Callsign: King II- Underworld

“I take it the official story isn’t the real story.”


“That’s what you need to find out.” Aleman took a deep breath as if gathering his thoughts. “At 1435 local time—roughly thirty minutes after the accident—a video was uploaded to YouTube from the crash site. It took about fifteen minutes to go viral, but then…whoosh…it was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Someone erased it completely from existence. Or at least they tried very hard to. A targeted borer worm virus hit the worldwide web and hunted down every permutation of the original. And I mean every single one, everywhere in the world, even still pictures taken from screen grabs.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Believe me, it is, but to do it, you need some serious mojo—NSA mojo.”

The capabilities of modern computer systems were not King’s bread and butter, but what Aleman described sounded like the ranting of a conspiracy nut. For years, paranoid rumors of the government’s, and specifically the National Security Agency’s, ability to seize control of the flow of information on the Internet had spread like wildfire. King had always been skeptical; trying to control lines of communication was like trying to catch the wind in a bottle, and when you tried to do it, it almost always came back to bite you in the ass. Still, he trusted that Aleman knew what he was talking about. “So what’s so important about this video?”

“I’m sending it to you now.”

“How did you manage to get your hands on it?”

“I constantly monitor the Web for anything unusual, and this one certainly qualified. Normally, I would have dismissed it; it looks like something lifted from a horror movie. But when the virus hit the firewall, I decided to take a second look. Knowing where it came from, and how badly someone wants to keep it under wraps, I think it’s worth checking out.”

King’s phone chirped as the file arrived and he held the phone away to watch the clip. For all the buildup, he was a little disappointed. As Aleman had indicated, it played like something from a low-budget experimental horror movie. He held the phone back to his ear. “It looks like Blair Witch Meets Bigfoot.”

“Yeah, the monster kooks are all over this. The original video was probably only seen by a few thousand people, most of whom didn’t take it seriously, but now ten times as many people are talking about the fact that the video is missing; they’re sure someone is trying to cover up definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot.”

King pondered this. The video camera had captured only a brief glimpse of what appeared to be a hairy figure pounding its fists against the outside of a car window, but the image was blurred by movement. A moment later, the camera had presumably been dropped, and it thereafter recorded only sounds—human screams and bestial growls.

Because the video had come to him from Lewis Aleman, and because it was evident that someone had worked very hard to eradicate all trace of its existence, King had no doubt about its authenticity. He also knew why Aleman had brought it to his attention. “You think this might be Ridley’s handiwork?”

Richard Ridley was the founder of Manifold Genetics—officially defunct, but still very much active—and monsters were his stock in trade. In their first encounter with Manifold, Chess Team had squared off against the Lernian Hydra, an almost unkillable beast thought to exist only in Greek mythology. More recently, Ridley, had learned the secret of animating golem, granted life to inanimate creations of stone, clay, crystal and bone, and unleashed them on the world, killing thousands. Chess Team was still smarting from their bittersweet victory against the madman; Rook was still MIA after carrying out his assignment against a target in Siberia, though Queen was now hunting for clues for his whereabouts…or the man’s gravesite.

Stopping Ridley had become Chess Team’s primary objective. Unfortunately, it wasn’t their only mission. Recently, King had learned of a mysterious new threat with global influence, something they knew only as ‘Brainstorm.’ Aleman’s workload had doubled almost overnight as he took on the task of trying to find loose threads in the Brainstorm network, thus far to no avail.

“Serious mojo,” King muttered. Brainstorm had that kind of mojo. “Is there anything about this incident that definitively points to Ridley?”

“One thing,” Aleman said, a hint of excitement in his voice. “It’s hard to pick it out in the video, but if you freeze it at exactly the right moment, it’s clear as day.”

King’s phone chirped again and he looked at the image file Aleman had just sent him. His eyes were immediately drawn to the object hanging from a leather thong around the creature’s neck, and he realized that it was a good thing that George Pierce was already there.





4.