The Monarch

by Jack Soren

  Hunched over, Sophia ran along the cramped tunnel to one of the ladders that connected the levels. She climbed down as fast as she could, but knew she’d gone no faster than the elevator. At the bottom, she jumped off the ladder and ran, the pounding of the generators beneath her feet tickling her ears. She reached the access panel to the lab, kicked it open, and crawled out.

  She ran to the door, pulling out her access card as she went. She could hear footsteps on the other side, but it was impossible to tell how close they were. Sophia collided with the door and ran her card upside-­down through the slot twice in rapid succession. The light above the reader blinked red. She continued running the wrong side of her card through the slot reader. After the fifth pass, the panel emitted a long beep and the light turned solid red. She’d forced the electronics to lock down the mechanism. It would be an hour before the reader would accept a valid card again, though she doubted Lara would wait that long. Sophia looked at her watch as she ran to her computer. She figured she had about ten minutes before Lara had the guards break the door down.

  She dug through a drawer filled with miscellaneous junk, finally finding the little USB hard drive. She plugged it into her computer and started to copy the data. She had to save Natalie, but there was no way she was leaving without the research.

  As she watched the progress bar on the computer screen slowly crawl toward one hundred percent, she heard someone trying to use a security card on the lab door. After several tries, someone banged on the door and cursed. When the door went quiet, Sophia checked her watch again.

  While the data transferred to her drive, Sophia ran to the refrigerator and took all the remaining serum and baselines over to the sink. It was probably futile, but if she failed to save Natalie, she thought it would at least be harder for an unmedicated Nathan to execute his plan. She put one vial of the serum into a bag she grabbed from her office and dumped the rest into the sink. When it began taking too long, she just smashed the glass and ran the water, flushing her work down the drain.

  The data transfer was barely at fifty percent.

  She stood running her hands through her hair. What was she forgetting? Nothing could be left behind for them to reconstitute her serum. She saw her shelf of logbooks. There was no time to shred them all and she couldn’t carry them.

  She pulled a large garbage receptacle over by the exhaust fan and then ran to the shelf, pulling down all her notes. She dumped them all in and poured in a bottle of sulphuric acid. The books smoked for a minute before bursting into flames. Most of the toxic smoke went out the vent, but some of it leaked into the lab. Sophia coughed and covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve.

  The computer beeped that the data transfer was complete. Sophia grabbed the USB drive and put it in her jeans pocket. Then she initiated the wipe command—­a security protocol that would wipe the hard drives of their data and prevent their recovery by all but the most dedicated computer forensic team.

  Suddenly a bell sounded and the sprinklers in the ceiling burst to life, showering everything in the lab with a combination of water and fire retardant foam. Sophia grabbed her bag and slipped the eyes Thomas had brought for her to test into it, along with a few personal items. This wasn’t how she’d wanted to leave her life in the lab, but there was no time for melancholy. She wiped water and foam from her face. Darting to the back of the lab, slipping and almost falling, she unlocked all her animals’ cages. Everyone went free today.

  Stepping carefully over the fleeing animals, she hurried back across the lab and into the access panel. It wouldn’t shut properly, so she just pulled it closed as best she could. She’d kicked it open a million times as a child, but her mature leg muscles had damaged it in her rush.

  Out of the foamy rain, Sophia took off her lab coat and used it as a towel, wiping the water and foam off her face and body. Then she headed back down the tunnels to the ladder and headed up to level three.

  The alarm was still sounding when she crawled over to the welded vent that led to Natalie’s cushy prison cell. She peered in and saw that though Natalie could hear the alarm, it just seemed to be an annoyance to her rather than a danger.

  Tough kid.

  Sophia took the small vial of sulphuric acid out of her bag and carefully poured it along the vent’s welded seam. As the acid drew the moisture out of the metal, slight toxic smoke rose into the air. She stepped back so she wouldn’t inhale the poison. When she gave the vent a kick, the remaining seam cracked and the cover sprang free. She slipped inside, the screeching alarm hiding her entrance from both the guard outside the door and Natalie.

  Sophia eased up behind her and put her hand over Natalie’s mouth so she wouldn’t scream. The girl looked up with wide, confused eyes.

  “Relax, honey. I’m a friend of your dad’s,” Sophia said. “I’m going to take my hand away. Okay?”

  Natalie nodded, her wide eyes narrowed as she evaluated this stranger’s story.

  “How do you know my dad?” Natalie asked.

  “He helped me with a recent . . . problem. So I’m returning the favor. How’d you like to get out of here?” Sophia said, unsure of what exactly she would do if Natalie said no. It didn’t matter. Natalie smiled and nodded.

  They gathered up Natalie’s drawings, put them in her knapsack, and then slipped through the vent into the noisy tunnel. Sophia closed the vent cover, which unlike the one in the lab, married up well with the severed seam. She turned around and took Natalie’s hand, leading her deep into the complex’s innards, to a place Sophia had never shared with anyone.

  44

  Australia

  4:45 A.M. Local Time

  “THERE IT IS,” Lew said from the backseat of the Land Rover they had liberated from the Canton George Estate. After calling Kring and telling him they were coming, they’d locked George in his own vault. Jonathan glanced back and saw Lew’s new toy in his lap: a sniper rifle from George’s gun cabinet.

  Jonathan, driving with Emily in the passenger seat, didn’t see the car Lew said he’d stolen to get out to the reserve, but he drove up a rock outcropping on the side of the road Lew pointed at anyway. The three of them got out of the Land Rover, Lew taking the rifle, and walked through the long grass lining the dirt road. It was cool in the early morning dim, and Jonathan wished he had his own duster about then. In the distance, Jonathan could hear traffic on the main road, though it was still out of sight. Behind the rock outcropping, Jonathan saw Lew’s stolen car covered in branches. Jonathan helped him clean it off.

  “You walked from here?” Emily asked as she watched them work, awe in her voice.

  “Jogged, actually. If they hadn’t been hauling you two over their shoulders, I never would have caught up to them. Well, in time. They left a trail through the jungle like a herd of elephants running from a mouse.” Lew tossed the rifle in the back of the car. Jonathan held out his hand, but when Lew shook it he didn’t let go.

  “What?” Lew asked.

  “Nobody dies,” Jonathan said. He wasn’t just talking about them or expressing a consideration for human life. They needed the pilot and they had no idea if Kring’s man had made arrangements to contact Kring en route or not.

  “No worries,” Lew said with a smile. Jonathan would have felt better if Lew didn’t seem like he was enjoying all of this.

  Abruptly, before Lew could get in the car, Emily kissed him on the cheek. Jonathan thought Lew looked like someone had sent a jolt of electricity through him.

  “For luck,” Emily said, her eyes darting to Jonathan before her cheeks flushed red and she headed back to the Land Rover.

  Lew cleared his throat and seemed to avoid Jonathan’s glare as he got in the car. He started the engine and rolled down the window.

  “Remember, give me ten minutes,” Lew said, his arm crooked out the window. Lew was going to position himself at the airport so he could cover Jonathan and Emily when th
ey arrived at the plane.

  “What do you want, a kiss? Get the fuck out of here,” Jonathan said with a wink, slapping the roof of the car before backing away.

  “Asshole,” Lew said before gunning the engine, shooting dirt up into the air and heading on down the road. He gave the horn a toot and waved his arm as he went.

  Jonathan joined Emily at the Land Rover as they watched Lew’s car disappear around a bend.

  And then the longest ten minutes of Jonathan’s life began.

  “You had to do it,” Jonathan said when he thought he saw Emily retreating into herself. She looked at him and smiled sadly.

  “I know,” Emily said. “I was just thinking about how I’m going to tell him that my bio and name are phony.”

  “Right,” Jonathan said. It was then he realized Lew and Emily might be feeling more than the bond of two ­people in the same kind of trouble.

  “I finally—­” Emily started to say before she sighed and opened the passenger door. “Never mind.” She got in and closed the door, slumping in the seat with her arms crossed.

  While she sat alone in the Land Rover, Jonathan stood beside it, leaning against the hood and staring at the beauty around him as the sun started to come up. He thought about Natalie’s dream about him being with a mysterious woman who saved him from dying. Just a child’s wish in disguise. Or was it? Strangely enough he found himself thinking about Sophia Kring. What side would she be on when they got to the island? He thought he knew, but you could never tell. He felt a strange flutter in his chest as he thought about her, but turned his mind to other things. Checking his watch, Jonathan took one last look at the landscape and got into the Land Rover beside Emily, and started the engine.

  “Here we—­”

  The explosion rocked the Land Rover like it was doing the watusi. Jonathan thought they’d been double-­crossed, but aside from the rocking and an echo across the Australian morning sky that sounded like a rocket full of thunder, the event seemed to stop. He looked over at Emily, but she was looking out the window behind them.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Isn’t that about where we just were?”

  Jonathan spun around in his seat and then got out when he saw the cauliflower-­shaped cloud rising up into the sky. Emily was right. It was the George estate. Or what had been the George estate, judging from the size of the cloud.

  “What could have happened?” Emily asked when Jonathan got back in the Land Rover.

  Jonathan pulled off the shoulder and accelerated down the road. Every now and then his eyes would flick to the rearview mirror to look at the smoke. He had an idea of what had happened but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting to that plane.

  45

  Canton George’s Estate

  5:15 A.M. Local Time

  CANTON GEORGE WOKE up covered in glass and human flesh. The vault had saved his life, but he’d still felt the blast. He couldn’t tell from where he was, but he was pretty sure he could guess what had happened.

  “Kring, jou bliksem!” he said, calling Kring a bastard. They’d left the metal case of euros up in his office. If they had just been thieves and not after the brain, they would have taken that damn thing with them. As it was, he had no doubt there wasn’t much of his house left up there.

  It was all gone. Every last human treasure lay scattered on the vault floor, exposed to the air, with glass and debris slicing into everything. At the time of the explosion, George had been partially inside one of the vents, attempting to crawl through. He’d been slapped around inside the vent before falling back into the vault, his torso and face laced with broken glass and stinging from the preservation chemicals.

  He couldn’t really feel the pain. Not with so much rage boiling up inside him. Rage for both Kring and that oafish half of The Monarch who had destroyed his collection so long ago. What had they called him?

  “Lew,” George said like he’d tasted something bad. Suddenly, he knew what he was going to do. It would be expensive, in both dollars and favors, but he was so angry he couldn’t focus.

  George pulled himself up and limped to a panel in the middle of the vault that thankfully had been mostly spared from the blast. After the loss of his last collection—­and his hand—­he’d taken precautions. Like having the vault supplied with an air circulation system, and an emergency communication line that ran underground all the way to the forest in the back compound where an antenna was secreted atop one of the trees. Those close to him had thought he was being paranoid. If nothing else, this would shut them up.

  But he wasn’t calling for help. Not yet, anyway.

  “A Reaper? Have you lost your mind, George?” the voice on the phone said. His name was Colonel Rudyard Maitland—­pedophile, murderer, and base commander of Diego Garcia, the U.S. Navy’s base a thousand miles south of India. “I can’t launch a military drone on a civilian target, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You can if you want your secrets kept, Maitland,” George said. Even as he uttered the threat, he continued to scan his mind for other ways to entice him and any other impediments. Money wasn’t the problem. A fully loaded MQ–9 Reaper drone—­or UAV, as the military called them—­cost the military about twenty-­nine million dollars, though Maitland undoubtedly knew George would pay considerably more.

  “I . . . I can’t. There’s no way to protect myself. My career would be over, at the least!”

  “Your career is over as of today no matter what you do, Maitland. But it’s up to you whether you’ll have enough money for retirement in paradise under a new name, or if you’ll spend the rest of your life in a cell.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Maitland muttered.

  I’m losing him.

  And then thinking back to his childhood in the Capetown slums, he realized he could offer something else. Something uniquely tailored for a man such as this.

  “How about some playthings too, Maitland. All yours, to do with as you please. No questions asked.”

  The silence on the line was deafening. If he didn’t go for it, George knew he’d—­

  “How many,” Maitland said, breathing as if he’d just run a marathon.

  Canton George smiled.

  46

  Tartaruga Island

  10:30 P.M. Local Time

  THE CHAIR’S WHEELS crunched and popped as they rolled over the broken glass on the lab floor. The mélange of chemicals mixed with fire retardant foam and stuck to the wheels’ rubber, riding up the arc, and making them look like whitewalls. The alarm and the sprinklers had shut off before the door had finally released its lock, not that it made any difference. The damage was done. Nothing of any use remained.

  Movement caught Nathan’s eye, a twitching mouse sitting on a lab bench across the room. A healthier mouse ran around and around, pausing now and then to stop and sniff the invalid before returning to the important work of showing off. Fury blurred Nathan’s vision and he looked away, blinking his eyes clear.

  Normally resilient to a fault, Nathan in better days would have already been planning his recovery from such a tragedy. It was how he’d lived his entire life. There was always an alternative, a route back to the top. Always, except now. The absent serums and the blinking computer screens shouting “ERROR ERROR ERROR” all around the lab told him Sophia had taken the research too. Even if they found her, someone who would do this to her own lab would never cooperate again. Without that, he’d have to start all over. But Nathan knew he didn’t have time. Even if he could find the money to hire a new staff and restock a new lab, he wouldn’t live long enough to see the first trials happen. Without the serum, he’d be dead in a few months, if he lasted that long. She’d killed him as surely as if she’d plunged a knife into his heart.

  “My God,” Lara said from behind him, seeing the destruction for the first time.

  “What is it?” Nathan said. He just wanted to be alone, b
athe in his despair and depression. Decide on the best way to kill himself.

  “She took the girl too,” Lara said. “We’ll find her.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said. Sophia wasn’t the one responsible for this. It was Hall. Nathan’s plan had backfired; Hall had planted something in Sophia’s brain during those few minutes they’d spent together. Lara walked up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. It was the first time she’d touched him in over a year.

  “We need the girl,” Lara said. “If you want to lure him in, you need her as bait.”

  Lure him in. Yes, lure Hall in and use him and his daughter as leverage to force Sophia to cooperate. He’d kill Hall in front of her, just like he’d killed that Bobby at her university. Then he’d hold a gun to the girl’s head and Sophia would do whatever he asked. And once she’d done it, then he’d kill the girl. And he’d kill Sophia too. Slowly.

  Nathan felt the despair fade and mutate, become something white-­hot burning the depression away. The girl was the key.

  “Find her,” Nathan said. Lara took her hands off his shoulders and headed out, stopping by the wall.

  “I think I know where to look,” she said. Nathan spun his chair around and saw Lara standing by the bent maintenance tunnel access panel.

  “Nothing fancy,” Nathan said, rolling out of the room. “They’ll be here in a few hours. And Lara . . .”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “I want them both alive,” Nathan said.

  “Yes, Father,” Lara said, her voice strained.

  47

  Australia

  5:30 A.M. Local Time

  “ON YOUR KNEES!” the large Australian shouted.

  Jonathan and Emily knelt beside each other with their hands behind their heads for the second time in the past few hours.

  “Just take it easy,” Jonathan said.