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The stone corridor got smaller as they moved forward, and it began to slope sharply after two hundred yards. Then they came to a metal door, with a security keypad next to it.

King checked for security cameras and tripwires, then examined the keypad. It was a pretty simple pad, with just numbers and an enter button. He didn’t have any technological tools with him, and even if he did, he wasn’t very good at picking locks.

Asya reached for the doorknob on the door and pulled. The door gave about a half inch, then hit its stop. She titled her head to the side, to look at the gap the door made. She looked at King and raised her eyebrows at him. Then she pulled a curved plastic hairclip from her head, and slipped it around the edge of the door and into the gap. In less than ten seconds, King heard a click. The hairclip broke, but the door came open in Asya’s hand.

“Nice,” he told her.

“We do things low-tech in Russia,” she smiled.

“Yeah, I’ve heard the gag about the cosmonauts using a pencil.” King stepped in through the door to behold a large janitorial closet. The inside of the door held a large triangular plaque with a lightning bolt and a sign reading Electrical Breakers. He tapped the sign for Asya’s benefit.

“Camouflage. Effective,” she said.

“A secret escape tunnel for Ridley. The rest of his employees most likely didn’t know about it.” King moved across the closet to the opposing door, raised his Sig, and slowly cracked the door open.

They were in a well lit laboratory, with blinding white walls, stainless steel counters and cabinets, with bank after bank of fluorescent lamps lining the ceilings. The counters were filled with computers, microscopes and equipment King had only seen a few times before — in Manifold labs. He understood some of the basic principles of genetic science after studying up on the field when they had first run afoul of Ridley, but he really didn’t have a desire to press deeply into the subject. Viruses and DNA strands all felt like a tiny invisible world to him. Sara felt at home in that microscopic, unseen realm, but he would rather live in the world he could see, where there were threats he could shoot.

His thoughts drifted to his new fiancée for a moment. He’d left her in a hurry once again, and he couldn’t help but feel bad about it. She’d just finished pointing out the chaos of their lives and how hard it was going to be for them to have anything resembling a traditional marriage. She’d said yes, but he wondered if she was now second guessing that decision. Because really, who asks a girl to marry him and then flies halfway around the world to fight wraiths and Hercules? Of course, when he got home, she might already be flying off to some other corner of the world, fighting a breakout of some civilization-ending bird flu.

“What is all this stuff?” Asya asked, pointing to one of the few devices King recognized. It was a white plastic box that looked something like a futuristic cash register — as imagined by Stanley Kubrick for a 1960s sci-fi film.

“A PCR. It performs a timed-thermal cycle so you can get an amplification of a polymerase chain reaction.”

“Huh,” she grunted.

King smirked to himself. If she asked about a dozen other objects in the room he would have been clueless.

At the far side of the lab, were two black doors. King had seen similar doors in Endgame’s headquarters. He knew they would seal with rubber airtight stoppers the second any kind of biological contaminant was released in the room. He didn’t see any other exits, so he made his way to the bio doors and opened the first.

He peered into a long white hallway that stretched to his right. It had shiny white linoleum floors. Black doors lined the walls, leading to what he presumed were more labs. Directly opposite from his doors were another set labeled Cold Lab. King glanced behind him for the sign on his doors. Microbiology Lab.

To his left was an unmarked single door with a tiny window. The glass was reinforced with wire. “This way,” he whispered. Leading with his handgun, he slowly opened the single door and found what he was hoping for. More stairs. They had been painted a nightmare shade of institutional blue and the stairwell walls were a dull and lifeless gray. The steps led down.

Asya crept down the stairs behind him. “The floor above?” she whispered.

“Probably all labs. I’ve been in a few of Ridley’s places. They all have the same general segregation of living quarters from labs. What we want will be in the offices.”

At the bottom of the first set of stairs they came to a landing with a red fire extinguisher and another single black door. A plate above the door read Sub Level 2. King passed it and followed the steps deeper into the bowels of the facility. Asya asked no questions this time.

The steps ended at another door, labeled Sub Level 3. King gently opened this door, and peered down yet another long corridor, although this one was carpeted in soft gray, and the walls, while painted white, did not glare. The lighting in this hallway was recessed in the ceiling, casting a soft orange glow. The hall held doors only on the right. The first set, were double doors, and looked to be made of cherry wood. King spotted no sign of bio seals around the door’s edges. This one will be an office, he thought.

He was surprised by the room’s contents. It was not an office. Instead, it was a massive natural cave, and along the walls, strange technology lined every inch of the curved stone from floor to ceiling.

But it was the room’s occupant that really got King’s blood boiling. Standing at the far side of the cavern stood a man with dark curly hair and tanned skin. His chest and arms rippled with muscles, just barely contained beneath his business suit.

Alexander Diotrephes.

He turned just in time to see King rushing into the room and about to tackle him.

SIXTEEN

Amphithéâtre de Carthage, Tunisia

Daryl Trajan, known by his operational callsign of ‘Trigger’ to most, stayed perfectly still in his tree, on the northern edge of the ruins of the amphitheater. The sun was down, and there was no one around to see him, but he didn’t want to chance that the enemy’s sniper might be scoping his way. The man was said to be formidable with a long-range weapon — any long-range weapon.

Trigger had been on lookout at the amphitheater for hours, just like he had been the last two days, but today the boredom had cracked in half and blown away on the ocean breeze. First, he had spotted the slim guy in the Elvis t-shirt and some woman making for the fountain entrance of the Omega facility. Then he had witnessed the mass exodus of cloaked figures. The “cloaks”, as he’d dubbed them, gave him the willies, what with their shriveled gray skin and their herky-jerky movements, but he felt pretty sure he would have no problem mowing them down with his HK416. The assault rifle looked like an AR-15—black and sexy — but with a wicked scope and a vertical fore-grip. Even though he mostly made his bones as a mercenary by shooting things, for this job, so far all they had done is surveillance.

Trigger keyed his tactical microphone and called in the new development.

“Trigger to Carpenter, I’ve got eyes on the flying wing. Team is landing in the field north of the mosque.”

“Trigger, this is Eagle. I want a complete account of who emerges from that transport.” The unexpected voice was deep and gravelly.

Crap, Trigger thought. He had been expecting his fellow mercenary and friend, Carpenter, to answer the call. But apparently the Big Boss was here now. The man was ugly as sin, with a huge bald head criss-crossed with scars and a jagged hole where an ear should have been. He had chosen the name Eagle for himself, but behind his back, most of the mercs referred to him as Beak, because of the man’s immense nose.