"You got it, K. Be safe."
"I always am."
She hung up, opened her laptop, and pulled up Janet LaLonde's number.
* * *
Matt put on his tactical helmet and double-checked Sakura's chute. He gave her a thumbs-up, so without hesitation she leapt from the open door of the small airplane. He followed her out, and the vista of Baltimore on a late fall night opened up twelve thousand feet underneath him. Oriented over the Gwynn's Falls hiking trail, a twist of his upper body shifted his path of descent toward the rooftop of a large industrial building leased by Liaguno, Morton, and Wood.
Big K had used a burner—a prepaid phone with no contract and no linked accounts—but with the number they'd managed to narrow his cell location to Baltimore, and put out a discrete APB. Eyes-on by an astute beat cop from the Baltimore Police Department pegged Big K at the warehouse below. A task force of FBI, BPD, and Maryland State Police had quietly cordoned off the area with orders to detain anyone attempting to leave the building, but due to the likelihood of at least one hostage—eleven months old—come in hot only if called by Matt, Sakura, or Janet.
The aerial entry had been Sakura's idea, a way to get inside the perimeter fence and past any guards without drawing any eyes. Mankind had left the jungle too long ago for the average person to consider looking up to scan for threats. Blueprints had indicated roof access via a southern balcony, and a wide-open warehouse area topped by two floors of offices.
Positioned above the building, they dropped in pencil dives, the air whipping past them at terminal velocity. The HUD indicated no hostiles on the roof but two on the ground inside the fence perimeter, walking together instead of on opposite sides of the building. He wondered again if it were a trap, and how far his enemy would go to kill him.
They deployed canopies three hundred feet above the building.
His boots crunched gravel so he pulled in his chute, twisting the fabric to keep it from blowing away or dragging him off the building. Sakura reached the ladder first, her chute already wrapped around a pipe sticking out of the rooftop.
She dropped back on her haunches and signed, Guards below, two of them, walking east, chatting like sweethearts. Her American Sign Language outpaced his by a good deal, but he understood her well enough despite the lack of practice since ICAP had ended tactical operations.
Wait for them to circle to the North side, then ignore them.
She nodded her agreement, waited until their voices had faded into the distance, then led down the ladder to the fourth-story balcony.
Matt put his fingers on the glass and pushed up. The unlocked window slid open with ease. Hands bare, Matt took point through the small manager's office and listened at the door. He heard nothing, so he opened it without a sound and peeked out into the hallway.
Doors lined either side, dark save for one, a room at the far end with light peeking under the door crack. Matt approached on the balls of his feet, scanning the floor for loose boards or anything that would betray his presence. Light clacking sounded behind the door.
Matt pulled an endoscope from his kit and slithered it under the door crack. A quick survey showed two dark-haired occupants sitting on an enormous brown leather loveseat. Both wore headphones and played Call of Duty on a giant flat screen TV, their backs to the door. A pair of Chinese AK-47s leaned against the wall next to the TV. Matt pulled back the scope and stuffed it into his kit.
Behind me, take the left, Matt signed to Sakura.
He turned the knob ever so slowly and opened the door. Neither man responded, so he motioned Sakura in, drew a combat knife and stepped forward. They took them together, leaning down in synchronous motion to grab foreheads and drag their knives across unsuspecting throats.
Matt held his target's head against his abdomen as blood leaked from the struggling body. When he lay still Matt let go, wiped the knife clean on the back of the couch, and sheathed it at his ankle. After a quick look out the window—they had an excellent view of the main gates—Matt picked up the controllers one by one, said AFK, and left the game while Sakura disabled the firing pins on the AKs.
The dead men both stared at him, heads leaned together like new lovers at the movies. Brown hair, brown eyes, they had to have been brothers, the older no more than twenty-five. Matt wondered if either had raped his wife, or taken his son, or murdered Chris and Sandy.
They closed the door on the way out and backtracked to the unlit rooms. Dusty collections of filing cabinets and banker's boxes, none held a crib or bassinette, none held his son. They took the stairs to the third floor after checking for cameras or tumblers and finding none.
The well-lit hallway looked identical to the one above it, save that every door stood open, every room ablaze with stark fluorescent light. Matt raised his AA-12, and Sakura switched from her knives to the REC-7. They made it four steps before a man walked out of a far room, eyes downcast, blowing across the top of a steaming mug in his hands. Matt's Friend-or-Foe identifier outlined him in a double triangle.
Sakura stepped into a doorway, taking cover while keeping her weapon trained on the target.
The man froze mid-step and turned, giving Matt a good view of his face. Big K's soft brown eyes widened under his bright red baseball cap, but to his credit he neither panicked nor tried to run. Instead he smiled, blazing white Hollywood teeth behind red gums. With easy confidence he took a sip of his drink. "Your son's not here, Matty-boy. Yardley's got him somewhere you ain't never going to find."
Yardley. What did that psychotic have to do with Humans for Humanity?
"Where is he?"
"Safe, for now. But you so much as muss our hair, your son won't live to see sunup."
His finger on the trigger, Matt shrugged with a nonchalance he didn't feel. "Too late for that. Your boys upstairs won't be finishing their game."
Black rage descended on Big K's face. "If you touched my brothers—"
A twinge of guilt sparked off the whispers, who rejoiced at the heartache and agony he'd caused.
"Too late. You shouldn't have brought them into this."
All sense of toughness drained out of Karthik's body, and in that moment he looked like nothing so much as a scared little boy. His coffee clattered at his feet. "Are . . . are they okay?"
"They're dead," Sakura said.
The whispers giggled and tittered just before two things happened simultaneously: Karthik charged, and someone threw a grenade out the door to their left. Matt stepped forward and turned, using his momentum to swat the grenade back to the room it came from. He ducked under the undisciplined MMA fighter and heaved with his legs, throwing Karthik past the room. Matt just had time to slam the door and turn his head before the explosion rocked him.
Jagged splinters dug into the back of his neck between his vest and helmet. In the deafening silence he picked up weapons-chatter, staccato bursts characteristic of Sakura's efficient, impersonal brutality. Matt turned as Big K struck, his fingers punching right through Matt's visor to shatter his nose.
Matt stumbled back, blocking a series of lightning-fast strikes and kicks. Only his precognition kept him alive as Karthik hammered him with strikes too strong for a normal man, too fast even for Sakura. Matt ducked a wild haymaker and didn't take the bait—instead of closing in to take advantage of the false opening, he took a farther step back and raised the shotgun.
Karthik chopped down on the barrel and Matt's shot hit the floor, but the microgrenade sprayed Karthik's bare ankles with high-velocity shrapnel. He didn't fall, didn't even react except to snap-kick Matt's hand, crushing his fingers between boot and gun.
Matt stepped into the kick and brought up his knee. Karthik turned to catch the blow on his side, but the force slammed him into and partially through the plaster wall. Matt cracked him under the jaw with the stock, and Karthik sent him flying with an open-palm strike to the chest.
His armor solidified around the blow, disbursing the impact, but he slammed into the opposite wall hard
enough to snap the stud behind the now-ruined plaster. The shotgun clattered to the floor.
Karthik grinned around bloody teeth. "New game in town, Rowley. Time to die."
Big K covered the distance between them in two fluid steps. Matt fell back to the ground and, as Karthik's knee occupied the space where his head had been, unholstered the Glock and pulled the trigger twice, sending two .45-caliber bullets up through Karthik's groin into his abdomen.
Matt kipped up to his feet as Karthik collapsed to the ground, eyes wide, mouth open in a surprised "O." He fired twice more into Karthik's center of mass at point-blank range, then swept up the AA-12 and opened the first door, through which he'd batted the grenade.
A mangled body smoked next to an overturned table, and a third clutched his ruined leg and screamed inarticulate madness. The injured man wore a pistol, so Matt stepped forward and kicked him in the side of the head. His neck snapped under the force. Matt turned and stepped back into the hall, shotgun raised and ready.
Sakura took cover in the room across the way. Rifle in one hand, she pulled a flash-bang grenade from her bandoleer, grabbed the pin with her teeth, and pulled it. She nodded to Matt, then gave it a toss. He timed his charge for the split second after the explosion and made it halfway down the hall before anyone had recovered.
A man leaned out from the far room, an AK-47 raised toward where Matt used to be. Matt spun around the barrel and slammed the stock of the AA-12 into his neck. A second stumbled back and shot Matt twice in the chest with a small-caliber pistol. Matt grunted as his armor absorbed the impact, let go of the shotgun, the explosive rounds near-useless in such proximity, and lunged.
He punched through the shooter's torso, shattering the drywall behind, turned, and threw the body at the doorway. Ravaged entrails spilled out of the cavity as Matt's forearm pulled out of the wound with a wet sucking sound. Red meat and rotting curry filled his nostrils, mixed with a sharp, acidic bite. Another man rounded the corner and fumbled his weapon trying to catch the body as it hit him.
Matt leapt, tackling both dead body and living man through the hallway into the kitchenette. Bullets stung his leg on the way through, hot and sharp but through-and-through. He tore out the living man's throat left-handed and with his right, drew his pistol and fired twice, taking the room's sole occupant square in the chest. The shot man stumbled back into the coffee pot then sank to his haunches, blood streaking the cupboards on the way down.
In the sudden silence Matt's right hand burned, and his throat tightened at the stench of bile and stomach acid. "Sakura, status?"
The dead man fell forward onto his face, a pool of red leaking out under his body.
"All but the last two rooms are clear. The three who tried to make the stairwell are down. We can probably negotiate with the rest."
Using a chair, Matt dragged himself to his feet. He couldn't put weight on his leg yet, so he needed to buy a little time. "Alright, I need a minute. Can you cover them if they come out?"
"Yes."
He raised his voice. "Your boss is dead. If you want to live through the next sixty seconds, throw down your weapons and come into the hallway with your hands on your heads. We won't ask again."
He looked down the hallway. The stairwell door stood ajar, the bodies of three women in their underwear lay in a tangle, preventing it from closing. An infrared signature kept just out of sight of normal vision in the dark beyond them.
"That includes you in the stairwell. The building is surrounded, and you're going to jail on weapons and kidnapping charges, unless you prefer suicide by cop, which we're happy to provide. Your choice." He flexed his leg, put a little weight on it, then bobbed up and down on his toes. "You've got forty-two more seconds."
The first man came out ten seconds later, followed by another four.
In the end they had seventeen casualties and five perpetrators in custody, including two more of Peter Salomon's former employees. Matt washed up before forensics moved in to pick through the bloodiest "no-knock raid" in the history of the city of Baltimore. This time their credentials kept them out of custody and put them in the interrogation rooms with the perps.
They talked.
* * *
Standing over Karthik's split-open remains, Matt raised his eyebrows at the coroner, an FBI forensic examiner on loan from Keene. The pasty little man looked up from his calculator, and then at the rib fragment in the graduated cylinder, and cleared his throat. "By my estimation, bone density is three grams per cubic centimeter, not quite double human normal. Based on the luster I would suspect some kind of metallic additive—it looks like honeycomb under the electron microscope."
Big K's organs already lay in trays, for the most part normal, but as the coroner had removed each one, tiny black filaments pulled from them, the combination of strength and tiny size leading Matt to believe they were made from—or entwined with—graphene fiber of some kind.
"What about the brain?" Sakura asked.
He smiled. "Let's take a look, shall we?" He plopped a face shield on his head and picked up the vibrating Stryker saw. The high-pitched whine lowered as it bit into Karthik's forehead and a musty, smoky odor overpowered the antiseptic aroma of bleach. "Difficult, like the sternum."
They waited until the little man had pried Big K's skull cap off, then stepped around to observe the pinkish, shiny blob.
"Seems normal enough," the coroner said. "Let's see what it weighs."
As he worked the brain out, a thousand or more black fibers held it in, and he grunted at the effort necessary to pull the organ away from the skull. They came away like hair, black and wiry, all attached to a tiny bundle at the base of the brain stem.
Sakura leaned in and clicked on a small, hand-held flashlight. "Processor."
Over her shoulder Matt saw the truth of it: the bundle of artificial nerves terminated at a clear box, inside of which a series of small microchips lay on a bright green circuit board.
"Fascinating," the coroner said. He turned to them, bloody gloves raised in the air, and gave a quick nod toward the door. "I'm going to wash up and call in someone who might know what this is, who built it, and how it got into our fighting friend, here."
"Can you trust him?"
He nodded without hesitation. "She and I have worked together on many sensitive issues. We'll get you a report as soon as we have one to issue."
"Thanks."
Chapter 16
Twelve hours of surveillance via satellite and county PD told them enough to go in without weapons: Murdock Yardley's mother lived alone on her seventeen-acre farm and employed neighborhood boys to keep the yards mowed and the cows fed. She'd upgraded fourteen years earlier, after her son had made his first million dollars as a prize fighter, well before he'd volunteered to join ICAP. He held the house in his name, but had never lived there.
They drove up the winding, pothole-filled dirt driveway to the modern McMansion completely out of place in the middle of the Maryland pasture. The brick facade and vinyl siding encased enormous windows revealing an open floor plan with all the amenities—a fake fireplace, marble countertops, bar, Jacuzzi. Sakura stayed with the car by choice, so Matt walked up the porch and rang the bell.
Anita Yardley smiled when she opened the door in a chaotic broomstick dress to make any hippie proud. Her gray hair hung in curls almost to her waist, and Matt couldn't help but admire her beauty. Approaching sixty, she didn't look a day over forty, and the kind of forty that makes boys appreciate women as opposed to girls. "Well, if it isn't Matt Rowley. What brings a gentleman like you down a country road like this?"
If she saw Sakura leaning against the car, she made no comment of it. Instead she stepped back and offered him a drink—which he refused—and a plate of cookies, which he accepted. "You look . . . fantastic. Miraculous. Skin grafts can't do that."
"No ma'am, they can't."
"So . . . ?"
He shrugged. "I can't explain it."
After they'd settled in her imm
aculate living room, in front of the gas fire, she took a sip of tea and set it down. "So what brings you here?"
"I'm looking for Murdock. I haven't seen or heard anything from him since that day you and I met, when things went south last year." Like so many bonks, Yardley had collapsed under the weight of his own body when his augmentations had failed. Matt had spent far too much time visiting former colleagues in hospitals. He'd met Anita Yardley at her son's bedside when Murdock still languished in a coma and Matt had been covered with burn scars.
"Is this a social call?"
"No, ma'am, it's not."
She waited, so he continued.
"He's either causing trouble or someone's using his name to do it. Either way, I'd like to speak to him about some friends of his who seem to have a vendetta against me."
She took another sip, pinning him over the top of her cup. "Well, he said you really showed him something in some fight or another last year, before, you know, before. He didn't have many nice things to say once he woke up."
Matt remembered it well enough. Yardley had been called in to kill Matt and Sakura and didn't give a damn when Matt proved they hadn't bonked out by trying to have a conversation with him. He'd only stopped crushing Matt to death when Sakura had torn out most of his spine and emptied half a magazine up into his abdomen.
Yardley liked killing people and didn't much care who, how, or why.
"We didn't really know each other except by reputation. He was following orders, I was doing my job, we ran afoul of each other. Wasn't his fault, wasn't mine. Either way, he's not in the hospital and he's not here. Can you tell me where he is?"
She shrugged. "Lying in a bed somewhere with a machine keeping him alive. Other than that, I'm not sure I'm comfortable ratting out my son to the police. Or whatever you are. Do you have a title anymore? Jurisdiction?"
"My credentials are what they need to be. Where is he, please?"
"I don't know."
"Can you get a hold of him?"
"Not for you, I don't think so." She smiled a sad smile and patted his hand. "He's never been a good boy, but he's still my son."
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