She ignored it and broke into a run, wincing with the ache from her ankle. A halo of white glared around her as she fell into the beam of one of
the flashlights, and she threw up a hand to shield her eyes. Anna stumbled backward, and she was looking for another means of escape when
she heard the voice again.
"Kelso! Damn it, where the hell are you going?"
She squinted into the light. "D-Bar?"
The young hacker became visible, flanked by a couple of thuggish men who had the watchful, grim manner of career leg-breakers. They had
machine pistols as well as the flashlights. "You are a real pain in the ass to pin down, do you know that?" D-Bar beckoned her to follow him.
"C'mon. We don't have long until the railroad signals reset, and then this will not be a safe place to stand."
Anna hesitated. "You left the package."
That got her a nod. "You're predictable, Agent Kelso. Juggernaut ran your psych profile, figured where you'd most likely go. 'Course, the
Tyrants figured the same thing, didn't they?"
She returned his nod. "I suppose I should thank you, then." Anna followed them toward the far side of the tunnel, where an archway led to a
branching conduit.
He grinned wolfishly. "That's twice now I saved your pretty little backside. Honestly, being your white knight is getting to be a habit."
"Don't get a swelled head over it..." Anna halted. "Because I'm not going anywhere with you until I know where we're heading."
One of the thugs, a tall Hispanic man with acres of tattoos and chromed augmented hands, stepped toward her in an obvious gesture of threat,
but D-Bar waved him away. "No, no. Agent Kelso's got a point. If she wants to stay here and chance it with the cops, she can do that." He leaned
in. "Or, you can come with us and finally get a freakin' clue. What's it gonna be?"
Her first instinct was to cut and run. Trust had never come easily to Anna, and after everything that had happened, it was harder still to find
that conviction inside herself; but she knew that she wouldn't make it another day without some kind of help. "I guess when you put it like
that... I don't have a lot of options, do I?"
D-Bar gave a smug smile. "About time you caught on."
Aerial Transit Corridor—Northeastern Sector—United States of America
The transport jet settled into its heading, angling into a course that would follow the Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland before
turning to strike out across the Atlantic. Once they were at stable altitude, all the members of the Tyrant team had taken Namir's orders to
heart and returned to their cramped cabins in the aircraft's midsection. The lighting dimmed to night-flight levels; they would not see day again
until they reached the airspace of the European Union.
Saxon waited twenty minutes, listening at the wall to be certain of no other movement out in the corridor. Then, with care, he eased open the
door to his cabin and slipped back out, moving forward with all the stealth he could muster. The only weapon he had on him was a Buzzkill stun
gun, although he wondered if the tazer pistol would be enough to put down any of the Tyrants. He was on a mission of his own making now;
discovery would mean failure, and worse.
In another pocket he had the disposable vu-phone. Waiting in the cabin, he had read and reread the message sent by Janus, committing it to
memory before erasing the text.
Melina; he turned the name over in his thoughts. Saxon tried to imagine a younger Jaron Namir, a man and not the lethal cyborg that he knew.
He tried to picture that young Namir dealing with the death of someone close to him. Had it hardened him, he wondered? Made him callous to
the suffering of others, put him on the path to who he had become? Saxon frowned and dismissed the thought. Whatever secrets Namir had, if
this worked, he would learn them soon enough.
He threaded his way along the length of the jet, to the stairs dropping to the lower level. Crouching, Saxon carefully placed each silent footfall,
keeping in the lines of shadow along the main corridor. Blinks of light, from the wingtip navigation indicators on the jet's wings, cast faint halos of
color over his shoulders through the oval windows. Saxon knelt in the lee of a support frame and cycled through the variant modes of his optics.
Through the partition walls, he picked out the faint heat-blobs of the two-man flight crew up toward the cockpit area, while at the aft, in the
operations center, the only colors were the dull green-blue glow of the idling computer systems.
Saxon entered the ops room and closed the door behind him. Keeping low, he threaded his way to Namir's console and tapped the glassy
surface. The panel came to life, immediately demanding a pass code. He let out a breath to steady himself, and tapped out the first string of
symbols. Melina's date of birth.
The panel chimed a warning; the code was wrong. The sound seemed like a shout in the quiet of the dormant room, among the low murmur of
the computers. Saxon waited for a moment, one hand on the stun gun, but no one came to investigate. He went on; the second code string was
also incorrect. A fail on the third attempt would lock down the console and doubtless trigger some kind of alert—but the list of potential
passwords Janus had provided had more than three variations. He ran them through his thoughts again.
Namir's sister. His daughter. A simple code. It would not be complex, Saxon realized. Namir wasn't that kind of man, not one to waste time on
needless subterfuge. He was direct. There were no shades of gray to him.
Saxon thought about people he had lost, people he had felt responsible for; and then he typed in the name of the dead woman as it might have
appeared on her gravestone, plain and unaltered.
The console unlocked and bloomed with new display windows, welcoming him into the main lines of its data store. Saxon's eyes narrowed as he
saw line after line of files, labeled with places, dates, names ...
Targets. There were hundreds of people listed here, and they were all objectives for the Tyrants. He scrolled through the names, looking for
points of commonality, struggling to understand. There were men like Mikhail Kontarsky, high-profile figures linked to criminal groups like the
Hong Kong Triads and the Russian Bratva, others tagged as in collusion with terrorists and activists—Juggernaut, L'Ombre, Purity First, and
others. On the surface, people who looked like bad guys, up to their necks in illegality. But Saxon had only to scratch the surface to find lists of action orders ranged against the names of civilians, politicians, scientists—people the
Tyrants had no business going against. Some of the orders were straight kill commands, others ghosted under setups that would appear as
suicides, robberies gone wrong, accidents. A few were tagged as "coercive"—no deaths there, instead the application of violence and
intimidation.
Saxon felt betrayed. The mission of the Tyrants, the reason he had allowed himself to be recruited by Namir, was a lie. The faceless men of the
group giving the orders were not using them to help maintain global stability—they were using them as enforcers, eradicating anyone who
might prove dangerous to them, killing or intimidating all across the planet.
He picked a handful of files at random and opened them. June SellersDepartment of Homeland Security—terminated; Donald Teague,
advisory staffer on the United Nations science council—terminated; Martine Delancourt, founder of the French Bioethics Association—
terminated; Garrett Dansky, CEO of Cadin Global—terminated; Ryu Takahanada, cybernetics research scientist at Isolay—terminated ...
The list w
ent on and on, and among it all, Saxon found the data on the men he had surveilled in Glasgow and Bucharest; one was a technology
researcher on the payroll of the British government, the other a politician. Both files had additional information beyond what he had turned
over to Namir; there were still images, digital shots of a body in an alleyway, throat slit and pale, another of a car on fire. Neither man had been
a criminal, but clearly, someone had considered them a threat. Now they were both dead. Both killed by the Tyrants. He saw expedited code
tags on the files, bearing the idents "Green" and "Red." Scott Hardesty. Yelena Federova.
Saxon closed the files and sat in the dimness and silence, musing on what he had seen, silently cursing his own stupidity. At first, he hadn't
wanted to think too hard about what he was doing, about what the meaning of the Tyrants might be. It was only as time had passed that the
nagging disquiet in the back of his thoughts had grown to a ceaseless churn—and now that he had an idea of the truth, it made his blood run
cold. He thought about Janus's repeated question, and nodded grimly. Do you know what master you serve? He was beginning to build a
picture, and he didn't like what he saw. This was what the Tyrants did. This is who they were, and he was a part of it.
With a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone, Saxon brought up a search function and keyed in the phrase "killing floor."
He wasn't sure what he had expected to see—the name drew up ideas of some kind of arena, perhaps something like the fight room in Namir's
home. Why the members of Juggernaut were so eager to find it was beyond him; but instead of opening a file, the computer showed a new set
of data panes. It took Saxon a few seconds to realize what he was seeing; the console launched an interface protocol via an encrypted tight
beam signal to an orbiting communications satellite, and then on into the global web of data net connections.
On the screen, the Killing Floor unfolded; a virtual space existing in a realm of pure information. Shielded by layers of smart attack barrier
programs, firewalls, and baffles, the non-place was a shifting island in a sea of data. Program nodes contained files at levels of encryption so
powerful that the console read them as impregnable, spiked spheres—but there were other panels of text that were clearly visible, doubtless
open for Namir or anyone with the same access level. Saxon read them, but in isolation there was little he could glean. He saw references to
Federova's current mission, to the "primary target" Namir had mentioned in passing—but who or where that person was did not make itself
clear. He frowned, activating the vu-phone's wireless link, starting the process to copy the contact protocols from the jet's mainframe.
It was clear that the Killing Floor had no true physical reality to it; it was a synthetic server construct, a clever agglomeration of computer
programs moving through the data net in a chaotic, unpredictable pattern that no outsider, no hacker, could ever hope to calculate. Without the
locational key to gain access, there was no other way in—how could you break into a fortress you couldn't find? It was an encrypted virtual
space, reachable in seconds from any location on earth if one was granted clearance, a place where the group could exchange target information
with the Tyrants without fear of ever being overheard. It was the digital equivalent of a piece of espionage tradecraft over a hundred years old
—the "dead drop."
The vu-phone chimed, signaling the conclusion of the data transfer. Saxon wasn't willing to risk using the device to contact Janus, not yet at
least. After they landed in Europe, maybe then ... But before that, there was still one more thing he had to do.
He entered two words into the search protocol and waited. Instantly, a file tagged with numerous security flags unfolded before him. There, laid
out in stark text, in emotionless, clipped terms, was the reality of what had happened during Operation Rainbird. A dark, fearful impulse made
Saxon hesitate; part of him didn't want to know. He wanted to disconnect, to erase the file and bury the memories of that night deep.
But that would be a betrayal, of Sam and Kano and the other members of Strike Six, of himself, of the truth.
Saxon began to read, and as he did he felt himself detach from the moment, losing all sense of where he was. In his ears, he heard the rattle of
gunfire and the howling of torn metal; he felt the heat of fuel fires on his bare skin, and the sting of burning plastic and spent cordite in his
nostrils. It was as if no time had passed, and he was there again on the Grey Range, fighting to stay alive.
What he read on the screen hollowed him out. He saw the reports from the Belltower recon, the intelligence profiles of enemy strength and
numbers, the warnings of sleeper drones; and with them, he saw mirrors of the same data, only with all threat and nuance carefully bled out of
them. Fabricated reports showing the area of operations for the Rainbird mission clear of enemy contact. Lies and more lies, dressed up like
truth.
A truth Ben Saxon had accepted without question. A truth that had cost his men their lives. He heard the crunch of metal and glanced down; his
augmented hand had fractured the arm of the seat he was sitting in. Sucking in a breath, he released his grip and glared back at the screen.
Where has this false data come from? How long has Namir had it in his possession? Saxon's jaw set hard, and his thoughts turned toward
darker places.
When he heard Namir's voice call his name, it didn't come as a surprise.
Dundalk—Maryland—United States of America
Passing a network of accessways leading from the rail tunnel, Anna let herself be led by D-Bar and his two minders along a maze of featureless
concrete corridors, until they finally emerged in a parking garage. The hacker brought her to a van with blacked-out windows that was
uncomfortably similar to the prisoner transport she'd escaped from less than a day earlier, and once inside they set off. The trip was brief; the
next thing she knew, the van was halting and the doors were opened once again.
Kelso stepped out into a decrepit warehouse that was little more than a vast box made of bricks, girders, and aged glass. The smell of concrete,
rust, and water reached her nose; she guessed that they were in Baltimore's old docklands. The area was a warren of derelict buildings left to rot and crumble, now that the cargo ships entering the city's port were largely automated.
And for someone who needed space and privacy, a place off the grid, it was a good locale. Glancing around she saw that the old building had
been retrofitted with converted cargo containers, military surplus tents, and bubbledomes—but it was unkempt and random, here a wide
satellite dish, there a cook pit near a pair of armored SUVs. The place was a peculiar mix, like an army's forward command post by way of a
rock festival. The eclectic look reminded her of the same chaotic community she'd seen on board the Intrepid in New York.
D-Bar saw her looking around. "Don't sweat it, you're safe here." He pointed upward and Anna followed his gesture. High over their heads, vast
sheets of silvery material carpeted the ceiling; her first impression was of a giant mosquito net. "Electronic camo screen," explained the hacker.
"Blocks orbital scopes, smothers our EM footprint, that kinda thing. We could have the mother of all barbecues in here and this place would still
look dead and empty." He beckoned her to follow him. "C'mon, you'll wanna meet the big cheese."
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