Killer Thrillers Box Set: 3 Techno-Thriller, Action/Adventure Science Fiction Thrillers (8 page)

Labels of the pyramid’s main features had been added, and in parenthesis under each element was the corresponding street or feature on the D.C. map. The Ascending Passage was Pennsylvania Avenue, leading directly to the King’s Chamber — the White House map. The northwestern side of Pennsylvania Avenue was the Grand Galley, starting on the D.C. map perfectly where the Capitol Building was located.
 

The Descending Passage lined up with Potomac Avenue, the Subterranean Chamber corresponded to a point in the Potomac River. The shaft section of the pyramid had a similar shape to D.C.’s canal, and Vilocek explained that there were some liberties taken by the architects of the canal due to the natural topography of the area. Still, the similarities were uncanny. After a full minute examining the map, Corinne and Jensen looked up at Vilocek’s wide grin.
 

“You see, Professor, you’ve helped us determine the location of this power source — hidden in plain sight for more than two centuries. The Founding Fathers needed to protect the location of the secret if they were unable to find it in their lifetime — in some way that would go relatively undisturbed over the years.

“The small sliver of crystal you see before you was originally found at the bottom of the Potomac River, in Washington, D.C. by a team of scientists. As a matter of fact,” he said, pointing now at the superimposed pyramid/street map image on the table, “they found it right here. It was in a rotting box, almost buried by silt, directly where the Subterranean Chamber on this image lies. It turns out they were pointing us to Egypt; to the chamber beneath the Great Pyramid.”

Jensen Andrews and his niece shared a puzzled look, then one of shock.

“I require you and your niece to join us on this expedition — your knowledge of the Golden Ratio and ancient Egypt dwarfs even my own. We may need that kind of expertise.” His eyes moved slowly from Corinne to the map, finally resting on Professor Andrews.

“Mr. — Dr. — Vilocek,” Jensen stammered, “I appreciate your acknowledgement of my expertise, but why help you? What’s to say you won’t just kill us when you no longer need us?”

Vilocek nodded toward Agent Karn.

Karn smiled almost imperceptibly. He stood up, grabbing a fistful of Corinne’s long, red hair. She gave a yelp as he yanked her to her feet and forced her toward the far wall behind the table.
 

When they were about twenty feet away, Professor Jensen screamed in pain.
 

“What the hell!“ Corinne said, as Jensen fell over backward in his chair, clutching his side. He struggle to his hands and knees, crying out in short gasps.
 

“Help… I… can’t breathe… Please!” Jensen gulped for air, his right hand clutched tightly over the bullet wound in his side.

“Professor Andrews,” Vilocek said calmly, “you were not shot with a ‘normal’ bullet last night. We have developed here at Vilocorp a very unique instrument — one based on the crystal piece our Founding Fathers left to us.
 

“In addition to its miraculous healing properties, we’ve found that by synthetically bonding the crystal with particular elements — in this case, lead — we can produce some interesting results. You were shot with a lead-infused synthetic crystal that acts as a magnet of sorts — dormant when close to another piece of lead-crystal like it, but when pulled a certain distance apart, it becomes active, turning into a heated piece of metal.
 

“You,” he continued, looking at Corinne, “are wearing a counterpart piece of this crystal substance, locked to your leg.”
 

Corinne looked down in horror, just now noticing the small handcuff-like metal band, with a grayish-clear rock attached to one side of it.
 

“Your uncle is experiencing this phenomena firsthand,” Vilocek continued, waving a careless hand at Jensen. “Eventually, if you get far enough apart, the heat will become so intense that it will literally burn a hole through his body. He’ll be in pain, but eventually he’ll be knocked out from catalytic shock. Our test subjects lasted about twenty minutes, depending on where their bullet wound was on their body. Eventually, though, they all bled out — and I expect the same outcome for your uncle, should you remain separated for that long.”

Corinne had tears in her eyes. “You bastard…“
 

“You should also know, Ms. Banks,” Vilocek said, ignoring the insult, “that each of us is carrying an identical substance, designed to react with the bullet inside your uncle. If you try to get away, alone, from the men on my team, he will die. Slowly, and very painfully, I assure you.”

Jensen silently rocked back and forth on the floor, seething in pain.
 

CHAPTER 11

12:13 AM - WHITTENFIELD LABORATORIES Headquarters, Washington, D.C., USA

Bryce sighed with weariness, less from exhaustion than extreme boredom. His wounds hardly bothered him, save for the occasional flare-up in his shoulder where the ball and socket’s tendons had taken a little longer to heal properly. His security detail tonight had him walking quite a bit. His route through the complex was essentially a circle he shared with two other men, one named Eric Benson and the other a fat lumpy fellow named Behar. Bryce couldn’t remember the guy’s first name — kind of sad, since he was Behar’s boss — so he usually just called him “Behemoth;” only in his head, of course.
 

He shook his head, laughing internally. He walked up the stairs out of the tall tower encasing the facility’s combustion core unit — the power center for the Whittenfield Research center. Except for his two “recruits,” part of the compensation package Bryce had worked out with Whittenfield two months ago in Afghanistan, his team was a pretty shoddy excuse for a security detail. He’d have been happier with some “rent-a-cops” from the D.C. Police force. “Behemoth” Behar was a nice guy; mid-forties, wife and kids in the city, probably liked long walks on the beach, that sort of thing. He just wasn’t much to write home about when it came to physical appearance or agility. Or target practice, weight training, or anything else related to being a security guard at a high-security research firm.

The other five members of the team weren’t much better. He had only really met one of them, mostly because the kid was out drinking the night he was supposed be on the clock with Bryce. Not well-suited to dishing out tongue-lashings, Bryce had just stared him down when he finally returned from his “night out,” two hours late for his shift. The kid’s conscience seemed to have taken over from there, and he’d caused no more trouble. Bryce thought his name was Adams… Adamson? No, Adam something.
Whatever,
he thought. The remaining three men didn’t strike Bryce as anything more than the standard career-type guards. At least they were all nice enough, and got along pretty well together, but not one of them was higher than average in any regard. They were all just guys punching a clock, looking forward to quitting time. They all went home at the end of the day, forgetting about work until their next shift.
 

Only Bryce and his two hand-picked recruits — Privates Wayne and Jeff Thompson — lived at the firm’s headquarters, in the same residence wing with the scientists and some of the other staff. The three of them shared a room, Bryce on one side and the brothers on the other, in a bunk bed unit. Wayne “Ranger” and Jeff “Hawk” Thompson were actually out tonight enjoying the D.C. nightlife, but Bryce expected them back within the hour for the shift change. They were good men, and great soldiers — Bryce had trained with them a few years ago, and they’d been close with Bryce since college.
 

The Thompson brothers were from Texas, raised on a ranch north of Abilene. They had grown up most of their lives farming, hunting, and wreaking havoc on their sleepy town. Their father was an avid farmer and rancher, and their mother was a housewife. Both the boys enjoyed a comfortable existence living the American Dream.
 

To outsiders, the family of four seemed to have a normal existence, but their commonalities with the traditional American way of life ended with a home-cooked meal each night.
 

Their father, Mr. Thompson (Bryce hadn’t ever heard his first name used), was an ex-Marine who had served in Vietnam and the Gulf War, and had a distinguished service record that contradicted his nonchalant farming life. As boys and young men, the Thompson brothers were trained by their father to track, hunt, and shoot like soldiers, and the three of them had even spent weeks at a time on numerous occasions living off the land on camping trips and survival expeditions on their 100-plus acre Texas farmstead.
 

In college, Bryce loved to listen to their stories, often told by the brothers via intense bickering and arguing matches; Wayne staying coolheaded and understated, while Jeff would exaggerate the stories beyond recognition. The effect was a hilarious hours-long epic, complete with animated descriptions and accounts acted out by the pair.
 

One of Bryce’s favorites was the time when twelve-year-old Wayne and ten-year-old Jeff, home for the summer from middle school, had decided to go on a camping trip for the weekend down by the farm’s brook — this time unaccompanied by their father. They’d gone to the same location plenty of times and had long before stashed gear and supplies at the campsite for a quicker setup. This particular weekend the boys had forgone their mother’s prepared picnic-style meals, planning instead to catch or hunt their own. The only food item they brought, however, was a plastic 12-ounce Coca-Cola bottle Jeff had filled with dry ice from the supermarket on the way home from school. He didn’t tell Wayne he’d brought it, and when they were about to cast their lines, Jeff filled the bottle with water, tightened the cap, and threw it in a bit farther upstream. As it floated past, he casually asked his older brother to grab it, claiming he’d accidentally dropped it in.
 

As Wayne reached for the bottle, the pressure inside from the reaction of the melting CO2 and water forced the plastic to expand and explode — right in Wayne’s face. Half of the busted cap left a shallow yet bloody gash from his left cheek to his ear.

At first Wayne didn’t respond. The pain of the small cut didn’t immediately set in, so Wayne’s first reaction was to chase Jeff through the campsite and neighboring farmland.
 
Being older and faster, he eventually caught Jeff near the house and started to deliver a memorable beating — which was abruptly interrupted by their mother, who happened to glance out the kitchen window just in time. The tongue lashing she gave both boys was almost as bad as the beating Wayne had tried to give Jeff; to make matters worse, their father came home and restricted both boys to the house for a week.
 

Bryce had met the brothers in college in a required physical fitness course and liked them instantly. They tried to meet up often, to work out, grab a pizza, or just hang out often. By the time they’d finished their degrees — Wayne’s in Agricultural Economics and Jeff’s in Recreation Studies — Bryce had watched them grow into two of the finest men he’d had the pleasure of knowing.

When they trained together — in college or as young soldiers — they would usually get into competitive lifting sessions that would leave them sore for days afterward. Bryce loved their charismatic personalities; wherever they were, people seemed to flock to them. They had great hearts and cared for people, a trait instilled into them by their parents and cultivated over years of hard work managing the farm’s cattle, fields, and the multitude of daily chores. Bryce considered them his closest friends, even though he hadn’t seen them for more than three years prior to hiring them for this job. It was great to be back together — almost like college again.
 

Bryce shook off his nostalgia as he approached the final checkpoint of his round. After this stop, he’d reenter the research base for a brief 15-minute break. Following that he’d start the entire loop over again for a final round, a one-hour trip around the facility’s buildings and research labs, followed by one more check of the power plant’s core unit. Finally, after six trips around the base — equal to about a 7.5-hour shift — he’d retire for the night as the Thompson brothers and a few of the other security guards took up the early morning shift.
 

His last stop for the route was a small building set apart from the main facilities. Its construction was similar to the rest — white, stucco exterior with few windows — but Bryce wasn’t sure what was inside. The building had only one door on the southeast side and was simply labeled “H.” As the building was set on a small hill, he liked to take a brief pause at its north side and look out over the rest of the complex. Getting a bird’s-eye view of the entire place let Bryce see how sprawling the Whittenfield Research firm’s grounds were. From here, nine buildings filled his vision. All painted an eggshell white, all mostly the same size and roughly the same shape — one or two stories tall; the smaller ones about 50 yards long by 50 yards wide, and the largest, in the center of the grounds, about 200 yards long and 100 wide.
 

Looking down, Bryce noticed the Thompson brothers returning from their trip out on the town. They were too far off to make out the details, but he instantly recognized their walk — an ambling gait, sort of a hybrid between a duck and a cowboy who’d been on a horse for too long. Stealth wasn’t in their nature. Bryce chuckled to himself as he watched their lazy stroll toward the building’s glass entranceway, their motions indicating that they were again engaged in a heated — though certainly trivial — argument.
 

As they closed in on the front door, Bryce noticed something else. Something moving behind the brothers, around the next building to their north. His eyes darted over to the spot, the rest of his body instinctually going stiff.

There it was again.
 

If he hadn’t been focused at the spot, he would have completely missed it. It was a very large man, crouching down and clad in black. It looked like Quasimodo from
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
— if Quasimodo had been a larger-than-life football player. The man was clearly stalking something — sneaking toward the building the Thompsons had just entered.