“Sir, we have footage of three intruders on the perimeter of the base. Just down the road from Central. We’re looking for them now. Teams are reporting in from Labs and the Dock, but it looks like it was just the three guys.” White Zero sounded out of breath.
The base was a sprawling underground affair in three sections. On a map, the three main sections of the facility formed a capital letter A. High speed trains, hidden underground, connected each section of the appropriated base. This section was designated Central, and it contained the hangar, the computer rooms and surveillance equipment that Duncan would use to orchestrate Chess Team field operations and a variety of smaller labs and offices. Central sat at the top point of the letter A. The lower left of the A was a section designated Labs, because it mostly contained those. That was the section of the base the team had first encountered when the whole base belonged to the megalomaniac Richard Ridley. Finally, the lower right leg of the A-shape was the Dock, because the team kept a captured submarine there — the same Russian Typhoon class the team had used to escape North Korea. The sub reached the New Hampshire sea coast through a series of massive natural flooded tunnels and caverns.
The base had initially caused Duncan no end of headaches, because he first needed to get the Army to help clear it of chemical and biological weapons. After Chess Team had begun to move in, they had fought off an incursion of hostile forces and mutated creatures, while Duncan had been trapped inside and his security forces had been trapped outside. Since then, he had been continually beefing up security. Now three men had just sauntered up to the front door of his top-secret base. Duncan wasn’t happy.
Queen reached over to a nearby desk and picked up a radio earpiece. She placed it in her ear and listened in on the conversation.
“Zero, who are these guys?” Duncan asked, irritation creeping into his voice.
“No idea, sir,” came the reply. “But, they looked pretty weird.”
“Define weird.” Deep Blue was racing for the main computer operations room, and Queen was at his side, her firearm out. Once in his chair, Deep Blue could use the vast security systems as his disposal to find the intruders faster than White Zero could on foot.
“They look the same. Three guys in white business suits,” came White Zero’s reply.
Queen and Duncan exchanged glances as they reached the door to the central computer lab.
“They all have bald heads too. In the footage I’m seeing, they look like triplets.” White Zero’s voice sounded confused.
Deep Blue opened the door and then stopped dead. The room was mostly dark, but the lights had been on when he left. Queen read his body language and had her pistol up in front of her. She stepped in front of Deep Blue, motioning for him to remain shielded at the side of the doorway. Unarmed, he complied.
Queen began to enter the mostly darkened room. There was one recessed light in the ceiling, dimly lit, and shining down on the central computer chair in the room. A tall man with a bald head sat in the chair. He wore a fine white linen suit, and a huge shit-eating grin on his face.
“Richard Ridley,” Queen said, her gun trained on the maniac’s face.
“Not quite who you were expecting, eh, Ms. Baker?” The man’s grin grew wider. Two men stepped out of the shadows behind the chair to stand on either side of Ridley. Each man looked exactly like the other.
They were all the same man.
They were all Richard Ridley.
EIGHT
King was ready to give up. The dreary basement of the library held several hundred cardboard boxes of books, and rows and rows of dusty metal shelving. He felt like he was looking through a haystack and wasn’t even sure he was after a needle.
“There must be something,” Asya said. He could tell she was losing her patience too.
They had been in the basement for over an hour, looking at the boxes, the walls, the ceiling and the floor, for any sign that the Herculean Society had been here, or that they had at least stored something here. But short of going through all the boxes, King had no idea what his next move was.
“Should we open boxes? That assistant librarian might be back at any moment. If she’s looking for something further from the stairs next time, we will have nowhere to hide.” As usual, Asya was thinking what he was thinking.
“It won’t be in the boxes. It’ll be something more secretive, and it’ll probably be marked in some way, like the floor upstairs—” King stopped and he squinted, thinking hard about the layout of the building, as he had viewed it since he entered.
“You only squinch your nose like that when you have idea,” Asya told him.
King turned to her and smiled. “Squinch?”
“I am trying to sound more American.”
“Let’s go back upstairs. I might have an idea.”
Asya followed King up a spiral metal staircase to the main lobby of the library. They slipped quietly through the door and wandered back into the larger part of the hall, as casually as if they were just returning from the restroom.
King scanned the long hall, then turned his eyes up to the second story balcony that ran around the entire room. There were more shelves up there, and several small windows that let golden sunlight stream into the echoing chamber. Asya watched him look, then turned her own eyes up. She pointed to the spot on the balcony directly above the front door — and above the Herculean Society symbol on the floor.
“Was up, not down,” she said.
“Yep. Up,” King moved to another circular staircase. This one was in the corner of the large hall, and the ironwork along the railing was far more ornate than on the stairs to the basement, with small sections painted in gold leaf.
At the top, they navigated past the occasional book browser, along the carpeted floor of the balcony to the spot above the main hall’s doors. King glanced around the space. It was a small reading nook with a chair and a low table. Nothing fancy. He leaned over the balcony’s rail and looked down at the H on the floor below. Then he looked both ways along the balcony. No one was on this side of the second floor. He quickly turned and started searching every inch of the wall behind him, sliding the chair aside, and looking behind the table. Asya casually leaned on the rail watching him. Finally he stood straight and faced the wall, scratching his head.
“I don’t see it,” King said.
Standing slightly behind him, close to the rail, Asya swept her hand up and smacked King in the back of his head. He whipped around and looked at her, more in irritation than pain.
“Use your eyes,” she said. Then she pointed her thumb over her shoulder. “That way.”
King looked across the space to the railing on the other side of the library’s second floor. An identical reading nook mirrored the one in which he stood, with one major difference. On the far wall, behind the chair, and at head level for anyone standing in King’s position, was yet another small stylized H symbol, this time carved into the wooden surface of the wall molding.
King mentally kicked himself. He had stood here first and looked down at the symbol on the floor, and looked sideways down both lengths of the balcony, but he hadn’t bothered to look across the beautiful library and seen what was right in front of him.
“I’m starting to be glad we didn’t grow up together,” he grumbled, then started to walk the perimeter of the balcony.
Asya chuckled softly and walked after him. Once on the other side, the first thing King did was look back at the first nook — just in case. Then he zeroed in on the wooden molding on the wall. There was a nearly imperceptible groove around the circular part of the symbol. King grasped the uprights of the stylized H with his fingers and twisted. The entire symbol slid clockwise with a smooth wood against wood scuffing noise. King glanced down the balcony and saw only one other patron on the second floor with them.