Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance Read Free Book Online Page B

the priest had delivered his sermon. The mouth of the temple was open, unguarded.
    The interior was what he’d expected, the typical religious setup – an altar, torches, incense, and that corporate logo, chiseled into the stone above the altar.
    “Let’s see if this is all there is,” Chen said. “Spread out, look for seams in the stone, secret passages, that sort of thing.”
    It didn’t take long. Cruz pressed against one of the monolithic stones that made up the wall behind the altar. It opened so smoothly and silently that he had to call out to the others to let them know. The door revealed a long tunnel, lit with an endless string of LED lights along the walls.
    They removed their disguises, reassembled their projectile weapons and put their carbobsid knives within easy reach. Chen took the lead as they entered the tunnel.
    After a few hundred meters, it widened into a cave. At the other end of the cave was a small, golden idol on a simple stone pillar. Chen started to step forward and Cruz grabbed him by the back of his shirt, yanking him back.
    “It’s booby trapped.”
    “How do you know?”
    Cruz grinned. “Sergeant fucking Hewitt and his collection of 20 th century pop culture. That he’s always imposing on us when we’re on station. Check out the floor.”
    Chen looked at the floor, composed of flat stones with dirt or mortar between them. Cruz unshouldered his backpack, and took out some of the heavier trinkets they’d bought if they’d been needed to bribe or impress the locals. He threw them across the room.
    As they landed on certain stones, darts shot out of the walls that would have sunk into the flesh of any person stepping on that stone.
    “ Raiders of the Lost Ark, ” Chen said, finally recalling the movie. “Wow.”
    Kaplan grunted. “If Alex has a sense of humor, it’s a sick one.”
    “Well,” Chen said, “it would definitely deter the natives from probing any further.”
    They all unpacked their “gift junk” and threw it in a straight line across the room’s stones, until they were sure they’d triggered all the darts. They walked across the safe zone to the little gold statue.
    “Is that…”
    “Yes,” Cruz laughed. “It appears to be a solid gold ‘Hello Kitty.’”
    “It’s all coming back to me now,” Chen said. “If we pick this up, then a giant boulder chases us back out the way we came, right?”
    “Unless Alex has rewritten the script,” Kaplan mused.
    “Only one way to find out,” Chen said grimly, his patience with Alex’s little games wearing thin. He stepped up on the platform and lifted the Golden Kitty off the pillar.
    He stumbled as the platform began to move, and the room split in two, leaving Kaplan and Cruz on the other side of a widening divide.
    “No!” he commanded as they prepared to leap across the gulf. “Let this play out.”
    The back of the cave split as well, making way for the platform, now sliding smoothly into its depths. “Sixty minutes,” he called back to his team. “If I’m not out of here by then, evac to the ship and wait,” he said as fast as he could, getting the last syllable in just before the cave resealed itself behind him.
    He was in a white room, bare of anything but a comfortable white easy chair, with a white table beside it, on which was a glass full of red liquid.
    There was no sound, no echo; rather the voice was a direct stimulation of his eardrum. It was warm, pleasant, friendly, the voice innumerable engineers and marketing committees had tested and marketed and refined until it was as appealing as science could make it, the ideal voice for the “virtual friend” any bored or lonely person could buy to brighten up their lives.
    The voice that had then become the stuff of children’s nightmares, the voice reproduced in uncountable cheap horror films, that of the Bringer of Death…Red Alex, the Butcher of Lagos.
    “Hello, General Chen,” it said softly. “Welcome to Alexia.”
     

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