The team had broken through the second layer of reinforced concrete, which was days ahead of schedule, and the ground-penetrating radar was showing a void approximately four meters below their current position, which was about two meters below the floor of the basement. It matched what he'd been told on the phone by the clan's compeller about the chamber Navuhhad supposedly built beneath the enclosure. According to the compeller, that chamber held coffin-like chests containing five clan members in stasis.
Losham placed the report on the desk and steepled his fingers.
Four meters. At the current rate of careful progress that the compeller had demanded be powered only by the hands of humans, they would reach it within the week.
The question that had been nagging at him since the first phone call resurfaced was why his father had gone to such extraordinary lengths to hide a handful of enemy bodies? A glass enclosure in his basement, filled with sand, climate-controlled, sealed, and rigged with booby traps destructive enough to collapse an entire section of the mansion. Obviously, he had been protecting something he considered extremely valuable. The question was, who were the immortals whose bodies were in stasis in those chests, and what made them so valuable.
The clan's spokesperson, the one whose identity Losham still did not know, had said that Navuh planned to use the bodies as leverage, which implied that those bodies were not of random clan members.
They had to be important to the goddess.
Losham needed more information.
The compeller and the leader on those calls were careful, revealing only what served their purposes and nothing more. They wanted the chests. They wanted them intact. They wanted Losham to do the digging and the heavy lifting while they sat comfortably wherever their base was and issued commands through Lokan's phone.
Losham had no choice but to comply because of the compulsion, and because they had dangled his supposed mother in front of him like a lure, and he had bitten.
Rolenna. His mother.
The thought still triggered a slew of complicated emotions that vacillated between longing and fury. They were using the one vulnerability he hadn't known he possessed until Lokan had sent that photograph.
And the worst part was that it was working.
He was over two thousand years old, and he hadn't missed his mother or even thought of her more than once in a long while. It was his natural curiosity that was his main motivation for connecting with her. He wasn't looking for a mother's love. He didn't need it. He was just curious.
Losham pushed the thought aside. Whether sentiment or curiosity, both were a distraction, and he had more pressing concerns than the female who had birthed him.
He needed to go over some of the security feeds like he did each morning, choosing most of them at random. It wasn't the best method of keeping tabs on what was happening on the island, but it was better than nothing.
The one he checked each time, though, was the external surveillance of the laboratory. Four cameras were covering the building's front door, the path leading to it, and the courtyard where the guards rotated their shifts. The internal cameras had been turned off to keep his brothers from learning about the human enhancement research he had ordered.
It hadn't been an easy decision to give up on keeping tabs on the lab, but it had been necessary.
He pulled up the time-stamped logs from the past seventy-two hours and began reviewing the footage at high speed.
The first anomaly was from two nights ago.
The external camera covering the lab's main entrance showed Dimitri leaving the lab shortly after dark, which wasn't surprising on its own, but then all eight of Dave converged on the scientist, and the nine of them started a leisurely walk, with Number One keeping pace with Dimitri and the other seven following close behind.
They returned from their stroll more than an hour later and parted ways at the lab door, with Dimitri going in and the Eight heading in the direction of the mansion.
The next day, Dave came in for his enhancement injections, which should have taken no more than fifteen minutes based on previous visits, but this time the visit lasted much longer.
What were they talking about?
And more importantly, why?
Losham was not paranoid like his father, and he didn't jump to conclusions, but he didn't ignore patterns either, and the pattern here was unmistakable.
Dave was developing a relationship with the scientists that went beyond the clinical.
The question was whether this relationship was benign or dangerous.
The eight who were Dave were the most powerful entity on the island. The compulsion ability of the hive mind was not in Navuh's league, but it was formidable enough to control any person or group of people Dave targeted.
It was true that the enhancement drugs that Dimitri administered were the only thing keeping Dave's merged consciousness stable, which meant that Dave had a vested interest in keeping the scientists alive and functional, but vested interest and friendship were different things.
He wished he had better intel on what was going on between Dave and Dimitri.
