“Un caffè e una di acqua, grazie signore,” the waiter said with a nod and walked away.
Otto took the opportunity to appreciate some of the magnificent architecture that surrounded them, dominated by the spectacular ornately decorated marble arches of St. Mark’s Basilica and the towering red brick Campanile opposite it. The most striking thing for a place this busy was the lack of traffic noise; instead there was just the burbling white noise of humanity as a hundred different conversations went on around him.
“He’s late,” Raven said.
“Maybe, but the important thing is that we’re not,” Darkdoom replied. “Don’t worry, he’ll be here.”
They had been waiting for several minutes when a voice behind Otto said, “Do you mind if I sit here?”
“Actually we’re waiting for someone,” Raven said, her hand slipping inside her coat.
Otto turned to see a young woman standing behind him with long dark hair which was held back in a bunch, skewered by a pair of pencils. She was wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, paint-spattered blue jeans and a battered khaki army surplus jacket that looked like it had probably been through at least a couple of wars.
“Oh, I know you are,” the girl said with a smile. “My name’s Gretchen and you’re here to meet with the Architect. I’m going to take you to him.”
“Why the change of plan?” Darkdoom asked, with a slight frown. “I thought we were meeting him here.”
“Oh no,” the girl called Gretchen replied, “much too public. He just wanted you to come here so that I could meet you and confirm that you actually are who you say you are.”
I am detecting an encrypted narrow-band signal, H.I.V.E.mind said inside Otto’s head. It would seem to be originating from this young woman.
Otto noticed the tiny hole in the center of the peace-symbol badge that the girl was wearing on her coat and he reached out with his senses, trying to see if he could determine who might be receiving the signal broadcast by the microcamera that Gretchen appeared to be wearing. It was no good—he could sense the stream of data that was being sent, but after a short distance it was lost in the digital background noise of the hundreds of smartphones, tablets, and laptops carried by the people that surrounded them.
“Understood,” Gretchen said after a few seconds, as if replying to someone. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Go where?” Raven asked.
“That would be telling,” Gretchen replied. “Come on, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
With that, she set off across the square and Darkdoom rose to follow her.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Raven said as she and Otto stood up. “She could be leading us anywhere.”
“Between the three of us,” Darkdoom said with a wry smile, “I’m reasonably confident we should be able to handle whatever situation might arise.”
They followed Gretchen across the square as she made her way through the crowds.
“We’ll take your boat, if that’s okay?” Gretchen said as they walked.
“Of course,” Darkdoom replied. “Do we have far to go?”
“No, not really,” Gretchen said.
Minutes later they were onboard the sleek black boat, sweeping along one of the ancient city’s many canals. Otto sat quietly, memorizing their route as Gretchen gave Darkdoom occasional directions. Eventually they pulled into a narrow waterway flanked on either side by the walls of the surrounding buildings. Ahead of them was a darkened tunnel entrance, sealed by a pair of rusty iron gates that slowly swung open as the boat coasted forward.
“Head inside please,” Gretchen said, gesturing toward the open gateway. Raven shot Darkdoom a concerned look.
“Nice place for an ambush,” Raven said, eyeing the pitch-black tunnel suspiciously.
“If that’s how you feel, you can drop me off now and walk away,” Gretchen said with a shrug. “You requested this meeting, remember.”
“It’s okay, Natalya,” Darkdoom said calmly. “We’ll be fine.”
He pushed forward on the throttle and the boat glided into the tunnel. The gates swung shut behind them and lights flickered on, illuminating the crumbling brickwork of the tunnel which stretched ahead into the gloom.
“Stop the boat,” Gretchen said. Darkdoom did as he was instructed and cut the engine, letting the boat slowly drift to a halt. Gretchen reached inside her coat and in a blur Raven had a pistol leveled at the girl’s forehead.
“Diabolus,” an amplified voice crackled from a loudspeaker mounted on the wall nearby, “please tell your nervous friend to put her gun down.”
Darkdoom reached out a hand and placed it on top of Raven’s weapon, slowly pushing it downward until it pointed away from Gretchen.
“Hello, old friend,” Darkdoom said. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.”
“All in good time, Diabolus,” the voice replied. “First, I need you to do what Gretchen here asks you. Please forgive my caution. I fear that I may have become somewhat paranoid in my old age.”
Gretchen pulled her hand out from inside her coat and opened it to reveal a tiny black box. She opened the box to reveal three small capsules.
“Please take one each and swallow it,” Gretchen said. “The drug inside the capsule is harmless, but it will render you unconscious for approximately half an hour, during which time I will take you to my employer.”
“This is too risky,” Raven said, shaking her head.
“Then you should feel free to leave and we will go our separate ways. I shall not trouble you and you shall not trouble me, ever again,” the voice from the loudspeaker said calmly.
“Natalya, I know this may seem foolhardy,” Darkdoom said, “but we have no choice. You may not trust these people, but I know this man. We have nothing to fear from him.”
Raven looked Darkdoom in the eye and after a couple of seconds she sighed, gave a tiny shake of her head, and holstered her pistol. Darkdoom reached out and took one of the capsules and handed it to Otto before taking one for himself. Raven took the last pill and placed it in the palm of her other hand, still eyeing it with suspicion. Darkdoom popped the capsule into his mouth and swallowed, followed by Otto and finally Raven. For a few seconds Otto felt nothing, but then he felt a sudden rush of dizziness and the world around him faded first to gray and then to black.
Laura stood behind a pillar at the edge of the combat training area in the bottom of the Glasshouse’s central pit, watching for any sign of a guard who might realize that she wasn’t actually supposed to be there. She’d arranged to meet Nigel, Tom, and Penny there earlier that morning by discreetly passing them notes during breakfast. The notes had been written on scraps of paper so tiny that they were easily swallowed once read. It would be suicide to be caught by one of the guards with anything that even hinted at any kind of covert conspiracy. It had taken Laura several days of subtle observation to find a spot that was not covered by any of the many cameras that filled the facility. They could meet here unobserved as long as they avoided any random guard patrols. It was the usual hour for the Glasshouse’s inmates to carry out their work assignments and she had noticed that the guards seemed to focus their attention on the areas that contained potential improvised weaponry like the kitchen or the workshops during that time. If they were quick, careful, and a bit lucky, they should avoid detection. Tom was the first to arrive a couple of minutes later.
“I can’t stay long,” he whispered. “I’m supposed to be cleaning shower block D.”
“Is Penny coming?” Laura asked, looking around nervously.
“She’ll be here,” Tom replied. “She’s on laundry duty though, so she needs to make her pick-ups first.”
“Hi, guys,” Nigel said as he arrived. “Is it safe to talk here?”
“As safe as anywhere is in this place,” Laura replied.
“That’s not terribly reassuring,” Nigel said with a weak smile.
A minute or so later Penny arrived, pushing a cart of dirt
y laundry in front of her which she parked against the wall before quickly walking over to them.
“I’ve got five minutes before someone notices I’m taking too long with the collections,” Penny said, “so what’s this all about?”
“I have an idea for how we can get a message out of here,” Laura said, “but I’m going to need your help.”
“Okay, I’m listening,” Penny said. “What you got, Laura?”
“This might sound crazy, but I need to get access to one of the camera drones,” Laura said.
“You’re right, that does sound crazy,” Tom said with a frown. “They’ll execute all of us the moment we lay a finger on one of those things. Not to mention the fact that there’s the whole ‘they can fly and we can’t’ thing.”
Penny put a hand on his arm. “Let’s hear her out,” she said. “Assuming we could get our hands on one of those things, what then?”
“I think I can reprogram one with a simple virus that will be transmitted throughout the camera drones and via them to the central server. If I can, I should be able to encode a simple message within that virus that can be hidden inside every data packet that leaves the central server. We wouldn’t necessarily know where the message was being sent, but since it would be contained within every data packet it would hopefully spread far and wide before anyone realized it was there.”
“Then what? We just wait for someone to intercept one of these messages and hope it’s someone friendly?” Tom asked. “Seems risky. What if it’s decoded by someone else and Furan finds out?”
“Then I’m dead,” Laura said matter-of-factly, “but at this point I’d rather risk that than just stay here slowly losing the will to live.”
“So it’s a message in a bottle,” Nigel said.
“Effectively, yes,” Laura replied with a nod. “I know it’s a long shot, but it’s got to be better than nothing.”
“So where do we fit into all of this?” Penny asked.
“I need you guys because there’s one thing that I have to get for this to work—and only you can get it for me.”
chapter five
Flack studied the latest status reports with a mixture of anger and frustration. He had always known that it was probably a vain hope that they would pick up some trace of Malpense at a border crossing, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the mysterious boy had once again slipped the net. He had reviewed the file on Malpense for what felt like the thousandth time and still he was no nearer to understanding who he was or where he came from. There were some records from an orphanage in London giving details of the boy’s younger years, but at the age of thirteen he appeared to have simply vanished off the face of the earth. That wasn’t terribly unusual; people disappeared all the time, but the fact that he then went on to be involved in events of such magnitude told Flack that there was probably much more to the disappearance than there initially seemed to be. He didn’t like mysteries, he liked solutions.
There was a ping from his laptop and he put the file down and focused on the screen in front of him. The supercomputer buried beneath Langley that was responsible for all of the agency’s facial-recognition processing had raised a flag. He pulled up the image that had caught the machine’s attention and studied it. At first glance it was nothing of interest, just a photo that an English schoolgirl had uploaded to a social-media site showing her and her friends standing in the middle of a busy square. The machines at CIA headquarters routinely scanned all images uploaded to these sites for persons of interest and though the software was good it was notorious for throwing up false positives. The rectangle highlighting the positive hit in this particular image was not framing anyone in the foreground though. Instead it drew his attention to a face in the background. Sitting at a café table behind the group of laughing girls was the woman who the security camera had caught entering the hotel in Phoenix and sitting next to her, with his back to the camera, was someone with a crop of spiky white hair. Flack felt his heart rate increase as he accessed the data embedded within the photograph, silently praying that it had been taken with a smartphone. A moment later his prayers were answered as he studied the properties of the file and saw the precise GPS coordinates that had been recorded at the moment when the photo was taken. He smiled to himself as he punched the coordinates into his laptop’s mapping software. His job was so much easier now that everyone carried a device around in their pocket that allowed people like him to track their movements twenty-four hours a day. A second later he had the precise location of where the photograph had been taken less than forty-five minutes ago. He picked up the phone and quickly dialed a number.
“This is Flack,” he said, “get me the Italian field office. I want a full snatch team mobilized and feet on the ground in Venice within half an hour. Malpense was in St. Mark’s Square less than one hour ago.”
“I knew he wasn’t just lying on a beach somewhere,” Shelby said with a grin as she, Wing, and Franz read the report on the screen in front of them. It detailed Otto and Raven’s efforts to track down and interrogate the senior members of the Disciples. “Although, with his complexion, lying on a beach for more than about thirty seconds would potentially be just as dangerous as what he’s been getting up to. He’s been working with Raven all this time.”
“It would appear so,” Wing said, “though they do not appear to have made an enormous amount of progress.” A note of frustration was clearly evident in some of the latest reports. The last update detailed the accidental death of a senior Disciple commander in London while he was being pursued by Raven. Shelby pulled up the accompanying photographs.
“Ewwww,” she said, before hurriedly closing the pictures again. “Train one, bad guy zero.”
“Yes,” Wing said, “most unpleasant, but that was several weeks ago. This file is not up to date.”
“Well, at least we are knowing that Otto is okay,” Franz said. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Hmmm,” Wing said, walking across the room and sitting down on the edge of what had once been Laura’s bed, with an unhappy look on his face.
“Hey, you want to give us a minute, Franz?” Shelby said quietly, looking slightly worried.
Franz saw her expression and gave a quick nod before heading out of the room.
“You okay, big guy?” Shelby asked as the door hissed shut behind Franz.
“No, not really,” Wing replied.
“What’s up?” she asked, putting her arm around his shoulders.
“I hate this,” Wing replied, shaking his head and staring at the floor. “Hard as it was when Otto told us that he had been expelled from H.I.V.E., at least we had the consolation of knowing that he would not be in any further danger. But this,” he gestured toward the text on the screen across the room, “knowing what he’s doing out there makes being stuck here unable to help worse. Otto is more than just my friend, Shelby, he is my brother and I cannot stand the thought of him risking his life trying to find Laura, Nigel, and the others without my . . . without our help.” He let out a long sigh.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Shelby said, hugging him. “I understand, you know. You think there’s an hour that goes by without me thinking about Laura? Wondering if she or Nigel are still alive? What Furan did to us . . . it hurts, but we can’t . . . we mustn’t give up hope.”
“I know that, but I just want to help somehow. I’m sick of sitting here, not knowing what’s happening. I thought that knowing what progress was being made to find the others would help, but it doesn’t. If anything, it just makes it harder.”
“Well,” Shelby said with a crooked smile, “look at it this way. If you’re a member of the Disciples right now, you have Otto tracking you down and Raven coming after you when he does.”
“Actually,” Wing said, “when you put it like that, I almost . . . almost . . . feel sorry for them.”
Furan slowly flexed her hand in front of her, examining the silver metal that was now fused with her flesh and bone. The procedure had been
quick, but excruciating, just as she had been warned it would be. It didn’t matter, she had experienced worse.
“Mobility seems good,” Dr. Ross said, examining the screens nearby. “You should find that your grip strength is actually higher than it was before your injury.”
“Excellent work, Doctor,” Furan said, “thank you. Now if there is nothing else I have pressing matters to attend to.”
“No,” Ross replied, “just let me know if you experience any problems with fine motor control.”
Furan nodded and walked out of the room and into the main laboratory area. She headed toward the rear of the room and examined the large Plexiglas cube. The robotic arm was now immobile, folded into its rest position, and the vapor that had previously filled the room was gone, revealing the empty metal table bolted to the floor in its center. Furan heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Dr. Klein approaching, looking tired but satisfied.
“I assume the prototype is in transit?” Furan asked, glancing over her shoulder at the empty cube.
“Yes,” Klein replied, “the transport left over an hour ago. It should be at the target area in less than three hours.”
“Good,” Furan replied, “and the kill-switch is armed? I want to be able to destroy it if we lose control for any reason.”
“Of course,” Klein replied, “armed and keyed to your biometric data as requested. Let’s hope that we don’t have to use it though.”
“Indeed, Doctor, let us hope not, for your sake.”
Klein swallowed nervously.
“Assuming that this trial goes as planned you may begin the transfer of your equipment and staff over to the main facility,” Furan said. “If the prototype is a success, I see no reason to delay Absalom any further.”
“As you wish,” Klein replied with a nod. “I shall make the necessary preparations immediately.”
“Otto,” Raven said, shaking him gently by the shoulder. “Otto, wake up.”
Otto groaned softly and then opened his eyes. He had a slight headache and his mouth was dry, but other than that he didn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from whatever drug it was that they had been forced to take.