The Emperor's Revenge

SIXTY-ONE

Eddie cupped the phone in his hand. “Murph says there’s no answer from Beatrix Dräger,” he said to Linc, who was driving their rented SUV.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it’s not because her phone battery died,” Linc said as he followed Gustaaf Dijkstra’s Mercedes sedan through the front gate of the Continental Control Hub. By breaking every speed limit in the Netherlands and weaving through traffic like they were on an obstacle course, the two-vehicle convoy made it to the facility in record time.

“There’s no way she’d ignore a call from Gustaaf Dijkstra.” He took his hand off the phone and spoke to Murph, who was in the Mercedes’s backseat with Gustaaf. “Go through the front entrance with Dijkstra to the command center. Make sure you take plenty of armed security guards with you, just in case.”

The throb of rotor blades picking up speed vibrated the windows.

“It sounds like the helicopter is getting ready to take off,” Murph said.

“We hear it. We’ll circle around the building and make sure they don’t leave.”

“Roger that.”

Eddie drew his pistol and now wished he’d brought a more substantial weapon.

They rounded the point of the building’s lightning bolt shape and saw the Eurocopter’s rotors spinning at full speed.

A door at the back of the building opened and two athletic men sprinted toward the helicopter. They were followed by a tall Indian, a young woman, and Maxim Antonovich, who was practically being dragged by the woman. She had to be Ivana Semova. They weaved their way through the cars in the parking lot.

“There they are,” Eddie said.

“Timing is everything,” Linc said.

“We also have three men by the helicopter. They’ve got automatic weapons.”

Antonovich was the first one to spot their approaching SUV. He wrested himself away from Ivana and dived behind a car. Eddie was amazed to see her shoot at the billionaire. If he was in charge of this whole operation, why was one of his underlings trying to kill him?

He popped off three quick shots at Ivana. None of them hit, but the sudden shots made her rethink going after Antonovich. She turned and ran for the helicopter with the Indian.

The three men guarding the helicopter sprayed the front of the SUV with fire, splattering the windshield with holes, as Eddie and Linc ducked. Eddie popped up to take down one of the guards, but the other two retreated into the helicopter as soon as Ivana and the Indian arrived.

The pitch of the chopper engine increased.

“They’re about to take off!”

Linc tightened his grip on the steering wheel and spun the SUV one hundred and eighty degrees. “Feel like doing something crazy?” He mashed the accelerator down as he kept his eye on the backup camera.

They were pointed directly at the helicopter and picking up speed.

“Let’s go nuts,” Eddie said, cinching up his seat belt.

They roared through the parking lot as bullets punched into the SUV’s rear, exploding the back window. The helicopter’s wheels rose off the asphalt as the SUV’s back roof smashed into the tail section.

The SUV bounced off and rolled onto its side, skidding across the pavement and popping the windshield out as it slid to a stop. Eddie shook the cobwebs out and then swatted the deployed air bags out of the way to watch the helicopter.

At first, it didn’t seem as if the helicopter had been significantly damaged, just knocked off its initial flight path. Because the tail rotor was encased inside a protective housing, the blades didn’t snap off instantly. But the aluminum housing was bent enough that the rotors began to wobble and then hit the frame.

As pieces of the rotor started to fly off, Eddie knew the helicopter wasn’t going to get very far.

Ivana hadn’t had time to strap herself in and she knew the helicopter wasn’t going to make it. The warning alarm signaled a major malfunction caused by the impact with the SUV.

Smoke poured from under the rotors, filling the cabin with noxious fumes. The door on her side of the chopper was still open. The men behind her were shouting in panic.

The helicopter spun in a lazy circle as it crossed over the Control Hub’s roof. For a moment, it seemed as though they’d crash on top of the building itself, but they cleared it, with only a few feet to spare, as they began their final descent onto the facility’s front lawn.

The spin violently increased as they plummeted. Ivana let go of the briefcase holding her laptop and it flew out the door. Not wanting to be trapped inside the helicopter when it crashed, she jumped free when it was still twenty feet above the ground. She curled herself into a ball, taking the brunt of the impact with her shoulder. The jarring blow knocked the wind out of her as she rolled to a stop.

Sirkal tensed to jump, too, but he made the mistake of leaping out at the same time that the pilot tried to bank the helicopter in a corrective maneuver.

Sirkal threw his hands up and screamed as he saw the massive main rotor churning toward him. It caught him in midflight, chopping him to pieces in a spray of blood and gore. Nothing larger than a hand made it to the ground.

The fragile rotor came apart and the Eurocopter slammed into the ground. The fuel tank ruptured as the fuselage collapsed from the crushing impact. The entire chopper exploded, taking the rest of the occupants with it.

Despite the pain in her shoulder, Ivana looked around for any way to escape. Then she saw her one chance.

A Mercedes was idling by the Control Hub’s entrance.

After Eddie and Linc crawled from the SUV’s remains with little more than scratches and bruises from the crash, they ran toward the smoke that was billowing up over the Control Hub building.

Eddie came around the corner to see Ivana pick up a briefcase and throw it into the burning hulk of the helicopter. She held one arm close to her body as if it were injured while she ran toward Gustaaf Dijkstra’s Mercedes, which was idling at the front entrance. Its driver, who had gotten out after the helicopter crashed, fled toward the building’s entrance when he saw Ivana waving a pistol at him.

Eddie sprinted toward her with Linc hot on his heels, but she climbed into the car and slammed the door. The Mercedes screeched away toward the facility’s gate.

“Close the gate!” he yelled at the guards.

One of them pressed the button to raise the cylindrical truck barriers.

Instead of slowing, the powerful Mercedes, which had already reached highway speeds, continued to accelerate in an attempt to make it across the top of the cylinders before they were fully raised.

But the top of the cylinders had risen just enough to catch the front of the chassis. The Mercedes catapulted over the cylinders and somersaulted in the air.

The air bags deployed, but the car continued to tumble over the pavement. Ivana, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, was slingshotted from the car and bounced across the pavement like a rag doll before the Mercedes came to rest as a jumble of nearly unrecognizable metal.

Eddie and Linc were the first ones to reach her. She stared up at them with unseeing eyes, her neck broken from the impact.

Eddie’s phone dinged. It was Murph.

“Eddie, are you and Linc okay? We heard an explosion.”

“We’re fine. The helicopter went down in front of the building.”

“Did Ivana Semova make it out? Because the electrical grid is about to melt down and we need her alive to stop it. And see if you can find that laptop she was carrying.”

“I’ve got bad news and worse news,” Eddie said as he looked at Ivana’s corpse. “Ivana survived the crash, but the bad news is that she threw her briefcase into the fire. I assume her laptop was inside. The worse news is that she’s no longer in a position to help us restore the grid. Her next destination is the morgue.”

“Then we are supremely hosed if Golov hits that transformer station.”

“Actually, there is one survivor,” Linc offered. “Antonovich might be able to help.”

Now that Beatrix Dräger and her team were freed from the offices, they assessed the damage that Ivana Semova had done to the grid. As Murph continued to see nothing but red lights on the big board, the shouts that echoed around the room were panicked, some in English, most in Dutch.

“I’m still locked out!”

“I can’t access the breaker subroutines!”

“What did she do?”

Gustaaf Dijkstra watched helplessly as Dräger begged Murph to help them.

“If you have any idea what that woman did to our system, we need to know right now.”

“There’s one possibility outside,” Murph said, hustling to the emergency exit. “I’ll be right back. Keep the door open for me.”

“Where is he?” he asked Eddie, who was still on the line.

“The last I saw, he was near a blue Audi.”

“You sure Semova was trying to kill him?”

“Sure looked that way to me.”

Murph spotted the billionaire, who was still huddled behind the car. “I guess I’ll ask him.”

“Linc’s on his way to give you a hand.”

Murph hung up and ran over to Antonovich, who was holding his left leg. Blood oozed through his fingers and down his pant leg. When he saw Murph, Antonovich spoke at him in rapid-fire Russian.

Murph didn’t speak the language, so he tapped on the same language translation application he’d used at the Albanian Mafia castle. He spoke into the phone as it interpreted his words.

“Mr. Antonovich, my name is Mark Murphy. Speak slowly and clearly.”

Antonovich nodded and said, “They made me do this. I’m innocent.”

“They who?”

“Golov and his daughter.”

“Ivana Semova was his daughter? Was she also a hacker named ShadowFoe?”

Antonovich nodded and winced from the pain as he moved his leg. “They’ve been holding me captive for nearly a year. My whole crew mutinied and took over the Achilles under Golov’s direction. He’s the one behind this attack.”

Linc rushed up and knelt beside them. He rolled up Antonovich’s pant leg to reveal a bullet hole in his calf.

“He says he’s completely innocent,” Murph said as Linc took off his jacket and put pressure on the wound.

“Sounds like a convenient story,” Linc replied.

“Then why did Semova shoot him? And Dräger said he didn’t seem to be directing her inside. If anything, he seemed to be at her mercy.”

“Then he won’t mind helping us, will he?”

“Good point,” Murph said, and turned the translation app back on. “Mr. Antonovich, if you’re telling the truth, then how do we reactivate the continental grid’s circuit breakers?”

Antonovich shook his head. “I don’t know. Ivana had a program on her laptop. It let her lock out access from the Control Hub’s systems. Her program is the only way to control the breakers.”

“Her laptop is destroyed and Ivana is dead. There must be some other way.”

“There isn’t. You would have to get another copy of her program.”

“How can we do that? Do you know someplace online where we can find it?”

“No,” Antonovich said. “You won’t be able to get it. There’s only one place she would keep a backup of that file.”

Murph wanted to shake the answer out of him. “Where?”

Antonovich shook his head in hopelessness. “In her cabin on the Achilles.”