Present day
Lightning split the dark Parisian sky.
Albert Van Ness navigated his wheelchair toward a framed photograph of his father, Otto, on the office wall. He knew the world right now stood on the cusp of a great precipice, just like his father had always predicted. A moment that would define the ultimate survival of a species. Much like when a giant asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-five million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, but this time the threat was coming from below, and it was coming for humanity.
Van Ness stopped in front of the photograph of his father. Every detail stood out. A sharp SS uniform. An armband with the swastika. An iron cross hanging around his neck. Chest proudly puffed out. The creator of the Foundation for Human Advancement and a true visionary . . . though also a man who had not lived to witness his dream become a reality.
It’s okay, Father. Your reality is about to happen.
The creatures were evolving rapidly to tolerate higher levels of oxygen. Their rise to the surface was inevitable. The planet no longer had a choice.
Van Ness had reasoned the day would come when the Foundation would need to take more direct control over governments, but he did not think it would be so soon. The events in New York had changed that.
Thankfully, he had left nothing to chance.
He glanced at the flat-screen monitor on the wall. The tiny red circles on the global map indicated the Foundation’s live operations. So many creatures’ nests, spread across the entire world. New ones had appeared on a monthly basis since the botched mission under the Hudson River. In fact, that damned city appeared to have acted as a catalyst. Australia, India, Thailand, Oman, Argentina. Under major cities, capitals. The locations had an eerie coordination about them as they sprung up around the globe, like the creatures were preparing for war. He wondered if they had realized the time had come for a death match, where there could be only one winner.
Maybe.
His eyes narrowed when he focused on the United States of America.
It had several live nests growing, and one in particular—under San Francisco—was potentially what he had always been looking for. It was vast, according to initial reports, perhaps twice the size of the one below New York City. Van Ness had long suspected that he would know the true nature of the creatures only once his team had discovered their main lair—if there was one. He had a feeling this one in the Bay Area was it.
But there was still so much to learn about them.
They were an intelligent species—more so than humans—yet their purpose and motivations remained unclear in his mind. He wanted to investigate, but the new administration in America was a hindrance to finding out if San Francisco really was “creature ground zero.” There was only one way to find out, and that meant he needed unlimited resources for the upcoming fight. With time running out for humanity, he couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
The governments of the world no longer mattered except for their ability to give him what was necessary to save—and advance—the human cause.
“Shield mode,” Van Ness snapped.
The office’s voice activation system responded with an affirmative beep. Then the wall-to-ceiling window, twenty stories above the Parc du Champ de Mars, changed from transparent to gunmetal gray.
Darkness momentarily swamped the room before the overhead spotlights blazed down to restore the light. None of the array of international spooks who watched him from various vantage points on the city skyline needed to see this quiet moment of reflection.
The calm before the storm, he thought.
Van Ness reached across the table and poured himself a finger of Jameson. The smooth, sweet whiskey warmed the back of his throat, and he exhaled in satisfaction. It wasn’t the most expensive bottle in his office—there were a few rare Scotches and a Pappy twenty-three-year-old in the sideboard—but the taste of this particular drink always brought back memories. Whiskey was his father’s favorite, and they had shared a bottle of Jameson forty-five years ago in a villa on the Amalfi Coast after destroying a small nest beneath Naples.
He smiled to himself, picturing their heated political debates on the deck overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. They were best friends as well as father and son, and even during times of levity, they had strategized.
Sadness momentarily engulfed him.
All of those years Otto had spent building the organization. Grooming Albert to take over. Teaching him the Foundation’s doctrine. And the old man wouldn’t be here to appreciate that their goals were about to be realized.
Van Ness poured another glass and washed it around his mouth.
This one’s for you, Father.
It was cruel, really, watching such a powerful man wither away. Otto had spent four decades successfully fighting creatures and bringing most governments in line, only to be beaten by a disease. He remembered the old man staring up from his deathbed through bloodshot eyes, wincing in agony, muttering about revenge.
His final words were “Don’t let our dream die,” before Albert had suffocated him with a pillow to end both of their suffering.
Like father, like son.
Van Ness had never completely bought into his father’s idea of revenge against the World War II Allies. It had always felt spite-fueled and counterproductive to the Foundation’s primary aim of protecting the world from the creatures. But as Van Ness grew older, and he learned the truth of how his mother had died, he clearly saw how his father was right about these supposed democratic nations. They were the real war criminals. It wasn’t just bitterness; it was a cold, hard fact. To save the world, certain countries had to be brought to their knees.
I’ll finish them, starting with Washington and London.
Van Ness checked his watch. He hated being late for meetings and his next was in five minutes. A couple of deep breaths brought him back to the cool, calm, and collected man his employees knew. He rotated his chair toward the mahogany bookcase and keyed in a code on his armrest.
A door-shaped section of the bookcase eased out with a pneumatic hiss and rolled to the side, revealing a brightly lit corridor. The labs and rooms on either side lay in darkness, empty. This part of the operation had moved to the newest area of the Foundation’s complex. Hatching the master plan required extra protection, a safe space to deal with national leaders without fear of any reprisals.
A fortress from which Van Ness could save the world.
Van Ness drove forward.
The wheels squeaked against the polished corridor, and the quiet purr from the chair’s engine echoed around the walls. He reached an elevator, got in, and hit the button to take him to the basement parking garage. The elevator smoothly descended through the center of the building, like the tip of a creature’s tail spearing through a person’s head and gliding effortlessly through their body. That had been the signature move his team had observed.
Within seconds the elevator bumped to a gentle halt, and the doors parted to a dull, football-field-sized parking lot. Cars packed the spaces.
At the far end, two guards, dressed in black coveralls with rifles at the ready, stood at either side of a concrete bunker, thick enough to shield against any conventional or nuclear attack. The massive central blast door opened with a mechanical grind as he wheeled closer, sliding from right to left to reveal an all-glass elevator that was twice the size of a typical one found in office buildings.
Van Ness entered. Seconds later, the door closed and the elevator began its smooth descent, plunging rapidly beneath Paris in a transparent shaft that had a slight blue tinge. After fifty feet, the carved rock wall opened out into a vast underground cavern. This moment always stunned any guest: the sheer scale of the prehistoric cavern, and the clear elevator plummeting downward into the abyss. Fifty huge, shining globes, mounted from the ceiling and from the outcrops, pumped enormous amounts of light on the hundreds of small cave entrances that were typical of how the creatures constructed their nests. The new complex let the creatures know who was the real apex predator on the planet.
Van Ness peered through the glass of the elevator at what he had built: the most cutting-edge complex in the world. A spectacular, domed operations center, like half a bubble built right into the cavern. It was made from the same ten-inch-thick graphene glass as the elevator shaft and sat right in the heart of a creatures’ nest. Van Ness’ version of the Cheyenne Mountain facility, though his was a thousand times bigger and nearly a mile below Paris.
Two stone corridors ran from the operations center to labs and testing areas for newly developed weapons. Other rooms contained supplies and dorms and machinery to keep the place running. The Foundation could survive down here for years if required. With what he was planning, it was an entirely possible outcome.
Van Ness leaned toward the wall-mounted control pad and hit the external speaker button. Faint shrieks filled the car. Hundreds of them. A sound that would strike fear into any person, but not him. Not here where he was in complete control.
To him, it was one of the sweetest sounds in the world.
The elevator slowed as it reached the operations center, which had the same faint blue tinge. He loved the hue. Twenty members of his staff, all dressed casually in light cotton shirts and dark blue trousers, sat in front of workstations that ran around the circumference of the center.
Allen Edwards, Van Ness’ trusted number two, glanced up from the central command table as the car halted at the edge of the cool, air-conditioned area. Edwards had lost a lot of weight and most of his remaining hair over the past year. He appeared stick thin in his beige suit—painfully so—and he didn’t have any known sicknesses. Van Ness didn’t believe his claim of shedding those pounds through jogging. Edwards was loyal to his core, but the disaster in New York and its stress had clearly changed the man. It was a situation that required monitoring. Nobody understood the Foundation’s activities as well as his number two. He needed him, though not to the point of him becoming a liability.
Ten large screens were suspended around the dome at regular intervals. Van Ness studied them while he wheeled to the central command table. They displayed maps of the Foundation’s global presence, video footage from live operations, streams of public data being searched for anything creature- or Foundation-related, and feeds from cameras attached to the dome’s four laser turrets.
One of the live cameras moved across the cavern, and one of the lasers rotated toward a small cave. A heartbeat later, it fired, slicing two red beams across the cavern into the darkness. None of the staff members reacted, and they continued with their work, having become numb to this almost continual occurrence.
Edwards acknowledged his arrival with a thin smile. “Good morning, Albert.”
Van Ness peered at one of the big screens, which displayed a two-mile stretch of countryside and forest. “Do we still have him tracked?”
Edwards nodded. “Yes, he’s in the forest. Everything is going to plan.”
“Excellent.” Because now it begins. “The former mayor of New York will not be a problem for much longer . . .”