Callsign: Bishop (Erik Somers) (Chesspocalypse #5)

“Damn,” Keasling said.

“How is Bishop?” Duncan asked. While the team was no longer officially Delta, they still lived at Fort Bragg and would move to their new quarters at the Alpha facility later in the year. While Duncan oversaw the progress at Alpha, Keasling kept an eye on the team and sometimes reprised his middleman role. But Duncan was still on top of things and knew Bishop was the only team member not currently deployed or on personal leave. “Think he’s up to it?”

“You know Bishop,” Keasling said. “No matter how beat up the guy gets, he’s impossible to read.”

Bishop had fallen victim to one of Ridley’s experiments that left him with incredible regenerative capabilities but had nearly driven him mad. A crystal with strange healing properties recovered from Mount Meru in Vietnam had helped control the rage, but he’d endured physical injuries—a removed arm, near decapitation, repeated drowning—that took a toll on the human psyche, even one as tough as Bishop’s. The team’s last mission had stripped Bishop of his regenerative abilities, and the madness that came with them, but the memories of his injuries, and the madness, had to be haunting him.

“Think he’s ready for a trip to Iran?” Duncan asked.

“As luck would have it, he came to see me this morning, asking for exactly that.”





3.



The cabin of the Boeing 737 was much too quiet for his taste. Bishop was used to traveling in the Crescent, which was loud even inside the cabin. But for this job he’d had to take a commercial flight to Tehran, and the two planes couldn’t have been more different.

For one thing, he thought, there aren’t any computers on the walls.

When Duncan called him and told him he would be going to Iran to look for a terrorist cell that had stolen Manifold material, he almost couldn’t believe it. It seemed like too much of a coincidence, given the timing of his recent discovery. Of course, he would be landing in Tehran, in northern Iran, while Dawoud and Faiza Abbasi lived in Shiraz, some distance to the south in the Fars province. Still, at least he was in the country. If time permitted, he would make the trip south and pay them a visit.

Dawoud and Faiza Abbasi. His parents. Could it be true? Bishop knew he was adopted as a baby, but he’d never even bothered looking for his birth parents. They gave him up, and he was fine with it. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need to know them. But now that he did know, he couldn’t help but feel excited at the possibility of meeting them, as well as a bit anxious.

What would they be like? Would they be happy to see him? A thousand questions ran through his mind, and he meant to ask them all, especially the most important one.

Why? Why had they given him up? The old anger threatened to bubble to the surface. Childhood memories began to play through his mind. Years of wondering what was so wrong with him that his own parents didn’t want him. Didn’t he measure up? Was he weak as a baby? Small? Were his eyes the wrong color? As a baby, it couldn’t have been anything he’d done, so what was it? Maybe his parents just weren’t ready for children. Maybe they had better things to do than raise their own blood. Maybe—

He realized he was squeezing the armrest so hard his knuckles had turned white, and he forced himself to relax. He took a slow, deep breath and reeled in his racing thoughts, slowing them to a crawl. He pictured a placid lake in the mountains. Cool, clear water. The sound of birds in the background. A laughing family in a canoe paddling their way across the surface. It was a technique he’d employed often in his attempts to manage his anger. Soon his pulse and breathing returned to normal, and he released his grip on the armrest.

I’m okay, he thought. Still waters.

Why had his parents given him up? The answer would have to wait. As anxious as he was to meet the Abbasis, Deep Blue had sent him to do a job. He shook his head and tried to clear his parents—his parents!—from his mind and focus on the task at hand.

Manifold had been making a stronger, more potent form of some poison called ergot. Bishop knew that ergot had been used as an effective weapon in the ancient world, but the new strain could be much, much worse. No one knew what it did, but the fact that Manifold was involved boded ill for everyone. Ridley never did things on a small scale.

But even worse than making a dangerous new bio-weapon, Manifold had let it fall into the hands of Iranian terrorists. Bishop shook his head, wondering who in the hell had let that happen. Ridley was a lot of things, but unorganized wasn’t one of them. Of course, Ridley was out of the picture and without his oversight, someone in his company screwed up, or just jumped ship, and now Bishop had to clean up the mess.