CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dundalk—Maryland—United States of America

Through the dirty glass of the window, Kelso watched the lights of Baltimore turn dim as the sky grew lighter, losing herself in the passage of the clouds overhead and the never-ending wash of the water against the concrete pilings out on the old, abandoned docks.

Sleep, when she’d been able to snatch a little of it, was a fitful and troubled thing. Anna couldn’t settle. She dreamed about skies full of squawking ravens, and vast black wings that wheeled and turned in the sky, blotting out the watery glow of a sullen sun. In the end, Anna stayed awake, keeping to the margins of Lebedev’s compound while the men from the New Sons worked at tasks she could only guess at, and D-Bar’s hackers pored over the sealed files in the stolen flash drive. The inside of the warehouse looked exactly like what it was—a staging area for an antigovernmental terror group—and it ground against all Kelso’s training as a federal agent to stand among it and do nothing.

So she went to the windows and watched the march of the morning approaching. Looking out at the distant city, Anna wondered who was out there, looking for her. Drake would be leading the capture team, she imagined. He would have considered it a personal slight that her escape had happened on his watch. Sorrow crossed her face. What are they saying about me? She didn’t want to know the answer, didn’t want to imagine the looks in the eyes of the men and women who had served with her. All of them would believe the lie about the death of Ron Temple and the murders

at his home. They would hate her.

She wanted so much to run, to give in to the base impulse that tensed in the muscles of her hands. But out there, she would be prey. If Lebedev’s stories were true, she had nowhere to go. Even if they were not, the fact did not change. Anna Kelso was alone, and she had been forced into a single choice she did not want to make.

Trust or distrust.

But that was the corrosive nature of any conspiracy; it played on the fears inherent in all human beings, the terror of having your secrets known by the unknown, the vicarious thrill of keeping a sinister secret yourself. These people, this group Lebedev called the Illuminati … What they were doing lived in darkness, and the part of Anna that was still an officer of the law wanted to see them dragged screaming into the light.

She found herself back at the army tent, and ducked beneath the door flap. The place was empty, but the comms gear and the big screen were as live as they had been hours earlier. The snow of static on the monitor shifted slightly as she came closer, as if her presence were a breeze disturbing a scattering of leaves.

“I know you can hear me, ” she said. “I want to ask you something. ”

After a few seconds, the static settled into the familiar pattern of dispersion she’d seen before, the phantom no-face. “I will help you if I can, Anna, ” said Janus. “But please understand that I don’t have all the answers “

“These people… the Illuminati. The Tyrants. Back in D. C. there was something that D-Bar said to me, a phrase that I couldn’t get out of my head. ” She sighed. “He talked about something called ‘the Icarus Effect. ’”

“Ah, yes. A sociological construct, originally conceived in 2019 by Doctor Malcolm Bonner of the University of Texas. It’s a very interesting theory, a societal echo of something that occurs in nature. Imagine a pack of animals, among which is a single individual exhibiting signs of nascent evolutional superiority. Not common superiority, that is, but a marked difference from the norm. A rare excessive. ” The ghost-face shimmered. “The individual’s renegade nature threatens the stability of the pack. The others close ranks against it. Expunge or terminate it. Stability returns, and the pace of evolution is slowed to a more manageable scale. ”

“We’re not talking about animals here, ” Anna insisted. “This is about people. ”

“Indeed. But the principle is the same. Like brave but foolhardy Icarus, those who dare to go beyond the boundaries will fall to their deaths. ”

“But who gets to choose where those boundaries are? ” she asked. “This group Lebedev talked about. I thought the Illuminati were just a historical curiosity, some kind of pre-millennium modern myth. But you expect me to believe that they’re still around, and they’ve set themselves up as the… the stewards of humanity? ”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself” Janus allowed. “They have been here for a very long time, Anna. They believe that gives them the right to run the world, and so they do not wait for the Icarus Effect to play itself out. They induce it wherever and whenever they deem it suitable. The Tyrants are one of the tools they use. ”

A chill passed over her. “How… how many times have they done this? ”

“You mean, is this the first time they have manipulated global events to their own design? Oh, no. As I said before, the Illuminati have actively taken control of human history in this manner on many occasions. They have a long, long reach. World wars, disasters, famine, assassinations, cover-ups…all have been set in motion to deliberately retard the advancement of society when it threatened to go too far beyond the borders they created. We can’t be allowed to fly too close to the sun, do you see? ” Anna thought she detected bitterness in the artificially distorted voice. “Imagine a vast steel hand enveloping the world. We must wear the invisible chains they have fashioned for us, because they believe only they have the right to judge when humanity can step from the cradle. ”

The screen flickered and began to display a mosaic of images, video, and still photographs from the last hundred years. She saw soldiers on the battlegrounds of the Great War, Vietnam, the Pacific, Europe, the Persian Gulf. Grainy footage of a space shuttle blossoming into a fireball. A clip from the Zapruder film. The Berlin Wall midcollapse. Waves of dark oil across the Louisiana coastline. Gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. Diagrams of what looked like a flying saucer. Blurry news camera shots of an airliner striking the second tower. Tanks rolling through the burning streets of Jerusalem; and there was more, but she couldn’t recognize every fractional moment.

Anna thought about Janus’s words and looked down at her hands, very aware that she was seeing them not through the eyes she had been born with, but through augmentations that made her more than human. Transhuman. The word resonated with cold possibility; it felt a million miles away from Anna’s very ordinary existence.

The hacker seemed to sense her train of thought. “A society that can augment itself at will, a human race capable of exceeding its physical limits through the application of technology… Can you imagine what kind of threat such a thing would be to those who want to control us? ”

“We’re flying too close to the sun, ” she said to herself.

“The Illuminati see themselves as an intellectual elite. If we are Icarus, they think of themselves as Daedalus, his father. The guiding hand of the parent. The creator and mentor. ”

Anna’s lip curled. “I studied Greek mythology in college, and I remember that Daedalus was an arrogant bastard. The man built a maze of death, and killed his nephew when he thought he might be smarter than him. ”

“And the Illuminati have killed, and worse. But the truth is, what you have seen is only one thread in the whole. What is taking place right now, the assassinations that claimed the life of your friend and all the others, these things are only the precursor. This is just one battle in a greater campaign they plan to win. At any cost. ”

Her mouth went dry as the scope of that statement settled in her thoughts. “What do you mean? ”

When Janus replied, she felt a stab of fear deep in her gut. “Would you like me to show you, Anna? I’ve been building a model of all the potentials. It is incomplete, but there is truth there. You could consider it… a glimpse of our tomorrows. ”

And then she heard herself answering. “Show me. ”

The hacker Janus did as Anna asked. The screen rippled, and the cascade of images returned—but this time they were almost too fast for her to register, a barrage of light and color and sound that washed over her with hypnotic force. She couldn’t look away, and across her scalp she felt her skin crawl. The image-storm stuttered and blinked like an old analog television signal, hazing as it tried to tune itself into her. Anna suddenly became aware of the augmented optics in her eye sockets, for the first time feeling them as if they were spheres of hard, heavy steel. Something was happening; Janus’s images were moving in synchrony with the digital processors built into her artificial eyes. It was like a switch flipping inside her mind; and she saw—

—the skyline of a city made of tiers, fires raging, and weapons discharges sparkling in the twilight, chaos, and disorder rising like a tide—

—crowds of panicked people desperately trying to flee hordes of crazed rioters, all of them augmented, all of them mad with wild fury—

—a wall of video screens filled with a storm of screaming, hissing static, and before them an enhancile woman collapsing to her knees, tearing at herself in crazed agony—

—orbiting above the Earth, a communications satellite shutting down, lights dimming, dish antenna retracting. Then video screens, holograms, advertising billboards, cell phones, televisions, computer monitors, all of them showing the same message in bright red letters—NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL—

—a field of crosses, made from machine parts and cybernetic limbs, behind a sunrise over barren grassland. In the distance, a string of fallen power lines— —a ghost town of fallen buildings and empty streets— —a dead future-

It ended as quickly as it had started, and Anna stumbled, suddenly robbed of her balance. Her eyes throbbed and her skull ached. The woman rubbed at the skin of her face and it was hot to the touch. She glared up at the screen, which had returned to its neutral aspect.

“What the hell… did you do to me? ” Kelso was familiar with strobe-effect crowd-control systems, and she wondered if Janus had used something similar on her, the pulse-image stream casting some kind of soporific effect through her optics. She felt weak and nauseated.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disorient you, ” came the reply. “But the data is only sketchy. It is only the impression of a possibility. It’s difficult to comprehend in a more linear fashion. Try to breathe deeply. Normalize your heartbeat. You’re not injured, believe me. ”

Anna glared at the screen. “You’re lucky you’re not standing right here in front of me…” She trailed off, her stomach tightening.

“I’m sorry ” Janus repeated. “But do you understand now? Did you see? ” She took a shuddering breath. “I’m starting to, I think. ”

There was movement behind her, and she turned to see Lebedev enter the tent. He had a curious look on his face, as if he realized he had intruded on something private. “Is everything all right? ”

“Fine, ” Anna bit out. “Are you looking for me? ”

He nodded, sparing Janus’s screen a quick look. “We have a problem. D-Bar and my people have gone through the contents of the flash drive you brought to us. There’s a lot of material there, but what we really want exists in a subpartition that we cannot access. The key to the Killing Floor is inside that thing, if only we can crack it open. But it is protected with multiple-layer firewalls and a kill-switch. If we try to brute-force it, the drive will erase itself. ”

Anna folded her arms. “I can’t help you with that. Ron Temple was the only one who knew the codes for his subnet, and the Tyrants killed him right in front of me. ” She turned to the screen. “Can’t you do something? I thought Juggernaut’s hackers were the best of the best? ”

“Even we have our limits ” admitted Janus. “I’ve been watching D-Bar’s attempts to crack the device. He won’t be successful. To penetrate the subpartition, we need a connection to an active Tyrant computer server. It is as if the first lock nestles inside a second. Without both, it won’t open. ”

“Then we’re no better off than we were a day ago…” Lebedev said, his expression turning stormy.

“There has to be some way! ” Anna retorted. “After everything I went through for those damn files, we can’t just write this off! ”

The ghost-image in the screen shifted slightly. “There’s another solution ” said the hacker, after a few long moments of silence.

“Explain, ” said Lebedev.

“It will be here within the hour. ”

They waited at the dockside, and Kelso scanned the surface of the shipping channel. The water was murky, patched with rainbows of fuel oil and slicks of floating trash. Out in the middle of the vast canal, huge robot cargo ships without conning towers or portholes sailed silently toward the docks, icebergs of steel emblazoned with the names of the corporations that owned them.

Beneath the turgid waters, something stirred, coming closer, making ripples into waves as it rose up from the gloom.

“There! ” Powell called out, pointing with a slender cyberarm. He was one of the New Sons, and from what Anna had been able to gather from watching him interact with Lebedev, the man had some degree of authority in the group. He carried himself with a swagger, and she saw prison tattoos peeking out from under the collar of his body armor. His men came quickly to the quay and took up firing positions; they were armed with an assortment of rifles, everything from twenty-year-old Heckler & Koch assault weapons, through to the modern MAO submachine guns that had supplanted the old AK-47 as the signature firearm of rebellions the world over.

Lebedev frowned at the river as the water churned and a shape broke the surface. Anna saw a steel spine and plates of anechoic polymer as the vessel rose into the sunlight.

D-Bar craned his neck to get a better look. “It’s an autonomous trawler sub… Like, the little brother of the big computer-controlled cargo barges. ” Fleets of similar unmanned ships, deployed from carriers in the Atlantic, plumbed the depths for shoals of fish driven from the higher waters by the effects of pollution. “Our buddy Janus must have reprogrammed this one, split it off, and sent it here. ”

A hatch opened on the dorsal hull, the plates retracting backward, and the stink of wet, rotting fish billowed out to assail them.

Powell nodded to one of his men. “Check it. ”

Gingerly, the man dropped from the concrete dock onto the top of the bobbing trawler and approached the opening. It was dark inside, and Anna couldn’t make out anything. Powell’s man snapped on a flashlight clipped beneath the barrel of his rifle and aimed it inside. “What am I looking for? ” He stepped into the open hatch, grimacing at the smell. “I don’t—”

Without a moment to cry out, the man suddenly vanished, pulled from sight by something inside the trawler. Anna heard a rattling thud from within, and a moment later, Powell’s man was thrown back out of the open hatch, arms pinwheeling as he fell into the dirty water. D-Bar swore and backed away from the canal’s edge.

The upper torso of a stocky, muscular figure emerged from the hatch, aiming the rifle back at the dock. Anna caught a glimpse of a grimy, weary face glaring down the weapon’s iron sights.

Powell and the others all immediately took aim. Lebedev shook his head. “No, no! ” he cried. “Put your guns down! Put them down! ”

Anna could see that Powell wasn’t convinced, but he lowered his assault rifle and his men did the same; still, they kept their fingers close to the triggers, ready to snap back to a firing stance in a heartbeat.

“Where is this? ” called the man on the trawler. His accent was rough, British.

“Port of Baltimore, ” Lebedev replied. “We were told to expect you. We have a mutual friend. ”

“Let me guess, a ghost named Janus, yeah? ” He let the rifle’s muzzle fall a little. “Hell of a thing. ”

That was when Anna got her first good look at the man, and she gasped. “I know him! He’s one of them, a Tyrant! I saw him at Temple’s house—”

Suddenly the guns were coming back up. “What is this? ” Powell demanded.

“Stop! ” Lebedev took a step forward. “We were told—”

“You might sign a lot of checks for us, but I have the military authority, ” Powell snapped, cutting him off. “Pardon me if I don’t take the promises of a phantom hacker as gospel. This smells like a setup. ”

“I’m not one of them anymore, ” said the man on the boat. “We had a… parting of the ways. ” Anna heard the pain and the cold in his voice. She watched him carefully, remembering the moment when he could have ended her life. He had let her live. She wondered if she should return the favor.

Finally, he shrugged and tossed the rifle away, onto the deck of the trawler. He raised his hands. “If you’re gonna shoot me, then shoot me. Because I have had a day like you would not believe. ”

Powell’s aim didn’t waver. “What reason is there to keep you alive? ”

The man pulled a vu-phone from his pocket. “Our mutual friend Janus sent me a message. Tells me this thing has data on it you need. For the Killing Floor. ” The name brought a moment of silence with it. “That got your attention? I have the access code. So at the very least, you want to keep me breathing until I give that up. ”

“He works for them, ” Powell said, glaring at Lebedev. “First off you bring her in”—he jerked a thumb at Anna—“and now this? ”

“Waifs and strays…” muttered D-Bar.

Lebedev ignored the other man and stepped up to the bobbing trawler. “Who are you? ”

“Ben Saxon. I’m just… a soldier. ” He let out a ragged breath. “I know who you people are. I’m in the same fight as you now. ”

Lebedev held out his hand and said nothing. After a long moment, Saxon sighed and tossed the phone to him. “Now give me the code. ”

“I do that, laughing boy there will slot me. ” He inclined his head toward Powell.

“You want us to trust you? ” Anna asked. “Do as he says. ”

Saxon met her gaze and gave her a long, measuring look; then finally he nodded. “All right. But someone get me off this tub first? I busted both my legs and it stinks in here. ”

A year ago, it was the kind of gamble he would never have considered making; but a lot had changed since then, and nothing had made it more clear to him than the events of the last few days that his life was turning into one long roll of the dice.

He gave up the sister’s name and waited for the one called Powell to put a round in his head. The guy wanted to do it, that was plain as day all over his face; but instead the other guy, the one called Lebedev, had a couple of blokes help him inside a nearby warehouse. Behind the derelict look of the place it was a regular staging post. They dumped him in a hospital tent and left him to the ministrations of a severe-looking medic.

Fatigue held him in tight coils, tighter than the metal nets that the robo-trawler had used to snag him from the ocean. In the grip of the steel wire, dragged under the frigid waves, Saxon had been certain that death was upon him.

It was only when he awoke inside the wet, reeking, meat-locker chill of the trawler’s intake bay that he started to piece together what had happened. His attempt to contact Janus from the Tyrant jet had been at least partially successful, enough for the hacker to pinpoint where he was and track the vu-phone. After his explosive midair exit, Janus had retasked the nearby trawler as an ersatz lifeboat.

In the cold and the dark, Saxon fought all the way to stay free of hypothermia and unconsciousness. His augmentations had kept him alive, although the high-fall unit was burned out and would never function again; and as for the Tai Yong-manufactured cyberlegs, his impact with the sea had severely damaged them both.

The medic dosed him with a pan-spectrum restorative, hooked up a nutrient drip, and disconnected his legs beneath the knees with a sparking beam tool; then he left Saxon alone.

As he lay there, hobbled, Saxon felt more isolated than he ever had before. After the crash in Queensland, during recovery at the field hospital, he’d always had something to hold on to, to drive him… the need to find justice for Sam and the others. But now, even that was lost to him. Saxon felt dead inside, as if the energy to live on, to fight back, had been sapped from him by the icy waters of the Atlantic.

As far as Namir and the Tyrants were concerned, he was a dead man. He was compelled to agree with them.

There was movement at the tent flap and the woman from the docks entered, carrying a plastic hard case. She gave him a level stare. “You remember me. ” It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “You’re Anna Kelso. U. S. Secret Service. ”

“Not anymore, ” she said bitterly. “No thanks to your friends. ”

“I had nothing to do with that, ” he insisted, shifting on his gurney. “I wasn’t part of it…” Saxon’s words died in his throat. That wasn’t true, was it? A nagging voice in the back of his head demanded an answer. You were in all the way. You were just too bloody thick to see what was going on. Or maybe you did see, but you were too gutless to face up to it.

“Why did you let me live? ” she asked. “At the house. You had the shot. You could have killed me. ”

He glared at her, and an ember of the old rage flickered deep inside him. “I’m a soldier! I don’t kill unarmed civilians! ”

Kelso seized on his words. “But the Tyrants do. They don’t have principles or compunction. They’re assassins. And you’re one of them. ”

“Not anymore, ” he repeated back to her. “I don’t think I ever really was. I couldn’t… couldn’t stop being the man that I was. Before. ”

She saw something honest in his expression and her manner softened a little. “Why were you working with them? ”

“I could ask you the same, ” he noted. “I know who these jokers are. ” He gestured around. “I recognize the hardware, the weapons, the setup. Juggernaut. New Sons of Freedom. They’re all on the most-wanted list. That’s a long way from the Secret Service. ”

She offered him the hard case. “I’ll tell you what. A trade. You tell me how you ended up on Janus’s radar and I’ll give you these. ” Kelso cracked open the case to reveal a pair of replacement legs. “Caidin make. They’re compatible with the TYM chassis you got. ”

He nodded and took them. “Fair deal. ” Saxon had extensive field training in augmentation repair, and he set quickly to work on his limbs. As he spoke, he let it spill out of him; from the incident in the Grey Range to Namir’s recruitment pitch, the events in Moscow and Janus’s first challenge, to the moment in the grounds outside Temple’s house. “I suppose that’s when I knew it, ” he concluded. “When I couldn’t stay silent anymore. I thought I was going to make a difference in the world. But all we did was exercise someone else’s power. ”

He sealed up the last of the connections and pushed off the gurney. Saxon stumbled a little as the gyros in the replacement modules ran through start routines and synchronized.

Kelso nodded at the legs. “You can consider that repayment for not shooting me. ”

He jerked his chin at the door flap and the warehouse beyond. “And the rest of this raggedy lot? What’s their take? ”

“Half of them think you’re a security risk and want you killed. They found an inert tracer in your damaged leg. The other half want to interrogate you. Pull out everything you know about the Tyrants. ”

Saxon snorted. “Hell, I’ll give you that for nothing. I’ll sing like a bloody canary, as long as you promise me I get to be there when the Tyrants are taken down. ” He looked away. “I got no loyalty to them. Once, maybe… I thought I did. But right now, the only thing I want to do is break them. ”

The woman gave a nod. “Well, we got that in common, then. ”

The tent flap opened and a young guy peered in. His face was flushed with excitement. “Kelso! We got the uplink! Looks like our new pal here was on the money. ”

Saxon stepped forward, limping slightly. “This I wanna see. Show me. ”

Kelso followed D-Bar back to the hacker’s work pit. In the center of the warehouse was a section of the building that had probably been a cluster of bathrooms; now all that was left was a square patch of yellowed, cracked tiles and the brick roots of partition walls demolished in the name of some refurbishment project that had never come. There were ragged holes in the tiled floor, from which snaked thick knots of cabling; the Juggernaut hackers had helped the New Sons set up their base here by drilling directly into the municipal power lines running from the city, snatching watts from the raw feed.

A ring of consoles, server units, and eclectic computing hardware circled the cable trunk. Every one of the decks was alive with screens and holos showing complex, overlapping panes of data. D-Bar dropped into a canvas chair and set to work. Lebedev and Powell watched like a pair of sentinels, faces grim.

Anna saw the flash drive, the case broken open and festooned with jury-rigged connectors. Nearby, another of D-Bar’s team had Saxon’s vu-phone wired up to a console, which in turn was cabled to a collapsible satellite antenna.

“Here we go, ” D-Bar said, cracking his knuckles. “Data sources are linked in parallel. All we need to do is ping the main Tyrant server and the rest is easy. ”

Lebedev folded his arms. “How much risk is there to us? We’re opening a live connection to the Tyrants. What’s to stop them backtracking it to this location? ”

“Agreed, ” Powell added. “We could be calling an air strike down on ourselves. ”

D-Bar made a face, as if those were the dumbest questions he’d ever been asked. “Okay, forgetting the fact that I’m bouncing our signal through a hundred other locational IPs around the country before we even send it, forgetting the copious layers of active subnet masks being run in real time by my troop of monkeys here”—he threw a wave at his team—“not to mention nigh-invulnerable firewalls written by yours truly, there’s this. ” The hacker laid his hand on a black box lined with glowing indicators. “It’s a speed-imager. I need to get only a couple milliseconds of access to duplicate what we need from the Tyrant server. Then we can disconnect and run a virtual analog of it right here, without them ever knowing we were there. ”

“So there’s no chance we’ll be detected? ” Saxon asked.

D-Bar grinned. “I never said that. But if I screw up, the last thing we’ll see is the sky going white as some orbital laser array burns us off the face of the earth. So why worry, yeah? ”

“Yeah, ” Saxon replied flatly.

Lebedev sighed. “Do it. ”

Anna stood back and watched. She really didn’t know what to expect; on the screens, timer windows opened as a web of virtual system nodes unfolded, depicting a representation of the connection, the servers, the target. D-Bar’s face became a study in calm as he plunged into the lines of code. His augmented hands were a blur across the keyboard in front of him, and flashes strobed down the connector cables that wound from a terminal behind his ear to the console.

Saxon looked up at the grimy skylights over their heads. “Nothing yet. ”

Rods of data reached from node to node across the screen, the alarm timer falling with each passing moment. At zero, the network would go into lockdown and the tiny window of opportunity to invade the server would slam shut. It would be the virtual equivalent of sending up a flare in front of the Tyrants.

Nodes turned green where the hacker team had been successful, others blinked red where the invading code was not taking root. Anna realized that D-Bar and the others here in the warehouse were not the only members of Juggernaut working on this digital attack; other inputs from across the globe were leading their own assaults. But of Janus, there was no sign.

“Ten seconds, ” Powell said, reading off the time. “Can you do this or not? ”

“Do it? ” D-Bar sniggered. “It’s already done! ” With a flash, all the nodes went green, and the hacker lolled back in his chair, jerking the connectors from his skull socket. “Piece of cake. ” The film of sweat over his pale face put the lie to his words.

With five seconds left on the clock, the connection was severed; but now a new construct was blossoming on the holographic screens. A meshing of three complex clusters of information—the flash drive, the vu-phone’s memory core, and the duplicate server.

D-Bar saw her staring into the display. “We still gotta work fast, ” he said. “The ghost copy of the Tyrant server won’t maintain parity for long. It’s like trying to catch an echo. Longer you hold on to it, faster it degrades. ”

“Open it up, ” said Saxon. “Let’s see what I almost died for. ”

A fourth data node emerged from the shared flux and blossomed like a flower made of newsprint, petal-pages spilling out. “The Killing Floor, ” said Lebedev. “This is the means through which the Illuminati commune with the Tyrants, the method they use to give them their targets and their missions. ”

Anna glimpsed vast libraries of files as they swept past. On some of them were names she had seen from her own investigations, but many were unknown to her. “We have to get a drop on them, ” she said, thinking aloud. “We need to know the name of their next target before they attack it. ”

“Exactly, ” agreed Lebedev. “Find us a face and a name, ” he told D-Bar.

“Look for something connected to an operative named Yelena Federova, code name ‘Red. ’” Saxon pointed at the display. “She was deployed separately from the rest of the Tyrants. That has to mean something. ”

Anna tensed with a moment of memory. “I think… she was the one who tried to murder me. ”

“Likely, ” Saxon agreed, with a grim nod. “She enjoys the close-up work. ”

“Got something, ” D-Bar announced. On the screen, a single blue-haloed file moved to fill the image. The image seemed grainy and hazed. “Parity is starting to drop quicker than I expected. Better make this fast. ”

Powell stepped closer to read the data presented before them. “Operative ident ‘Red’ tasked to shadow target-designate ‘Alpha, ’” he read aloud. “Action: terminate with extreme prejudice. ”

“That’s it, ” said Lebedev. “But who is Alpha? ”

“Gimme a second…” D-Bar typed in a few commands, and on a tertiary screen a new image appeared; a publicity still of a man in his sixties, with gray hair and glasses. He wore a dark suit and an expression of patrician earnestness, both of which were impeccably tailored.

Anna had seen him before, from a skybox balcony in downtown Washington. “That’s William Taggart. He’s the founder of the Humanity Front. ”

Saxon raised an eyebrow. “What, that anti-augmentation bunch? The ones always whining about ‘science gone too far’? ”

“Why would the Tyrants be targeting him? ” She turned to Lebedev. “He wants the same thing as the ones holding their leashes! Restriction and regulation of human augmentation technology. Why kill him? ”

“More important, ” Powell broke in, “why haven’t they done it already? ” He glanced at Saxon. “This Federova woman. If she’s already shadowing Taggart, could she ice him? ”

He nodded. “In a heartbeat. She’s a phantom. Could make it look like natural death and no one would ever know she’d been there. ”

Anna saw something on Saxon’s face as he said the words. “What is it? ”

“Powell’s got a good point. If Taggart’s the next mark, why isn’t he a corpse? ”

She studied the image for a moment, thinking back to what she recalled from the last series of briefings she’d had at the agency. “Search for a connection between Taggart and the United Nations, ” she told D-Bar.

New data unfolded before them. Anna saw images of the Palais des Nations, the foundation and European headquarters of the UN in Geneva. “There’s stuff here from a sealed memo to the Secret Service from the U. S. State Department, ” said the hacker. “Designating Taggart as a citizen of note. He’s going to be part of the American delegation in a meeting with some of the movers and shakers at the UN. ”

“The vote, ” Lebedev muttered. “Taggart’s going to the United Nations to spearhead the push for a ballot on augmentation control. ”

Saxon gave a dry chuckle. “Huh. Oh, yeah, now I get it. Makes sense. ” He glanced at Anna. “You want to know why Taggart is still breathing? Because they don’t want to kill him quietlike. They want to do it out in the open, in front of people. They want an event. ”

“The founder of the Humanity Front, murdered by an augmented killer in full view of the global media, on the steps of the Palais des Nations…” Powell shook his head. “Can you imagine the fallout from that? Taggart becomes a martyr to his cause. His organization already has a lot of momentum. They lead the charge and do the work of the Illuminati for them. It’s brilliant. ”

“Who? ” Saxon asked, catching on the word, but Lebedev spoke over him.

“It’s what they do. They find others and manipulate them into following their agenda. ” He frowned. “How long until Taggart arrives in Geneva? ”

“His flight lands in Switzerland around midday our time, ” said D-Bar. “According to this, eighteen hours later he’s at the UN to give his speech. We got less than a day before they waste him. ”

Powell drew himself up. “We’ve got to stop the kill from going down. ”

Lebedev nodded. “I’ll contact our colleagues in France, get them to mobilize. ”

“That won’t be enough, ” Powell insisted. “We need to be there. I’ll assemble a unit. You get us some transport. ”

Anna watched the other man mulling it over. “All right, ” he said after a moment. “It can be done. ”

Powell gestured toward Saxon. “I want him to come with us. ”

Saxon snorted. “You trust me now, all of a sudden? ”

Powell ignored the question. “He can provide visual identification of any Tyrant operatives. ”

“Fine by me, ” grunted the soldier.

Lebedev nodded again. “Agreed. ” He turned to the hacker. “D-Bar, gather your gear. You’re going along as well. ”

D-Bar’s pale face flushed red and he blinked. “What? Why? No! ” He shook his head. “I can do this from—”

“No arguments! ” insisted Lebedev. “We can’t go in without an information warfare specialist. You’re always telling me how good you are—now you can prove it. ”

D-Bar jabbed a finger at the screens. “What, this wasn’t enough for you? ”

“Cheer up, son, ” Saxon offered. “You’ll get to see it from the sharp end for a change, yeah? ”

Anna listened to the interchange and it was as if she were falling away from it all, being left behind with every passing moment. When she spoke, the words came of their own accord, without her conscious control. “I’m going, too. ” Anna searched herself for a good, convincing reason, but she came up empty. All she could grasp was the distant, undying anger deep in her chest.

Powell shot her a look. “No. We don’t need you. ”

“How about she goes and I stay? ” offered D-Bar.

“I have to! ” she insisted, with a force that came from nowhere. Anna went on, her voice rising. “I’ve been chasing the Tyrants for months! I’ve thrown away everything—”

“Kelso is right, ” Saxon broke in abruptly. “She should be part of the team. We can use her. ”

“How, exactly? ” Powell demanded.

Saxon made a look-see gesture. “She saw the faces of the Tyrants. Two sets of eyes, mate. ” He gave Anna a look that was unreadable. “Right? ” he asked her.

“Right, ” she repeated. “Yes. ”

Powell seemed as if he was about to argue, but Saxon gave him a look and tapped his wristwatch. “We don’t really have time to waste arguing, do we? ”

“Get the veetol and head for the shore, ” said Lebedev, ending the debate. “I’ll contact you with the details once you’re airborne. ”

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