“Bon voyage,” Otto said, closing his eyes and mentally activating the autopilot. The plane’s twin engines throttled up and it accelerated away down the wide strip of tarmac, before lifting off and banking away into the bright blue sky.
“It should run out of fuel somewhere over the Atlantic,” Otto said, his voice calm. “Plenty of time for him to think about it.”
“A bullet would have been quicker,” Raven said, watching the departing jet as it grew smaller and smaller.
“Too quick,” Otto said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Laura placed the metal tray on the tabletop and sat down on the bench. The sectioned compartments of the tray contained portions of brown and gray sludge and a couple of dry military-ration biscuits. It was the only meal that the Glasshouse trainees ever ate and while it might mean they didn’t starve it was a very long way from appetizing. Another tray clanked down on to the table and she looked up to see Nigel Darkdoom taking a seat opposite her.
“You okay?” Nigel whispered. Chatter was frowned upon during mealtimes and though the guards on the far side of the room seemed not to care there was no point giving them a reason to start swinging their stun batons. Nigel frowned as he saw the fresh cuts and bruises on Laura’s face.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Laura replied with a sigh. “Just took another beating in the pit. It’s nothing. How are you feeling?”
Nigel had taken several months to fully recover from the gunshot wound he had suffered when the Disciples ambushed the Hunt. In truth, he had been lucky to survive but he still looked thin and he tired quickly.
“Better every day,” Nigel said. “The doctor said that I should be ready to start with physical training in a couple of weeks. Though looking at you I’m not sure that’s actually a good thing.”
“Yeah, well no one hates you the way they do me,” Laura said, glancing across the room at the table where the other captured H.I.V.E. Alpha stream students all sat together, eating in silence. Within just a couple of hours of arriving at the Glasshouse, Furan had gathered them together to explain the situation they now found themselves in. She had made it clear that escape was impossible and that any attempt to prove otherwise had only one punishment: immediate summary execution. Just when Laura had thought that things could not get any bleaker Furan had then, with obvious pleasure, explained to the other H.I.V.E. students that the reason they were in such danger was because of Laura’s treachery. She had neglected to mention that the only reason Laura had betrayed the school was in a desperate attempt to save the lives of her parents and newborn baby brother, who were being held hostage by the Disciples. From that point, her life had been a living hell; on one side were the existing Glasshouse trainees, who hated all of the captured H.I.V.E. students, and on the other were her former classmates, who now blamed her for not only their capture but also the deaths of many of their friends. The only people who still spoke to her were Nigel, Tom, and Penny, all of whom had been present when Laura’s betrayal had first been exposed. They were the only ones who understood the nightmarish position that Laura had been put in and even they had still found it hard to forgive her. She knew how they felt; she still had not forgiven herself.
“I’ve tried to explain what happened to people,” Nigel said quietly, “but most of them don’t want to hear it. It’s going to take time.”
“Oh, I don’t expect anyone to forgive me,” Laura said, pushing the gray slop on her tray around with her plastic spoon. “Even you, Nigel.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not your call,” Nigel said with a tiny smile. “I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I know you, Laura, and I know that you’d never have given them the information they wanted if you’d known what the consequences would be. We’ve got to try and stay positive if we’re going to have any hope of surviving this place.”
Tom and Penny walked past Laura and Nigel and sat down opposite each other at the far end of the table. The last traces of Penny’s exuberantly pink hair had vanished weeks ago, to be replaced by her natural shade of dark brown and she too bore the marks of the Glasshouse’s training—a fresh pink scar on her neck from a recent defeat in a “mock” knife fight. Tom glanced over at Laura and gave a small nod as their eyes met. The pair of them had barely spoken to Laura since they had arrived at the Glasshouse, partly because they did not want to incur the wrath of the other captured H.I.V.E. students, but also, Laura suspected, because they too blamed her for their current predicament.
“I understand that, Nigel,” Laura replied, a sudden look of deep sadness in her eyes, “but what if there’s no one coming for us? What if they can’t find us? What if they don’t want to?”
“You can’t think like that,” Nigel said, shaking his head. “You know they won’t give up on us, Nero, my father, Otto, and the others, so we mustn’t give up on them.” He paused, glancing at the guard who was wandering across the room toward them. “That witch Furan wants nothing more than to break us and so we mustn’t lose faith, because if we do, she wins.”
“This is an . . . unexpected development,” Nero said with a slight frown. Across from him, on the opposite side of H.I.V.E.’s main conference room table, sat the semi-transparent holographic projections of Raven and Otto. “I was pleased to hear that Senator Ronson had met with such an unfortunate accident, but assuming that what he told us was true, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, we may now only have one remaining clue as to the whereabouts of Furan and our students.”
“The Architect,” Otto said.
“Exactly,” Nero replied.
“Is he even real?” Raven asked. “I mean, I’ve heard the stories, just like everyone else, but I always thought they were just that . . . stories.”
“Oh, I can assure you he is quite real,” Nero said with a sigh. “Indeed, we have a certain amount of, shall we say, history.”
“So just who is he?” Otto asked. “And why is he so important?”
“As you are well aware, Mr. Malpense, there are times when members of our fraternity find themselves in need of elaborate but well-hidden facilities.”
“Every good villain should have a secret base,” Otto replied, with a slight smile.
“Precisely,” Nero said with a nod, “but it is phenomenally difficult to construct that kind of project in total secrecy. Quite aside from discreetly obtaining extremely large quantities of construction materials, one must also recruit a skilled workforce that can work quickly and efficiently in often extremely hostile environments and can also be relied upon to keep the nature of that work absolutely secret.”
“So say, for example, you wanted a school built inside an active volcano and didn’t want anyone finding out about it, he’s the man to call.”
“Yes, though he was actually only partially responsible for the design of this facility,” Nero replied. “Which is also part of the reason I’ve not had any contact with him in recent years.”
“And now he’s working for the Disciples,” Raven said.
“Oh, he doesn’t work for anyone,” Nero replied, “he works for whoever has the most interesting project to offer him. He is not the sort of man who would trouble himself worrying about which side he was working for. That neutrality is part of the reason that he has managed to survive in our murderous little world for as long as he has.”
“So he’s not a Disciple, but he’s not part of G.L.O.V.E. either,” Otto said. “So why would he help us?”
“I’m not sure he will,” Nero said with a sigh. “In fact, I rather suspect that he won’t. Especially if you mention my involvement.”
“So where do we go from here?” Otto asked.
“If I had his location, perhaps I could persuade him to tell us where to find Furan,” Raven said.
“Thank you, Natalya,” Nero said, shaking his head, “but I’d rather it didn’t come to that. He may not want to meet me, but there is someone that he would talk to. Get ready to move. I’ll contact you later.”
He cut off the connection and O
tto and Raven’s holographic projections flickered and vanished. Nero stared into space for a moment, lost in thought, before tapping a command into the touch screen embedded in the surface of the table in front of him. A few seconds later, another glowing figure coalesced out of thin air on the other side of the table.
“Hello, Max,” the tall, bald man said, “what can I do for you?”
“Hello, Diabolus,” Nero said with a smile. “I have a favor to ask. I need you to talk to an old friend.”
Anastasia Furan felt a cold fury building inside her as she read the report on the mysterious aviation accident that had claimed the life of Senator Matt Ronson. She had been instrumental in steering his rise through the political ranks and now all of that appeared to have been wasted effort. While it would not have been the first time that a member of their shadowy world had occupied the White House, it would have been extremely useful for her future plans if she had been able to dictate the response of the United States government once those plans went into full effect.
“How did this happen?” Furan said angrily. Her entire head was covered in horrific twisted burn scars, such that there was no longer any trace of her once great beauty. She wore gloves, a long black coat, and a high-necked black blouse that covered every other square inch of her skin.
“We’re not sure,” the nervous-looking man standing on the other side of her desk said. “Our sources within the American intelligence services have told us that they are just as puzzled about what happened. Somebody took out Ronson’s security detail and the two pilots and then it appears that they crashed the plane into the ocean with the senator still on board. They found floating debris from the crash this morning, but they’re still searching for the plane’s flight recorder. They should know more when they find it. Whoever did this, it was a suicide mission, so they’re working on the assumption that it was an act of terrorism at this point.”
“You’re assuming that whoever was responsible was on board when it crashed,” Furan replied. “And why did the Secret Service logs show Ronson’s wife and child as having left the hotel for the airport and yet they were later found unconscious in their room.”
“As I say,” the man replied, “there are many unanswered questions.”
“First our cell leader in London is pushed in front of a train and then someone steals a data slab from our field office in Chicago. Raskoff may have insisted that there was no sensitive data on the device that was stolen, but I fear it may be more than a coincidence that within a week our American cell commander is dead too. It looks to me like someone has declared open season on senior members of our organization and I think I know exactly who that is.”
“Nero,” the man replied.
“Yes,” Furan said with a nod. “I expected reprisals after we attacked his beloved students, of course, but I did not think they would be this effective or brutal. I knew he would send Natalya after us, but there’s more to it than that. I want our best men on this. I want to know how they got to Ronson and I want to know where they intend to hit us next. Project Absalom is at too critical a stage for us to be distracted by this now. Increase the security details on our senior commanders and brief them fully on the threat. Make sure that any sighting of Raven is reported immediately. She will not catch us out so easily again.”
“Understood,” the man replied with a nod and walked out of her office.
Furan stood up from her desk and walked over to the far wall where a portrait of her late brother, Pietor Furan, hung. She stared at the picture for a few seconds before reaching out and laying a hand on the canvas.
“Soon, Pietor,” she said softly, “soon you will be avenged.”
The young man ran across the crowded office, carrying a single sheet of paper. He stopped at an office door on the other side of the room that bore the words “Robert Flack, Director of Operations, Artemis Section.” He knocked once on the door and a few seconds later a voice shouted for him to come in.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Simons?” Flack asked as the young analyst walked into his office.
“I thought you’d want to see this, sir,” Simons said, placing the sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. Printed on it was a black-and-white image that, judging by the poor quality, had been captured from a surveillance-camera feed. It showed a fuzzy image of a teenage boy and a tall dark-haired woman walking through a pair of large glass doors. The only thing unusual about the boy was the spiky snow-white hair on his head.
“Shut the door,” Flack said, studying the image. “When and where was this taken?”
“Yesterday morning,” Simons replied, “at the Ritz Carlton in Phoenix. The Secret Service had been running all of the surveillance feed to see if they could identify whoever it was that attacked Senator Ronson’s wife and son. Our facial-recognition software raised a possible Person of Interest flag and when I checked the alert it was level five.”
Level five was the highest-level flag that could be assigned to an individual by Artemis Section. The section was one of the most secretive and powerful branches of the Central Intelligence Agency. Their job was simple: They found people, people who almost invariably wanted very much not to be found, and they were exceptionally good at their job. As head of the section Robert Flack joked that he reported to only two people, God and the President, and that unlike the President he was an atheist. Now he studied the photo, peering over the half-moon glasses that were perched on the end of his nose. A frown appeared on his gaunt, almost skeletal face as he turned his attention to the woman walking beside the boy in the photo.
“That’s definitely Malpense,” Flack said, gesturing for Simons to take the seat on the other side of the desk, “but who’s this with him, I wonder.”
It had been over six months since Flack had been personally instructed by the President with discovering all there was to know about the mysterious young man known as Otto Malpense. They had first become aware of Malpense when he had saved the President’s life when Airforce One had been hijacked in midair by terrorists. He had then been taken into custody by the disgraced rogue intelligence agency H.O.P.E. and subsequently vanished. Several months after that he had contacted the President during the crisis that had arisen when hostile forces had attacked the Army’s Advanced Weapons Project facility and taken various high-ranking military officers and civilians hostage. The boy had persuaded the President to give him the launch codes to Thor’s Hammer, an orbital nuclear-weapon launch platform, and had then used it to destroy a weaponized nanite swarm that would otherwise have almost certainly killed every living thing on the face of the planet. Immediately after this incident, the truth of which was only known to a handful people outside of the Oval Office, the President had ordered Flack to find out just who Otto Malpense was and whether he posed an ongoing threat to the nation’s security. The stark fact of the matter was that Flack knew almost as little about Otto Malpense today as he had when he had been tasked with the investigation. He had been a prisoner of H.O.P.E. for some considerable time, but all of that agency’s records had been lost during the chaos of its dramatic collapse. As it stood he had little more than the boy’s name and a handful of images. Now here he was, walking into the same hotel that Matt Ronson had been staying at on the night before he died in such mysterious circumstances.
“She’s no one,” Simons replied, “apparently.”
“Really?” Flack said, sounding surprised. “You ran her?”
“Through every database we have,” Simons replied. “Not one hit. She’s a ghost.”
“There’s no such thing, Simons, you know that.”
“I know, sir, but there’s no trace of an ID for her.”
Flack’s puzzled frown deepened further. By this point in the twenty-first century it was staggeringly difficult to erase all traces of a person’s identity. The American government alone had poured trillions of dollars into making sure that they could always put a name to a face. Beating the system and moving around freely on American soil wa
s supposed to be next to impossible.
“Do you want me to broaden the search?” Simons asked. “I could put this out on the black net and see who bites.”
“No,” Flack said. “The last thing I want is to spook Malpense and whoever this woman is and send them into hiding. I’m going to feed her image to some allied agencies and see if we can get any hits in the next few days. If she is with Malpense we can track him that way without flagging our interest in him to anyone else.”
“Okay, boss,” Simons replied. He was halfway to Flack’s office door when he turned back with a half-smile on his face. “I don’t suppose you can tell me who this kid is and why everyone’s so interested in him, can you?”
“Sure, no problem,” Flack said, raising an eyebrow. “All you have to do is get yourself elected President.”
chapter four
Wing stood in the doorway of Shelby’s room keeping watch for any sign of one of H.I.V.E.’s many security guards while Shelby and Franz sat staring at the monitor attached to the terminal on her desk.
“I am thinking that maybe we are needing Otto or Laura at this point,” Franz said with a puzzled frown as he examined the text on the screen.
“Yeah, well, we’re just going to have to do our best without them,” Shelby replied. “I think I’m nearly there. If I just try and log in through this proxy then—”
Shelby’s terminal emitted a loud warning tone and the screen went black save for two lines of glowing red text in the center of the screen.
ACCESS DENIED
ONE LOGIN ATTEMPT REMAINING
“Damn!” Shelby spat, slamming her hand down on the desk. “I was sure that was it.”
“I am thinking it is a good thing that H.I.V.E.mind is offline for maintenance,” Franz said with a sigh. The artificial intelligence that normally ran the school’s electrical and data systems had been down for the past couple of months. There had been no real explanation as to why, other than Professor Pike occasionally muttering something under his breath about “substantial upgrades.”