Deus Ex: Icarus Effect

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Palais des Nations—Geneva—Switzerland

Building B was the library, the archive, and the League of Nations Museum, closed today because of security concerns over the meeting and as such empty of visitors. Saxon broke in through a ground-floor window and blinked his cyberoptics through their scan modes, sweeping the big chamber for motion. Lines of high bookshelves formed shadowed lanes running the length of the building, and above a balconied area contained the glass cases of the museum exhibits and the interactive hologram tour guides.

Hardesty and Saxon found each other at the same moment; the sniper was moving with the Longsword rifle at his hip, and in one fluid movement he swung it up to his shoulder and fired.

Saxon vaulted to the floor, landing in a tuck and roll as a heavy rack of books exploded into confetti. He was in the worst place he could have been. Hardesty had the height advantage, looking down from the second floor, and the range to make the high-powered rifle work for him; Saxon had a revolver with a single bullet.

It wasn’t just the lay of the land that was working against him. Outside, the Swiss police were gathering their wits and he had maybe a minute before they would pile into the library, mob-handed. And he knew one thing for certain; if he was going to find Anna Kelso, he would have to go through Scott Hardesty to do it.

As if on cue, the sniper called out to him. “Hey, limey! Thanks for the help, man. No matter how this plays out now, you’ve done the job for us! I’m gonna ice you, leave you here for the cops… Namir gets the group to finesse things a little, and by the evening news cycle, it’ll be like you pulled the trigger yourself.”

He edged along one of the shelves. “You reckon? You missed the mark, mate. Taggart’s still breathing!”

“Doesn’t matter!” he shot back. “We got a contingency for everything, Saxon. Don’t you get that? The plan goes ahead, no matter how much the little people try to screw with it…”

Another bullet ripped through the shelves close to Saxon’s head and he ducked. The son-of-a-bitch had a T-wave scope, peering through the cover. Unless he could get out from under, close the distance, nothing the soldier could do would keep the sniper from making the hit sooner or later.

He glanced up. The balcony overhead was a few feet from the top of the tallest bookshelf; he could make it, but the moment he moved, Hardesty would cut him down. He needed a distraction.

Saxon leapt up onto the top of a study desk and the sniper saw him, swinging his rifle around to draw a bead. Saxon raised the Diamondback and squeezed the trigger; as good a shot as he was, even with the aim point enhancements in his optics, Hardesty was in three-quarter cover and essentially untouchable.

The massive crystal chandelier above him was a far larger, far easier target to hit. A great bowl of frosted glass and brass workings suspended from a metal chain, it dated back to the opening of the Palais almost a century earlier. Saxon’s shot destroyed it utterly, the fragile antique exploding under the impact. Hardesty cried out in alarm as the chandelier came apart and crashed down around him.

Glass pealed as it shattered and collapsed, and Saxon used the moment to his advantage. Discarding the spent, useless revolver, he rocked back on his augmented legs and applied power to a sprinting leap that took him scrambling up the bookcase, careworn old volumes tumbling to the tiled floor as he kicked them free. Reaching the top of the stack, he swung for the rail running the length of the balcony and snagged it with his cyberarm. The metal fingers locked on and he hauled himself up with a hissing grunt of effort. He was rolling over and down as a bullet strike cut a divot of marble from the balcony at his side, sending chips of stone scattering like shrapnel.

Hardesty dashed from his cover, changing position, seeking a better angle. The long sniper rifle wavered at his hip, a spear made of black iron.

It was exactly the move Saxon knew he would make; the man wasn’t one to take a fight on the terms that were offered to him, that was his weakness. Hardesty always wanted an engagement his way, and sometimes that wasn’t how things worked out. Saxon, by contrast, had learned through hard experience how to play the hand he was dealt.

He gave a book cart a savage kick and it spun across the floor, cutting off Hardesty’s escape route; then he mantled a desk and came diving down on the man, leading with his augmented arm.

Hardesty brought up the sniper rifle to block him and Saxon punched the gun in the breech, hearing a satisfying crunch as the mechanism inside broke under the impact. He followed through and brought the other man to the ground, sweeping in with a punch that knocked Hardesty’s sunglasses from his narrow, hairless face.

Saxon forced the weight of his forearm across Hardesty’s throat and pressed down with all the power he could muster. He heard a strangled yelp die in the other man’s mouth, and the sniper flailed, bringing up his hands in what for a second looked like a gesture of surrender, palms open, fingers spread.

Then the shape of Hardesty’s right hand bifurcated and reassembled itself, little finger and thumb sliding back, middle fingers opening in a fan until the hand resembled some kind of strange insect; at the same moment, a slot across the palm of Hardesty’s left hand grew a wide, flat dagger-tip of sharpened steel.

He slammed the palm-blade into Saxon’s gut, but the jacket protecting him deflected the first few stabs, the tip skipping off the articulated panels of armor embedded in it. Hardesty snapped the spider-hand around Saxon’s throat and contracted it. He stabbed again, and this time the blade plunged through into the flesh of Saxon’s belly.

Pain shot through the soldier in a hot, burning surge, and he let it drive him. Saxon’s free hand scrambled for purchase and caught Hardesty as he tried to twist the blade. The sniper pushed back and the men shifted, staggering, caught in a lethal embrace.

Saxon’s fingers slipped on the palm-blade, his own blood preventing him from getting a solid grip; at the same time, Hardesty was inexorably tightening his own hold on the soldier. Warning icons flicked into view at the corner of his cone of vision, projected directly onto his retina by his implanted health monitor. Oxygen levels were dropping; he was getting dizzy. Had he still had organic eyes, Saxon would have been on the verge of a gray-out.

“You won’t win,” spat his opponent. “I will fucking gut you!”

Holding on to Hardesty was like trying to keep his hands on a snake, the other man writhing and shifting, doing everything he could to break free of the soldier’s grip. Saxon had the strength but not the agility to match him; and if the sniper disengaged, he wouldn’t be able to close to combat range again.

Finish it now, he told himself, before it’s too late.

With a roar of effort, Saxon dropped his cyberarm and snagged Hardesty’s wrist. Twisting his grip violently, he bent the other man back and yanked the hand with the palm-blade against the direction of the joint. The ball socket squealed and snapped back, forcing the dagger-tip up and away.

Hardesty’s dead eyes widened as he suddenly understood what Saxon was going to do. For a moment, they pressed against each other, strength against strength; but it was a fight that the American was never going to win. Saxon had the weight, the power, the stamina.

Ignoring the pain singing from his knife wound, Saxon locked his gaze with the other man and slowly, relentlessly, forced the blade into the base of Hardesty’s jaw, jamming it up though the roof of his mouth in a spatter of blood. The spider-hand juddered and snapped open, and a flood of air filled Saxon’s starved lungs.

Hardesty tried to speak, but all he could do was emit a froth of pink fluid from his lips. With a last grunt of exertion, Saxon shoved him away and the sniper spun backward, clipping the edge of the balcony. His body tumbled over the rail and fell to the marble below, landing in a heap.

At the far end of the library, the main doors slammed open and smoke grenades entered the space, trailing mist behind them. Figures in combat armor moved behind the smokescreen, the thin red threads of targeting lasers sweeping ahead of them. Saxon heard voices calling out commands in French.

He grimaced at the pain from the cut and ran for the window; beyond were the grounds and a mission as yet incomplete.

Location Unknown

When the cell door opened again, Anna vowed she would be ready; but to her horror it wasn’t Jaron Namir who slid open the metal hatch. She found herself staring at the bigger man she’d seen in the corridor before, the one with the buzz cut and the thuggish swagger. He surveyed the small chamber with a predatory eye; Anna saw that the scarring down one side of his face was the puckered tracery of burn damage. His jawline seemed off somehow—until she realized that his jaw was actually a prosthetic of plastic pseudoflesh. She wondered what could have damaged a man so brutally; but he carried his ugliness like a badge of honor. The mercenary wanted people to see the mutilation, as if it were an act of defiance.

His nostrils flared around the brass bull-ring through his nose, and he grinned, ducking slightly as he entered the room. “Lawrence Barrett, at your service,” he said in a mocking tone, spinning out his drawl in parody of a Southern gentleman. “Pardon me if I’m the bearer of some bad news.”

It was all Anna could do not to back away as he approached. She still felt woozy and unsteady on her feet. Her hands gathered behind her back and she watched him come closer, waiting for the right moment, fighting down her panic.

Barrett cocked his head. “Your value has taken a dive. Seems your pal Saxon didn’t hold up his end of the deal.” He grunted in amusement. “He gave you up. How about that?”

Despite herself, Anna felt a sudden, sharp jolt of emotion. She tried to ignore it. She was on her own here; she’d been on her own all along, from the very start…

“I know you,” Barrett said, studying her. “Yeah. Washington. The Dansky kill. You were there, right?”

Anna’s blood ran cold, her thoughts snapping back through the reports she’d read and reread about the incident in Georgetown, the data on the faceless figures who had ambushed the limo. He was one of the killers, part of the same team as Hermann.

Barrett kept talking. “Couldn’t let it go, could you? Why’d you women always do that, huh? Never leave well enough alone?” He was looming over her now, close enough that she could smell his breath.

“What… do you want?” she managed.

He showed her a cruel smile. “Namir reckons you know some things. You wouldn’t talk to him.” Anna swallowed, her throat tight with the pain where the other Tyrant had held her as he questioned her about Janus. “I’ll bet you’re gonna talk to me, though,” Barrett went on. “Once we get better acquainted, ’course.”

She knew what would come next. Barrett bent down slightly, reaching up with the heavy, thick digits of his cyberarm, closing the distance between their faces; and that was when she hit him.

Anna put every ounce of force she could muster into the swing from her balled fist, bringing it around in a fast haymaker. Even as she threw the punch, she was stepping into him, snatching at the bull-head belt buckle at his waist. She had only once chance to strike; with Barrett’s heavily muscled, augmented frame, if he landed any kind of return blow on her she would be done.

Her fist hit him on the cheekbone and slid up to strike Barrett in the eye. The brass sobriety coin, held between her index and forefinger, ripped across his skin and dug into him, the blunt edge ripping at the scarred flesh. Pain ignited in a dull, burning shock through her knuckles, and the force of the landed punch was so much that she felt her thumb dislocate behind the coin. Anna followed through by slamming her kneecap into Barrett’s crotch; she was rewarded by a concussive grunt from the big man.

He flailed, clawing at his face and the blood streaming from his eye. “Damn, bitch!” Barrett struck out blindly and she was almost felled by a black metal hand that snatched at empty air near her head.

Anna threw herself past the mercenary toward the still-open door to the cell, but Barrett was faster than she had anticipated, and he was turning, reaching for her.

He grabbed the trailing hood of her top and snagged it, pulling hard. For a second, Anna was yanked off balance, but then she wriggled free and slipped out of the hoodie, half running, half stumbling out of the cell.

Barrett made a wordless noise of anger and came after her, his face lit with fury. She caught a glimpse of his expression and knew that the man would beat her to broken if he got hold of her.

Anna slammed the heel of her fist into the door control, and it slid shut—but not fast enough to prevent Barrett from getting his forearm through after her. The cyberlimb thrashed right and left, bending in angles that would have been unnatural for a human arm. “I’m gonna make you pay for that, you cop whore!” he shouted. The hatch jammed in place, and she could hear Barrett snarling as he tried to force it open. “You got nowhere to go!”

She ignored him and broke into a run down the narrow, windowless corridor, frantically searching for anything that could tell her where she was, and more important, how to get away. The corridor split, and one branch ended in a steep metal staircase. Anna took it, two steps at a time, and felt a faint vibration through the frame, like humming engines.

Then she was emerging on the next level, a wider corridor lit by bright daylight through wide rectangular windows. Anna lurched toward the windows, shaking her head to force herself to concentrate, fighting off the last dregs of the sedative in her system.

The floor shifted slightly beneath Anna’s feet, and the abrupt understanding of exactly where she was hit her like a shock of cold water. Out the windows, she could see the blue-green of Lake Geneva ranging away, on the far shore the Rue de Lausanne highway and the suburbs north of the city. She was on a boat, racing away from Geneva at a steady rate of knots.

Anna glanced around, desperately trying to map this new information onto her current predicament. The vessel was a large one, an opulent three-hundred-foot megayacht, one of the many that circled the lake in the employ of the wealthy who made the resorts between here and Montreux their homes. The smoky-colored sandalwood paneling and elegant brass details all around conflicted sharply with the stark steel and gray of the lower decks where the Tyrants had been holding her.

If she stayed here, they would kill her. Perhaps not at first, not until they had been able to wring every last morsel of information from her, no matter how trivial; but her death was certain if she did not escape. With the boat, they could take her anywhere, north to some isolated location in the Swiss mountains, south into France, or perhaps nowhere, adrift on the lake and isolated from any prying eyes until they decided to pitch her overboard…

Clutching her injured hand, Anna hurried toward the stern of the yacht, alert for any sign of danger. She still had the brass coin, gripped in her clawed, bloody hand.

A sound from belowdeck reached her as she moved away; a howling snarl of effort and the shriek of a mechanism forced open against its tolerances.

She broke into a run.

Ariana Park—Geneva—Switzerland

A four-wheel ATV veered off the pathway as Saxon reached the Space Memorial, the Swiss civil police officer in the saddle leaning into the turn to bring the quad bike back toward his target. Riding in the jump seat behind him, a second lawman brought up a pump-action MAO shotgun and fired twice at the fleeing mercenary.

Saxon heard the low hum of the thick tangler gel-rounds as they passed near him. The semifluid was a biodegradable hyperglue compound, a nonlethal man-stopper that adhered to anything, and a single hit would be enough to arrest any plans of escape he might have.

He dove into a deliberate tumble, letting the curve of the shallow hill roll him down and away from the metal spar of the memorial sculpture. The ATV came after him, the rider following Saxon over the blind rise.

The Swiss officer met a strike from nowhere as Saxon suddenly reversed his motion and came running back to meet them as they crested the hill. His powerful cyberleg hit the rider in the chest and took him from the saddle. Uncontrolled, the quad bike spun out and pitched the cop with the shotgun into the grass.

Saxon grabbed the rider and dragged him into a sleeper hold. Using his knee to pressure the man against his grip, in seconds his target had blacked out and Saxon was running again.

The other policeman was on his feet, working the slide to pump a new round into the shotgun; Saxon heard him calling out over the police band, requesting backup. He was on him before he could fire, the two men colliding in a crunch of impact that drew a howl of pain from the other man. For a moment, they wrestled over command of the shotgun, but then Saxon got the angle and shoved hard, slamming the butt of the weapon into the officer’s faceplate. It shattered and he cried out again.

Saxon snatched the shotgun and used the gel-round to put him down; the fat plug of bright pink resin frothed and foamed, expanding into a gooey, stringy mass that only a tailored solvent could dissolve. The lawman swore in a torrent of violent, gutter French to Saxon’s back as he made for the stuttering ATV, where it lay upended on the lawns.

The quad bike was still operational, and Saxon flipped it, gunning the motor. As he set off down the slope, the vu-phone in his tac vest buzzed. He slapped at the device, opening the channel. “What have you got, Janus?”

The reply was relayed to the mastoid comm. “A possibility. You must understand\ the situation is fluid and there’s a lot of virtual traffic in this quadrant—”

“Save it,” he snapped, leaning into the handlebars, fighting to control the pain from the wound in his gut. “The Swiss cops are throwing a net over this city and I don’t have long before they take me down. I need answers now!”

“I understand’,” said the hacker. “Cross-referencing the code name ‘Icarus’ with known Illuminati holdings and surrogates yielded a large number of returnsbut only one of consequence. Statistically, it’s your best shot at locating Anna Kelso, if she’s still alive.”

Saxon took the ATV across a service road and out across the railroad running parallel with the parkland. “Go on.” In the distance, he could heard the rattle of approaching police helicopters.

“A vessel, registered to the DeBeers Foundation, a private yacht owned by a corporate interest Juggernaut has long suspected to be an Illuminati front.”

“Icarus is a boat? Namir must be using it as a secondary command post…”

“Exactly. And it’s currently five miles from your present location, heading northeast at four knots. I’m sending you an image now.”

Saxon toggled the brake and the quad bike skidded to a halt. “How the hell am I going to get out there?”

When Janus spoke again, there was a hard edge under the hacker’s words. “Listen to me. I can’t help you with this anymore. I’ve already gone well beyond my own… limits in order to assist you. There’s a marina on the far side of the botanical gardens, close to your location. I suggest you appropriate some waterborne transport there and attempt to intercept the Icarus.”

“What limits?” Saxon demanded, with a wince. “You know who these people are, Janus. You know what they are capable of. You can’t back off now. You’re in too deep. We all are.”

The line was silent for a long moment, and Saxon began to wonder if the hacker had cut the connection and gone dark for the last time; but then the response came again. “I have done questionable things.” The strange non-voice wavered, static lacing the tones, pushing them back and forth between male and female, high and low. “It’s disturbing.”

“I know what you mean,” said Saxon with feeling.

“I’m trying to make amends. I don’t know if I can do any more…”

“You can. Help me,” he insisted. “Help Kelso. Help me save at least one life today.”

The reply was firm. “This will be the last time. I’m tapping into the civil police network. I’m going to flag the Icarus with an Interpol stop-and-search warrant, alert the Swiss. But I can’t do any more to disrupt whatever plans the Tyrants have. That’s up to you.”

“Thanks.” He hesitated. “Look, Janus…”

“No,” said the hacker, anticipating the question forming in his mind. “You’re never going to know me. I’m not ready to reveal myself yet. Good luck, Ben.”

Saxon frowned. “Yeah. You too,” he replied; but the line had already been severed.

M V Icarus—Lake Geneva—Switzerland

The yacht’s name was emblazoned on a brass plaque near the sundeck, between a spray of crystal ornaments and antique loungers. She frowned and kept moving aft, shouldering open a slatted door that led into the boat’s tender garage.

The small bay extended across the width of the Icarus’s hull; scuba gear, water skis, and a compact motor-launch hung from a complex set of lifting gears and equipment racks over her head, while a curved staircase led to the passenger decks above. One wall was a retractable gate for deploying the smaller craft, and inset in the wooden decking there was a circular dive hatch made of heavy-gauge polyglass, looking down a drop tube to the frothy waters of the lake. She hesitated over it. The rebreather implant in her chest was capable of keeping a human being going for several minutes without the need to take air, but could she risk exiting the boat this way? Through the glass she saw a churning chop of dark blue and white foam. The dive hatch was never designed to be used while the yacht was in motion—the second she hit the water, Anna would be exposed to the riptide from the powerful hydrojet motors propelling the Icarus. She had to find another escape route.

Skirting the patches of seawater on the slatted wooden deck, Anna scanned the space for anything she could use. With her elbow, she broke open the emergency case on the dash of the motor-launch, and greedily snatched up the flare launcher inside. The device was shaped like a pistol grip with no barrel; it was hardly a weapon, but she was in no position to be choosy.

Anna stuffed the flare gun into her pocket and pulled at a heavy duffel that lay discarded along the launch’s keel, hoping that the contents might be something more useful. She pulled at the rope ties and the bag opened up to her.

Inside, D-Bar stared blankly into nothing, his face ashen. A purple-black contusion discolored the flesh around his throat where his neck had been twisted and broken.

She swore and jerked back. Dive weights clattered out of the duffel and onto the deck. For an instant, Anna’s anger at the young hacker boiled over and she allowed herself to hate him for his betrayal; but then the emotion bled away and all she could see before her was the corpse of a frightened youth who had got in over his head.

He was not long dead, she guessed, examining the body. Only a matter of hours had passed since the double cross on the Mont Blanc bridge, and while Anna had been left to ride out her dreamless chemical sleep, Namir and the others had doubtless put D-Bar to the harshest of questions. Looking him over, she found more bruising and contusions; she tried to imagine what he had gone through, perhaps believing himself the equal of the Tyrants for the dispatch of Croix and the gift of her as his prisoner, believing that right up until the moment they decided to torture him.

The hacker would not have lasted long, and for all that he told Namir, all the secrets he gave up, the killer would have hurt him all the same, just to be certain he had not lied. What did he tell them? she wondered. The names of his Juggernaut cohorts? The locations of the New Sons of Freedom? It was troubling to think what could be done with such information.

“Patrick” she said, gently closing his eyes, “you stupid kid.”

The words left her mouth as a ripple shimmered on one of the puddles across the deck, in the corner of her sight; and a coldly familiar sense of no longer being alone raced through her. Anna reached into the launch and her hand tightened around the shaft of a boathook.

Without warning, she spun in place and swung the wooden rod out in a fast arc. It swept through the air and collided with something invisible, splintering. In the next second, a ghost formed out of nothing and Federova batted the boathook away, sneering as she came in to attack the other woman.

Federova was so fast; in the apartment, the EMP charge had leveled the ground between the two of them, but here and now Anna Kelso was totally outclassed.

Out of blind fury and raw fear, Anna grabbed the gear rack above her head and hauled herself up. She kicked out to meet Federova as the other woman came in, and her heel connected with the assassin’s face, knocking her aside. Before Federova could recover, Anna was running for the stairs, crashing up toward the main deck.

The assassin was directly on her heels as she emerged into the middle of an observation space, walled in on three sides by elegant glass windows. Velvet couches and master-crafted faux-Elizabethan tables were side by side with minimalist holographs and inset data consoles.

Anna grabbed at a footstool and hurled it behind her, trying to slow Federova down, but she missed and stumbled. The Tyrant woman was suddenly on her and she heard the soft hiss of augmented muscles. Anna came off her feet and Federova pitched her into the air.

She spun and crashed through a glass lamp, bouncing off the half-moon bar at the back of the room. Pain flared along her side as she plowed through an arrangement of glasses and liquor bottles. Air blasted out of her lungs in a croaking howl and she tipped over and down.

Dizzy, blood wet on her face where her earlier wound had reopened, Anna struggled into a crouch. There was broken glass everywhere she laid her hands. Blinking owlishly, she saw a bottle of bourbon lying on its side, and she grabbed it by the neck.

Anna rose as Federova came in to hurt her again, and brought down the bottle like a club. The assassin tried to deflect the hit away, but the glass shattered on her arm and she hissed in pain.

Despite herself, Anna showed teeth in a feral grin; to get something from the silent woman, even the smallest of utterances, was a little victory in itself.

The rich, brown liquid spattered across Federova and the curved bar, and she staggered back a step. That was all the time Anna needed to yank the flare launcher from her pocket.

She squeezed the trigger bar and a smoking dart chugged out into the air, skipping off the bar in a blare of sputtering phosphorous. Federova went for cover as the flare ignited the bourbon spills and carried on across the room, battering itself against the inside of the windows. Orange smoke, acrid and cloying, choked the air.

Coughing, Anna fired off another shot and clipped the Tyrant woman with it. Federova’s bolero jacket instantly caught alight, red flames leaping up at her face.

Through the thickening haze and shrieking of the trapped flares, Anna stumbled blindly toward the windows, desperate to escape. Behind her, she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and the crackling chugs of a fire taking hold, as one of the couches became a torch.

Federova came out of the roiling smoke ahead of her, a furious revenant blocking her path. Her skin seared and her face twisted in hate, the Tyrant looked like something spat from the fangs of hell.

The stolen jet ski rode low and fast over the wave tops, leaving the water in skipping blasts of power as it skimmed across the wake of the Icarus. The stern of the yacht loomed high before Saxon, just as a glint of bright light flashed along the mid-deck. For a moment, he thought it was a reflection from the sun, but then it happened again, and this time thin plumes of orange smoke coiled from the cracked windows.

Saxon twisted the throttle and gunned the motor, bringing the jet ski around to approach from the near side, where the haze would hide his approach.

The voice on the radio repeated itself in French, English, and Mandarin, warning the Icarus to cut power and heave to, by the authority of the Swiss civil police.

Namir’s lip curled and he silenced the speaker, shooting an angry glare across the yacht’s flying bridge as Barrett entered.

The big man’s face was thunderous, and his scarred cheek was red with lines of blood, spilled like tear tracks from his eye. “What the hell is going on down there?” he demanded, jerking a thumb toward the aft. “The fire alarms are going crazy! Kelso wasn’t on the mid-deck, so—”

“Yelena has her,” Namir snapped. “She’s cleaning up your mess.”

“The bitch got the drop on me!” Barrett roared.

“Imbecile!” Namir shot back, with such force that the other man fell silent. “You underestimated the woman and she made you pay for it!”

Coils of smoke, black threads joining the flare fumes, drifted past on the wind. Fire-suppressor lights blinked across the control boards and Namir could hear an alarm bell ringing somewhere beneath them. He advanced to the helm control and pulled the throttle levers back to the zero mark.

“What are you doin’?” said Barrett. “Where’s the pilot?”

Namir nodded toward the rearward sky deck where the unmarked Tyrant veetol was waiting. “He’s warming up the helo. We’re abandoning ship.” He ground out the words in annoyance. “This operation is turning into a clusterfuck! We have to extract now, while we can still salvage something.” He glared out of the bridge’s canopy. “Police launches are on the way. Our mission security has been compromised. Apparently someone alerted them as to our extralegal status.”

“Saxon?”

“Does it matter?” he snarled. “Our objective was achieved, even if Taggart didn’t die. The Humanity Front is in disarray, the media will report what we want them to say. We are done here.”

“We’re just gonna cut and run?” Barrett replied. “First we lose the jet and now this tub?”

“Let it burn,” Namir told him. “The cost is nothing against the gains. We’ll be across the border before the Swiss realize what has happened, and by the time they’ve doused the flames, the group will spin the truth to whatever best suits their needs.”

Federova’s fingers were like iron rods where they bored into Anna’s flesh through the smoke-dirtied sleeves of her blouse, and each motion of her pushing and shoving her across the decks was a new flash of pain. The assassin worked a nerve point in her arm and it was like her skin had been doused in acid.

She gasped and kept moving, tasting blood in her mouth. Anna caught a brief glimpse of herself in the curve of the Icarus’s gray glass windows as she passed; once upon a time she would have loved to find herself walking the decks of an elegant vessel like this, but now she looked like an apparition, some walking wounded left behind by the passing of a war.

Federova marched her to the upper tier and shoved her forward. The wind across the open sky deck caught her and she staggered. Across the flat space, the unmarked black flyer that had gathered her up from the Mont Blanc bridge was poised, ready for takeoff, rotor rings humming at idle. Namir and Barrett were waiting, and the big man’s face lit up with a dark, hateful smile as he saw her approach. He took a step forward, flexing the thick, heavy digits of his machine hands.

Anna tried to back away, but there was nothing behind her but a curved line of steel rail and the slope of the flying bridge. The silhouette of the yacht angled away down to the main deck and the prow, the profile like a knife blade edge-on. Smoke wreathed the drifting vessel.

Namir held up a hand to halt Barrett before he could tear his payback from her. “I want Kelso intact,” she heard him say, over the drone of the rotors. “If we can’t interrogate her here, we’ll do it at a black site.”

“No…” She struggled again as Barrett grabbed her and pulled her along until she was almost off her feet. “No!” Anna threw punches and kicks, but they battered off the other man without effect.

A dark pit of terror opened up inside her chest. Until this moment, Anna had been able to hold on to the thinnest thread of hope, the slimmest chance that she could still find a way to escape from the Tyrants and survive. That hope disintegrated as she was dragged toward the helo, the hard, unflinching certainty falling down upon her that she would have no future, no respite, no escape—

“Hey!” Ahead, Namir rapped on the cockpit hatch, calling to the pilot. “Answer me!” He tugged at the handle and the canopy opened; the pilot’s lifeless body shifted and spilled out onto the helipad. The dead man’s neck was canted at an unnatural angle.

Anna saw a figure drop from the cover of the tail fin and jam a shotgun barrel into the meat of Namir’s neck.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” said Saxon.