Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

  Ten seconds, that was all the time she was able to buy. The man’s hand reappeared while he was in midturn, the gun wrapped in his fingers black and nonreflective, with a long barrel.

  As he brought it up, his thick arm extended, Kali faded back and ducked sideways and delivered a hard kick to the side of his right knee, driving her boot through the joint. The blow hyperextended the knee, ripping the patella out of its anchoring nest of tendons and muscles so it slid around inches to the left of where it belonged. It folded the wrong way underneath him, bulging grotesquely on the side of his leg as he went down to the floor of the garage, falling hard next to the Ducati, his weight slamming into the concrete with a flat, fleshy thump.

  Kali swooped in a breath, quickstepping around him to the rear of the motorcycle. Unsnapping her right side pack, she reached inside for a cap wrench. It was a steel-titanium alloy, hard but lightweight, and about eight inches long.

  Out of the corner of her eye now, she saw Windbreaker emerge between two parked cars, giving her almost no chance to act. She whirled halfway toward him, the wrench straight down at her side, hidden between her arm and leg.

  He’d drawn a gun with a silencer on the barrel. If his intention was to kill her, he would have already fired it. But she did not think these men wanted her dead. Not yet. She believed their goal was to find out what she knew about Gunther Koenig and the Bergmanns. Which meant they would try bringing her someplace where they could question her.

  “Lass uns gehn!” he said with a nod toward the Golf. And then repeated the command in English. “Let’s g—”

  He stepped closer, crowding her, using his physical bulk to intimidate her. She was still standing slightly sideways to him. Her body between him and the wrench so he could not see it in her hand.

  She knew he would expect her to stand still or back away. He did not expect her to move in on him, which was what she did, pivoting on her heel, ducking under his arms and raising the wrench and smashing its flat side across his face, catching him on the cheek below his right eye socket with a crunch of cracking bone.

  He staggered backward, one hand coming up reflexively to his eye, the other still holding the gun.

  “Whore bitch!” he grunted. Blood was sheeting down from under his hand.

  The wrench giving her half a foot of extra reach, Kali brought it up swinging again, twice in rapid succession, putting all her strength into it, striking him across the side of his mouth, and then the middle of his face with her backswing.

  The man swayed on his feet, his eyes glazed, his nose a shapeless mash of shattered bone and cartilage. Blood streamed over his mouth and chin, his jaw hanging at an odd, loose angle. Kali was guessing the jaw was broken at its hinge.

  She did not wait to find out for certain. Shoving the wrench into her jacket pocket, she pulled her helmet off its backpack straps and lowered it over her head. Then she mounted the bike, grabbed hold of the handlebars, and pushed up the kickstand with her heel, simultaneously toggling to manual transmission.

  Up the aisle, ahead of her, the Golf was backing up the ramp, turning head-on toward her, its taillights pointed toward the street as if entering the garage.

  She switched on the bike’s engine, squeezing fuel into it. The Golf was a hundred, a hundred twenty feet in front of her, coming straight at her now.

  Shifting into first, she opened her throttle and shot straight up the aisle toward the vehicle. Underneath her, the Diavel was all humming, throbbing, barely contained power.

  Her heart was pulsating rapidly, perhaps seventy or eight beats a minute as she closed the distance between them, the ground running out under her wheels like a short thread, the front of the car coming up large in her sight, the outline of the driver’s head and shoulders visible through his tinted windshield...

  Kali waited until an instant before they would have collided head-on and went peeling off to the left, roaring away from the Golf and into the empty turn lane perpendicular to the ramp. Two seconds later, she reached the end of the lane, cut another hard left, and charged toward the rear of the underground space. The garage was twice as long as it was wide, but it took her just under three seconds to reach the end of the lane. She took a third hard left, throttled some more fuel into the line, and hooked left again, putting herself back in the lane where the bike was parked when she mounted it. Tan Blazer was still heaped on the floor there, and she somehow managed to swerve around him as she shot back toward the Ruppertstrasse entrance.

  It was then when Windbreaker came into the lane from between two parked cars. He’d managed to stay on his feet and was still holding the pistol. His eyes huge and glaring over the bloody ruin of his face, his clothes splashed red, he was gripping the gun in both hands now, putting himself between her and the Golf.

  Probably he didn’t think she would keep shooting forward, not with the Golf right behind him. Probably he believed she would veer into one of the aisles to her left. But if she turned away, she was surrendering her advantage. If she turned, it would give him a chance to react.

  By the time Windbreaker realized she wasn’t going to change direction, it was too late for him.

  In any collision between two objects, the one with greater size, speed, mass, brittleness, and momentum fares the best. The man in the lane was made of soft tissue and bone and was standing still, or in terms of physics, he was an object at rest. The Ducati was rubber, steel, and primed carbon fiber and speeding along at fifty miles an hour, or somewhat less than a mile a second. That made it the less vulnerable of the two by far.

  The kinetic force of its impact sent the man’s body flipping into the air at a velocity equal to that of the motorcycle. Sailing backward from its fender, he hit the flank of the Golf with a loud thump and then rebounded, shattered and bloody, to the garage floor. His weapon flew from his nerveless fingers to skitter under a parked car.

  Kali kept moving forward, slid her fingers over the clutch, and positioned one foot over the rear brake. The Golf had come to a stop directly in front of her. She needed to relax her body, distribute its weight evenly on the saddle. She loosened her arms and legs, letting her knees angle comfortably outward on either side of the motorcycle frame.

  She could see the driver of the Golf through his windshield. She could hear the bellow and growl of the Ducati’s engine, the sound echoing and amplifying between the cement walls around her. She could feel the throbbing, unbridled power under her saddle as she opened the throttle some more and the bike responded with a roar and a surge of speed.

  Her teeth clicking together, she shot toward the Golf like a meteor.

  * * *

  “Hawk Leader, do you read me?” McKenzie exclaimed in Braithwaite’s radio earpiece. “The woman...she... Bloody hell!”

  “What’s going on? What about her?”

  “She took out Drake. Kragen, too.”

  Braithwaite turned to Lau and gave him a puzzled glance.

  This was ten seconds ago.

  “Okay,” he said over the radio. “Listen to me—”

  “Did you hear what I said? That crazy whore—”

  “Listen. Where is she now?”

  “On the motorcycle. Circling.”

  “Circling?”

  “Yes. Circling. The fucking garage. What do you want me to do?”

  Braithwaite took a breath. He preferred to find out what she knew before dealing with her. But if she escaped the garage, they would find out nothing, and she would continue to be a threat. Maybe a greater one than before, because they had revealed themselves, and she might decide it was her or them.

  “Stop her,” he said. “Whatever it takes. Copy?”

  “Yes—”

  “And update me when it’s done.”

  “Yes, yes. Out!”

  The commlink went silent.

  That was five seconds ago.

  Inside the BM
W now, Braithwaite was still waiting to hear back from McKenzie.

  Lau stared at the GoMunich surveillance video of Ruppertstrasse on the dash display. It showed no cars or pedestrians. There was no sign of McKenzie or the woman. The street was quiet and dark.

  “What do you think is going on?” he said in his whisper of a voice.

  “I don’t know,” Braithwaite said.

  “Do you think McKenzie can handle it himself?”

  “We’ll see if he can.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then we’ll do it ourselves.”

  Lau was silent. Braithwaite was silent.

  “If he can’t do it,” Lau said, “how will we know?”

  Braithwaite turned to him.

  “This car’s practically racetrack ready, and the garage is just around the corner,” he said, starting the engine. “The camera will tell us if she leaves it. And if she leaves it, we’ll be right on her. And then she’ll be roadkill.”

  * * *

  Riding the Devil, Kali was within twenty yards of the Golf’s front grille.

  Fifteen yards.

  Ten...

  Inside the Golf, the driver suddenly lunged for his door. Flinging it open, he scrambled out behind it, keeping the door ajar, using it as a shield. He reached over the top of the window, a weapon in his hand, square and black and compact—

  A submachine gun.

  Kali was five yards from the Golf when she popped her clutch, pulling it in to disengage the transmission while simultaneously closing the throttle, then releasing the clutch, fast, and opening the throttle again to restore power to the rear wheel. The surge of fuel created tremendous torque in back, the torque bouncing the front end off the ground now as she applied the rear brake, bringing the bike down, getting closer to the car, four yards, three, two...

  She repeated the sequence. Clutch, throttle, fastfastfast, and instantly her front wheel was up again, higher this time, and it was all about weight and balance, finding the point of perfect balance where she felt weightless in the saddle, and the bike felt weightless underneath her.

  In precise control, she sped forward on her rear wheel, the front of the bike rearing like a bronco on its hind legs as it came up on the Golf. She had fifteen or twenty feet of clearance between the Golf’s roof and the ceiling of the garage. Enough. It would have to be enough room.

  The machine gun cackling in the incredulous driver’s hand, spitting a noisy and inaccurate tempest of ammunition at her, Kali reached the front of the Golf, cranked the throttle wide, and her bike leaped up onto its hood, only her rear tire making contact, her front end still up in the air. Weightless, balanced, she leaned forward and rear-braked, and the motorcycle hopped onto the roof of the Golf, both wheels touching down briefly before she bounced up and over its rear end to hit the street side of the ramp behind it with an impact that knocked the wind out of her lungs, sent a jagged bolt of pain shooting through her chest, and almost flung her over the handlebars like a rag doll.

  Somehow she held on. The motorcycle back on two wheels, balanced underneath her, Kali held on to the handlebars and shot up the ramp onto the middle of Ruppertstrasse, where she heard the screech of tires that weren’t hers and was washed in the brilliance of headlights. She instantly registered a vehicle braking behind her, coming to a sudden halt inches before it would have crashed into her motorcycle.

  Bringing down her pivot foot, taking a sharp right turn, Kali saw two people running toward her from a bench outside the bald man’s building—a woman and a man. Behind her, in the vehicle that had come to a short stop, the driver was sitting upright behind the windshield, his features impossible to make out in the blinding glare of his lights.

  Her heart skipped a beat. The vehicle was an Audi, a powerful 4x4, and it had been moving at a high speed. If the driver’s reflexes were a hair slower, and the Audi stopped a moment later, she would be a shattered corpse.

  But she could not afford to think about it. She had to get away, now.

  Opening the Ducati’s throttle, Kali surged forward with a burst of unbridled horsepower and went growling off into the night.

  * * *

  Braithwaite was about to radio McKenzie again, try to get a response out of him, when he saw an Audi 4x4 speeding in his direction on Lindwurmstrasse, swing left through the red light at the corner intersection up ahead, then go barreling onto Ruppertstrasse toward the woman’s building. A second later, he heard the overlapping surge of an engine and the high, horrible squeal of rubber tires on blacktop.

  He straightened in his seat, staring at his dash display in bewilderment. The smart city pod showed Ruppertstrasse to be clear of vehicles.

  “Where’s the SUV?” Lau said. He pointed at the screen. “We should be able to see it here. And that other noise...was it a motorcycle?”

  Braithwaite stared at the screen, wiry with tension. Lau was right. He knew what he’d seen and heard. But he could see nothing on his display.

  He tried McKenzie over the commlink again. “Hawk One, I need an update.”

  Nothing.

  “I repeat, Hawk One, we’re waiting here.”

  A long moment passed. Lau glanced over at him. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  Braithwaite shot him a jagged look. “No shit,” he said, and got back on the link. “Hawk One, come in. Do you read—”

  “Sorry... I copy...”

  Finally. “What is going on?”

  “She’s gone. Couldn’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “Wait... I thought you were monitoring us.”

  “We are.”

  “And you didn’t see?”

  Braithwaite studied the dash screen in deepening confusion. “Tell me what’s—”

  He fell into abrupt silence. His gaze back on the dash screen, he saw the Audi pull to a dead halt halfway up the street as the woman came hurtling out of the garage entrance on her motorcycle, sailing through the air as if fired out of a cannon. Landing in the middle of the road, she turned sharply right down Ruppertstrasse, heading away from Lindwurmstrasse.

  Comprehension dawned across his features.

  She’d fucked with the cameras. A time delay.

  Christ.

  He started up the BMW and pulled from the curb with a jolt.

  “Can you get after her?”

  “Yes. But Drake and Kragen—”

  “Forget them,” Braithwaite said. “Pay attention...”

  * * *

  As he hit the brakes, Carmody took it all in at once. Wheeler and Krauss coming up off the bench to his right, and just a few feet up the street, Outlier soaring over the Golf hatchback and then through the garage entrance as if her damned motorbike had wings...

  He was rarely surprised by anything. But if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would have never believed it.

  Then, suddenly, he registered two things at once: the Golf quickly reversing out of the garage, and Long’s voice in his earpiece.

  “Alpha,” Long said over the RoIP. “Target’s on the move.”

  Carmody lifted a glance at the rearview mirror. Braithwaite had not turned the corner onto Ruppertstrasse.

  “I don’t see him.”

  “He’s headed west, boss. On Lindwurmstrasse.”

  He had no time to consider that. “I’ll handle things here,” he said. “Stay with him.”

  “Got it. Out.”

  Carmody allowed himself time for one deep breath. Just ahead of him, the Golf was near the top of the entrance ramp and within inches of backing onto the street. But he was already in position.

  Giving the Audi some gas, he jerked forward to block its way.

  * * *

  Kali hurtled to the end of Ruppertstrasse and bore left on Tumblingerstrasse, checking the heads-up display on her helmet’s face s
hield. Her hard landing had thankfully left the small IR video cam in the back of her saddle seat functional and streaming over the Bluetooth. For now, she was in the clear.

  Her body wasn’t in nearly as good shape as the camera. Turning the handlebars brought a hot jab of pain on the right side of her chest, in the same area as the duller pain accompanying each breath. She must have bruised or even cracked a rib coming down off the Golf’s roof.

  For now, though, it was tolerable. If only because she needed it to be.

  She bore north on Tumblingerstrasse, the traffic around her thickening the farther she rode toward the Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt district and the highway. This was Saturday night, and the students from two or three nearby universities would be pouring out to its pubs, hookah lounges, and the new reality/stim club near the central rail station. It could possibly slow her. But it also would clog the roads for anyone chasing her.

  “Cas,” she said, awakening the helmet’s integrated AI. Cas, short for Castor, her guiding star. Long thought of as a single star in the constellation Gemini, it was in fact a complex system, three binaries held together by mysterious physical processes. “Secure call.”

  “Yes, Kali.” A gentle male voice, not old, slight British accent.

  Weaving through traffic, she named the recipient. “Tell him I’m on my way and will arrive as arranged,” she said. “Also, Cas... Metallica.”

  “‘Wherever I May Roam’?”

  “Yes. Loud.”

  She listened to the opening riff. Searing, Phrygian, it called to mind her favorite childhood story: Dare I?... She blinked and the stars were shattered.

  Kali looked ahead at the stop-and-go traffic and decided she would have to split the lanes. It might draw a police siren, but she had to take the risk. Though the HUD still showed no one on her tail, she couldn’t count on that to last.

  Electric guitars and pounding drums in her ears, she cranked her throttle, white-lining between the sluggish crawl of automobiles, hopeful the road would open up when she left Tumblingerstrasse, then turned onto Schaftlarnstrasse to head out toward the rendezvous spot. The cemetery with its decades of resting souls was not among Munich’s nightlife attractions, but it was where she needed to be...and she had to get there without any more interference. Too much was at stake.