“Open your eyes, Agent St. Claire. Playin’ possum insults me. It’s gotta be borin’ you.”

The honey-on-steel voice carried the faint tones of the Texas oil fields, decades after the speaker had stopped wildcatting.

J. Anson Galt. Mad scientist. Or, more accurately, mad engineer whose billions funded an army of scientists.

I opened my eyes.

There was no other choice. My infiltration of his Rocky Mountain fortress had failed. His security robots had captured me in the facility’s power plant, as I attempted to cause a catastrophic failure. The explosion was the only possible way to stop Galt from releasing his weaponized smallpox virus.

I expected to find myself in a cell and instead faced my captor in a padded leather chair. The lack of restraints spoke...

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