Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

Sara continued pleading with Brainstorm, but there was no answer and King knew that salvation would not come from that quarter. He opened a line to Deep Blue. “How long have we got?”

“Estimated time to target is six minutes, thirty seconds…mark.”

“I don’t suppose you can ask the navy to self-destruct those missiles. You know, maybe say ‘pretty-please.’” He tried to sound lighthearted, but he was beginning to worry. In the past, the only people who would miss his passing were the team, who shared the risk and understood it and his mother, who he now realized may or may not have cared about his welfare after all. But now there was Fiona, whose parents died when she was young and whose grandmother was killed in front of her during the attack on the Siletz reservation. She’d put on a tough-girl routine when he left, but he knew his death would affect her profoundly. He’d considered retiring from the field for her, but she’d actually convinced him to stay active. “If you don’t fight,” she’d said, “the world would be a bad place to live.” So here he was fighting, and, it seemed, about to make Fiona regret that little speech.

“You know I can’t.” Deep Blue sounded distraught. He knew the stakes for King were higher than ever. “Believe me, I’m trying everything. Director Boucher is working the official channels for us and Aleman is trying to hack his way in, disable the missiles, or change their trajectories.”

Dominick Boucher was the director of the CIA, Deep Blue’s friend and confidant, and the one man who knew everything about Chess Team’s new black ops gig. After all, he’s the one who set it up. Lewis Aleman was the team’s genius techie. An injury took him out of the field, but he’s been waging cyber war for the team since. If anyone could take care of the missiles it was them, but stopping several missiles midflight was no easy task, especially when some of the people in danger don’t officially exist.

“I know you’ll do your best. I’m gonna sign off now. If you don’t hear from me in seven minutes…well, you know.”

He severed the connection and then turned to Sara and Felice. “Graham was down here with us. Now he’s gone. There has to be another way out. Find it.”

Sara immediately pointed to a door set against one wall. “I thought that might be a closet, but it’s locked.”

“I have a key.” King loaded a Beehive shell into the SCAR’s FN40GL attachment, and took aim at the doorknob. The gun thundered and the entire lock mechanism disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and metal. The door swung back to reveal a landing with a stairs going both up and down. “Go!”

They hastened up the dark stairwell and emerged a few moments later in the elevator foyer on the first floor of the villa. In the distance, there was the roar of a jet engine; not incoming cruise missiles, but the Gulfstream V taking off, presumably with Graham on board.

Sara steered them toward the front door, and they ran from the house, across the courtyard, and through the gate out into the desert. They were still running when the explosions began.





EPILOGUE


Afar District, Ethiopia—One week later



The Old Mother made one more journey to the elephant graveyard.

Felice had spent the week resting and recuperating from injuries she hadn’t even realized she’d suffered. Her deepest wounds of course were not physical in nature, and some of them were only now manifesting themselves in the form of chronic insomnia and panic attacks. She had been referred to a specialist in treating post traumatic stress disorder, but deep down she felt there was more to it than that. She knew that she carried within her the ability to undo hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution—to utterly destroy human civilization.

That was a lot for one person to carry.

Good thing that I’m not just one person, she thought. There’s two of us in here.

But how much longer would that last? The Old Mother’s memories were a source of comfort and strength to her, but sometimes she felt that her connection to the past was slipping. She thought about Sara’s theory of quantum entanglement; it was as good an explanation as any other she’d entertained. Was it possible to become disentangled?

She hoped so.

“We’re just about ready,” Jack Sigler announced.