Ragnarok (23 page)

Fogg had already made sense of it for herself. This was just how crazy the world had gotten. King and the rest of Chess Team were always in the thick of it. Genetically engineered soldiers, reani-mated monsters, custom tailored bio-weapons and viruses, anthropological missing-link creatures, golems, artificially intelligent super computers, assassins, corporate megalomaniacs, modern-day pirates, terrorists and even black holes. This was King’s world and she was a part of it. The world would go apeshit nutso and Chess Team would stop it. That’s what they did. And if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a world to worry about. Armed with that knowledge, she was able to remain as calm and tranquil as a Buddhist monk.

Most of the time.

Seeing King ejecting from that plane and smashing into a skyscraper had been a jolt. So had the dire wolf roar that brought back her claustrophobia.

It’s strange
, she thought.
Being in this base under a mountain doesn’t weird me out, but the thought of a tiny dirt tunnel so close to the surface that I could dig my way there with my fingers gives me the heebie-jeebies.

She had a rock-solid inner belief in King’s invincibility, and that got her through each new crazy thing that arose. But she also found herself wondering if maybe there would be a time soon when someone else could become ‘King.’ A time when she and Jack could take Fiona and go off to some isolated part of the world away from corporate madmen and bio-engineered super threats.

She knew enough about lab-created viruses from her work at the CDC to realize that it was only a matter of time before some super-plague wiped out a good swash of the world’s population. Going off to live like a survivalist in a cabin in British Columbia was looking more attractive to her all the time. Of course, the forest would play havoc with her sensory processing disorder, but maybe she could learn to live with that.

As she stepped into the computer room, she saw Lewis Aleman and George Pierce, who had both clearly found the time to throw on new clothes—Aleman still in jeans and a t-shirt, and Pierce with a black sweatshirt with a white King chessman icon on the left breast. Both men hunkered over Pierce’s computer terminal at the side of the room, Aleman having abandoned the ergonomic chair.

“What’s up?” she asked.

Aleman stood straighter and stretched his back, turning to her. “We’re tracking the portals and trying to find their origin.”

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“No,” Aleman smiled weakly. “But we can look at the surrounding environmental disturbances that the portals create and make some educated guesses.”

“Environmental disturbances?”

Pierce placed his hands on his lower back and stretched as Aleman had done, then slid his glasses further up his nose with the tip of one finger.

“The weather,” he said. “Each event creates local disturbances in the weather pattern because of the amount of electricity—even the ones that have appeared underwater or underground.”

“Oh that’s genius,” she walked over to the screen to see a map of the globe and colored circles representing the placement and appearance of known energy portals based on storm patterns detected by weather satellites. She’d seen similar maps on the news.

“Thanks,” Aleman said. He pointed at the screen. “So we’ve factored in the likely weather phenomenon when one of these things appears, and we’re tracking the size of them as they keep appearing. They keep getting bigger. So George had the idea to try to find smaller ones from before yesterday…”

Pierce broke in, “Right, and Lewis realized we could use existing satellite data to find smaller occurrences of the portals before yesterday when the first really big ones appeared in Asia.”

Aleman continued. “Right now the algorithm is searching out likely weather patterns and making a list of possible portals. But even if we can trace their origins, it doesn’t mean we’ll be able to figure out how to stop them. It’s just something to do. More data to gather. Hopefully it will all lead somewhere.”

As they watched the screen, Fogg noted the date in the upper-left corner of the screen going backward as fewer and fewer possible incidents appeared in different populated areas of the world. Eventually they got so small that she realized these events had gone unnoticed in large cities around the world. Only the portals of the last few days had been large enough to gain the world’s attention. The number of portals on the screen got smaller and smaller until only two remained—in Kathmandu, and in northern Norway. Fogg pointed to the one in Nepal.

“How large would that one be?” she wanted to know.

“About the size of a panel truck, probably.”

The next date, a week earlier, was of a portal about the same size, and it showed up in Norway again. It was now the last portal on the map. Then another on the previous day in Norway. Then another a few weeks earlier. These events were smaller than the one in Kathmandu. But she noticed they were all in the same town.

“Fenris Kystby. Hey, isn’t that the—”

“—the town where Rook is.” Aleman’s face was shocked. “He’s been at the source this whole time.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

ROOK SAT ZIP-TIED to the metal chair and seethed. Fossen had led him to a small office off the main room with the giant metal apparatus. His pet dire wolf had followed at a distance, walking on all fours, curious and sniffing the air. Some of Fossen’s assistants were in the office—two men and a woman. They had secured Rook to the chair while Fossen kept his small pistol trained on him.

Rook didn’t recognize the people, but he knew the glazed look they had in their eyes. It was the same look the town’s villagers had that morning, when they attacked him at Peder’s farm. The assistants wore lab coats like Fossen and once they secured Rook to the chair, they left the room.

Rook scanned the space, but it mostly resembled a regular office. Desks and chairs—although the styles were pretty out of date—and a few far-newer laptop computers. The walls were white, and a large glass window looked out to the massive chamber with the metal octopus-like machinery. Fossen ignored Rook and consulted a laptop at one of the desks. Rook kept waiting for the man to start monologuing like a comic book villain, but the stoic Norwegian wasn’t inclined to oblige.

“You lied to me,” Rook tried.

“Actually, Stanislav,” Fossen looked up from the screen of his laptop and considered Rook. “If you carefully consider everything I told you, you will find that I did not lie to you at all. I told you to leave Fenris Kystby when we first met. I really didn’t know what Edmund Kiss had become, or that it was he that was destroying Peder’s livestock. I lost my son Jens to that monster.”

Rook didn’t think it a good idea to correct Fossen and inform him that
he
had killed Jens Fossen. It had been self-defense, but Rook didn’t think Fossen would care. A son is a son. Peder had helped him dispose of the body. He simply disappeared. It was only natural that Fossen assumed the creature Edmund Kiss had been responsible.

“I told you the truth about my research with the wolves. I admitted to you that I had known about Kiss’s lab, but that I had forgotten it even existed—because it had been shut down years ago, when this larger installation was constructed. You asked me why Kiss’s lab was called
Ragnarök
. I told you I had no idea why. I really don’t. It was something the German Ahnenerbe group came up with. Kiss was a part of their research. Part of their group. I didn’t tell you about this installation because it wasn’t your business. But I never lied to you.”

Rook looked at the man in astonishment. “You just found it unnecessary to share information about this giant lab—which connects to the smaller lab upstairs. You didn’t bother mentioning that Kiss was your father. You didn’t mention anything about a Nazi experiment in World War II or that you had a pet marshmallow with teeth.” Rook motioned his head toward the dire wolf that sat quietly in the corner on its haunches. “Is that the
Ulveria
? The dire wolf, the local woman Anni was afraid of?”

“Yes, indeed. It is.” Fossen just looked at Rook with a blank expression. No questions and no more information forthcoming.

“You didn’t tell me about zombie people coming to kill me. And Kiss wanted you to seal something. He said he’d seen the dire wolf and it was terrible. Looking at it now I’d have to agree with him.”

“When could you have spoken to Kiss? He was beyond speech when we tracked him down and killed him. He was little more than a yeti.” Now Fossen was interested. His eyebrows raised high on his pale Nordic forehead as he waited for an answer.

“He had a note clutched in his hand. It was for you. Part of it was illegible. He still retained some of his human intelligence at the end, and he wrote the note for you. He urged you to
seal
something. What was it?”

Fossen turned his head to gaze out the huge pane of glass at the giant metal cage in the main room. He turned back to Rook, then looked down to his laptop screen again and typed a quick key sequence. The clacking noise of the keyboard was loud in the small room. With a flourish, Fossen hit the Enter key.

In the other room a small sphere of yellow light appeared in the center of the eight-beam structure that still reminded Rook of an oversized Faraday cage. The light was no more than a foot in diameter. Then there was a loud popping noise. The ball grew to nearly thirty feet in diameter, filling the space between the curving struts of the structure. It threw bursts of lightning, only to be caught by the solar panel-like sheets of metal attached to the uprights. The whole thing crackled and hummed with a deep bass vibration. Rook could feel it in his chest.

“He wanted me to seal that.”

THIRTY-NINE

Exxon Building, New York, NY

KING FELT HE was losing himself inside the dreamy world that had filled his head. His vision clouded at the edges and everything in front of him looked bright and cheerful. He smiled so big his cheeks hurt.

The tiny voice at the back of his head trying to regain control needed something to hang on to—something that it could use to keep itself anchored in his brain.
Something…
But that voice was weak now. Weak and insignificant. He still stood in front of the wall of light, staring at the yellow brilliance. He could hear the hum and crackle from the portal crossing the barrier from somewhere else to his world. The dire wolves were still moving around him and smelling him. He could smell them, too, but only faintly. They smelled like talcum powder and the soft fur of stuffed animals. But had they always smelled that way?

He didn’t think so.

It didn’t matter. No point in worrying about it. He felt great. Happy, calm and full of contentment.

Wasn’t he unhappy before the portal and the dire wolves?

Wasn’t he considering spending more time with Fiona and Sara?

Fiona…

Every time he thought of Fiona and his responsibility for her, the part of his mind that really was him gained strength. The only other thing that the tiny voice could find to cling to was a question. And that small part of his mind held on to it as if it were a life preserver in thirty-foot swells at sea.

Why?

Why had he been mentally hijacked? Why hadn’t Deep Blue been affected? Was it something from the light the portal emitted? No, that didn’t work. He would have seen the portal too, but Deep Blue was gone now. King lazily swiveled his head around the corridor, looking away from the bright light of the portal. Several more dire wolves filled the hallway and crouched on the walls and upside down on the ceiling.

“Cool, man” he said.

No. Not cool. How did they get here? You didn’t even see them come out of the portal did you?

Then he felt the tiny voice shrinking again.

Why?

Fiona. Remember Fiona.

The voice grew stronger and tried to work out the mystery of why again. How long had he been here in the hallway? He turned his head again and looked down the corridor past the dire wolves that clung to every surface.

Deep Blue isn’t here anymore
.

A clanging bell sounded somewhere deep inside of him, like a big red wall-mounted number used in older elementary schools. But it was so soft. Almost beyond the range of his hearing.

He was worried, that’s what it was. Deep Blue was more than a teammate and former President. He was a friend.

Where is he?

The voice noticed the shattered window at the end of the carpeted hallway. The smile on his face faded slowly, hesitantly, as if it wasn’t sure it wanted to contribute to a look of concern on his face. Smiling was so good and right.

Fiona. Where’s Fiona?

No
, the small voice shouted from the black depths of his hind-mind,
she’s safe in New Hampshire
. Safe with Endgame.
Endgame. That’s right. Deep Blue…

He had turned back and stared at the wall of light again. He hadn’t even been aware of turning away from the sight of the shattered window.
Damn.
He turned again to look down the corridor, but this time he did so slower and more deliberately. The smile that had crept back onto his face remained, but he was afraid to battle it. Whatever had control of him was incredibly strong, and the nature of his bliss as a weapon prevented him from even noticing when he was being attacked.
One battle at a time. Why? How?

He dimly recalled Deep Blue wearing a parachute.
He must have bugged out. But why?
His thoughts rapidly returned to his own predicament and used the mantra that was allowing him to retain even a sliver of control over his senses.

Fiona.

How was the portal controlling him? Or were the dire wolves doing it? It wasn’t the light. It wouldn’t have been a physical attack or an auditory one. He was protected against that. He slowly slid his hand up to touch the side of his cheek. He felt the rough stubble there. He hadn’t shaved since leaving the hotel for Epcot.