The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller by A. G. Riddle Read Free Book Online Page A

Where was he? It looked like one of the station’s holding cells. The man brought a pellet to Josh’s nose and cracked it open with a loud pop. Josh inhaled the worst smell of his entire life — a sharp, overwhelming ammonia smell that coursed through his airways, inflated his lungs, and sent him reeling backwards, hitting his head against the wall. The constant throbbing turned to a sharp pain. He closed his eyes tight and rubbed his head.
    “Ok, ok, take it easy.” It was the station chief, David Vale.
    “What’s going on?” Josh asked.
    He could open his eyes now, and he realized that David was in full body armor and there were two other field operatives with him, standing by the door to the cell.
    Josh sat up. “Someone must have planted a bug—”
    “Relax, this isn’t about a bug. Can you stand up?” David said.
    “I think so.” Josh struggled to his feet. He was still groggy from the gas that had knocked him out in the elevator.
    “Good, follow me.”
    Josh followed David and the two operatives out of the room with the holding cells and down a long hallway that led to the server room. At the server room door, David turned to the other two soldiers. “Wait here. Radio me if anyone enters the corridor.”
    Inside the server room, David resumed his brisk pace, and Josh had to almost jog to keep up. The Station Chief was just over six feet tall and muscular, not quite as beefy as some of the linebacker-esque ops guys, but big enough to give any drunken bar-brawler pause.
    They snaked their way through the crowded server room, dodging tower after tower of metal cabinets with green, yellow, and red blinking lights. The room was cool, and the constant hum of the machines was slightly disorienting. The three-person IT group was constantly working on the servers, adding, removing, and replacing hardware. The place was a pigsty. Josh tripped over a cord, but before he hit the ground, David turned, caught him, and pushed him back to his feet.
    “You alright?”
    Josh nodded. “Yeah. This place is a mess.”
    David said nothing but walked a bit slower the rest of the way to a metal closet at the back of the server room. David pushed the closet aside, revealing a silver door and a panel beside it. The red light of a palm scan flashed over his hand, and another panel opened and performed a facial and retinal scan. When it finished, the wall parted, revealing an iron door that looked like something from a battleship.
    David opened the iron door with a second palm scan and led Josh into a room probably half the size of a gymnasium. The cavern had concrete walls and their footsteps echoed loudly as they approached the center of the room, where a small glass box, about twelve feet by twelve feet, hung from thick twisted metal cords. The glass box was softly lit, and Josh couldn’t see inside it, but he already knew what it was.
    Josh had suspected the cell had such a room, but he’d never seen it in person. It was a quiet room. The entire Jakarta station headquarters was a kind of quiet room — it was shielded from every manner of listening device. There was no need for further precautions within the station — unless you didn’t want another member of the cell to hear you.
    There were certainly protocols that required it. He suspected the Chief talked with other station chiefs via phone and video in this room. Maybe even with Central.
    As they approached the room, a short flight of glass stairs descended and quickly retracted after they climbed into the room. A glass door closed behind them. A bank of computer screens hung on the far wall of the room, but other than that, Josh thought the room was surprisingly sparse: a simple fold-out table with four chairs, two phones and a conference speaker, and an old steel filing cabinet. The furniture was cheap and a bit out of place, like something you might see in the on-site trailer at a construction site.
    “Take a seat,” David said. He walked to the file cabinet