boots. As if she had been out for a casual morning run when she had come across thirty bloodthirsty villagers dog- piling on him. But he didn’t buy it. Her fighting skills were world class.
Then she turned to face him and he recognized her.
“Asya,” he said.
She simply nodded at him. Once. Curt. Very Russian.
He had last seen her when he had put ashore in Norway. Two men had held her captive and beaten her on the boat before Rook had boarded. At first, he told himself it was none of his business-he had been trying to disappear, after all. When he had finally had enough of her whimpered cries in the hold, he had fought the two men and sent them both overboard into the frigid Barents Sea. Then he had released her from the hold. They had gone their separate ways when Maksim Dashkov, the captain of the fishing trawler Songbird, had used a small inflatable rowboat to get them ashore.
Rook looked at the woman and once again felt the suspicious feeling that he knew her from somewhere. He had felt the same thing when they first spoke on the boat. The bruises on her face had mostly healed. Her dark brown eyes revealed nothing. He peered at her more intently.
“What is it, Stanislav?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“My spider-sense is tingling,” he grunted.
“Your what? I do not understand.”
“Never mind. Thank you for saving me back there.”
“It is only proper I repay you for saving me on the Songbird.”
“Yes, it is. But your timing is…convenient,” Rook hadn’t taken his eyes off her. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but now all the alarms were going off in his head. He felt that this woman was familiar. She was a serious badass, and now he questioned how she could have ended up in that situation on board the boat, tied up by two worthless thugs. And then, weeks later, after heading off in the opposite direction, here she was, just in time to bail him out.
“Why are you here, Asya? Don’t get me wrong-I’m grateful for the rescue, but a lot of weird shit has been going down and you showing up out of the blue is a bit suspicious.”
“I understand,” she looked him in the eyes, and he felt she was about to level with him. “Those men that had me on the boat. I do not know who they were. But I have learned that they also took my parents. I do not know why. I thought I might ask you to help me locate them. It took me awhile to find you.”
“Uh-huh. And your fighting skills?”
“My father trained me. He was always a big fan of the ballet and the martial arts.”
Rook still kept his eyes on her. He wasn’t sure about the rest of her story, but he did believe that her parents had been taken. He could see the pain in her eyes when she had spoken about it.
“What kind of work does your father do? Is he a soldier? A spy?”
She looked aghast. “No. Nothing like that. He works for an electric utility company.”
“And men kidnapped him and your mother? And you want my help to rescue them?”
“Yes.” She cast her eyes down, suspecting his answer would be negative.
“I’m sorry, Asya. You saw those nutbags from the village.”
“Nutbags, Stanislav?” Asya asked with a quizzical eyebrow raised high on her forehead.
Damnit, Rook thought. He’d slipped back into his normal American accent. Fuck it. Too late now.
He let out a sigh and continued. “It was like they were possessed. I need to get to the bottom of this mess.” He felt bad telling her he couldn’t help, but he had put off getting in touch with the rest of his team for too long. They would be wondering what had happened to him after Siberia. It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself and the people who had died, his team in Russia and Peder.
“I need to bury my friend and then get to the nearest phone. I have some other…friends who need to know about what’s going on here.” He started to turn and walk away from her, waiting to see what would happen next. Surely, she wouldn’t let him just go. There would be more to the story, he could feel it.
“Wait,” she grabbed his arm. “If I come with you, and help to get to the bottom of this mess, as you say? Then you will help me?”
EIGHT
Above Lake Michigan, Chicago, USA
3 November, 0100 Hrs
Tom Duncan sat in the troop area of the stealth-modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter looking at a small array of computer screens that showed the chaos around the globe.
He was monitoring the situation, as well as orchestrating the retrieval of his various field personnel-King, Knight and Bishop-to combat the phenomenon. One of his other field agents, Rook, had been missing in action for some time, although some conflicting reports placed him in the northern part of Russia or Norway. The fifth member of the field team, Queen, was in that region looking for the man.
As the de facto leader and dispatcher of Chess Team, Duncan was known as Deep Blue, and his identity was a closely guarded secret from all those not part of his team. Only those members of his growing organization, which he had recently christened Endgame, were privy to the fact that Tom Duncan, former President of the United States of America, was now a global mover and shaker, in control of his own former Delta team of commandos that could be sent anywhere around the world on a moment’s notice.
The formation of the team had been Duncan’s idea when he was president. Along with Domenick Boucher at CIA, and General Michael Keasling at Fort Bragg, Duncan had created a crack team that could deal with terrorists the world over. But then a strange thing happened. More and more frequently, the team had needed to combat unusual threats, starting with a genetics company led by a megalomaniac that had genetically altered soldiers and animals with the blood of the recently discovered Lernian Hydra. Then there had been an outbreak of the Brugada virus, which led to the discovery of a race of Neanderthal-like creatures in Vietnam. Most recently, the team had battled golems and other inanimate objects-statues, crystals, skeletons, even Stonehenge-imbued temporarily with life.
Duncan’s decision the previous year to allow an upstart senator to smear his name was part of a longer- range plan of Duncan’s to step down from the presidency and out of the spotlight-so he could devote more time to Chess Team and their efforts to battle all manner of threats worldwide.
The present threat of city-devouring energy domes around the world most certainly qualified as a Chess Team-level threat. The only problem was the team was scattered. With Rook AWOL and Queen on a personal mission to find him, he had already been down two bodies when the new threat emerged.
King was on leave down in Florida; Knight and Bishop were on a mission in Uganda that he had been forced to abandon. The team was stretched too thin. He was glad he had hired a few more people to act as occasional field personnel and support-his Black team, as well as another group to act as security and assistants at the team’s base of operations in the White Mountains of New Hampshire-the White team.
The continuation of the Chess theme was satisfying, but it was really more a matter of logistics. The team needed support. Their budget came from one of the Pentagon’s fabled black budgets and was buried so deeply in red tape that no one would be able to discover it, even if they knew to look for it. Only Keasling and Boucher were still directly working with the military. But others were required for security at Endgame’s headquarters, to fly Chess Team’s transport ship the Crescent and the Black Hawk he pres-ently rode in, as well as mechanics, weapons experts, scientists and computer experts like Lewis Aleman-who had been a part of the group since the beginning- and even a few spies. Over all, Endgame was shaping up nicely.
But even with the additional team members, this current threat necessitated Duncan getting out into the field himself.
“Two minutes to drop point, sir,” Black Three, the pilot, turned to address Duncan. “Better suit up.”
“Thanks.” Duncan couldn’t go into the field without disguising his identity. His face was known, far and wide, as a previous president. And the current president, his former VP, would not take too kindly to the discovery of a covert special ops team operating on US soil. Duncan felt bad for deceiving the man, but the President not knowing provided him with a buffer of not just plausible deniability, but actual deniability, and provided Endgame the
