“Bishop, you read?” Knight calm voice spoke softly in his earpiece.
“What’s going on?” He asked.
“They’re bugging out. But there are a lot more over on the bridge by Big Ben. You okay on your own for a minute?”
Bishop glanced back the way he had come through the jungle gym of connected white bars. Upriver, he could see Westminster bridge was overrun by dire wolves and a portal had formed on the Victoria Embankment, close to, but not yet touching Big Ben, the famed British landmark clock tower at the end of the Palace of Westminster-one of the city’s major seats of governing.
“Go. I’m going to help the people still trapped in the other capsules.” Bishop resumed his scramble through the bars.
“We’ll be right back. Try to hurry. If the portal goes, the center of that wheel goes too. You’ll look pretty silly rolling to Southend.” The Crescent suddenly peeled away from the top of the London Eye, heading for the middle of the green-painted Westminster Bridge.
Bishop continued down past the remains of his original capsule and the next, on to the one after that. Inside were three young girls that looked to be no more than sixteen or seventeen, each dressed in fashionable pink and white fleece jackets. They probably dressed like each other intentionally, Bishop thought. He remembered when he was younger, the girls would have been mocked mercilessly by their peers for showing up at high school or elsewhere looking like ‘Twinkies’-identical and two to a package. What was considered cool had apparently changed.
When Bishop looked up from under the capsule, he saw that each of the girls had smeared eye make-up. They had been crying. Also, it was a long way up to the capsule from the bottom of the triangular passage. He would have to shimmy nearly twenty feet up one of the diagonal uprights to get to the girls.
He looked down briefly to the hundreds of feet of air and steel below him before the river, then looked back at the portal. The last of the remaining dire wolves were high-tailing it back inside.
Running out of time.
He took one more glance, this time further afield toward the bridge, where the Crescent lowered and Knight delivered pain from above. Bishop began to slide, climb, shimmy and shrug his way up the slick metal pole. The angle helped the climb considerably, and before he realized it, he reached his hand up for more pole only to find the upper rim of the wheel. The girls had watched his ascent awestruck, and now that he was close enough to almost reach out and touch, they started screaming for his help.
“Relax. I’m going to get you out!”
Then the unthinkable happened.
The portal disappeared. He could see its absence from his limited peripheral vision in the helmet. He turned his head to look and just as his side vision had suggested, there was a massive gaping space where the hundred-foot diameter globe of energy had been. In the distance across the city, other globes were still present, but his had gone, taking everything it had touched. A quarter of the outer rim of the wheel was now missing, along with the capsules that would have been there. The tie rods that reached from that portion of the wheel down to the hub were gone too. The hub itself and the two gigantic white cantilevered supports that held the entire wheel aloft were also gone. Bishop was holding onto a crescent-shaped incomplete wheel of steel and now-dangling tie rods and cables that were held in the air by…nothing.
With several people still trapped in capsules below him on the unaffected side of the wheel, the girls still trapped in the one above him and Bishop still holding on to the structure near the top, the London Eye began to fall over into the river.
THIRTY-THREE
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
The woman with the callsign Queen disappeared. In her place was a fourteen-year-old girl with the unlikely name of Zelda. Her mother was dead. Her father was a drunk and beat her nightly. Sometimes with a leather belt. She was terrified of spiders and mice. She couldn’t stand heights. Enclosed spaces would make her break down into a puddle of tremors. Lightning terrified her and made her scream. She dreamed every night that she was being devoured by wild animals. She was still alive and breathing as lions and cougars pulled her intestines from her abdomen. When she woke from her sleep, the nightmares just got worse in the light of day.
Her world was a living state of terror. If only she could find a way out of it. But she knew drugs were not the way. She had been on drugs when her son died and they hadn’t helped.
Wait, that’s not right. I didn’t have a child at fourteen.
She struggled to make sense of the fear and the logical incongruity that crept into her mind. I crushed the spider. I’m not afraid of spiders any more. She knew she shouldn’t think that way. He would be back and he would be angry. He would beat her again and again, and maybe this time he would go too far. I don’t fear anything. Major-General Trung tried to break me in Vietnam, but I beat him too. I am the hunter now.
“Quiet,” she whispered. “He’ll hear!”
I base jump.
“He’s in the hallway, right now.”
I free solo rock climb!
“He has the one with the large buckle.” The whispers were frantic.
I am fearless!
She moved her hand up in the darkness to touch the scar on her forehead. The brand-it was a skull encased in a star, the symbol of the VPLA Death Volunteers, Vietnam’s Special Forces Unit. Trung had branded her like cattle, but she had escaped and exacted her vengeance on the bastard. Then she made the symbol her own, drawing strength from the wound. She felt the rough lumpy surface of her scarred skin beneath her fingertips and the sensation brought her fully back to the here and now.
Queen opened her eyes and looked at the small room in which she lay. There were a few wooden crates with swastikas on them and the legend Ahnenerbe. Queen recalled Rook mentioning the word-the name for a WWII German unit that focused on historical research and German superiority. The room had a door with no handle on it. Beyond that, she was alone in a storeroom of sorts, turned into the perfect jail cell. No window, but a lone 40-watt bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling.
She sat up from the floor where she had been lying and rubbed the brand on her forehead again, reassuring herself that she was in the present and not lost in the quagmire of her childhood. It was there under her fingers. Her old anger about the mark resurfaced, and with it bloomed a new anger at the people who ran this place and the creatures they employed. Her face felt red and hot. She could feel her heart beating faster as rage coursed through her strong body, cleaning out the last vestiges of the fear that had filled it moments before.
And then her anger turned toward Rook.
“I am so going to kick your ass again, Rook.”
Had he called this in sooner, the team could have come together and moved through this place like the coordinated tor-nado of destruction they trained to be. Sure, they could solve a puzzle or two, unlock the secrets of history, science and the unknown, but they really excelled at blowing shit up. It was an art form they perfected as a team. Solo, they were dangerous. In two-man teams, they were deadly. United, they could fight the unkillable and win.
By her logic, the blame for the trouble they found themselves in lay squarely on Rook’s broad shoulders.
But she couldn’t stay angry at him. He’d suffered a loss in Siberia, and right or wrong, it had affected him deeply. Loss was part of the game, but Rook had never really experienced it before. Not like that. Now he was damaged goods, just like her.
She smiled at the idea. A match made in Heaven.
Or hell.
She couldn’t deny her growing feelings for the man. She’d nearly come out with it back at that store, but he’d gone and used that nickname.
Zel.
It was the name her mother used for her, before she succumbed to cancer and left her alone with her abusive alcoholic father. She didn’t remember a lot about her mother. Didn’t think about her much, either. But that single word, Zel, was like a key to her soul. It unlocked the past and she wasn’t ready to share that yet, with anyone.