Brad Thor - The Athena Project

They left the cages behind and stepped through the double doors into the long research corridor. As they passed the various labs, Casey forced herself to slow down. Was there anything she was missing? Were there any clues to who had been here? Any clues to who had opened this place up and cleaned it out? That was their job. That was why they had been sent here.

She shone her flashlight into each of the rooms they passed. She didn’t expect to suddenly spot something they hadn’t seen the first time around, but she felt that she should at least try to bring back something useful regardless of how disturbing the scene in the cavern had been.

They kept moving, and with each room they passed, Casey allowed herself to become more convinced that there wasn’t anything of value left here.

Soon, they arrived at the office corridor. At the end of it was the hatch, and on the other side of that were the stairs up to the airlock. Then it was the tunnel and finally they’d be away from this place.

They stepped through the hatch and climbed the stairs up toward the airlock. When they reached the landing, all of them were breathing more heavily than normal. They were all in incredible shape, but considering the stress they were under, the distance, and the number of stairs they had climbed, as well as the speed they had been moving, it wasn’t surprising that they were all a little short of breath.

The women moved through the doorway and into the airlock. After passing through the blast door, they quickened their pace up the tunnel. None of them looked up at the ghastly murals. They had seen enough to last them a lifetime.

Passing the guardhouse, Casey said, “Everybody okay? We’re al-most out.”

“Ask me how I’m feeling once we get out of here,” said Rhodes.

Gretchen looked back at Ericsson, “You all right?”

Julie nodded. “I’m okay,”

“Good,” replied Casey as she reached for her radio and hailed Cooper. The reception was terrible. There was a lot of static and she couldn’t understand what Alex was saying. So much for the quartz improving radio reception , she thought.

Soon enough, they began to smell the forest and knew that they were almost out. Had it been daytime, they would have been able to use the sunlight spilling in to gauge how much farther they had to go.

As it was, all they had to go on was their memory of how long the tunnel was and the radio signal, which was starting to become clearer.

They knew they were just about there when they picked up an audible snippet of Cooper’s voice.

“Say again,” replied Casey over her radio.

When no response came, Gretchen said, “We’re going to be on top of you any second now. Be ready to move.”

There were a couple of radio clicks, but that was it.

“On our way out,” said Casey. “Do you copy? Over.”

They were twenty yards from the tunnel entrance when they heard Cooper’s voice again, but this time it didn’t come over the radio. This time it came in the form of a scream.

“Run!”

ISTANBUL

TURKEY

Armen Abressian blinked his eyes and looked at his watch. It was late. Business never sleeps , he thought to himself as the phone on the nightstand kept vibrating.

He picked it up and placed his feet over the side of the bed. He was a handsome, powerfully built man in his early sixties with gray hair, a thick beard, and deeply tanned skin. When he spoke, he did so with a soothing, basso profundo voice coupled with a slight accent that was difficult to place.

Looking out over the twinkling lights of the Bosporus, he activated the call and said, “I’m here, Thomas.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Armen. I assume you have a guest,” said Thomas Sanders, Abressian’s second in command.

Abressian looked over at the gorgeous creature in his bed. She was less than half his age and worth every penny. He’d have to see if he could hire her for another night. Things were not moving as quickly as he had planned.

“What is it I can do for you, Thomas?”

“We have a problem.”

Another one? It had been just over twenty-four hours since Nino Bianchi had been abducted from his home in Venice. While no one knew for sure who had done it, it smacked of the Israelis, especially as they had used women to pull off the job. That would be just like them. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. Abressian still had one more shipment he was expecting from Bianchi.

Turning his attention back to Sanders, he replied, “What is the problem?”

“It’s Professor Cahill.”

Of course it was. “What has happened now?” Abressian asked calmly.

“The Bratva want him.”

Bratva was slang for the Russian mafia who ran the town of Premantura at the southern end of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula. There wasn’t a single official or law enforcement officer in the area who wasn’t on the Bratva’s payroll. It was a place where people learned to keep quiet. The locals kept to themselves, minded their own business, and didn’t ask any questions. That was one of the reasons Abressian had selected it. Via his relationship with the Russians, he was able to purchase a significant amount of goodwill. Professor Cahill, though, had been burning through it very quickly.

When it came to quantum physics, George Cahill was a genius. When it came to everything else, he was an idiot.

Abressian had discovered him toiling away in a physics lab at the Australian National University. Technically, he was on unpaid administrative leave. Cahill had been reprimanded twice for his substance abuse, but when it came to light that he had been involved in several inappropriate relationships with students, he was removed from his duties until he could complete a rehabilitation program with a full review of the charges against him. But Cahill’s situation had rapidly deteriorated.

It seemed that the harder his demons rode him, the faster he descended into a hell of his own making. Incredible brilliance often dwells on the razor’s edge of madness, and this was certainly the case with George Cahill.

When Armen Abressian had found the twenty-nine-year-old Cahill, he was being beaten outside a seedy bar on the outskirts of Canberra. The wheels had completely come off Cahill’s axles. Abressian suspected the man might have been bipolar or sociopathic, prone to incredible mood swings and incredibly self-destructive behavior. Alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, and gambling had sucked the young genius into a suicidal black hole from which not even the faintest hope of escape appeared possible. That is, until Abressian had made Cahill the offer of a lifetime.

Cahill had a bad habit of blaming his problems on others. He claimed that because the university didn’t give him enough support and leeway to pursue his research, he hadn’t been able to make greater headway. He saw other, far less intelligent professors soaring to academic heights and pawned it off on their ability to play “the game.” Everyone knew that university life was all about publish or perish, but until you could prove your hypothesis, there was nothing to publish. The more frustrated he became, the more depressed, and the more depressed, the more self-destructive.

What Abressian offered him was an opportunity to be his own boss, to prove to everyone that he had been right; that he was smarter than everyone else. It was a chance for redemption. Abressian had appealed to both the man’s intellect and his ego, and Cahill had accepted.

Cahill tendered his resignation at the university and with Abressian’s help, disappeared.