It sounded impossible, but as Rook had so eloquently pointed out, impossible was a fluid concept for the Chess Team.
King had been dosed with a regenerative serum, similar to the one Bishop had received but without the negative side effects. Although after returning to the present he had voluntarily given it up, his physiology returning to normal, the serum had made it possible for him to survive the millennia and show up to save the day. To the rest of them, only a few hours had passed, but King had lived every minute of nearly three thousand years of human history, fifty lifetimes worth of war and unimaginable brutality. Worst of all, he’d been unable to alter the course of events. Everything happened just the way it had always happened, and he had been forced to witness it all. He fought in wars. Led armies. Staged coups. Defeated evil. He’d lived lives as vagrant nobodies, as revered heroes and demigods, as quiet farmers and famous warriors, in every part of the world. Whenever he could, he did what was right, but since the history he learned in school was the history he had already taken part in, he often knew how things worked out in the end. Wars, natural disasters and madmen claimed untold millions of lives throughout his 2800 years of life, and try as he might, he couldn’t prevent the world from going to hell over and over again.
No wonder King is taking this personally.
“I know there’s not a lot I can do,” he said finally. “But it’s like what happens when you see that your neighbor’s house is on fire. You can’t just stand by and let it burn. You’ve got to try and save him.”
“De Oppresso Liber,” Bishop murmured. “That’s what we do isn’t it?”
Queen immediately recognized the Latin phrase. It was the motto of the US Army Special Forces. Free the oppressed. It was a message that definitely resonated with Bishop, and with her as well.
“I agree,” Knight said, then shrugged. “You know, for whatever that’s worth.”
Queen gave them both a grateful smile, and then turned back to King. “Look, we’re all with you. If you say you want to do this, then you don’t even have to make a case for it… not to us anyway. All I ask is that you get back with the team. I know we all kind of got scattered to the four winds for a while there… and you… Well, you really got scattered. But we’re a team. That’s how we win.”
King looked at each one of them in turn, then he simply nodded.
“Great,” Rook said. “I can’t wait to tell dad. But a couple things first: A, what do we do about the missing Russian backpack nuke; and B, how in the hell are the five of us supposed to keep an entire country from going down the toilet?”
“You heard Boucher,” Queen said. “He’s going to take care of the bomb.”
King rubbed his unshaven chin. “The five of us,” he echoed, thoughtfully. “No. Not just us.”
“You mean Deep Blue?”
“Him, Pawn and everyone else at Endgame.” Pawn was the designated callsign for anyone temporarily attached to the team for special operations. It had once been given to Sara Fogg, King’s fiancée, but more recently it had been permanently assigned to Asya Machtchenko, King’s sister. “We won’t be able to do anything meaningful without their help, and that means before we commit to anything, we need to know that everyone is on board. That,” he concluded, holding up his glasses, “is what being part of the team means. So let’s have a team meeting and figure out how we’re going to turn this thing around. Like you said, that’s how we win.”
10
Rook curled his fingers around the steering wheel, his foot tense on the brake pedal, eager to slide over and punch the accelerator.
“Relax,” Queen said, from the passenger seat beside him.
He shot her a scowl. “Easy for you to say. You’re not driving.”
She laughed. “Since when do you complain about driving?”
He struggled to come up with a scathing retort, but the light changed and a taxi behind them laid on the horn. He shook his head and accelerated through the intersection. “When we took this ‘Save Africa’ gig, I thought we’d be… you know, staying in Africa.”
“You’ve got a problem coming to a country where they have hot showers and flush toilets?”
“I’ve got a problem coming to a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road.”
She patted his arm. “Once we find our missing African president, we’ll be on the first flight back to the land of malaria.”
“You always know just what to say to cheer me up, babe.”
He and Queen had drawn the short straw — at least that was how Rook saw it — and been given the job of tracking down Joseph Mulamba and rescuing him from his abductors, while King, Bishop and Knight waited for transport to the Congo.
Despite his grumblings, Rook knew that this task was critical to the mission’s success. Restoring Mulamba to power was probably the only way to prevent total chaos in Central Africa. The president was popular, and had received an overwhelming majority of the vote in the election that had put him in power. His return might not end the coup launched by General Velle, but it would erode the rebel power base to the point where further violence would be limited in scope. If Mulamba was already dead, there might be no stopping what had begun, but if his enemies had wanted him dead, they would have simply assassinated him and left his body behind with the two murdered bodyguards. Finding Mulamba was the most important part of Chess Team’s new mission. Nevertheless, Rook felt as if he’d been taken out of the game.
Deep Blue, using the almost unlimited computing power at his disposal, had done what the combined resources of London law enforcement could not: he’d found Mulamba. Well, probably found him.
Mulamba’s kidnappers had abandoned the SUV in an alley, hidden from the view of the closed circuit television cameras that lined most London streets. The police had checked the footage from cameras in the area, but had been unable to identify the kidnappers’ waiting getaway vehicle. Deep Blue had taken the additional step of collecting all the camera feeds going back to the site of the abduction, near Hyde Park, and cobbled them together into a virtual recreation of the crime. There were several gaps in the record, but it was easy enough to connect the dots. When the full picture resolved, he found a significant time gap. The SUV had stopped for almost a full minute in one of the CCTV blind spots. Deep Blue believed that the kidnappers had used this break to transfer Mulamba to another car, and then continued on to the alley several miles away where the driver ultimately dumped the vehicle and escaped on foot.
Figuring that out had been the easy part. What he did next would have been nearly impossible without the quantum computer.
Deep Blue had used the footage from multiple cameras to track every single car that moved away from the suspected transfer point, and through a process of elimination, identified the getaway car. He then tracked the vehicle to a rural area near Dartford, about twenty miles southeast of London. By the time Queen and Rook deplaned at Heathrow, Mulamba’s location had been pinpointed.
After picking up their rental car, Queen and Rook had made just one stop, at the main branch of the Royal & General Bank to collect the contents of a safe deposit box, which included two SIG Pro pistols with spare magazines, two SOG Ops M40TK-CP combat knives and several bundles of £20 and £50 banknotes.
Rook cruised past the driveway entrance to the farmhouse, letting Queen handle the visual surveillance, and continued down the road for another half a mile before pulling off and parking on the shoulder. “So, dumb tourists?”