They quickly arranged for a rental car, dissuading the attendant of his notion that they would need a driver. Once they reached the privacy of their rental car, King opened the box, and removed two MP-443 Grach pistols. He recognized these as the modern Russian 9mm sidearm. They were more commonly called Yarygins. He handed one to Asya, and she quickly chambered a round from the seventeen in the magazine. He did the same. Then he chuckled.
“What is funny?” Asya asked him.
“You know this weapon?”
“Yes, Pistolet Yarygina. Why is this funny?”
“Also called a Grach. Or Rook. It’s Deep Blue’s way of making a joke about how we are on this wild goose chase for our parents and not out helping the team.” He started the engine of the gray Mercedes sedan. The car barely made a noise.
“Blue is…a complicated man.” Asya turned away from him slightly as she spoke, but King saw her cheeks flush. Realization dawned on him.
“Oh my God, you have the hots for him,” he laughed.
“I do not have hots,” she said, still facing the window.
King laughed harder as he brought the sedan out into traffic on the main road, passing a McDonald’s. They would need to drive about five miles to get across the main island of Malta, to reach the capital, Valletta. He opened the windows on both sides of the car, letting the warm Mediterranean air wash over them. He was looking forward to getting to the coast, so he could see the brilliant blue hues of the sea, which had looked so stunning from the air.
The traffic was thick, but they made it to Valletta in good time. After a twenty minute search, King found a place to park the car. They walked along Republic Street to the plaza in front of the library, which was packed with tourists having lunch at the many umbrella-shaded tables. King wore his signature outfit: jeans and a simple black t-shirt with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, showing his back to the audience, and holding a microphone in his hand. King guessed he now had close to a hundred different Elvis t-shirts. It was the only thing he collected, besides scars. Tucked under the shirt, in the waistband of his jeans, he carried the Yarygin.
Asya walked next to him, her long dark hair up in a ponytail. She wore a light blue blouse and a tight black pair of jeans. King didn’t know where she carried her gun, but he knew she had it on her somewhere. Maybe in the small purse-like backpack she wore.
The white umbrellas over the tables all read Café Cordina on the flaps, and the chairs were a strange mix of plastic patio furniture and woven wicker backs. A long aisle had been left down the center of the plaza, leading to the statue of Queen Victoria in front of the library’s doors. Currently, the statue’s head was mobbed with about five white and gray pigeons, all jostling each other for the best perch on the Queen’s noggin. Above it all, high on the roof of the library building, the Maltese red and white flag flapped loudly against its flag pole.
Above the doorframe, the word BIBLIOTHECA was carved and inlaid with gold. King also noted a ridiculous number of CCTV cameras clustered over the arch, but most pointed outward toward the crowd in the plaza.
“Ten cameras is excessive,” Asya stated, and once again, King was startled to find how similar he was to this woman that had grown up on the other side of the world from him.
They passed through the stone columns and in through the library’s main entrance. King’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the lower light. The floor was a zigzagging pattern of green and white marble. He spotted what he was looking for as soon as he entered the room.
Asya looked at the long tables and the walls lined with wooden bookshelves. The main chamber was a huge rectangular room, running to their left and right, the length of the building. Although several windows allowed light to pour into the space, he and Asya both had pink spots in their vision from having been outside in the brighter sunshine.
“Where should we begin?” Asya asked.
King pointed down to the floor, just inside the door, where the green and white marble had been laid in the H symbol of the Herculean Society.
“I’m going to say we should look for stairs to a basement.”
SEVEN
Endgame Headquarters, New Hampshire
Tom Duncan stood by the open hangar door, as he always did when the team returned from a mission. He would be present to greet them unless there was a dire situation somewhere that required him to be in operations, where his computers and a connection to the world waited for him. He knew that King and Asya would have only just touched down in Malta, so as the morning sun streamed in the massive hangar door, he smiled warmly for the returning field team.
They came roaring up in a black Land Rover, driven by the team’s new head of security, Quinton Saunders. Saunders was yet another steal from the 10th Mountain group at Fort Drum. Duncan had sent the man to collect the team from Laconia airport, where their transport plane would slip in and then be hidden away in a private hangar. Although the vehicle had VTOL capabilities, there was nowhere near the Endgame Headquarters, which was built in sections under several mountains, to keep the plane. The hangar in which Duncan stood normally housed two Black Hawk helicopters — both of which were being upgraded at Fort Devens, down in Massachusetts.
Rook was the first to emerge from the vehicle, and Duncan was surprised to see the month-long growth of blonde beard on the man’s face. Combined with Rook’s bulk, the overall effect made him look like a wild mountain man.
“Rook, good to see you. If that really is you past all that hair,” Duncan said.
“It’s coming off today. I’ll be glad to have a proper shave.”
Bishop, Queen, Knight and Saunders, the new callsign: White Zero, all stepped out of the vehicle, and onto the concrete floor of the wide hangar.
“You could have shaved in the field, like I did,” Bishop said.
“I’m just wondering how come we never saw Knight shave,” Rook replied.
“I’m Korean. Our hair is trained to grow only where we want it to.” Knight smiled, then headed off toward the far end of the hangar.
“Queen, anything you want to tell me?” Duncan asked.
“We were lucky. A small patrol stumbled up on us, just as Knight was moving in to take his look. He’ll tell you all about the interior from the look he got, but the intel was righteous. Bishop took it down, and we got the hell out of there. Better intel would have made a month-long stakeout an afternoon takedown.” She shook her blonde hair out of a ponytail, and a long swath of it fell across the branded scar she bore on her forehead, covering it.
“Sorry about that. Sometimes we have to go on what we have. I’m glad it turned out alright.” Duncan replied. He put his hand on her shoulder. “You were wounded?”
“A scratch,” Queen dismissed it. “How are the North Koreans taking it?”
They turned to walk toward the far end of the hangar as they talked. Bishop and Rook had gone on ahead, and Saunders had taken the Rover back out to handle another matter.
“As you might expect. Saber-rattling at both China and Russia, because they don’t know who did it. They’ll turn their venom on us by tomorrow, whether they have any inkling it was us or not. They always do. They’ll threaten to nuke us, and the UN will level more sanctions at them, and it’ll blow over. But there will be one less chemical plant in their hands.”
“And how long will it take them to build another one?”
Duncan sighed. “Estimates are one month.”
“That’s not a good ratio. One month to take them down and one month to build them?”
“I know. Some days I feel like we need ten Chess Teams.”
A shrill alarm rang out throughout the base, with a red light circulating on the hangar ceiling. The steel door to the hangar began to close on its hydraulic pumps. Five soldiers wearing woodland-camouflage battle dress uniforms (BDUs) raced past Duncan and Queen toward the guard shack on the side of the main hangar door.
“What’s this now?” Queen asked.
Duncan touched a Bluetooth earpiece
. “White Zero, what’s going down?”
“Sir, we have footage of three intruders on the perimeter of the base. Just down the road from Central. We’re looking for them now. Teams are reporting in from Labs and the Dock, but it looks like it was just the three guys.” White Zero sounded out of breath.
The base was a sprawling underground affair in three sections. On a map, the three main sections of the facility formed a capital letter A. High speed trains, hidden underground, connected each section of the appropriated base. This section was designated Central, and it contained the hangar, the computer rooms and surveillance equipment that Duncan would use to orchestrate Chess Team field operations and a variety of smaller labs and offices. Central sat at the top point of the letter A. The lower left of the A was a section designated Labs, because it mostly contained those. That was the section of the base the team had first encountered when the whole base belonged to the megalomaniac Richard Ridley. Finally, the lower right leg of the A-shape was the Dock, because the team kept a captured submarine there — the same Russian Typhoon class the team had used to escape North Korea. The sub reached the New Hampshire sea coast through a series of massive natural flooded tunnels and caverns.
The base had initially caused Duncan no end of headaches, because he first needed to get the Army to help clear it of chemical and biological weapons. After Chess Team had begun to move in, they had fought off an incursion of hostile forces and mutated creatures, while Duncan had been trapped inside and his security forces had been trapped outside. Since then, he had been continually beefing up security. Now three men had just sauntered up to the front door of his top-secret base. Duncan wasn’t happy.
Queen reached over to a nearby desk and picked up a radio earpiece. She placed it in her ear and listened in on the conversation.
“Zero, who are these guys?” Duncan asked, irritation creeping into his voice.
“No idea, sir,” came the reply. “But, they looked pretty weird.”
“Define weird.” Deep Blue was racing for the main computer operations room, and Queen was at his side, her firearm out. Once in his chair, Deep Blue could use the vast security systems as his disposal to find the intruders faster than White Zero could on foot.
“They look the same. Three guys in white business suits,” came White Zero’s reply.
Queen and Duncan exchanged glances as they reached the door to the central computer lab.
“They all have bald heads too. In the footage I’m seeing, they look like triplets.” White Zero’s voice sounded confused.
Deep Blue opened the door and then stopped dead. The room was mostly dark, but the lights had been on when he left. Queen read his body language and had her pistol up in front of her. She stepped in front of Deep Blue, motioning for him to remain shielded at the side of the doorway. Unarmed, he complied.
Queen began to enter the mostly darkened room. There was one recessed light in the ceiling, dimly lit, and shining down on the central computer chair in the room. A tall man with a bald head sat in the chair. He wore a fine white linen suit, and a huge shit-eating grin on his face.
“Richard Ridley,” Queen said, her gun trained on the maniac’s face.
“Not quite who you were expecting, eh, Ms. Baker?” The man’s grin grew wider. Two men stepped out of the shadows behind the chair to stand on either side of Ridley. Each man looked exactly like the other.
They were all the same man.
They were all Richard Ridley.
EIGHT
Valletta, Malta
King was ready to give up. The dreary basement of the library held several hundred cardboard boxes of books, and rows and rows of dusty metal shelving. He felt like he was looking through a haystack and wasn’t even sure he was after a needle.
“There must be something,” Asya said. He could tell she was losing her patience too.
They had been in the basement for over an hour, looking at the boxes, the walls, the ceiling and the floor, for any sign that the Herculean Society had been here, or that they had at least stored something here. But short of going through all the boxes, King had no idea what his next move was.
“Should we open boxes? That assistant librarian might be back at any moment. If she’s looking for something further from the stairs next time, we will have nowhere to hide.” As usual, Asya was thinking what he was thinking.
“It won’t be in the boxes. It’ll be something more secretive, and it’ll probably be marked in some way, like the floor upstairs—” King stopped and he squinted, thinking hard about the layout of the building, as he had viewed it since he entered.
“You only squinch your nose like that when you have idea,” Asya told him.
King turned to her and smiled. “Squinch?”
“I am trying to sound more American.”
“Let’s go back upstairs. I might have an idea.”
Asya followed King up a spiral metal staircase to the main lobby of the library. They slipped quietly through the door and wandered back into the larger part of the hall, as casually as if they were just returning from the restroom.
King scanned the long hall, then turned his eyes up to the second story balcony that ran around the entire room. There were more shelves up there, and several small windows that let golden sunlight stream into the echoing chamber. Asya watched him look, then turned her own eyes up. She pointed to the spot on the balcony directly above the front door — and above the Herculean Society symbol on the floor.
“Was up, not down,” she said.
“Yep. Up,” King moved to another circular staircase. This one was in the corner of the large hall, and the ironwork along the railing was far more ornate than on the stairs to the basement, with small sections painted in gold leaf.
At the top, they navigated past the occasional book browser, along the carpeted floor of the balcony to the spot above the main hall’s doors. King glanced around the space. It was a small reading nook with a chair and a low table. Nothing fancy. He leaned over the balcony’s rail and looked down at the H on the floor below. Then he looked both ways along the balcony. No one was on this side of the second floor. He quickly turned and started searching every inch of the wall behind him, sliding the chair aside, and looking behind the table. Asya casually leaned on the rail watching him. Finally he stood straight and faced the wall, scratching his head.
“I don’t see it,” King said.
Standing slightly behind him, close to the rail, Asya swept her hand up and smacked King in the back of his head. He whipped around and looked at her, more in irritation than pain.
“Use your eyes,” she said. Then she pointed her thumb over her shoulder. “That way.”
King looked across the space to the railing on the other side of the library’s second floor. An identical reading nook mirrored the one in which he stood, with one major difference. On the far wall, behind the chair, and at head level for anyone standing in King’s position, was yet another small stylized H symbol, this time carved into the wooden surface of the wall molding.
King mentally kicked himself. He had stood here first and looked down at the symbol on the floor, and looked sideways down both lengths of the balcony, but he hadn’t bothered to look across the beautiful library and seen what was right in front of him.
“I’m starting to be glad we didn’t grow up together,” he grumbled, then started to walk the perimeter of the balcony.
Asya chuckled softly and walked after him. Once on the other side, the first thing King did was look back at the first nook — just in case. Then he zeroed in on the wooden molding on the wall. There was a nearly imperceptible groove around the circular part of the symbol. King grasped the uprights of the stylized H with his fingers and twisted. The entire symbol slid clockwise with a smooth wood against wood scuffing noise. King glanced down the balcony and saw only one other patron on the second floor with them.
“Go,” Asya said.
King twisted the H the remainder of the distance until he had sp
un the symbol a full 180 degrees. A soft thunk sounded, and the wooden wall swung back on invisible hinges, revealing a tiny door in the wall behind the chair. Asya slid the chair aside, and King stepped up to the door. It was just slightly more than a foot in width, and only about four feet tall. He had to put his head in first, and then slip in sideways.
Once inside, he was in complete darkness. He reached back on the inner wall behind him as Asya slipped into the doorway, pulling the chair back to its original position as she came. King’s fingers brushed across a plastic panel, and he flicked the light switch. A long row of ceiling-mounted fluorescent bulbs illuminated the room. It was a narrow brick passageway, the walls having long ago been painted a shade of white, but the paint was peeling and crumbling now. Asya pulled the door nearly to the closed position and examined the rear of it for a similar handle. She found an identical one in wooden trim that had been painted the same shade of off-white as the corridor, but the handle was smudged from years of dirty fingers. They wouldn’t be locked in. Asya pushed the door gently until it clicked in place.
King pulled his Yarygin and walked cautiously to the end of the tunnel. He noticed the floor declined a bit, but certainly not enough to take them to ground level. Along the way, he checked every inch of the ceiling, wary of traps. Although Alexander and his Herculean Society specialized in protecting — and in some cases obscuring — antiquity, he knew the man was not above using cutting edge technology to do so. King was expecting security traps or, at the very least, CCTV cameras. Instead, he found only the painted brick tunnel.
After about seventy feet, the tunnel ended at a T-intersection. King checked for cameras. Still surprised to find none, he looked in both directions. Fluorescents ran the length of the cross tunnel. At one end was what appeared to be a small room with dark gray metal file cabinets. The other end of the tunnel was in darkness. King looked into the gloom for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked toward the room with the file cabinets. Asya followed, checking behind her as she walked, her own Yarygin in hand.
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller cta-5 Page 4
