Chapter 195: Duke Norton

Chapter 195: Duke Norton

Elizabeth pulled in a deep breath and shoved the heavy blast door open.

The corridor's emergency lights pulsed a dim, flickering red. And there, standing amid it all like a war god, was Caesar—fully armored, weapon in hand.

The nerve that had been strung to its absolute breaking point inside her finally snapped. She didn't hesitate. She threw herself forward and locked her arms around him, holding on for dear life.

Caesar tossed the spent magazine aside, curled one arm around her slim waist, and rested his chin against her hair. His voice came low and warm.

"It's over. I'm here."

Elizabeth buried her face against the hard plating of his tactical armor.

Then she heard it—a few barely-suppressed coughs and stifled snorts of laughter from off to the side.

She turned her head. James was leaning against the wall, assault rifle cradled in his arms crossed over his chest, fighting a losing battle against a grin.

Her cool, elegant face went scarlet in an instant. She jerked back half a step like she'd been shocked, tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, and reassembled herself into the poised Wall Street president once more.

"Hello, James."

James straightened up and threw her a lazy, distinctly non-regulation salute, still grinning.

"Ma'am, we're all brothers who've bled beside Caesar. You're one of us. No need to be shy about it."

Caesar let out a soft laugh and kicked the toe of his boot into James's shin guard.

"Cut the chatter. Get Elizabeth up to the rooftop helipad. The Apache's still up there waiting for you two."

James wiped the smile off his face instantly, snapping to attention, his eyes going razor-sharp.

"Copy that."

Elizabeth turned back, looking up at Caesar with worry etched across her face.

"You're not coming with us?"

Ka-chak. Caesar racked the bolt, chambering a round. A bloodthirsty, roguish grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"First I'm going to clear out every last one of these sewer rats who crawled onto my turf."

He met her eyes, absolute confidence burning in his own. "Everything else—once this is done, I'll tell you all of it. Now go."

James slapped a hand against his chest plate reassuringly. "Boss lady, you can rest a hundred percent easy. The trash down there isn't even enough to warm my big brother up as an appetizer."

Elizabeth's lips parted like she wanted to say something more. But she knew—staying here would only turn her into dead weight around Caesar's neck. She gave a nod and took off after James toward the rooftop fire stairwell.

Once he'd confirmed Elizabeth was safely away—

The warmth drained from Caesar's face in a single instant.

He pulled the matte-black faceless mask from a tactical pouch and fitted it over his face.

His hand rose to a miniaturized switch beside his earlobe and pressed it.

The HUD inside the mask flared to life, glowing a ghostly blue.

A cold, synthesized electronic voice hummed through his earpiece.

【Tactical AI 'Echo' now online. Good evening, Caesar.】

"Echo, take over the building's internal surveillance network. Bring up thermal imaging. Find their positions for me."

【Decrypting building schematics... complete.】

【Initiating heat-scan matrix... complete.】

【Target distribution: four hostiles in the left-side A-Zone stairwell, four in the right-side B-Zone stairwell. Formation is a pincer movement.】

Caesar walked to the edge of a high, open atrium at the corridor's end and looked down into the bottomless black.

Then he threw himself over.

The grappling hook on his tactical belt deployed automatically. With a metallic clack, it bit hard into a steel girder above him.

Caesar dropped through the darkness in free fall.

Less than a meter from the floor below, he squeezed the brake valve, and his body hung suspended in midair with feather-light ease.

Beneath him, the four mercenaries of the A-Zone team were sweeping forward, rifles up with weapon-mounted tactical lights, their backs turned to him, checking every corner with careful precision.

They had no idea death had just dropped down right over their heads.

The rear guard, dead last in the stack, seemed to sense a shift in the air current and instinctively started to turn.

Caesar dropped on him silent as a giant bat, scissored both legs around the man's neck, and wrenched.

Crack. The mercenary's spine snapped clean.

Almost in the same breath, Caesar had already brought his modular rifle up.

Thup. Thup. Thup.

Faint muzzle flashes spat from the suppressor. Three precise armor-piercing special rounds punched straight through the Kevlar helmets of the three men in front.

Red and white—brains and blood—burst apart in the dark, spattering across the walls.

The three bodies dropped bolt-straight to the floor without ever getting the chance to fire off a warning shot.

Caesar stepped across the corpses sprawled on the ground and hit the retract key on his belt. The grappling line reeled tight, hauling him back up into the black atrium.

...

The building's right wing. B-Zone stairwell.

Harry was personally leading the other four-man element. The tactical advance on this side was clearly far more professional, far more cautious.

The four of them moved in a tight CQB stack. A pointman probed ahead, two men held the middle covering the flanks, and Harry brought up the rear himself, rifle shouldered.

Backs to the wall, they crept forward through the pitch-black corridor.

Just as they passed an office—

The wooden door on one side of the hallway was suddenly yanked open from the inside by a monstrous force.

The mercenary walking second in the stack didn't even get a chance to react. A big hand in a tactical glove clamped around his throat and dragged him bodily into the dark room like a sack of rags.

"Fuck! Contact—"

Thud. Thud.

Two dull, heavy impacts of flesh on flesh sounded from inside the room. Then—total silence.

Harry's face plunged straight to the bottom, cold sweat soaking through the back of his suit.

Rifle up, he locked his eyes on that black doorway. To mask the fear crawling through him, he raised his voice and started sneering.

"Caesar! Since when did you turn into a rat, skulking around with your head down?!"

"Hiding in the dark, playing these little assassination games—this isn't the invincible Patient Zero I used to know!"

Harry was trying to bait Caesar out into the open.

Caesar's cold voice, warped by the mask's voice modulator, echoed back at him from every direction at once, carrying the reverb of death.

"Harry, you traitor. Back in Siberia, I should've put a bullet in your skull right then."

The moment Harry heard the voice, he flashed a hand signal to the two remaining men beside him.

The three of them dropped low, muzzles fixed dead ahead, hugging the wall as they crept toward the doorway the voice had come from.

Just as the pointman's boot crossed the threshold—

Click.

An impossibly crisp, blood-freezing snap of a metal spring releasing.

A tripwire frag grenade.

"DOWN—!!!"

BOOM—!!!

The violent blast shredded the entire door and a chunk of wall into a cloud of lethal shrapnel in a heartbeat.

The pointman was blown into pulped meat on the spot.

A tenth of a second before the detonation, Harry had grabbed the last man beside him and hauled him hard into position as a human shield.

The shockwave, packed with steel ball bearings, turned that mercenary's back into a sieve.

Cushioned by the corpse, Harry slammed into the corridor wall. Blood ran from his ruptured eardrums.

Whatever was left of his sanity and his pride shattered completely in that instant.

"Fall back... FALL BACK!"

Harry shoved the bloody, mangled body off of him, staggered to his feet through the thick gunsmoke, and turned to run.

Like a stray dog fleeing for its life, he stumbled and lurched into an abandoned assembly workshop at the far end of the corridor.

The workshop was empty. Moonlight spilled down through the massive glass skylights overhead.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

From outside the workshop came the unhurried, measured footfalls of Caesar's tactical boots—like the countdown of the reaper himself.

"Harry. You really haven't changed one bit."

Caesar's voice reverberated through the cavernous space. "Danger shows up, you throw your own men in front of you as a shield. Still the same gutless coward you were back then."

Harry crouched behind a huge lathe, teeth clenched, his whole body trembling.

"Caesar! So you kill me today—so what?!"

He screamed hysterically. "You can't change a damn thing! This is a kill order straight from Lord Norton! I have no choice but to carry it out! You will never escape the organization's reach!"

Caesar's voice stayed flat, even laced with a trace of mockery. "That old bloodsucker Norton's still alive? Now that really is bad news."

Harry sucked in a breath and, using the moonlight, quietly poked half his head out from the side of the lathe.

There, in the shadows a dozen meters off, he saw a blurred tactical silhouette advancing on him at a slow, steady pace.

A flash of wild joy shot through Harry's eyes. He whipped up the Glock in his hand and squeezed the trigger.

Bang.

A perfect shot, dead center in that silhouette's heart. The figure crumpled to the ground.

A euphoric grin split across Harry's face. "Hahaha! Die, you monster!"

Thup.

An impossibly faint suppressed shot.

The grin froze solid on Harry's face.

Slowly, he lowered his head and looked down at his own chest. A gaping, ghastly hole had opened there, blood fountaining out of it.

Caesar stepped out of the shadows from a completely different direction, rifle level, taking his time.

What Harry had just shot was nothing but a spare ballistic plate Caesar had dropped on the floor with a tactical jacket draped over it.

Caesar walked up and stood over the man who had once been his comrade, looking down at him.

He reached up and pulled the faceless mask off.

Harry, clutching his chest, slid weakly to his knees, staring up at Caesar's face, his eyes flooded with defiance and despair.

"This... how is this possible..." Harry spat out a mouthful of bloody foam. "My tactical helmet has the most advanced life-detection sensor there is... there's no way you could've fooled it..."

Caesar crouched down slowly and tapped the barrel of his rifle against Harry's cheek.

"You think the junk scrap metal you people are holding is the most advanced tech in the world?"

His eyes were full of pity. "Harry, everything you're using right now—the gear, even those nano-bombs you're so proud of. All of it is just the rejected, discarded prototype versions from back when I was helping develop it."

Harry coughed violently, blood staining his chin dark red.

"No... impossible... Lord Norton said... he said theirs was the most perfect..."

Caesar cut him off, cold, his voice like a final judgment.

"You want to know why you people will always be stuck picking through my leftover garbage?"

"Because from the very beginning, the one and only Prime Specimen they poured every ounce of their effort into—was me."

Harry's pupils contracted violently. His lips moved a couple of times, like he wanted to beg for his life, but no sound would come out anymore.

Caesar rose to his feet and pressed the muzzle firmly against the center of Harry's brow.

"Go repent in hell. See you there."

Bang.

A single shot to the head. Harry's body toppled backward, dead as dead could be.

Caesar coldly holstered the weapon and turned to head out of the workshop, to link up with Elizabeth on the roof.

That was when—

A satellite-encrypted phone in the pocket of Harry's corpse suddenly started ringing.

In the empty, blood-soaked workshop, the ringtone sounded jarringly loud.

Caesar stopped. He walked back over, fished the phone out of the pool of blood, and pressed answer, then speaker.

From the other end came a voice—incredibly old, yet dripping with boundless authority and arrogance, wrapped in a British aristocrat's accent.

"Caesar. It's been a long time, my boy."

Caesar's grip on the phone tightened slightly, his knuckles blanching white with the force of it.

"Norton." His voice was cold as ice. "You old turtle, still hiding down in the sewer. Amazing you haven't croaked yet."

Faced with such a brazen insult, Norton didn't get angry at all. Instead, he let out a low, rolling chuckle.

"Hehehe... you've still got that same volatile temper. Seems all these years still haven't taught you the meaning of reverence."

Killing intent surged wildly in Caesar's eyes. "You know what I regret most right now?"

On the other end, Lord Norton answered with breezy indifference, as if everything were already firmly in his grasp.

"What you regret most right now is that, back in that Siberian lab, you didn't kill me with your own two hands."

Caesar let out a soft laugh, one edged with bone-deep frost. "Congratulations, old man. You're finishing my sentences now."

He paused, and his tone turned lethally dangerous. "Enough small talk. You didn't dial up this sat phone just to reminisce, did you?"

Norton's voice shed its hollow amusement, turning deadly serious and greedy.

"Hand over the complete formula for the Super Serum. And I'll let you and that woman—Elizabeth—live out the rest of your days in peace."

Caesar didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second, his answer flat and absolute. "Go to hell. That will never happen."

At that, far from losing his temper, Norton burst into booming laughter.

"Hahaha... Caesar. In this world, in the face of absolute power, nothing is impossible."

"Or should I say..."

Norton's tone abruptly turned light and airy, yet it carried a venom capable of ending the world. "You don't actually care whether Elizabeth lives or dies at all?"

Caesar's heart plunged.

A lethal sense of danger unlike anything he'd ever felt slammed into him. The hairs on the back of his neck shot straight up.

Instinctively, he lifted his head, gazing up through the workshop's massive glass skylight at the deep, endless Nevada night.

The cloud cover was being ripped apart by violent wind.

An entirely black aircraft, bearing no national markings whatsoever—an MQ-9 Reaper drone—descended slowly, silently, from the high altitude, like the true reaper come to collect.

The weapons pylon beneath its fuselage was already fully deployed.

A single, staggeringly expensive AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missile, its laser-guided infrared seeker glowing at the nose, was locked dead-on target—the helipad atop the factory.

The exact spot where Elizabeth and James were preparing to evacuate.

Lord Norton's demonic voice slid slowly out of the receiver, like a man pronouncing the final judgment.

"Caesar, the missile is locked. You have ten seconds to think it over."

"Ten. Nine. Eight..."