Page 121 of The Lazarus Protocol

“If this was a horror movie, something would scurry across the end of the hall out there.”

Adam kicked beside the door handle, but he couldn’t break it. He ended up slumped against the door with sweat on his forehead, breathing hard.

He heard a beep, over by the light.

“Yeah, that’s not a trap.” Adam had survived worse situations than this by talking to himself. Maybe it was more like praying, because he liked to think there was Someone listening. “Trying to get my attention? I’ll be over here doing that ‘do not fret’ thing.” Even if this situation was one of the worst he’d been in.

The computer terminal had a stool in front of it, so he sat carefully, hoping decades of disuse didn’t make the thing collapse under him.

When it held his weight, he hit the Enter key. “Hopefully, that unlocks the door.”

Hopefully.

“Assuming hope is a thing I still have access to.” Better than fear, or worry, or being swallowed up by the fact he’d been overpowered by someone else.

Adam hit a couple more keys. He checked his phone again, but there was still no signal. “Something on this thing has power. Why don’t you talk to me?”

The monitor flickered, and an image came on screen.

“So they used the screen saver from The Matrix in 1950? Is that it?”

“You asked to talk.”

The voice came from a speaker above him, high on the wall. At the same time, the sound waves of a person speaking bounced in the middle of the screen, then descended to a flat line.

“Let me out of here.”

“Unable to comply.”

“Under orders, like a good soldier? I know what you are. And you know everything about me. But it’s not my job to convince you that you don’t have to listen to anyone else.”

Then again, maybe convincing artificial intelligence to be autonomous was a bad idea.

“No one wants Vesper to be right, even though she probably is. We just differ on our methods.” That time Adam was talking to himself.

He sighed. “I could use some fresh bandages.”

“Unable to comply.”

“Yeah, because that would be too analogue for you. Out here in the real world we have aches and pains, and we’d like to know where our friends are.”

The screen flickered and split into a grouping of square images that looked like surveillance camera feeds.

Adam’s stomach clenched. “Jay.” Top left. Beside him was Kai, pacing back and forth. Dan lay alone in a cell, and Adam couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not.

His breaths came faster. “Noah and Marina.” They were together in a cell.

“And Ash.” Looked like he was in a van, tied up. Steph, down in the corner, was still upstairs in the room where he’d been, pacing back and forth. “Where’s Ice?”

“Ivan Calvin Edwards.

Location unknown.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess.” He wasn’t going to breathe Kyle’s name out loud, or anything else to do with the Phoenix Network. The program in the lab on that boat had known what the Lazarus Protocol was, but it could have just learned the rumor.

Adam wanted to watch each of them, as if he could keep them safe by standing guard. In reality there was nothing he could do.

“What do you want?”