by David Bruns
“Ming,” the woman breathed.
Ming smiled at her, enjoying the rush of emotion that surged inside her chest. Pride at having fooled the old woman. Satisfaction that her plan had worked. And an icy rage to underpin all of it.
“Tell me about my father,” Ming said in a low voice.
Auntie Xi shifted. Ming watched her every movement. Echo was on full alert. Her aunt surely had a security signal with her staff for emergencies. She’d probably already sent it.
“I don’t know—”
“How he died,” Ming cut in. “I want to know why you killed him.”
Xi’s face flushed. “Why I killed him? Your father died in an accident in the—”
“He gave you everything you ever wanted.” Ming pointed at the photo. “You were poor kids and he gave you wealth beyond your wildest dreams. And yet that wasn’t enough for you.”
Xi struggled to her feet. She was wearing traditional dress, a long heavy robe with a woven belt. She even dressed the part when playacting history, but Echo flagged the jade brooch on her lapel as oddly out of place in this setting. The zither belched out a twanging chorus as her knee bumped it.
“I loved my brother,” she said in a heated voice. “You know that, Ming. Whatever I did, I did for him and for our legacy.”
Ming’s gaze ran over her aunt’s face. Her aging skin was stretched tightly across her cheekbones, her thin lips a red slash in her face, her deep green eyes flashed with anger, and her dark hair was pulled back into a bun.
It all looked like Auntie Xi. Except it wasn’t.
Ming gripped the woman’s robe and dragged her close. “Who are you?”
“Ming.” The woman’s voice faltered and Echo detected a provincial accent breaking through under the stress. “You’re hurting me.”
The brooch. Ming snatched the pin from the woman’s lapel and crushed it between her fingers. The cracked shell revealed a camera.
The woman squealed in pain as Ming twisted her head to look for the transmitter buried in her ear. She tossed the impostor hard against the wall and the counterfeit Xi collapsed to the floor.
A trap.
Ming spun, whipping the hood over her head and engaging camouflage mode at the same time. She could hear the quiet tread of boots on the cobblestones in the courtyard, the suppressed breathing of soldiers, the smell of their weapons.
And they had her surrounded.
The suit, sensing the spike of adrenaline in her body, tightened around her muscles. Her mind raced as Echo searched for options. The narrow window was the obvious escape port. They would have that covered.
She spied the stone lintel over the door. It stuck out a bare four centimeters from the plaster wall. In a flash, she snatched up the lantern and hurled it out the window, then spidered up the wall and stretched her body over the door. She dug her fingers into the plaster and held on.
The lantern through the window had the desired effect of drawing their attention. She closed her eyes to concentrate on the sounds around the building. Eight … nine … ten people were out there.
Auntie Xi hadn’t underestimated her after all.
A whispered instruction, the crunch of boots on stone. Ming knew what was coming next. She clenched her eyes shut, thankful for the protective hood over her ears.
The blast of the concussion grenade nearly dislodged her from the wall. Nearly. Ming struggled to catch her breath but hung on. Crushed plaster sifted between her fingers to the floor.
There were three in the first wave. The first man through the door put a three-round burst into the impostor’s body without a second thought, the second person swept the opposite side of the room, while the third stopped directly below Ming in the doorway.
“Clear!” they all shouted.
A flurry of activity in the other two rooms sounded as the assault teams swept the tiny house.
“Where the fuck is—” the one directly below Ming started.
She dropped her legs onto his shoulders and twisted his head sharply to the right. Using the momentum of his fall, she hit the floor on her back and used her legs to hurl his limp body at the second man. They crashed back into the zither, releasing a cacophony of discord.
The third guard—a woman, Ming realized—had her weapon up, searching for a target. She sprayed the room at waist height to avoid hitting her prone companions.
But Ming, still in camouflage, was on the floor. She reached up to grip the barrel of her rifle, then swept the guard’s feet out from under her. She hit the floor hard, but rolled instantly, avoiding Ming’s heel strike where her face would have been.
“In here!” the soldier shouted in Mandarin.
Ming’s next punch knocked her back against the wall, silencing her call for help. She pounced on the fallen soldier, but the woman would not give up. Her frantic fingers tried to find Ming’s eyes and tore back her hood instead. With a final frustrated cry, Ming smashed her fist into the woman’s face.
She whipped the hood back in place to find that it was torn. Ming cursed as another soldier came through the door. She took him out with a swift kick across the face, then launched herself through the broken window.
The cobblestones of the courtyard were rough across her back as Ming broke her fall with a somersault. A lone soldier was in charge of guarding this side of the courtyard. He saw the flash of movement from her damaged camouflage suit and fired immediately.
In the slow-motion processing of Echo, Ming saw sparks from two bullets hitting the cobblestones skip away from her before the third impacted her torso and she was thrown backwards into the shadows.
Ming saw the stars in the night sky winking above her. She smelled damp stone and dirt as she drew in a fresh breath. The body armor had saved her, but the camouflage of the suit was failing. Any second now, she’d be completely exposed.
The soldier called out as he advanced. “I have her!”
He turned on a light on the barrel of his weapon and the spotlight searched back and forth as he tried to find her in the shadows. Ming’s hand crept to the carbon smartglass knife she kept on her calf. If she drew it too soon, he’d see the movement. Echo made her reflexes fast, but not faster than a bullet.
She could hear the others regrouping in the house, finding the bodies in the front room.
The spotlight was a meter away now … still too far. Her grip tightened on the hilt of the knife. Any second now, he’d see the spot where her hood was torn.
A half-meter away…
Ming turned off the camouflage and she sprang into existence right at the soldier’s feet. He recoiled in fright, just as she had hoped. His rifle went off, mere centimeters from her head, but she was already moving.
From between his legs, she stabbed upwards, searching for the femoral artery. She felt a gush of warmth flow over her gloved fingers and she slid behind him. He tried to spin around, to engage her again, but she nailed him in the back with both feet.
Camouflage broken, hurting from the bullet hit to her armor and covered in a man’s blood, Ming shimmied up the nearest pillar and rolled onto the tile roof. Beneath her, the courtyard erupted in confusion as they discovered the dead soldier.
Ming pushed herself to a kneeling position and got to her feet.
Then she ran.
Chapter 20
William Graves • New York City
The Neo hacker den was in the Bronx. Not the nice part of the Bronx, the other part. And not in one of the high-rises in the not-nice part, but in a below-ground hovel positioned such that the best way to make a tactical approach was from below, via the old sewer system.
Graves breathed through his mouth to avoid the stench that threatened to make him gag. Although the atmosphere was technically breathable, the FBI prep team at the top of the manhole entrance six blocks away had offered him a gas mask. He’d refused out of some tough-guy machismo and now he was beginning to regret it.
He resisted the urge to touch the brick walls that glistened in the glow of his
headlamp. No telling what kind of bacterial scourge lived down here. A sharp movement at floor level a few meters ahead caught his attention, made him startle.
“Just a rat, general,” Special Agent Craft said over his shoulder.
“Biggest goddamn rat I’ve ever seen.”
Craft snickered. “Yeah, they grow pretty big down here.”
They both wore knee-high rubber boots as protection against the puddles of fetid water that slopped at their ankles. They would probably protect him from a rat bite, too. A normal-sized rat, that is.
“I never knew these tunnels were down here,” Graves said, more to change the subject than because he cared. All this closeness was starting to get to him.
“Yeah, pretty cool, huh?” Craft reached out and stroked the wall with his gloved hand. “Some these tunnels date from the early 1900s. You can still see the original brick. They’ve all been bypassed now by newer pipes and drainage systems, but some of these old tunnels are still around.”
Craft, who had struck Graves at their first meeting as a no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’am kind of guy, had a wistful tone to his old-school Brooklyn accent. In fact, Graves had attributed their quick success in finding the bomber at Anthony Taulke’s UN announcement to Craft’s bulldog attitude.
“We have positive confirmation they’re in the house?” he asked.
Craft paused for a breath. The smell was denser here and Graves wished again for a gas mask. The FBI agent nodded. “They’re in there. As soon as we send the street team after them from above, they’ll skedaddle down here. And then we’ve got ’em. No muss, no fuss.” He made a dusting motion with his hands.
Graves still wasn’t convinced. It just felt too easy. Why go to the trouble of hacking the UN security system and turning a security drone into a weapon—neither action a small feat of technical prowess—and then hang around New York? If it had been him, he’d be in Vancouver by now, maybe somewhere in Asia that wasn’t flooded or being threatened by a massive storm or an earthquake … maybe he was answering his own question. The United States was one of the better places to be, but it was a big country. He’d at least have gone to Kansas or Missouri.
Craft paused next to a ladder that disappeared up into darkness. “This is it,” he said. “The assault team is up there ready to snatch them up. Easy-peasy.” He made another dusting motion with his hands.
Graves wished this guy would stop telling him how simple this was going to be. He put his booted foot on the first rung and started to climb, leaving Craft steadying the ladder.
The ladder brought him to another tunnel. This one had rough concrete walls and smelled like there was fresh air being supplied from somewhere. The space was lit by intense floodlights set up in a ring, making Graves squint in the glare. Through narrowed eyes, he saw a gloved hand reach out and he grasped it, letting the man lift him the last few feet.
As his vision adjusted, he found himself standing in a circle of six black-suited agents with FBI stenciled in yellow across the front and back of their bulky body armor and their helmets. Craft clambered up beside him. “Turn those goddamned lights off,” he said in a harsh stage whisper.
All the lights went out except for one, leaving purple afterimages in Graves’s vision.
“What’s our status, Nichols?” Craft said, less harshly this time.
“Standing by, sir,” said the man beside Graves. “I can send you the inside feed if you want it.”
“Do that, and send it to the general as well. He needs to let Mr. Taulke know we’re taking all possible precautions to take this asshole alive.”
Graves slid on his data glasses and waited for the pulsed prompt from Nichols. By Mr. Taulke, Craft meant Tony. As far as he knew, Anthony was still in a medically induced coma. He’d live, but when they finally woke him up he was going to wish he hadn’t.
Graves’s last-ditch effort to pull Anthony off the stage at the UN had probably saved his life. Basically, his body was one enormous bruise now, but he was alive and that was what mattered—at least that’s what Tony said.
Tony himself was a hero of sorts for getting Adriana Rabh off the stage before the window blew in and shredded them both. He’d taken a few shards of glass in the arm and had a pretty nasty cut on his brow, but he’d fared okay. Adriana Rabh emerged with nary a scratch. Teller on the other side of the stage had also bailed to safety, but his seatmate, the secretary-general, was among the dead.
The rest of the audience and news corps did not fare so well. One hundred sixty-nine dead and twice as many injured. Graves found it hard to believe there were even that many people in the room that night, but whatever the number, the carnage had been horrific. The drone had plowed into the audience and then smashed right through the back wall into the room where they’d had cocktails and then into the kitchens.
Graves, Cora, and the people in the front row who had had the foresight to shelter beneath the lip of the stage actually fared pretty well. Cora was shaken up but unhurt. Graves had taken some glass when he pulled Anthony down, but he was okay after a few stitches.
The woman who’d been sitting next to Graves had stood frozen when the drone crashed into the room. The only thing they found of her was a single high-heeled shoe.
It had been Tony’s idea to put Graves in charge of finding his father’s assassin—as if Graves didn’t have enough to worry about.
“Please, General,” Tony said, refusing to let go of Graves’s hand after they shook. “We—I—need your help. The council, we can’t trust anyone, least of all the UN. They tried to kill my father.” He finally let go of Graves’s hand and pressed his fingers to his forehead. He was sporting a colorful bruise on the side of his face and a thin red slice an inch or so above his brow.
Graves let him have a moment.
“Look,” Tony said finally. “All I’m asking is that you act as my eyes and ears for this investigation. I need someone I can trust on the inside.”
“Why me?” Graves asked. “You don’t know me.”
“My father trusted you, that’s good enough for me. If—when—he wakes up, I want him to know that we did everything we could to bring this assassin to justice.”
That was the short version of how Graves came to be standing above a stinking, centuries-old sewer line under the Bronx waiting for his government-issue data glasses to sync with the FBI’s live feed on the Neo hacker den.
The image popped into his vision. Four young people, two men, two women, sat on beanbag chairs in a rough circle. One of the girls was vaping, a cloud of smoke obscuring her face. She had her fingers entwined with the guy next to her and he seemed anxious to get a hit of whatever she was puffing.
There was another girl with her back to them, her Neo tattoo clearly visible on the slender white nape of her neck. Graves thought she looked like she was sixteen. Barely.
“That him?” Graves said. “Guy on the left?”
“That’s him, sir,” Craft replied.
Archibald “Spike” Lemmon. Graves studied the kid’s profile as he recalled what he knew about him. Twenty-seven years old, MIT grad, summa cum laude in computer science. Ran identity scams and ByteCoin ransoms to pay for school and fund his operation. Citizens Against Weather Superiority, or CAWS, was a Neo splinter group dedicated to stopping all forms of manipulation of nature. Anthony Taulke, a two-time offender in their eyes, was public enemy number one.
On paper, Spike had the skills needed to hack the UN, but something still bothered Graves. It was a big leap from stealing ByteCoin from rich people to turning a drone into a weapon of mass murder. Nothing in his record indicated he was violent. And then there was the fact that he was still here, as if waiting to get picked up by the FBI.
“We’re ready to go whenever you are, General,” Craft said. “Just waiting on you.”
Graves nodded. Maybe once he got a chance to talk to this hacker he could make himself comfortable with the inconsistencies in the suspect. “Okay, let’s do it. Remember, I want them alive.
”
“Roger that, sir,” Craft said. “When we hit them from the street level they will scurry to their bolt-hole, which will take them right here.” He pointed to a narrow hole in the ceiling. “We wait for all of them to get down here, then we hit the lights and take them all together. No muss, no fuss. Any questions?”
The armored FBI agents retreated to form a semicircle outside the lights, weapons up. Graves stepped back until his leg touched the steel ladder he had used to climb up from the sewer below. He was unarmed. The FBI was in charge of the arrest. He was here to observe and get a crack at talking to the infamous Spike.
The last light went out and Graves put his data glasses in his pocket. Craft’s Brooklyn accent said quietly: “Street team, this is mole team leader, you are a go. I repeat, you are go for the takedown.”
“Roger that, mole team.”
Graves held his breath, listening. Silence, then a distant thundering noise like running feet. There was the squeak of a hinge and the slapping sound of a rope hitting the floor of the tunnel. A clink and a hiss.
“Smoke grenade,” someone whispered.
“Steady,” came Craft’s whispered reply.
Another clink and the room erupted in the flash of a concussion grenade. Graves felt himself slammed backwards into the rough concrete wall, ears ringing, eyes watering from the force of the blow. He clawed himself to his hands and knees.
“Craft!” he shouted, but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears. He crawled forward, his fingers finding the hole in the floor and the reassuring solidity of the steel ladder.
And something else. A hand, attached to an arm, connected to a body not wearing armor. With his free hand, Graves switched on his headlamp to find he was gripping the arm of the suspect Spike Lemmon.
The young man’s eyes widened and he struggled to get away. Graves hung on.
Spike smashed him in the face with his elbow and then slithered down the hole. The weight of the man pulled Graves downward. He hooked an elbow over the rung of the ladder and held on. Beneath him, Spike struggled like a wild animal. He gripped Graves’s wrist, hauled himself up, and bit Graves’s hand.