The Milestone Protocol, Ernest Dempsey [100 best novels of all time txt] 📗

parted ways with a tenuous alliance, he had no desire to test that bond.

“What’s on your mind?” Adriana asked from the seat next to him.

“Oh,” he said, jogged from his thoughts. “Just thinking about all of this. It’s just, everything seems so strange now. And sad.”

“Because your friend betrayed you?”

“Partly,” Sean admitted. “Magnus was a mentor to both me and Tommy. He gave me a huge head start in life. Both of us, actually. I doubt either of us would be where we are without Magnus Sorenson’s help.”

“And that’s confusing for you, isn't it?”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t tell what paths you chose in life or which ones were deliberately laid for you to follow, perhaps without your awareness.”

He looked over at her and smiled. “You have good intuition.”

She shrugged. “It’s how I would feel. In a way, it’s how I feel knowing the truth about Miyamoto and my father, my family line.” A darkness settled over her face.

“No word from Madrid?”

“We’re on an old airplane flying over the Norwegian Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. Not exactly the best place to get cell service.”

“True.”

The group had boarded a train to Estonia a few hours after leaving the farmhouse outside Moscow. In the city of Tallin, they had met up with their pilot, Matt Prichard, and had flown to Helsinki where they refueled and picked up some crates before heading to Oslo.

Matt had greeted them with a broad smile from behind a thick red beard. He wore a beanie that covered short blond hair. Prichard was a big guy, standing two inches over Sean. Bulging muscles stretched his jacket and pants, making the guy look more like a Viking in disguise than a cargo pilot.

After filling him in on the details, the group boarded the plane, and Matt made arrangements to fly to Oslo to drop off the crates from Helsinki and pick up a shipment of seeds to take to the Global Seed Vault on Svalbard—an underground bunker operated by the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in partnership with an organization called Crop Trust. The location on Spitsbergen Island was ideal because of the absence of tectonic movement, and the permafrost helped with preservation. It was also over four hundred feet above sea level, which would keep the site dry in the catastrophic event that the ice caps melt.

To Emily’s surprise, Prichard said he’d made the run to Svalbard on two occasions, the first being to deliver some equipment to the seed bank. That was the first time he’d heard about the odd storage facility, and that knowledge served him well this time around on his journey to the far northern island.

Sean looked around the cabin at the other members of their team. Their weapons were safely stored in compartments below, and because most of the focus would be on the cargo and getting it moved to a transport truck, there was little concern that the authorities in Svalbard would even check their additional luggage.

“We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes,” Prichard announced over the speakers.

Sean craned his neck to the side to get a better look forward through his window, but he still couldn’t make out their destination in the archipelago.

Adriana noticed that he still seemed pensive.

“It’s unfortunate,” she said, “that you have to face someone you trusted, and who you cared about as a personal friend. If it comes down to it, I will pull the trigger.”

He twisted his head around and stared into her dark eyes. She never wavered, even under his piercing, searching gaze. Then he nodded. “The man I believed Magnus to be never really existed. There’s no telling how many people he’s killed throughout the years, how many executions he’s ordered. He was going to have you, Tabitha, and Niki all killed at the farmhouse, like you were nothing more than insects.”

Tabitha heard the conversation from the seat in front of them and turned around, leaning over the top of the cushion. “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. If you get Sorenson, I get Kevin Clark. That little weasel killed more than a dozen members of his own excavation team. I’ll happily put him down if I get the chance.”

“I hope you do,” Sean said. Then he had another thought. “What’s your story, by the way?” Sean asked. “You said you’re with MI6, but how’d you get into that role?”

She sighed, and her eyes briefly looked up to the ceiling as if recounting a long, dramatic tale of how she arrived at that moment.

“Not a very interesting story, I’m afraid. Grew up in the city in London. Parents were both working blue-collar jobs. They never made much money, but enough to send me to university. I earned a degree in political science, but I was always more interested in a more active role with the country. So, I went through the process, the training, and ended up working a desk job for four years before I was moved into field duty. And voilà,” she said, opening her palms. “Here I am. On a plane. Flying over the Arctic Ocean.”

Tabitha was a little skimpy on the details, but that was to be expected. She was, after all, part of a very secretive organization. Sean decided not to press her.

“I used to be the same way,” he said. “Thought I wanted more of the action, more adventure. Then I realized all I really wanted was a nice bungalow on the beach and warm sunshine on my face.”

Adriana nudged him with an elbow.

He chuckled. “Turns out, what you want isn’t always what you need. Or what the world needs.”

“You were with her, weren’t you? At Axis?” Tabitha flashed a glance toward the front of the plane where Emily sat alone in the forwardmost seat.

The corner of Sean’s right eye tightened slightly. “You never really know who worked for them.”

Tabitha nodded. “I see how it is.”

“Emily and I worked a lot of jobs together. When she got the director job, I left. She wanted me to stay. I