“Finally, he starts to use his brain,” says Clara behind me.
“But I don’t understand what you’re going to do to them when you’ve lured them all here. There’s, what? Four of you now? GlobaTech are going to roll up to your front door with a few hundred heavily armed soldiers from their own private army.”
Ketranovich walks past me before turning and gesturing for me to follow him back into the room I woke up in.
“This entire compound is a network of underground chambers,” he begins. “Think of this place as a wheel. The control room back there is the center, and each spoke that leads off it brings you to its own little hub, like this one. Right now, we’re directly under the main yard of the compound. There are five mega-furnaces here, originally used to dispose of chemical weapons in the fifties and sixties that your government says never existed, that they used for trials and tests that they say never took place.”
“Hey, I’m not responsible for what the government did or didn’t do fifty years ago,” I say. “Don’t take your little temper tantrum out on me.”
“Whatever,” he continues. “The point is, when GlobaTech turned its back on us after your intervention, and denied us access to the Uranium we had planned on using, we had to quickly change our plans.”
We’re all standing just inside the door of the furnace room, the intense heat blasting out at us.
“Instead of launching an attack on America, we had to start off with something slightly smaller.”
He points to the ceiling. I look up, struggling to make out what he’s looking at in the gloom. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but I eventually see it…
Stuck to almost every inch of the ceiling is enough C4 explosive to blast the world out of its orbit…
“Fuck me…” I mutter to myself as I struggle to get my head around seeing that much explosive in one place.
There has to be close to a hundred bricks of C4, all with detonators in them, attached to the ceiling. If the furnace room is directly under the main courtyard, then the explosion would blast up and through the ground, causing the compound to sink in on itself.
I suddenly see what he’s planning. I look over my shoulder at the other doors, then back at Ketranovich. He smiles, seeing me reach the frightening conclusion.
“Yes, Adrian Hell,” he says. “All the other furnace rooms are exactly the same.”
“Holy shit!” I gasp.
They’re going to lure all the GlobaTech soldiers into the compound and then blow it to hell. The explosion will be catastrophic. The entire area for miles will become a crater. Taking out a very large chunk of both GlobaTech’s and the US military’s forces in the process.
“You’re insane,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief.
“Sanity is simply a matter of opinion,” he shrugs.
I turn and walk out of the furnace room, back into the cooler central hub. I turn to face them both and look at Clara.
“So where do you fit in then?” I ask. “You were being shot at just as much as me.”
“No one in our organization knew about my role in this except the Colonel,” she explains. “I told you that he only tells people what they need to know. Loyalty and trust have been issues for us in the past, which is why we like to keep our numbers small.”
“But I thought there were thousands of you?”
“And who told you that?” she asks, smiling.
“Ted Jackson, and then you…” I say, trailing off as I instantly realize she lied from the very beginning about something else, too.
“We told GlobaTech what they needed to hear to secure the deal for the Uranium. A bit of inventive marketing goes a long way.”
“Unbelievable. So Jackson had no idea you were playing him?”
“Of course not,” she says, almost gloating. “He was an idiot, blinded by his own greed. He’d have believed anything if he thought he could get rich from it.”
“I still don’t get why Natalia was shooting at you…”
“I saw you tailing us days ago. I recognized you and knowing about the Pellaggio deal that Jackson had recently cancelled, I put two and two together and figured you were in town to take him out. When you knocked on our hotel room door, I just let you and Jackson form your own conclusions and leapt on the opportunity to play the victim. I spoke to the Colonel, who agreed we’d play it out in secret, to keep up appearances with you. It was difficult fighting against Natalia, but necessary.”
I shake my head with disbelief. “You guys are ruthless bastards, I’ll give you that.”
“Once GlobaTech turned their backs on us and you gave up the deeds to the Uranium mine, we had to change our plans and simply go after the people who have screwed with us. It was easy cleaning up after we'd abandoned our original plan. I was able to take out the soldiers we no longer needed when Natalia found us in the bar. I got you to take out Marcus Jones, and I was able to get rid of Webster moments before you arrived at the safe house.”
“Wait, you killed Webster?”
“Yes. The men at the safe house had passed the time torturing him once they’d learned he was no longer necessary. I went there to clean up, which you helped me with. I was just about able to shoot him before you walked in, assuming I was the victim, as always.”
I start pacing up and down, trying to process the fact that everything I’ve gone through in the past few days has been a lie. I stop and look at Clara and Ketranovich, who has moved to stand next to her.
“So you’ve been using me to clear up your mess and position everything to exact your revenge on GlobaTech?”
“And you played your part beautifully,” says Ketranovich. “Once everything was in order, we tried to kill you, but you somehow managed to survive the blast.”
“The car bomb…” I say. “That was you?”
I remember when I was face to face with Pellaggio. Right before I killed him, he began to say something. It didn’t register until right now, but he must've been trying to say he didn’t know anything about the car bomb…
“Yes, but you assumed it was the mafia man, so we let you run with that idea and it led to you wiping out his entire empire!” He pauses to laugh. “Very impressive, by the way. I’ve said it since the first time we met — we could use a man like you in our cause.”
I stare at him, feeling the anger and the hatred boiling to the surface.
“That’s nothing compared to what I’m gonna do to you,” I say, before turning to Clara. “Both of you.”
“I’m afraid you won’t have chance to try, Adrian Hell. The next stage of our plan is beginning now, and soon you will be nothing but a stain on the graveyard that will replace Nevada.”
I have one last card to play to buy me some time. And it’s a long shot.
“And what did Natalia think of this master plan?” I ask Clara. “I’m assuming she was kept in the dark as much as everyone else?”
“Of course,” she replies, shrugging. “I’m the only one who knew what the big picture was. Our Colonel keeps his plans to himself, remember?”
“Are you sure she’s okay with not being the number one girl around here?”
Ketranovich brushes a piece of hair from Clara’s face before kissing her on both cheeks. He turns to me.
“Natalia is one of my finest soldiers,” he says. “But who else could I trust with such a delicate plan, if not my own daughter?”
Ha!
Do you know what? I’m not even remotely surprised…
I obviously had no idea Clara is Ketranovich’s daughter, but at this stage, nothing else can shock me.
“Your daughter,” I say, nodding as I process the information. “Of course she is…”