of this group of visitors could send and receive real-time audio and video instantaneously. Because the processor used quantum entanglement, any lag of signal transmission was too minute to be measured. Nor was there any need for encryption. The transmission was not broadcast using radio waves, so there was no way for anyone to intercept it.

Images were recorded by a high-def camera in the nose-piece of each pair of glasses. They were viewed using a virtual, retinal-display projection system that beamed the video feed directly into the wearer’s eyes. From his perch on the roof of a three story building near the port, the man the locals had dismissed as the ‘Chinese photographer’ was able to see everything that the others could, and in turn, he was able to share his unique perspective with them. That, however, was only the beginning of what was possible with the technology in the glasses.

Even a cursory look around was enough to transmit a wealth of data into the shared network. The information was also transmitted instantaneously to a mainframe on the other side of the planet. A sophisticated facial recognition program compared every single face that passed in front of the cameras against a dozen different databases, including several international terrorist watch lists. The information could be displayed visually if so desired, but at present it was enough to simply overlay the results of the facial recognition scan. Each person that entered into the virtual environment had a tiny icon right above their head: a green dot if a positive identification was made and the person was free of suspicion, a yellow dot if no identification was possible and a red dot if a person was of special interest.

“I think I’ve been out in the sun too long. All I can see is a lot of yellow spots.”

The man on the roof smiled. He heard the voice as clearly as if the speaker were standing next to him, right down to the trace of a New England accent on some of the vowels. But if someone had been standing right next to him, they would have heard nothing at all. The sound was not played through ordinary electronic speakers, but instead utilized a technology called ‘bone conduction’ to transmit sound waves from tiny metal probes in the ear pieces of the glasses, directly into the skull of the person wearing them.

The statement wasn’t completely accurate however. While there was a sea of yellow dots, all marking people whose identities remained unknown, there were four tags that were neither yellow nor dots. The icons marked the four other visitors, and if it were possible for the man on the roof to see himself, he would have found a fifth icon floating above his own head — virtually speaking at least. These markers were a bright royal blue, but each one was different. Each one was the likeness of a chess piece.

“Seriously,” the same voice continued. The speaker was Stan Tremblay, but when he was working — as he was right now, albeit disguised as the German tourist — he was simply: Rook. “What good is facial recognition technology if it doesn’t recognize any faces?”

The man on the roof nodded in silent agreement. His name was Shin Dae-jung — his nom de guerre was Knight — and he was not Chinese. Ethnically, he was Korean, but he had been born in the United States and considered himself, first and foremost, an American. Nor was he a photographer. His camera case contained a disassembled Chey Tac Intervention .408 sniper rifle. It was the tool of his trade, and he had been practicing his trade a long time, without any help from quantum computers and high-tech sunglasses.

“He’s right, Blue,” another voice said. “If the FRS is just going to show us a lot of yellow dots, then we’d be better off without it.”

Knight was surprised to hear King supporting the wise-cracking and generally rebellious Rook. King, also known as Jack Sigler, was the field leader of the group, and he was usually the calm voice of reason. He was the shorter man presently disguised as an Arab, sipping coffee at the outdoor café. He wasn’t an Arab, but his thick black hair, strong features and skin bronzed by years — a lot of years — in the sun, along with his uncanny mastery of the Arabic language, enabled him to easily pull off the deception.

Eight years ago, King had been an officer in the US Army Special Forces Operational Detachment D, better known as Delta or simply ‘the Unit.’ Circumstances, in the form of a crisis that threatened the safety of the entire planet, had brought the five of them together from different military special operations backgrounds, to form what King had called the ‘Delta of Delta’—the elite of the elite, a new team answerable only to the president. The Chess Team. Since then, they had faced threats beyond comprehension — dangers that were the stuff of science fiction — and King had always guided them with a steady hand, no matter what the world threw at them. Except that after their last mission, where they finally, once and for all, dealt with rogue geneticist Richard Ridley, King just didn’t quite seem like himself anymore.

“Egypt doesn’t have a centralized picture ID database,” a new voice explained. The speaker was not one of the five — in fact, he was in a command center on the other side of the world — but he was nevertheless an essential member of Chess Team. His callsign was Deep Blue — a nod to the marvelous chess-playing computer that had performed the impossible, by beating the then-reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. Deep Blue’s real name was Tom Duncan, and he had once been the President of the United States. In his role as chief executive, he had created Chess Team, and he’d personally overseen their missions, anonymously at first, until necessity had forced him to sacrifice his presidency to save the nation he had sworn to serve. Giving up the Oval Office had enabled Deep Blue to devote himself full time to leading the team. The organization that had begun with the team was now a separate entity from the military, operating from their new headquarters in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

“But we know what the target looks like,” Deep Blue continued, “so just ignore the yellow dots and keep your eyes peeled for a red one.”

The other members of the team — Queen and Bishop, respectively — did not add their input.

Queen was Zelda Baker, and while she pretended to be a tourist, there was no pretense to her relationship with Rook. Knight had known her before they were both recruited to Chess Team. She wasn’t just the toughest woman he’d ever met, but she was also one of the toughest human beings on the planet. Pain and suffering were like fuel in her engine. She had joined the Army to burn away the memories of her traumatic childhood, and by surviving the two-month long trial-by-fire that was US Army Ranger school — the first woman to ever do so — she had succeeded. She had emerged stronger and harder than seemed humanly possible. It had only been in the last year or so that her old emotional scars had begun to fade, and that owed in no small part to her burgeoning relationship with Rook.

The other quiet member of the team, Bishop — also known as Erik Somers — was the enormous man sitting across the café table from King. Bishop was Iranian by birth, but he had been raised from infancy in the United States by adoptive parents. That he spoke some Arabic, as well as Farsi, Dari and a smattering of other tongues common to the Middle East, was only because of hours of immersive language instruction — American English was his first language.

Like Queen, Bishop carried a lot of emotional baggage. The only thing stronger than the simmering anger that had boiled in his heart from his earliest memories, was his extraordinary self-control, but the cost for that control was a stony, silent demeanor that repelled other people like a force-field. His size and his ability to unleash that fury made him a very effective member of the team. But it left him as isolated as a monk, when it came to personal relationships.

The delicate balancing act between rage and self-control had nearly reached critical mass a few years earlier, when Manifold Genetics had injected Bishop with an experimental regenerative serum that had made him effectively invincible. An unfortunate side effect of the serum was that its regenerative properties stimulated a primal fury, which had turned most test subjects into rabid beasts. Bishop’s lifelong struggle to keep his anger in check had enabled him to do the impossible — to heal from even mortal wounds, without losing his sanity. The serum had eventually been purged from his body, evidently removing the good effects along with the bad, but the damage to his already compromised psyche would not be so easily taken away.

They had all changed a lot over the last eight years. Some of the changes had been good, like Queen’s and Rook’s deeper relationship, but they had all made sacrifices. There was really no such thing as an ordinary life when you were tasked with saving the world from things that even the US military couldn’t handle.

The present crisis was almost run-of-the-mill by comparison to their typical day at the office. A Yemeni terrorist named Hadir al-Shahri had acquired a Russian-made RA-115 tactical nuclear weapon — a one kiloton yield ‘backpack nuke.’ Hadir was a known cell leader for Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and he had personally been involved in some of the most noteworthy international terror incidents, post-9/11. AQAP was playing the long game. They were not content to merely terrorize, but rather they had their sights set on destabilizing the existing political structure of the Middle East, removing the influence of Western nations and multinational corporations and ushering in a new Islamic age. It was almost a certainty that, if Hadir had indeed purchased a nuke, he would use it. The only unanswered question was the matter of target.

Chess Team was involved in this matter for the sole reason that the information had come directly to them from a source inside the Russian government. The sale of the nuke had been bait in an operation designed to flush out terrorists in Chechnya, and unfortunately, the mouse had gotten away with the cheese. The Russians were scrambling to cover their asses, and so far they had kept the whole affair quiet, which meant that Chess Team’s informant risked exposure — fatal exposure — if the information was passed on to the international intelligence community.

Hadir had made only one mistake: he’d made a phone call to electronically transfer funds to the Russians, and then he had promptly replaced his disposable cell phone with another ‘burner’ phone. From that one call, Deep Blue had been able to pinpoint his position, and even though that phone stopped transmitting, Blue was soon able to pick up a new signal — the replacement phone. He had tracked Hadir and his purchase through the Caucasus, along the borders of Iran and Iraq, across Syria and ultimately here to the southern end of the Suez Canal.

The good news was that they knew his last location to within a square mile of the city. The bad news was that his phone had stopped transmitting, and they didn’t know if he’d already left, or where he was headed next. Was the terrorist planning to put the bomb on a ship bound for a European or American port, or would he take it in the other direction, across the Indian Ocean? Or was the Canal a feint, a bluff to hide his real intent to use the bomb against Israel or simply disappear into the Arabian desert with his prize?

“Knight, anything on the sniffers?” King asked.

On the roof, Knight had just finished deploying a bank of portable detectors capable of ‘sniffing out’ slight variations in the background level of ionizing radiation. Such variations might indicate the presence of an unshielded radio isotope, of the kind that might be used in a dirty bomb. Unfortunately, if the RA-115 was handled correctly, its small plutonium core would emit about as much radiation as a smoke alarm.

Knight checked the sniffers for any abnormally high returns, but all the readouts were consistent with the normal amount of background radiation. He zeroed them all and set them to alarm if there were any changes, before making his report. “Nega—”

Before he could get the word out, one of the sniffers began beeping softly, registering a sudden gamma spike. “Hang on. Got something in Zone Three.”

Knight did a quick visual sweep of the area. About a hundred yards away, a city block away from the main street where the team was focusing their search, someone had just opened a door. Knight squinted and the glasses responded by zooming in on the doorway. A face appeared there, someone Knight would have recognized even if a red dot had not suddenly blossomed into view above the man’s head.

It was Hadir.

A moment later, the sniffer registered another spike as the terrorist stepped out onto the street, burdened down by an enormous olive drab backpack. He headed straight for a parked car, one of the ubiquitous white Toyota Corollas that had become a fixture in the nations of the Middle East. Four more figures stepped from the doorway right behind him, and one by one, a red dot appeared above each of the men. Another icon started flashing in the display, a prompt to open and read the data file for each of the men, but Knight knew enough already. These guys were all known terrorists, they had a small nuclear device and they were on the move.

He breathed a curse as he realized his rifle was still stowed in its case. He knew he could have it put together inside of thirty seconds, but his gut told him that in thirty seconds, the bomb would be driving off.

“Targets in the open,” Knight said. “They’re getting in a vehicle, preparing to move.”

“Roger,” King replied. “Bug out.”

On the street below, the other four immediately stopped what they were doing and headed to their designated rally points — cars parked at different ends of the street that would allow them to move quickly, in just such an event. Knight swept the sniffers into his backpack, hefted the camera case and bolted from the roof.

He could still see the red icons in his display, their last known location marked and remembered by the computer, but the image was only useful now in helping them reacquire their quarry. He knew that Deep Blue was probably looking for local CCTV networks, or even real-time satellite imagery to provide them with constant updates, but those resources weren’t as readily available in a developing nation like Egypt.

Knight swung easily off a second story balcony and dropped into a back alley, two blocks away from where Hadir and the bomb had last been spotted, and three blocks from his assigned rally point, which lay in the opposite direction.

Decisions, decisions.

As he was the only member of the team to actually get eyes on Hadir, he decided the wisest course was to reestablish visual contact before the car got lost in traffic. He sprinted from the alley, forced his way through the milling pedestrians and crossed the street. The virtual display flashed, warning of an imminent collision, even as the sound of shrieking brakes and tires skidding on the pavement filled his ears, but Knight never slowed. He vaulted over a vendor’s cart and slipped through the crowd like a bead of quicksilver. He ducked into another alley, and a few seconds later he emerged a stone’s throw from the door through which Hadir had exited.

The red dot winked out. The car was gone.

He scanned the street in both directions and caught a glimpse of white moving away, perhaps two blocks to the north. And then another further down the same street.

Knight shook his head in frustration. “Lost them. Look for a white Corolla. My best guess is that they’re going north.”

“Blue?” King’s voice echoed through his head. “Give me something.”

“Northeast would put him on the main road, about half a mile away,” Deep Blue replied. “That’s the most probable route. Once there he can either go northwest, toward Cairo, or southeast, which is a short ride to the port. I’ve got the plate number of the vehicle. If you see it again, the software will recognize it faster than you can.”

“Northeast then. Rook, Queen, you take the portside. Bish and I will head toward Cairo. Knight, acquire transport and follow as you’re able.”

Knight frowned in irritation.

Cut loose without even a thank you. Oh well, it’s not like I do this for the glory.

He skidded to a stop and began scanning the street for an unsecured set of wheels — not a car, though. No way he could boost a car without getting noticed, caught and drawn and quartered. A motorcycle? That would have been nice, and a lot easier to steal, but there were none to be seen. A bicycle? A camel?

The answer screeched to a halt beside him. He turned slowly and saw a black and white Fiat sedan with a large metal frame mounted to its roof. The driver had stepped out from behind the wheel and was making an inviting gesture.

“Blue,” he muttered. “How do you say: ‘Yes, thank you, I would like a taxi,’ in Arabic?”

2

“I’ll drive!” Rook didn’t wait for Queen to protest, but dashed for the left-side door of the rented sedan, intent on taking the driver’s seat. She was fast, but he easily outpaced her, seizing the door handle like it was the brass ring on a merry-go-round.

Queen didn’t say a word. Rook thought that was a little odd since he’d been hoping for some spirited competition. She simply ran to the right-hand door, opened it and slid inside. Shaking his head, he opened his own door and dropped into the seat, one hand reaching for the keys and the other for the steering wheel. The engine roared to life and the car rabbited away from its parking slot, but Rook’s hands were still empty. Queen, seated behind the right-side steering wheel of the sedan, blew him a kiss.

“Damnit!” He punched a mostly playful fist into the dashboard. “Who puts a steering wheel on the right side?”

“You drove it here,” Queen retorted with a triumphant smile. “Blame your failing memory, not the car.”

Rook’s mouth worked as he groped for a suitable retort, but nothing came. Queen had that effect on him. She was as beautiful as she was tough, and not even the scar in the center of her forehead could diminish that. The star with a death’s head — the mark of the brutal Vietnamese People’s Liberation Army’s Death Volunteers — had been burned into her skin by a particularly sadistic Death Volunteer officer, during a mission to save the world from a pandemic virus. He had tortured her brutally before branding her, but in the end she had survived and he had not. She now wore the scar proudly, as a sign of her triumph. Rook found that strangely beautiful, too.

“Rook, if you keep your eyes on the road,” Deep Blue admonished, “instead of on Queen, you’ll double our chances of spotting the target vehicle.”

Rook straightened in his seat. “I really hate technology.”

“Now you sound like King,” Queen teased.

King’s voice immediately echoed through Rook’s head. “I heard that.”

Rook wisely kept his mouth shut and focused his attention on the mission. He understood the operational reasons for having a completely unrestricted flow of information between the team members and Deep Blue, but it would have been nice to exchange a little playful banter with his best-girl without being on public display. He couldn’t even look at her appreciatively without the others knowing. His thoughts were still safe, but it was probably only a matter of time before Deep Blue and the team’s resident techno-geek, Lewis Aleman, figured out how to wire the q-phones directly into their brains, and then nothing would be off limits.

Queen raced down the lightly-trafficked street, slowing only as they reached the intersection with the much busier 23 July Boulevard, named for the date in 1952 of the revolution that had ushered in Egyptian independence from Britain. She rode the brakes as the front end of the sedan poked out into the thoroughfare, but then she cranked the wheel to the right and punched the gas. They shot into traffic amid a squeal of tires and horn blasts.

There were faint flashes of light in the virtual environment, as their cameras scanned every single license plate on the road ahead of them. Rook squinted to get a zoom-view of the road, even though he wasn’t really sure what to look for. Knight had said it was a white Corolla, but that was about as helpful as saying water was wet. Every other car in the Middle East — including the rental he and Queen were now riding in — was a white Toyota Corolla.

“Technology,” he grumbled again. “It’s no substitute for—”

There was a flash in the display and a red icon appeared above a barely discernible white speck, far ahead of them and traveling in the same direction. Next to it was a readout of the distance to the target—0.56 miles, an exact GPS coordinate that kept changing and a compass azimuth of SE 148 degrees.

“Gotcha!” Queen said.

“Like I was saying,” Rook continued, barely missing a beat, “we’re becoming too reliant on these gizmos. We’ll lose our edge.”

Queen ignored him and poured on the speed, weaving through the mostly unregulated traffic and generally giving no indication that her edge had in any way been dulled.

“Roger,” King said. “We’re turning around, en route to your location. Don’t press too hard. If he gets an itchy trigger finger, we’re all toast.”

The red icon veered right, following the road, and was abruptly lost from view, but Queen’s assertive driving brought them quickly to the same bend where they were able to reacquire the target, before it could perceptibly deviate from the computer’s prediction. Hadir appeared to be headed for Port Taufiq, at the mouth of the canal, presumably to put the bomb on a ship.

The distance-to-target indicator showed less than five hundred yards, and the numbers ticked off steadily at about five yards per second. Rook did some mental math — they were going about twelve miles per hour faster than Hadir’s car. They’d catch up in less than two minutes. “Might want to back off a bit,” he suggested. “We’ve got him.”

Suddenly the numbers became a blur… 450… 375… 225. “He’s stopped,” Rook said, unnecessarily. Queen was seeing the same thing he was.

“No. He’s turning.”

After just a second, the numbers started going the other way, as Hadir’s car sped off in a new direction — almost due east.

“Where the hell is he going?”

Rook meant it rhetorically, but Deep Blue provided an answer nonetheless. “This road runs parallel to the canal for nearly its entire length. There are only a few turn-offs, and all the main arteries lead back to Cairo. But further north there are bridges, tunnels and ferry crossings, and on the other side he could get on the road that goes all the way to Gaza.”

“Israel, then.”

“I don’t think my taxi driver will take me that far,” Knight mumbled, clearly trying to keep from being overheard.

“That makes no sense,” King said. “If he was planning to hit Israel, he wouldn’t have bothered coming all the way to Egypt.”

“He may have planned to double back all along,” Deep Blue countered. “This trip to Suez might be his way of leaving a false trail.”

“That bomb is a hot potato. Every minute he holds onto it, he risks being caught, and he knows it. We’re missing something.”

Queen reached the left turn Hadir had taken and followed without slowing. The car slid a little, but she accelerated out of the skid and shot through the oncoming traffic, accompanied by a veritable symphony of irate honks.

“They must love Jesus,” Rook remarked, and when Queen shot him a disparaging glance, he pointed forward. “Eyes on the road, dear. Hands at ten and two o’clock.”

Hadir’s car was now just 500 yards ahead and easy to pick out, because traffic on the northward bound lane was relatively light. There were just four cars separating them now. Queen eased off the gas until the range meter stabilized at 450.

“We’ve turned around and are heading your way,” King said. “Maintain visual contact. We might need to intercept on the move.”

“I’ll need a pick up,” Knight said.

“Negative.” King’s voice was flat and final. “We don’t have time to stop. You’ll have to sit this one out, Knight.”

There was a long silence, and Rook knew that everyone else was thinking the same thing he was.

What. The. Fuck?

Stopping for the thirty seconds it might take to pick up Knight was hardly going to make a difference, while sidelining their designated ‘long distance operator’—the one member of the team they were most likely to need if they were going to take Hadir out and not get vaporized in the process — was patently foolish. King had to know that.

What is he thinking?

The fact that no one said anything, not even Deep Blue, felt like a confirmation of Rook’s suspicions.

King was different.

3

Bishop kept his eyes on the road ahead, despite the urge to glance at King. Off in the distance, he could see the chess piece icons that marked Rook’s and Queen’s location, about three miles away, along with the red dot that was their ultimate target. He unconsciously squeezed the steering wheel in his powerful hands and pressed down a little harder on the accelerator pedal.

It would have surprised Rook to know that Bishop completely supported King’s decision to leave Knight behind. There was a time and place for caution, and this was not it.

King spoke again. “Hadir has a plan, and I don’t think it’s anything we’ve considered yet. Why would he come here?”

An uncomfortable silence followed, as if the other parties to the conversation were having trouble switching gears. Then King spoke again. “He’s going to take out the canal. It’s the single most important link for international shipping in the hemisphere. If he takes it out, he disrupts the flow of oil to all of Europe and America. Shipping it around Africa or across the Pacific would send gas prices soaring.”

“A move like that would hurt the Arab states just as much as the West,” Deep Blue said. “If they can’t get their oil to market, they lose their most important source of revenue.”

“That might be exactly what Hadir wants. Cut the strings that tie the Saudis and other OPEC nations to the West, and those governments won’t last long. The Arab Spring will sweep the oil emirs out of power, and open the way for a Muslim theocracy.”

“If he uses the bomb in Egypt, he’ll be killing Arabs,” Queen pointed out. “Not a great way to start a revolution.”

“Can a little backpack nuke even do that much damage?” Rook asked.

“King might be on to something,” Deep Blue said. “The section of the canal between Suez and Timsah Lake is less than a half a mile wide. The RA-115 has a one kiloton yield. That’s certainly big enough to trigger a slide, which would block the canal. The radiation would make repairs impossible in the near term. The area is lightly populated, so civilian casualties would be kept to a minimum. Hadir might consider that an acceptable trade-off.”

“That’s what he’s going to do,” King said with that same note of certainty. “And he’s doing it right now. Step on it, Bish.”

Bishop didn’t need the admonition. He was deftly threading their rental car through traffic and was nearing the turn that would send them onto the road paralleling the canal.

“I can catch him,” Queen said. “Force him off the road.”

“Negative,” King answered, sharply. “Wait for us to catch up to you.”

That did surprise Bishop. Queen and Rook were in the best position to stop Hadir. Sure it was risky, but the risk would be the same when he and King got there. Had he misread King’s decisiveness in deciding to leave Knight behind?

He pushed the thoughts from his mind as he took the turn. In all their years of serving together, he had never had cause to question King’s judgment. He wasn’t about to start now.

The target was now slightly less than two miles ahead, but if they were going to catch up to it in the next few minutes, it would mean pushing the rented sedan like it was a Formula One race car. He applied steady pressure to the gas pedal, watching as both the speedometer and the tachometer needles started moving into rarely visited points on their respective dials. After only about a minute of running at over five thousand RPMs, the engine temperature needle also started rising, but one important meter was running in the opposite direction — they were rapidly closing the distance to Queen and Rook, and more importantly, Hadir and his bomb.

“Shit,” Rook said. “He’s turning… pulling off.”

“Blue, overlay the sat photo,” King snapped. A semi-transparent image, like the heads-up display of a fighter jet, appeared in Bishop’s vision. It showed a satellite map of the area through which they were driving, with the icons now shown as points in two-dimensional space. The red dots indicating Hadir’s car had left the road, crossed traffic and pulled into an open sandy area on the west side of the highway, across the road from the canal. Further west, three hundred yards away, the beige desert was transformed into green fields and orchards — evidence of the close proximity of human habitation.

“What is that? A dune?”

Bishop wasn’t sure what King was talking about, but with the car hurtling forward at nearly 120 miles per hour, weaving back and forth to pass slower cars and avoid being hit by oncoming traffic, he didn’t really have time to study the display more carefully. He considered taking the glasses off to have an unrestricted view, but that would mean taking one of his hands off the steering wheel, and that didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“It’s a berm, formed of material dredged from the canal,” Deep Blue explained.

“The perfect place to plant that bomb if he wants to collapse the canal.”

“He’s heading for it,” Queen said. “I’m going after him now. I can use his dust cloud for cover.”

“No. Wait for us. That’s an order.”

Bishop was too focused on the drive now to even question King’s abrupt and uncharacteristically authoritarian shift. On the map display, the little red dots moved away from the Queen and Rook icons, and stopped at the base of a low hill that was too perfectly straight to be anything but manmade. Abruptly, it split into five separate dots — the terrorists now tracking as individual signatures — all of whom began moving up the side of the hill on foot. Their motion barely registered now, and in the time it took for them to crest the hill, Bishop reached the spot where Queen and Rook had pulled off the road just ahead of them.

Rook had the hood of the rental car open and was pretending to tinker with the engine but was in reality covertly watching Hadir’s progress. Queen was rooting around in the car’s trunk, as if searching for tools, but the tools in this instance were a case of Uzi submachine guns. In addition to the noise and flash suppressors, each gun was equipped with a holographic sight that was wirelessly synched to the user’s q-phone and glasses. When active, targeting crosshairs would show exactly where the bullet would go, so the weapon could be fired from almost any position, even around a blind corner. The system also automatically adjusted for the ballistic trajectory of the bullet over distances, which was particularly useful for long-ranged weapons like Knight’s Intervention, but not so much for the Uzi, which had an effective range of 200 yards.

Bishop and King retrieved their own Uzis from the trunk of their car, and hustled to rendezvous with Queen and Rook. The latter glanced back. “Honey, the auto club guys are here.”

Queen left the trunk open and came up to join them. Rook took one of the Uzis from her and wrinkled his nose in irritation. “A pea shooter to save the world from nuclear fire,” he said, with all the gravity of a Shakespearian soliloquy. “Blue, why is it you can give us all these fancy gizmos, but can’t come up with a way to sneak the girls past the TSA?”

‘The girls’ were a pair of Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum semi-automatic pistols, Rook’s pride and joy. When the mission called for a covert insertion, such as a Zodiac launched from a submarine or a HALO jump, the pistols were always holstered at his hips. Lately however, the team was increasingly more reliant on commercial airlines to get them wherever they needed to go. So when it came to weapons, they were all forced to make do with whatever Deep Blue could procure for them on the local black market.

The Israeli designed sub-guns wouldn’t have been Bishop’s first choice for the mission either. He liked something a little bigger, like the venerable Browning M-2 .50 caliber machine gun on a portable tripod, but Uzis were easy to acquire in this part of the world. They were anonymous enough that, in the event that something went horribly wrong and they were captured or killed, there would be nothing to directly tie them to the US military. Although, given their current status, that was far less of a concern than it had once been. The Chess Team had almost completely cut its ties to the military, and Bishop wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing or not. Autonomy had come at a price: no logistical support and no safety net. Despite the vast resources that Deep Blue had placed at their disposal, if they wanted to go somewhere, they had to get there on their own, and if things went FUBAR — military lingo for ‘fucked up beyond all recognition’—well, then they were out of luck.

“What’s the plan?” Queen asked.

Bishop squinted toward the rise. The map disappeared, and instead he saw a close-up view of the hillside. All of the red dots were still visible, but the terrorists to which they belonged were eclipsed from view. “No lookout,” he murmured.

“We’ll go in on foot,” King said. “Rook, take the right flank. Bishop, go left. Establish visual contact and positive real-time targeting. We’ll designate priority targets once in position, and then on my signal, we will take them out.”

Queen cleared her throat. “Ah, forgetting someone?”

King shook his head. “Queen, you’ll be the reserve element.”

“Excuse me?”

Bishop winced a little at the acid in her tone, but he was even more surprised by King’s decision. It was one thing to leave Knight behind because they were in a hurry, but leaving Queen in the rear with the gear made absolutely no sense.

King, however, just nodded in her direction. “Cover our approach. If anyone pops their head up, take them out. Once we secure the bomb, bring your car up to the base of the berm, so we can get it out of here ASAP. Okay, let’s do this.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but simply made an overhand gesture — the hand signal for ‘move out’—and broke into a trot, leaving the rest to stare at each other in disbelief. Queen finally broke the awkward silence. “Better get moving.”

Bishop turned away immediately and set off after King, veering to the left as he had been directed. He kept his gaze fixed on the slope ahead. King had already reached the base of the rise and was starting up the steep slope, following the distinctive trail left by the terrorists. Bishop wondered whether King would wait for Rook and him to catch up, or if perhaps it had been King’s plan all along to leave them behind and take the objective single-handedly. It bothered Bishop that he couldn’t easily dismiss that speculation.

He was halfway to his goal when he heard the helicopter.

For a moment, the sound of turbines and rotors didn’t quite reach his conscious mind. Helicopters weren’t uncommon around cities, and particularly since he’d been in the military, he found that he often tuned them out. It wasn’t until he heard Queen comment that he actually started paying attention.

“Helo incoming.”

Bishop swung his head around and quickly found the approaching aircraft. Queen had already tagged it, and Deep Blue had supplied ancillary data to identify it as a Bell Industries 206 JetRanger. By itself, that meant very little — with over seven thousand produced in its nearly fifty-year production run, not including numerous military and civilian variants, the JetRanger was arguably the most commonly used helicopter in the world. Bishop himself was certified to fly one. Far more revealing was the fact that it was painted a flat desert beige, with nothing at all to indicate who owned or operated the craft, not even identifying numbers on its tail rotor boom.

The helicopter was still a mile out, coming out of the south, but there seemed little question that it was heading their way.

“I don’t like this,” Queen said. “Bringing the car up now.”

“Negative. Stay put.”

“Sorry, King. Did not read your last. Queen out!”

A grim smile touched Bishop’s lips. It was a small act of defiance, but one that had been sorely missing. King might have been acting squirrelly, but Queen was her old self. Nevertheless, the situation remained unchanged. Hadir still had the bomb, and they had no idea whether the crew of the helicopter was friend or foe.

A cloud of dust marked Queen’s location and movement as effectively as the icon in the glasses’ display. She was making a beeline straight for Bishop, who was closest to the approaching aircraft.

King spared Bishop the dilemma of having to decide whether to join Queen in her little mutiny. “All right. I don’t like this either. Queen, if you’ve fixed your commo issue—” The exasperation in his tone came through loud and clear. “—pick up Bishop and Rook and get clear. Draw that helo off, if you can. I’m going to continue to the objective.”

Bishop shook his head, but didn’t comment. The helicopter was close enough that he could zoom in on it and make out the silhouettes of its occupants. The side door was open, revealing one of the passengers, a man wearing what looked like desert camouflage fatigues, his face swathed in a kefiyah-style scarf. The man was turned sideways in his seat so that his body faced out, and Bishop had no trouble distinguishing the rifle he cradled in his arms.

Bishop broke his long silence. “I think these guys might be military.”

“Ours?” Rook asked.

“Not sure. Probably not. Could be Russians trying to roll up their missing nuke.”

Through some trick of the Doppler effect, the helicopter seemed to pick up speed as it approached, and then it was past Bishop’s location and continuing toward the hillside. An instant later, the report of a gun was heard, then another, and still more. Five shots rang out, all in the space of about three seconds, after which the helicopter began to descend, dropping behind the berm like a satellite over the horizon.

Bishop stared at the empty space where the aircraft had been. The rotor noise was muted, echoing weirdly off the atmosphere. There was a crunch of tires on sand as Queen pulled the car up alongside him, but before he could make a move toward it, there was a change in the pitch of the sound, and the helicopter rose into view once more. It smoothly banked away from them and headed west, quickly disappearing into the distance.

Bishop didn’t get in the car. Instead, he sprinted forward and scrambled up the hill of loose sand. He was faintly aware that Rook and Queen were doing the same, and thirty seconds later, they had joined King at the top of the berm, staring down at the carnage beyond.

Hadir al-Shahri and his accomplices lay in a tight circle, motionless, awash in a small sea of blood. There had only been five shots from the shooters in the helicopter, one bullet for each of the terrorists, but the bodies were practically shredded, as if they’d been hit by close range shotgun blasts.

There was no sign of the bomb.

“What the…?”

Rook’s voice trailed off, so King finished for him.

“Fuck.”

4

The heavily armored, black SUV, with three men inside, cruised south along the eastern boundary of Hyde Park. All three occupants gazed out the windows at the passing cars, people and scenery. Two of the men scanned for potential threats — cars moving up too fast, places where snipers might be concealed — while the third was simply enjoying the ride. His head bobbed back and forth as he admired locations he had previously viewed only in photographs or as names on maps.

Not only was this his first time in London, it was his first trip more than four degrees north of the equator. His travels, up to this point, had been limited to the nations surrounding the country of his birth. That country that had changed names several times during his lifetime: the Belgian Congo, Zaire and since the late 1990s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was his dream that it might see yet another name change.

The man’s name was Joseph Mulamba. The son of a Luba farmer, Mulamba had lived much of his life on the banks of the Congo River in the city of Kisangani. It had been called Stanleyville when his parents had moved there almost fifty years earlier, named for the famed British journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had founded a trading post there, marking the navigable terminus of Africa’s second longest river. It was an intense interest in Stanley that had brought Mulamba to London, though not for the reason that most people would have suspected.

As was the case for many of the native Africans living in the vast Congo basin, Mulamba’s opinion of Stanley was complicated. Stanley was a white man, and a foreigner. In a quest for wealth and glory, he had arrogantly claimed a huge portion of Africa for foreign nations. Like Christopher Columbus, who by virtue of being the first European explorer to ‘discover’ a land that had already been inhabited for thousands of years, Stanley’s claims rested solely upon a racial conceit: he was the first because he was the first white. And like Columbus, historians saw him as a divisive figure, responsible for the exploitation of a land that already belonged to someone else, and for the enslavement of the native inhabitants. His critics pointed to widely reported incidents of brutality directed at the porters in his expeditions. His contemporary, Sir Richard Francis Burton, opined that ‘Stanley shoots Negroes as if they were monkeys.’ Yet, despite these accusations, many Africans in the region credited Stanley with bringing civilization to the Congo and opening it up to the modern world, in a way that would not have been otherwise possible.

Mulamba however wasn’t interested in Stanley’s reputation.

The SUV turned right and headed down Kensington Avenue, along the southern edge of the park. Ahead and to the left the curving dome of Royal Albert Hall was visible, like a moon rising from the midst of the city. But Mulamba’s goal lay closer, among the long row of elegant brick residences, many of them with historic pedigrees.

The vehicle pulled to a stop at the corner of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road, in front of a house known as Lowther Lodge. Built in the latter quarter of the 19^th century, the stately brick edifice had, for more than eighty years, been the headquarters of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. The Society, which had been in existence for nearly two centuries, had counted Charles Darwin among its many members, as well as famed polar explorers Ernest Shackleton and the ill-fated Robert Falcon Scott, as well as the legendary Everest conqueror, Sir Edmund Hillary. Scottish missionary David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley were also part of the Royal Geographical Society’s proud history.

Mulamba’s fellow passenger — a former Royal Marine sergeant named Ian Woodhouse — got out first, firmly closing his door. He scanned up and down the street for a moment before rapping on the front window. The driver — another British military veteran named Bryan Clarke — turned off the engine and got out, likewise closing the door and checking his side of the vehicle before returning the signal. Only then was Mulamba allowed to get out. He thanked the two members of his security detail and then took a position between them for the short traverse to the public entrance to Lowther Lodge.

As Mulamba entered the lobby, Clarke fell back, taking up a position at the front of the building, where he could keep an eye on the SUV. Mulamba and Woodhouse continued inside and approached the reception desk.

The receptionist, a young man with an earnest and pinched scholarly expression, glanced first at the imposing figure of Woodhouse, and then at Mulamba. “May I help you?”

“Thank you,” Mulamba replied. He spoke fluent French, along with Swahili, Tshiluba and Lingala, but he was less confident with English. “I am Joseph Mulamba. I am here for Henry Morton Stanley.”

The receptionist gave a polite, if somewhat patronizing smile. “I’m afraid you’ve just missed him… by a hundred and ten years, actually.”

Mulamba smiled as well — a polite smile that hid his irritation. “I understand. I want to read about Mr. Stanley. In your… bibliotheque.”

“You mean our library, sir? I’m afraid our reading room is reserved for members of the Society.” The young man paused, as if recognizing that he had made a potentially embarrassing assumption. “Are you… er, do you have your membership credentials?”

“I am not a member of the Society,” Mulamba confessed.

The receptionist offered a sympathetic frown.

“May I join?”

“Certainly, sir. We have a variety of membership options. You can learn about them all at our website.”

Mulamba was having more difficulty now managing his frustration. “Please, I do not have a great amount of time. May I join today?”

“What, right now? Well, I suppose we could do that. Let me just print you off an application. May I presume that you’ll be selecting our ordinary membership?”

Woodhouse leaned over the desk, and fixed the receptionist in his laser-like stare. “Here, now, mate? Have you got a supervisor we could talk to? Someone who can get things done?”

The young man shrank in his chair, but tried his best not appear intimidated. “Sir, I assure you—”

“You know who this is?” pushed Woodhouse, jerking a thumb at his charge. “The bleedin’ President of the Congo, that’s who.”

Mulamba put a restraining hand on Woodhouse’s arm. “Please, Ian. I do not wish to…”

He was groping for the right word, when a paunchy but well-dressed middle-aged man seemed to materialize beside the reception desk. “Did I hear correctly? Are you Mr. Joseph Mulamba?” The man did not wait for a reply, but reached out and began vigorously pumping Mulamba’s hand. “Jonathan Grigsby, sir. Assistant Director of the RGS. This is a rare and unexpected honor, sir. I wish that you would have phoned ahead so that we could arrange a more fitting reception.”

“Mr. Woodhouse advised me not to publish my itinerary.”

“Mr. Wood — ah, your bodyguard, of course. Well, it’s no matter.” He made a shooing gesture to the receptionist, who quickly surrendered his desk. “The full resources of the Society are at your disposal, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Grigsby. I wish to see the papers of Henry Morton Stanley.”

“Of course,” beamed Grigsby. “We have a full collection of all his published writings in our digital archive. You are welcome to use one of the computers in the reading room, or if you like, I will arrange for you to have full access to the archive off-site so that you can peruse the information at you leisure.”

“Forgive me, Mr. Grigsby, but I am not speaking of the published works. I would like to see Stanley’s original diaries.”

Grigsby’s enthusiasm slipped a notch. “Ah, well let me see what we have. You do know that most of Sir Henry’s journals are housed at the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa?”

“I was not aware of that.” Mulamba frowned. “The portion I wish to read relates to the search for Dr. David Livingstone. Would that be in your collection?”

“The original?” A crease appeared in Grigsby’s forehead. He seated himself at the terminal and began tapping on the keyboard. Minutes passed in an uncomfortable silence, and at one point, Woodhouse caught Mulamba’s eye and tapped his watch meaningfully. We’ve been here too long.

Woodhouse was not merely being paranoid. While the newly elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was popular with most of his countrymen, his bold vision for the future of his nation — and for all of Central Africa — was not embraced by all. He had enemies, a small but highly motivated minority of his countrymen, who feared that his promised reforms would somehow undermine their wealth and power.

Ironically, he felt much safer here, abroad with just two personal protection agents, than he did in the Palais de la Nation, his office in Kinshasa, where he would be surrounded by soldiers and bodyguards, any one of whom might secretly be plotting his assassination.

“Ah,” announced Grigsby. “The original diaries containing his record of the search for Livingstone are in the collection in Belgium, but we do have scans of the document in our archives.”

“What about the missing pages?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Stanley removed several pages from his diary,” Mulamba explained. “Including the entries where he described the actual meeting with Livingstone. Do you have those pages?”

“Well, no. As you’ve said, those are… well… rather missing.”

Mulamba sagged in defeat. “I had hoped that perhaps those pages would have found their way into your collection.”

“Sadly, no. If they still exist, they might be in the museum in Belgium. They aren’t on record, but perhaps they were catalogued incorrectly.”

“Oui. Yes, that is a possibility worth exploring. Thank you, Mr. Grigsby.” Mulamba extended a hand, which Grigsby shook, and then Woodhouse was guiding the president back toward the exit. The bodyguard ducked his head out to check with his counterpart, and then held the door open for Mulamba.

The two bodyguards bracketed him for the short walk back to the SUV. Even though the vehicle had not been out of his sight the entire time, Clarke did a quick walk around the exterior, checking to verify that no one had tampered with it. When he finally gave the all clear, Woodhouse opened the rear door and gestured for Mulamba to get in.

“Thank you, Ian. I apologize for wasting your time.”

The bodyguard smiled. “As long as your checks cash, my time is yours to—”

Woodhouse’s head suddenly split open like a ripe melon, splattering blood, bone chips and brain matter all over the interior of the SUV.

Mulamba was too stunned to even move. He was no stranger to violence of this sort. He had witnessed countless atrocities during his childhood. Yet this was different. This wasn’t a border village or a back alley in Kisangani. It was London. This was the civilized world. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen here.

Woodhouse fell onto the floorboard and then slid back onto the sidewalk, as if his bones had turned to liquid. From the corner of his eye, Mulamba saw Clarke drop, similarly stricken. It occurred to Mulamba that he ought to pull the door shut and engage the locks. That would be enough. He would be safe inside the armored vehicle, safe from whoever had killed his bodyguard, but before he could move, a figure in a red hooded sweatshirt thrust his head and shoulders into the vehicle and brandished a pistol.

“Don’t move,” the hooded man warned. “Just be cool and you’ll live.”

Mulamba managed a weak nod. The man got in and pulled the door shut. Another similarly attired man opened the front door and slid into the driver’s seat, and without saying a word started the engine.

As the SUV pulled away, continuing down Kensington Gore, Mulamba barely noticed the scenery passing by.

5

Domenick Boucher sat back in his chair and let his gaze sweep around his office. The room had a comfortable familiarity to it. Even though much of his working day was spent on the move — visiting various directorate heads and their personnel, leading briefings in the conference rooms and the crisis center, shuttling back and forth between the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon and other destinations throughout Washington — this space was his. It was, in every sense save the literal, home.

Boucher had occupied this office, and held the title of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, for nine years, which meant he had been leading the organization longer than anyone in its sixty-six years of operation. That was longer even than the legendary Allan Dulles, who had overseen some of the most dramatic and controversial intelligence operations in the nation’s history, culminating in the disastrous Bay of Pigs incident. Boucher would not have quite such a notorious legacy.

He had been thinking a lot about his legacy lately, ever since announcing his plans to retire.

Although he would not formally leave his post until the end of the month, most of the day-to-day operations were already being overseen by his interim successor, Danielle Rudin, the woman who would hold the job of acting D/CIA until the Senate approved President Chambers’s pick for the job. Given the way Washington was functioning lately, that might be a long process. But politics were no longer Boucher’s concern. He was merely a figurehead now, a placeholder.

It was a rare thing indeed for someone to hold an appointed post for so many years. Most agency directors lasted a year or two at most. Some were brought down by scandal. A few had chosen to fall on their swords — figuratively speaking — taking the blame for bad decisions made higher up the food chain. Most, however, came and went as administrations changed. Boucher had been appointed by Tom Duncan shortly after his election. When Duncan had been forced to resign from office late in his second term, Boucher had been one of the few appointees from the previous administration to keep his job, owing in no small part to his perceived role as the whistle-blower who had brought Duncan down.

No one knew, no one could ever know, that the president’s fall from grace had been carefully orchestrated by Duncan himself, along with Boucher’s help, to save the country, and indeed the entire planet, from a much greater threat.

When the scandal had finally slipped from the headlines, Boucher had been prepared to leave office as well, but the newly sworn President Chambers had implored him to stay, at least through the next election cycle. Oddly enough, it had not been Chambers’s pleas that had prompted Boucher to stay, but rather the debt he owed Tom Duncan. For although Duncan had resigned from office in disgrace and slipped out of the public eye, he had not for one second forsaken his oath to protect and defend America from all enemies. Duncan needed a friend in the administration, and Boucher was that man.

Now, more than two years into Chambers’s first full term in office, Boucher felt the time was right to shuffle off the stage, but it was going to be a big change. It was as if there was a countdown clock running in the corner of his vision wherever he looked, ticking down the time remaining before he wouldn’t ride in the elevator, sit in his chair or visit with his secretary. He felt like a bright orange leaf on a tree branch in autumn, afraid to let go, but eager to see where the wind would take him.

The hum of an incoming phone call stirred him out of his musings. A picture of the person calling was displayed on the screen of his smart phone. It was a very familiar picture, as it was identical to the framed portrait hanging on the office wall. Boucher answered before it could ring a second time.

“Good morning, Mr. President.”

“Domenick, hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” Chambers’s voice sounded weary, but that was a chronic condition for men who sat behind the Resolute Desk.

“Mr. President, for the rest of the month, there are no bad times for you to call me. Next month? Well now, that’s a different story.” Boucher tried to keep his tone light, though in fact the call had him worried. The president wasn’t the sort of person to call out of the blue and shoot the breeze. If he was calling the Director of the CIA, then it was because he needed something from the agency — needed it urgently. Also, Chambers knew that Boucher had handed over most of his duties to Rudin. That meant the president wanted something that the designated interim director could not provide.

“Glad to hear it.” It wasn’t a platitude. The president actually sounded reassured by the promise. “Do you think you could come by the office? Say, in an hour?”

It wasn’t really a question. “I’ll be there, sir.”

The president had left instructions with Stewart Hulce, his Chief of Staff, to have Boucher brought to his informal office in the study adjoining the Oval Office. Because he controlled access to the president, the White House Chief of Staff was one of the most powerful positions in the government, and Hulce took both his responsibilities and his privileges as gatekeeper very seriously. His expression indicated that he wasn’t at all pleased by this unscheduled meeting between his boss and the outgoing head of the CIA. He was even unhappier when Chambers asked him to leave them alone, but he slunk from the room without protest.

The president sank into his chair, gesturing for Boucher to sit as well. Then he skipped the customary exchange of pleasantries and got right to the point. “Have you been following this business in Africa?”

Despite having voluntarily side-lined himself, Boucher had not completely disengaged from day-to-day operations. He read and annotated the daily intelligence brief before it was forwarded to the White House, so he knew exactly what the president meant.

Approximately twenty-one hours earlier, Joseph Mulamba, the newly elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — not to be confused, Boucher had pointed out in the margins of the paper, with the neighboring Republic of Congo — had been abducted off a London street while on a state visit. The police had no leads and no knowledge of whether Mulamba was even still alive. Within a few hours of the incident, General Patrice Velle, the chief of the Congolese Army, had marshaled his troops in the eastern city of Kisangani and declared himself the acting president. The cities of the DRC were on a knife’s edge and poised to slip into chaos. This was actually a better state of affairs than what was happening in the eastern provinces, where the smoldering coals of ancient tribal feuds were being fanned into a fresh wave of ethnic violence. Further complicating matters, several of the stateless guerilla armies that roamed the Congo rain forest — really nothing more than well-armed criminal gangs made up of legions of indoctrinated child soldiers — were swarming out of the jungle, attacking rural villages and outposts.

Boucher let out a soft sigh. This was the kind of stuff he wouldn’t miss at all. “I am, sir. I believe I added a footnote or two to the brief.”

“Is there anything we can do about it?”

The question caught Boucher off guard. “Sir?”

Chambers drew in a breath. “You were there, at CIA, during the Clinton administration, weren’t you Domenick?”

“Yes sir.” Back then, he’d been a senior operations officer. It was hard to believe he’d come so far in such a short time.

“Do you know what Clinton said was the biggest regret of his presidency? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t that business with the intern and the cigar.”

Even if he hadn’t known the answer, Boucher would have been able to guess from the context. “Rwanda.”

“We sat on our hands and kicked our heels, and a million people were slaughtered.”

Boucher didn’t respond. He understood, better than most, the sort of horrors that were loose in the world. He also understood how political realities could get in the way of the most honorable intentions.

Just six months before the events in Rwanda, an attempt by the US government to intervene in a similar humanitarian crisis in Somalia had led to a two-day long battle, in which two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, eighteen American soldiers were killed and one was taken prisoner. The bodies of the slain were desecrated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The images of these atrocities were dutifully recorded and broadcast by the news media, and many Americans began to publicly question why their sons were getting killed trying to save a bunch of ungrateful savages. With the bitter taste of that disaster still in its mouth, the administration had all but ignored the unfolding genocide in Rwanda, and innocent people had died.

Unfortunately, twenty years and two wars later, the attitude of the American public remained largely the same, especially with respect to Africa. Their antipathy was understandable. Despite numerous humanitarian missions and billions of dollars in foreign aid packages, nothing ever seemed to change.

Chambers regarded Boucher from across the desk for several long seconds. Finally, it was he that broke the uncomfortable silence. “You know something, Domenick? You’re the first person I’ve talked to who didn’t have a ready excuse for our failure.”

Boucher spread his hands. “I’m sure you’ve already heard all the reasons why we didn’t do more, and why we probably shouldn’t get involved the next time it happens. From a pragmatic viewpoint, they are perfectly correct reasons.”

“Pragmatically speaking,” said the president. “It always comes back to that. My opponents in Congress say that until we can put our own house in order, we’ve got no business trying to help the Third World.”

Boucher winced at the dated term. ‘Third World’ was a holdover of the Cold War era, when nations were divided into ‘worlds’ based on how they fit into the global chess game between the superpowers. The Western nations were the First World, the Communist powers were the Second and the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Central America, who were pawns in the struggle, were the Third World. Despite the largely political definitions, ‘Third World’ had become synonymous with poverty, squalor and corruption.

“Pragmatism is cold comfort when millions of lives are in the balance,” conceded Boucher. “It’s a little like saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t rescue you from drowning until I finish waxing my car.’”

The president chuckled softly at the apt metaphor. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

“It’s easy for me to say it. I’ve already packed my office. You have to worry about a re-election campaign.”

“And if I lose that campaign, I’ll lose whatever ability I have to make a difference in the world.”

Boucher almost laughed aloud at that. Chambers’s predecessor was proof positive that you didn’t have to be president to save the world.

“Not very many people know what I’m about to tell you,” the president went on. “And for now, it’s best to keep it that way. You know that Joseph Mulamba was kidnapped in London. What you might not know is the underlying reason for his state visit.”

“I just assumed he was looking for foreign aid.”

“In a manner of speaking.” The president drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, as if trying to decide how to reveal his secret. “What do you know about the African Union?”

“It’s sort of like the United Nations. A treaty organization designed to promote peace and security among the African nations. They’ve done a lot to advance human rights and combat the spread of AIDS, but they’re sort of a paper tiger, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

“What if I were to tell you that Joseph Mulamba wants to give it some real teeth?”

Boucher narrowed his gaze. “Just what exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“President Mulamba intends to transform the African Union into a legitimate federal authority.”

Boucher leaned forward in his chair. “Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. He wants to create an African federation?”

“The United States of Africa,” the president said, almost reverently.

Boucher shook his head. “It won’t work. It will never work.”

“I believe differently. Mulamba was in London to meet with the Prime Minister to get the Brits on board. His next stop was to be here, and I was going to pledge the support of the United States of America.”

“Sir, with respect, the nations of Africa would never agree to this. There are so many reasons why this would never work.”

“Mulamba presented a very persuasive argument to suggest otherwise. Look, I didn’t ask you here to debate this or to explain myself.”

“Then respectfully sir, why did you ask me here?”

“Because I want this to succeed.” Chambers took another deep breath. “With Mulamba missing and probably dead, the odds of this happening are shrinking with each passing second. His legal successor, Gerard Okoa supports the plan, but the army is divided. If this General Velle takes power, that will be the end of it. I’ve drafted a resolution asking Congress to send American forces to supplement UN peacekeepers in the Congo. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to fight to make it happen, and that will take some time, which is something we don’t have.”

“You are the Commander in Chief. You don’t need Congress—”

“If I act unilaterally… Well, I might be out of a job a lot sooner than the next election.”

“Go public with it. Tell the American people what you’ve told me. Tell them how we’ll be saving millions of lives.”

The president shook his head sadly. “That’s a nice idea. I suggested it to Stewart. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Mr. President, it’s Africa. No one cares about Africa.’”

“The American people just might surprise you, sir. Let them decide.”

“You might be right. God knows, I hope you are. But I can’t wait for that to happen. So, I ask you again, is there anything we can do about it? Do you have any assets we can send in, something off the books, just to hold things together long enough to give this a chance?”

Boucher was impressed by Chambers’s sincerity. He had never really thought of the president in any terms except as Tom Duncan’s replacement, and Duncan was a hard act to follow. Even in defeat, Duncan was formidable and Chambers had none of Duncan’s real world experience or savvy. Now Boucher found himself wondering whether there was more to Chambers, something that most politicians sacrificed along their journey to the top: compassion.

But the answer was still going to be ‘no.’

No matter how much he wanted to help, the Agency simply didn’t have anything to offer. As the Chief of Staff had so aptly pointed out, no one cared about Africa, or at least not sub-Saharan Africa, far removed from the influence of Islamic extremists, who were the latest hot-button national security issue. Even if he had assets in place — and he didn’t — he would still have to answer to Congress about how the people were used and the money spent. Not even a pension and a gold watch would immunize him against that. There was, quite simply, nothing he could do.

That was why it came as such a surprise when he heard himself say: “I’ll see what I can do.”

6

Monique Favreau was in love.

It took every ounce of her self-control to keep her hands in her lap during the flight. She wanted so badly to touch… to fondle the object of her infatuation. If not for the presence of her traveling companions, she almost certainly would have done so. But she was their leader, and it wouldn’t do for her subordinates to see her behaving in such a way.

Her men didn’t seem to share her fascination with the prize. Perhaps they were overawed by the presence of so much destructive power, terrified at being so close to instantaneous death. Favreau wasn’t the least bit fearful. The possibility of getting turned to ash was something to which they should have been accustomed. They routinely carried blocks of plastic explosives in their backpacks for use in breaching doors or for improvising claymore mines. An accidental explosion that might kill them, along with anyone else in a hundred yard radius, was not outside the realm of possibility, yet they didn’t seem to dwell on that outcome. This was no different. It was merely a question of scope. As Favreau saw it, the weapon she now possessed didn’t really kill faster or leave a person any deader than mishandling a block of C-4, so why be afraid of it? She didn’t fear it at all. So much power, and it was hers to use as she pleased.

When the Gulfstream V private jet finally landed at the not quite charmingly rustic airport in Kisangani and slowed to a halt near the terminal building, she immediately hefted her new prize onto her back, and exited the short flight of stairs to the tarmac. The thing was tremendously heavy, and although she was in excellent physical shape, she felt the strain in her thighs and knees, and in the soles of her feet. But she did not for a moment consider asking someone else to carry it. The ordeal was, in its own way, as exhilarating as it was exhausting.

With a bearing that was as erect and as confident as she could muster, she strode to the second of three waiting Russian-made VPK-3927 Volk armored infantry vehicles that were lined up at the edge of the runway. The vehicles would transport Favreau and her team to the nearby military camp, where Lieutenant General Patrice Velle had promoted himself from Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — to President of the country.

Although it was the third largest city in the country, boasting a population of nearly a million people, Kisangani occupied only about ten square miles on the northern bank of the Congo River. It was a short journey from the airport to the military camp, barely enough time for Favreau to make the necessary modifications to her prize, which mostly involved rigging a connection to the Volk’s electrical system. A constant supply of power was essential to her prize’s operation. Part of the prodigious weight of the device was its battery backup, which allowed it to be unplugged for transport, but like all batteries, it was only good for a few hours. She left the device in the Volk, with the engine running to ensure that the battery received a full charge, and she entered the headquarters building from which General Velle now presided over the eastern half of his country.

In her fifteen years of working abroad, first as an agent for the DGSE — the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, France’s premiere foreign intelligence service — and subsequently in her current position, as the director of operations for the private security agency Executive Solutions International, she had dealt with more than her share of tin-pot military dictators. Velle was no exception to the norm. He was a big man, a natural alpha, but his outward appearance was so cliché it seemed like self-parody. He wore camouflage fatigues decorated like a dress uniform, with shoulder braids and a full rack of medals and ribbons, which were far more impressive than his actual military career. His command center looked more like a throne room, and he was surrounded by toadying sycophants he called his ‘advisors,’ but who only advised him to do whatever he pleased.

When he saw her, a hungry, predatory smile split his fleshy face. “Miss Monique,” he said. “You’ve come back to us! We have so missed your delightful presence.”

Velle made no effort to mask the sarcasm in his voice, and Favreau was not naïve enough to think that he was merely being flirtatious. Even in her combat uniform, she was stunningly beautiful, at least by Western standards. She was tall and lithe, with long straight black hair and full lips, but that counted for little with Velle. Like many powerful men, he was instinctively wary of women, especially attractive women, whom he feared might use their sexuality to bewitch and enslave him. Favreau however, did not need to rely on her feminine wiles to control Velle.

“General Velle. It has been brought to my attention that you have not yet dealt with the situation in the northern Kivu region. We had an agreement. The scientific expedition is trying to find a way to recover the natural gas deposits at the bottom of Lake Kivu. If they do that, then the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will have no use for the services my client so generously offers them. Nor will they have much use for you as their leader. You must deal with them, immediately.”

Velle made a dismissive gesture. “Killing a few scientists in Nord-Kivu won’t put me in Kinshasa.”

Favreau fixed him with a Medusa stare. “Ignoring the requests of the people who are making your little coup possible, will most certainly not put you in Kinshasa.”

“What have you done for me that I could not have done myself?” he scoffed.

“I assume you mean aside from removing Joseph Mulamba from power?”

Velle snorted. “So you claim, but how do I know for sure? I have only your word. The news reports say that he has been abducted. He’s not even dead. Bring me his head, and then we will talk about Kivu.”

“As the democratically elected leader of your country, he is far too valuable alive.” She kept her gaze focused on him so that there would be no confusion about what she meant. “Especially if other arrangements do not work out as planned.”

“Your employers—” He stressed the word as if to remind her that she was merely a lackey, running errands. “—put me in charge for a reason. They need me to run this place, so don’t waste your breath on empty threats.”

Velle did not look as though he felt very threatened. A firmer hand was called for. Favreau shrugged. “A monkey could run this place, and probably better than you.”

The room went utterly silent.

Favreau’s carefully chosen slur had the desired effect. Velle abruptly changed from arrogant, strutting peacock, to an enraged bull.

Now she had his attention.

“Shoot this bitch!” Velle shouted. “No, give me a gun. I will shoot her.”

Before anyone could show the slightest inclination to comply, Favreau held up a hand, displaying a small black plastic object that looked a little like a mobile phone or the remote control for a television set.

Velle froze but his rage did not abate. “What is that? A bomb? You bring a bomb into my headquarters? You are dead already.”

“No General, I didn’t bring the bomb in. It’s waiting for me out in my car. But it is a very large bomb — a one kiloton yield tactical nuclear device, if it matters.” She waggled the plastic device. “And in case you haven’t figured it out already, this is a remote trigger with a dead-man switch. You do know how that works, right? Shoot me, I let go, and this entire camp gets vaporized.

“I’m going to leave now,” she continued. “But I won’t go far. See that you take care of the situation in the Kivu, and then we’ll talk about how to get you to Kinshasa.”

7

Asya Machtchenko stepped out onto the porch of the Pinckney General Store and cracked the seal on the can of Java Monster Mean Bean she’d just purchased. She was still adjusting to her new life in the United States, and the list of things she disliked about it was nearly as long as those she liked, but Mean Bean was one guilty pleasure that heavily weighted the balance on the positive side.

Pinckney wasn’t so bad. It reminded her of Peredelkino, the dacha village southwest of Moscow, where she had spent several summers during her childhood. The locals, who depended on the variable tourist economy, seemed to harbor no suspicions about this mysterious woman with the exotic accent, who had taken up residence in their midst. Yet, despite its quaint charms, sometimes Pinckney seemed as remote as a Siberian gulag.

Her eyes were drawn to a black Lexus crunching into the gravel parking lot. Her gaze lingered on the Virginia license plates as the vehicle eased up against the curb, just beyond the porch rail. The driver, a late middle-aged man with short, steel gray hair and a face that was still handsome despite a deeply-etched map of worry lines, lowered his window without turning off the engine.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but I think I might be lost.”

“If you think you are lost,” Asya replied with a smile, “then it’s probably true. Where are you wanting to be?”

“I’m supposed to meet a friend at the Bible Campground.”

“Ah, you are true believer. You are not as lost as you think. Is close. I happen to be going that way.”

The weary face cracked with a grin. “My lucky day. Hop in.”

She descended the steps and found the passenger door of the Lexus open and waiting. She climbed in and slipped the Monster can into the center console cup holder before closing the door. “I think I am supposed to say something about not accepting rides from strange men,” she said.

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but never ‘strange.’” He gazed at her sidelong. “You look just like him.”

She knew exactly to whom the man was referring; with her dark hair and lean features, Asya bore more than a passing resemblance to her brother — her much older brother — Jack Sigler. “Thomas thought you would say that. Is why he sent me to meet you.”

The man, Domenick Boucher, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking spot. “So how is your brother?”

“I don’t really know him as well as I…” She realized how ridiculous the statement was and didn’t finish. “Older and wiser, I think you would say. Turn right and follow this road.”

Boucher drove in silence, clearly preoccupied with whatever matter had brought him so far from the nation’s capital, and Asya was content to let him do so. They drove into the wooded outskirts of the small town and through the open gate of the Pinckney Bible Conference Grounds. Although a fully functional campground for religious retreats, its funding anonymously came from the headquarters of a very secret security organization known as Endgame, which was partially located under the grounds. Although the campground gate was never closed, it was by no means unsecure. Asya knew that their every move was being followed, and that at the first hint of danger, an armed security force would materialize out of one of the rustic cabins they were driving past, and descend on them like the proverbial ton of bricks. The park was technically open, but mid-week the place was deserted of campers.

The Lexus cruised past the small welcome center, turned right and passed the ‘Snack Shack.’ The road became dirt as they drove into the woods, past the campground’s trailer park and onto a narrow path that wended into the forested foothills of an imposing block of granite called Fletcher Mountain. The trail ended at an overgrown trailhead parking area. Asya directed Boucher to stop there. They got out, and she led him to a small wooden outhouse near the trail signpost.

Boucher wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Actually, I don’t really have to go that bad.”

Asya grinned. The smell was overpowering, but the knowledge that it was just a mix of tert-butyl mercaptan and other odor-causing chemicals, and not actually raw sewage stewing in the New England sun, made it a little more tolerable. “This way, Mr. CIA.”

The door to the outhouse was barricaded with two-by-fours and a sign proclaiming ‘Closed,’ but like the aroma, the look was merely for cosmetic effect. The door swung open revealing a spotless room, tastefully decorated in muted hues of green, and sans all plumbing fixtures, primitive or otherwise. A strong smell, like coffee mixed with cinnamon, filled the space, overpowering the offensive odor outside. When Boucher stood beside her, Asya pulled the door shut. There was a hiss and then a feeling of lightness as the floor began to descend.

“Ah, the old secret elevator in the outhouse trick,” Boucher said. “It’s like something from a James Bond movie.”

“Who is James Bond?” Asya said, in her thickest possible Slavic accent. She laughed as he struggled to come up with an answer. “Relax, Mr. CIA, everyone in Russia knows who James Bond is. When I was young, he was symbol of Western decadence. When I was older… come to think of it, he is still symbol of Western decadence.”

A faint tremor marked the end of the descent, and another door slid open to reveal a luxurious room that might have been the lobby of a high-rent office building or a four-star hotel. There was only one person in the room, a fit man who looked to be in his late forties, with extremely short salt and pepper hair. It was starting to recede from a forehead that was, like Boucher’s, creased with the deep wrinkles that come with years and experience. He was the man Asya had called ‘Thomas’ but her brother and his friends always referred to him as ‘Deep Blue.’

Boucher had a different name for him.

“Mr. President,” he said. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”

“You had better start calling me ‘Tom.’”

“Tom and Dom. Sounds like a bad comedy routine, but your house, your rules.”

Deep Blue turned to Asya. “He give you any trouble?”

She grinned mischievously. “No. I am a little disappointed.”

“I’m glad you could come, Dom,” Deep Blue said. “I’d love to give you the nickel tour, but we’re kind of on a crisis footing at the moment, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to do business before pleasure.”

“Ah… sure. Fire away.”

“We’ve got a loose ball on the field.” Deep Blue briefly related the details of Chess Team’s failed mission in Suez.

When he finished, Boucher’s eyes narrowed in irritation. “I wish you’d read me in on this, Tom.”

“There were reasons why I couldn’t do that.” Deep Blue glanced at Asya, but he didn’t explain. “I couldn’t come to you until we had positive independent verification that there really was a bomb in play. We were thirty seconds from securing it when that chopper showed up. We did verify the radiation signature at least.”

“So who was it?”

“We don’t have a clue. My source in Moscow assures me that it wasn’t a Russian Spetsnaz unit. Honestly, I was hoping that it might be your people.”

“You were right to turn this over to me. I’ll make sure word gets to the right people.”

Asya got the impression that Boucher wasn’t nearly concerned enough about a missing tactical nuclear device in the hands of an unknown rogue element. Evidently, Deep Blue felt the same way. “Dom, is there something you’re not telling me?”

Boucher looked away, nervous or possibly embarrassed. “Tom, is there somewhere we can talk?”

“We’re in a top secret, underground facility that less than a hundred people in the world know about. I’d say you can talk anywhere you like.”

Boucher’s gaze flicked to Asya. Sensing his apprehension, she cleared her throat. “I will let you two catch up.”

Surprisingly, it was Boucher that forestalled her. “No. Wait. Actually this is probably going to involve you as well.”

“Me?”

“You. Your brother. The whole team. You should all hear what I’ve got to say.”

8

Boucher felt their eyes on him, but he could only guess at the thoughts swirling behind those stares.

More than twelve hours had passed since the debacle on the edge of the Suez Canal, a period of time in which they had had very little to do aside from sitting idle in a safe house outside Cairo, second-guessing everything they had done. The Chess Team looked thoroughly beat, as they sat around the table in the briefing room. The story he’d told them had not improved their collective mood.

They were not really present in the room with him. Boucher knew that, and yet his eyes told him otherwise. No matter which way he turned his head, he could see them, rendered in three-dimensions with perfect clarity. He lifted his glasses momentarily, and the group of special operators blinked out of existence. But when he lowered the glasses back into place, they were all right where they had been. It was telepresence on steroids.

They had listened without comment as he related the facts of the situation developing in the Congo and of the as-yet-unresolved abduction of Joseph Mulamba. This clearly had not been what they were expecting.

Finally, Tom Duncan — Deep Blue — broke the silence. “What exactly is it that you want us to accomplish?”

That was a question that had troubled Boucher from the moment President Chambers had made his desperate plea. Before he could frame his answer, another voice chimed in — Zelda Baker, the one called ‘Queen.’

“What about the bomb? Shouldn’t that be our priority right now?”

“We can handle that,” replied Boucher. “What we can’t handle… what no official US government agency can touch right now, is the situation in the Congo. And if someone doesn’t act now, the powder keg will blow up and a lot of people will die.”

Rook, whom Boucher had first met years ago, when Chess Team was just getting established, shifted in his chair. “You want the five of us to stop a revolution?”

“You just have to buy the President enough time to marshal support for a peace-keeping operation. Mulamba had a plan, and President Chambers wants to make sure that plan has a chance to work. That means keeping the presidential successor, Gerard Okoa, in power, if at all possible. Mulamba was also working on some kind of renewable energy project at a place called Lake Kivu, at the eastern border of the country. Currently, rebel forces are threatening the team that’s working there, so protecting them is critical to the long term success of the plan. Or failing that, rescuing them before they’re overrun.

“Don’t underestimate the impact a few individuals can have in a situation like this,” he continued. “The abduction of just one man, President Mulamba, set this all in motion. There are a lot of people in his country who want his vision to succeed. They just need some help.” He studied each member of the virtual audience. “You’ve all been through the Robin Sage exercise?”

Robin Sage was the fifth and final phase of the US Army Special Forces training course, conducted in rural North Carolina. It was a simulated exercise in which Special Forces candidates infiltrated the fictional country of Pineland, to train and lead a force of guerilla insurgents to overthrow an oppressive government. Despite the public perception that Special Forces operators were all unstoppable commandos who dropped behind enemy lines to destroy enemy missile sites and take out terrorist leaders, their primary mission was to act as a force multiplier.

While it was true that certain groups within the Spec War community — SEAL Team Six and Delta in particular — did train for high profile missions like hostage rescue and antiterrorism, every single shooter started with the basics of unconventional warfare. In terms of war strategy, they were called ‘force multipliers’ because a small unit of SF operators could embed with a local group of freedom fighters and turn them into an army.

Deep Blue shook his head. “You don’t need to explain unconventional war to any of us, Dom. We’ve all lived it. The situation in Africa… It’s like trying to hold back the wind. These countries are always about two steps away from a bloody revolution or tribal genocide, and nothing anyone has been able to do has changed that. I was in Somalia; I know.”

Boucher had felt much the same way during his meeting with the president. Chambers had asked for something that no one — not armies, diplomats, or well-funded humanitarian organizations — had been able to accomplish, and now Boucher was asking these five weary souls to give it a try. “You’re right,” he said, defeated. “It’s impossible. But I had to ask.”

He was about to strip off the glasses and end the ordeal, when a voice that had been quiet throughout was heard.

“I’ll do it,” King said.

9

Queen tore off her glasses and made a gesture for the others to do the same. King was the last to remove his, and he did so with a detached expression, as if he didn’t quite understand why she wanted him to do so.

“What the hell?” she said.

He stared back at her. “I said I would do it. The rest of you can Charlie Mike.” Charlie Mike — CM — meant continue the mission, or in this case, find the bomb.

“Oh, I heard what you said. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’re a team. We work together. Remember?”

“You heard what Blue said. It’s an impossible job.”

“Oh, right,” Rook said. “We can’t do impossible.” He made air-quotes to emphasize the last word.

Queen waved him off. “King, if you’ve got a reason why we should do this, I’d like to hear it. We all would. You owe us that.”

“There’s no reason. It’s plainly a fool’s errand.”

“Bullshit. If you thought that, you wouldn’t have volunteered yourself. What I want to know is why you’re treating us like we’re your children instead of your teammates.”

She saw Knight and Rook nod and Bishop’s gaze became a little more focused. They all felt it. King however, seemed genuinely surprised by the accusation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ever since… since Tunisia, since you came back, you’ve been acting like you’re afraid to put us in the fight.”

“Have I?” The faintest hint of a smile touched at the corner of his mouth. “I guess maybe my teamwork skills have gotten a little rusty.”

“Damn straight,” Rook said. “Now, as much as I’d love to leave a tender moment alone, can you please explain why you just volunteered to single-handedly save Africa from its latest self-destruct?”

King took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “You know that old saying about history repeating itself? You can see it coming from a mile away and you just want to grab someone and shake them, but it’s like nothing you do makes any difference.”

“I think the rest of that old saying talks about learning from history. You can’t make people do that. They have to figure it out for themselves.”

“Believe me, I know. But that’s the funny thing about history. How can you really learn anything? It’s all just dry facts and statistics. A million dead here or there… life goes on. It’s not real to you unless you watch it happen. I did, over and over again, knowing that it was going to happen, knowing that, even when I got involved, there was nothing I could do to change the outcome. But now…the future hasn’t been written yet.”

Queen could sense the others holding back from commenting, and she knew why. Despite the things they had all seen in their military careers — and some of those things had been pretty terrible — there was no comparison to what King had experienced.

It still boggled Queen’s mind. Eight months earlier — eight months for her at least — during a mission to rescue King’s parents from renegade geneticist Richard Ridley’s Omega facility in Tunisia, King had been blown up in a mysterious explosion… or so they had thought at the time. A few hours later, King had shown up just in time to save them all from one of Ridley’s creations run amok. When the dust had finally settled, King had told them how he had survived. It was a whopper of a tale, but the short version was that King had been blown back in time — all the way back to 800 BC — with no way to get home.

It sounded impossible, but as Rook had so eloquently pointed out, impossible was a fluid concept for the Chess Team.

King had been dosed with a regenerative serum, similar to the one Bishop had received but without the negative side effects. Although after returning to the present he had voluntarily given it up, his physiology returning to normal, the serum had made it possible for him to survive the millennia and show up to save the day. To the rest of them, only a few hours had passed, but King had lived every minute of nearly three thousand years of human history, fifty lifetimes worth of war and unimaginable brutality. Worst of all, he’d been unable to alter the course of events. Everything happened just the way it had always happened, and he had been forced to witness it all. He fought in wars. Led armies. Staged coups. Defeated evil. He’d lived lives as vagrant nobodies, as revered heroes and demigods, as quiet farmers and famous warriors, in every part of the world. Whenever he could, he did what was right, but since the history he learned in school was the history he had already taken part in, he often knew how things worked out in the end. Wars, natural disasters and madmen claimed untold millions of lives throughout his 2800 years of life, and try as he might, he couldn’t prevent the world from going to hell over and over again.

No wonder King is taking this personally.

“I know there’s not a lot I can do,” he said finally. “But it’s like what happens when you see that your neighbor’s house is on fire. You can’t just stand by and let it burn. You’ve got to try and save him.”

“De Oppresso Liber,” Bishop murmured. “That’s what we do isn’t it?”

Queen immediately recognized the Latin phrase. It was the motto of the US Army Special Forces. Free the oppressed. It was a message that definitely resonated with Bishop, and with her as well.

“I agree,” Knight said, then shrugged. “You know, for whatever that’s worth.”

Queen gave them both a grateful smile, and then turned back to King. “Look, we’re all with you. If you say you want to do this, then you don’t even have to make a case for it… not to us anyway. All I ask is that you get back with the team. I know we all kind of got scattered to the four winds for a while there… and you… Well, you really got scattered. But we’re a team. That’s how we win.”

King looked at each one of them in turn, then he simply nodded.

“Great,” Rook said. “I can’t wait to tell dad. But a couple things first: A, what do we do about the missing Russian backpack nuke; and B, how in the hell are the five of us supposed to keep an entire country from going down the toilet?”

“You heard Boucher,” Queen said. “He’s going to take care of the bomb.”

King rubbed his unshaven chin. “The five of us,” he echoed, thoughtfully. “No. Not just us.”

“You mean Deep Blue?”

“Him, Pawn and everyone else at Endgame.” Pawn was the designated callsign for anyone temporarily attached to the team for special operations. It had once been given to Sara Fogg, King’s fiancée, but more recently it had been permanently assigned to Asya Machtchenko, King’s sister. “We won’t be able to do anything meaningful without their help, and that means before we commit to anything, we need to know that everyone is on board. That,” he concluded, holding up his glasses, “is what being part of the team means. So let’s have a team meeting and figure out how we’re going to turn this thing around. Like you said, that’s how we win.”

10

Rook curled his fingers around the steering wheel, his foot tense on the brake pedal, eager to slide over and punch the accelerator.

“Relax,” Queen said, from the passenger seat beside him.

He shot her a scowl. “Easy for you to say. You’re not driving.”

She laughed. “Since when do you complain about driving?”

He struggled to come up with a scathing retort, but the light changed and a taxi behind them laid on the horn. He shook his head and accelerated through the intersection. “When we took this ‘Save Africa’ gig, I thought we’d be… you know, staying in Africa.”

“You’ve got a problem coming to a country where they have hot showers and flush toilets?”

“I’ve got a problem coming to a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road.”

She patted his arm. “Once we find our missing African president, we’ll be on the first flight back to the land of malaria.”

“You always know just what to say to cheer me up, babe.”

He and Queen had drawn the short straw — at least that was how Rook saw it — and been given the job of tracking down Joseph Mulamba and rescuing him from his abductors, while King, Bishop and Knight waited for transport to the Congo.

Despite his grumblings, Rook knew that this task was critical to the mission’s success. Restoring Mulamba to power was probably the only way to prevent total chaos in Central Africa. The president was popular, and had received an overwhelming majority of the vote in the election that had put him in power. His return might not end the coup launched by General Velle, but it would erode the rebel power base to the point where further violence would be limited in scope. If Mulamba was already dead, there might be no stopping what had begun, but if his enemies had wanted him dead, they would have simply assassinated him and left his body behind with the two murdered bodyguards. Finding Mulamba was the most important part of Chess Team’s new mission. Nevertheless, Rook felt as if he’d been taken out of the game.

Deep Blue, using the almost unlimited computing power at his disposal, had done what the combined resources of London law enforcement could not: he’d found Mulamba. Well, probably found him.

Mulamba’s kidnappers had abandoned the SUV in an alley, hidden from the view of the closed circuit television cameras that lined most London streets. The police had checked the footage from cameras in the area, but had been unable to identify the kidnappers’ waiting getaway vehicle. Deep Blue had taken the additional step of collecting all the camera feeds going back to the site of the abduction, near Hyde Park, and cobbled them together into a virtual recreation of the crime. There were several gaps in the record, but it was easy enough to connect the dots. When the full picture resolved, he found a significant time gap. The SUV had stopped for almost a full minute in one of the CCTV blind spots. Deep Blue believed that the kidnappers had used this break to transfer Mulamba to another car, and then continued on to the alley several miles away where the driver ultimately dumped the vehicle and escaped on foot.

Figuring that out had been the easy part. What he did next would have been nearly impossible without the quantum computer.

Deep Blue had used the footage from multiple cameras to track every single car that moved away from the suspected transfer point, and through a process of elimination, identified the getaway car. He then tracked the vehicle to a rural area near Dartford, about twenty miles southeast of London. By the time Queen and Rook deplaned at Heathrow, Mulamba’s location had been pinpointed.

After picking up their rental car, Queen and Rook had made just one stop, at the main branch of the Royal & General Bank to collect the contents of a safe deposit box, which included two SIG Pro pistols with spare magazines, two SOG Ops M40TK-CP combat knives and several bundles of £20 and £50 banknotes.

Rook cruised past the driveway entrance to the farmhouse, letting Queen handle the visual surveillance, and continued down the road for another half a mile before pulling off and parking on the shoulder. “So, dumb tourists?”

“I’m thinking feminine wiles might work better. I’ll distract them while you try to sneak in the back door.”

Rook managed an enthusiastic grin to hide the fact that he wasn’t entirely happy with the thought of her going up the long drive alone. He couldn’t help feeling protective, especially now that they were together, but he knew better than to voice these concerns. She would knock him senseless for even thinking it.

Good thing she’s not a mind reader, he thought, then glanced at her to make sure.

While Queen sauntered down the road, making a show out of enjoying the scenic vistas and fresh air, Rook looked over the hedgerow bordering the nearby field, watching for trouble. With his glasses on maximum zoom, he could just make out two figures near the farmhouse — one milling near the front entrance, and one standing on a gabled second-floor balcony. He couldn’t see any weapons and at this distance the facial recognition software was useless, but the men didn’t look like farmers to him.

He chose a circuitous path that afforded the best level of concealment behind trees and hedges. At a fast jog, he was able to cover most of the distance in the time it took for Queen to reach the driveway. When she strolled toward the house, waving like a bikini-clad model at a boat show, he darted from the fence line to a barn right behind the two-story house.

Although none of the men were now directly in his view, there were yellow dots floating before his eyes, marking the location of the men he had spotted earlier, along with two more that had come out to greet Queen.

“Hey guys,” he heard her say. “Is this the house where Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Am I in the right place?”

“Should have gone with Much Ado About Nothing,” Rook muttered, knowing that only she could hear.

“My boyfriend told me it was,” she continued, a hint of flirtation in her voice, “but he’s kind of a tool, if you know what I mean.”

“You’ve got the wrong place. You need to leave. Now.” Rook heard the tone of menace in the voice. The man wasn’t buying the dumb blonde routine, and the only thing aroused by Queen’s good looks were his suspicions.

Rook snuck to the corner of the house, crouching under the windows, as he made his way to the back door. The knob turned smoothly in his hand, and he eased the door inward a few inches, and then a few more. It wasn’t until he had opened it enough to slip through that he realized someone was in the room beyond. Fortunately, the man’s attention was turned toward the front of the house and Queen’s performance.

One of the yellow dots abruptly went red as the facial recognition program identified a man outside. Rook ignored the information scrolling in front of his eyes, focusing on the room — a dining room, with a scattering of paper plates and plastic cups on the cheap table — and on all the places where another hostile might be lurking. Seeing no one else, he slipped inside and crept up behind the man.

More yellow dots changed to red, and Rook had to fight the urge to rip the glasses off. He was about to kill a man, and he didn’t need any distractions.

He slipped the SOG knife from its sheath and struck like a viper. In one fluid motion, he wrapped his left arm around the man’s head, covering nose and mouth with the crook of his elbow, and rammed the blade into the base of the man’s skull, instantly severing the spinal cord between the Atlas and Axis vertebrae. There wasn’t much blood, but the wound was instantly fatal, and the man went limp, like his bones had turned to jelly. Rook didn’t let him fall, but instead dragged the lifeless body back across the room to the dining table and eased him into one of the chairs. As he did, the quantum computer recognized the dead man.

His name was Michael Caruthers, a former Royal Marine. Caruthers’s military record was an open book, but there was scant information since his discharge four years earlier. Rook had a pretty good idea what that meant. Caruthers was a mercenary.

Emphasis on was, Rook thought.

He didn’t feel the least bit of remorse at taking the man’s life. He had more regard for the terrorists and fanatics that he’d fought than he did for this man, who had once pledged to give his life for Queen and country, but now was willing to kill for a buck… or whatever they called it here.

He patted down the corpse and found a Skorpion vz. 68 machine pistol in a shoulder holster. The compact weapon, produced in mass quantities by Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, was cheap, and if you knew the right people, it was easy to come by, even somewhere like the United Kingdom, where access to firearms was strictly regulated. Except for the curved twenty-round magazine positioned forward of the handgrip, the Skorpion didn’t look much different than a regular semi-auto, but it was lighter and smaller than one of Rook’s Desert Eagles, especially with its wire stock folded forward over the barrel. Rook decided to leave it behind. It would just get in the way.

Caruthers had been standing at an arched entryway to a sitting room with a clear view of the front door. Rook could see another of the men — red-tagged as another former military man turned hired gun — standing in the doorway, facing Queen. There was no one else in the room, but there was a staircase leading up. Rook figured his chances of making it up the stairs unnoticed weren’t great, but they wouldn’t get any better by waiting.

“Take it up a notch,” he whispered, “and then get ready to break contact.”

“Actually,” Queen said, in a voice loud enough that he would have heard even without the glasses, “you remind me a lot of my boyfriend. Big and dumb.”

Rook rolled his eyes, then made his move, crossing swiftly to the stairs. The banister spindles wouldn’t provide much cover, but he ducked low and ascended the carpeted steps slowly, on all fours, like a stalking cat.

“Last warning,” the man at the door growled. “Get lost.”

“Fine,” Queen said. “I’m going. But I’m gonna tell my boyfriend what an asshole you are, and he’ll be pissed. He might even come here himself and kick your ass.”

“You tell ‘em, babe,” Rook said, under his breath. He reached the landing and checked both ways before continuing. There was a yellow icon floating to his left, beyond a closed door, marking the man on the balcony he had seen from afar. Rook’s instincts told him that this man was more than just a lookout. Mulamba was probably in that room, too.

He crept down the hall, checking each door along the way — a bathroom and two bedrooms, all unoccupied — and came to the door at the end, behind which the unidentified gunman waited.

“Activate X-ray vision mode,” he whispered, and smiled.

Deep Blue’s voice immediately sounded in his head. “Sorry. There’s no app for that. Yet.”

“Useless.” Rook knocked softly on the door.

“Yeah?”

A couple more muffled inquiries followed and Rook could hear the sound of someone moving through the room. When the doorknob started to turn, Rook threw his weight against the door, slamming it into the man on the other side, knocking him backward. Rook let his momentum carry him into the room. He pounced on the still uncomprehending mercenary and drove the knife blade down into the man’s sternum, covering the body with his own and clamping a hand over the mortally wounded man’s mouth to silence any outcry.

“What the—?”

Rook felt a cold surge of panic shoot through his veins. Two guys! Crap!

He looked up, saw another man standing near the French doors that opened onto the balcony. There was one more person in the room as well, a man that Rook recognized instantly as the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Joseph Mulamba was tied to a chair and had a strip of silver tape over his mouth, but his eyes were alive with emotion — fear and maybe something like hope. Rook was only peripherally aware of Mulamba. His attention was fixed on the other captor, the man who was struggling to unholster his Skorpion.

Rook didn’t bother trying to wrench the SOG knife free of the corpse, but launched himself at the still living threat. He cleared the distance in a single leap and drove the man back, through the open doors and onto the balcony where they crashed together in a heap. Rook succeeded in trapping the man’s right arm across his abdomen, but he hadn’t been fast enough to keep his foe from drawing the machine pistol. The gunman’s finger tightened on the trigger and the pistol sandwiched between their bodies erupted in a burst of noise and lead.

A searing blast of heat scorched Rook’s chest where it was pressed against the gun. The pain was sudden and intense enough that he thought he’d been shot, but he didn’t let the injury slow him down. As the mercenary fought to get his weapon free, Rook delivered a knife-hand blow to the man’s throat that ended all resistance. Rook rolled off the stricken mercenary, but it wasn’t until he heard more shooting that he realized that stealth was no longer an option.

“Two down,” he heard Queen say. “I’m coming in. Don’t shoot me.”

“Wait.” Rook was still feeling a little disoriented after the unexpected struggle with the mercenary. He looked around and met the eyes of the bound hostage, the man they were here to rescue. “I think we’re clear. Stay put. I’ll be right down.”

“Roger.”

He moved over to Mulamba and plucked off the tape covering the man’s mouth. Mulamba winced as the adhesive took a layer of skin, but he immediately broke into a smile. “Thank you, my friend.”

“Call me Rook. And don’t thank me until we’re out of here.” He saw that the mercenaries had used half-inch wide wire-reinforced zip-ties to secure Mulamba’s arms and legs in place. He reached for his knife then remembered where he’d left it, buried in the chest of the mercenary near the entrance to the room. He’d driven it deep, and as he struggled to wrench it free, he felt like an unworthy knight trying to draw Excalibur from the stone.

“Uh, oh,” Queen said.

Rook didn’t like the sound of that.

A shout drifted in through the open balcony doors — definitely not Queen’s voice — and a moment later, he heard two more sharp reports.

He definitely didn’t like the sound of that.

He began wiggling the blade back and forth until it finally came free. Ignoring the blood that now dripped down onto his hand, he hastened back to the prisoner and slipped the blade underneath the zip-ties.

Queen spat a curse. “Alamo time. I’m coming in.”

“Where’d they come from?” He gave the blade a twist and the plastic restraint parted, but not before pulling taut against Mulamba’s wrist. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“This is not a time to be gentle, Rook.” The man spoke with an almost musical accent. “Do what you must. No worries.”

Rook laughed in spite of the urgency of the moment. “No worries. Hakuna matata, right?”

Mulamba’s smile broadened. “You speak Swahili?”

“Not exactly. ” He moved the blade to the second tie.

“I’m coming up,” Queen shouted. “They’ve got both exits covered. Hope you’ve got an alternate exit up there.”

“Damn. Where did these guys come from?” Rook caught Mulamba’s blank look and added, “Sorry, Mr. President, got my girlfriend on the other line.”

“Call me Joe.”

Rook nodded.

“Not sure,” Queen said. “Might have been in the barn.”

“The barn? Damn.” There had been five men in the house, and now a force of unknown size was swarming out of the barn. Somebody had gone to great lengths to make sure that Mulamba didn’t get away.

He cut the remaining bonds and then scooped up a discarded Skorpion. “Know how to use one of these, Joe?”

The African president eyed the weapon with distaste, as if the thought of firing it brought back bad memories, but then he nodded and took it. He unfolded the collapsible stock and snugged it to his shoulder. “I do.”

“Coming in!” Queen shouted. She appeared at the doorway a moment later and dropped into a crouch beside the opening. She risked a quick glance in Rook’s direction, and then said simply: “They’re coming.”

11

Felice Carter awoke to the sound of gunfire.

She rolled from her cot, still bleary-eyed, uncertain whether the noise was something from a dream or something real. Then there was another report, the chattering sound of a machine gun, and she knew it wasn’t her imagination.

The war had found them.

The tent flap flew back and she jerked in alarm, but it was only Sam.

“Felice! The rebels are attacking. We have to leave!”

She scooted her backpack out from beneath her cot and slung it over one shoulder. They had known that this was a possibility and had prepared accordingly. As much as she had wanted to believe that the storm would pass, leaving them untouched, she had not let herself give in to the seductive lethargy of denial. She had packed her go-bag and slept in her clothes…

Just in case this happened.

The noise of machine gun fire was almost constant, and close enough that the sound itself was an assault on the senses. Sam urged her on with an impatient wave, then turned and ducked through the flap. She was only a few steps behind him when he suddenly jerked as if he’d stepped on a live wire. He pitched backward. A series of red splotches dotted his torso, gushing dark blood.

Felice skidded to a halt, throwing herself flat beside him. Over the staccato reports, she heard a different sound, like someone beating on the heavy canvas walls of her shelter, and a line of holes appeared in the fabric, allowing the early morning sunlight to stream in along with the sulfur smell of burnt gunpowder.

She crawled away from Sam’s body, retreating to the back of the tent. Leaving through the front wasn’t an option but she had to get out and reach the rest of the team.

She slipped her Gerber folding multi-tool from its sheath on her belt and opened the knife blade. More rounds pierced the tent above her head, but she focused on what she had to do. She stabbed the knife point through the heavy canvas and worked it back and forth, sawing open a hole big enough to crawl through. Through the cut doorway, she could see the dark brown and green of the rain forest, just twenty yards away, looking as foreboding as the first time she had glimpsed it. The jungle wasn’t where she wanted to be, but it would get her away from the gunmen.

She edged out, just far enough to make sure the coast was clear, and then launched herself through the opening. In her peripheral vision, she could see the other tents lined up beside hers with almost military precision, twenty of them in all. Ten of them were for the science team, herself and her colleagues, and five more were for their locally hired support team, the latter sleeping four to a tent. Thirty people in all, twenty-nine now that Sam was dead. She wondered how many of the others were still alive.

She reached the edge of the clearing and crouched behind the nearest tree. The tents blocked her view of the attack, but she could see a low pall of smoke hanging over the camp. Above the din of weapons fire, she could hear shouting — the gunmen bellowing orders mixed with cries of terror from the victims.

Keeping to the tree line, she ran toward the south end of the camp. When they had learned of the political upheaval in distant Kinshasa, they had made a contingency plan to evacuate at the first sign of trouble, but this attack had come without warning. She wondered if anyone had made it to the trucks parked at the center of the camp, and if they had already left without her. All of the local men carried rifles, and she knew that at least some of the shooting was probably defensive fire. Perhaps they were holding off the attackers long enough for the scientists to make their escape. It was something to hope for, but she didn’t think it very likely.

Staying low, she darted from the cover of the trees and made for the corner of the last tent in the row. It was, she recalled, where they kept supplies and food stores. It seemed likely that the contents of the tent were what the attackers might want most, but the situation had escalated beyond the point where the expedition could buy their safety by surrendering their stores. The attackers clearly intended to kill everyone and take whatever they pleased.

She crawled along the side of the tent and peeked around the front facing corner. She allowed herself only a quick glimpse, just long enough to take a mental snapshot of the camp, before pulling back and processing what she had just seen. It was enough to lift her out of despair.

One of the trucks was idling. She hadn’t been able to identify the driver, but there were three figures huddled in the bed of the vehicle. Two more were crouched behind the front end, taking careful shots with their rifles in the direction of the attacking force.

She had seen the enemy as well, at least a few of them, arrayed at the far end of the camp, crouching behind trees, content to pin their victims down until they lost the will or the ability to resist.

The space in between was littered with unmoving forms. People she knew. People she had lived with, worked with, shared meals with, joked with, gossiped with and sometimes fought with. Her friends. Dead.

She felt something stir in her gut — a primal creature too long subdued, with the scent of blood in its nostrils.

“No.”

The plea was a whimper, inaudible to anyone who might have been close enough to hear. I shouldn’t have come here, she thought. Shouldn’t have taken the risk. The beast — the ghost of a distant primitive creature that had become bound to her like a shadow during an expedition in Ethiopia two years earlier — responded to her rising fear. When it had first possessed her, the beast had nearly destroyed her mind, and in the resulting fugue state, had responded to external threats by destroying the minds of her attackers. She had mastered it, learned to control her emotions, but fear was like a fire that, once ignited, burned out of control. If the beast awoke, the world would burn. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to erase the image of horror from her mind.

“Felice!” The shout snapped her back into the moment, the bestial presence momentarily subdued. She opened her eyes and saw Derrick, hunkered down in the bed of the truck but waving to her, urging her to join them.

Yes. Escape. But how will they get past—

There was a deafening boom, and in the instant that followed, she saw something streak out of the forest beyond the camp entrance and strike the front end of the truck. Then a wave of darkness crashed over her.

Her awareness returned in a blaze of green and blue. She was on her back, staring up at the sky. The noise of the battle was gone. All she could hear now was a low tone, like microphone feedback. She felt strangely tranquil, and for a moment, she dared to believe that the attack had been a nightmare from which she was just now truly waking. Then she tried to breathe, and when her lungs refused to draw so much as a gasp, the terror returned with a vengeance.

Sensations bombarded her: smothering heat, something stinging her eyes like a chemical burn, pain shooting through every nerve of her body. The ringing in her ears started to diminish, replaced by the crackle and roar of a fire. Her breath finally caught, but instead of fresh air, she drew in a choking miasma of burning metal and plastic, the sulfur of gunpowder and high explosives, and ghastlier still, the odor of cooking meat.

Where the truck had been, there was only a blackened shell, dominated by flames and a pillar of dark smoke. The vehicle, however, was not the only thing burning. The tent behind which she had been hiding — or rather what remained of the flattened, shredded canopy — was also ablaze.

The darkness surged through her, not just in her gut but electrifying every fiber of her being. She told herself to run, to escape back into the woods where the killers would not find her, and where she might, just might, be able to quiet the beast before it tore through her defenses and laid waste to everything, but her body betrayed her. She could do little more than turn her head to witness the holocaust that had devoured her friends and would soon burn her as well… and when she burned, the world would burn.

A shape emerged from the smoke, a man, tall and thin almost to the point of looking emaciated. He wore no uniform — just tattered jeans and a t-shirt — but the rifle he carried marked him as one of their attackers. He pointed the weapon at her, but there was not a hint of wariness in the way he moved. The battle was over, and he was about to claim the spoils due the victor.

Felice struggled to move, willing herself to get to her feet… to run… but it didn’t happen. She lay there, unable to move, and as the man drew closer… twenty feet… ten… she knew that there would be no escape.

“Kill me,” she rasped, and in his eyes, she saw that he would, but only after he was done with her.

Suddenly, the man pitched back as if slapped by an invisible hand. A red mist settled over his unmoving form. Two more men had come into the camp behind him, and they were instantly on their guard, ducking for cover behind the flaming wreckage, shouting in confusion and alarm.

One of them went down, his head practically dissolving in a spray of crimson.

The remaining man screamed an unintelligible curse and broke from his place of concealment. He only got a few steps before the same unseen force struck out like divine vengeance and dropped him in his tracks.

Was someone still alive? One of their local guides perhaps?

There was more shouting and sporadic gunfire from the forest, but it seemed distant now, unthreatening. With the immediate threat removed, Felice felt her self-control returning, and as the beast retreated back into quiescence, she was able to move again. She rolled onto her side, away from the burning tent, and then managed to sit up.

An ominous quiet fell over the jungle; the shouts and shooting had stopped.

Suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. A figure stepped into view, as if materializing out of the smoke. Her first thought was that he looked like one of the tree people from The Lord of the Rings — Ents, she remembered, they’re called Ents—brown and green, covered with what looked like leaves and moss, and as big as a walking tree trunk. It was camouflage, she knew. There was a man underneath it all, a man carrying an enormous machine gun. His face became clearer, peeking out from beneath a tree colored hat that was covered with leaves and twigs. His face was streaked with green and gray paint, and his eyes hid behind a pair of dark sunglasses, but she could tell by his features that he wasn’t African.

“Are you all right?”

The voice sounded faint, distant, as if a much greater space separated them, as if he was speaking from another plane of reality. He repeated the question again as he finished crossing the distance and knelt beside her.

“I don’t know,” she croaked, and she discovered that she couldn’t hear her own voice very well either.

With surprising gentleness for someone so big, the man put his hands on her shoulders and peered into her face. “I’m a friend. You’re safe now, Miss Carter.”

12

“How do you know my name?”

Bishop winced a little. Felice Carter was shouting and didn’t even realize it. Hearing damage from the explosion, he decided. Nothing permanent.

“I was sent to get you out,” he said. It was a lie, though more an omission than an outright falsehood, and given the circumstances, a full explanation wouldn’t have made much difference. “I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner.”

He had not been sent to get her specifically. He hadn’t even known the names of the people he’d been sent to rescue. Domenick Boucher hadn’t provided much more than a general location for what he described as ‘a science expedition researching some kind of renewable energy project.’ As they had flown over the area aboard Crescent II—Chess Team’s dedicated supersonic stealth transport plane — they’d spied the attack already underway. At that point, more information about the individuals under fire wouldn’t have made much difference to the outcome. He and Knight had HALO jumped from 25,000 feet — high enough that no one on the ground had even heard the plane passing overhead — but the only clear drop zone had been the shallows of Lake Kivu, which necessitated a damp hike through very unfamiliar terrain to reach the camp.

Bishop had assumed they would be Congolese nationals, but Felice Carter was an American. He had been able to make the almost instantaneous identification thanks to the facial recognition software in his glasses. There hadn’t been time for him to fully process all the accompanying information, but two words had jumped out at him.

Geneticist.

Manifold.

Felice Carter had once worked for Richard Ridley, the man who had injected Bishop with the regen serum, sending him on a hellish journey to the edge of madness and back.

He shut this information away in a distant corner of his mind. Her association with Manifold did not automatically make her a villain. Anna Beck, Knight’s girlfriend and currently chief of operations for the Endgame organization, had also once worked for Ridley. Moreover, there was enough additional information about Felice — something involving King and the Brainstorm crisis — for him to recognize that her work for Ridley was only a small sliver of her life story.

Doesn’t matter, he thought. My mission is to save her, not judge her.

“We?” she asked after a moment. “You’re not alone?”

“I brought a friend. Can you walk? We need to get out of here. The rebels will be back.”

She tried to rise, reaching out to use Bishop for leverage. He remained there, kneeling to provide support, until she succeeded. He stayed there a moment longer, looking up at her, checking her for any signs of injury.

Where her coffee-colored skin was exposed — her forearms and face — there were raw abrasions too numerous to count, but all appeared superficial. Felice was tall, not quite six-foot he guessed, and she was lean and fit beneath her slightly scorched khakis and work shirt. She was attractive, too, though for Bishop this was nothing more than one more observation to be filed away. Appearances could be deceiving, and this was especially true of beautiful appearances — Queen was living proof of that.

He finally rose to his feet, towering over her once more, and turned away to let his gaze roam over the wreckage of the camp. His eyes were immediately drawn to the bodies, more than a dozen sprawled out in the open area near the burning truck. There was no sign of movement and he didn’t hold out much hope that there were other survivors, but he had to make sure.

“Stay right here,” he told her.

She nodded, but then tilted her head as if remembering something. “There’s some data in the lab tent that I should bring.”

Several of the tents had been knocked flat, and some were burning. Even those that still stood, furthest out from where the truck had exploded, were shot full of holes. “Which one?”

She pointed down the row, and then started moving in that direction, as if he had given her permission. Bishop frowned. He had been hoping to spare her the sight of her dead colleagues, but there was no turning her back now. Fortunately, she seemed to have developed a kind of tunnel vision, which Bishop knew often happened to people in a crisis. She passed so close to one corpse that she almost stepped on a hand, but she didn’t seem to notice. The tent she sought had partially collapsed, but she threw back the flap and went inside as if nothing at all was wrong. Bishop just shook his head and turned back to surveying the camp.

“Deep Blue, this is Bishop.” He didn’t actually need to identify himself. The q-phones rendered traditional radio protocols completely obsolete, but old habits died hard. “We’re going to need extraction here, ASAP.”

“Understood,” Deep Blue replied. He didn’t ask about whether or not they had succeeded in rescuing the science team. Deep Blue was able to see everything and already knew the situation. “How secure is that location?”

“Not very. We got five of them.” Knight had taken out the three in the camp with his Intervention sniper rifle. Bishop had found two more hanging back at the edge of the camp and dispatched them without a shot. “But there were several more that retreated. My guess is, they’ll be back with more friends.”

“Crescent is dropping off King and Pawn in Kinshasa right now. It can be back at your location in one hour.”

Bishop thought that estimate was a bit optimistic. Kinshasa was more than 900 miles away, but Crescent could manage Mach Two if the pilots didn’t care about burning up all the fuel, so it was possible. “Roger. We’ll try to establish a secure LZ. Bishop, out.”

The sign-off was another ingrained and totally unnecessary response. Deep Blue would continue to monitor everything he and Knight said and did, and would respond to them as easily as if he was standing there with them.

Felice emerged from the tent a moment later, now carrying a black backpack. “Got it.”

She stopped in her tracks, as if being in the lab tent had magically transported her away from everything that had happened, and coming out had snapped her back into the moment. Bishop interposed himself between her and the carnage, drawing her gaze to his face. In an attempt to look a little more human, he removed his boonie hat with its adornment of fern stalks and other jungle flora, and gave her a reassuring nod. “Our ride will be here soon. Let’s find a nice safe place to settle down and wait.”

She nodded and made no effort to look around him, as he guided her back to the south end of the camp, where she had hidden earlier. He found a folding camp chair that had somehow come through the attack unscathed, and gestured for her to sit. “Now, one more time. Stay put, okay?”

Another nod.

Bishop straightened and did another 360 degree sweep of the camp. He had to do a double-take when he saw a chess piece icon floating above what looked like a pile of leaves, just ten yards away. Knight had entered the camp without making a sound, and his ghillie suit — an over-garment made from strips of camouflage netting and burlap — rendered him virtually invisible, even when standing right next to him.

“Sneaky,” Bishop remarked.

Knight grinned up at him. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“I’m just jealous.” Bishop gestured to the camp. “We’d better do a sweep and then dig in. Could be a while before our ride shows up.”

“I heard.” Knight rose from his prone firing position and slung his perfectly camouflaged rifle across his back. He surveyed the wreckage and in a grim voice, added, “I don’t think there’s much left to sweep.”

Bishop had no reply to that, but before he could simply turn away, a loud pop sounded from somewhere out in the jungle. Another sound like it followed almost immediately.

Bishop spun on his heel and threw himself at an uncomprehending Felice, tackling her to the ground and covering her with his own body. Knight dove down by his side. With no way of knowing where the rounds would fall, there were only two practical courses of action in response to incoming mortar fire:

Get down, and pray.

Bishop listened for the distinctive shriek that would herald the arrival of the explosive ordnance. The longer the noise lasted, the more likely the shell would fall well off the mark. If they were lucky, the whistling noise would last several seconds. The shells would hit a hundred yards or more from their location, putting them well outside the radius of a lethal shrapnel storm. That would give them plenty of time to pick up and run before gun crews could adjust fire and drop two more shells into their tubes.

They weren’t lucky.

13

King crouched on the end of the ramp poised to hop down as soon as the ground was close enough. Hot jet exhaust, caught between the tarmac — which was still a good ten yards away — and Crescent II’s enormous turbofan thrusters, swirled around him and into the open cargo bay of the stealth transport. The exhaust was alternately trying to blast him back and suck him out. He glanced over at his sister and flashed her a grin.

Asya clung to the hydraulic cylinder on the opposite corner of the ramp, but she managed to loosen her death grip just long enough to flip him the bird.

Must be Rook’s influence, King mused.

Crescent II dipped low with a stomach shaking lurch, followed by a strong jolt as the deployed landing gear bounced on the pavement. The pilots weren’t going to land completely. There wasn’t time for that if they were to have a chance of getting back to the Kivu region to pick up Bishop and Knight. This was as close to the ground as they were going to get.

“Go!” King shouted, and then he leaped down from the ramp.

Asya dropped beside him, flexing her knees to absorb the impact with the ground and putting out one hand to steady herself. She made it look easy. King didn’t know Asya nearly as well as a brother should know a sister, but he felt a flash of familial pride. She reminded him a lot of Julie, the older sister he had grown up with and who had inspired him to join the Army in the first place. Over the years, his memories of Julie had faded and the sting of her tragic death in a military training accident had diminished to the point where he sometimes had trouble remembering that his two sisters were not the same person.

There was a loud roar as Crescent’s pilot cranked up the turbos and pushed the jet back up into the sky. King and Asya stayed crouched down to avoid being knocked over by the rush of air and waited until the storm abated. In a matter of seconds, the stealth plane appeared to shrink, and then the thrusters swiveled to cruising configuration. It took off like a rocket.

Only now did King take a moment to survey the landing zone, a large open area of tarmac adjacent to the runway of the N’Djili International Airport. The east terminal building lay off to their left, the gates currently occupied by three passenger jets. A line of green military vehicles, each with a crew of soldiers, separated them from the terminal. One of the trucks started forward, and King did not fail to note that the gunner in the center-mounted turret had his machine gun trained on Asya and himself.

“Easy does it,” King said. The admonition was directed at Asya, but he hoped the soldiers approaching them heeded it as well.

The vehicle stopped a few yards away and three men, all dressed in woodland camouflage fatigues and wearing red berets, got out. One of them, the only one not brandishing an AKS-74 semi-automatic carbine, strode forward. He had a broad smile, which was at odds with everything else in the picture, but King returned a grin and raised a hand in salute.

“Bon jour,” the man said, greeting King like an old friend. He gave an answering salute before continuing in French. “I am Brigadier General Jean-Claude Mabuki, commander of the Republican Guard. We’ve been expecting you.”

King had no trouble understanding the man, and probably could have carried on a conversation in a few of the languages commonly used in the African nation. During the course of his long journey through time, he had learned dozens of languages, and not just as a matter of survival. He had intentionally sought out opportunities to learn tongues that he knew were still widely used in the twenty-first century. French was a piece of cake.

King introduced them using only their callsigns. If Mabuki found this strange, he gave no indication. He looked them over and his smile slipped a notch. “Only two? I had hoped your country would be able to provide a larger force.”

“Officially, my country isn’t providing anything. We’re here unofficially.”

“Yes, I understand. Still, I’m not certain what you will be able to do to help us.”

“I’m not really certain either,” King admitted. “But if you can brief us on the situation, I’ll have a better idea.”

“Of course. Please, come with me. I will take you to meet with President Okoa.” He gestured to the vehicle. The soldiers accompanying him opened doors on either side, and once King, Asya and the general were seated, they closed the doors and climbed up onto the roof of the vehicle.

As they drove around the terminal building, Mabuki briefly summarized the state of his country. The events were mostly the same as what Boucher had reported, but Mabuki provided insights that the official report could not.

“General Velle has the Army on his side,” he explained. “They have been waiting for just such an opportunity to make their move.”

“Why did President Mulamba not remove him from power?” Asya asked in heavily accented, but nonetheless passable French.

Mabuki gave a patient smile. “Africa is a complicated place, my friends. The simple answer is that many of the senior officers are loyal to Velle. The only way to prevent Velle from leading a coup was to keep him in his position. Velle is strong, but his control of the Army is not absolute. And he does not control the Republican Guard. We are loyal to the President. But there are many other players in this game. Arms dealers, mercenaries, rebels. They are loyal to no one, and they support whomever will make them wealthy. And the people will support whomever can keep them safe.”

Mabuki elaborated further on the various factions that were contributing to the unrest as they made their way through the capital city, but King was only half-listening. It was a familiar story, and one that he had witnessed too many times to count. In the streets, he saw the signs of a populace gripped by fear of the unknowable future. There were soldiers everywhere, and military and police checkpoints every few blocks. Civilians carried on their daily activities, but there was a tension in their movements, as if one and all were prepared to bolt for cover at the first sign of trouble. It was a powder keg, and there was no way of knowing if the spark that would set it off had already been struck.

They arrived at the Palais de la Nation, the seat of power in the country, in name at least. The three story building was a sprawling structure that might have looked more like a college stadium than a government office, if not for the hundreds of soldiers milling about in the foreground. The walls were a flat and featureless white on what appeared to be concrete slab construction. A domed roof rose up from the middle of the structure. From the street it reminded King of the Legion of Doom headquarters from Saturday morning cartoons. Mabuki escorted them through a blue and yellow painted gate that separated the street from the brick walkway leading into the palace.

As they entered the palace grounds, King heard Deep Blue’s voice. “King, I have bad news. There’s no way to sugar coat this. I’ve lost contact with Bishop and Knight.”

The words hit King like a plunge into an icy lake. He heard Asya give a little gasp, but like him, she kept moving, putting one foot in front of the next. “Lost contact?” King asked through clenched teeth. “What’s that mean? Are they dead?”

“It means their q-phones aren’t working anymore. They were alive when I lost the signal, but the rebels were firing mortars on their position. We built those phones to take a beating. The fact that we lost both signals at the same time…” Deep Blue didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. “It gets worse. Queen and Rook found Mulamba in a farmhouse outside London. He’s alive, but they’re pinned down. I thought you should know.”

“Understood. Keep me posted. King, out.”

Damn it!

14

The shit had hit the fan, and there wasn’t a thing King could do to help any of them. The instantaneous connectivity afforded by the q-phones made him feel all the more helpless. The Chess Team were the best soldiers on Earth. If anyone could get out of a tough scrape, he knew they could, but that didn’t make dealing with it any easier.

He flashed back to the conference call just a few hours earlier. It had not been as difficult to convince Deep Blue to commit to the operation as King had initially feared. Like the others, the former president felt the same compulsion to defend the innocent and the helpless — the ones who would almost certainly die first if the situation in the Congo continued to deteriorate. Because he was no longer constrained by political realities, the former president was actually eager to do something, anything, even if it seemed like a desperate long shot. His restraint stemmed, not from an ambivalence toward the plight of the Congo’s people, but from a very real concern about putting his people in harm’s way for a goal that was, at best, unclear.

King understood that kind of thinking better than Tom Duncan ever could. He had spent nearly three thousand years focused on one objective — saving his friends and family. It had become a sort of mania, almost impossible to let go of. Like an overprotective parent, he had become so used to the idea of saving them that now he couldn’t bear to see them at risk. But risk was what they did. They were, one and all, willing to sacrifice anything, their lives if necessary, for a greater good, just as he was.

Easy to say, but a lot harder to accept, especially after centuries focused on the single goal of keeping them alive.

And for what? So they could die senseless deaths just a year later?

He choked down his helplessness and anger, and he followed Mabuki into the presidential palace. The general led them to a large conference room where several people were already gathered around a table. Given the awkward silence that followed their arrival, King guessed they had probably been arguing.

As he moved his gaze about the room, his glasses began supplying him with biographical data. The photosensitive lenses were now barely tinted, and would hopefully be passed off as ordinary spectacles. None of those present could see the information being beamed onto King’s and Asya’s retinas — the names of Congolese assemblymen and military officers, tribal leaders and of course, acting President Gerard Okoa. Not everyone in the room was African, however. A group of Caucasians sat near the president, two men with the sort of muscular physiques that could be achieved only through the use of illegal chemical substances — King dubbed them ‘the steroid twins’—and another older man with doughy features and slicked back hair. King’s attention, however, was drawn to the fourth person in their group, a stunningly beautiful woman with dark hair, who focused her laser-like stare in their direction.

Asya narrowed her eyes and stared back. “We don’t like her,” she muttered in Russia.

King knew his sister wasn’t merely being catty. There was something dangerous about this woman, and she made no effort to hide it.

A name appeared before his eyes, seemingly superimposed over the woman’s face. Monique Favreau. Former officer of the DGSE. Presently field director of Executive Solutions International.

King knew that name very well. ESI was a notorious private security company. Not just mercenaries, but an army of mercenaries. Only the wealthiest corporations could afford ESI — the diamond cartel and petroleum multinationals — and certainly not a poor developing nation in Africa. If ESI was involved, it meant that someone with a lot of money and power had taken an interest in the Congo situation.

Mabuki introduced King and Asya simply as ‘advisors from the United States’ and no one questioned it. King got the sense that there was a lot of advising going on. As they took seats, the acting president addressed them.

“More Americans.” Okoa was a blunt man in both word and appearance. He was not exactly overweight, but thick, like an unfinished clay statue. “Why are you here?”

King studied him, wondering how much he could say about what they hoped to accomplish, and whether he could promise the man anything at all. Okoa claimed to be a strong supporter of Joseph Mulamba, but politicians could rarely be trusted to say anything that wasn’t self-serving, and now that Okoa had a taste of power, King wondered if he would he still be faithful to Mulamba’s vision of a unified Africa.

There seemed no point in lying to the man. “If I may speak frankly, Mr. President, my country is reluctant when it comes to interfering in the politics of a sovereign nation.” Someone laughed aloud, a staccato sound, like the crack of a whip. It was the woman, Monique Favreau. King didn’t stop. “But some of us are not willing to stand by and allow another genocide to take place.”

Genocide was a powerful word. Even those who openly advocated the extermination of their hated enemies shied away from it.

Okoa was unmoved, though. “And since we have oil and natural gas, our genocide is much more interesting to you.”

The not-so-thinly veiled accusation shocked King. “I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“Is that so?” Okoa glanced toward Favreau and the other men. King did, too, and as he did, he heard Deep Blue mutter a rare curse. An instant later, the facial recognition software displayed the name of the older Caucasian man. Lance Marrs, United States Senator, Utah.

Two years earlier, Marrs had taken advantage of an unfolding global crisis to target his number one political enemy, President Tom Duncan — Deep Blue. While Duncan and Domenick Boucher had ultimately turned Marrs’s attack to their advantage, it had come at great expense. Duncan had been forced to resign from office in disgrace, providing endless fodder for late-night talk show comedians, and his accomplishments, the public ones at least, had been relegated to a footnote in history.

King realized that Marrs was staring back at him. “I’m not sure who you are, fella,” the Senator said, oozing contempt. “I can only assume that President Chambers sent you here without the approval of the United States Congress.”

“You can assume whatever you like,” King said. “That’s your standard operating procedure, isn’t it?”

Marrs bristled, but King kept talking. “Speaking of assumptions, am I to assume that you have the approval of Congress?”

“I am on a fact-finding mission.” Marrs enunciated each word as if that would somehow lend gravity to his statement. “This region may have strategic importance to the energy policy of the United States of America, so naturally my colleagues and I are concerned with maintaining stability.”

King suddenly understood what Okoa had meant with his accusation. He didn’t know exactly what kind of resources the Congo had to offer, but the evident collusion between Marrs and Executive Solutions International hinted at a well-funded agenda.

An agenda that would have been seriously threatened by Joseph Mulamba’s plan to create a unified African federation.

Favreau spoke up. “Mr. President, we can end this crisis right now, right here in this room, without any meddling from foreign governments.”

Okoa seemed to deflate a little. “And all it will cost me is the wealth of my nation.”

“Sir, my employers do not want to take away the resources of your nation. They want a mutually beneficial partnership, that will help you and your citizens reap the benefits of those resources. What do you want to give your people? Jobs? Security? A future?” She cast a glance at King. “Or genocide?”

King subvocalized a message to Deep Blue. “Who is this bitch working for?”

Marrs was quick to add his input. “I am in complete agreement, sir. We do not, I can’t stress that enough, do not want to meddle in your affairs. We want to help you help yourselves.”

“ESI’s client list is heavily safeguarded,” Deep Blue said, “but the record of Marrs’s campaign donors isn’t. His super-PAC receives support from three different petroleum multinationals. Consolidated Energy tops that list. It’s probably not a coincidence that Methods Logistics — the second largest oil field support company in the world — is headquartered in Salt Lake City.”

King suddenly felt like he was in over his head. He was a soldier, a warrior, accustomed to dealing with threats head on. This was an entirely different kind of battlefield.

Deep Blue must have sensed his growing frustration. “Disengage,” he advised. “You won’t beat Marrs here. We need to find out more.”

King scanned the faces in the room once more. Several of the politicians were nodding in evident support of Favreau’s statement, and Okoa, too, seemed to be wavering.

King stood up and addressed the man at the head of the table. “Sir, it’s not my place to advise you on matters of internal policy. I’m here to give you whatever support I can… until President Mulamba is restored to office.”

The words had the desired effect. A stir of confusion arose among the government officials. Marrs looked bewildered. Favreau’s gaze sharpened to its earlier intensity. She leaned back and whispered something to one of her steroid-infused goons.

She knows.

King drove the point deeper. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but President Mulamba has been found. He’s alive and well, and on his way back right now.” Please let it be true. He turned to Asya. “Let’s go.”

No one stopped them from leaving the room, but as soon as they were in the hall outside, General Mabuki caught up to them. “Is this true? The President is alive?”

“He is.” King didn’t like deceiving the man with a half-truth, but revealing his uncertainty about Mulamba’s fate would undermine what little advantage he had gained. “If you are as loyal to him as you claim, then let me help you hold this country together until he returns.”

The general gave a pensive nod. “There is only so much that I can do, but I will try. I will speak to you again when the meeting is over.”

When he was gone, Asya said, “Well that was fun. Are all your assignments like this?”

No, he almost said. Usually there are monsters.

Before he could utter the comment, a group of soldiers rushed toward them. At first, King thought they might be Mabuki’s men, come to escort them to a place where they could await the general’s return, but two things made him quickly realize this was not the case.

Unlike the Republican Guards he had seen thus far, these men were not wearing red berets. Rather, they wore soft patrol caps that matched their uniforms.

The second indicator was much more explicit.

The soldiers were all aiming their Kalashnikov carbines at him.

15

Queen held her SIG out in a two-handed grip, the muzzle trained on the door. Behind her, Joseph Mulamba raised his weapon as well, but Rook placed a hand on the muzzle and gently pushed Mulamba behind him.

“Just stay back, sir,” Rook said.

“Let him fight,” Queen said, “When they come through that door, we’re going to need all the firepower we can get.”

Rook gave a nod. “I agree. So let’s keep them on the other side of that door.”

He advanced, his pistol at the ready, and knelt down. When he was as close to the opening as he dared get, he took his glasses off, set them on the floor so that the lenses were facing out, and then slid them out into the hallway.

Queen gave a little gasp of delight when she saw the result. It was like being able to see through the wall. Two figures, both tagged with a red icon, were creeping along the passage, just a few yards from the door. She raised two fingers to signal Rook, then inspiration dawned. She took a step back, aimed her pistol at the wall, and fired twice.

The bullets punched through the thin plaster and then kept right on going through the heads of the two mercenaries. Queen saw both men go down, the one closest to the door pitching forward, and then his image, along with everything else that was being transmitted in the virtual display, abruptly vanished. Just visible on the hall floor was the outstretched hand of the dead would-be attacker. The Skorpion pistol in his grip had landed squarely atop Rook’s glasses, smashing them to bits.

“O-kay,” Rook said slowly. “That wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

“It was a good idea,” Queen said. “I just wish we had a spare pair.”

Deep Blue’s voice sounded in her head. “You do. Use your glasses, Queen. You can use the q-phones to view the feed. I’ll configure them remotely.”

Queen relayed the message to Rook, and then took her q-phone out and placed her thumb on the dark screen to unlock it. It immediately glowed to life, and showed a picture of what Queen was looking at, which at that moment happened to be the phone in her hand, creating an infinity mirror effect. She took the glasses off and extended them around the door frame so that the phone screen showed the now empty hallway.

Rook was looking at the display of his phone as well, which also showed the feed from Queen’s glasses. “Where’d they go?”

Queen knew there were at least three more gunmen, and possibly as many as six more, but evidently the loss of their vanguard had caused them to reconsider their tactics. “Keep watching the hall. I’m going to check the balcony.”

Staying low, with the glasses held up over her head like a periscope, she crept through the French doors and scanned the ground below. She immediately spotted two mercenaries, crouched down behind a parked car in the driveway. Their guns were trained on the front of the house. The men were hunkered down. Not going anywhere.

They’re covering someone, she realized, and extended the glasses out a little further, tilting them down to reveal the front porch almost directly beneath her. She expected to see a line of men preparing to storm the house, but something much worse waited below.

“Shit,” she muttered.

There were more mercenaries near the front of the house, but they weren’t getting ready to make a tactical entry. Instead, they had opted for a scorched earth policy — literally. Two men poured the contents of large red metal canisters onto the side of the house and all over the porch. If she had any doubts about what was in those cans, they were swept away when she caught a whiff of gasoline fumes.

There was no time to sort through the options. Queen placed her phone on the floor and raised her SIG. The weapon was equipped with a sensor that linked its holographic sight to the glasses, so now the phone showed not only the scene below but also a highlighted section where her shot would strike. She adjusted the barrel until it was centered on one of the gas-can toting mercenaries, and pulled the trigger.

The mercenary dropped, but before she could line up a second shot, the men by the cars opened fire on the balcony. As bullets hammered into the wooden railing, Queen was forced to retreat inside. She didn’t see what happened next, but she could smell it. The odor of gasoline was replaced by something else: the acrid tang of smoke. At first, there were just a few wisps of black vapor, but in a matter of seconds, the smoke became a cloud, roiling with convection waves as the fire spread.

Rook crept out the bedroom door but returned a moment later, shaking his head, accompanied by a trail of smoke. “No good. The first floor is already engulfed. They must have doused it first.”

“Looks like we’ve only got one way out,” Queen said, jerking a thumb at the balcony.

Rook didn’t challenge the assessment, and she knew he wouldn’t. They had worked together — been together — long enough that they didn’t need quantum technology to communicate. He stooped down and relieved one of the corpses of a Skorpion. He released the magazine, checked it and slammed it back in. “Out of the fire and into the frying pan.”

“Don’t be a pessimist,” Queen said.

Rook grinned. “I was talking about them.”

Queen returned his smile. “Right. Let’s get cooking.”

Mulamba didn’t share their almost psychic bond. “What are you saying?”

“We’re going that way.” Queen pointed to the balcony.

“But they are out there!”

“Not for much longer,” Rook said. He edged outside, using the smoke for concealment, and unleashed a burst from the machine pistol. Rounds sparked off the hood of the car parked below. A hand holding an identical weapon appeared above the front fender, and Rook drew back an instant before another volley raked the wall above the balcony. Rook was already back inside, so he didn’t see the man at the other end of the car move out into the open, training his weapon on the doorway, ready to take a well-aimed shot the next time an opportunity presented itself.

Rook didn’t see it, but Queen did. She saw everything in her phone’s display and with just a slight adjustment, isolated the man in the targeting box and took the shot.

“Got him.”

“Good, ‘cause we gotta go right now.”

Queen knew he wasn’t exaggerating. The room was filling up with smoke, stinging her eyes and lungs, and heat was radiating up through the floor. In a few minutes, or perhaps only just a few seconds, the fire would burn through, plunging them into the inferno, but there were still at least two more mercenaries outside, waiting for the flames to drive them out.

She put the glasses on and stowed the phone in a pocket, then turned to Mulamba. “We have to jump. You’ll have to go first so we can cover you.” She didn’t ask if he could do it. He didn’t have a choice. “Drop, roll and then run for cover, got it?”

He gave her a terrified look, but then Rook clapped him on the shoulder. “He’s got it. Am I right, Joe?”

Mulamba managed a wan grin. “Hakuna matata.”

Queen gave a three count, and at the word “Go!” both she and Rook laid down covering fire while Mulamba clambered over the rail and dropped to the ground.

“Your turn!” Rook shouted. He triggered another burst as she rolled over the rail. For a moment, she caught sight of Mulamba, on the ground and looking dazed, and then she hit. The impact jolted through her, sending a throb of pain up from the soles of her feet to her knees, but she remembered her own advice and tucked into a roll to reduce some of the effect. She came up searching for a target, saw movement and fired.

Rook landed beside her and rolled into a crouch, sweeping the barrel of his Skorpion back and forth, looking for someone to shoot. When no return fire came, he pivoted and scooped Mulamba off the ground. Queen turned in the direction of the parked car and ran. Rook stayed right behind her, half-dragging Mulamba.

Smoke billowed from every window of the farmhouse, obscuring everything to either side, but she could hear distant shouts and then the report of machine pistols. The mercenaries that had been covering the rear of the house were coming around to join the fight.

Queen rounded the front end of the vehicle, finger poised on the trigger of her SIG, but found only sprawled bodies. At least that much had gone in their favor. Rook and Mulamba ducked down next to her, and as Rook fired blind into the smoke, Queen tried the door.

Unlocked.

She crawled inside and a quick search revealed a key under the driver’s side floor mat. She slotted it into the ignition and gave it a turn. The engine turned over almost right away, but as it settled into an idle, she could hear a rattling noise. Some of Rook’s shots had perforated the hood and found their way into the car’s mechanical guts. It was running, but there was no telling how long it would continue to do so.

The window above her shattered, spraying her with glass fragments, but she stayed focused on the task of contorting her body into the driver’s seat while keeping her head down. Rook fired out the Skorpion, and then tossed Mulamba into the backseat.

“We’re in! Punch it!”

Bullets hammered into the car, drilling right through the metal panels. Queen winced as a fragment dug into her right thigh, but she didn’t let off on the accelerator. The car fishtailed a little as she wheeled it around, throwing up a spray of gravel, and then she straightened it out, aiming for the driveway.

The rattling noise from the engine intensified to an earsplitting crescendo and the smell of burning metal filled the interior of the vehicle. Indicator lights on the console flashed, telling her what she already knew: this was going to be a short ride.

The noise of the engine tearing itself apart nearly drowned out every other sound, but Queen realized that she no longer heard the distinctive crack of rounds striking the car. She raised her head and saw that they were almost to the end of the drive. A glance back showed the farmhouse, fully wreathed in smoke and fire. She also saw a pick-up truck, loaded with armed mercenaries, rolling out from behind the curtain of flame.

Queen eased off the gas a little to make the turn onto the road, but when she pressed it again, the response was sluggish. She floored the pedal, but the engine continued to clatter.

Their rented sedan was a tiny speck in the distance, perhaps five hundred yards away. “Come on,” she said, willing the car to hold together just a little bit longer, but the universe rejected her plea. The engine gave a final sickening thunk, and the clattering ceased altogether, plunging them into near total silence.

“Stay with Joe!” Rook shouted, and he was out the door before the car could come to a complete stop. He bolted toward their car, running all-out like an Olympic sprinter.

Queen had no intention of leaving Mulamba behind, but staying with him wasn’t the same as staying put. She threw her door open and swung out of the seat, only remembering the wound in her thigh when the first step sent a stab of pain through her entire leg.

Pain she could handle, but the tissue damage was another story. The bullet fragment had gouged into her quadriceps, and now the entire muscle was inflamed. She steadied herself against the car, ignored the agony and begged her muscles to keep going just as she had pleaded with the engine a moment before. Unlike the car, her body listened.

Mulamba, still in a daze, was slow to exit, but as soon as his door was open, Queen grabbed his arm and dragged him along. Her leg throbbed with every step, threatening to collapse beneath her, but through sheer force of will, she stayed on her feet and kept moving, almost faster than Mulamba could manage.

Behind them, perhaps two hundred yards away, the pick-up full of mercenaries burst out of the driveway and skidded onto the road. Queen reached back and fired the SIG, emptying the magazine. The truck was well outside the effective range of the pistol, but Queen wasn’t shooting in hopes of hitting someone. She was just trying to buy them a few more seconds.

She saw Rook reach the car and yank the door open… the left door. Wrong side, Rook. He threw his head back and shouted, “Friggin’ backwards England!” She heard him despite the distance, and for a second, she wondered why his curse hadn’t come through on the comm link, but then she remembered that he had sacrificed his glasses during the escape.

Rook didn’t let his frustration slow him down. He leaped across the hood and got in on the right side. A moment later, the car’s tail lights flashed and its backup lights came on. A cloud of rubber smoke rose up and half a second later, she heard the squeal of tires, time delayed because of the distance the sound had to travel.

This is going to be close, she realized. She and Mulamba were at the mid-point between the sedan and the pick-up full of mercenaries. The latter had the advantage of moving forward and a higher range of acceleration, but as long as they were moving away from it and toward Rook, there was a chance. She considered trying to reload the SIG, but wasn’t sure that she could juggle one more task.

Move your ass, Rook!

She started and nearly tripped as a loud report sounded right behind her. It wasn’t the mercenaries, but Mulamba, firing the Skorpion Rook had given him. He let off two long bursts and more than a few of his rounds found their target, sparking off the truck’s hood, shattering the headlights and windshield. The pick-up swerved and slowed, and Queen thought maybe he had hit the driver as well.

Another shriek of tires and grinding brakes signaled Rook’s arrival. He had swerved out into the road at the last second, and now idled beside them. Queen got the rear door open, pushed Mulamba in, and then climbed in after.

“Go!”

Rook was already going, accelerating down the straightaway as fast as the car would go, not exactly street-racer fast, but enough. “And remember to drive on the left!”

Rook muttered a curse, and Queen felt the car swerve into the other lane. Behind them, the pick-up was starting to move forward again, but Mulamba’s volley had definitely taken the wind out of their sails, and Rook was able to increase their lead to the point where it was clear that the mercenaries had given up the chase. A few minutes later, they passed a string of emergency vehicles — police cars and fire trucks — responding to the towering column of black smoke, and Rook slowed to a less conspicuous pace.

“Well, that didn’t quite go according to plan,” he said, “but I think we’re clear.”

Queen finally allowed herself to breathe normally. She widened the hole in her blood-soaked jeans to fully expose the injury that now throbbed in time with her heartbeat. At the center of the oozing wound was a piece of dark metal that looked almost like a tiny shark tooth. She massaged the surrounding tissue until it was close enough to the surface for her pluck it out with her fingernails. She would need stitches to close it, but that would have to wait a while longer.

She glanced over at Mulamba. “Are you all right? Any injuries?”

The Congolese president stared back at her for a moment as if uncomprehending, but then broke into a broad smile. “I am free! Thank you, thank you so much.”

Rook looked over his shoulder. “Introductions all around. Joe, Queen… Queen, Joe.”

“Queen? That is your name? And he is Rook? I see now. You are chess pieces. And I must be the king you are meant to protect.”

Rook laughed aloud, and Queen found herself chuckling, not so much at Mulamba’s mistake as at the idea of King needing protection. “Not quite, Mr. President… Joe. But we are going to make sure you get back home safely. No offense, but things have gone completely to shit since you’ve been away.”

“No offense taken.” Mulamba’s elated smile slipped a little. “If I am truthful, things there were completely shit before I left. That is what I have been trying to change.”

Queen nodded, but she was only half-listening. She held a hand to her ear, as if keying a concealed microphone and spoke aloud. “Blue, we need transport to the Congo.”

She was hoping to hear him say that Crescent II was already on the way. At Mach two, they could have Mulamba back in his office in Kinshasa by dinnertime, and that would be the end of it. But Deep Blue never got the chance to say it.

“No!” Mulamba cried. “I cannot go back. Not yet.”

Queen worked her jaw, trying very hard to stay calm. “Mr. President, maybe you didn’t understand what I just said. Your country is on the brink of civil war. If you don’t go back, millions of people will die—your people.”

He shook his head emphatically. “Even I cannot prevent that now. I must go to Belgium.”

“Listen, we just put our asses on the line to get you out of that place back there. Our friends are in your country, knee deep in it so that you’ll have somewhere to go back to. So don’t tell me it’s too late.”

Deep Blue’s voice sounded in her head. “He might not be wrong, Queen. Things have taken a turn for the worse.”

Queen clenched her teeth, but before she could reply to either man, Rook spoke up. “What’s in Belgium? I mean aside from the world’s best waffles.”

Mulamba, evidently excited at the prospect of being able to tell his story, leaned forward, sticking his head over the back of the passenger seat. “In Belgium, I hope to find the truth about what happened on the day that Henry Morton Stanley found Dr. David Livingstone.”

“And why is that so important?”

Mulamba’s voice dropped to a hushed, almost reverent whisper. “Dr. Livingstone found something in his journeys. Something of which the world has no knowledge. Something that will save Africa.”

16

Bishop’s awareness returned in a jumble of disconnected pieces. His perceptions made no sense without the context of memories, which at the moment, were elusive.

Hot, humid air, reeking of rot and smoke… a jungle… Africa. Why?

A dark-skinned woman lay a few feet away… Felice, her name is Felice, but how do I know that? A man lay motionless just beyond her. Knight. Why isn’t he moving? A ringing in his ears from the explosion… Explosion? The mortar shells… Someone had been dropping mortars on them.

The pieces came together in a rush that was almost painful in its urgency. He scrambled up, then almost collapsed as a wave of dizziness washed over him. The head rush, brought on by the effect of gravity pulling blood away from his brain, passed after a moment, and he saw, thirty yards beyond Knight, an enormous crater, still smoking from the shell that had detonated there just a few seconds earlier.

He didn’t know why the attacking force was not still raining hell down on them, but he wasn’t going to wait around for them to realize their mistake. He scooped Felice up with one hand, throwing her over his shoulder like a bag full of laundry, then hoisted Knight onto the other shoulder, and took off running toward the green wall of jungle.

Shots sounded behind him. Tree branches and leaves disintegrated as bullets tore through. That at least explained why there hadn’t been any more mortars. The rebels, believing that the first volley had accomplished its intended purpose, had stopped firing and sent out a party to investigate. Bishop kept running, pushing through a tangle of vegetation that tore at his arms and legs and threatened to pull the human cargo off his shoulders, but he fought through, and after a moment, he found himself in the relative openness of the forest floor.

The tree branches were spaced widely enough for him to move unimpeded. High above, the foliage grew together to form a ceiling that shut out nearly all sunlight, leaving the jungle floor as dark as dusk. Bishop now understood why Africa, with a sun-scorched desert that was bigger than the entire United States, and endless miles of open grasslands, had earned the nickname ‘the dark continent.’

He could no longer hear the report of rebel guns behind him, but he didn’t mistake that for safety. They might have stopped shooting so they could chase him down. In the eternal night beneath the jungle canopy, it was difficult to tell whether he was being followed, but he had to assume that he was, so he kept running as if the hounds of Hell were biting at his heels.

He gradually became aware of an insistent pounding against his back. At first, he assumed that it was his M240B machine gun on its thick nylon web sling, swinging back and forth in time with his footsteps, and he tried to ignore it. Finally, when the beating grew more insistent, he stopped to shift his load, and that was when he realized the sensation wasn’t coming from his gear.

“Put me down.” The words were grunted, breathless and not at all familiar. It wasn’t Knight. Felice? “I can walk. Put me down.”

Bishop peered into the darkness behind them. There was no sign of pursuit. He knelt cautiously until the soles of Felice’s shoes brushed the ground, and then he released his hold on her legs. She kicked like a swimmer until her feet found purchase. She wobbled unsteadily and caught herself on his shoulder.

“You okay?” Bishop’s voice sounded strange in his own ears, as though his head had been stuffed with sawdust. It occurred to him that the exploding mortar shells might have rung his bell a little harder than he realized.

Felice looked herself over. Her dark skin was painted with a lighter-colored coating of sticky dust, and beneath her torn clothing were too many scrapes and abrasions to count, but the amount of blood staining the fabric suggested the injuries were only minor.

A fresh wave of realization washed over him. In his desperate panic to get away from the besieged camp, he hadn’t stopped to assess what damage he had taken. He wasn’t feeling much pain — just the ache of the exertion and a mild headache, but he knew that sometimes adrenaline had a way of masking serious injury. A glance up and down his extremities showed numerous small tears and scorch marks on his BDUs, and underneath a lot of bloody scratches, but as with Felice, none of it looked serious. Then he remembered. “Knight!”

Knight had been closer to the blast.

Bishop gently shifted his teammate off his shoulder and laid him on the ground. Knight didn’t stir.

A cold knot of fear clenched Bishop’s gut. He laid a hand on Knight’s chest, felt the faint rise and fall with each shallow breath.

Still alive.

Then he got a look at Knight’s face and the dread exploded into a horror like nothing Bishop had ever felt before. The emotion tore from his throat in a howl that startled birds and monkeys in the branches high overhead, and in an instant, the jungle descended into a cacophony of primal rage.

17

Felice let out a cry of her own and clapped her hands over her ears as the bestial roar reached a fever pitch. The big man that had rescued her from the attack looked like something from a movie — a human transforming into a werewolf before her very eyes.

She knew what that felt like.

Darting forward, she reached out and slapped him.

It was like hitting a skyscraper. Her palm cracked loudly against his skin, and pain shot all the way to her elbow. His howl became a snarl of animal fury as he turned on her, and in that instant, she knew he was going to kill her.

But he didn’t. He remained where he was, kneeling, hands raised and fingers curled like claws, teeth bared and chest heaving as he breathed.

“He needs you!” She tried to shout it, but the words clung to her throat like molasses. She searched her memory for something that would get through to him… a name. Knight. He called him Knight. “Knight needs you!”

A glimmer of humanity flashed in the man’s eyes, and with what seemed like a superhuman effort, he swallowed down his rage. His fingers straightened and then his hands fell to his side. For a few seconds, he remained that way, statue still except for his rapid breathing.

Felice was panting, too, but forced herself to move. She circled around so that the supine Knight lay between the big man and herself. She knelt and assessed the unconscious man’s injuries. She quickly saw why the bigger man had reacted the way he had.

The left side of Knight’s face was a mess of swollen and scorched flesh, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Something ragged and misshapen, a piece of metal, protruded from the place where his eye should have been.

Felice let out a gasp, but quickly got control of herself, lest her reaction push the big man back over the edge. She willed herself into a detached, meditative state, and bent over Knight, checking for other injuries that might be even more critical.

His left side had taken the brunt of the mortar blast. There were more chunks of metal embedded in his upper arm. The entire limb was swollen, but the wounds were only oozing blood. There didn’t appear to be any arterial bleeding or damage to his torso.

“I need some water. And a first aid kit if you have it. We have to clean and dress these wounds.”

The request seemed to pull the big man back from the precipice. He unslung his gear and weapons, and produced a small satchel. Inside was a collection of combat medical equipment, bandages and other supplies. He took out a plastic bag filled with clear liquid and passed it to her.

In the darkness, she could not read what was written on the bag, but she assumed it was a saline solution or perhaps Ringer’s lactate. Either one would work just fine for irrigating Knight’s wounds. She bit off a corner, careful not to spill too much of its contents, and then directed a stream of the liquid onto Knight’s ravaged face.

“By the way, I’m Felice.”

“I remember. I’m Bishop. This is Knight.”

Bishop and Knight. They were code names, obviously, like the callsigns that fighter pilots and military units sometimes used, but they were also the names of chess pieces, and that took her to a place in her memory she preferred not to visit. She shook her head and focused on what she was doing.

The simple act of getting out the medical kit seemed to have a calming effect on Bishop. He took out a pair of trauma shears and cut away Knight’s right sleeve, exposing the undamaged arm. It took him less than a minute to find and sterilize an injection site, and subsequently to insert a needle catheter into a vein and begin a rapid infusion of fluid into Knight’s bloodstream.

“What else do you have in there?” Felice asked. “We’re going to need to sew up these wounds.”

“Not yet. I don’t know if they’re still on our six, but we have to keep moving.”

“Where do we go? There are villages a few miles from here, but I’m not sure it’s safe to show our faces.”

“We just have to get to the alternate LZ…” Bishop’s voice trailed off for a moment, then an ember of his earlier rage flared to life. “Damnit!”

Felice flinched a little, but quickly laid a steadying hand on his forearm. “What is it?”

“My glasses are gone.”

She had no idea what he meant by that, but before she could ask for an explanation, he pulled away and took out what looked to her like a mobile phone from one of his cargo pockets. He stabbed a finger at it, then shook it, and when nothing happened, closed his fist around it. There was an audible crack as the device imploded in his grip.

He let the pieces fall to the ground. “We’ve got no comms. No way to let anyone know we’re alive.”

Felice grasped his arm again. “Hey. Let’s deal with one thing at a time, okay?”

He clenched his jaw so tightly that Felice could hear his teeth grinding, but then he nodded.

“Good. I’m going to bandage his… his face. I don’t think we should try to remove any of the metal from his wounds yet. Not until we have time to put in some sutures.”

Bishop nodded and withheld further comment, while she packed Knight’s eye with gauze and swathed his head with a long strip of self-adhering Coban wrap. “Should we try to wake him?”

Felice pressed two fingers to Knight’s wrist. “His pulse is strong and steady. I don’t think he’s in shock, but he’s going to be in a lot of pain. Ideally, he shouldn’t be moved at all, but since that’s not an option, getting him walking is going to be better for him than riding on your shoulder.” Felice gave a helpless shrug. “Sorry. I can’t give you a better answer. He needs a real doctor.”

“You’ve done a pretty good job so far.”

The compliment was so unexpected, and so totally unlike anything she thought she’d hear from this man, that she found herself laughing. “Well, I know some basic first aid. You probably know more about battlefield medicine than I do.”

“You kept your head when I was about to lose mine.”

Something in the way he said it made Felice realize that staying cool under pressure was of paramount importance to the big man. His comment was both high praise for her and harsh self-criticism. “Well, I have my bad days, too.”

Bishop passed her a small foil pouch. “This should wake him up. Smelling salts.”

Felice shook a small capsule out of the packet and crushed it, releasing a strong odor of ammonia and eucalyptus. She expected a strong reaction, but when she held it under Knight’s nose, she was startled at the violence with which the injured man returned to consciousness. He jerked and flailed his arms, as if falling out of a dream, and then let out a scream that echoed back from the jungle ceiling.

Bishop caught Knight’s arms before he could tear at the bandage covering his face. Knight’s one good eye seemed to fix on Bishop’s face and he calmed a little, but he kept struggling to reach the wound.

Felice reached in as well, placing one hand on Knight’s forehead and another on his chest, soothing him as a mother might soothe a feverish child. “It’s okay.” She felt a pang of guilt at the lie. It wasn’t okay, not by a long shot. “I know it hurts, but you have to settle down.”

Whether it was her words and soft touch, or simply the return of Knight’s higher reasoning abilities she could not say, but she felt him relax beneath her hands.

“Shit!” he rasped. “It feels like there’s a knife sticking out of my eye.” His expression grew even more agonized. “Oh, God. There is, isn’t there?”

Before Bishop or Felice could give an answer — the bitter truth or a poisonous lie — a voice shouted from somewhere nearby. It sounded to Felice’s ear like the Swahili dialect some of the expedition’s bearers had used, and while she didn’t understand a word of it, the message was clear. I’ve found them.

The shout was followed immediately by the report of a rifle shot, then another and another. Three shots, not directed at them, but at the sky. A signal.

Bishop launched into motion, spinning on his heel, scooping up the enormous machine gun and holding its stock to his shoulder. He swept the jungle with the muzzle but did not fire.

He turned to Felice. “Take him. Run. I’ll find you.”

And then he was gone, running at a gallop toward the place from which the shots had come.

Without Bishop to hold him, there was nothing Felice could do to restrain Knight, but when he shook free of her grasp, it was not to tear at his wound. Instead, he tore the intravenous line from his arm, then groped for his rifle and rolled over into a prone firing position, facing in the direction Bishop was moving.

Felice gripped his arm. “You heard what he said. We have to run.”

“I don’t run,” Knight said. His teeth were clenched against the pain, but his voice was unnaturally calm.

“But I have to,” she said, matching his tone. “And I can’t make it on my own.”

Felice saw immediately that she had found the right pressure point. Knight’s posture relaxed, and then he sprang to his feet. “Bring the gear.”

She closed the med kit, stuffed it into Bishop’s rucksack, and hefted it onto one shoulder. Knight was staring at something on the ground, and she saw that it was the crushed remains of Bishop’s cell phone. “Should I bring that, too?”

When Knight didn’t answer, she gathered up the pieces and shoved them in a pocket. “Which way?”

He stared at her, his face twisting between inscrutable stoicism and unimaginable pain. Finally, he pointed away from where Bishop had gone and then lurched into motion.

They had only taken a few steps when the forest behind them erupted with the noise of machine gun fire.

18

Asya put her fingers through the metal grating that had been erected to close-off half of the small room, turning it into a makeshift detention cell. The wire mesh barrier, the sort of thing used to block off cashier booths and the back seats of police cars was a poor substitute for iron bars, but a cage was a cage.

One of the soldiers guarding them jabbed the muzzle of his carbine at her and grunted for her to move back. She wasn’t sure why. King and her were no threat to anyone now. Nevertheless, she moved back a few steps and looked to her brother, hoping to see the glimmer of an escape plan in his eyes.

If it was there, she didn’t see it. King just stood there, as still and silent as the Sphinx, staring through the barrier, looking at nothing.

As the troops had herded them through the palace, following a labyrinthine course that seemed designed to keep them away from curious eyes, she had listened as King reported everything to Deep Blue in a series of rapid-fire reports, which he disguised from their captors by feigning a cough. “We’ve been arrested.” Cough. “Regular army troops.” Cough. “Don’t know who’s behind it…” Cough. “… or if we have any allies.”

The soldiers hadn’t caught on to what he was doing, but as soon as they were in the cell, they performed a more thorough search, taking the glasses and the phones from King and Asya. Asya could see them sitting atop a folding table on the other side of the mesh. King had fallen quiet after they were shut in, and Asya knew why. Their captors would almost certainly be watching and listening carefully to see what the prisoners would reveal. Silence was absolutely necessary, but as the minutes stretched on, she began to feel truly alone.

She was obliged to change her mind about the merits of solitude when the room door opened and Monique Favreau entered, flanked by the two-steroid monsters. They had changed out of their business formal attire, and now wore BDUs with the same camo pattern as the soldiers. Favreau had a holstered pistol on her belt while her goons carried H&K MP5s.

“Look,” Asya remarked. “Is dragon lady, come to visit us. I knew there was reason I did not like you.”

Favreau stood on the other side of the mesh barrier and regarded her with a bemused expression for a moment. When she turned her attention to King, her look changed to something like… hunger.

“Who are you?” It wasn’t a demand so much as a statement of awe, delivered with all the sultriness and intensity that made most American men weak in the knees.

Asya hoped her brother would answer with something defiant or sarcastic—‘No one you want to mess with’ or ‘Your worst nightmare’—but that was more Rook’s way of doing things. King said nothing at all.

“No? Nothing? Perhaps I need to ask the question differently. Or perhaps…” Favreau’s lips curled in a predatory smile as she shifted her scrutiny to Asya. “Ah, I see it now. Brother and sister. Perhaps she will tell me what I want to know. Or, perhaps you will tell me to spare her unnecessary discomfort.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Asya said.

“Later,” Favreau replied without missing a beat. “For the moment, I think I will—”

“You’ve already lost.” King spoke quietly, forcing Favreau to stop and focus her attention on him again.

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Mulamba’s proposed African federation would mean the nationalization of the oil and natural gas industry across the entire continent,” King continued. “Your Big Oil bosses couldn’t stand for that, so they had you arrange his abduction in London. But it wasn’t enough to just get him out of the picture. You want chaos. Chaos makes the people who live here desperate, willing to give away their natural resources for the promise of stability and a quick buck.”

Favreau rolled her eyes and then moved over to the table where their phones and glasses lay. She tried to activate one of the q-phones but gave up when nothing happened. Asya knew that there was no way for her to overcome the phone’s biometric security, but she suspected that the phone actually was on, and transmitting every word that was said back to Deep Blue. King’s long accusatory statement had been his way of telling Deep Blue what he thought was actually going on in the Congo.

Asya wasn’t sure how that was going to help them get out of this mess, but she trusted that King knew what he was doing.

“Are you going to tell me who you are?” Favreau asked, setting the phone down. “You aren’t CIA. Senator Marrs believes you are, but we both know that isn’t true.”

“Let’s talk about Senator Marrs. Are you working for him, or is he working for you?”

Favreau laughed. “Neither. We have coincidental… sympathies.” She rolled the word around in her mouth like a sip of wine.

“Give him a message for me. Tell him he’s wasting time. President Mulamba is free. He’s on his way back here. This little revolution is finished.”

She made a brushing gesture with her hand. “Let him come back. It’s too late for him to make a difference.”

“He’ll have a very compelling story to tell his people — to tell the whole world — about how you are responsible for all of this, about how you were willing to tear the entire continent apart just so you could take their oil.”

“This is Africa,” Favreau said. “That’s how things are done here. Read a history book.”

“Oh, I know history, believe me. And I know that sometimes, things change.”

“You’re very sure of yourself. I like that in a man.” Favreau looked at him again for a long moment, breathing quickly as if aroused. Then she turned to one of her associates. “Take them out into the jungle and shoot them.”

19

Favreau watched as the two prisoners were herded out of the cell and taken away. She had considered shooting them herself, right then and there, but there was something about the man, something compelling.

She marveled at how quickly he had dissected the particulars of what she was doing on behalf of Consolidated Energy. He hadn’t gotten everything quite right, and he’d mistakenly attributed their motives to her. In fact, she didn’t care at all whether CE got their oil and natural gas leases, or for that matter, whether the inhabitants of the region got rich or got hacked apart with long knives. Her desires were for nothing so banal as wealth and power.

The wealthy and powerful believed that life was a game where the goal was to achieve an ever increasing amount of wealth and power, not realizing that, in so doing, they were consigning themselves to the same endless hamster wheel existence as everyone else. Favreau believed life was a different sort of game, where the true goal was to test oneself — win or die.

When she was young, joining the DSGE had once seemed like the ultimate challenge, but she had mastered the spy game and eventually grown tired of it. She had been drawn to the private sector, not because of the lucrative promise of material reward, but because it was the same game she had excelled at, but with fewer rules and much higher stakes.

The best games always had high stakes.

Favreau was fascinated with games. She had organized the men in her ESI strike team according to a playing card system: ten men, each designated by a corresponding card value, two through ten, with ace reserved for the unit leader. The suit — spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs — was used as the unit identifier, though rare was the situation that called for the deployment of all four units at any given time. Presently, Spades and Diamonds were in the UK, where they had carried out — and if the American had not been lying, subsequently botched — Mulamba’s abduction, while Hearts and Clubs were deployed throughout the Congo region.

The three positions corresponding to the face cards in each suit, she reserved for special roles — consultants or, when the contract called for it, the clients themselves — and as such, it was rare to have a king, queen or jack ‘in hand.’ For her own part, Favreau, had chosen the designation ‘Red Queen.’

One of the younger ‘cards’ had once asked if she’d taken her name from the supercomputer in a video game about zombies, and although she had no idea what he had been talking about, she rather liked the idea of both the computer and the fact that it was from a game. Her inspiration had been the character from the Lewis Carroll story Through the Looking Glass. Unlike the mercurial Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen from Carroll’s earlier tale was a cold, calculating chess piece that embodied the simple truth that Favreau lived by: to stay alive, you have to keep moving forward. In her case, that meant running toward the fight, not away from it. Retreat was weakness, and weakness was death.

That summarized her philosophy of life.

Her hand dropped to the remote trigger device in her pocket. With less pressure than it would take to pull the trigger on her pistol, she could detonate the RA-115, which lay in a corner of that very room. The explosion would erase the palace and kill hundreds, perhaps thousands in the blink of an eye.

She had no intention of doing so, but the mere fact that she could was as potent a stimulant as any illicit drug. That was true power.

She had learned about the bomb through her personal network of intelligence contacts. A disgruntled Russian official had told her of the sale to Hadir. An informant in the terrorist group, a man who would not have dreamed of selling his information to the West, but owed her a personal favor that he was eager to settle, had told her of the plot to destroy the Suez Canal. Her employers, both her superiors at ESI and the oil barons of Consolidated Energy, had given her carte blanche when it came to carrying out their schemes, so she saw no conflict in stopping Hadir personally or acquiring the bomb for her own, as yet undetermined, purposes. It had already proven quite handy at keeping General Velle in line, but merely using it as a threat — as a tool for extortion — wasn’t very satisfying.

There was a line from an American film—Speed—which summed up her feelings perfectly. The villain of the movie, a former bomb disposal officer who had himself become a bomb wielding terrorist, told the hero: ‘A bomb is made to explode. That’s its meaning. Its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.’

That line had stuck in her memory. The tactical nuclear device would one day fulfill its purpose, and she would be the one to make it happen. That was her purpose. The bomb was the instrument — the paintbrush — with which she would create her masterpiece, but like any artist, she needed to find the right inspiration.

She caressed the trigger and thought about the American. There was something about him, something that made her believe he might be a very formidable enemy, the very challenge she so craved.

If her men returned and reported that they had carried out her orders, then she would know that she had read the man wrong, that he was not the man she believed him to be.

But a gut feeling told her that her men would not be coming back with such a report. They might not ever return, in fact, and the idea brought the smile back to her face.

20

King did not share Favreau’s rosy optimism with respect to the matter of his own survival, but he was by no means resigned to his fate. As soon as the makeshift cell was unlocked, and he and Asya were escorted out by the steroid twins and a platoon of Congolese soldiers, he began looking for any opportunity to turn the tables on their captors.

“Be ready,” he told Asya, as the soldiers entered the cell, brandishing carbines. Two of their number came in to bind the prisoner’s hands with zip ties.

There was no time to say more, and really nothing more to be said. King didn’t know when their chance would come. If they were lucky, the soldiers would do something very stupid — that wasn’t completely beyond the realm of possibility — but it was much more likely that they would have to make their own luck. Unfortunately, without the glasses, there was no way to coordinate with Asya. She would just have to follow his lead.

Nothing that seemed like a good opportunity presented itself as they were hastened to a side exit and into the back of a waiting heavy transport truck, where Favreau’s mercenaries were joined by several Congolese army troops. He and Asya were forced to sit on the floor of the truck’s cargo bed, in between two rows of soldiers assembled on the inward facing troop seats.

The canvas canopy had been rolled back, exposing the occupants of the truck to the elements, but King’s view of the roadside was mostly obscured by the wall of bodies. At first, he caught glimpses of tall buildings, but as the journey progressed, they were replaced by the tops of trees. There were other changes, too. The sudden stops, accompanied by squealing and hissing air brakes, and followed by lurching starts, became less frequent, replaced instead by the back and forth sway of the truck swerving through turns or jouncing over potholes. It was a punishing ride, and King knew from experience that the wooden benches where their captors sat were only marginally more comfortable.

Something wet struck his cheek. At first, he thought one of the soldiers had spit on him, and he studied their blank faces to identify the culprit, but then another gob of moisture hit him, and he realized that it was rain.

In the space of just a few seconds, the afternoon sky darkened and the scattering of droplets became a torrent. Water filled the bed of the truck faster than it could drain out through the gaps in the tailgate. The soldiers did their best to lift their boots up out the flood, but King and Asya were obligated to simply slosh about in the deepening puddle.

A blinding flash seared across the sky and King’s retinas, followed about two seconds later by a peal of thunder that reverberated through the truck bed.

Damn, that’s close.

The basic rule for estimating the distance of a lightning strike was to count the number of seconds between the flash and the thunderclap — five seconds meant the lightning was a mile away. Two seconds meant only about seven hundred yards.

There was another flare — not a quick flash, but a prolonged burst of light that seemed to come from all around, shifting through degrees of intensity. The thunder boom arrived even before the electrical discharge finished.

They were driving right into the heart of the storm.

The African soldiers took the weather in stride, but King noticed the steroid-twins looking around nervously. Lightning was unpredictable, and while the all-steel frame and roll-over cage construction of the truck could afford some protection against electrocution — acting as a sort of impromptu Faraday Cage — the open bed offered no shelter whatsoever from a direct strike.

King realized this was the moment for which he’d been waiting. He doubted there was a psychic bond between siblings, but tried to project his intention into his sister’s brain. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut tight so that the next flash wouldn’t blind him. When it came just a few seconds later, it wasn’t lightning that struck the back of the truck.

“Now!”

Even as he shouted it, he was moving, twisting around and aiming a kick up at the nearest of the steroid twins. His boot heel caught the unsuspecting man under the chin, snapping his head back with a crunch of vertebrae that King felt but could not hear over the thunderclap that followed.

Still flash-blind from the lightning, the soldiers were slow to react, giving King time to roll over into a kneeling position. The remaining mercenary’s eyes widened in alarm, but before he could even twitch a muscle, King threw himself forward, smashing his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. The injury had the desired effect of stunning the mercenary, but King’s primary goal had been to get closer to the man’s weapons, and he accomplished that task by spinning around and throwing himself bodily onto the man’s lap. As his fingers knotted around the nylon sling of the man’s MP5, King saw the soldiers on the opposite side start to raise their carbines.

There were shouts, but the men couldn’t shoot King without hitting their fellow soldiers. The men on the bench to either side of King realized this, too, and almost in unison, they threw themselves flat onto the bed, leaving only the stunned mercenaries and King in the line of fire.

Several carbines fired all at once, but none found a target. In the instant before a single trigger was pulled, Asya, who had scrambled to the front of the bed to avoid the tangle of bodies seeking cover, lashed out with a double-footed kick to the line of soldiers on the bench. The shove not only threw off their aim, but sent two of them spilling over the tailgate.

“Jump!” King shouted.

Asya didn’t hesitate. She got her feet under her, scrambled onto the bench and leaped over the side.

Before he could follow, King felt the truck braking. The sudden deceleration threw him forward, but he kept his grip on the sling of the machine pistol. The mercenary, who was just starting to recover from King’s initial attack, was pulled off the bench, and fell atop King in the midst of the tangled bodies.

With his hands still bound, King had to wriggle like a snake to get free of the squirming mass, but unlike the other men jumbled together, he knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish. He rolled out from under the mercenary, and without releasing his hold on the nylon sling, got to his feet and heaved himself over the side of the truck.

The sling pulled taut against his grip and for a moment, he feared it might rip right through the flesh of his fingers. His arms were suddenly yanked up painfully, and for a moment, he hung from the side of the truck, a few feet above the glistening mud that covered the road. The still rolling dual wheels were close enough to kiss.

Then, as abruptly as his fall had been arrested, it resumed, and he slammed onto the ground. The dazed mercenary slammed down atop him a moment later, driving the wind from his lungs.

King fought to suppress the pain and rising panic of breathlessness. Everything that had occurred had been a result of action he had taken, and that gave him the edge, no matter what happened. He heard the truck’s brakes squealing as it slid to a stop perhaps fifty yards away, and he knew he had to keep moving, had to keep acting instead of reacting, if he was going to survive the next few seconds.

Bending his body like a contortionist, King slipped his bound hands down past his hips and then threaded one leg at a time through the hoop formed by his arms. It took only about three seconds, but that was time enough for the soldiers to start piling out of the truck.

He dropped to his knees beside the mercenary, delivering a double-fisted hammer blow that rendered the man unconscious, and then he brought the machine pistol up. He flicked a thumb across the fire selector, and then swept the muzzle toward the line of soldiers as he squeezed the trigger.

The MP5 bucked in his hands and a long yellow tongue of flame erupted from the muzzle, along with a report to rival the thunder. King had fired thousands of rounds from MP5s, but never in all that time had he ever experienced so much recoil. The pistol bucked in his hands like one of Rook’s Desert Eagles. Yet that was nothing compared to the effect of the shots.

Two of the soldiers simply burst, like enormous water balloons filled with blood. A third was only grazed. The bullet took his arm completely off below the shoulder in an eruption of gore.

King let go of the trigger and stared, dumbstruck, at the weapon in his hands. Some part of him understood what had just happened, at least in respect to the matter of physics. The MP5 was loaded with some kind of special overpressure ammunition — probably hollow rounds filled with a dense heavy metal like tungsten or depleted uranium. They would be fired by a larger than normal gunpowder charge or even some new experimental powder that yielded more explosive energy. That was the how and what, but it didn’t begin to explain the why.

The surviving soldiers bolted for cover, but they didn’t flee. Instead, they brought their weapons around and took aim at him. He fired again, just a single shot this time, and at the noise of the bullet punching through the metal bed of the truck, he spun on his heel and ran.

Another flash of lightning revealed Asya, a short distance away, crouching down near the edge of the road and attempting to wriggle her hands around to the front as he had done.

The lightning also illuminated the surrounding environment: undulating hills covered with lush green fields and trees, pools of brown water in the hollows, fed by raging torrents of rainwater runoff, and in the distance, the blocky shapes of tall buildings. A line of headlights was visible on the glistening ribbon that was the graded gravel road leading back to the city.

“Get off the road!”

Asya looked up just as King reached her. She doubled her efforts and slipped her bound wrists over her left foot, freeing her legs for the much more urgent task of running for her life. He grabbed her arm and hoisted her to her feet. He steered her toward the marshy ground to their right, as the tumult of lightning and gunfire filled the air. Mixed in with the bullwhip like crack of the Kalashnikov carbines, King heard the deeper, rhythmic report of a heavy machine gun. The sound echoed weirdly off the hills, but from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed muzzle flashes right above the headlights of the approaching vehicles.

A three foot wide stream of water flowed between the road bed and the field beyond. A drainage ditch, King surmised. It was filled to capacity by the tropical downpour and on the verge of overflowing. He leaped across and saw Asya do the same, but when his feet touched down, the ground tried to swallow him whole. He pitched forward and felt vegetation and gritty mud close in around him.

For a moment, the threat of death at the hands of the soldiers was diminished by the much more immediate danger of drowning. He tried to push himself up, but his hands found nothing solid to grasp. Fighting back a primal instinct, he stopped struggling and instead rolled over, curling his body to get his head out of the mud. His lower extremities sank deeper, the earth sucking him down, but he also felt a cascade of rain on his face, and as it sluiced the mud away from his mouth and nose, he risked a shallow breath and felt the damp air enter his lungs.

It was the briefest of reprieves. Silhouetted on the road, less than twenty yards away, King saw three large vehicles that looked like oversized SUVs. The trucks weren’t moving, but while their headlights shone straight ahead, swiveling searchlights were probing the field where he and Asya now hid.

Asya!

Frantic, he looked to where he had last seen her. The grass had closed over the spot, but something was moving beneath the green shroud. He thrust his bound hands into the tangle and felt something solid.

Asya thrashed violently, her desperation accomplishing nothing more than digging her grave deeper. King tried to pull her up but the soft earth beneath him confounded his efforts, and instead of freeing her, he found the mud once more closing over his head.

Recalling his earlier success, he tried rolling again, first pulling away from Asya’s struggling form, and then rolling toward her. He felt the earth’s grip loosen, and then, like Jonah vomited from the belly of the whale, they were both disgorged out of the soft mud bank and into the rushing water in the drainage ditch.

The current wasn’t quite strong enough to sweep them away, but every time King tried to plant his feet against the solid ground below, he was promptly bowled over and returned to the water’s embrace. He felt Asya’s arm slip away, and when he reached out to her, he found only handfuls of water.

As exhaustion closed over him, he felt a strong arm close around him, drawing him out of the flood. He knew that it wasn’t Asya. He intuitively recognized that it could only be one of the soldiers, saving him from drowning to carry out Favreau’s death sentence later, but there was no fight left in him.

He let himself be dragged up onto the road, where he was surrounded by a knot of men in camouflage fatigues. Another man pulled Asya, coughing and gasping for air, from the ditch and laid her beside him.

A knife flashed, and before King could take any kind of defensive action, the blade moved close and sliced through the zip-tie that bound his wrists together. Surprised, he looked up into the smiling face of General Mabuki.

“I am sorry I wasn’t able to stop them from taking you,” the general said. He turned to Asya and cut her bonds as well. “We must go. Things are happening very quickly. There isn’t much time.”

21

Rook checked the rearview mirror again as they turned onto the M20 motorway and headed toward London. There had been no sign of pursuit since they’d lost sight of the truck, and while he wasn’t about to relax his guard, he reckoned they were safe for the moment.

He turned his gaze to Mulamba. “Okay. One more time. Why Belgium? And this time maybe ease up a little on the messianic proclamations.”

“I shall endeavor to restrain my enthusiasm,” Mulamba replied. “This story begins with David Livingstone, a Scotsman who spent many years in Africa, exploring and setting up missions throughout the interior, in the hopes of opening commercial routes and ending the slave trade. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Livingstone did not see the African natives as savages to be exploited without mercy, but rather, he believed that they were also God’s children. He was fiercely opposed to human trafficking, and he believed that the only way to bring Christianity and civilization to Africa was by establishing trade in natural resources.

“He was correct in recognizing the vast untapped wealth of Africa, but naïve in his belief that this wealth would change the way his fellow Europeans looked at Africa. Instead of recognizing the humanity of Africans, most saw only a new opportunity to increase their wealth.”

“Human nature is a bitch,” Rook said.

Mulamba gave a sad look. “Oui. King Leopold II of Belgium was perhaps the most notorious of these adventurers. In 1885, he established the Congo Free State, in what is now my country. It was not to be a territory of Belgium, but rather an entirely commercial venture dedicated to exploiting the natural resources of the region. Elephants were hunted for ivory, native forests were cleared for rubber plantations, and of course, there were diamonds and other minerals to be taken. And although they were not slaves in name, the people of the Congo — my ancestors — were just one more resource to be exploited. The conditions on the plantations were brutal. Failure to meet a quota was punishable by death, and the mutilated bodies of men, women and children would be publicly displayed as a warning to others. The right hands of the victims were collected as proof of death, and the soldiers who enforced the quotas were rewarded for the number of hands they collected. Those bounty hunters soon realized it was easier to cut hands off without killing, and hundreds of thousands were mutilated, but still forced to keep working.”

Queen, who had been calmly stitching the gash in her thigh with a suture needle from her first aid kit, shuddered. “That’s someone’s idea of civilized behavior?”

“Is that what you’re looking for in Belgium?” Rook said, regretting the tone of his earlier statement. “Proof of these atrocities?”

“No. The abuses of the Congo Free State were widely reported, even then. Men such as Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote books exposing the brutal treatment of the native population. Please, pardon my digression. I will try to explain.

“In the year 1866, Livingstone embarked on an expedition to discover the source of the Nile River. At the time, this was an ambition on the order of…say, going to Mars. For years, no one heard from Livingstone. No one knew if he was alive or dead. In 1869, a New York newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone, and his search took nearly three years. Stanley eventually found Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in November of 1871.”

Rook remembered that historic nugget. “‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume.’”

“Exactly. Though Stanley probably did not actually speak those words. It is more likely that he fabricated the account of the meeting, to add an element of drama to his newspaper dispatches.”

“A goddamned sound bite.” Rook sighed. “Just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

“We do not know for certain what Stanley said, or what else transpired during that meeting, because Stanley removed several pages from his diary, which were the only records of his meeting with Livingstone.”

“Why would he do that?” Queen asked. “That’s like erasing the videotapes of the moon landing.”

“Some historians have speculated that the actual account in Stanley’s diary would have contradicted what he reported, making him look foolish. Stanley himself claimed that he was embarrassed, because he did not embrace Livingstone, fearing that he might contract malaria or sleeping sickness.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time someone destroyed evidence to cover their ass.”

“I believe he might have been trying to cover something else. Recall that Livingstone had been missing for nearly six years. In that time, he explored parts of Africa that had never been seen by Europeans, and perhaps not even by the natives living nearby. Imagine the stories he had to tell, and now, at long last, he had a chance to share what he had learned with another white man.”

“Makes sense. So why the cover-up?”

Mulamba pursed his lips, reminding Rook of the look that Bishop sometimes got during their poker games, when he was trying to decide whether to fold or go all in. “Scientists believe that the first humans originated in Africa, probably in the Great Rift Valley. Yet, throughout all of recorded history, Africa has always been the land of the savages. There is no record of any great civilization in sub-Saharan Africa, in ancient times. The oldest known advanced culture in the interior is the Great Zimbabwe society, which dates back no further than the eleventh century. The birthplace of humanity, and yet no significant advancement for thousands of years. Does that seem likely to you?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “When European explorers arrived in Africa, they found marvelous kingdoms possessing great wealth and power in the interior. These civilizations did not appear overnight, but were, like many other great civilizations throughout history, built on the foundation of previous civilizations. Tribal warfare, often driven by the demand for slaves, destroyed those kingdoms, ensuring that Africa would never be anything more than the land of the savages. Nevertheless, there are stories of great forgotten cities in the depths of the jungle.”

Rook rolled his eyes. “You’re talking about the plot of every Tarzan story ever written.”

“Rook,” Queen said, the tone of her voice a warning to be polite, then she turned to Mulamba. “Forgive me for being blunt, sir, but he makes a good point. Lost cities? It’s like something from an Indiana Jones movie.”

“Where do you imagine the ideas for such stories originated?” Mulamba said. “Until the arrival of European missionaries, the native tribes of the interior had no written language. They had only oral traditions, stories handed down from one generation to the next. Stories of fantastic cities and ancient kingdoms reclaimed by the jungle.”

“You said it yourself,” Queen countered. “There aren’t any ruins. Wouldn’t someone have found something by now?”

“When the missionaries and explorers arrived, they brought death on a scale that we can scarcely imagine. It is believed that as many as ten million people died in the Congo alone — fifteen percent of the population — during the Belgian occupation. Who can say what was lost?” Mulamba paused, momentarily overcome with emotion. “However, to answer your question, I believe that something was found. There is a rumor that Dr. Livingstone himself found the ruins of an ancient civilization, perhaps on the edge of the Congo rain forest or somewhere in the Rift Valley, during his expedition to find the source of the Nile.”

Rook saw where Mulamba was headed. “So Livingstone told Stanley about it. Stanley wrote it all down in his diary, but then decided to tear those pages out. Why the change of heart? And why didn’t Livingstone ever talk about it?”

“Livingstone was quite ill at the time, possibly delirious. He died less than two years later, without ever recovering. It may be that he never intended to reveal what he had found, believing that such a discovery would lead to further exploitation of the African people. However, Stanley might have had a much different reason for destroying the record of that meeting.

“For several years thereafter, Stanley tried in vain to organize another expedition to Africa. He might very well have intended to search for Livingstone’s lost city himself. Maybe he removed the diary pages so that no one would beat him to the prize. What is known with certainty is that Stanley abandoned his plans for another African expedition when he was approached by Leopold, who asked him to personally oversee the creation of the Congo Free State.”

“If Stanley was coming back anyway, what would have stopped him from going after the lost city?”

Mulamba pursed his lips again. “When the ruins of Great Zimbabwe were excavated, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the colonial government of Rhodesia insisted that the city had been built by an unknown white civilization, all evidence to the contrary. As late as the 1970s, archaeologists and museums were threatened with censure or worse if they tried to publish the truth. This was not merely a case of willful ignorance. The government believed, correctly as it happens, that the knowledge of a strong historic African civilization would embolden those who sought to break the chains of colonial domination. It is not a coincidence that the country once known as Rhodesia, named for a white man, is now called Zimbabwe.”

Queen caught on faster than Rook. “You think that if you can find evidence of an even older African civilization, it will become a symbol for your united Africa.”

“This is no small matter,” Mulamba said. Rook noticed that he gradually began speaking more rapidly, with greater passion. “For centuries, white Europeans, and the Arabs before them, justified every sort of atrocity — slavery, rape, wholesale slaughter — by simply saying that black Africans are savages, animals, incapable of achieving civilization on their own.”

Rook shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, yeah, but things are different now.”

“Are they? The developing nations of Africa are locked in an unending cycle of violence, and what does the rest of the world say? They are savages. They cannot rule themselves. The petroleum companies show up and say: ‘let us drill for your oil,’ and if the leader of the country says, ‘No, this belongs to us,’ they simply pay that man’s enemies to overthrow the government. And why not? The Africans are savages.”

Queen held up a hand. “Look, I get it. We both do. And I agree with you. It sucks. But do you really think finding an old ruined city is going to change things overnight?”

“I don’t expect you to understand. You are white. You are American.”

“Hey—”

“Until the people of Africa believe that they are capable of greatness, they will never rise above the savagery that prevents them from achieving it. And there are powerful forces working to ensure that the status quo does not change. Why do you think I was taken? They fear the day when Africa says, ‘No more. You will not take our wealth and feed us your table scraps anymore.’”

Rook sighed. De Oppresso Liber—that was what he’d signed up for when he’d joined the Army, earned his Green Beret, and gone on to be a part of Chess Team.

Freeing the oppressed was a hell of a lot easier when it involved nothing more complicated than shooting some maniac terrorist bent on mass extermination.

He tilted the rearview mirror until he found Queen’s face. She was wearing her glasses, which meant that Deep Blue was also listening in, but even with the lenses in place, Rook could still read the uncertainty in her eyes.

He nodded to her, a gesture that said both ‘I trust you’ and ‘let’s do this.’ She nodded back, then turned to Mulamba. “I don’t know if this crazy idea of yours has a chance in hell of succeeding, but that’s your problem. Ours is keeping you safe.”

“I always wanted to go to Belgium,” Rook said, grinning. “Actually, that’s a lie. I don’t have a clue where Belgium is.”

22

The forest seemed to fold over Bishop. He knew he had traveled only a short distance from where he had left Knight and Felice, and yet when he looked back, he saw no trace of them.

Good, he thought. If I can’t see them, the rebels can’t either.

He slowed his pace, treading so softly that he could no longer hear his own footfalls, and he began paying closer attention to his surroundings. The humid air hummed with activity. Insects swarmed around his head, while birds and monkeys chattered and squealed, as they capered in the tangle of branches overhead. The jungle was a living thing, indifferent to his presence, but just as capable of destroying him as the men who hunted him.

A distant metallic sound reached his ears, and he oriented toward it, keeping the heavy M240B at the ready. Although the machine gun weighed more than forty pounds and was meant to be fired from the ground, or preferably from a stable tripod or turret mount, Bishop’s prodigious size and strength enabled him to wield the machine gun as effectively as an ordinary infantryman might shoot a rifle. Even so, it was a cumbersome weapon for moving through the labyrinth of tree boughs, and when he heard the noise again, off to his left and much closer, it took him a moment to swing his body around toward the source. That moment almost cost him dearly.

A man stood there, forty yards away, a surprised look on his face, as if Bishop had caught him with his pants down, relieving his bladder. But the man had his Kalashnikov to his shoulder, and in the instant that Bishop’s finger tightened on the trigger of the 240, a jet of yellow flame erupted from the rifle.

Bishop felt hot metal rake his arm, but the sensation was forgotten the moment his machine gun bucked in his hands. The gunmen slumped lifeless, a dozen 7.62 mm rounds perforating his chest, before he could get off a second shot.

Bishop immediately swept the area, just in case the man wasn’t alone. There was no sign of any other rebels nearby, but the sound of the brief firefight would bring them running. Bishop considered setting up a hasty fighting position and waiting for them, but he discarded the idea. His goal was to draw the attackers away from Knight and Felice, not take them all on single-handedly. He moved off at an angle from the direction the gunman had been facing, listening intently for any hint of enemy presence.

After about a hundred yards, he recalled that he’d been shot, but there was no pain now and an inspection of the area revealed a hole in his sleeve, but no injury, not even a graze. Bishop didn’t believe in luck. Sometimes things just happened, but hoping for miracles to save the day was a dangerous way for a soldier to live.

His path brought him to the edge of the forest, and from the cover of the trees, he could see Lake Kivu stretched out across the eastern horizon. His mental GPS told him that the camp where he and Knight had found Felice was to the north, and he assumed that was where the rebel forces would be found as well. He aimed the machine gun in that general direction and squeezed off two short bursts, and then waited.

He didn’t have to wait long.

A dark green shape appeared in the distance, moving slowly along the lakeshore. It was low and flat, barely visible above the tall grass, but Bishop had no difficulty identifying it as an armored personnel carrier, similar to the US Army’s Bradley fighting vehicle. The APC rode on parallel tracks like a tank, but it was smaller and equipped with an open gun turret instead of a heavy cannon. A lone soldier sat behind the machine gun, slowly sweeping the barrel of his weapon back and forth in the forest’s direction.

Armored troop carriers were not usually found in the arsenal of a rag tag guerilla force and for a fleeting moment, he wondered if these were DRC Army troops, arriving to drive off the rebel attackers. That illusion evaporated when he saw a cluster of riflemen moving behind the tracked vehicle. They wore civilian attire — jeans, canvas trousers, T-shirts — not like the battle dress uniform worn by the gunner in the tracked vehicle.

Another APC appeared right behind it. Then another.

The army was here all right, but not to rescue them from the rebels. The two groups had joined forces to hunt down the last survivor of the scientific expedition.

This was why Bishop didn’t believe in luck.

He slung the M240 across his back and melted into the forest.

23

To Felice’s surprise, they didn’t run far. Just a few minutes after their flight began, Knight stopped in his tracks and hissed for her to join him. He pointed to the base of a tree that looked no different than any of the hundreds of others they had passed.

“There.”

She didn’t immediately understand what he meant, but assumed he had some kind of plan. He knelt at the base of the tree and thrust his hands into the accumulation of decaying leaf litter. She heard him give a little grunt of pain as he drew up a double armful of debris and soil, but he kept at it until he had scooped out a hollow large enough for both of them to lie in.

“Bishop said to keep moving.”

“I know what he said.” Knight spoke through clenched teeth, but Felice could not tell if he was in pain or merely irritated with her. Given his wounds, she thought it must be the former, but he wasn’t letting it slow him down. “Trust me. This is what I do.”

She acceded to his wishes and lowered herself into the hole he had dug. He knelt beside her and went to work filling the hollow with the material he had removed. Felice could not fathom what it was about this particular place that had prompted him to choose it as a hiding place, but she took comfort in his assurance. She knew better than to question his expertise — her survival depended on it.

As he piled the leaves on top of her, Felice experienced an instinctive panic at the thought of being buried alive, but the debris was no heavier than a blanket, and when he was done, there were large gaps — albeit artfully concealed — through which to breathe and see.

“We need to stay perfectly still,” Knight said softly, almost breathing in her ear.

“How long?”

“Hard to say. Hours. Maybe days. Is that going to be a problem?”

“What if I need to pee?”

She had meant it as a joke to lighten the mood, but Knight took the question seriously. “You’ll have to hold it. The smell of urine might give us away.”

Felice sniffed. The odor of rotting vegetation was so overpowering, she couldn’t imagine anyone being able to make the distinction, but once more she deferred to his judgment. “Wonderful.”

“What happened to my eye?”

The whispered question stung her like a slap. She didn’t know how to answer him.

“It’s gone, isn’t it?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. Sometimes injuries like that look a lot worse than they are. Doctors can do amazing things…” Her voice trailed off. She meant what she said, but it sounded like a lie in her ears. Maybe a skilled ocular surgeon could repair the kind of damage he’d sustained, but they were a long way from anywhere with that level of medical care. She wasn’t sure how they were going to make it to Kisangani, much less whether they would ever see America again.

Knight didn’t say anything for a long while after that, and at first Felice was grateful for the silence, but the complete lack of movement or conversation made the minutes pass with interminable slowness. Finally, she could stand it no more.

“By the way,” she whispered, “I’m Felice. It’s Knight, right?”

Knight grunted an affirmative, which she took as a good sign. At least he hadn’t told her to shut up.

“And your friend is Bishop. I’m guessing those aren’t your real names.”

“No. My real name is Shin Dae-jung.”

“Should I call you Shin?”

“If you want. In Korea, the surname comes first, then the given name.”

“Maybe I’ll just stick to Knight.”

He laughed softly, which Felice took to be an encouraging sign. “That’s probably a good idea. Honestly, I’ve been Knight for so long, I hardly even remember my real name.”

“You took those names from chess pieces, right? You’re some kind of special military unit, and those are your callsigns?”

“Well, I could tell you, but… you know.”

“I know — well, knew — a guy who calls himself King. Friend of yours?”

“Seriously? Wait… shhhh.”

The change was so abrupt that she thought he might be joking, but given the circumstances, it was better to err on the side of caution. She immediately clammed up, sucking in a breath and holding it, lest the sound of her inhalations give their position away. Felice strained to catch some hint of noise, but the only sound she heard was the lub-dub of her own heartbeat. Eventually, the burn of carbon dioxide in her lungs forced her to resume normal breathing, but during all that time, Knight was as still as a corpse. Then, without any sort of warning, he sat up like Lazarus risen from the dead.

“Bish!” Knight hissed the word, barely louder than a whisper. “Over here.”

Felice sat up as well. She didn’t see the big man at first, and when she finally did, he was so far away that she wondered how Knight, with only one good eye, had seen him.

Bishop trotted toward them, smiling. “Pick up,” he said. “They’re coming. We have to move.”

“And go where?” Knight asked. “We’re better off digging in and letting them pass by. Then we can get back to the LZ.”

Bishop shook his head. “There is no LZ. A mechanized infantry company is between us and the lake, and they’re sweeping this way. Then there are the rebels.”

Up to this point, Felice had been content to stay quiet, but she found this news too unsettling. “You’re saying the Army is after us?”

Bishop nodded. “It looks like they’re trying to form a cordon around this section of the jungle. They’ll surround us and then close the noose. We need to get moving, break through before they can complete the circle.”

Knight hauled himself to his feet, wincing and favoring his left arm. Felice got up as well, and realized that both men were staring at her. “What?”

“Somebody’s going to a lot of trouble to make sure that no one from your expedition makes it back,” Bishop said. “I’m wondering what a geneticist in the backwater of Africa could do to piss off so many people.”

“Geneticist?” Knight said with a frown. He looked at Bishop, who just shook his head as if to say later.

Felice sensed there was something important about their aversion toward her profession, but without further explanation, she let it go. Instead, she simply said, “The explanation is a little technical.”

“Then it will have to wait. We need to move.”

24

They trekked for nearly four hours, moving deeper into the forest in what Bishop hoped was a straight line. When they came upon the occasional clearing, he was able to verify that they were still moving west by the location of the sun, but under the jungle canopy, there was no way to be sure that they weren’t wandering in circles. There had been no sign of pursuit, but in the dense jungle, Bishop knew that the rebels could be anywhere.

Knight had kept up with Bishop’s relentless pace, managing better than Felice, but he grew more listless as the day wore on. Bishop felt concerned, but there was nothing more he could do for his friend.

As night approached, the scant light penetrating the tangled canopy vanished completely, plunging them into darkness, and leaving them with little choice but to stop for the night. They huddled together under a hasty shelter made from Bishop’s parachute — still damp from the plunge into Lake Kivu — and in the glow of a chemical lightstick, he handed out an MRE. Knight had no appetite, but Bishop hassled him into eating a piece of bread and drinking some water, along with a hefty dose of penicillin to combat infection from his injuries. He also passed out some mefloquine as an anti-malarial. Knight soon fell into a restless slumber.

After a while, Bishop turned to Felice. “Tell me about your project.”

She tore her gaze away from Knight and stared at the green chemlight as if composing her thoughts. “The Congo region sits on enormous reserves of fossil fuel. Despite that, it is one of the poorest nations on Earth, energy-wise. Except for the cities, most people don’t have electricity or automobiles, but live the way they’ve lived for thousands of years. Most of the petroleum that is recovered gets exported to foreign markets, so while there is some revenue from energy production, most Congolese don’t see any benefit.

“President Mulamba commissioned my team to find a new source of energy — renewable energy — that would address the needs of the people living here, as well as providing a long term source of revenue.”

“You’re American. How did you get involved in this?”

“For the last couple years, I’ve been working with a non-profit agency that’s trying to use cutting edge technologies to help developing nations stand on their own. Most of Africa is stuck in the 1950s. Not much has changed in the Congo since the Belgians left. The economy is driven by natural resources, but that’s not sustainable in the long term. If the Congo follows the pattern of other developing nations, they’ll keep exploiting those resources, with most of the money leaving the country, and they’ll deplete everything long before they make any kind of progress. Our goal is to find a way to leapfrog straight into the twenty-first century. Energy production is critical to such a plan. You can’t put computers in every school if there’s no electricity to run them.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound like a job for a geneticist,” Bishop said.

“We’re a multi-disciplinary team…” She paused abruptly and Bishop saw that she was blinking back tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “It just hit me that they’re all…”

Bishop laid a hand on her shoulder. He felt awkward trying to comfort her. He kept such a tight lid on his own emotions that he didn’t really have much experience reading or reacting to the emotions of other people. “It’s okay.”

He didn’t know what else to say, but he left his hand where it was until he sensed that she was ready to continue. “I guess I got involved by accident. I was working with a group in Kenya, trying to develop new gene therapies to stop the spread of AIDS, when I heard about some research going on at Lake Kivu, involving extremophiles.”

“Like the organisms that live around deep-sea volcanic vents?”

“Exactly. Extremophiles are life-forms — usually unicellular organisms — that can survive and thrive in conditions where nothing should be able to. Many are autotrophs — they produce their own food, like plants — but instead of using sunlight, they can transform heat and energy from chemical reactions into food. Lake Kivu is situated in an area of extreme volcanic activity, which makes it a perfect environment for extremophile organisms to thrive.

“These microbes interact with escaping volcanic gasses, to produce hydrocarbons in huge quantities. There’s an enormous bubble of natural gas at the bottom of Lake Kivu — about sixteen cubic miles”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“Enough to supply about a hundred large electrical plants, and it’s constantly replenishing. Unfortunately, it’s also very dangerous where it is. The methane breaks down into carbon dioxide, and there’s an even larger bubble of that trapped at the bottom of the lake. If the methane spontaneously ignites — which can happen without any warning — the resulting explosion would release the CO₂ to the surface and suffocate everyone living in the lake basin.”

Bishop stiffened in surprise. “You’re kidding, right?”

“In 1986, a carbon dioxide cloud released by Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, killed 1,700 people. The cloud was believed to have contained about 300,000 tons of CO₂ and affected people more than fifteen miles from the lake. Lake Nyos is fairly remote, with just a few rural villages. The bubble at the bottom of Lake Kivu is believed to contain 500 million tons, and there are more than two million people living along its shores.”

“Why would anyone choose to live near something like that?”

Felice shrugged. “The same reason people live on the San Andreas fault, or in Tornado Alley. You’ve got to live somewhere. Most of the people in the Kivu region probably don’t even know about the danger, and spontaneous eruptions happen on geological time scales — thousands, even millions of years in between.

“Several agencies have been working to come up with a way to mitigate the threat, as well as to harvest the natural gas for energy production, but those solutions carry a lot of risk. Disturbing the gas deposits might very well trigger the catastrophe they’re trying to prevent.

“Our research isn’t — wasn’t — concerned with that, though. We were looking at the cause, the microbes that produce the methane in the first place. If we can find a way to adapt them to a different environment, we would be able to produce an endless supply of renewable energy.”

“You want to use bacteria to make natural gas?”

“It’s a natural process,” she explained. “Scientists in South Korea have found a way to use E. coli to produce gasoline. We just need to find a way to make it efficient and cost effective, and we were very close. Our research would revolutionize energy production everywhere. There would be no more need to drill for petroleum, no more tearing up wilderness areas to sink wells, no more fracking or pipelines. And since the process would be carbon neutral, it would pretty much solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.”

“So why would anyone want to stop you?”

“A lot of people have invested heavily in the status quo. This process would be available to anyone, and that would mean the end of the fossil fuel industry.”

“So the rebels who attacked us, and the Army… they’re all working for oil companies?”

“Possibly. Or they might just want to keep things the way they are. People fear change, even when that change means a better life for everyone.”

Bishop had no response to that, so he switched gears. “You said you had to find a way to adapt these extremophiles. You’re a geneticist, so I’m going to assume that your plan is to re-engineer their DNA. Isn’t that kind of risky?”

She frowned at him. “What have you got against genetic research?”

“Oh, let’s see… tinkering with the blueprint of life, creating organisms that aren’t supposed to exist and that can’t be controlled, only figuring out when the shit hits the fan that there might be unintended consequences… I could go on.”

“Humanity has been modifying the genetic code for thousands of years, long before anyone ever knew that such a thing as DNA even existed. Most of our food supply derives from plant and animal strains that were produced through selective breeding. This isn’t Frankenstein science. Sure, there are abuses, but that doesn’t mean we should go back to living in caves.”

He wanted to argue with her, to tell her how he knew firsthand just how much damage one misguided person could cause by playing God, but there was no point. Genetic engineering was a genie that was already out of the bottle. There was no turning back the clock. “Better get some sleep,” he said, finally. “Tomorrow could be a long day.”

He could tell that she wasn’t happy about the way the conversation had concluded, but she nodded and curled up on the ground next to Knight. Bishop continued to watch her until she was snoring softly.

The glowstick eventually faded to a dim green stripe, barely visible in the darkness, but Bishop did not sleep.

25

When King and Asya had first arrived in Kinshasa a few hours earlier, they had seen a city poised on the brink of chaos. At some point during their captivity, someone gave it a push.

Mabuki brought him up to speed as their convoy rolled back toward the city. “Shortly after you left the assembly, Army troops loyal to General Velle launched a coup from within the Palais de la Nation itself. They waited until I was away from the palace, looking for you, to make their move. They have taken several hostages, including President Okoa, your Senator Marrs and that woman, Favreau.”

Asya let out what sounded like a strangled laugh. She had recovered from her near drowning, but still looked like a drenched rat. Both of them were soaked through, and coated in a thin film of mud.

King accepted a canteen from one of the soldiers and drank a mouthful of lukewarm water. He swished it through his teeth to dislodge the muck, then let it dribble out unswallowed. A little more water spilled on his clothes wasn’t going to make much of a difference, but drinking water from an unreliable source was a good way to get the runs, and that was something he definitely didn’t need right now. Too late, he saw Asya guzzling from another bottle.

Oh well, he decided. Can’t be any worse than what we were just swimming in.

The thunderstorm had moved on, but it was still raining heavily. The streets were ankle-deep in water, and it was still accumulating faster than it could drain away. The rain kept most people inside, which was good, because there were soldiers everywhere — their red berets marked them as members of the Republican Guard, loyal to Mulamba’s government and under Mabuki’s direct command. This part of the city was controlled by pro-Mulamba forces, but if Mabuki’s report was correct, several divisions of the army had openly declared their support for General Velle, and now occupied more than a third of the city, including the important Gombe commune, where the Palais de la Nation and numerous other government buildings and foreign embassies were located.

King explained Asya’s reaction. “Favreau organized this. She’s the one giving them their orders.”

Mabuki’s brow furrowed. “This is a very serious accusation. She is here as a guest of the government, helping negotiate an end to this crisis.”

“Yeah, well I think she’s been negotiating a lot more than that. She’s a mercenary, working for an outfit called Executive Solutions.”

“Oui,” said Mabuki. “I have heard of them. They were in Angola. Very brutal men.”

“And women. She’s only interested in what’s best for her employers — which in this case is probably Consolidated Energy.”

The general considered this for a moment. “You told the assembly that President Mulamba is still alive. Is this true?”

“Last I heard. Favreau took my phone, so I haven’t been in contact with my team.” King thought Mabuki looked like he needed more convincing, so he added. “I would assume he’s on his way.”

“His return might not be enough to turn the tide,” Mabuki said. “Now that General Velle has made his move, there might be no way to prevent civil war.”

For the first time since he’d been given them, King found himself wishing for the instantaneous connectivity of the q-phones. The situation had moved beyond the point where he could advise the government forces on the best way to maintain stability. Now, every choice he might make was fraught with the potential for blowback. That however, was only one of the troubling thoughts occupying his mind. There was something else bothering him, a detail that seemed at first glance like a jigsaw piece mixed up with the wrong puzzle.

His mind kept turning over the moment where he had fired on the soldiers with the MP5 taken from one of the steroid twins. The mercenary, along with everyone else in the truck, was now dead. Mabuki’s Republican Guard forces had opened up on the army truck, strafing it with rounds from the turret-mounted DShK 12.7 mm machine gun, and setting the truck on fire in the process. King had lost the MP5 during the plunge into the drainage ditch, but he still recalled how it had felt in his hands, especially when he’d pulled the trigger. It had been heavier, with a lot more recoil than it should have had. He also remembered how it had devastated the bodies of the soldiers.

Bullets killed; that was their job, and they did so in a way that usually wasn’t pretty. Even so, some types of ammunition seemed designed to accomplish that grim purpose in a way that was almost sadistic. Overpressure rounds, like those he suspected had been in the magazine of the MP5, contained particles of heavy metal, loosely packed in the hollow core of the bullet. When the bullet was fired, the acceleration would compress the powdered metal against the rear of the hollow core, and then on impact with the target, the powder would be catapulted forward, creating a catastrophic shock wave that caused massive destruction at the cellular level.

Aside from their perceived inhumane effects, overpressure rounds were usually disdained by military forces for purely practical reasons. To accelerate the heavier payload to lethal velocity, the bullets needed more explosive force in the firing chamber. The added recoil not only made the weapon harder to use, but reduced its effective lifespan, and this was particularly true of semi-automatic weapons like the MP5. Firing overpressure rounds in a machine pistol was analogous to putting nitrous oxide in the carburetor of a sports car. You went faster, but at the cost of burning up your engine.

King wasn’t surprised that the mercenaries were packing overpowered ammunition. It was entirely consistent with their testosterone-fueled lifestyle. What bothered him was the sense that he had seen something like this before.

Still pondering the significance of this troubling detail, King turned back to the general. “Can you get me to a telephone?”

Mabuki smiled and produced a slim mobile unit that looked about ten years old. “Will this suit your needs?”

King took it and thumbed the power button. The backlit monochrome LCD display showed a strong signal. “I apologize in advance for the long distance charges.”

Mabuki waved a hand dismissively. “Let the government pay for it. That way, even if General Velle succeeds, we will still be able to stick it to him.”

King laughed and dialed a number.

There was a brief pause between the click of the connection being established and the mumbled greeting. The voice was groggy and irritable, not surprising since it was the middle of the night at the other end of the call, but the voice was still instantly recognizable.

“It’s King.”

The bleariness — an act, Deep Blue wouldn’t be sleeping much with the team in the field and under fire — was completely gone when the response finally arrived. “King. Thank God. What’s your situation?”

“For starters, I don’t have secure communication.”

Silence. The transmission lag was maddening. Carrier pigeons would be faster, King thought.

“I kind of figured that,” Deep Blue said. “Go on.”

“Pawn and I are fine, but things here have gone sideways.”

“I’ve been monitoring the news reports.”

King waited for Deep Blue to elaborate, but several seconds passed and he realized that there wasn’t anything more to be said. “How are the others?”

“Queen and Rook…” Another pause occurred, presumably Deep Blue trying to come up with a way to share his news in ambiguous terms. “… were successful. They’re checking something else out right now, but I expect them to be on their way very soon. I’ve booked their flight.”

That meant Crescent II was already en route to pick them up. Mulamba might conceivably be back in Kinshasa in time for breakfast. “Bishop and Knight?”

“No word. Doesn’t look good.”

Damn.

King closed his eyes, took a breath and went on. “What’s the best play here?”

“Remember what you’re there for. Advise and support. I know that’s not very helpful, but it’s all I’ve got. I trust your judgment on this. You’ve got a lot more experience than I’ll ever have.”

King parsed the comment quickly. The ‘experience’ to which Deep Blue was referring was the sum of several lifetimes spent roaming the planet, championing the defenseless, knowing full well that the outcome had already been written in the annals of the history King knew. His choices hadn’t been guided by knowledge of what the inevitable outcome would be, but rather by a more fundamental determination to protect the innocent, help the helpless, to do what he believed was right and the certain knowledge that he would have to live with his choices for hundreds of years thereafter. He wasn’t immortal anymore, but that didn’t mean he could just wash his hands of the situation. Walking away, or even simply staying on the sidelines as a spectator was unthinkable, especially knowing that Bishop and Knight might have already made the ultimate sacrifice. If he didn’t do something, their deaths would be meaningless.

He knew what he had to do.

He glanced at Asya, who was watching and listening expectantly, and he felt his certitude start to crumble.

“I understand,” he said. Without hanging up, he turned to Mabuki. “I need to find a way back into the Palais.”

The general looked at him expectantly. “To rescue the hostages?”

King shook his head. “No. I left my sunglasses in there. I’d like to get them back.”

26

Monique Favreau took the news of the Americans’ rescue and the death of her men in stride. It confirmed her instincts about the man and filled her with an almost sexual anticipation for the battle she knew would follow.

She was not quite so optimistic about the report that had preceded it.

As the American had hinted, President Mulamba had escaped, or rather he’d been liberated by a commando team working in conjunction with her new nemesis. The failure of her men — two teams, twenty men, against just two people, if reports were correct — was unforgivable, and the very few who had survived the debacle could count themselves lucky that the Red Queen was in a different hemisphere. The news that Mulamba was free and on his way back had forced her to accelerate her original plan. Instead of waiting for General Velle to show up and lead the charge, she’d had to settle for one of his subordinate officers, a colonel in the 1^st Brigade, who had happily assassinated his immediate commander, the man between him and Velle, and taken charge, deploying his 2,000 troops throughout the Gombe commune, and personally seizing control of the Palais de la Nation.

The colonel was more ambitious than intelligent, but at least he knew how to carry out his assignments, which was more than could be said for her men in London, who had not only let Mulamba escape but had subsequently lost track of him. She had given them an hour to fix their mistake. Fifty-eight minutes later, her phone rang.

“Ace Diamonds,” the caller said.

“I hope you have something good to tell me,” she replied.

“Um, I’m not sure exactly.” Ace Diamonds had, up until about fourteen hundred hours, Universal Coordinated Time, been Four Diamonds, and was still getting used to his new position of responsibility. “We’re spread kind of thin here, but we’ve got the international terminals covered… at Heathrow, I mean…”

“Stop!” Favreau closed her eyes and took several breaths to control her rising ire. Despite his ultimate failure, the previous Ace Diamonds had at least been self-motivated and marginally intelligent. “What exactly do you plan to do if he happens to wander past you?”

“Well…”

“He won’t be traveling in the open. He’s not that stupid. The only way to regain a strategic advantage is to think one step ahead of him. What other ways are there for him to leave the country?”

“Ah, military transport?”

“If he had the support of the British Government, we would know about it.” Favreau considered her own question. “He was there to get that support. Would he leave without it?”

“Uh…”

“It was a rhetorical question. He has unfinished business. Where exactly was he when you took him the first time?”

There was a long pause, as if the man was asking someone else for the answer. “He was at the Royal Geographic Society.”

That was a surprise. Mulamba had been in the United Kingdom to build support for his African federation. Why would he visit a historical institution? She caught herself before asking Ace for more information — that way lay madness.

“Stand by,” she said, and ended the call. She immediately placed another, calling a directory assistance number for London. A few minutes later, she was talking to a receptionist at the RGS.

She introduced herself as a French journalist, covering the situation in the Congo. “I am trying to get some background information about the abduction of President Mulamba. I understand that he had just left your offices when he was taken?”

The receptionist passed her off to one of the directors who came on the line armed with a carefully worded legal statement, which could be distilled down to two basic words: no comment.

At the other end of the line, Favreau just smiled. She liked a challenge, and as a seasoned intelligence operative, she knew a thing or two about interrogations. In a voice that was seductive in its helplessness, she said, “I have no wish to scandalize your institution. It’s only that the citizens are wondering why President Mulamba would have left at such a critical time. If you could only help me to understand what he was trying to accomplish…” She let the request hang, allowing the man to fill in the blanks.

She could hear the inner conflict in his voice. “Yes, of course. I understand. It’s just that I can’t comment on the matter. You see, there’s to be an inquest, and… well…”

“Oui, of course. But if you could only just tell me why President Mulamba came to see you, how could that little thing matter? It could be our little secret. You could be my ‘unnamed source,’ no?”

“Ah… I… well… He was very interested in the diaries of Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Some foolishness about missing pages.”

“Missing pages?”

As Favreau expected, that minor concession broke the dam of his resistance. “Yes, it seems that Stanley removed several pages from his diary, relating to his meeting with Livingstone. No one quite knows why, but I’m sure there’s a reasonable and quite mundane explanation.

“We didn’t have what he was looking for. I’m not sure the pages even exist. If Stanley tore them out, he would surely have gone the added step of tossing them in the fireplace. I suggested he try the Royal Museum for Central Africa near Brussels. They have the largest collection of documents relating to Stanley, so if the pages exist, they would be there.”

Favreau rang off without another word and immediately called Ace Diamonds.

27

Queen got out of the taxi and did a quick 360 degree visual sweep, before stepping aside to allow Mulamba to climb out. Rook, who had been up front with the driver, got out as well, passing over a handful of Euro notes that generously exceeded the amount shown on the meter.

“It is as I told you,” the driver said in French. “The museum is closed. Are you certain you wish to be dropped off here?”

“Yes,” Mulamba insisted. “This is where we need to be. Thank you.”

Queen frowned, wondering if they would not have been better off taking the driver up on his offer and going to a nearby hotel instead. They were too noticeable as it was, and the taxi driver wasn’t likely to forget them or their destination. But there was no reasoning with Mulamba, and it probably wouldn’t make much difference anyway. They would be done and out of the country long before anyone realized that the missing Congolese president was skulking around a museum in Belgium.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa was housed in a stately palatial structure in the municipality of Tervuren, just a short drive from the capital city of Brussels. The museum grounds appeared completely deserted. The small parking area opposite the museum entrance was empty, except for an enormous statue of a trumpeting elephant that guarded the path into the beautifully cultivated, but uninhabited, forest park surrounding the edifice. The utter lack of activity was due, in part, to the lateness of the hour, but was also because the museum was closed to the public for renovations, which were expected to last several years.

They had only learned of the renovation during the two-hour train ride from London to Brussels. While this development had thwarted Mulamba’s goal of finding a scholar or curator to walk him through the Stanley archives, Queen had seen it as a blessing in disguise.

“We’ll sneak in, find what you’re looking for, and get out before anyone knows we were there,” she told him. “Zero footprint.”

The African president had not been particularly happy about the idea of breaking and entering, but his eagerness to find the missing pages of the Stanley diary far outweighed his moral restraint.

Which left only the question of how they would actually accomplish the break-in.

“Leave that to me,” Lewis Aleman had told her.

Aleman was the team’s tech guru. Someone — probably Rook — had once jokingly referred to him as R2-D2, because of his uncanny ability to solve any problem related to computers or electronic systems. The resemblance to the mech-droid from the Star Wars movies stopped there however. Aleman was a tall, lean, endurance athlete and former Special Forces sniper. A combat injury had taken him permanently out of the field, but over the years, he had done more to ensure the success of Chess Team missions from his computer console than he ever could have with a long-range rifle. Although the original design was not his, Aleman’s technical savvy had made the quantum computer network a reality, leapfrogging developments in the private sector by decades. If anyone could get them past the security in the museum, it was Aleman.

What was unusual was that Aleman was now communicating with them directly. “Deep Blue is wrapped up with the situation in the Congo,” he had told Queen, “so you’ll be dealing with me directly.”

That wasn’t a problem for Queen, but she was concerned about the matter that now occupied Deep Blue’s attention. She knew that King and Asya had escaped custody in Kinshasa, and that they were now launching a raid on the national palace, but there had been no word from Bishop and Knight, and it was clear that Deep Blue feared the worst.

Queen couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that her teammates were dead. Bishop had always seemed indestructible to her, even before he had been given the regen serum. The fact that he had survived the dire side-effects of that serum, which transformed ordinary people into unstoppable rage monsters, had only deepened her sense of his invincibility. Even though he — like King — was now one hundred percent mortal again, she still couldn’t imagine him dead, especially not at the hands of a few rebel fighters.

It was difficult to believe that Knight was gone, too, though for much different reasons. She had known Knight longer than anyone on the team. They had worked together in her first field assignment. He was always calm and coolly professional, essential to the success of any mission, and yet at the same time, almost invisible, which for a sniper was a critical skill. Even though she often forgot he was there, she couldn’t imagine a world without him.

It had been Bishop’s quiet invocation of the Special Forces motto that had prompted her decision to help Mulamba in his crazy quest. Like him, she felt a keen desire to defend the defenseless. If Bishop and Knight had made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the innocents living in the Congo region, then she was going to make damn sure that it wasn’t for nothing.

As eager as she was for news — good or bad — she understood the importance of staying focused. King and Asya needed Deep Blue’s full attention, and as it happened, she and Rook needed Aleman’s expertise.

They strolled along the fringe of the park until the taillights of the departing taxi disappeared from view, then they reversed directions and headed back down the brick sidewalk that ran the length of the museum’s north wall. Just beyond the building’s corner, illuminated only by streetlights, a wrought iron fence blocked access to the museum campus. The gate to the staff parking lot just beyond — also empty — was secured with a heavy padlock.

“Stealth mode activated,” Aleman said. “I’ve looped the security camera feed, so you’re invisible for the moment, and I’ve bypassed the alarm. Not much I can do about that padlock though.”

“We’ve got that,” she replied, and turned to Rook. “Got the picks?”

He took a slim wallet from his back pocket. They’d left their weapons in the trunk of the sedan at a car park in London, but had managed to slip a few other items through the train station security checkpoint, including a set of carbon composite lock-picks.

“I got this,” he announced.

“You know I’m better with the…” she licked her lips seductively, “delicate stuff.”

“Nice try, babe,” he replied in the same tone. “But I’m the key master.”

“I’ll flip you for it.” She made a show of checking her pockets, then said, “Got a quarter?”

Rook rolled his eyes, and jammed his free hand into the front pocket of his jeans. Queen casually took the pick case from him so that he could check the right side, and as he did, she spun around and went to work on the lock.

“Call it in the — hey!”

The lock released with an audible click and Queen handed the picks back to him. “Told you. You’d still be fumbling around trying to get it in.”

Mulamba laughed, and Rook shot him a venomous look before turning back to Queen. “You have the glasses. That’s cheating.”

“That must be it.” She patted him on the shoulder, then pushed the gate open just enough to permit access. Rook entered first. As Mulamba passed through the opening, she followed and pulled the gate shut again.

Queen’s research indicated that they would find what they were looking for in the Stanley Pavilion, a three-story satellite structure a short walk from the museum palace. They moved quickly to the elegant pillared porch and found the main entrance door, locked.

Rook stepped forward and went to work with the lock-picks, trying several before finding one that he thought would do the job. After a full minute of teasing the tumblers, he said, “These institutional locks are a lot trickier than a big ass padlock.”

“Uh, huh.”

Finally, the door yielded, and he pushed it open with a flourish.

Queen led the way, her glasses revealing details about the darkened interior of the pavilion that were hidden from unaided eyes. She saw that several of the display cases were empty, while others contained what looked like nothing more than a collection of dusty old knick-knacks without any sense of continuity. In an age of high-tech interactive displays and immersive environment, the Royal Museum was itself a relic from another age.

“I can see why they thought it was time to renovate.”

“Well, it’s good that one of us can see something,” Rook said.

“Don’t get all pissy just because I take better care of my things.”

“Oh, is that how you remember it? Because I—”

“Are you guys always like this on a mission?” Aleman cut in.

Queen smiled but didn’t reply. Banter was standard operating procedure for Rook, but as a rule she didn’t engage in it with him during a mission. Right now though, the good humor was a welcome distraction from the uncertainty surrounding the rest of the team’s fate, a situation which left her feeling helpless.

They made their way to the reading room, where to their disappointment, they found rows of empty shelves. A computer terminal sat idle on a desk near the entrance, and at Aleman’s direction, she booted it up. A password prompt appeared on the screen.

“Hang on,” Aleman said. “The good news is, I’m already in the museum’s WiFi network… Okay, try this.” He rattled off a string of letters, numbers and characters, which she entered on the keyboard, and when the desktop appeared a moment later, Aleman began remotely searching the directory. Queen watched as file folders and spreadsheets began opening on the screen.

“Okay,” he said, after several minutes of silence. “The Stanley archive is still in the building, but has been moved to conservation storage, just down the hall.” He gave her directions to the nearby room, along with the number of the container with the relevant documents.

The storage room was crowded with plastic totes, each labeled with an inventory sticker. The room had no windows to the outside, and with Aleman’s permission, Queen told Rook to turn on the lights.

Still squinting from the change in illumination, Mulamba began scanning the stickers. He seemed to have a sense for the way the collection had been organized, and he found the correct case without consulting the catalogue number Queen had provided.

“Here,” he said, his voice bubbling over with enthusiasm. “This is the one.”

He loosed the clasp and opened the lid to reveal a nest of packing paper, and several bound books, each vacuum sealed in heavy cellophane and marked with another sticker. He held up one of them. “This is the diary in which Stanley recorded his meeting with Livingstone.”

“I thought he tore out those pages,” Rook said.

Mulamba nodded. “That is what has been reported. Still, it is a place to start.” He pinched the plastic between his fingers and tried, without success, to tear apart the protective overwrap.

Rook rummaged in the desk and found a pair of scissors. “Try these, Joe.”

“And be careful,” Queen added. “Let’s not add anything else to the list of crimes we’re committing.”

Mulamba seemed not hear her as he sliced open the packet and took out the journal. He thumbed through it quickly, scanning the dates at the top of each page until he found the entries from November of 1871. His expression fell just a little.

“It is true. The pages have indeed been removed.” He looked uncertainly at the container but made no move to take anything else from it.

Queen spoke to Aleman in a low voice. “Any suggestions?”

“Wait one. Okay, there is a collection called ‘miscellany.’ Loose papers, looks like scientific notes, personal letters and so forth. Should be in the same container.”

She relayed the message to Mulamba who commenced rooting in the packing material like a kid tearing into a Christmas present. His enthusiasm outpaced Rook’s valiant effort at keeping the discarded items in some semblance of order, but after a minute or so, the African president held up another sealed package containing a dark brown manila folder. Mulamba cut it open and shook out several yellowed envelopes. He thumbed through them quickly, glancing at the delicately scripted name on each, before shuffling it to the bottom of the stack.

Rook chuckled and muttered, “Bills, bills, junk mail, bills.”

Mulamba let out an excited cry and held up an envelope. “This is addressed to John Rowlands, esquire.”

“And that’s good?”

“John Rowlands and Henry Morton Stanley are one and the same. Stanley was born as Rowlands… forgive me, that’s not quite correct. There is uncertainty as to his parentage. His mother abandoned him as an infant and Rowlands, the man he believed to be his father, died shortly after he was born. In any event, he took the name Stanley when he was eighteen.”

“So what is that?” Rook asked. “Letters to my former self?”

“It is unopened,” Mulamba said, breathlessly. He broke the wax seal and teased out the folded paper inside.

Queen saw his eyes moving back and forth as he read the contents, growing wider as he digested the information contained therein. Right up to that moment, she had been expecting the search to end in disappointment, a wild-goose chase, which she had agreed to only to placate the African leader. Now, she knew better.

“Aleman, it looks like we got what we came for. Tell Crescent II to come get us, ASAP.”

A loud noise, like the sound of a very heavy book slamming down on a tabletop, startled the night watchman seated in the security office, in the main building. He laid his Sudoku puzzle on the desk and peered at the monitor, which showed the feeds from the security cameras distributed throughout the museum. Every few seconds, the display would change as the system cycled through the cameras, but nothing he saw accounted for the unusual noise in what was otherwise, at least as far as the guard was concerned, the deadest place on Earth.

He glanced at his wristwatch, then shrugged and stood up. He was just reaching for the antiquated security watch-clock when he glimpsed a figure standing on the other side of the security desk. He stared in disbelief for a moment, as if not quite believing his eyes.

He started to say something, but his voice was drowned out by the bark of a pistol. He was permanently silenced by the bullet that tore into his chest.

The man who now called himself Ace Diamonds looked down at the dead watchman to make sure that he wouldn’t be getting back up. Then he took aim with the handgun just in case he did. If Ace had been using overpressure rounds, like his counterparts in the Congo, there would have been no need to verify, but it was hard enough getting guns in the more security conscious European countries. The experimental depleted-uranium rounds were simply out of the question. Too bad though, he thought. He kind of liked the way those super-bullets made a weasel go pop.

He rounded the security desk to get a look at the monitor and watched the feed for a few seconds. Finally, he unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt and keyed the transmit button. “This is Ace D. Looks like we got here first. Diamonds, set up an outside perimeter so we’ll know if anyone’s coming. Spades, start a full sweep of the museum, just in case.”

There was a flurry of responses, though not as many as there would have been just a few hours earlier. The unknown duo that had hit the farm outside Dartford had practically driven a lawn mower through their ranks. When the dust had finally settled, the force of ESI mercenaries had been reduced nearly by half. Just eleven men remained, four from the Spades team, and seven from the Diamonds. Ace, who had previously been the fourth man on the Diamonds team, suddenly found himself the most senior operator still standing.

A search of the desk yielded a map of the complex, and he used it to find the archives, where the Red Queen had told him Mulamba would be going next. He pushed the talk button again. “Ace Spades, this is Ace Diamonds, send a two-man element to secure the structure on the east side. That’s the primary target. We’ll finish here and then move over to set up our welcoming committee.”

“Affirmative. Ace Spades, out.”

As he lowered the walkie-talkie, it occurred to Ace Diamonds that he might have been a little hasty in storming the museum. What if Mulamba didn’t show until morning? They couldn’t hold the museum all night long. It was only a matter of time before…

He let the thought trail off as he stared at the unchanging images on the video monitors. He had thought it particularly lucky that he had been able to blow the door with a small breaching charge, and then make his way to the security office without attracting the watchman’s notice. The cameras clearly showed the exterior. Ace would have been visible for several seconds during the time he set the charge. Stranger still, all the door indicator lights were green.

A malfunction?

He kept watching the cameras, certain that he was missing something, but the rotating shots of exhibition halls, labs and corridors showed no change. None whatsoever.

The cameras are on a loop, he realized with a start. Somebody disabled the security system before we got here.

With equal parts dread and anticipation, Ace Diamonds raised the walkie-talkie once more. “All units, converge on the Stanley Pavilion — the east building. They’re already here.”

28

The shot was barely audible. In fact, Queen didn’t even realize she had heard anything until Aleman said, “What was that? It sounded like a gun.”

Before she could reply, he answered his own question. “Nine mil. Single round.”

Aleman was a walking encyclopedia of firearms trivia, but she knew the only way he could have made that identification was by running the audio transmission through some kind of gun noise database.

“I’m dropping the video loop… Queen, get out of there! You’re not alone.”

Queen jolted into action. “Rook, lights!”

He knew without asking that something was wrong. He swept a hand across the light switch and then moved to Mulamba’s side, pulling the man down into a crouch. Although the room was plunged into instant darkness, Queen clearly saw Rook pluck the letter from Mulamba’s grasp and tuck it into the man’s inside jacket pocket. “We’ll read it later,” he whispered.

“I’ll recon,” Queen said. She turned and jogged out of the room. Her leg throbbed with each step, but she compartmentalized the pain and moved without even a limp. She’d experienced far, far worse, and she was reminded of it every time she saw the bright red brand on her forehead in a mirror.

Ghost images began appearing in her field of view. Aleman was integrating the security camera feed into the virtual environment. She saw, as if looking through the walls, two figures crowned with red dots, entering the building through the front door. “Two coming in,” she whispered to Rook. “Make your way to the fire exit, if you can. I’ll go meet the neighbors.”

“Be care… Ah, I mean, go get ‘em, tiger!”

She smiled in the darkness, then spun away running silently through the dark halls. The two men were creeping along, and as she neared the lobby, she could see the beams of flashlights bobbing. She also saw more red dots outside the Stanley Pavilion, closing in from all directions, moving to cut off all the exits.

Damn it.

“Aleman,” she whispered. “Can you call Rook’s phone? Let him know that the exit is a no go?”

“I’ll try. No guarantee he’ll pick up. They aren’t really ‘telephones’ in the literal sense, you know.”

“Busy now.” She waited until the flashlights were pointing into the corners of the big room, then dashed forward and ducked behind the nearest display case. She watched the lights a few seconds longer, fixing their pattern and dodging between displays until she was behind the two men. The nearest gunman, able to see only what was illuminated in the cone of his flashlight, looked right past her and kept going.

There was no time for subtlety. She sprang forward and punched the man in the throat. It sent him reeling back, gagging softly. As he staggered away, she wrestled the pistol from his grasp and turned it on the second man. The gun erupted in a flash of light and noise, and the man pitched backward into a display case. Whether it was the sudden weight of a human body or the bullet passing through, she could not say, but the glass shattered. The man’s bulk snapped the shelf apart, smashing and scattering the contents.

The ghost images of the men outside showed an immediate reaction to the noise of gunfire from inside the Stanley Pavilion. They continued their advance, but now they were in a defensive posture, ready to engage the unseen enemies within. Queen heard a crackle of static and then a voice.

“Three Spades, report.”

There was no answer and she realized the sound had come from a radio clipped to the belt of the first man she had taken out. She grabbed the radio and twisted its volume knob down so she could monitor their communications without giving her own position away. Then, she fell back toward the hallway that led deeper into the pavilion.

Another voice sounded, this time as if inside her head. “Queen, we’re cut off here. No way out except up. Déjà vu all over again.”

She turned, finding Rook’s icon in the virtual display. He was only about twenty-five yards away, on the other side of a wall, standing near the rear stairwell. “Go for it,” she said. “I’ll meet you on the roof.”

“The roof?”

There was another inquiry from the walkie-talkie, more urgent this time. She ignored it and addressed Rook’s question. “Aleman, what’s the ETA for Crescent?”

“ETA?” The tech genius sounded confused. “You mean to the rally point?”

The original plan had called for them to make their way into the Belgian countryside, where the stealth plane could land and take them on without attracting attention. The plane was invisible to radar and much quieter than a commercial jet, but when the thrust from its turbofans was directed earthward during a vertical landing, it sounded and felt like a gale force wind.

“Change of plans. We need a pick-up from the roof of this building. How long for that?”

It was an almost unthinkable request. Stealth plane or not, people would notice the angular black aircraft hovering above a building in the middle of the city. Aleman made a choking sound, but thankfully did not point out the obvious. “They’re over the channel. Thirteen minutes.”

Queen reached the open staircase opposite the entry doors and started up. “Tell them to kick in the afterburners. They need to be here in three.”

That too, was an extraordinary thing to request. Crescent’s sonic boom would advertise its presence to every military listening post in northern Europe, and without the protection of the US government, the only real question was which government would scramble its interceptors first.

In a small voice, Aleman answered. “I’ll tell them.”

She rounded the banister at the top of the stairs and looked back at the entry. One of the mercenaries eased through the doorway. She fired twice in his direction, missing but driving him back. She considered staying put, holding off their advance to buy a little more time, but it would make little difference. More men were congregating at the main entrance, and on the north side of the building, two more were forcing open the basement level door. She headed into a corridor, following Rook’s icon.

She caught up to Rook and Mulamba on the stairs leading up to the rooftop. “Our ride is on the way,” she said.

“I heard. Three minutes, huh? You think we can last that long?”

“I guess we’d better.”

There was a sloped trapdoor, secured with another padlock blocking the way, but a decisive kick from Rook splintered the hasp and removed that impediment. Queen ushered Mulamba through and ventured out onto the roof of the Stanley Pavilion.

The night was deceptively quiet and peaceful. Queen knew that wasn’t going to last long. “Find some cover.”

Rook guided Mulamba toward a blocky protrusion that looked like an old disused chimney, one of several that sprouted from the irregular roof. There was no shortage of places to hide, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, as Queen turned to face the trapdoor, she realized that the virtual environment was no longer updating.

“Aleman. Where did they go?”

“Sorry, Queen. There aren’t enough cameras inside that building to track their movements.”

“Wonderful.” She crouched and took aim at the black opening, waiting for the surprise moment when someone would pop out like a jack-in-the-box.

She didn’t have to wait long.

A head broke the plane and she pulled the trigger, but in the nanosecond it took for thought to become action, the mercenary ducked back down. Her bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the sloping roof above the opening. A moment later, a hand holding a pistol appeared and fired off several shots in a blind spread. Most of the rounds sailed harmlessly out into the night, but a few smacked into the chimney behind which she was concealed, spraying her with dust and stone chips. Knowing that this was just cover fire to allow another shooter onto the roof, she braved the barrage and lined up another shot.

A figure erupted through the doorway, rolling to the side and scrambling for cover as the bullets continued to fly. Queen squeezed off another shot, but couldn’t tell if she scored a hit. The man crabbed away from her and sought the refuge of another chimney.

Queen breathed a curse and drew back. The gun she’d taken was a beat-up looking Browning Hi-Power 9 mm. It was a military surplus gun, old school and not as sexy as a Glock or FN, but reliable and easy to find with the right connections. It had a thirteen round magazine, and she’d fired five times, which left eight shots, or possibly nine if the mercenary had kept one round in the chamber. She had to make every one of them count.

The volley from the doorway ceased, but the man behind the chimney took up the slack, providing cover fire for the other man to emerge. Queen didn’t allow herself to be distracted by the noise and fury, and when the mercenary made his move, she fired once and saw the man topple back through the opening.

That one counted, she thought. But there was no telling how many more shooters were lined up and waiting their turn.

“Queen,” Aleman said. “Crescent is thirty seconds out. You should see them coming in—”

The roar of a jet turbine drowned out the rest of his comment, and Queen saw the black shape of the stealth transport plane sliding across the sky above the museum grounds.

“Yes!”

The aircraft moved like something from a science-fiction movie, changing speed and direction without banking, in defiance of gravity. She knew that VTOL maneuvering was just about the most stressful activity in aviation, requiring constant and precise control of a dozen different systems, but the pilots made it look easy. The plane spun around and descended toward the rooftop, practically right on top of Rook and Mulamba, and as it did, a section of its belly lowered to form an access ramp.

The turbofans stirred up a tempest of grit, and amid the din, Queen thought she heard the sound of windows breaking.

In the corner of her eye, she saw the open ramp, its edge wavering slightly a few feet above the rooftop. Rook hoisted Mulamba up onto the ramp, who then turned and offered his hand. Rook frantically waved him back.

More shots rang out. Queen returned fire: a shot at the chimney where the gunman was hiding, another round into the open doorway and then she repeated the process to keep the mercenaries at bay until the others were aboard.

“Queen! Move!”

She did. Firing out the last of the magazine, she broke cover and sprinted for the ramp, diving up and onto it like an Olympic high jumper. She felt the hard metal beneath her and kept rolling deeper into the interior of the plane.

“I’m in!” she shouted. “Go!”

She could feel the aircraft moving beneath her, and she spread-eagled to avoid being tossed around the cabin by the acceleration. There was a loud whine of hydraulic motors as the ramp drew back into the fuselage, and then abruptly, the noise diminished to a low roar.

Queen lay panting on the deck for several seconds, letting the adrenaline drain away. She knew there would be hell to pay for bringing the stealth plane into a populated area, but that was a worry for another day. It was also the beauty of being an off-the-books operation. There would be an uproar about it, but it wouldn’t be directed at Chess Team or the Endgame organization, since they didn’t technically exist.

She rolled over to look for the others. “What’s our next—?”

What she saw hit her like a physical blow. Rook had his back to her and was hunched over an unmoving form, his arms bowed and trembling. She looked around for Mulamba, her brain not quite processing that she had already seen him.

Rook had both hands pressed against Mulamba’s chest, as if by so doing he might keep the man’s life from escaping through the hole there, but too much of it had already poured out. The deck was awash in blood, most of it oozing from the ragged exit wound.

“Stupid son of…” Rook was almost incoherent. “Damn it, Joe. Why the fuck didn’t you…? Damnit!”

Mulamba’s eyes were wide with pain or panic, but somehow his gaze found Queen. His lips moved, trying to form words even though there wasn’t enough breath left in him to make a sound.

He managed two words.

“Find it.”

Then he was gone.

29

King lifted his head out of the dark water and surveyed the shoreline. It was nearly midnight. Behind him, on the northern shore of the Congo, the city lights of Brazzaville glittered like jewels, but Brazzaville was in another country. Few lights were visible in Kinshasa.

At King’s direction, General Mabuki’s forces had shut down the power grid, plunging whole sections of Kinshasa into darkness. The army and many of the government buildings had gasoline powered generators, so the blackout was only a minor inconvenience, but King was counting on the darkness to conceal his approach to the Palais de la Nation.

He crept forward, feeling the marshy river bottom beneath this hands and knees, and crawled up onto the grassy bank, immediately seeking cover in the trees that overlooked the river. He gently shook the water from his borrowed AKS-74, and waited for Asya and the rest of the strike team to join him.

The six Republican Guardsmen had been hand-picked by General Mabuki, and all boasted that they had received special commando training. King was suspicious of the claim, but he didn’t have the luxury of being choosy. For their sake, he hoped they weren’t exaggerating their prowess.

“Stay close to me,” he whispered to his sister, reiterating what he had already told her several times.

A low fence ringed the palace property. Beyond it was a lot of open ground. Although the palace was dark, a few tiny pinpoints of light marked the location of soldiers patrolling the expansive courtyard. A lone helicopter — a Russian-made Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter, painted in a military camouflage pattern — sat idle in front of the pillared exterior of the palace. When the nearest patrol started moving away, King whispered the ‘go’ order, and then slipped over the fence.

The palace grounds were partitioned with hedge walls laid out in a geometric pattern around a large reflecting pool. King darted to the nearest of these and then ducked down, waiting for the others to catch up.

As they huddled there, waiting, King checked his watch. The stainless-steel Omega chronograph — a gift from American astronaut Buzz Aldrin — had been on his wrist more or less constantly for nearly forty years. Winding the mechanism and verifying that it was still keeping accurate time had become something of a daily ritual for him, a habit that had taken root as he had ticked down the days and hours remaining in his long journey through the centuries.

“Two minutes, forty-five seconds to go time,” he whispered, then added, “If they’re on time.”

He did not hold out a lot of hope that Mabuki would be punctual. In Africa, and indeed in most areas of the developing world, people took a rather philosophical approach to scheduling. Things got done when they got done… or sometimes they didn’t.

Go time came and went, but King was pleasantly surprised when, not quite two minutes later, he heard the noise of distant explosions and gunfire. The bobbing lights of the foot patrols immediately swung around in the direction of the disturbance and several of the patrols moved off to investigate.

King slipped over the hedge and stole forward, moving from one place of concealment to the next. The noise of the distant battle continued to grow, but King knew that it would be some time before the large force of Republican Guard soldiers got anywhere near the Palais. Mabuki’s attack on the forces at the edge of the Gombe commune was a diversion, designed to draw attention away from the vulnerable river approach and mask the insertion of King’s team.

For several long minutes, King and his team moved in short spurts across the open area, ducking behind hedges, or sometimes simply lying prone in the open, trusting that their camouflage would blend in with the lawn. King’s objective was the smaller annex building, connected to the east wing of the palace, the place where he and Asya had been held captive, though he hadn’t been aware of it at the time. He only knew it now because Deep Blue had continued to monitor the q-phones, which were right where Favreau had left them.

The door to the small building was just twenty yards away, but two soldiers stood between that door and King. The men were in the open, easy targets, but without suppressed weapons, King didn’t dare shoot them. Doing so would give them away and bring the full might of the Congolese army down on them.

There was only one way to get past the men, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

King leaned back and whispered his plan to the leader of the Republican Guard team. Asya shot him an annoyed look, but he pretended not to notice. He didn’t doubt that she was capable of doing what he was about to do, but she was his sister, and if he could spare her a few sleepless nights by outsourcing the dirty work to the locals, then he would.

He gave the signal. Both he and the Congolese guardsman sprinted forward. The soldiers never noticed them. King buried the blade of his AKM Type II bayonet in the nearest man’s throat and clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle any cry of alarm. A second later, the guardsman did the same to the second soldier.

King held his hand in place until his target stopped struggling, then dragged the body around the side of the building where, hopefully, it would go unnoticed for a while. He did what he could to wipe away the hot sticky blood that covered his hands, and then moved toward the entrance door, where Asya had the rest of the team assembled.

They went in fast but silent. The dark anteroom was completely empty, along with the rest of the first floor. King soon found his way to the stairs leading down to the sub-basement, where he and Asya had been kept prisoner. He descended, the barrel of his carbine leading the way, and entered the room with the makeshift detention cell.

Their glasses, q-phones and the rucksacks containing weapons and other gear lay on a desktop, left there like car keys and junk mail on an entryway sideboard.

King donned one pair of glasses and handed the second to Asya. As soon as they were on his head, the night-vision feature activated and the room seemed to brighten around him.

“Blue, it’s King. Do you copy?”

The relief in Deep Blue’s voice came through loud and clear. “Good to have you back on the air.”

“Any news for me?”

“Nothing that can’t wait until you’re finished there.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” He dug into his rucksack and took out the Uzi he’d brought from Cairo. The weapon was still equipped with the integrated holographic virtual aiming sight, as well as a sound suppressor. “Give me a route to the assembly chamber.”

A faint blue arrow hovered in the air before him, pointing the way out, along with a top-down map of the entire building that showed King and Asya as tiny chess pieces, and showed the destination as a red dot. Although Deep Blue didn’t have access to the floor plan, he had been able to extrapolate a rough approximation of the layout from their earlier journey through the Palais. There were a lot of blank spaces, but every room and corridor that King and Asya had glimpsed while in custody was now flawlessly rendered as part of the digital model. With Deep Blue guiding him, King could have walked through the maze blindfolded.

In his eagerness, he almost forgot that the guardsman didn’t share his enhanced visual abilities. They stared blankly at him, their pupils fully dilated and visible as white dots in the night-vision display.

“Stay close,” he told them in French. “But don’t shoot anything unless I give the signal.”

He moved through the structure more quickly now, his confidence bolstered by the technology that he had earlier found so excessive and even a bit intrusive. The glasses were far superior to any night vision goggles he had ever used, not only providing a much sharper perspective on the unlit environment, but doing so without a disorienting change in depth perception. He knew Asya, similarly equipped, was right behind him. The guardsmen, fumbling along in the dark, were having trouble keeping up, but he didn’t slow down.

The glasses registered a change in the ambient light level and King slowed, easing forward to investigate. As he neared a turn in the corridor, he heard voices from just ahead, an odd mix of Swahili and French that, despite being fluent in both languages, taxed his linguistic abilities. He also caught a whiff of fragrant smoke. The glasses weren’t equipped with chemical sensors, but King had no trouble recognizing the aroma of nicotine, mixed with the much more distinctive smell of burning cannabis.

He moved closer, his glasses changing from full-dark to low-light mode as the light from the room beyond increased. He eased around the corner, barely long enough for his gaze to be drawn, moth-like, to the old-fashioned oil burning lamp on a tabletop in the center of the room. The glasses instantly registered what he did not have time to make out: the presence of at least six men, all wearing army uniforms. The soldiers were sprawled out around the table, smoking and joking, presumably off-duty, certainly not in a state of heightened defensive alertness.

Although he had drawn back into concealment, King could still see the men clearly in his display, ghostly figures, seemingly visible through the solid wall.

“Pawn, on my signal move in fast.” He knew that Asya’s glasses showed her the same image. “I’ll go left, you go right.”

“Ready.”

“Go on three… One… two… three.” He slipped around the corner, leading with the Uzi.

He shot the first target before anyone in the room was aware of the intrusion. He swung the gun toward the next closest target. The crosshairs moved with him, and when they settled on the head of another soldier, his finger tightened on trigger. The gun coughed and bucked slightly in his two-handed grip. The man fell dead, but King had already moved on.

Asya eliminated her designated targets with equal efficiency. Two were down, the third, who had been facing away when the attack had begun, was just starting to turn when a bullet caught him in the throat. He dropped, a torrent of blood pouring from his mouth, as he fought to get his rifle up.

King killed the last target and swung his Uzi around to engage any survivors. Asya had already lined up a second shot on the wounded soldier and finished the job her first bullet had started… but not before the soldier got his finger into the trigger guard of his Kalashnikov. As he slumped forward, the weapon discharged.

It was just a single shot, and the bullet embedded itself harmlessly in a wall, injuring no one, but it was enough. A gun had been fired inside the palace.

There was a possibility that the report would raise no alarm. Accidental discharges happened in even the most disciplined armies — and the Congolese military certainly was not that — but King resisted the seductive desire to hope for the best.

Asya muttered a curse under her breath, but King silenced her self-recriminations. “It’s done. The first rule of war is that no plan survives contact. Shit happens. Stay alert and keep moving.”

He quickly turned down the wick of the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, and then he called the rest of the team forward. The guardsmen might have benefited from the light in the short term, but their eyes were already adjusted to the dark. Exposure to even a dim light source would have left them night blind.

He continued through the room, steeling himself for the likelihood that the next encounter would not be so one-sided.

The bobbing yellow glow of a flashlight heralded the approach of a squad of soldiers running to investigate the shooting. Although they no longer had the element of surprise in their favor, King and Asya still had technology on their side. The soldiers went down in a hail of whisper quiet 9 mm, but they didn’t go quietly. As their comrades dropped, the soldiers began firing blindly into the darkness where King and Asya were concealed. None of King’s team were hit, but it was now almost a certainty that their enemies would be ready for them.

The assembly room, where he hoped to find the hostages, lay just ahead, but to get there, they would have to cross a wide atrium — an area where the enemy forces would almost certainly be waiting.

King consulted the map, looking for a better answer.

He found it.

He called the senior guardsman forward and quickly outlined his strategy. The man nodded enthusiastically, eager for a chance to do more than just trail along in King’s shadow, and then he urged his men forward. King took Asya back the other way.

Moving quickly, unencumbered by the guardsmen, they found a stairwell and ascended. They hadn’t visited the second floor, so the virtual map was mostly blank, but the landing opened into a hallway that ran in the same direction as the corridor they had just scouted on the first floor. The atrium lay ahead to their left. As King and Asya moved at a jog, the noise of gunfire filled the air. The guardsmen had, right on schedule, engaged the enemy forces assembled on the ground floor of the open hall.

Light spilled through the open passage leading to the balcony, which overlooked the atrium, where the battle was now raging. The army troops had set up mobile generator-powered lights in the big hall. King could see a dozen soldiers on the balcony, firing down at the guardsmen, oblivious to the threat approaching from their flank. He and Asya picked them off from the shelter of the entryway, and with the way clear, they raced out onto the balcony.

None of the soldiers on the lower floor took note of what was happening above, but seizing the high vantage point was not King’s ultimate goal. Instead, he moved to the far side of the atrium and plunged into the dark passage opposite the one from which they had emerged. Further down the hall, he found a matching stairwell. The map showed an entrance to the assembly hall just ten yards from the first floor landing.

The stairwell muted the sound of the gun battle, but when they reached the ground floor, King and Asya found themselves in the thick of the fight. The guardsmen, clustered at the eastern entrance to the atrium were firing at a group of soldiers who had taken up a position in the western entrance, a stone’s throw from the stairwell. The soldiers, focused on the threat in front of them, paid no heed to the stealthy pair at their rear, but stray rounds were sizzling past them and into the corridor.

“Stay low,” King whispered, and then ducked out into the corridor, his sister right behind him.

King felt a rising anxiety as he reached for the door handle. Everything had been leading up to this moment. He didn’t know what he would find on the other side of that barrier, but their survival and indeed the success of their entire mission in Africa, hinged on what would happen in the next few seconds.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Electric lanterns illuminated the assembly room, and revealed more than two dozen figures huddled in the far corner of the room, doing their best to avoid being hit by bullets penetrating the wall that abutted the atrium. Several heads turned in their direction and the facial recognition software went completely nuts. Red, yellow and green icons started popping up as the computer instantaneously began separating friend, foe and unknown. There were, unfortunately, plenty of the latter two categories, and many of them were clustered tightly in the midst of the captive dignitaries.

A soldier, marked with a yellow dot, started to bring his rifle around. Asya dropped him with a precise headshot. King however, sprinted forward, desperate to reach his primary objective in the center of the group. He didn’t need the red dot to find her. Monique Favreau’s white face stood out clearly.

She was looking right at him with an eager, hungry expression.

Another Caucasian man — presumably one of her mercenaries — got his machine pistol up and fired in King’s direction. King somersaulted forward and the burst hit the wall behind him, each overpressure round blasting a cantaloupe-sized hole in the wood paneling.

King came out of his roll in a crouch just three yards from where Favreau and the mercenary stood. He fired point-blank without bothering to check the virtual crosshairs and drilled the man between the eyes. In the same fluid motion, he stood up and thrust the Uzi in Favreau’s direction. The smoking suppressor floated a hand’s breadth from her face.

But he didn’t fire.

As satisfying as killing Favreau would have been, his goal from the start had been to take her alive and use her as a human shield, so he could move the hostages to the river shore, where a gunboat would get them clear of the fighting. He did not doubt for a moment that she was the puppet-master pulling the strings of the revolution. The only troubling question was whether the rebellious army forces would lay down their arms to save her life.

Time to find out.

“Drop your weapons,” he shouted in clear French, “or she dies.”

The noise of the battle in the atrium continued, but there was total silence in the assembly hall.

Favreau just stared at King like a hyena savoring a carcass. Her smile never wavered, but after a few seconds, she spoke in an equally forceful tone. “Do as he says.”

For a fleeting moment, King believed he had won. Then Favreau raised her hand.

“Don’t,” he warned.

She froze, but the thing in her hand was now plainly visibly, and he recognized it immediately. “You know what this is, don’t you? It is a remote trigger with a dead-man switch. Kill me and…” She made a little poof gesture with her free hand.

“Your way we both die. My way, we both live. Your choice.” Without breaking his stare, he went on. “Pawn, get the hostages clear.”

“Pawn?” Favreau asked with an air of delight. “How marvelous. Do you play chess? I am called the Red Queen. Did you know that?”

“How nice for you.” King maintained his best poker face, but her confidence was eroding his own.

“I love chess. Victory can be achieved only through sacrifice. What, I wonder, are you willing to sacrifice to win?”

“You, for starters.”

She laughed. “Look behind me. Do you see it, there in the corner?”

He couldn’t help but look, just the briefest flick of his gaze, and when he saw the large green duffel bag, all the pieces fell into place. He had a mental image of Hadir, blown apart by a single bullet — an overpressure round, just like the ones Favreau’s mercenaries used. Now at last, he had the answer to the question of who had taken the RA-115 in Egypt.

“It is a nuclear device,” she explained. “A small one, just a kiloton, but more than enough to wipe this palace off the face of the Earth.”

From behind her, Senator Marrs erupted with an indignant curse. “Good God, she’s got a nuke.”

“It doesn’t change anything.” He lowered his voice so she wouldn’t hear what he said next. “Pawn, get those hostages out of here. Blue, call Mabuki and tell him to send the gunboat now.”

Asya did as instructed, moving forward with a boldness that King knew was all for show.

“It changes everything,” Favreau said, seeming to ignore what was going on behind her. “You see, I have already won. If I let go of this trigger, we all die, and I win. Checkmate!”

“No. All that happens is that we’ll die. And regardless of whether or not that happens, tomorrow morning, every news agency in the world will be reporting the truth about what’s happening here. How mercenaries working for Consolidated Energy kidnapped President Mulamba and tried to overthrow the country. It’s over, and you’ve lost.”

“Do you think so?” Favreau brought her hands together, moving with exaggerated slowness as if daring him to shoot, and transferred the remote detonator to her left hand. “Let me show you how I win this game.”

She knelt down and pried the MP5 from the hands of the mercenary King had killed.

King felt a cold panic surge through his extremities. “Don’t!” He jabbed the Uzi at her again, but even he could hear the desperate quaver in his voice.

Favreau was visibly trembling with excitement as she held up the detonator in one hand, the gun in the other. King felt impotent as he waited for her to pull one trigger or the other, but instead she pivoted away.

“What are you willing to sacrifice to win?” she asked, almost breathlessly. “A pawn perhaps?”

Then Favreau thrust the gun toward Asya, and pulled the trigger.