Someone else had been responsible for the murder of Dansky, Matt Ryan, and a handful of other good agents; but that was a minority opinion in an agency that just wanted to bury its dead and move on.
Temple's ire lessened, and he sighed. "I blame myself for this. I should have seen the signs. I should have known you weren't ready to return to operations."
"Don't talk about me like I'm ..." She stumbled over the word. "Weak"
"Do you really think raking over the ashes of what happened six months ago is honoring Matt Ryan's memory?" He shook his head. "Can you imagine what Jenny and her kids would think about this?"
"You don't understand!" she insisted.
"I do," he insisted. "I know what Matt did for you, Anna. I know how much he meant to you." Temple opened the case and drew out an evidence packet containing her personal effects. He fished inside and came back with a clear plastic bag; within was the rodlike shape of an injector pen, along with a couple of drug ampoules. "And I know how disappointed he'd be to see this. How long have you been back on stims?"
Kelso's mouth flooded with saliva at the sight of the injector, and it took a physical effort to look away. "I'm not using again. It's not the same." Her cheeks burned. "I just needed to stay on top of things ..."
"I would like to believe you." He tapped the bag. "Frankly, this alone is enough to have you cashiered, maybe even net some jail time." Temple pulled out a data slate, and studied it. "Ryan got you a second chance after you were suspended for use of stimulants three years ago. If not for him, your career would have been over." He put it down. "This is worse than just backsliding, Anna. This is a lot worse. You've become erratic, even obsessed. You're unstable."
"I want justice!" she shot back, pulling against the restraint. "The attack on Senator Skyler was a false flag operation! She was never the target, it was Dansky all along, and we got caught in the cross fire!"
"I read your report," Temple said. "There's nothing to back that up. And the case is closed. The men who killed Ryan and the others are dead."
"I don't believe that." Anna leaned forward. Why can't he see? "Division turned down my requests to reopen the case, so I looked into it myself. Dansky wasn't the only one ... There are others, important people, scientists and corporate executives, other politicians, even United Nations ambassadors ... all of them targeted by assassins with a similar MO—"
"You can't know that!"
"The same men who killed Matt are still running free!" she spat. "I've been trying to find something, anything, a name ..." Anna suddenly realized how she had to look, the wild intensity in her eyes; she swallowed hard and tried to calm herself. "That's why I came here, to deal with the hackers on the Intrepid. They could get me data that was off the grid. Get me names."
"Or maybe they were just playing you?"
"Tyrants." She said the word like a curse.
Temple eyed her. "What?"
"That's what they call themselves. The killers." She frowned. "If I can track them, find out who they are working for—"
"That's enough!" Temple slammed his hand down on the table. "Those hackers you were caught with? Half of them are known associates of a global cyberterrorist cell, a group called Juggernaut. They're on the National Security Agency's most-wanted list, for god's sake. Think, Kelso! Can you imagine what would happen if a Secret Service agent was connected to people like that?" He shook his head again. "I saw your requests to Division, that paper-thin garbage you called evidence. You were turned down because you have nothing but supposition and hearsay. At best, you've got a half-baked conspiracy theory! I kept the heat off you out of respect for Matt, because I knew his death hit you hard. But you've crossed the line."
Anna felt a chill run through her. "So ... What happens now?"
Temple folded his arms. "If things were different... I'd charge you myself. But the fact is, what with that pit bull sniffing around the Service looking for some dirt, the agency needs to keep this in-house." The "pit bull" was Florida governor Philip Riley Mead, who was working the angles on Capitol Hill, using every trick he could—including pouring scorn on the DeSilvio administration by shining a light on every mess he could find. Some people called him a crusader for good, speaking about him taking the Oval Office for himself one day; but Kelso just saw a bland, opportunist politician who was nothing but good teeth and hollow platitudes. "We're going to deal with this quietly," Temple went on.
He handed her the packet and then drew a thin envelope from the pocket of his coat. Inside there was a credit chip and an airline ticket.
Temple fixed her with a steady, measuring gaze. "Your badge and ID have already been deauthorized. I've reclaimed your service firearm. As of this moment, you are officially on medical suspension. In a month, when this has all been forgotten, a closed-session review of your conduct will be held, and you will be discharged from the Secret Service, forfeiting pension and all privileges. At the very least." He stood up. "The ticket will get you back to Washington. Do yourself a favor, Agent Kelso. Go home. Let this go. Let Matt go." He gathered up the evidence bag with the stims and grimaced at it. "And don't make things any worse for yourself."
After he left her alone, the restraint loop gave a buzz and fell off her wrist. Anna picked up the packet and something slipped out. A brass coin clattered to the table; her sobriety chip. For a long moment, she thought about leaving it where it had fallen. Angrily, she snatched it up and jammed it in her pocket.
Zubovskaya Square—Moscow—Russian Federated States
The night-black helo circled once over the buildings along Burdenko Street, the ducted rotor-rings turning, the sound-deadening baffles humming. The boxy little flyer hugged the angular tops of the offices and apartment blocks, skimming over old tiled roofs cheek-by-jowl with modern polyglass domes and sheets of solar paneling. The nose of the craft dipped as Hardesty dropped from the starboard side; then they were rising up and away, describing a wide circuit around the lines of the plaza at Zubovskaya.
Saxon straightened the Kevlar balaclava over his face and peered through his polarized eye-shields. Ahead he could see the roof of the Hotel Novoe Rostov. The team had reviewed the deployment on the way from the airport, and they were ready.
He took a breath and ran through his own internal checklist, ending it with a last look at the ammo selector on the Hurricane tactical machine pistol that hung from his shoulder strap. The compact submachine gun was all ABS plastic and black-anodized steel, the blunt muzzle lost behind a triangular suppressor.
"Twenty seconds." Namir's words came over his mastoid, buzzing in Saxon's skull. The subvocalized radio message had the peculiar echo to it that made encrypted comms sound as if they were being beamed down from space.
Saxon frowned. They were cutting it fine. The sun was rising, and the morning light would cost them good cover if they didn't move fast. Then Hardesty spoke over the general channel.
"Inposition"he said. "Three targets. Green light."
Namir gave an imperceptible nod. "Execute."
Saxon turned to the window in time to see a man on the roof of the Rostov looking up at them, raising a handheld to his ear; in the next second the man jerked violently backward as if pulled by an invisible wire, a jet of red spurting from his chest. As the helo descended, he spotted the other guards on the roof, collapsing in puffs of pink mist.
The helo fell into a hover ten meters up, and the rest of the Tyrants deployed, Barrett and Hermann leading, then Namir and Saxon, with Federova last.
Saxon tensed; he was used to fast-roping, but his new high-fall aug—part of the "recruitment package"—meant he could drop straight into the thick without a descender cord. The whole thing was counterintuitive, but it worked. He jumped, and a moment before he landed, a brief pulse of electromagnetic energy flared around him, cushioning his fall. He landed squarely, the crackle of the effect generated by the augmentation taking the shock and bleeding it off to nothing.
Federova put down a heartbeat later, cat-falling wit
h little more than a crunch of gravel. She had her hair back behind an Alice band studded with data loops, but no hood. Federova saw him looking and gazed back, languid and unconcerned.
With a gust of downwash, the helo powered into the sky. He looked away, scanning the rooftop. The Rostov was a shallow, three-lobed tower that had been thrown up in the boom years of the early 2010s, but never completed. There were whole floors of the building that were locked off, still unfinished over a decade later.
"Blue, Green," said Namir, using Barrett and Hermann's call signs. "Secure the roof. Check for stragglers." He glanced at Saxon. "Gray, with me."
"Roof is clear" Hardesty said, from his firing nest across the square. He didn't like the suggestion that he'd missed someone.
Low and quick, Saxon followed the Tyrant commander toward the boxy service shack in the middle of the roof. He passed the corpse of the man the sniper had shot in the chest, and scanned the body. The dead man had a look of frozen surprise on his face, a foam of red froth on his lips. Hardesty's bullet had punctured the heart, the exit wound ripping open the guard's back.
The man's face triggered a connection to the mission data Saxon had shunted to a temporary memory store in his implanted neural hub; the modified wet-drive was another "bonus" from the Tyrants. He blinked up an image from an arrest record. The man lying in the pool of crimson was immediately identified as Oleg Pushkin, a minor enforcer with the main Moscow crime syndicate, the Solntsevskaya Bratva. "This guy's a mob hitter," Saxon murmured.
"They all are," Namir replied. "Keep up."
Barrett was at the service shack as they reached it. Air-conditioning equipment, heat exchangers, and cable gear for the Rostov's elevator banks hummed inside.
Namir nodded at a secured maintenance hatch on the side of the shack. "Open it."
Hermann leaned close and used a digital lockpick to neutralize the security latches; when he was done, Barrett stepped in and curled his fingers around the lip of the hatch with a grimace. The bunches of myomer muscles in his arms stiffened, gathered—and then with a low howl of tortured metal the hatch came away, shearing the bolt heads clean off.
As Namir peered inside, Saxon glanced over his shoulder and his brow furrowed in confusion. "Where's ... Red?" There was no sign of Federova anywhere on the rooftop. She had been only a few steps behind him.
Barrett chuckled. "She's around."
"Green," said Namir. "Deny their communications."
"Complying." Hermann nodded, drawing a thick, disc-shaped object from his backpack. It resembled a land mine. Acting quickly, the German set it on the ground and flicked a yellow-and-black-striped activation switch. A flicker of interference momentarily stuttered across Saxon's cyberoptics.
"Target comms are dead," reported Barrett, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. "Ready."
"Insertion," said Namir. "Go!"
One after another, they threaded in through the torn-out hatch and into the mass of machinery crowding the interior of the service shack. Inside, a triangular cluster of running gear fell away into a series of shafts that ran the length of the Rostov, down to the basement parking levels sixteen stories below. Saxon toggled his optics to low-light mode and the space became visible in shades of green and white. The shapes of elevator cars were visible, most of them static, others gently rising or descending.
Namir and Saxon took point, working their way down past the slowly turning drums of support cables and the rumbling lift gears. According to their information, Kontarsky and his people were on floor thirteen; outside, the pilot of the helo was watching the windows of the apartments on the thirteenth floor, scanning through the vision-opaque glass with a thermographic sensor, watching the body-heat traces of the minister and his staff. At this time of day, most of them were asleep; only the guards were supposed to be awake. They had to take care, though; their intel wasn't clear on how many, if any, civilians were in the building. Collateral damage was to be kept to an absolute minimum.
Securing nylon cords to the cable frames, the two of them fast-roped down in silence, pausing at each level to sweep for magnetic anomaly detectors or beam sensors. Saxon watched Namir work with speed and delicacy, rendering security systems inert with the skill of a veteran.
The central lift of a three-block cluster was locked in place at the thirteenth. The plan was to enter through its roof and fan out along the three radial corridors—Namir, Hermann, and Saxon taking one each, Barrett holding the core as backup.
"Prep for breach" Namir sub vocalized. Saxon lowered himself to the top of the elevator car, disconnected his tether, and drew out a pressurized canister of det-foam. Dialing the nozzle to narrow feed, he put marble-size blobs of the khaki-toned chemical in the corners of the car's roof, then thumbed a set of slaved microdetonators into the congealing foam.
As he finished, he felt the elevator move slightly beneath him and heard voices. Three men, speaking in Russian. Through an air vent, he could see a sliver of what was going on.
"Shto slüchios?" said one of them. He was tapping the radio headset at his ear, frowning.
Another man, out of Saxon's sight line, spat in irritation and followed his cohort into the lift. They were leaving their posts; Hermann's trick with the communications blackout had spooked them.
Then the man with the radio gave a slow, owlish blink; Saxon recognized the action. He had implanted optics—he was changing vision modes. The guard looked up, and for a fraction of a second Saxon saw a bluish glitter in his right eye. The tell gave away exactly what kind of optic the guard was using; a terahertz lens that could see right through light cover.
In the next few seconds, everything happened with bullet-fast rapidity. The guard swore explosively and slammed his fist into the control pad, sending the elevator into an express plunge to the lobby. The other men in the car dragged their guns up, but they were armed with cut-down assault rifles and inside the close confines of the elevator, the size of the guns made them unwieldy.
Saxon held tight to the car's frame and felt his stomach turn over as the lift dropped away; in the next breath the guards would have a bead on him. A spray of blind fire, and he would be ripped to shreds.
He cursed and did the only thing he could, tapping the detonator key on the control bracelet around his wrist. The blobs of det-foam combusted with sharp, smoky reports and the roof of the elevator car collapsed inward, Saxon falling with it. The noise deafened him.
The confined space became chaotic. The guards cursed and struggled to deflect the debris, lashing out. Saxon had no time to draw a weapon; it was like fighting inside a coffin, with no room to maneuver; nothing to do but strike fast and give no quarter.
He punched the man with the t-wave optic into the wall and the guard's rifle snarled, discharging a three-round burst into the door. Then, spinning in place, Saxon drove the armor-plated pad on his elbow into the rib cage of the second guard. He shoved him into a thinscreen along the back wall and it fractured, webbing with cracks.
The third guard was still struggling with his rifle, shouldering aside the remains of a collapsed lighting rig. He launched himself at Saxon and slammed the frame of the weapon into his face, cracking his eye-shields. The soldier hit back with a punch from his augmented arm, and connected with the guard's ribs. Bones fractured with a sickening crunch and the assailant staggered backward, wheezing.
Then all three of them attacked him at once, using their guns like clubs to beat him about the head and shoulders. Saxon felt an impact at the base of his spine and he stumbled, losing his balance as the elevator continued to drop toward the ground floor. He had no doubts that the guards had reinforcements waiting there; he had to finish this quickly.
Locking his legs, Saxon pivoted and let his reflex booster implant ramp up to full. His nerves jangled with the sudden new input, the influence of the neuromuscular accelerator coursing through him. The guards were crowding in and he struck out once more. The man with the cracked ribs went back into the doors, slammed into
place by the torso of the first guard. Saxon fired a low, fast kick at the leg of the other man and was rewarded with a pain-filled yelp. Natural bone broke easily under the turned steel of a heavy augmentation.
The giddy rush of speed made Saxon's skin prickle; he felt heat wash over him, and in a moment of sudden, shocking scent-memory, he smelled aviation fuel and smoke. The crackle of the fires around the crashed veetol were abruptly there in the front of his thoughts, the horrible tearing noise as Sam died in front of him—
Fury spread through Saxon like a wave, and he went in for the kill. The throat of the fallen guard he crushed with a brutal, stabbing blow from his cyberarm; then he pulled a broken piece of roof support up from where it had landed and used it to beat the next of the guards bloody. The last man, who fought back as he coughed and spat, struck out with a cyberhand that sprouted a fan of blades. Saxon took a cut across his cheek, but the pain seemed distant, edited from the moment. He took the guard's arm—a spindly model sheathed in pink, flesh-toned plastic, doubtless Federal Army surplus—and bent it back against the joint, fracturing the casing. The guard tried to struggle free, but Saxon took a clump of his hair and beat his head into the walls until he fell.
The elevator chimed and Saxon let the guard's body go, allowing it to fall out and onto the dusty marble floor of the lobby.
Three more men were waiting for him, standing in a semicircle around the elevator bank, each with a heavy-caliber automatic raised and aimed. The data feed from the wet-drive helpfully told him that these men were also members of the Bratva, each with a lengthy police record; but the tips of the prison tattoos that emerged from the open collars of their shirts made that clear enough.
Saxon slowly raised his hands, panting, the moment of animal fury he had felt in the elevator fading as fast as it had come. For a few seconds there, he had become lost, absorbed in rage-fueled guilt over Sam, Kano, and all the others. The edges of the dark anger he had first felt in the field hospital boiled inside him.
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