CHAPTER TWO

Georgetown—Washington, D. C. —United States of America

Anna rose up from where she had fallen, her arm tight with pain in a line of new bruises, all along the points where she had collided with the heavy planters. She felt woozy and her hearing was flattened and woolly from the concussion of the grenade blast. She could smell smoke and dirt and the cloying scent of crushed flowers.

The agent made it up to her knees and blinked; her optics were blurred like a poorly tuned video image, the delicate subsystems of the augmetic eyes cycling through a reset mode. Her vision hazed from black and white to color, and she saw her pistol lying among a drift of broken window glass. Anna loped forward, and stooped to gather up her weapon, eyes darting around.

As her fingers tightened around the butt of the Mustang automatic, she felt a sharp jerk at her back that dragged her off balance. Kelso saw the hood of the stalled town car coming up to meet her and she brought up her hand just in time to block the new impact. Slipping down over the crumpled fender, cursing, she saw her assailant.

It was one of the figures from the car, dressed head to foot in black combat fatigues with a zip hood that closed like a mask over his face. The man was easily twice her body mass, and protruding from the ends of his jacket sleeves were hands of dull machined metal. Her hearing was coming back by degrees, and she heard his combat boots crunching on the glass as the attacker balled a knot of her expensive Emile jacket between those steel fingers and hauled her off her feet. She struggled, but her arms felt like lead.

Blank eyes, shark-black and wet, measured her; this bastard was playing games, tossing her about like a rag doll—but now that was going to end, now he was going to kill her. The other hand came up and clamped around her bare neck and squeezed like a vise. Anna tried to scream, but the sound died in her throat, trapped there. A cascade of warning icons rained down across the inside of her eyes, fed from the implanted biomonitor tracking her vitals. She heard her bloodstream thundering in her ears.

The Mustang was heavy and dead in her grip. It was a block of iron, dragging her down. It took all her effort to lift it, her exertion ending in stifled gasps.

He saw the movement, and tried to deflect her, knock the gun away. Anna jerked the trigger by reflex and the pistol roared. The first discharge missed, but the muzzle flash flared bright across the killer’s eye line and he snarled; for a moment his grip slackened and Kelso pushed away, turning. When she fired again, the round hit him at point-blank range through the base of his jaw. Her assailant dropped like a felled tree, trailing a stream of blood from the back of his head.

Anna went down with him, landing hard for the third time. She pushed away and came up in a crouch, turning away from the mess she’d made of him. A crawling, itchy gale of static was gnawing at the base of her skull—she’d lost the mastoid comm from the blast. Putting the dead man out of her thoughts, she moved off, low and quick behind collapsed tables and fallen chairs, wincing with pain at each step.

There was thick smoke everywhere; all of Q Street was wreathed in it, the drifting haze of gray mist put out by the distraction grenades churning with the dark black pall from the burning limo. The rebreather implant in her chest stiffened; she’d use it if she needed to. A strident chorus of pealing car alarms was crying up and down the street, warning lights flashing. She glimpsed Connor lying at the curb, his torso a red ruin of bullet impacts. The agent’s eyes were lifeless, staring into nothing.

Anna kept moving. The crackle of automatic rounds sounded nearby, and she heard someone call out. The words were lost to her, but she knew Matt Ryan’s voice when she heard it. She could make out the vague shape of the SUV—he had to be there, with Skyler. The Secret Service’s first priority was always to their principal, and Ryan would be doing everything he could to get the woman out of danger.

A figure moved in the smoke, and she called to it, stifling a cough. “Matt? ”

The gunshot that answered her struck Anna in the gut and she cried out. Burning, white-hot agony seared her belly and she recoiled, stumbling against a low wall. Her legs turned to water and she slipped down, a blossom of stark crimson blooming across the white silk blouse beneath her jacket. The round had gone straight through the Kevlar undershirt and buried itself in the meat of her. The agony was like nothing she had ever felt before. Her hands tightened into fists; her pistol was gone, spinning away out of reach. She felt a tightness in her chest as her biomonitor’s active response system released protein threads into her bloodstream, racing to the source of the injury.

The SUV’s engine rumbled, and the taillights glowed white as the gears shifted; they were going to get away, get Skyler to safety. Kelso felt panic rising in her thoughts. She was going to be left behind.

The haze was thinning, and for one random moment, a breath of clear air passed before her. She saw Byrne and Ryan with Skyler between them—the senator was slack, semiconscious—trying to maneuver the woman into the back of the SUV and keep a watch for the assailants at the same time. Dansky was staggering after them, pressing a bloody kerchief to a nasty wound on his face.

Anna tried to get up, but the pain flared in her torso like another bullet hit, and it forced her back down. She was gasping for breath when she saw the figure again.

Like the one she had killed, he was broad and thickset—a linebacker profile, black-clad and lethal. He lacked the obvious cyberlimbs of the dead man, but he moved through the smoke without pause; he had to be tracking his targets with a thermographic implant. In the assailant’s hand was a large frame automatic, the length of it doubled by a cylindrical silencer.

Dansky caught sight of the armed man and cried out; the gun replied with a metallic cough and the executive went down. Anna’s heart hammered in her chest as she saw what would come next. She shouted Ryan’s name, the pain rising with it, and he turned toward the sound, pushing himself in front of Skyler to shield her from attack.

The next shots took Byrne in the throat and the face, ending him before he hit the asphalt. Ryan returned fire, his rounds going wide.

Anna’s legs felt numb and unresponsive. She lurched forward, but the limbs were dead meat. The coppery stink of her own blood filled her nostrils and she gagged. She wanted to look away. She wanted to, but she couldn’t.

The assailant went in for the kill and Ryan threw himself at the figure. There was a scuffle, and the agent tore open the zip hood. Kelso got a look at the face underneath—all fury and exertion, sallow and Nordic, with a shock of ice-blond hair. He clubbed Matt Ryan across the skull with the butt of the pistol, knocking him down. Then, with care, the killer took aim and ended him with a single shot.

Anna felt her friend die, the awful inevitability of it. She felt the horrific sense of the moment pass through her like an electric shock as Ryan crumpled into a nerveless heap and was still.

Everything about him, everything he was, the good, honest man who had done so much to help her… all of it gone in less than a second. Tears streamed down her dirty, bloodstained cheeks as she struggled to hold on to consciousness, her pain overwhelming everything. It all seemed impossible, unreal…

The killer halted for a long second, and she recognized the body language of someone conducting a sub-voc conversation. Then, very deliberately, he turned to examine Senator Skyler, where the woman lay half in and half out of the SUV. She tried to hold up her hands to ward him off. In the distance, sirens were approaching.

Anna waited for the next shot, but it never came. Even with all the madness unfolding around her, confusion rose in her thoughts as the assailant walked away, leaving Skyler very much alive. Instead, he crossed to where Dansky was lying on the edge of the restaurant patio, and shot the man again.

Then he turned to look toward her, and once more Anna got a good look at the sharp angles of the man’s face.

It was the last thing she saw, as the thundering in her ears grew loud and dragged her down toward blackness.

The Grey Range—Queensland—Australia

Saxon never felt the impact.

A split second before the veetol collided with the hillside, jets of shock foam flooded the cargo bay with gouts of yellowy matter, reeking of chemical stink. The fluid sprayed across him, the frothing mass instantly hardening as it made contact with the air. He gagged and coughed as some of the foam made it into his mouth, his nostrils. It enveloped his body, smothering him.

The aircraft crashed down and ripped itself to bits as it drew a long black gouge of scorched earth across the tree line, the wings and rotors shearing away in puffs of high-octane flame. Somebody was screaming.

The cockpit was crushed and the fuselage torn open. Inside, Saxon was slammed around his makeshift cushion, and for long seconds he teetered on the brink of losing consciousness. He grunted with the exertion of keeping himself awake, and with a final, tortured screech of stressed metal, the wreck of the flyer tumbled to a halt, inverted, half buried in a drift of loose earth packed around the nose cone.

A wave of punishing heat pressed in on Saxon through the cowl of the solidified shock foam and he felt it running like molten wax under his hands. He dragged his left arm up through the mass and his fingers found the handle of the heavy jungle knife, lying in its holster atop his shoulder pad. The soldier lurched forward, cutting through the clogged restraint straps still holding him in his seat, then down through the thick foam-matter.

He used his right arm, his cyberarm, to peel back the curdled material. A gust of hot, putrid air washed over him. The cloying, sickly-sweet stench of burned flesh and the tang of spent aviation fuel made him cough and spit out a thick gobbet of bloody phlegm.

Fire beat at him; the cargo bay was open to the night on one side where an entire quadrant of the fuselage had peeled back off the veetol’s skeletal airframe. The rest of the space was filled with black smoke and sheets of orange flame. Seats where men and women had been strapped in were now little more than charred, indefinable things. The smoke was thickening by the moment, and he wheezed, cursing, calling out their names as he sliced through the straps still holding him upside down. The knife cut the last and he dropped, falling badly. A shard of agony shot up from his right hip and he howled.

The flames were all around him now, and Saxon felt the hairs of his rough beard crisping with the heat. He stumbled forward, reaching for spars of broken steel, searching for a foothold to get him up and out of the wreckage. The metal was red-hot and he hissed in pain as it burned his palms through his combat gloves. The smoke churned around him, clogging his lungs. It was leaching the life from him, dragging on him. His chest felt like it was full of razors.

Saxon gripped the fire-scorched spars and dragged himself up the side of the fuselage, ignoring the singing pain from the places where jagged swords of hull metal slashed his torso and his meat arm. Then he was out, falling into the dusty brown loam churned by the crash. He grasped for his canteen, and through some miracle it was still clipped to his gear belt. Saxon thumbed off the cap and swallowed a chug of water, only to cough it back up a second later. Panting, he staggered a few steps from the wreckage.

The tree-lined hill extended away, becoming steeper, falling to a fast-flowing creek bed a few hundred meters below. A black arrow of smoke was rising swiftly into the night air. There was little wind, so the line was like a marker pointing directly to the crash site.

He stopped, fighting down the twitches of an adrenaline rush and took stock, running the system check. Red lights joined the green, and there were more of them than he wanted to see.

He couldn’t stay here. The drone that had shot them down would be vectoring back to scope the crash site, and if he was here when that happened…

Kano’s face rose in his thoughts and Saxon swore explosively. He glared back at the burning veetol. Am I the only one who survived?

“Anyone hear me? ” he called, his voice husky and broken. “Strike Six, sound off! ”

At first he heard only the sullen crackle of the hungry flames, but then a voice called out—wounded, but nearby. He turned toward it.

Pieces of hull were scattered over a copse of thin, broken trees, small fires burning in patches of spilled fuel. Saxon blinked his optic implants to their ultraviolet frequency setting and something made itself clear against the white-on-blue cast of the shifted image.

A hand flailed from underneath a wing panel, and he moved to it, crouching to put his shoulder under the long edge. Bracing against a boulder, Saxon forced it away and heard a moan of pain.

Sam Duarte looked up at him from the dirt, his tawny face a mess of scratches. The young mercenary’s legs were blackened and twisted at unnatural angles; he’d likely been thrown clear of the veetol when it plowed through the trees, but the luck that saved him from being immolated had left him broken.

“Jefe …” he gasped. “You’re bleeding. ”

“Later, ” Saxon said, and bent down to gather Duarte up, hauling him to his feet. The other man grunted with a deep hurt as he put weight on his right leg, and Saxon frowned. “Can you walk? ”

“Not on my own, ” came the reply. “Madre de dios, where the hell did that drone come from? ” Duarte looked around, blinking. “Where… Where’s Kano and the others? ”

Saxon could smell the burned meat stench on himself and he couldn’t say the words; his silence was enough, though, and Duarte shook his head and crossed himself. “We have to move, ” said Saxon. “You got a weapon? ”

The other man shook his head again, so Saxon drew the black-anodized shape of a heavy Diamondback. 357 revolver from a holster on his belt, and pressed it into Duarte’s hands. “That vulture, he’ll be coming back, ” he said, checking the loads.

Saxon nodded, casting around, scanning the drift of wreckage. He’d lost his FR-27 in the crash, but the veetol had been carrying cases loaded with extra weapons for Operation Rainbird. He spotted one off to the side and made for it.

Rainbird. The mission had been blown before they even reached the target zone. Saxon’s mind raced as he ran through the possibilities. Had they been compromised from the start? It was unlikely. Belltower’s mercenary forces were the best paid in the world, and there was an unwritten rule that once you wore the bull badge, you were part of a brotherhood. The company did not tolerate traitors in the ranks. Belltower policed itself, often with lethal intensity.

He reached the case and tried the locks, but they were stuck fast. The knife came out again, and he worked the tip into the broken mechanism.

“The intel…” Duarte said out loud, his thoughts mirroring those of his squad leader. “The mission intel had to be bogus…”

“No, ” Saxon insisted.

“No? ” Duarte echoed him, his tone changing, becoming more strident. “We had a clear highway, jefe! You saw the data. No drones for twenty miles. ”

The lock snapped and Saxon cracked the case. “Must’ve been a mistake…”

“Belltower intel never makes mistakes! ” Duarte snapped, coughing. “That’s what they always tell us! ” He tried to lurch forward on his one good leg. “Whatever happened, we’re screwed now…”

Saxon shot him an angry glare. “You secure that crap right now, Corporal, ” he said, putting hard emphasis on the young man’s rank. “Just shut your mouth and do what I bloody well tell you to, and I promise I’ll get you back to whatever barrio rattrap you call home. ”

Duarte sobered, and then gave a pained chuckle. “Hell, no. I joined up to get out of my barrio rattrap. I’ll settle for just getting away from here. ”

“Yeah, I hear you. ” Saxon dragged a bandolier of shells from the case and pulled a heavy, large-gauge shoulder arm from the foam pads inside. The G-87 was a grenade launcher capable of throwing out a half-dozen 40 mm high-explosive shells in a matter of seconds; the Americans called it “the Linebacker. ” He cracked open the magazine and began thumbing the soda-can-size rounds into the feed. He was almost done when he heard the low whine of ducted rotors overhead.

“Incoming! ” shouted Duarte, and the soldier stumbled toward a twist of wreckage.

Saxon looked up and shifted the optics to low-light, instantly painting the whole sky in shades of dark green and glittering white. He caught movement as something ungainly and fast wheeled and turned above them. The wings of the drone changed aspect and folded close to the spindly fuselage as it dove at them. Saxon glimpsed a ball festooned with glassy lenses tucked underneath the nose of the robot aircraft as it turned to single him out.

He broke into a run and vaulted away over fallen tree trunks just as the clattering hammer of heavy-caliber bullets ripped into the place where he had been standing. Saxon rolled, hearing the deep report of the Diamondback as Duarte fired after the drone. The aircraft’s engine note throbbed and changed as it went up into a stall turn and came about.

“The trees, ” Saxon shouted, working a dial on the grenade launcher. “Get to the trees. We stay in the open, we’ll be cut to shreds! ”

Duarte didn’t reply; he just ran, as best he could, half-staggering, half-falling. Saxon looked up, finding the drone as it came hunting once more. He pulled the G-87 to his shoulder, almost aiming straight up, and squeezed the trigger. With a hollow grunt, the weapon discharged a shell in an upward arc. The dial set the grenade fuse for a half second, but even as the drone passed over him, Saxon knew he had misjudged the shot. The shell exploded and the robot flyer bucked from the near hit, but maintained its dive.

His blood ran cold as the aircraft put on a burst of speed and fell toward Duarte, like a cheetah zeroing in on a wounded gazelle. “Sam! ”

The soldier twisted and raised the revolver, the bright stab of discharge from the muzzle flaring in the low-light optics. The heavy cannon, slung in a conformal pod along the length of the drone’s ventral fuselage, opened up with a sound like a jackhammer—and Sam Duarte was torn apart in a puff of white.

“Bastard! ” Saxon rose from cover, screaming his fury at the machine as it looped and turned inbound once more, preparing to finish the job at hand. He broke out and ran as fast as he could toward the steeper slope where the trees were denser, the grenade launcher bouncing against his chest, his every breath a ragged, gasping effort. The cannon started up again as he reached the perimeter of the tree line, and Saxon turned as he ran, mashing the trigger. The remaining three rounds in the magazine chugged into the air one after another, exploding barely a heartbeat apart at a height just above the canopy. The drone’s delicate sensors were blinded by the flashes and the scattering of shrapnel, and it lost its target. The flyer drifted off course and clipped a tall tree; in seconds it was spinning and coming apart, shredding into a new firestorm of burning metal.

The detonation sent Saxon sprawling and he lost his footing. The soldier slipped over the lip of the hill and tumbled headfirst down the steep, crumbling face, bouncing hard. Unable to arrest his descent, he fell pinwheeling over the edge and into the muddy waters of the creek below.

Washington Hospital Center—Washington, D. C. —United States of America

Sensation returned to her by degrees, assembling itself piece by piece, line by line. She had the sense of being in a bed, the cotton sheets pressing against her legs, the prickly feel of the mattress cloth beneath. Her lips were cold and dry, a steady breath of oxygen flowing from a plastic mask resting on her face. Anna felt worn and old, broken and twisted. Her body seemed dislocated from her; she expected pain. Why wasn’t there any pain?

With difficulty, she turned her head on the pillow beneath it and felt warmth on her face. Licking her lips, she tried to speak, but all that emerged was a hollow gasp. It was dark all around her, a strange dimensionless void that she couldn’t grasp.

Then footsteps, people nearby. A voice. “Anna? Can you hear me? ”

“Yes. ”

“Okay, just lie still. You’re in the hospital. Try not to move. ”

The oxygen mask was pulled away and she licked her lips. “Why… is it dark? ”

“Okay, nurse, thank you. ” Someone else coughed and she heard the familiar shuffle of expensive Italian loafers, a door closing. “Hey, Anna. It’s me, Ron. I’m here with Hank Bradley from Division. Just take it easy. ”

“Ron? ” Agent-in-Charge Ronald Temple was Kelso’s supervisor, a decent guy with a long career in the Secret Service. She hadn’t expected to hear him. “What’s wrong? ”

“Agent Kelso…” The next voice was Bradley’s. Anna didn’t know the man as well as Temple, just by hearsay and reputation as something of a hard ass; he was a senior agent working liaison with the Secret Service and the Department of Justice. His presence underlined the gravity of what had happened. “I’m afraid we had to take your eyes. ”

“What? ” Her hand automatically reached upward. Pads of gauze covered her face, and in a sickening moment of understanding, she realized that the orbits of her skull were empty. Something hard and plastic protruded through the bandages from one of the sockets.

“We can’t talk like this. Wait a second. ” Bradley came closer and Anna heard the whisper of a cable uncoiling. Something connected with a snap and she felt a sudden giddy rush of vertigo as an image exploded before her.

She saw a strange figure swaddled in bandages and crowded by electronic devices, like a hi-tech mummy. Monitors and an oxygen cylinder framed a bruised, puffy face. “I can see again. ” The figure mimed the words as she said them, and then the point of view shifted, taking in Ron Temple at the window, framed by sunlight. His round face was tight with concern. “Me. I’m looking at me. ”

The view bobbed. “I’m running you a feed from my optic implants, ” said Bradley. A thin, brassy cable extended from inside his right-hand cuff and into a socket on the temporary eye interface.

“I look like shit, ” she managed, swallowing a sob.

Temple came to the bed and perched on the edge, taking her hand. “Yeah, sweetheart, you do. But you’ll be okay. The doctors got the round out of you, it didn’t hit anything vital. Tissue damage mostly. The Kevlar took the brunt of the impact, slowed it down some. ”

The next words fell from her in a breathy rush. “Matt’s dead. Byrne and Connor, too…”

Temple gave a shallow sigh. “Anna… They’re all dead. You’re the only one in the detail to make it. ”

“We hoped Hansen, the Belltower guy, might pull through, ” said Bradley. “They lost him on the operating table. ”

“How long have I been in here? ” She gripped Temple’s hand hard.

“Four days. ”

“The senator? ”

Bradley’s point-of-view nodded again. “She’s okay. We already got a statement from her. That, plus imagery from the traffic cams, and we’re assembling a model of the incident. But that’s why we had to subpoena your optics. You’re the only one who got a good look at a face. I had tech forensics from the FBI reconstruct a few stills from the data in the image buffer. ”

“We’ll get you replacements, ” Temple noted. “Good stuff, new Caidins or maybe Sarif…” He handed her a sip-bulb of water. “I’m sorry you had to wake up blind…”

“Thanks for being here, sir, ” she said, taking a drink of the cooling fluid. “Has someone—” Anna took a shaky breath and started again. “Has someone told Jenny? ” Jennifer Ryan was Matt’s wife of some sixteen years. They had two girls, Susan and Carole. She remembered their house as a warm, welcoming place.

Temple nodded gravely. “She knows. I’m sorry, Anna. ”

“I understand you and Agent Ryan were close? ” asked Bradley.

The other man answered before she could. “Ryan was her… mentor. ”

“Something like that, ” said Anna, the words barely a whisper. She swallowed and straightened up. “Do you have the images with you? Can I see them? ”

Bradley and Temple shared a look. “Okay, ” said the agent, and he drew a folding Pocket Secretary PDA from his jacket; it opened up, blooming like a metallic flower. Bradley hesitated, then held it in front of him, tabbing through the virtual pages. “We’re sifting through witness statements at the moment, still building the picture. ”

“Leads are coming together, ” Temple offered. “We don’t have any suspects as yet… These creeps just melted into thin air. ”

“We had a report about an unmarked helicopter putting down briefly in Montrose Park, but D. C. air traffic control have nothing on that, ” noted Bradley distractedly.

“I never saw anything, ” said Anna, her thoughts churning. “What about evidence at the scene? ”

Temple shook his head. “No shells—they used caseless ammo. Fiber traces are a dead end, too. We did get a line on the car they used, though. License was fake, most of the registration marks were lasered off, but we got a partial from the engine block. Turns out it was listed as stolen from a shell company that’s a known front for the Red Arrow triad. ”

“I killed one of them, ” she insisted.

“They torched the corpse before they left, ” he said. “Thermite grenade. All we got left is a heap of burnt scrap metal and some biological traces that come up blank on the Interpol register. ”

Bradley gestured with the PDA. “Here’s the picture of the shooter. ”

Anna studied the grainy, ghostly image through the other agent’s eyes. The blond hair, the hard, pitiless gaze of the man who killed Matt Ryan caught in midturn.

Suddenly she was back there again, collapsed in the street, wet with blood, racked with agony. Waiting for death. A shudder ran through her.

“Why… Why didn’t he kill me? ” she breathed.

Temple squeezed her hand. “Best guess is, you lucked out. Black-and-whites from the Georgetown precinct were maybe ten seconds away at that point. Blondie there probably thought you weren’t going to survive a gut shot and decided to buck out instead of hanging around to make sure. ”

“But he didn’t kill Skyler, ” she insisted. “Matt, Byrne, the rest of the team, even the guy the senator was meeting, Dansky… They murdered all of them, but not her. If it was the triads, why the hell is she still breathing? ”

“A warning, ” said Bradley. “This is the Red Arrow telling Skyler to back off from chasing down the harvesters in SoCal. They’re showing her that she can be got to, no matter where she is, or who’s protecting her…” He trailed off and ran a hand through his hair. “This whole thing is a mess. These people have made the Service look incompetent. Even Skyler’s started distancing herself. ”

“Sure she has. This is Washington, ” said Temple, with an irritable snort, as if that were explanation enough.

“No, ” Anna shook her head. She placed her hands flat on the bed and tried to gather her thoughts, tried to screen out the howling emotional pain clawing at the inside of her, forcing herself to think like a federal agent and not like a woman who had seen one of her closest friends brutally gunned down in front of her. “You saw that creep in the picture. He’s whiter than I am. I worked on a counterfeiting investigation against the Wo Shing Wo triad in Detroit, back in 2021. Those guys don’t hire contractor muscle to send messages, and the Red Arrow are no different. ”

“You can’t be certain of that, Agent Kelso. ” Bradley was studying her closely. “Skyler’s people have already had the Red Arrow taking shots at them back in Los Angeles. This is an escalation. ” She saw her own expression tighten as he spoke.

In her mind’s eye, the moment was unfolding again, and she grimaced. “He shot Dansky, ” Anna insisted. “There was no reason to do that. The man was unarmed, no threat, not like the rest of us. And then the shooter went back, and he finished him off He executed him. ”

Bradley was quiet for a moment. “We’ve already interviewed the staff at Caidin. ”

Temple nodded. “It was like someone kicked over a hornet’s nest in that place…”

Bradley continued. “Garrett Dansky was meeting with Senator Skyler to discuss some details of…” He drifted off, glancing down at his PDA again. Anna saw panels of notes, the words “United Nations” and “rumors” leaping out at her. He looked away before she could read more. “Apparently, the Caidin corporation are concerned about the possibility of some discussions going on at the UN. Something to do with the regulation of augmentation technology production. Pretty dry stuff. I don’t see the Chinese mob having much stake in that kind of thing. Right now, we don’t have anything to suggest that Dansky’s death was anything more than just a collateral. ”

“The fact is, ” Temple said, “we’ve got to work to keep on top of this. And you surviving is a break, Anna. I’ve got a couple of techs outside ready to debrief you if you’re up for it. The more you can tell us, the more we can do about getting these guys. Okay? ” He gave her a supportive smile.

Anna tried to return it, and she felt a sob rising in her throat again. Perhaps if they hadn’t taken her eyes, she would have cried right then and there. She hated herself for feeling like this, barely able to control her emotions—the rage and the fury, the anguish and the sorrow that swept about her like a silent hurricane.

Matt Ryan is dead. The one person she trusted more than anyone else in the world, the man who had saved her life. The man who had given her a second chance. He had died and Anna had been unable to do a thing to stop it. Her hand instinctively reached for the pocket where the brass coin would be; but it wasn’t there, and her fingers tensed. She thought about the call she’d made, the night before the incident. Matt had always been there for her, and asked for nothing in return.

“The Service will not stand to let this pass, Agent Kelso, ” said Bradley. “We will not let these men walk free. ”

She took a shuddering breath and gave a long nod. “Yes, sir. I’ll do everything I can to assist the investigation. ”

“Good—” Bradley leaned in to remove the wire, but she halted him.

“Before we do that, could I… Can borrow a cell? I need to talk to Jennifer Ryan. She needs to hear it from me. ”

Temple handed her his vu-phone. “Go ahead. Take your time. ”

When she was alone, and everything was dark again, she spoke the number for the Ryan household into the device and listened to it dial.

Inside her thoughts, something hard, cold, and beyond anger began to crystallize, like black diamond.

Station November—New South Wales—Australia

He remembered bits of what happened in the time between the drone exploding and awakening in an SAF field hospital just south of the redline.

He remembered drowning, or something near to it. The slurry of muddy orange-brown water in the fouled creek smothering him like the shock foam. He remembered the horrible ripping sound of Sam Duarte’s execution at the guns of some autonomous robot predator. And he remembered the shadow, the hulking shadow that waded into the river and dragged him out over the rocks. The voices, talking in languages he didn’t understand.

Saxon lost a lot of time there, or so it seemed. Days and nights blurred into one another. He found it hard to keep the passage of them straight in his head. Dimly he was aware that they had medicated him. The doctors talked about how the burns that the crash had inflicted on him were severe. They talked about the damage his cyberlimbs had suffered from the fall into the creek. The Hermes leg augmentations were shot, little better than scrap metal now; and then there was the litany of malfunctions with his internal implants, the optics and the reflex booster, the commo and all the rest. All this, without even a mention of how the meat, the human part of him, was faring.

All these things seemed faint and far distant, though. Each time he slept—if you could call it sleep—there were ghosts waiting.

Sam, Kano, all the others from Strike Six, all watching him. They never spoke, they didn’t curse him or cry out. Sometimes they were intact, the black tri-plates of their flexible armor vests pristine and bloodless, gold-faced helmets raised visor-up as if they had just walked in off the parade ground. Other times, they were burned things, shapes of red and black flesh on charred bones.

They didn’t blame him or forgive him. They just watched.

Sometimes, in those moments when he couldn’t be sure if he was dreaming it or if he was seeing the real thing through a veil of painkillers, they would be in the room with him. Sitting on the beds, smoking a cigarette, sipping from a cup. And the shadow was with them. In the room, watching him like they did.

Saxon had lost men before. He wasn’t a stranger to it. But he wasn’t used to the idea of being a survivor, of being the only survivor. It gnawed at him.

One day he drifted back to the surface of consciousness and found the shadow sitting in the chair next to his bed. Saxon knew he was real because he could smell him. The shadow smelled like rich, strong tobacco, and the scent triggered a sense-memory in the depths of Ben Saxon’s mind. He remembered being a boy, maybe five or six years old, his grandfather taking him through the streets of London past impossibly old buildings, to a gilt-edged hole-in-the-wall shop, all paneled with mirrors and advertisements for cigars. A man in there, selling packets of raw pipe tobacco, and the strange exotic textures that smelled like the air of distant lands.

The memory evaporated and Saxon blinked. The shadow was a man, a few years his senior, but intense and muscled, with an angular face like carved wood. Rugged, handsome after a fashion… but hard with it. Saxon sensed that about him more than anything, like a ghost aura. The shadow was a soldier and a killer.

“You…” he managed, licking dry lips. “You’re the one… pulled me from the creek bed. ”

That earned him a nod. “You would have died” said the other man, the trace of an Eastern accent threaded through his words. “That would have been a waste. ”

Saxon eased himself up a little, blinking away the last of the fog from his chemical sleep. “Thanks. ”

“I did it because it was the right thing to do, ” he went on, fixing him with an intense look, his right eye a striking silver-blue augmentation. “And, it seems, because fate deemed it right. ”

Saxon shook his head. “Never believed in that stuff myself. ”

“No? ” The man drew out a cigarette, offered one that Saxon refused, and then proceeded to light his own with an ornate petrol lighter. “I am a great believer in the notion of ‘right place, right time, right man, ’ Mr. Saxon. ” He took a long drag. “And that is you, at this moment. ”

Saxon noticed the man’s arms for the first time; they were like images from old medical textbooks, skinless limbs packed with dense bunches of artificial musculature over steel bones. Top-of-the-range, mil-spec cyberlimbs. For a moment, he measured himself against the stranger, wondering if he could take him on. Saxon concluded that at best, they might be evenly matched.

He looked away, glancing around the ward. They were alone. “Who are you? ” He studied the man for a moment. He was wearing a nondescript set of black fatigues completely bereft of any identification tags or insignia. He was also unarmed… but then he showed a kind of careful poise that made Saxon suspect he didn’t need a gun or a knife to be lethal. “Are you Belltower? ”

“I have a far wider remit than Belltower Associates. ” He smiled and exhaled. “You wouldn’t know the name of my… group. And that’s exactly how we like it to be. I suppose you could call me a freelancer, if you really felt the need to hang a label. ”

Deep black. Saxon had crossed paths with men like this before, in his time with the SAS. Soldiers whose missions were so far off-book that they didn’t exist on any official documentation, groups that simply did not show up on the radar. He had to admit, he was intrigued. If a unit like that was operating in the Australian conflict zone, what did it mean? Was this man even fighting for the same side as him?

“My name is Jaron Namir, ” he said, at length. “We share a similar past, you and I. Both of us have worked under, shall we say, special conditions for our respective homelands. ”

The accent suddenly clicked with Saxon and he placed it. Israeli. Which makes him, what? Former Mossad? Someone who got out of there before the war with the United Arab Front flattened everything?

Saxon tried to keep the tension he was feeling from showing. This man knew who he was, and he’d revealed key information about himself, or at least laid out some false trail; that meant there was a good chance Namir never intended to let Saxon live.

“I wonder, would you let me make an observation? ” Namir went on. He asked the question with all the certainty of a man who knew he would not be refused.

Saxon watched him carefully. “Feel free. ”

“You’re wasting your potential here. Belltower offers a good career for men like us, I don’t dispute that. But the chance to really accomplish something? To make a difference, to bring order to a chaotic world? Belltower can’t do that. ”

A chill ran through the soldier’s veins. “You’re trying to recruit me? ”

Namir studied him. “I read the after-action report on the failure of Operation Rainbird. You survived against very long odds, Mr. Saxon. I am quite impressed. ” He stubbed out the cigarette. “I could use someone with your skill set. I find myself a man down after a recent incident, and you make a good candidate. Interested? ”

“Maybe if you told me who the hell you are. ”

“I told you, the name would not—”

“Try me. ”

Namir gave a shrug. “I am field commander of a non-aligned special operations unit known as the Tyrants. We are an elite, independent, self-financing group dedicated to maintaining global stability through covert means. ”

“A rogue cell? ” Saxon frowned. Like any other, the spec ops community had its own share of urban legends, and in his time he’d heard stories of so-called rogues, operators who had dropped off the grid and gone into business for themselves; but the idea had always seemed a little too far off the beam to be truthful. Saxon had never believed anyone could run alone out there in the thick for too long, not without backup. “Tyrants… That name doesn’t exactly have the ring of righteousness to it. ”

“I beg to differ, ” said the other man. “The true meaning of the word stems from the Greek turannos. It was only later the name gathered its negative connotations… In its original form, the term describes those who take power by their own means, instead of being awarded it through birthright or elective. That is what we do, Mr. Saxon. We take power from those who abuse it. We restore the balance. ”

“Out of the goodness of your heart? ”

“Belltower’s failures cost you the lives of the men and women in your unit, ” Namir said, his tone becoming grave. “Are you really ready to go back to them, knowing that? Be honest with me, Mr. Saxon. Are you ever going to trust your employers again? ”

Saxon closed his eyes, and for a second he saw the ghosts. “I have a responsibility. I signed a contract…”

“One that is near to ending. ” Namir made a dismissive gesture. “We can deal with that. If only a piece of paper is stopping you, believe me, I can make that go away. ” When Saxon didn’t answer, he got up and straightened his fatigue jacket. “This offer won’t come again, ” he said. “And if you decide to go looking for us after the fact, I warn you… there will be consequences. ”

Saxon looked down at his hands, one scarred flesh, the other scratched steel. Everything Namir had said about trust, about Belltower—all of it was as if he had plucked the thoughts straight from his mind. Each day that had passed here, each day he sat surrounded by his ghosts, every passing hour was eroding something deep inside him, and in its place it left only a cold hollow. That, and a slow-burning, directionless desire to claim a blood cost back from the people who had murdered Kano, Duarte, and the others.

“We can give you what you need, Ben, ” said Namir. “The Tyrants help their own. ”

When Saxon said the next words, they seemed to come from a very great distance. “I’m in. ”

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