With a hiss, the door opened to the world outside. Metal clicked back in response. Michael raised his hands before exiting. Cora leaned across her seat to the window, watching his approach at the well-armed military types outside. They wore casual clothes, but the buzzcuts and stiff posture gave them away, even at a distance. Michael approached a small gathering of men, exchanging words and gesticulating wildly.
“See what he did there?” Giovanna said, staring out the next window over. “It means ‘kill them all.’ I’m very good at reading body language.”
“Stop. I’m in stitches. You’re too funny,” Cora replied in monotone. “He’s coming back.”
Michael walked back onto the plane and stood in the doorway, rubbing the stubble at the back of his head.
“Alright then,” he said. “Julian has agreed to meet with you. You’ll be blindfolded for the duration of the trip, and your weapons and Arcadias will be confiscated. The troll is leaving?”
“Derk right here,” he replied, still standing by the cockpit entrance only a few feet from Michael. “Can ask Derk.”
“Very well,” Michael said. “Are you planning to come along?”
Derk turned to Cora and crossed his arms. “Cora want Derk? Derk does protection, too.”
Cora laughed in spite of the tension and walked over to the massive troll. Already crouched against the low ceiling, she beckoned him to lower himself further and pecked him on the cheek. Derk snarled and shifted his lower jaw, his fangs sliding along his upper lip.
“Cora so hot,” he grumbled.
She rolled her eyes and slid a holographic screen out from her Arcadia. She motioned him to do the same. Confused, the troll did as he was asked. With a few taps against the screen at the back of her hand, she swiped from her screen into his and tapped the comm button on her ear.
“Transaction approved, authorization Blake, six-Charlie-five,” she said. She turned her attention upward and met Derk’s gaze. “I want you to go home. For all your help and missed work, I wired half a million.”
Derk raised an eyebrow. “Derk like getting paid, Cora, but five hundred too much.”
“Well, we’ll call it a retainer, in case I ever need you again,” she replied, patting him on the shoulder. “I’m sure it’ll make Daiki happy.”
“Don’t get killed, hot Native girl,” he said, bowing his head.
Cora smiled, then spun around to face her team. Johnny, Giovanna and Gideon were no strangers to life-or-death situations and it showed. Their faces were grim, but determined. Even Gideon, with no official training in field work, looked ready to dive in. She nodded and pointed to the seats behind them.
“This is it,” she said, her voice solemn. “Let’s grab our bags and hand them to Michael.”
She turned to Michael, giving him a final once-over to be certain she trusted him. She didn’t, so she’d have to put her faith in her father’s visions instead. The predetermined prophecies had yet to be wrong, no matter how hard she fought against them. Removing the holster clipped her belt, she handed her weapon to Michael. If he was going to turn on them, it’d be her first.
Vincent swooped inside the plane and landed at Cora’s forearm, startling Michael. She fished out some feed from her pocket and stroked the raven with her free hand.
“Lay low for a while,” she whispered. “Don’t come unless I call you.”
“Caw,” Vincent replied begrudgingly. He made a racket as he flapped past Michael and back outside.
Michael took Cora’s weapon and shoved it into the waistband of his camouflage pants. Reaching around her, he took each bag he was handed by her teammates and nodded. Cora raised her hands in surrender, and her team mimicked her. They followed Michael in a line off the plane.
She stepped out to dozen armed men on her left, spaced out all the way to the nose of the plane, and another dozen on her left. The fresh air was salty, but relaxed her. They were near the sea. Cora surveyed the area. The makeshift runway appeared to be in the remains of a factory, long overgrown with vegetation after decades of abandonment. The former British soldiers surrounding her kept a stoic face, but there was no malice in the eyes of anyone she glanced at. A dark-haired man led a small group to her team and patted them down. Her eyes stayed fixed on Michael, burning a hole into his soul with her gaze until his troops were satisfied.
The dark-haired man gave Michael a handful of black cloth. With trepidation in his step, he moved to Cora and held up a black bag from the pile in his hand.
“I’m sorry, but I have to do this,” he said. “Julian’s orders.”
Cora shrugged. “Go for it. Wouldn’t be my first time. Some of them weren’t even against my will.”
Giovanna nudged Cora with an elbow and a smirk. “I may have even paid extra for it once or twice, patatina.”
“You’re so bad,” Cora laughed, shaking her head.
Michael stepped behind her and drew the bag over her face, throwing the world into darkness. While she wouldn’t know where she was going geographically, her next stop would be face to face with the man that stole Excalibur.
Roll Call
Cora hadn’t sensed any motion for fifteen minutes, and she was starting to get bored. She surmised the majority of her trip was over water, which explained the queasy feeling in her stomach. She heard a few doors close behind her as someone guided her by the arm to a room and sat her in a chair. The stiffness of the metal chair required her to shift around in it every few minutes to keep her legs from falling asleep.
“...to our home!” a man’s voice yelled from elsewhere. He was loud enough to penetrate the closed door of the room she was in.
“I was captured!” Michael replied, as loud as the man before him.
“You were compromised! Now, they’re here!”
“Somebody’s in trouble,” Gideon remarked, his voice the first indication in some time that her team was still at her side.
The door to their room slammed open, followed by two sets of footfalls.
“Take them off,” a man said. He had a regal, aristocratic British accent.
The sudden flash of fluorescent light blinded Cora with its intensity for moment before setting eyes on the man before her. He wore British Royal Army fatigues and combat boots. His face was clean-shaven with a buzzcut that matched his fellow soldiers. Her eyes were drawn to the gleaming silver longsword strapped to his back. Cora wanted to switch to Spirit Sight to view its aura and beauty, if her black eyes didn’t repulse anyone that saw them.
The man before her clenched his square jaw as he looked her over. “You’ve played a dangerous game coming here under the auspices of returning a hostage in good faith, Miss Blake.”
The man’s accent was thicker than Michael’s, but also more noble and refined. Cora glanced to her side, making certain her team was accounted for. Gideon looked nervous. Johnny and Giovanna looked bored. With their years of black ops experience, Cora doubted this was their first time bagged and interrogated at a secret location.
The room around her was industrial. Dark metal plating at the floor and walls gave way to bare pipes along the ceiling. The room they were in had a lone table between her and the man she assumed was Julian. Michael stood over his shoulder, still in the doorway. With four armed guards and her team, the space was claustrophobic and confined.
“Where are we? A submarine?” Cora asked, examining the walls.
“Probably,” Johnny replied. “Most of the trip here was over water.”
Cora did a double-take. Johnny was still wearing his sunglasses. “You wore those with a bag over your head?”
“What? I don’t like bright lights. I get migraines,” he replied.
Julian crossed his arms and cleared his throat, his intense blue eyes staring at Cora until he had her attention.
“Oh, sorry. You wanted to say something?” Cora asked.
“I asked you a question,” Julian replied, his aristocratic accent turned irritated.
“Your question wasn’t rh
etorical?” she said, wide-eyed. “I didn’t realize you wanted me to reply. I mean, you did send your BFF to spy on sovereign lands with a fake ident-chip. You can hardly call him a hostage. That was a criminal act. You’re lucky it was me that caught him.”
He held out his arms. “You wanted to meet me. Here I am. Parker over there had done quite a bit of snooping around trying to find me long before I sent Michael to the Native Free Lands.”
“You can call me Gideon,” he said, raising his hand.
Julian locked eyes with Gideon, his stern gaze causing the young hacker to retract his hand, red-faced. He turned his attention back to Cora.
“What is your stake in this?” Julian asked. “Why have you been looking for me?”
Cora took a moment to mull the question over before she replied. She could think of a hundred places she’d rather be than here, but her path forward in the battle against Lucius led her to the only person referenced in Project Phoenix as many times as her.
“It seems we’ve both been put on Lucius’ shit-list,” she said, resting her hands in her lap. “I also know that you’re aware of someone he’s imprisoned. I need him. Michael told me you’re getting beaten to the punch collecting artifacts by some ninja using magic. I smell an exchange between us.”
Julian furrowed his brow. “Who are you looking for?”
Cora looked at Michael as she recited the name. “Professor Robert Crowley.”
“Crowley?” Julian scoffed. He paced, huffing and agitated. “His name was in the database we salvaged, listed as ‘acquired.’ We believe he’s still being held at a Tetriarch satellite facility in France. No way in from the ground, and going in from the air, you’d have better odds in a blender. It’s swarming with Bauer Securities soldiers and high-end defensive tech including a pair of surface-to-air missile launchers programmed to shoot down any plane or helicopter in its vicinity. It’s a suicide mission.”
Cora nodded. “Right, I heard that. When do we get started?”
Julian squeezed the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “We wanted to observe you. I certainly didn’t want you here and I don’t trust you.”
“So, what happens now?” Cora asked, crossing her legs. She dangled one foot off the ground, bobbing impatiently. “Throw the bags back over our heads and send us home?”
Julian leaned forward, resting his hands on the table between them. “I have questions. If it’s true that we’re on the same side, then yes, we could use your assistance. But I am responsible for well over two hundred men that are now considered fugitives by Interpol and the British government.”
Johnny shrugged. “Seems fair. Ask your questions. You don’t like our answers, we part ways.”
“I’d prefer we did this individually,” Julian said.
Cora shook her head. “Not a chance. We came here together, we’re leaving together. There’s nothing to ask us we can’t answer in front of each other.”
Julian paused, assessing the situation. He turned to Michael and motioned to the side of the table. Michael stepped outside the doorway for a moment, returning with a metal folding chair. He set it up beside the table and joined Julian in sitting down. The commander swiped through screens on his Arcadia until he found what he was looking for. He glanced up, his attention to Gideon.
“Have it your way. We’ll start with Mister Parker,” he said.
“Really, it’s Gideon. Mister Parker is my Dad.”
“Very well, then,” he huffed, clenching his jaw. “You have no combat training, no field experience. The fact you’re with this group at all is astonishing. I’m assuming Miss Blake paid you?”
Gideon crossed his arms. “I mean, yeah, she did. Quite well, I might add. If you’re asking if that’s why I stay involved, that’s not it.”
Julian raised an eyebrow. “What is it, then?”
“She gave me a purpose,” he replied, his voice somber. “A way I could do some good with the skills I have. I’m not cut out to be a thief. I don’t believe in rules or laws like the UNS has. So, it was hacking for money like some prostitute or this. I like being a revolutionary.”
Cora tittered. Gideon thinking they were revolutionaries of any kind was silly. It was simpler to say they were four people that crossed a dragon and struggled to stay alive ever since. For his part, Julian may have been impressed with the answer. He kept his eyes fixed on Gideon with a single raised brow, boring into him as if he were a lie detector searching for cracks in his expression. Satisfied with what he saw, he glanced at a few screens before turning his attention to Giovanna.
“We did a great deal of research into you, and we can’t even find your last name,” Julian said.
“Let’s say Ricci,” Giovanna replied playfully. “I like that one.”
Julian indulged in a smile. She was coy and beautiful, but as deadly as any viper. He knew it well and played along. “There is one name that came up in all our digging. Pia Serreti.”
The smile left Giovanna’s face. Cora watched her reactions close. The Italian took a long breath and stared right back at Julian.
“She’s dead,” Giovanna replied. She cocked her head to the side. “What else is there to say?”
“If you’d humor me all the same,” he said. “Information about her was scrubbed from almost every database. I would like to know everything you know about Pia Serreti.”
Giovanna’s eyes moved about the room. Cora noticed something there she’d never seen before - a break in her confidence. Her every move was elegant, a reserved air that nothing could faze her. Her eyes drifted to each member of her team, as though she held a secret she didn’t want to explain in front of them. She sighed, resigned to their situation, and set her gaze back to Julian.
“She was a nobody. Other than being a model student, there was nothing remarkable about her. She was plain, middle class, not very pretty or fashionable. She went to a nice school, studied accounting. She tried dating, but she was too boring for the men she found attractive and too picky to settle for less. So she lived alone in an expensive high-rise in Milan.”
Johnny’s brow furrowed. He turned in his seat, joining everyone else in rapt attention as they listened to Giovanna’s story.
“Then there was a fire,” Giovanna continued. Her eyes lowered. “It started in the kitchen, while she slept. By the time she woke up, coughing and choking, the whole apartment was in flames. She panicked and tried for the bedroom door, but the handle had a faint glow. She could see out the window, the fire trucks were arriving, but she knew right then at twenty floors up, they weren’t going to get there in time. Going out the window was suicide. Going through the bedroom and crawling to the stairwell, that was her plan.”
Giovanna cocked her head to the side. “She tried to break down the door, but Pia was too weak. In that moment, with the smoke, and the blackness, the heat all around her, she realized she wanted to live. More than anything, she wanted to keep going. So, she wrapped her hand with a sheet and went for the door.”
Cora sucked air in through her teeth. The others in the room audibly groaned. Michael shook his head.
“She seared the skin of her hand so badly, she didn’t even notice,” Giovanna continued. “Parts of the fabric fused to her palm. She was in shock at that point, so she kept going. She got the door open, and went for the entrance on her stomach, across the living room. Flames were up and down the walls. Pia got about halfway to the door when one of her curio cabinets tipped forward and fell on her back. She was unconscious for what happened next, burned alive in her shitty apartment.”
Suffocating silence filled the space left by her terrible story. Cora glanced sideways to Julian, wondering what prompted him to ask about this poor girl. His deep blue eyes stayed unwavering to Giovanna.
“That’s not the end of the story, though, is it?” he asked.
Giovanna shook her head and sighed. “No. A doctor declared her dead at the hospital, officially. Unofficially, she was in a coma for two months in the sub-basement o
f a government facility that doesn’t exist. She woke up paralyzed, only able to see poorly out of one eye. She remembered the face of the doctor that came to her, though. Gray hair, dark eyes, glasses. He wasn’t there to comfort her, he was cold and played the part of the devil. He had a bargain for Pia.”
“A bargain?” Julian repeated.
“Oh, he was quite convincing,” Giovanna replied with a pained smile. “See, Pia couldn’t talk because of the tubes in her throat. She could only listen as he told her she had third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. If they brought her back from the brink and she healed, she would forever be a monster. That was her first choice, but that went right off the table. The other two options were pull the plug and let her die naturally like she should have, or she could agree to be a live subject for a radical new experiment. He said she could still die anyway, but if he succeeded, she would never need to feel shame to look in a mirror.”
Cora’s mouth twisted as she went from horror to shock. “What kind of sick bastard would offer this to a woman on her deathbed?”
Giovanna shrugged. “The kind who performed unrestricted biotechnology experiments with no accountability to anyone. As long as he produced weapons for the government, they looked the other way.”
“Those are all violations of the worst kind,” Cora said, counting off on her finger. “Untested technology on a live human subject, using a life-threatening injury to justify experimentation, there are so many international biotech treaties and accords over the last twenty years getting breached there.”
“Monstrous,” Michael said, shaking his head.
“Call me hard-headed, Gia,” Johnny said. “But we’re talking about you, aren’t we?”
She didn’t say a word in response. After a pause, she gave a slight nod.
Julian sat back in his chair. Even the guards shifted uncomfortably to the tension in the room. He raised a hand, words on the tip of his tongue, stuck as he tried to figure out how to phrase it.
“Forgive me,” Julian said. “How many...were created?”
The Pendragon Codex Page 5
