CHAPTER SIX

The Ohama Center—Washington, D. C. —United States of America

“We don’t have all the answers. ” Anna watched the hacker as he crossed to the minibar behind the skybox’s line of seats and did something to the lock to make it open, fishing inside for a slender can of Ishanti. He popped the cap and drained the energy drink in a single, long pull. “Ah. Better. ”

Beyond the sound-screened window, she saw William Taggart bow slightly as something he said earned a round of applause from his audience. The resonance of the clapping was distant, like faraway waves.

“What do you know? ” Anna demanded. “I’m tired of your games. ”

“Games haven’t even started yet, ” said D-Bar. “Not for you, anyhow. ” He sighed. “Let me put it another way… You ever heard of something called ‘the Icarus Effect’? ”

“Sounds like a Las Vegas magic show. ”

The youth chuckled and discarded the empty can. “Yeah, I guess. The Tyrants certainly have a way of making people vanish, that’s for sure. ” He came closer, became more animated. “You know the story of Icarus? Guy and his dad build a set of wings, guy gets bold and flies too high, too close to the sun, guy gets dead. Same idea. It’s a sociological thing, see? A normative process created unconsciously by a society in order to maintain the status quo, keep itself stable. ” D-Bar talked with his hands, making shapes in the air. “Whenever someone threatens to do something that will

upset the balance, like flying too high… the Icarus Effect kicks in. Society reacts, cuts them down. Stability returns. ” He sighed. “That’s what the Tyrants do. They enforce that effect for their masters, only they don’t wait for it to happen naturally. They choose whose wings are gonna be clipped, if you get me. ” He jabbed a finger at the air. “These creeps, they’re all about power. Anyone who threatens them, anyone who makes waves, gets dealt with. ”

“Threatens them how, exactly? ” said Anna.

“You know what they say; if you wanna make enemies, try to change something. People invested in keeping things the same don’t like it when you make waves. ” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a data slate. “Look at this. These places and faces mean anything to you? ”

Anna glanced down and images scrolled past her: a highway accident in Tokyo that claimed the life of a cybernetics researcher; a string of missing-persons reports from a Belltower law enforcement detachment in Bangalore; the violent mugging of a senatorial aide in Boston; an augmented teenager killed by police snipers in Detroit.

At first, she saw nothing that registered with her; then a face she recognized from her own investigations passed by—Donald Teague, an advisory staffer at the United Nations, shot dead in Brooklyn by unknown assailants. An eyewitness report talked about an ambush of Teague’s car and three men in black combat gear, and of the almost military precision with which the kill had been made…

She blinked, and for a moment the dark memory of a day in Georgetown pressed in on her thoughts, threatening to overwhelm her. Anna stiffened, forcing the recall out of herself. She read on. There were other points where the files connected to those she had discovered on her own. Men and women from corporations, government figures, those with international or UN connections like Teague. All of them either dead, missing, or assaulted. She halted on one image in particular; Senator Jane Skyler, caught by a stringer’s camera six months ago as she was wheeled through the doors of a private D. C. medical clinic. Matt Ryan’s blood was rust-red on her expensive silk blouse.

“And there’s more we don’t even know about, ” D-Bar told her. “The ones who were leaned on instead of getting roughed up or murdered. The ones who buckled, who did what they were told to. ”

“Assassination, extortion, coercion…” Anna said aloud. “The Tyrants are behind all these incidents? How could they be doing that? They would need global reach, unparalleled access to secure information—”

The hacker seized on her words. “Ah, now that, that we do know something about. The group, the guys with their hands on the leash of the dogs… they’ve penetrated hundreds of agencies. They got a spy network that spans the world. ” He nodded to himself. “That Skyler thing, fer’ex. How’d they explain away the shooters knowing exactly where and when to find the senator? ”

Anna frowned. “The FBI investigation turned up evidence that one of Skyler’s maids was paid off by the Red Arrow triad. ”

“Pled innocent, though, right? Then what? ”

Kelso recalled that the woman had died in prison, killed during a violent scuffle. Like so much about the Skyler hit, Anna had never accepted what had become the official version of events.

D-Bar went on. “The Tyrants got their info someplace else. I reckon you’ve probably been thinking that for a while, but you don’t wanna go there, do ya? ”

She glared at him. He was perceptive—she had to give him that. “If you’re so goddamn clever, say it. ”

“I can do more than that, ” he told her. “I can show you. We can show you the truth about what you’ve suspected all along. That the Tyrants have a source inside the United States Secret Service. ”

“It’s not possible, ” Anna said, without conviction. A chill ran through her. The very real possibility of someone being compromised within the agency made her feel sick inside.

D-Bar studied her carefully. “We came to you, Agent Kelso, because we can’t prove any of that. But you can. ”

She shook her head. “I can’t do anything. Even if you’re right, I’m suspended. ”

“I’ll get you back inside, ” he told her, with absolute, unshakable confidence.

“All right. ” It was a second before Anna realized she had spoken.

Knightsbridge—London—Great Britain

Namir gave him a room at the top of the town house, in the converted attic where white pine floors ranged up to tall, arched windows that looked out onto the London skyline.

Saxon left the lamps off and cracked open the window a little, letting in the night air along with the steady rush of the traffic out on Kensington Gore. The distant rattle of a police aerodyne reached his ears, and he saw a saucer-shaped advertisement blimp caught like an errant cloud, drifting east toward Mayfair. The glow of the video billboards flanking the airship reflected off the rooftops, strings of commercials for high-end fashion, cybernetics, and consumer electronics raining silently down over the city.

The night was uncharacteristically warm, and as soon as he had settled in the room, Saxon stripped to the waist and found a place to sit cross-legged by the freestanding mirror, checking himself over in every place that Gunther Hermann had laid his punches and kicks on him. He had a collection of ugly bruises, shallow cuts, and minor contusions, but nothing that could have been a broken or chipped bone. Saxon ran his flesh hand down the length of his cyberarm, checking maintenance seals and actuators. He made a few practice moves; the arm felt slightly off-speed.

With a grimace, Saxon filled a tumbler of water from the filter carafe on the nightstand near the wide, shadowed bed; then he loaded a fresh dose of neuropozyne into an injector pen and took the shot in his arm.

He drained the glass as he stood at the window. What the hell just happened? he asked himself. For a moment, it seemed as if he was hanging over the ragged edge, that everything he was or could be was about to be snuffed out in an instant; and then the gun and Gunther’s life had been in his hands.

Were the rounds in the pistol really blanks? If I had pulled the trigger, put a shot between the German’s eyes, what would they have done? It chilled him to consider a different truth from the one Namir had laid down as he took the weapon from him. Saxon’s disquiet should have been silenced; he had passed a test down there in that room. In some strange way, he had bonded with the rest of the Tyrants.

So why doesn’t it sit right? He almost asked the question out loud.

Saxon glanced up and saw the airship drift overhead. Up there, a woman’s face was lit by rainbows of color, showing off a cascade of diamonds around her wrist. Her mouth moved and a marquee of words appeared in sequence on smaller video-screens all around her. What master do you serve?

He blinked, uncertain if his eyes were playing tricks on him.

The woman on the screen, flawless and fashion-model perfect, was looking right at him, as if the billboard was a window through which she was peering. Over her shoulder, he saw a virtual skyline mimicking the view from the tenth floor of the Hotel Novoe Rostov.

What master do you serve? she asked once again. The words shifted and changed like drifts of sand, transforming into a string of numerals. The groupings matched an international sat-comm code.

Before he was even fully aware he was doing it, Saxon reached for his gear pack and recovered the spare vu-phone he kept for emergencies. It wasn’t the slick, cutting-edge device the Tyrants had given him, just a store-bought disposable. He entered the digits and thumbed the DIAL key. A string of swift tones sounded from the earpiece, followed by a hum as the line connected—

Behind him, the bedroom door clicked open, and he spun from the window, cutting the call short, letting the phone drop.

In the light cast from the airship’s advert-screens, Yelena Federova resembled some kind of shadow-wraith, a creature made out of flesh and darkness straight from fable. She stalked silently toward him, her black-and-steel legs catching the glow. Her eyes were hooded and he could not read them. Slowly, like a knife being drawn from a sheath, a low smile crossed her lips. The sullen glower that characterized her neutral mode of expression was gone, and instead Saxon saw an echo of the predatory thrill Federova had shown in the Rostov’s lobby, after cutting down three men in as many seconds.

It came to him that he had failed the test. She had come to kill him, quietly and discreetly. Sparing Gunther’s life had marked him as weak; he was going to be cut from the pack…

She halted a few steps from him, and then, with care, Federova pulled at the tabs holding the ballistic-cloth blouse closed over her chest. She let it fall free to the floor; beneath she wore nothing, and Saxon’s gaze was drawn to the rise of her breasts, a small ebon cross hanging in the valley between them. Her tawny skin was marred only by the scarred disc of an old bullet wound. Then she shrugged off her short breeches and crossed the rest of the distance, her hands reaching for him.

Saxon let her draw in, let her find her own way; and when their lips met, hers were as cool as fresh water. Together, they drifted out of the light and into the shadowed corner, descending into darkness.

U. S. Secret Service Headquarters—Washington, D. C. —United States of America

At this time of the evening, the building was sparsely populated; but then, cops never slept, and the agents of the Secret Service were no different. There would be more than enough people still on duty or working late to steal a march on their investigations, others preparing details to deal with VIP escorts while the demonstrators were in town. More than enough of them to make this a difficult endeavor for Anna Kelso. Everyone on her floor, at the very least, had to know about the cover story Temple had put in place—Kelso’s so-called medical suspension. She knew that others would have been told everything, and how those people would react if they saw her here… It would not go well.

All that she pushed aside as she went in through the front doors. In her head Anna was going through the same warm-up techniques she used for undercover work; it was peculiar to do it here and now, but she was pretending to be something that she wasn’t—an agent with a right to be there.

The security guard at the desk gave her a wan smile. Anna cursed inwardly; he knew her, in a nodding kind of way. She had hoped someone else would be on duty tonight.

“Agent Kelso. ” His face showed faint confusion. “I’d heard you were taking some medical leave? ”

She smiled back at him, playing into the moment. “That’s right. But I’ve got to drop some paperwork off for the guys picking up my caseload. ”

“I’ll need you to sign in. ” He offered her a touch pad, and she ran a stylus over it in a quick scrawl. Anna couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder, back out to the parking lot where her car was waiting. She thought about running.

A soft beep sounded from the guard’s panel. “Thanks. ”

She was through the security arch before it caught up to her that she had been allowed in without question. Anna resisted the urge to reach up and touch the badge in her pocket; whatever D-Bar had done to it on the drive from the conference center had worked.

The elevator took her to the seventh floor, and all the way up she fought back the twitchy sensation in her fingers, folding her arms, unfolding them, shifting her weight from foot to foot. The dose she’d convinced herself she needed, the shot of stims that had propelled her through her confrontation with D-Bar, was waning. She could sense the dark clouds of the comedown encroaching, like a thunderstorm just over the horizon. Anna blinked; her eyes were tired and gritty.

When her phone hummed in her pocket, she almost jumped. Quickly she thumbed the wireless headset from the dock on the back of the handset and inserted it in her ear; she wasn’t about to let D-Bar access her mastoid comm. “Talk to me, ” she said.

“Are you there? ” asked the hacker. “1 ghosted you via the entry subnet, blanked the sign-in as soon as you were through. Can’t go any further without your help, though. ”

“Working on it, ” she replied. “Now shut up and let me concentrate. ” Anna muted him as the elevator let out a melodic chime and the doors opened. She stepped out, and for a second, force of habit took her in the direction of the main office bullpen. Across the tops of the open cubicles, the desks and glassy partitions, dimly lit by glow strips and the occasional active monitor screen, she saw her work area. A bright orange storage crate was on top of it, crammed with her personal effects. She thought about the marksmanship plaque, the photo of her and the rest of the team after the Anselmo case bust, and fought down the irrational urge to risk discovery in order to salvage those little, trivial mementos.

Then she saw Agents Tyler and Drake walking between the desks toward her, and Anna’s purpose snapped back into sharp, cold focus.

Chiding herself for the moment of inattention, she turned on her heel and went back around the elevator bank, heading away. The corridors leading to the server room on floor seven went past the conference areas, and they were all dark and unlit. Anna hoped that Tyler and Drake would enter the elevators, but they were coming her way, their conversation reaching her. They were talking about the Redskins game, both men dour and serious about matters of yardage and field goals.

Fear bubbled up inside her, threatening to flood out into panic. She pressed it down, and her hand found a door. Anna slipped into an empty conference room and closed the door behind her, pressing her back to it. She held her breath.

It seemed to take forever for them to pass, the echo of their mundane discussion hanging in the air; then they were gone, and she was moving again.

The server room needed another identity pass, and Kelso showed the sensor her badge. The door opened with an obliging click and she was inside.

“I’m there, ” she said, toggling the mute on the headset. On the drive over, D-Bar had told her what to look for. From her pocket, she fished out a data rod the size and thickness of her thumb.

“You know what to do, ” D-Bar said, his tone a mix of eagerness and annoyance.

“Here we go. ” She found the correct input socket and slid the rod home. A sleeping monitor screen immediately flashed into life, and a cascade of information panels unfolded across it.

In her ear, the hacker muttered under his breath. “Wireless link established. Greentooth is handshaking… Okay, here we go…” He cursed and she heard the distant rattle of a keypad. “Damn it. You know, this would be a lot easier if I had both hands free. ”

Anna eyed the door. “What can I say? I’m the cautious type. ”

On the drive from the conference center, D-Bar had brought out a customized laptop from his backpack; the thing had the shell of an off-the-shelf business machine, but even her inexpert gaze could tell it was tricked out with multiple hardware modifications and bespoke black-market tech. The airstream casing was ruggedized and covered with laser etching and decals; it reminded her of a racecar.

She pictured D-Bar out there in the parking lot, hunched over the keyboard in the passenger seat, watching the feed as his machine talked through the rod’s encrypted wireless link to the Secret Service mainframe. Before she had left him in the car, Kelso had asked the youth to show her his right hand; with a flick, she’d snapped a cuff around his wrist and tethered him to the steering wheel. After all, she was putting a lot of trust in the Juggernaut hacker, and there was nothing to stop him from copying what he needed from the secure server and leaving her to take the rap.

“Okay” he went on, “I’m injecting the seeker worm program… now. ” One of the information panes on the screen flickered red-white and vanished. Search routine is running. I’ve preloaded the seeker with parameters related to the leaked information and the Tyrant targets. It’ll automatically flag anything it finds and upload it to a saved file. ”

“Good. ” Anna’s hand snapped out and she yanked the data rod from the interface socket. D-Bar called out in surprise as he lost his remote feed, but she ignored him, dropping the rod to the floor and breaking it in two with the heel of her shoe.

“Was that you? ” D-Bar demanded. “What did you just do? ”

Anna’s hands twitched, making it difficult to gather up the broken pieces in one go. “Cut you off, ” she confirmed, dropping the fragments into a cup of cold coffee some errant technician had left on a nearby desk. “This is not my first rodeo, kid. I let you drop the seeker, but I’m not letting you keep an open conduit into a federal law enforcement agency’s mainframe, not for one second more than I have to. ”

“And how exactly are you going to get the data out? ” he retorted.

“Way ahead of you. ” Anna rooted through a storage locker and found a case of blank media units, flash drives of the same model she’d used to store her own information. Working as swiftly as she could, she connected a drive in place of the data rod and let the unit fill with the seeker program’s digital harvest.

D-Bar was too interested to stay silent for long. “What are you seeing? ”

“A lot, ” Anna admitted. Data flashed past her eyes, much of it in formats unfamiliar to her, some immediately recognizable as U. S. Secret Service and Department of Justice files. There were operational schedules, transport routes, profiles of agents on duty and principals to protect; but there were other documents as well, evaluations and surveillance records, the kind of materials that Kelso’s agency didn’t use. Then she saw information that bore digital watermarks from Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Diplomatic Corps; other pages were not even in English, and it took her a second to realize that she was seeing memos and documentation from security agencies outside the United States. Whoever the leak was inside the service, they had been tunneling through the agency’s link to the DOJ, and from there out to the shadowy nexus of information shared by the global law enforcement community.

As abruptly as it had begun, the search ended and the data parsed itself into the flash drive. Anna felt a cold impulse down her spine and she reached for the keyboard in front of the monitor, inputting the name “Skyler” and a date string as the parameters for a sweep of the stolen data. Instantly, the complete scope of all the supposedly secure transit information about Senator Skyler’s detail on that fateful day was there in front of her. Every last bit of it, from details of what pool vehicles would be used and their maintenance records, through the receipts showing how many bullets the agents on the detail had logged out from the agency armory. Everything an assassin would need to prepare a flawless attack.

The file bore a validation code, a digital fingerprint tying the requested data to the terminal and agent identity of the person who had copied them. Anna knew the code; she’d seen it a hundred times appended to her own after-operations debriefs and memos. But still she clicked on the text string, hoping that she had read it wrongly. Hoping she had made a mistake.

The display opened a panel and showed her Ron Temple’s authentication.

“You son of a bitch. ” The words slipped out of her in a shallow breath, drained of all anger and fury. Anna felt nothing, just a chill numbness at the core of her gut.

A man she had trusted, a man she had served with, and before her lay proof that he was a traitor, proof that he had sold out whatever integrity he had to the faceless figures who had their hands on the leash of the Tyrants.

Then the emotion came, breaking the icy dam of the dead feeling in her chest, engulfing her. Anna’s eyes prickled and her vision misted. She staggered a little and reached out a hand to steady herself. Temple had sold them out—Kelso and Ryan, Byrne, Laker, and Connor, everyone on the Skyler detail, along with all those other men and women he had given up. Her hands drew into hard, tight fists. She wanted to know why. More than the fury, more than the rush of potent despair, Anna wanted to know the answer. How a man could betray his oath and his colleagues.

For money? Out of fear? No answer she could imagine seemed good enough.

A repeating tone dragged her back from her reverie, and she blinked owlishly. D-Bar was yelling in her ear, and Kelso glanced back at the server monitor; a warning panel was blinking there, a string of text in livid red letters telling her to stand by and wait for security.

“Are you listening to me? ” D-Bar shouted. “Kelso, can’t you hear that? ”

She pulled out the connector leading to the flash drive, then shoved the data device in her pocket, moving swiftly across the room to the door. Outside she could hear voices.

Fighting down the tremors in her fingers, she stepped out calmly into the dim corridor and walked at a steady, unhurried pace toward the elevator bank. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, but she knew that the agency’s internal security monitors possessed subroutines that looked for abnormal body kinetics—if she ran, they would see it. She smothered the urge with a grimace and metered her pace. Just a few more steps.

Behind her, she heard a voice call out. Drake. She knew it was him without having to turn around. Anna ignored him, kept moving. In a few more seconds, she’d turn the corner and be at the elevators.

“Hey, stop! ” called the other agent. “I’m talking to you! Stop right now! ” Anna heard the rustle of a holster being snapped open, the click of a safety catch flicking off. “I won’t tell you again! ”

She fled. It wasn’t a conscious choice on her part, not something she was aware of doing on anything but the most base, animal-brain level; but suddenly she was sprinting the rest of the distance down the corridor, her thoughts clattering inside her mind, the rush of new adrenaline warring with the tidal drag of the stim crash. She couldn’t think straight, she couldn’t process. All she could do was run, run, run—

Anna raced around the corner and came face-to-face with Agent Tyler, wandering out of the break room past the elevators, stirring a cup of dark coffee. “Kelso? ” His face registered a moment of confusion.

“Stop her! ” shouted Drake. That was enough to galvanize Tyler into action, and he let the cup drop, going for his service weapon.

Anna ignored him and dove for the open doors of the elevator, hand reaching for the controls. Her feet were just across the threshold when Tyler snatched at the collar of her jacket and pulled hard. Some of her hair caught in his grip and sent a shock of pain through her head. A kick landed in the back of her right knee and her leg buckled. She went down, catching a glimpse of herself falling and Tyler right on her in the mirrored back of the elevator car.

Then she was on the floor, half in and half out of the lift, with a federal agent’s handgun pressed into the small of her back. “You’re under arrest, ” said Drake.

Romeo Airport—Michigan—United States of America

The aircraft put down on the runway just as the sunset bled away across the landscape. No visible-spectrum landing lights were in operation, and the pilot brought them in using a virtual headset rig that made it seem to him as if he were touching down in the middle of the day.

Romeo had gone back and forth between active and inactive over the last four decades, until it had quietly slipped into the hands of a minor corporate consortium that, via a labyrinth of blinds and shell companies, was one cog in a far larger machine. The surrounding area was remote enough that the local populace were sparse, but it was close enough to Detroit for the glow of the city’s skyscrapers to be visible on the horizon, the colors reflecting off the bottom of the low cloud base.

Inside the hangar, a staging area had already been set up alongside a fuel bowser for the jet and a line of utility trailers. Robot forklifts swarmed around the rear of the plane, peeling back the vast curved blades of the cargo doors to gather up the helo nestled in its storage cradle.

In defiance of common sense and regulations, Hardesty stood at the thin sliver of open air between the tall hangar doors and smoked a cigarette. Saxon caught the pungent smell of the nicotine as he crossed the space, taking the opportunity to exercise his legs after hours aboard the jet. Federova was at the back of an unmarked van, picking her way through a set of armored, olive-drab cases. She was considering different models of grenades, picking them up, weighing them, exchanging them for others. He smiled thinly; she reminded him of someone at a market stall buying fruit.

After that night in London, he hadn’t known what would come next. Even in the throes of their quiet, animated sex, he had still been on alert, waiting for the moment when she tried to stick a knife in his ribs or snap his neck. But that moment never arrived; and when they were both spent she left him there, as silent as ever. He couldn’t help but wonder if Hermann had got the same treatment when he joined up.

On the flight, Federova looked right though him, her manner utterly unchanged from the one she had shown him before. Saxon decided to file their night together away as some kind of opportunist incident and think no more about it; but it wasn’t easy. She had been… a challenge.

“Saxon. ” He turned to see Namir beckoning him from a temporary workstation set up near the nose wheel of the jet. As he approached, he saw Barrett and Hermann there with him, peering into a virtual map of the city of Detroit.

The young German’s manner also remained unaffected toward Saxon, despite the moment in the fight room; but unlike Federova’s cool affect, Saxon could see the chink of something through Hermann’s metaphorical armor. A new respect, maybe? Or perhaps it was something else: some kind of jealousy. Saxon had beaten him because of two things—endurance and superior augmentations. The former was something that had to be taught, but the latter… that could be bought. He wondered how badly Gunther Hermann wanted to surrender a little more of his meat to the machine. Saxon guessed he wouldn’t hesitate if the offer was made.

He studied the map as he came closer. On the flight in, Namir had discussed the next operation in brief. Detroit was home to a corporation called Sarif Industries; Saxon had heard of it, a cutting-edge cybernetics research and manufacturing concern that specialized in boutique tech off the axis of most people’s budget. According to Namir, Sarif had forcibly indentured a group of scientists, who were now being held against their will in the company’s main research and development facility. The Tyrants were going to go in and extract these people, and “restore the balance. ” He wondered how much of that was true.

Barrett played around with the map control and shifted the image to a plan view of the Sarif facility. They were planning a rooftop assault, and the timing had to be perfect.

“We have a narrow window of opportunity to breach their perimeter, ” said Namir. “Some of the Sarif staff are heading out to Washington for a meeting with the National Science Board, and there’s a weapons demonstration taking place on-site for a representative from the Pentagon. As such, their focus will be split on that and preparations for the trip. We also have an electronic interdict ready to deploy, but for now, we’ll wait here for the word before we move to the forward waypoint in the city. ”

“Weapons? ” echoed Saxon. “I thought Sarif was all neural implant tech and athlete-grade cyberlimbs. ”

Namir gave him a long look. “That’s part of the reason we’re going in. ” He pulled the map back out to a higher scale, and Saxon got the message that he wasn’t going to give him any more details. “Some of our… associates have secured a holding area for us here. ” He pointed a slender steel finger at a location out in the city’s industrial wastelands. That’s our waypoint once we clear the objective and exfiltrate. There will be some postmission cleanup to go through at that location, then we’ll decamp and return here for departure. ”

“What kind of threat force will we be facing? ” asked Hermann.

Barrett answered before Namir could speak. “A bunch of rent-a-cops. Some embedded security tech. Nothing that’ll make you break a sweat. ” He shrugged, the action exaggerated by his augmented arms. “Hell, I could do this number on my own. We could leave half of you on the bench for this one. ”

Saxon met Namir’s gaze. “Is that right? ”

The Tyrant commander released a sigh. “I’m still working out the tactical details. The information we have received on the objective so far has been… incomplete. I decided to mobilize the whole unit in case it is needed. ” He smiled thinly. “After all, it’s better to have an asset and not need it, than to need an asset and not have it, don’t you agree? ”

“Can’t argue with you on that score, ” Saxon admitted. Next to the display there was a data slate showing what seemed to be personnel files. He picked it up and studied them. “These are the marks? ”

Namir reached over and took the screen from him. “That’s right. Along with some other actives who may be encountered in the area of operations. ” He hesitated, then called up a different file and showed it to Saxon. “Take a look at this. Give me your first impressions. ”

“All right. ” Saxon studied the screen, a little warily. Looking back up at him was a younger man with a narrow, angular face and hard eyes. A loop of footage a few seconds long ran past, perhaps snagged from a security camera feed. The guy had no visible cyberware, but the way he carried himself immediately set off a warning in Saxon’s mind. “This guy’s not a rent-a-cop, ” he said. “Trained. I’d bet on it. Not military, though, not a spook either. A federal agent? Some kind of copper? ”

“That’s a good read. He’s a former officer of the Detroit police department, Special Weapons and Tactics unit. Currently heading up physical security at Sarif Industries. ”

Saxon read the man’s name out loud. “Adam Jensen. ” He scanned the other pages in the man’s file. His eye dithered over marksmanship records, details of Jensen’s police career, and information about a discharge from the force that said more by what it left out than what it didn’t. What he read there crystallized his thoughts. “He’s no day-player. ”

Someone made a spitting noise behind him, and Saxon turned to see Hardesty approaching.

“Jensen’s a flatfoot, ” he sneered.

“An ex-flatfoot, ” Barrett added, with a derisive snort.

“My point, ” Hardesty replied, nodding. “He’s not even that. He’s just a broke-ass cop, out of his league. No threat to us. ”

Saxon answered, keeping his eyes on Namir. “You shouldn’t underestimate this guy. Read the file. He’s tenacious. Men like that don’t go down easy. ”

“Like knows like, is that it? ” Hardesty came closer.

“I guess. ” He shrugged and handed back the data slate, glaring at the other man. “Let’s just say I can tell the difference between someone who is a professional, and someone who pretends to be. ”

For a long second, Hardesty balanced on the edge of the veiled insult; then he gave a humorless smirk. “Useful. You gotta teach me that sometime, limey. ”

Namir blanked the holograph map with a wave of his hand. “Get your gear together and stand by. We need to be ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. ”

U. S. Secret Service Headquarters—Washington, D. C. —United States of America

In the basement of the agency offices there was a holding area with cells and a processing office. It didn’t see much use on a day-to-day basis and it was a lot cleaner and well appointed than its NYPD equivalent, but the function was the same. A cell was a cell was a cell.

They took all her gear, including the flash drive, the doctored badge, and her car key; Agents Drake and Tyler were dogged but they were smart, and she guessed that sooner or later one of them would head outside to the parking lot to go looking for her vehicle. Anna found herself hoping that D-Bar had been quick enough to hot-wire her nondescript Navig sedan and get the hell out of there when he’d heard the scuffle over the headset; she’d left the line open all the way.

They took her watch, so she had no way to reckon the passing of time. Maybe under normal circumstances she might have sat there on the plastic mattress and fretted about what was going to happen; but the crash was on her and she surrendered to it. Anna let herself go and fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

When Tyler woke her, it was like dragging herself up from the bottom of the ocean, as if her conscious mind were wrapped up in anchor chains that kept trying to pull her back to the dark and to sleep. Shrugging it off, she rose and followed him, grim-faced, down a corridor to an interview room. This, too, mirrored the one she’d been in at the 10th Precinct.

Inside: a plain table and a few chairs, the console of an audio and video recording system built into the wall, and Ron Temple. His arms were folded in front of him, and his face had an expression on it she’d never seen before. It wasn’t fear or anger, but some strange merging of the two.

Anna couldn’t help herself. The moment she saw him, she went for him. “You fucking bastard-! ”

Tyler was right there to stop her, and he caught her in an armlock, twisting the limb back until Kelso grunted in pain. “Calm down, Anna. ”

“Go screw yourself, Craig! ” she retorted.

“Sir? ” Tyler gave Temple a questioning look, and his superior nodded toward the other chair. In quick order, the agent pushed her into the seat. Anna’s cuffs slammed into the tabletop and were held there by an invisible electromagnetic inductor coil.

“I’ll take it from here, ” said Temple. “Wait outside. ”

Tyler gave her a last look and then did as he was told.

Before Temple could speak again, she snarled at him. “I know what you did, you goddamn rat! You sold out your own people! You got Matt killed—”

Temple reached across the table and silenced her with a hard slap across the face. “Shut up, ” he said tightly. “You stupid, stupid bitch. I warned you! Didn’t I warn you to stay away from all this? But you couldn’t just let it go, could you? You dosed yourself up and came right back. ”

Her head rang with the impact and pain flared on her cheek. “I know you’re part of it. The Tyrants. All of it. ”

“That name doesn’t mean anything to me, ” he replied, too quick, too practiced. “You don’t understand anything. ”

“I understand you abused your position! ” she spat, pulling at the cuffs. “I understand that you took money to give up confidential information, information that got people hurt or killed! ” She drew a sharp breath. “They were your colleagues. Matt and all the others…”

When she looked up, she saw fear in his eyes. Temple was shaking his head. “You don’t know. They have people everywhere. It’s not like there was a choice, Kelso! It was my life, the life of my family, my kids! ” Anna recalled he had an ex-wife and three children living in Toronto. “This is the way things work! ” he spat, the anger returning again. “You’re too na’ive to see it, and now you’re going to pay for that. Because I am damn well not going to take the fall! ”

“Who are they? ” Anna demanded. “The government? Corporates? ”

He gave a harsh laugh. “Too small. It’s more than just flags or dollars! These people are so big you don’t even see them! ” He was trembling, and he seemed to realize it. After a moment, Temple took control of himself. When he spoke again he was formal and guarded. “You’ve destroyed yourself, Anna. The drugs, collusion with terrorists, breaking in here and stealing classified data…” He produced the flash drive from his pocket and showed it to her. “You gave me everything I need. ” He shook his head. “If you had just listened to me, you could have walked away. But not now. ” Temple stood up. “You’re going to disappear. Everything about you will be destroyed, and when they’re done, it will be as if Anna Kelso never existed. ”

“You can’t hide this! ” she shouted.

“They already have, ” he said, without looking at her.

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