The Milestone Protocol by Ernest Dempsey (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📕

the surface, vibrating rhythmically like one of those old football games with the metal top and the magnetic players.

He picked it up and stared at the number. He knew that whenever his employer called, answering wasn’t an option. It was a requirement.

A quick look at the time caused him a wince of pain. It was unlike his boss to ring him at this time of night. Normally, the man would already be asleep. It must have been terribly important to warrant a call now.

Niki pressed the green Answer button and put the device to his ear. He ran his fingers through thick black hair and rubbed his scalp to help him wake up.

“Yes, sir. Go ahead,” he said in a clear tone.

“I’m sorry to wake you.” There was no insincerity in the statement, and Niki knew the man meant it. His boss wasn’t one to say things he didn’t mean.

“It’s no problem. I was barely asleep anyway.”

“That’s one of the things I appreciate about you, Niki. You are always ready, always ahead of everyone else.”

“Thank you, sir. I learned it from you.”

The man accepted the compliment without acknowledgment. “Darcy is handling the situation in the United States. She’s tracking the two lab rats from the IAA. Apparently, they’ve made their way out of the city and into a small town north of Atlanta.”

“You want me to rendezvous with her there? It would take me”—Niki looked at his watch as if that could tell him the estimated time of travel to Atlanta—“around ten hours to get there, if I left immediately.”

“No, no. She has it under control. They will be eliminated soon enough, along with any proof of their knowledge of the Quantium. I have something else I need you to do.”

The voice paused, leaving Niki to wonder why the man was being unusually cryptic. Ever since joining the organization, Niki had known the man to be secretive, even elusive, regarding certain operations, missions, and systems that kept the enormous machine turning.

There were multiple factions—groups of ordinary people called secret societies—all working for the same goal, and the same person. While most of the world believed these clusters of prominent or wealthy people were merely clubs or had become defunct, Niki knew their true purpose. He was one of the select few privy to that information. The Bilderbergs, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Syndicate, and a smattering of others maintained order in the world, just as colonial governors of old did.

Niki knew not to press his benefactor. The man had saved him from the streets in Greece, where he’d been abducted by a madman and set free by a kind woman who sacrificed her own life to let him escape. Many nights, he wondered what happened to that woman. Her beautiful, kind face held him on nights when he couldn’t sleep in his new home with the man who’d likewise saved his life, given him sanctuary, and become a father figure after seeing his own parents thrown off a cliff.

He spoke her name now and then, to make certain he never forgot it. Adriana, she’d said. He tried to recall if she’d mentioned her last name, but if she had, it had slipped from his memory. But the first name he would never forget. It was as elegant and beautiful as she had been. There’d been times he wondered if she’d died there in that basement dungeon, but something told him she’d survived.

Niki didn’t know why he felt that way, but over the years his instincts had proved corrected more often than not. Although he had to admit much of that had to do with the training he’d received from his benefactor, a man he only knew as Odin.

“I am an instrument of the cause,” Niki said, a motto he’d heard used many times by other followers of Odin within the organization.

“You are much more than that to me, Niki. I hope you realize that.”

“I don’t like to make assumptions, sir. I am grateful for the life you have given me, for taking me in and saving me from the streets. Every day I wake up, I am grateful for what you have done.”

“I appreciate that.”

Niki had never heard a loving, tender tone from the man when he spoke to others in the organization. As far as Niki knew, Odin had never been married, though the leader’s backstory was something of a mystery. No one seemed to know much about Odin’s life before he took the reins as the head of the shadow caste—the Fellowship of Thoth.

“You have served the cause well, Niki. For a man of such a young age, you have the fighting abilities of someone with twice the experience.”

“I’m twenty,” Niki said. “Wars have been won and lost with younger men than me.” The quote was one that had been ingrained in his mind since the day he began his training. They were the same words Odin used when he delivered Niki to the training facility to begin the arduous journey to becoming an elite warrior.

Through the years of toil and sweat, he’d honed his figure into a lengthy, muscular form, and with a mind more than capable of matching the quickest fighters in the world.

“I’m happy to hear you recall that,” Odin drawled.

“Would be difficult to forget, sir.” Niki knew the man had more on his plate than any single individual in the world. More than presidents or kings or prime ministers; Odin alone controlled them all. He used committees, councils, advisers in all things, but the last decision was always his as it had been for the leader before him. “What would you have me do?”

“Direct,” Odin said. “Just as I like it. We have an issue I need you to handle. The pests from the IAA have managed to salvage the tablet Dr. Clark discovered in Russia. They’re leaving Sweden and heading to Moscow tomorrow morning. I need you to intercept them.”

Niki knew what that meant. Odin wanted them dead. “I’ll handle it.”

“There’s one other