She came to a stop on the edge of the white fiberglass sail and the windows to the guest suites. She lunged toward the windows with a suction-cup device, handle attached, and secured it to the window.

  Then she felt the bungee pulling her back skyward. She reached into her pocket, produced a detonator, and triggered it. She knew high above it would trigger a tiny matchstick of a detonation that should destroy the carabiner and separate it from the helicopter.

  She looked at her watch. Time was up.

  Suddenly, she did not feel herself being pulled skyward anymore. She glanced up and saw the bungee snaking outward and tumbling toward the earth. She dropped the detonator and used her free hand to unhook the carabiner from her harness, watching the whole thing as it plummeted into the gulf. Above, the helicopter lifted off the helipad and into the night sky.

  But the job wasn’t over. The laser was coming back around. She had maybe fifteen seconds before it would hit her and bring the big guys with guns.

  She reached into her vest and pulled out the sonic cutter. She swung her body around and planted the cutter on the glass as far away from her handhold as her arm’s span would allow. She activated it and winced, expecting a deafening sound.

  She didn’t have to worry. The sonic cutter used ultrasonic waves that she could neither hear nor would damage her ears. Five seconds later, the sonic cutter fell into the hotel, making a perfect round circle around it.

  Tempest swung, using her suction-cup handhold and flung her body into the hole after it.

  CHAPTER 39

  She was inside, in the primary suite, and it was empty. If anyone heard the clatter of the sonic cutter, there was no sign of it.

  She hoped and prayed that she was on the right floor and in the right suite. She knew these suites were all two stories and that Aleks Sorokin was likely with his security downstairs. She sloughed off her harness, pulled out her tranq gun, and readied herself for the next trick.

  She left the opulent primary suite and went down the semicircular staircase to the main room. She heard voices. They sounded Russian. There was no guarantee, but it was a hopeful sign.

  Then she saw them. The two security men in the lounge, their backs to her, talking to their principal, who was lounging in the hotel’s gold-and-purple bathrobe. Sorokin saw her coming down the stairs and gasped.

  The two men spun. But she already had a dart away and had a bead on the second of them. One second later, both men were down—not unconscious yet, but on their way to La-La Land.

  Tempest looked at Sorokin and saw that he was not on the phone. Another stroke of luck. But she also knew that his heart would likely race just from the intrusion. She also knew that the special dart—the Sorokin dart—was the fourth in the chamber, not the third.

  She got the third dart loaded for bear, just in case she missed one of the security men. She fired the third dart into the one security guy who was still writhing, then raised the gun at Sorokin, who screamed a particularly effeminate scream. She pulled the trigger, and Sorokin’s scream stopped.

  The man had an odd look on his face. He wasn’t quite dazed, wasn’t quite stunned. He just seemed to be—out of it. Tempest didn’t pretend to understand the chemistry involved, or even, frankly, how it all worked. She was simply told that the shot should stabilize his vitals and yet, for all intents and purposes, incapacitate the man.

  And that seemed to be the effect.

  She waited a long minute and heard no alarm. She searched the security guy who took the second dart and retrieved his security key. Then she pulled off her catsuit, revealing a tasteful little black dress. Maybe it wasn’t quite up to the standards of this place, but she’d fit in all right.

  She then looked in the mirror, fluffed out her hair, and walked to the front door.

  Then all she needed to do was act normal, walk down the hallway, get an elevator, retrieve Chaucer, and bring him back up to the room.

  Of course, the moment she opened the door to her suite, there was a fancy-looking Chinese couple also stepping out into the hall. She immediately felt underdressed and awkward. Why, oh why, was this the hardest part of the mission?

  She simply smiled at them, averted her eyes, and walked swiftly to the elevators. She got in, pressed the button for the lobby, and prayed that the doors would close before the Chinese couple got in.

  Of course, they got in after her.

  She heard the woman tittering to the man, mocking her dress, paying particular attention to her choice of shoes and the dress’s wrinkles. The woman had no way of knowing Tempest was fluent in Mandarin, and furthermore had no way of knowing that Tempest could easily kill her and her sugar daddy in the ten seconds it took to get to the lobby.

  But, as Tempest often thought, ignorance is bliss.

  The elevator opened. There stood Chaucer. Tempest allowed the couple to exit first. Then she made a gesture as if she had suddenly realized she had forgotten something. Chaucer got in, swiped his security card, and pressed his floor. She swiped hers and pressed hers.

  They both got out on the security floor and a minute later, they were in Sorokin’s suite.

  Chaucer grinned. “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “The pantomime. Like you forgot something. In the elevator.”

  Tempest grumbled, “It was in my role. You don’t just take an elevator down and then right back up without a reason. There are cameras everywhere. Screw you.”

  Chaucer was deeply, deeply amused at how defensive she got. “No. Yeah. I get it. You’re a regular Meryl Streep.”

  “Hey, fuck you, asshole. I had to do thirty impossible things just now. All you had to do was remember to tip the bag boy.”

  Chaucer waved his hands in surrender. “Fair, Tempest, fair. You are amazing. A god among mere mortals.”

  “Goddamn right.”

  “Now, where is Sorokin?”

  “Hopefully on the couch where I left him.”

  Sorokin was indeed on the couch where she had left him. He just sat there, with that same far away look in his eyes.

  Tempest asked, “What exactly did I hit him with?”

  “Most sedatives work on the whole body. But then his blood pressure and pulse would drop. And that’d bring the security team to our door. But there are a couple of agents that work only on the brain. It basically disables the brain’s executive function. Kind of like brain fog. You are just kind of—out of it.”

  “Damn if it doesn’t work.”

  “It does, just not for long at all. You got the powder?”

  Tempest nodded and went upstairs to her bungee harness. She reached into a small pocket sewn into it and produced a single vial that looked for all the world like cocaine. She brought it back down to Chaucer. “This is the scopolamine?”

  Chaucer nodded. “Nasty stuff. They used to think this would be truth serum. It is not. It does do quite the number on the human brain though.”

  Tempest nodded. “I know. I met an operative once. Colombian. She used it a few times. Said criminals there had a thing for it. Dosing rich gringos and they’ll agree to just about anything you say, like getting all their cash from an ATM and bringing it back to you.”

  “That’s right,” Chaucer said. “But dosing’s a problem. You can absorb it right through your skin, so you’ve got to be really careful when handling it. And in just a matter of days, a person can build up such a high tolerance that the dose necessary for compliance is damn near the same dose that will kill you. Luckily for Gospodin Sorokin here, we should only need to use it once.”

  Chaucer slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, carefully opened the vial, and dusted Sorokin’s lips with the stuff. He then screwed the lid back on, threw the vial in the trash, and backed away.

  “How long does it take to take effect?” Tempest asked.

  “Fast,” Chaucer said. “Inside of five minutes. Maybe inside of a minute.”

  “How will you know it’s working?”

  “It should override the sedative. So⁠—”

  Suddenly, Sorokin’s head jerked. He looked up at Chaucer and Tempest.

  “Hey. You are not my security team.”

  “No, we’re not,” Chaucer said. “We’re here because we really need your help.”

  Sorokin’s eyes were wide, his pupils the size of pinpricks. He smiled and said, “Okay.”

  “We need to know everything you know about a project called Red Serpent.”

  For a moment, Chaucer thought the man hadn’t heard him. He expected some kind of reaction, but there was none. He wondered whether he needed to dose the man again.

  But then Aleks Sorokin started speaking.

  “Oh, that. The Red Serpent. The worst horror Soviet science ever created.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Tempest watched in awe as Sorokin told them everything they wanted to know.

  “It started off benign. We had a lot of oil spills when our petro industry was just starting up. Our scientists designed a microbe that eats and breaks down petroleum. Like Alcanivorax Borkumensis, the microbe your people used to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill, but a hundred times more effective.”

  Chaucer sensed a ‘but’ coming. “Then something happened to the tech, right?”

  “Scientists were told to develop it. To strengthen it. They knew we were discovering more and more oil reserves in our East. They thought, what if these microbes could become hungrier? What if we could introduce them into America, or the Arabian Peninsula? We could create a monopoly, no?”

  Chaucer played along. “Makes sense. Is that how it turned out?”

  Sorokin shook his head. “No! No, they did too well. They created Variant 111. This stuff ate through the plastic enclosure it was held in. It was in the lab's air. It was on their clothes, their shoes. In less than an hour, the heating system died. All the heating oil had turned to the consistency of gum. This was in Smolensk. In February. Not the time to run out of heating oil. They realized this new strain spread everywhere and ate not just oil, but any byproduct of it.”

  Tempest got it. “Plastic.”

  “Yes exactly. So they buried it. Literally. But they kept samples. The Soviets knew a weapon when they saw one. And then came Murmansk, 1972.”

  Suddenly Sorokin stared off into space, a look of horror on his face.

  Chaucer redirected him. “What happened in Murmansk?”

  “Disaster. The Red Serpent escaped the lab. There was a protocol in place. A devastating protocol. Did you know the CCCP tested just under one thousand nuclear devices, but only a handful were done outside of three main test sites? One of those rogue ‘tests’ was Murmansk, 1972.”

  Chaucer couldn’t believe it. “You’re saying, to prevent the Red Serpent from getting out, they glassed their own research facility?”

  Sorokin nodded. Tempest started pacing nervously. “What the hell, Chaucer?”

  Chaucer knelt in front of Sorokin. “It was that dangerous?”

  “The strain survives cold, heat, solvents. Anything except high-pressure pure oxygen environments. It sits on clothing, skin, anything. It spreads faster than smallpox. And anything petroleum-based, it turns into a thick sludge in moments. If Red Serpent gets out, we go back to the Stone Age.”

  Tempest couldn’t help herself. “Then why the hell is it still out there?”

  Sorokin sighed, “Because fear is greater than reason. One case, with one vial. It’s all that survived Murmansk. It had been kept for decades in a vault in the middle of the Russian steppe. Until the first Gulf War.”

  Chaucer said, “1990.”

  “Yes. The Soviet Union was on its last legs, and here, our great enemy looked to be moving on the Middle East. We thought you would just take all the oil. Create a lone superpower and watch us starve. So we hid a snake among your treasure, waiting for the day of release.”

  Chaucer was confused. “But we didn’t take all the oil. We backed away.”

  “Yes. And the Red Serpent has been here all along. Sitting in wait. Hiding.”

  Again, Sorokin got that far-away look. Chaucer grabbed his face and got his attention. “Aleks. One last question: where is the Red Serpent?”

  CHAPTER 41

  Chaucer and Tempest took the elevator back to the lobby and took a Lamborghini Urus cab into the city proper. Jefferson had another hotel room for them, and neither said a word to each other until they were inside.

  Tempest spoke up first. “Maybe it’s not the worst thing? In some ways, it’s an environmentalist’s dream.”

  Chaucer nodded. “The first zombie I encountered. He had a breakthrough in solar tech. They have it. The Venture has it. Want to bet they have a way, maybe the only way, for civilization to survive the sudden death of oil?”

  “That would be a payday in the trillions. Maybe tens of trillions.”

  Chaucer nodded. “But the cost. If it really spreads the way Sorokin says it does? The third world? Instantly without power. The first world? Next to zero transportation for a decade. Near-zero power for years. Communications, gone. There would be worldwide civil unrest. Do you have any idea what percentage of the world's food supply is mechanized? There would be mass starvation. Wars everywhere.”

  Tempest shook her head. “What would a war with no oil even look like? A war without plastic?”

  “But there’d be no tanks, planes, missiles, guns even. So what would you do? You realize most of your country’s defenses are about to be completely obsolete because this microbe is within thirty miles of your defense perimeter. What do you do?”

  Tempest saw the bigger picture. “Preemptive attack. Whoever you’re most worried about, you use your weapon against them before you don’t have them anymore.”

  “And you better believe the Venture is ready for this new world. They’ll not only have the eventual solution. Reynolds’ DARPA solar breakthrough, and much more. They’ll have answers for this new world. The weapons, the comms, the connections. He said the one percent only changed hands in times of revolution. So he’s creating the biggest revolution in human history.”

  Tempest sat back on the bed, in awe and terror. “I’m really gonna hate it if those prepper assholes end up being right. Okay. What do we do?”

  “We tell Jefferson what’s going on. And we tell him where the Red Serpent is.”

  Tempest shook her head, “Kuwait City. Some bank vault. That’s all we know. We don’t even know which Kuwaiti bank this is in.”

  Chaucer nodded. “That’s why we get on the horn with Jefferson. We get his people on the problem. And we get ourselves to Kuwait.”

  Tempest and Chaucer both agreed that Jefferson took the impending End Of The World As We Know It quite well. In moments, he had the same private plane ready and waiting for Tempest and Chaucer at Dubai International. He discussed strategy. Resources. He wanted to move team after team on the map to handle the problem.

  Chaucer had to talk him out of it. They had a zombie problem. The more people who knew about this, the greater the chance the Venture would know they knew, and escalate the situation.

  No, Chaucer was firm. Their best odds were to keep this small. Contained. They’re a quick hop from Kuwait. Get there, find the Red Serpent first, and bury it at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

  Jefferson didn’t want to agree, but he knew it was the smart play. “This is putting a lot on your shoulders.”

  Chaucer nodded, “We know. But the other way? We’re feeding the enemy intel.”

  Jefferson said, “Then Godspeed. I’ll be here, stockpiling animal pelts and grain.”

  CHAPTER 42

  The copilot alerted Chaucer and Tempest when they were over Kuwait City. He had a simple two-word message for them. “Buckle up.”

  Tempest took the bait. “Buckle up?”

  The copilot shrugged. “Baghdad approach.”

  Now it was Chaucer’s turn to be confused. “Baghdad? I thought we were going to Kuwait City.”

  Tempest, however, seemed to understand what the man was saying and buckled herself in tight. “Baghdad approach doesn’t mean we’re approaching Baghdad. It’s a type of landing, reserved for hostile locations.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Tempest thought about it for a second. “Actually, neither do I. Hey!”

  The copilot was at the cockpit door but turned around.

  Tempest said, “Hostiles? In Kuwait?”

  The copilot shrugged. “There’s an ISIS cell there, evidently. Trying to foment a revolution. Sounds like bullshit, but we’ve been told ‘credible threat’ so—yeah. Baghdad approach.”

  The copilot disappeared back into the cockpit. Chaucer asked, “What the hell is the Baghdad approach?”

  Tempest explained, “Second Gulf War. The Iraqi Army gets crushed, right? They take off their uniforms and blend in with the crowds. But they still have weapons. Even Stinger missiles. So with pretty decent frequency, planes approaching Baghdad airfield tended to get missiles shot at ’em. Some of em’ weren’t so lucky. So, a Baghdad approach is a maneuver designed to minimize that outcome.”

  “So what exactly is the maneuver?”

  As the copilot yelled back from the cockpit, “We start off high, and we get down fast! Seriously! Buckle up!”

  Chaucer did as he was told, and less than ten seconds after he cinched his belt tight, the Baghdad approach began. The world turned ninety degrees to his right. A pen flew out of his pocket, flying right at Tempest’s head. The woman didn’t even seem to look. She just grabbed it out of the air and put it in her own pocket.

  She smiled. “Haven’t been on one of these since ’07!”

  Then Chaucer felt the G-forces. It felt like the pilot was attempting to push him through his seat into the baggage compartment. The jet went into a high-G banking turn, the kind usually reserved for fighter pilots. As he tracked the sun whipping around the cabin, Chaucer figured they were doing a full rotation every twenty seconds. The feeling in his stomach told him they were not just turning.