“Go,” Asya said.
King twisted the H the remainder of the distance until he had spun the symbol a full 180 degrees. A soft thunk sounded, and the wooden wall swung back on invisible hinges, revealing a tiny door in the wall behind the chair. Asya slid the chair aside, and King stepped up to the door. It was just slightly more than a foot in width, and only about four feet tall. He had to put his head in first, and then slip in sideways.
Once inside, he was in complete darkness. He reached back on the inner wall behind him as Asya slipped into the doorway, pulling the chair back to its original position as she came. King’s fingers brushed across a plastic panel, and he flicked the light switch. A long row of ceiling-mounted fluorescent bulbs illuminated the room. It was a narrow brick passageway, the walls having long ago been painted a shade of white, but the paint was peeling and crumbling now. Asya pulled the door nearly to the closed position and examined the rear of it for a similar handle. She found an identical one in wooden trim that had been painted the same shade of off-white as the corridor, but the handle was smudged from years of dirty fingers. They wouldn’t be locked in. Asya pushed the door gently until it clicked in place.
King pulled his Yarygin and walked cautiously to the end of the tunnel. He noticed the floor declined a bit, but certainly not enough to take them to ground level. Along the way, he checked every inch of the ceiling, wary of traps. Although Alexander and his Herculean Society specialized in protecting — and in some cases obscuring — antiquity, he knew the man was not above using cutting edge technology to do so. King was expecting security traps or, at the very least, CCTV cameras. Instead, he found only the painted brick tunnel.
After about seventy feet, the tunnel ended at a T-intersection. King checked for cameras. Still surprised to find none, he looked in both directions. Fluorescents ran the length of the cross tunnel. At one end was what appeared to be a small room with dark gray metal file cabinets. The other end of the tunnel was in darkness. King looked into the gloom for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked toward the room with the file cabinets. Asya followed, checking behind her as she walked, her own Yarygin in hand.
The room was ten foot square, and as with the tunnel, King found no sign of cameras. The floor was rough, unfinished concrete. The room had no furniture, only seven large black file cabinets. At a quick glance, King could tell they were all unlocked.
“Why is there no security?” Asya asked.
“Uh-huh,” King said, moving toward the cabinet in the middle of the room.
“Why that one?”
“Gotta start somewhere. M. Roughly in the middle of the alphabet.” King smiled at her. “Figured I’d see what he had on Manifold. Be ready for shit to go haywire.”
King grasped the handle of the top drawer and gently pulled, just a half an inch. He checked for tripwires inside the drawer, but he found only hanging green folders. He pulled the drawer out further and saw that the files were all for names starting with the letter L. He didn’t recognize most of the names. The few he did recognize seemed innocuous: Labor Smart, Inc., Labwire, Lepenica, Lico. He slid the drawer closed and repeated the safety check on the next drawer. It was the M drawer. Close to the front, he found what he was looking for. Manifold Genetics.
He pulled the thick folder out and laid it gently on top of the cabinet. He soon saw the documents weren’t going to be much use to him. Most of the text was in Greek. What little was in English, was mostly what he knew already. Manifold Genetics was a biotech and genetic engineering firm, owned by the madman Richard Ridley. King and Chess Team had gone against the company and stopped them when they had discovered the head of the Lernaean Hydra buried in the sands of Nazca, Peru. Ridley had been cooking up designer soldiers, and Chess Team had put an end to it, appropriating one of Ridley’s labs in New Hampshire, and destroying two more in South America and on an island in the Atlantic. The file had US news clippings from the attack on Fort Bragg, when Ridley had reared his head again. But with Alexander’s help that time, Ridley had been shut down.
There were what appeared to be telephone transcripts — but in Greek — and photocopies of ownership documents, scientific formulas and all manner of material that King suspected would have been incredibly useful for the team when they had needed to stop Ridley. The intelligence would be invaluable, once they got it all translated. He was about to close the file and slip it into his shirt when the corner of a map slid out from under the stack of documents. King pinched the tip of it with his fingers and slid it out. The map showed the world, with five locations marked in black Greek letters. Although King wasn’t fluent in Greek, he and the rest of Chess Team had all spent the last few years studying up on ancient mythology, archeology, history and ancient languages. He was familiar with the Greek alphabet, even though he couldn’t read full words. And in this case, the meaning of these letters was obvious. In New Hampshire, the Greek letter Alpha denoted the former Manifold installation that Endgame now called their headquarters. In South America, King saw the letter Beta was crossed out with a circle and a slash mark in red permanent pen. Gamma, on Tristan da Cunha in the Atlantic Ocean was likewise marked as finished. In the Ukraine, King saw the letter for Delta was also crossed out.
King tapped it with his finger and said, “Queen dealt with this facility when she was looking for Rook.”
“And this one?” Asya asked, pointing to the fifth black Greek letter.
It was the symbol for Omega, and over the top of it, the person with the red pen had drawn the Herculean Society symbol. Under that, the word Carthage had been written in a smooth cursive script.
King heard a low guttural growl coming from the corridor behind them, in the dark.
“That’s where we’re going if we get out of here alive.”
A second growl came out of the dark at the end of the tunnel, and then the fluorescent bulbs at the far end went out. Then the next set went dark. King and Asya moved to either side of the open doorway, their weapons trained on the end of the tunnel as the darkness advanced toward them.
NINE
“Clones,” Queen said with disgust.
She stood in the room, with three perfectly identical copies of Richard Ridley seated before her. The original Ridley was a robustly tall man, with a gleaming bald head and a menacing smile. She recalled the man’s likeness. As she looked at the three seated men, she could detect nothing to indicate she wasn’t looking at three of him. They were perfect replicas of Ridley in every way.
The three men sat in metal chairs that had been hastily bolted to the floor. Their hands were cuffed to the backs of the chairs with industrial-strength plastic zip ties and metal handcuffs. Bishop, Knight and Rook stood behind Queen, each armed and suited up for battle, their weapons trained on the triplets. To the side of the room, another five armed Endgame soldiers, wearing battle armor, held M-16s trained on the seated duplicates.
“We prefer ‘divinely created persons,’ actually,” said the Ridley seated in the middle. “My name is Seth.”
“I’d prefer to put my boot up your—” Rook spoke up.
“Rook,” an electronically modulated voice came over the black speakers tucked up into the corners of the interrogation room. “That’s no way to treat our guests.”