Threshold (22 page)

“The others?” Pierce asked, turning from the statue. “How many people have you kidnapped?”

“Fifty-seven. But kidnapping implies a negative intent,” Alexander said. “I am saving their lives.”

“By keeping them in a subterranean tomb?” King asked.

“You were charged with keeping just one of them safe,” Alexander said. “And we know how that turned out. Until the matter is cleared up, they must remain under my guard. They will be safe in the secret places that only my people and I know about.”

“The Herculean Society?” Pierce asked.

Alexander gave a nod and a grin. “Your old friends, yes.”

King hated to admit it, but he agreed with Alexander. His methods were shady, as they had been in the past, but what he was doing wasn’t any different from the mission the rest of the team had undertaken; to protect the last speakers of ancient languages, they had to be stealed away and hidden. The difference was that Alexander employed inhuman helpers and kept the prisoners in the dark, both figuratively and literally.

Alexander leaned back, his large elbows resting on another crate. “Of course, your presence here debunks my claims of safe refuge.” His eyes, brimming with a mixture of cockiness and annoyance, glared at King. “How did you find me?”

“You didn’t mean for us to find you?” King asked.

“Not at all.”

King explained how they pieced together Alexander’s two separate mentions of a promise to someone—a promise he was now breaking by getting involved with the problems of the world. He related the logical jump to Acca Larentia and the hints about her burial place not in what history said, but in what it was missing. When he was done, Alexander looked stunned.

King noticed the ancient man’s flabbergasted expression. “What?”

“I’m … impressed.” Alexander sat up straight. “I thought you were simply a man who knew how to kill people.”

“I’m that, too,” King said.

“Dare I ask if you could have been followed?”

King thought about his unease while in the ruins of the Roman Forum. He’d felt a presence watching them, but he was sure it was the guard’s they had encountered that his instincts had detected. “We weren’t followed.”

Alexander didn’t look convinced. “These are strange times. The rocks themselves can have eyes.”

“Only Lewis knew exactly where I was headed,” King said. “We
weren’t
followed.”

“Mmm,” Alexander said, still not entirely convinced, but moving on. “You say you entered through the Lacus Curtius?” Alexander asked.

Pierce nodded. “A ladder might be a good idea, though.”

Alexander smiled. “It’s a favored entrance of the Forgotten. They don’t need ladders.”

“The who?” Pierce asked.

“The cloaked men you have encountered. They are as ancient as I am, but lost their voices and souls long ago.”

“Who were they?”

“Test subjects,” Alexander said. When he saw the angry stares of both King and Pierce, he added, “Unending life has slowly peeled away my curtain of immorality. I do not see things the way I used to when I was young. When I was mortal. I wasn’t all that dissimilar from Richard Ridley.”

King pictured Ridely, the head of Manifold Genetics, who had tried to unlock the secrets of immortality. The man’s pursuit of godhood had been ruthless. Human experimentation left victims insane and nearly impervious to harm. Thousands more had come close to death when Ridley’s actions resulted in the mythical Hydra being reborn. No price was too steep, and in the end he achieved his goal of immortality, but lost his company, his men, and his fortune. But he was free, and had all the time in the world to make a comeback. He pictured Alexander in a similar role and the image frightened him.
Thank God he’s on our side.

Alexander continued. “The Forgotten are proof of this. I keep them to remind me of what I could be. What I have been. And what the cost of my failures can lead to.”

King waited for the account to continue, but Pierce had already put the pieces together. “They killed Acca. The Forgotten?”

A sudden sadness swept over Alexander. He stared at the floor. “Could you believe it still stings after all this time?” He looked up at them. “They are prone to madness on their own. Desperate with thirst. Hundreds died at their hands in the early years, before Acca was killed. Since then I have kept them sated with a supplement that replaces their craving for blood.”

“You’re not saying they’re vampires,” King said.

Alexander shook his head. “Not in the traditional sense, but it’s possible they’re responsible for the legend.”

“My God…” Pierce said.

“Their hands are covered in pores, each containing a small, strong, and hollow tendril. Thousands of them. This is how they walk on walls. It’s also how they drain blood through their victim’s skin.” He demonstrated by grabbing his own arm with his hand. “May you never end up in their embrace. It is an awful thing.”

For a moment, King wondered if that was a veiled threat, but the distant look of heartbreak had returned to the man’s face. He’d
witnessed
Acca’s death.

“How did it happen?” King asked. “With Acca?”

“She stumbled across my lab. She was always curious. Always searching for answers. It’s part of what I loved about her. But it also got her into trouble. When she found them, locked behind bars, they hadn’t eaten in weeks. They were starved and pitiful-looking. Assuming they needed water, she held out a cup. Her act of mercy resulted in her death. The water spilled to the floor. They drank her dry.”

Alexander sniffed a deep breath through his nose and stood, his body thick, towering, and strong. All thoughts of the past were gone. “Enough of this. I’ll have one of the Forgotten escort you out at a secure location.”

King raised an eyebrow. “To quote you: ‘impossible.’” To punctuate his statement, King placed his hand on the handgun tucked into the front of his pants.

“You realize that’s useless in here, yes?” Alexander said, showing no fear of the weapon.

“But it will hurt,” King said with a grin. “A lot.”

Alexander chuckled and relaxed. “What do you want?”

“The same thing everyone locked away in your dungeon wants,” King said. “Hope. And if you have them, answers.”

Alexander walked past King and Pierce, entering the dark hallway. “I don’t know everything. But I can point you in the right direction.”

King fell in step behind Alexander. “That’s all I need.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Asino, Siberia

ROOK RAN DOWN
the street, headed for the turn onto his targets’ road. He had no intention of giving up the mission because the Russian military happened to be flying overhead. The choppers had yet to arrive, but they would soon. The chop of their rotor blades pulsed through the forest as they grew closer. With his earbud back in place, Rook contacted his team again. “Give me a sitrep.”

“Rook, this is fubar,” RP-Two came back. “These helos aren’t flying by. They’re circling.”

What the fuck?
Rook thought. It explained why he’d been hearing them for so long, but had yet to actually see one of the helicopters. But had the team? “What are we dealing with?”

“Unknown. We’ve seen shadows through the trees, but haven’t got a clear look. Best guess is that there are three of them, though.”

Rook’s earbud crackled to life again, but the voice didn’t belong to the five men on his Delta team. “Rook, this is Dominick Boucher. Queen reported mission compromised. Bishop has gone silent. We have reports of shots fired and men down in Taipei. Abort mission. Abort mi—”

Boucher’s voice was drowned out by the sound of an explosion. A pressure wave shot out of the forest carrying a cloud of pine needles. The shouts of his men followed the boom. “Rook, they’re Werewolves! Fully armed. Shit, they’re right on top of us!”

Gunfire ripped through the forest as the five-man Delta team returned fire. But Rook knew it was hopeless. Werewolf was the nickname for Russia’s Ka-50 Black Shark attack helicopter, so named because it seemed only a silver bullet could knock it out of the sky. They were heavily armored tank- and jet-killing weapons of war. With an armament that included antitank missiles, aerial rockets, air-to-air missiles, and an array of machine guns, three of which was severe overkill for taking out a five-man team.

Unless they knew who they were up against,
Rook thought.

“Abort mission!” Rook shouted. “Lose them in the trees and—”

The buzz of two miniguns ripped through the forest.

Rook held his breath.

A loud
cracking
filled the air as a tree fell. It
swished
to the ground and struck with a
boom
.

Labored breath came through his earbud, followed by a voice. “RP-Two through Five are down! Two of the helos are on me. One is headed your way!”

Rook had been so stunned by the battle being waged in the forest that he still remained rooted in the middle of the country road. But there was nowhere to hide. Running toward the choppers was suicide and they clearly had thermal sensors to help locate warm human bodies in the cool forest. The road stretched on endlessly in either direction. And across from the forest was the open hilly pasture of the cow farm. Armed with only a handgun and three grenades, hidden beneath his thick sweater, he would last only as long as it took for the gunner to line him up and pull the trigger.

Knowing he didn’t have time to find cover, Rook decided to hide in plain sight. He leaped a short barb-wire fence into the pasture and ran up the hill. As he pounded up the soft loamed hillside, a second explosion blasted apart the forest. The missiles being fired, meant for tanks, had no doubt reduced Jeff Kafer, his friend, to slurry. Rook’s rage carried him up and over the hill just as a lone helicopter rose up over the forest and bore down on him.

He quickly turned his run into a walk, joining the fringe of a large, spooked cattle herd. He looked over his shoulder. The obsidian helicopter looked absolutely evil, its two wings carrying enough firepower to fight a war. But he just watched it approach; hoping his lack of fear and his clothing would make the gunner think twice. As the helicopter banked sharply and circled the hilltop, he knew his plan had worked. At least for the moment.

The helicopter swiveled around and returned, facing him head on. As it descended, the herd panicked and broke into several stampeding groups. Confused, the cows ran over each other, making a mess, their anxious moos drowned out by the coaxial rotor chop.

Rook could see the pilot and gunner giving him the once over so he used his very real anger over the death of his team and channeled it as the fictitious owner of a panicked herd of cattle. With a beet-red face he let loose with a string of Russian curses, violently gesticulating at the helicopter and the scattering cows. When the helicopter remained rooted in place he got bold, picking up a small stone and lobbing it at the chopper. It struck the windshield and made the men inside laugh.

The helicopter rose up and flew just over his head, reuniting with the others still circling the forest. Rook watched them for a moment, but when two military trucks full of soldiers rumbled down the road, he retreated toward the farmhouse, where he hoped to find some kind of vehicle. As he neared the home, a vehicle wasn’t waiting for him. Instead it was a man speaking on a mobile phone and raising a double-barrel shotgun at him.

Rook stopped when he saw the weapon. He tried to hear what the man was saying, but became distracted by the chop of rotor blades growing louder. Not just one, but all three choppers were returning. Before Rook could speak, think, or move, the rising sound of approaching war machines was drowned out by the blast of two shotgun shells.

THIRTY-FIVE

El Calvario, Colombia

HIDDEN IN THE
shadows, Queen and her team watched as four more vehicles entered the town from the low side road. They stopped near the bottom of town, fifteen feet below the team’s position. But something was different about these vehicles. They were SUVs, perhaps 1990s models, black and mud-covered from off-roading in the jungle—not military. The twenty men who exited the vehicles were armed with a variety of semiautomatic and automatic weapons, but nothing the Colombian military was known to use. Most were dressed in olive green, like the fifteen men at the top of the rise, but the hodgepodge of uniforms smacked of militia. The anger in the men’s faces revealed who they truly were: drug runners.