Shadow Tyrants (Oregon Files 13)

“I think Carlton made it out with his assistant. Gupta, too.”

“Even if they aren’t all dead, it’ll take them time to regroup from that mess.”

When they reached the opening to the exit tunnel, the anxious guard stationed there asked Mallik and Torkan what the screaming had been about, but he didn’t get an answer. Torkan viciously chopped him in the throat and took his weapon. The guard fell to his knees, his windpipe collapsed.

“The other guards will come after us,” Mallik said, looking at the dead man. “Even you can’t kill all of them. They’ll catch us before we get off the Library property.”

“No they won’t,” Torkan replied. He took the guard’s guns and removed two wicked-looking knives from his belt and said, “Let’s go.”

Mallik didn’t ask what Torkan had in mind. Strategic thinking was Mallik’s skill, tactical creativity was Torkan’s. Mallik simply followed him into the passageway, where they took off at a trot.

As they got close to the end of the long tunnel, the sound of footsteps pounding behind them echoed off the stone. Torkan let loose a volley from his gun while Mallik activated the lion heads control. The barrier slowly lowered, and they dove to the ground to avoid the guards’ bullets that were pinging off the corridor walls.

By the time the barrier reached the floor, Torkan’s ammo was gone. They’d be chased down outside long before they got to their waiting car and executed on the spot.

They stepped across the barrier as it started to close with the rising water. Torkan turned and shoved the blades of each knife he’d taken from the dead guard into the narrow gap between the barrier and the wall.

The hardened steel of the knives squealed as the barrier came to a stop. The knives acted as wedges to keep the barrier from rising to seal off the passageway. Water began to gush over it. The temporary dams holding back the water from the canal were already starting to drop.

They ran up the steps and out onto the dry path. Mallik looked back, and the dams had disappeared from sight. Water was now flooding into the tunnel at a fearsome rate. The guards behind them would almost certainly drown before they could make the quarter mile back to the Library.

“Quick thinking,” Mallik said as they headed back to their car.

“Carlton will come at us with everything he can,” Torkan said.

“I know. Now we’re in a race against each other.”

Torkan silently nodded, his expression somber. He knew the stakes. Whoever won would change the course of civilization forever.

TWENTY

JHOOTHA ISLAND

Lyla Dhawan walked three paces in front of her guard as she had every day for the past six months. When she’d first arrived on the island eighteen months ago, they gave her much more freedom to explore. She knew how futile it was to make an escape attempt from one of the island’s beaches, yet she tried several times anyway. Now she’d been reduced to having a guard watch her every step during her single thirty-minute walk to the beach and back.

She kept telling herself it could be worse. The guards had been instructed not to harm or harass the prisoners, and she’d been well fed during her entire stay. She was even occasionally given perks like candy and DVD movies for good behavior or excellent work. But this was a prison all the same. Lyla had no doubt that once she was no longer useful to Project C, she would die in this lonely place.

She thought that might be soon. Every day for twelve hours, she’d sat in front of a computer screen, writing code based on her expertise in pattern recognition software. Like everyone else who’d been on Xavier Carlton’s plane, she was one of the top technicians in the world focusing on various elements of artificial intelligence. She didn’t know many of the details about Project C, but it was clear their work was critical to the project’s success. Now the amount of their work was winding down.

Lately, she’d spent many hours in front of her terminal doing nothing. In fact, it seemed like they were being kept around just as insurance in case adjustments needed to be made to the software. Then three weeks ago, she’d overheard one of the guards talking to another about something he called Bedtime.

At first, she thought it was some sick joke about their living quarters, which were spartan. But as she caught more tidbits here and there, Lyla began to understand that Bedtime was a code word. It would be issued when the guards were supposed to wipe out all traces of what had happened on the island.

That meant executing all the prisoners as well. And she knew the guards would do so without hesitation after seeing what happened the first day she got here.

After being knocked out by the gas in the cockpit of the Airbus A380, she was unconscious until they had landed. She groggily careened down the emergency slide with the ninety-seven other people who had been kidnapped. The only person missing had been Adam Carlton, who was brought out in a body bag after his deadly head injury.

The confused and upset passengers were separated into two equal-numbered groups for seemingly no reason. An array of guards with automatic weapons stood behind a striking woman in her thirties. She addressed the passengers in an emotionless voice and with an icy glare. The scene was so chilling and surreal that Lyla would never forget it.

“You’ve been brought here for one reason only,” their lead captor had said in her posh British accent. “You all have knowledge and access that we need. As you’ll find out tomorrow, any thoughts of escape are pointless.”

She’d been right about that, Lyla recalled. In her first escape attempt, she built a huge pile of coconut husks and driftwood and then set it on fire hoping someone would come to investigate it and liberate them. But it was soon snuffed out, and nobody came to the rescue.

Her second attempt had consisted of surreptitiously gathering enough driftwood and palm fronds over the course of weeks to build a crude raft. She didn’t know where in the world they were. It could be anywhere from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, but she

was sure they were in tropical waters. If she could paddle her way to a shipping lane, she might be saved.

Lyla managed to sneak out one night, lash together her raft, and push it out to sea. She made it across the atoll and into open water, but only got a half mile offshore before a Zodiac zoomed out to pick her up. She’d been put in solitary confinement for three months after that. Again, though, it could have been worse.