The door to the office opened, and Fossen looked up. Nathalie Schroder was Fossen’s assistant. She was young, at 25, but highly capable. She had a brilliant mind for the math involved in their undertaking, and she was equally good with electrical engineering. She wore a lab coat, and her dark hair was back in a ponytail. Her father had worked for the project before her. Fossen liked her, but she had been asking the wrong kind of questions lately.
“How are the power readings?” he asked her.
“Good,” she said, looking down at her tablet PC. “The turbines have collected a surplus and we should be ready for another test.”
“How long has it been since the last test?” Fossen interrupted her.
She tapped a few times at her tablet. “Five hours. I have the statistics now. It was at 98 % stability and generated over 12 gigawatts at one point, but I think we can go higher-”
Fossen waved his hand cutting her off. “I don’t need the details. As long as we are at 98 %, that’s all that is important.”
He let his eyes drift back to the screens with the scenes of destruction.
Schroder looked over his shoulder and cleared her throat. She spoke softly. “We still have no control over the global portals. They are definitely a byproduct of the experiment, but as you can see, they open at random intervals and geographic locations. There are far more of them than we ever expected.”
“I know. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“People are dying,” she said. “Far more than was projected.”
Fossen stood up from the chair, staring at her. Schroder lowered her eyes to the floor. “We knew this when we began, yes? Opening and maintaining the portal was always going to have side effects. One collateral portal or a hundred, it makes no difference.”
“But so many people-” she began again.
“Do not matter!” Fossen finished for her. “If after all this time you are having doubts about the project, if your faith is wavering…you can go.”
Schroder raised her eyes to him, hopefully. “You would let me leave?” Then more furtively, “ It would let me leave?”
Fossen grimaced as though pinched, but quickly forced a smile. “If your heart is not in it, Nathalie, you have no place here. You’ve already performed your part. The system is self-sustaining now. If you want to leave, go.”
She looked him in the eye, relief washing over her. “Thank you, Eirek.”
Schroder turned to make for the door.
Fossen drew a Walther pistol from his lab coat pocket and shot her twice in the back of her head. The bullets went through her at such a close range they chewed holes into the wood of the door beyond her. Her skull detonated like a popping water balloon, before her legs gave out and her body dropped to the floor.
“You are welcome. They are not people. They are sheep, waiting for the wolf.”
An intercom on the wall came to life with a clicking noise.
“What is it?” Fossen asked, disgust in his voice as if the shooting was the latest in a never-ending series of distractions and interruptions.
“Security, sir. We have intruders. The dire wolves have them cornered.” The voice said through the intercom with a thick slur, as if the man attached to it was on drugs.
“I want them alive. I’ll be right there.” Fossen got up from his chair and made for the door to the chamber.
Oh Stanislav, you should not have come back.
TWENTY-SIX
Pinckney Bible Campground, NH
3 November, 0700 Hrs
George Pierce sat atop a brown picnic table with his feet propped on the bench. Pierce knew the campground would fill with people in the summer, but right now, he was the only human being in sight. When Chess Team fought the monstrosity Manifold Genetics had created from the original Greek Hydra a few years back, the battle destroyed parts of the campground.
After the fight, Deep Blue had arranged for the Army to take over the entire area, while Hazmat teams cleaned up the secret Manifold facility hidden under the mountains behind the campground. Then they had the base refurbished and refitted to house Chess Team and its extended support crew, now collectively dubbed Endgame.
Pierce had assisted in the project at the time, before he was formally a member of Endgame. Finally, once the base was finished and operational, its secret entrance in the mountain sufficiently concealed again, Deep Blue had accepted Pierce’s suggestion of restoring the campground itself. After all, the public would become wary if a supposed chemical spill was being ‘cleaned up’ by the Army, but once that process was completed, they didn’t turn the land back over to the public. The last thing Endgame wanted was more scrutiny from the public. Besides, the base sprawled underground over miles. There were other entrances and exits, which afforded more privacy, and which did not require movement through a formerly public area.
Still, when Pierce felt the crushing claustrophobia of the underground base weighing on him, he liked to slip out of the vehicle entrance located behind the campground, and come out here to think.
He was exhausted, after spending all night researching Norse mythology. It wasn’t his field, and there was so very much to learn, although he had found little in reference to the dire wolves. In addition, the dire wolf roar had rendered him nearly useless for much of the night. He still suffered the terrifying visions that the sound induced in him, but they had lessened in their intensity, and he knew them to be nothing more than echoes of his hallucination.
Carrack had later told him he had fled the computer room at the sound of the roar, but Pierce had no memory of that. What he saw when the dire wolf roar had assaulted them over the speakers of the room, before Aleman had been able to switch off the audio, was worse than anything his mind could come up with in a normal nightmare.
And George Pierce had plenty of nightmares.
When Chess Team had gone up against Manifold a few years earlier, Pierce, much like Bishop, had been tortured and experimented upon. But unlike Bishop, Pierce had received DNA directly from the Hydra sample. His skin had changed into a green and scaly substance. He had been half-man and half-reptile by the time Manifold finished with him. The nonhuman genes attached to his body were eventually blocked and he had suffered no relapses. But the bad dreams had taken far longer to go away than his skin had taken to slough and repair itself.
Pierce sighed and watched his breath in the cool morning air. Some might say chilly, but he had quickly acclimatized to the cold, despite his years spent in Greece and even in the humidity of Peru. His hallucinatory reaction to the dire wolf roar still haunted him. It was far worse than any Hydra nightmare he had yet to experience. He’d seen Julie, King’s deceased sister, his fiancee who had died long ago in a fighter jet accident-except it hadn’t been her. It was Julie as she would have been if she’d been the one Manifold infected. She wore a flight suit and her skin had the same sickly green scaly look that Pierce’s had when he was altered by the Hydra DNA.
It was so real, he thought. I could smell her.
He hadn’t run from the computer center as Carrack had said. The monstrous Julie had chased him from the room in his hallucination.
She was going to eat me.
Julie’s death had initially led to Pierce and King falling out of touch. The Hydra incident, which had begun with Pierce on an archeological dig site in Nazca, had brought them back together. Pierce’s ordeal cemented their friendship.