Jeremy Robinson, Kane Gilmour
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller
For all the Jack Sigler fans who find us on Facebook. Thanks for the never ending encouragement, comradery and excitement. You know who you are.
THE STORY SO FAR
Richard Ridley was a megalomaniac with twin dreams: immortality and ultimate power. His multi-billion dollar genetics company, Manifold, was poised to give him both, when he discovered the historic resting place of the Lernaean Hydra — on the Nazca plains of Peru. Combining Hydra DNA with humans, Ridley hoped to create invincible regenerating soldiers and to gain his much-coveted eternity.
A crack squad of Delta operators, known as Chess Team — King, Queen, Bishop, Rook and Knight — orchestrated by the US President, defeated Ridley, his security forces and the unintentionally resurrected Hydra in a desperate battle. Along the way, the team had help from a mysterious man named Alexander Diotrephes — the legendary Hercules, alive, well and immortal. But in the chaos of the battle, Richard Ridley escaped.
A year later, nearly the entire population of the Siletz reservation in Oregon was exterminated. The only survivor, 13-year old Fiona Lane, the last living speaker of her native language, ended up in the custody of Jack Sigler, callsign: King, field leader of Chess Team.
The following year, King’s parents unexpectedly revealed they had led a secret life as former Russian spies. Then Richard Ridley returned, murdering the last living speakers of the world’s most ancient languages and deciphering the mother tongue—an ancient protolanguage, otherwise known as “the language of God,” which bestowed its user the ability to animate inanimate objects. With help from Alexander, Chess Team kept Fiona safe and defeated Ridley once again. But when the smoke had cleared, King’s parents were missing and presumed on the run back to Russia. Ridley was presumed dead, but had, in fact, become the prisoner of a man who had no qualms about torture.
Attempting to take some time off, King went repeatedly toe-to-toe and wits-to-wits with a criminal mastermind named Graham Brown, aka Brainstorm, and in their final battle, he stopped a black hole forming in the Louvre from destroying all of Paris. He fought side-by-side, once again, with Alexander. Unseen by King, Alexander pocketed a small round piece of rubble in the aftermath.
Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, discovered an old Manifold facility and faced off against Richard Ridley’s brother, Darius Ridley. In Norway, Stan Tremblay, callsign: Rook, took some unauthorized time off that led to him discovering a former Nazi laboratory. Erik Somers, callsign: Bishop, was horribly experimented upon by Ridley in their initial clash. Although cured, he still bears the emotional scars. Shin-dae Jung, callsign: Knight, faced the horror of the resurrected Hydra alone in the team’s first fight against Ridley. Hoping for some of his own down-time, he wound up facing another genetic monstrosity in an abandoned city in China. Also in the aftermath of the mother-tongue skirmish with Ridley, Tom Duncan stepped down from the US presidency to assume his Chess Team duties as callsign: Deep Blue, full time, running the team from a captured Manifold facility in New Hampshire, and rechristening the expanded Chess Team organization as Endgame.
Most recently, the team faced a world-wide threat of annihilation that resulted in a frantic battle in Norway and the capture of otherworldly technology capable of opening portals to different dimensions. Rook’s Russian ally, Asya Machtchenko, turned out to be King’s sibling — the result of his parents’ double lives in the mother country. Asya claimed their parents had been abducted, and she asked the team to help find them.
At the end of the fight in Norway, when the team returned to New Hampshire, a laptop containing the designs for the dimensional technology was mysteriously lifted from their headquarters, and a note was left behind explaining that Alexander needed the designs and that he was holding King’s parents hostage. King was warned to stay out of the way, but instead, he vowed to take the fight directly to the legendary immortal — and if necessary, to the death.
EPIGRAPH
“Only when the clock stops, does time come to life.”
“Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new…but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?”
“Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.”
PROLOGUE
The rocky slope shuddered. Two isolated jolts. Then the ground really started to move. Acastus Vassos clutched the large white boulder he had been sitting on while eating his bread.
He enjoyed hiking up into the green hills each day to eat. The sound of his sandaled feet on stone were like music as he climbed the low rises. When he was high enough, he turned around and admired the bustling harbor laid out before him. He would eat, absorbing the view and the gusting breezes off the blue Aegean Sea. The thick air in town was often stagnant because of the buildings, the throngs of merchants and the unwashed sailors. But up on the hill, the air was fresh, and the temperature in the summer felt cooler on his skin.
Vassos had been climbing the rocky incline to his normal perch for years, but he had never seen the small white pebbles on the ground hop and jump as they did now. A devout man, he quickly reminded himself of the last time he had made devotions to the gods, at the temples near the Acropolis. The rumble grew louder and louder, until Vassos pulled his hands from the boulder — no longer afraid of falling down the hill — and slammed them against his ears to stop the now deafening thrumming and grinding noise. He began to shout to Zeus for mercy, as his body slid down off the white rock to the ground a few feet below. The soil bounced and juddered just as the boulder had done. The ground squirmed. A living thing.
Only when his eyes turned toward the view of the harbor, did he cease worrying for his own safety. What he saw in the distance made him forget about himself.
Rhodes was renowned throughout the world for its one major tourist attraction. Across the view of the town lay the busy harbor. At the end of two stone jetties, stood the Colossus. A giant bronze statue of the sun god Helios, over three hundred feet in height, the statue stood even taller on the pedestals below its feet. The bronze guardian stood astride the twin jetties, and all the world’s ship traffic passed below the arch of its legs.
Vassos’s father, Cletus, had watched the construction of the statue for the twelve years it took, and he would frequently tell the tale before his death of how architects and builders had scoffed at the notion of building a statue astride the entrance to the port. The bronze was too soft and would never support the weight of such a creature, they had said. But, as Cletus had explained to his son, the genius designer, a man named Chares, from nearby Lindos, had an idea. He used several long iron rods inside the structure in a crossing X pattern, pulling the upper left of the statue to the lower right, and vice versa. The crossing iron bars would also add support to the statue’s limbs and head. The result was a statue strong enough to stand with legs apart, even at its immense size.