Icarus Effect

CHAPTER FOUR

NYPD 10th Precinct-New York City-United States of America

The coffee helped, but not enough. It was strong and tar-black, and it tasted awful, but the stew of day-old caffeine and stale sugar gave Kelso something to focus on.

The metal chair she sat upon, its twin across the way, and the table bolted to the floor were all the interview room had that could be considered furniture. The polymer cuff around her right hand was tethered to a loop in the tabletop, her other hand free to toy with the paper cup. Light came from a glow strip sealed behind armored glass, and high up over the lintel of the door across from her, the glassy fish-eye dome of a camera pod watched her, unblinking.

Anna knew things were going poorly when the cop who escorted her up from general holding didn't ask any questions. He just secured her, gave her the coffee, and left. Now she was marking time until the door opened again.

As if the thought of it were enough to make it happen, the metal hinges creaked and there stood the man she least wanted to see in the world.

Ron Temple threw a weak smile at the man by his side. "Thanks, Detective. I'll take it from here."

The other man eyed Anna, and walked away without a word. Temple dropped heavily into the vacant chair as the door locked shut behind him, placing a silver briefcase on the desk. He was tired, eyes bloodshot, still wearing the big, high-collared greatcoat he sported on the streets of D.C.

Anna imagined he'd come straight here, after he heard.

"What the fuck are you doing, Kelso?" he asked in a low, weary voice. Anna blinked; she couldn't recall Temple ever cursing like that before in front of her. He went on. "Do you have any idea of the kind of depths of shit you are in? No, don't bother to answer that. Of course you do.

Because you're an agent of this nation's highest-profile law enforcement agency, and not an idiot."

"I had my reasons," she managed.

"This is not a conversation!" he thundered, his annoyance bubbling over. "You do not get to justify this kind of stupidity!" Temple hesitated, and looked up over his shoulder at the camera eye. The indicator light showing that the monitor was active winked out, and he turned back to face her. His expression was conflicted; anger in there along with disappointment, sadness, and other things she couldn't read.

"You've put the Service at risk, Anna. Not just yourself, but all of us. I've had to call in a dozen markers from the NYPD to make this go dark, do you understand? As far as our flatfoot cousins are aware, your little excursion up here was a deep cover surveillance operation, and that's how it's going to stay. I'm damned sure I don't want New York's finest figuring out that an agent of the United States Secret Service was conducting an illegal, unsanctioned investigation!"

"It was the only way…"

He went on as if she hadn't spoken. "I know about everything. After I got the call, it all started to make sense. I had Drake and Tyler trawl your files. You've been using your access to the DOJ network and Nat Crime databases to pursue unlawful searches, hiding it from all of us while you let your actual assignments slide."

She didn't look away. Every word of what he said was true. For the past few months, ever since she had signed back on to active duty after the shooting, Anna Kelso had been digging into the investigation surrounding the Skyler hit and the identity of the assailants-despite orders to leave it to the team handling the incident. The case was closed; good leads took the agency to three associates of the Red Arrow triad, but they had all perished in a police shootout before arrests could be made. Strong evidence mounted up after the fact, placing the suspects as the black armored men in Washington.

Kelso hadn't believed any of it. The triad connection was a blind, she knew it in her gut.

Someone else had been responsible for the murder of Dansky, Matt Ryan, and a handful of other good agents; but that was a minority opinion in an agency that just wanted to bury its dead and move on.

Temple's ire lessened, and he sighed. "I blame myself for this. I should have seen the signs. I should have known you weren't ready to return to operations."

"Don't talk about me like I'm…" She stumbled over the word. "Weak"

"Do you really think raking over the ashes of what happened six months ago is honoring Matt Ryan's memory?" He shook his head. "Can you imagine what Jenny and her kids would think about this?"

"You don't understand!" she insisted.

"I do," he insisted. "I know what Matt did for you, Anna. I know how much he meant to you." Temple opened the case and drew out an evidence packet containing her personal effects. He fished inside and came back with a clear plastic bag; within was the rodlike shape of an injector pen, along with a couple of drug ampoules. "And I know how disappointed he'd be to see this. How long have you been back on stims?"

Kelso's mouth flooded with saliva at the sight of the injector, and it took a physical effort to look away. "I'm not using again. It's not the same."

Her cheeks burned. "I just needed to stay on top of things…"

"I would like to believe you." He tapped the bag. "Frankly, this alone is enough to have you cashiered, maybe even net some jail time." Temple pulled out a data slate, and studied it. "Ryan got you a second chance after you were suspended for use of stimulants three years ago. If not for him, your career would have been over." He put it down. "This is worse than just backsliding, Anna. This is a lot worse. You've become erratic, even obsessed. You're unstable."

"I want justice!" she shot back, pulling against the restraint. "The attack on Senator Skyler was a false flag operation! She was never the target, it was Dansky all along, and we got caught in the cross fire!" "I read your report," Temple said. "There's nothing to back that up. And the case is closed. The men who killed Ryan and the others are dead."

"I don't believe that." Anna leaned forward. Why can't he see? "Division turned down my requests to reopen the case, so I looked into it myself.

Dansky wasn't the only one… There are others, important people, scientists and corporate executives, other politicians, even United Nations ambassadors… all of them targeted by assassins with a similar MO-"

"You can't know that!"

"The same men who killed Matt are still running free!" she spat. "I've been trying to find something, anything, a name…" Anna suddenly realized how she had to look, the wild intensity in her eyes; she swallowed hard and tried to calm herself. "That's why I came here, to deal with the hackers on the Intrepid. They could get me data that was off the grid. Get me names."

"Or maybe they were just playing you?"

"Tyrants." She said the word like a curse.

Temple eyed her. "What?"

"That's what they call themselves. The killers." She frowned. "If I can track them, find out who they are working for-"

"That's enough!" Temple slammed his hand down on the table. "Those hackers you were caught with? Half of them are known associates of a global cyberterrorist cell, a group called Juggernaut. They're on the National Security Agency's most-wanted list, for god's sake. Think, Kelso!

Can you imagine what would happen if a Secret Service agent was connected to people like that?" He shook his head again. "I saw your requests to Division, that paper-thin garbage you called evidence. You were turned down because you have nothing but supposition and hearsay. At best, you've got a half-baked conspiracy theory! I kept the heat off you out of respect for Matt, because I knew his death hit you hard. But you've crossed the line."

Anna felt a chill run through her. "So… What happens now?"

Temple folded his arms. "If things were different… I'd charge you myself. But the fact is, what with that pit bull sniffing around the Service looking for some dirt, the agency needs to keep this in-house." The "pit bull" was Florida governor Philip Riley Mead, who was working the angles on Capitol Hill, using every trick he could-including pouring scorn on the DeSilvio administration by shining a light on every mess he could find. Some people called him a crusader for good, speaking about him taking the Oval Office for himself one day; but Kelso just saw a bland, opportunist politician who was nothing but good teeth and hollow platitudes. "We're going to deal with this quietly," Temple went on.

He handed her the packet and then drew a thin envelope from the pocket of his coat. Inside there was a credit chip and an airline ticket.

Temple fixed her with a steady, measuring gaze. "Your badge and ID have already been deauthorized. I've reclaimed your service firearm. As of this moment, you are officially on medical suspension. In a month, when this has all been forgotten, a closed-session review of your conduct will be held, and you will be discharged from the Secret Service, forfeiting pension and all privileges. At the very least." He stood up. "The ticket will get you back to Washington. Do yourself a favor, Agent Kelso. Go home. Let this go. Let Matt go." He gathered up the evidence bag with the stims and grimaced at it. "And don't make things any worse for yourself."

After he left her alone, the restraint loop gave a buzz and fell off her wrist. Anna picked up the packet and something slipped out. A brass coin clattered to the table; her sobriety chip. For a long moment, she thought about leaving it where it had fallen. Angrily, she snatched it up and jammed it in her pocket.

Zubovskaya Square-Moscow-Russian Federated States

The night-black helo circled once over the buildings along Burdenko Street, the ducted rotor-rings turning, the sound-deadening baffles humming. The boxy little flyer hugged the angular tops of the offices and apartment blocks, skimming over old tiled roofs cheek-by-jowl with modern polyglass domes and sheets of solar paneling. The nose of the craft dipped as Hardesty dropped from the starboard side; then they were rising up and away, describing a wide circuit around the lines of the plaza at Zubovskaya.

Saxon straightened the Kevlar balaclava over his face and peered through his polarized eye-shields. Ahead he could see the roof of the Hotel

Novoe Rostov. The team had reviewed the deployment on the way from the airport, and they were ready.

He took a breath and ran through his own internal checklist, ending it with a last look at the ammo selector on the Hurricane tactical machine pistol that hung from his shoulder strap. The compact submachine gun was all ABS plastic and black-anodized steel, the blunt muzzle lost behind a triangular suppressor.

"Twenty seconds." Namir's words came over his mastoid, buzzing in Saxon's skull. The subvocalized radio message had the peculiar echo to it that made encrypted comms sound as if they were being beamed down from space.

Saxon frowned. They were cutting it fine. The sun was rising, and the morning light would cost them good cover if they didn't move fast. Then

Hardesty spoke over the general channel.

"Inposition"he said. "Three targets. Green light."

Namir gave an imperceptible nod. "Execute."

Saxon turned to the window in time to see a man on the roof of the Rostov looking up at them, raising a handheld to his ear; in the next second the man jerked violently backward as if pulled by an invisible wire, a jet of red spurting from his chest. As the helo descended, he spotted the other guards on the roof, collapsing in puffs of pink mist.

The helo fell into a hover ten meters up, and the rest of the Tyrants deployed, Barrett and Hermann leading, then Namir and Saxon, with

Federova last.

Saxon tensed; he was used to fast-roping, but his new high-fall aug-part of the "recruitment package"-meant he could drop straight into the thick without a descender cord. The whole thing was counterintuitive, but it worked. He jumped, and a moment before he landed, a brief pulse of electromagnetic energy flared around him, cushioning his fall. He landed squarely, the crackle of the effect generated by the augmentation taking the shock and bleeding it off to nothing.

Federova put down a heartbeat later, cat-falling with little more than a crunch of gravel. She had her hair back behind an Alice band studded with data loops, but no hood. Federova saw him looking and gazed back, languid and unconcerned.

With a gust of downwash, the helo powered into the sky. He looked away, scanning the rooftop. The Rostov was a shallow, three-lobed tower that had been thrown up in the boom years of the early 2010s, but never completed. There were whole floors of the building that were locked off, still unfinished over a decade later.

"Blue, Green," said Namir, using Barrett and Hermann's call signs. "Secure the roof. Check for stragglers." He glanced at Saxon. "Gray, with me."

"Roof is clear" Hardesty said, from his firing nest across the square. He didn't like the suggestion that he'd missed someone.

Low and quick, Saxon followed the Tyrant commander toward the boxy service shack in the middle of the roof. He passed the corpse of the man the sniper had shot in the chest, and scanned the body. The dead man had a look of frozen surprise on his face, a foam of red froth on his lips. Hardesty's bullet had punctured the heart, the exit wound ripping open the guard's back.

The man's face triggered a connection to the mission data Saxon had shunted to a temporary memory store in his implanted neural hub; the modified wet-drive was another "bonus" from the Tyrants. He blinked up an image from an arrest record. The man lying in the pool of crimson was immediately identified as Oleg Pushkin, a minor enforcer with the main Moscow crime syndicate, the Solntsevskaya Bratva. "This guy's a mob hitter," Saxon murmured.

"They all are," Namir replied. "Keep up."

Barrett was at the service shack as they reached it. Air-conditioning equipment, heat exchangers, and cable gear for the Rostov's elevator banks hummed inside.

Namir nodded at a secured maintenance hatch on the side of the shack. "Open it."

Hermann leaned close and used a digital lockpick to neutralize the security latches; when he was done, Barrett stepped in and curled his fingers around the lip of the hatch with a grimace. The bunches of myomer muscles in his arms stiffened, gathered-and then with a low howl of tortured metal the hatch came away, shearing the bolt heads clean off.

As Namir peered inside, Saxon glanced over his shoulder and his brow furrowed in confusion. "Where's… Red?" There was no sign of Federova anywhere on the rooftop. She had been only a few steps behind him.

Barrett chuckled. "She's around."

"Green," said Namir. "Deny their communications."

"Complying." Hermann nodded, drawing a thick, disc-shaped object from his backpack. It resembled a land mine. Acting quickly, the German set it on the ground and flicked a yellow-and-black-striped activation switch. A flicker of interference momentarily stuttered across Saxon's cyberoptics.

"Target comms are dead," reported Barrett, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. "Ready."

"Insertion," said Namir. "Go!"

One after another, they threaded in through the torn-out hatch and into the mass of machinery crowding the interior of the service shack.

Inside, a triangular cluster of running gear fell away into a series of shafts that ran the length of the Rostov, down to the basement parking levels sixteen stories below. Saxon toggled his optics to low-light mode and the space became visible in shades of green and white. The shapes of elevator cars were visible, most of them static, others gently rising or descending.

Namir and Saxon took point, working their way down past the slowly turning drums of support cables and the rumbling lift gears. According to their information, Kontarsky and his people were on floor thirteen; outside, the pilot of the helo was watching the windows of the apartments on the thirteenth floor, scanning through the vision-opaque glass with a thermographic sensor, watching the body-heat traces of the minister and his staff. At this time of day, most of them were asleep; only the guards were supposed to be awake. They had to take care, though; their intel wasn't clear on how many, if any, civilians were in the building. Collateral damage was to be kept to an absolute minimum.

Securing nylon cords to the cable frames, the two of them fast-roped down in silence, pausing at each level to sweep for magnetic anomaly detectors or beam sensors. Saxon watched Namir work with speed and delicacy, rendering security systems inert with the skill of a veteran.

The central lift of a three-block cluster was locked in place at the thirteenth. The plan was to enter through its roof and fan out along the three radial corridors-Namir, Hermann, and Saxon taking one each, Barrett holding the core as backup.

"Prep for breach" Namir sub vocalized. Saxon lowered himself to the top of the elevator car, disconnected his tether, and drew out a pressurized canister of det-foam. Dialing the nozzle to narrow feed, he put marble-size blobs of the khaki-toned chemical in the corners of the car's roof, then thumbed a set of slaved microdetonators into the congealing foam.

As he finished, he felt the elevator move slightly beneath him and heard voices. Three men, speaking in Russian. Through an air vent, he could see a sliver of what was going on.

"Shto sluchios?" said one of them. He was tapping the radio headset at his ear, frowning.

Another man, out of Saxon's sight line, spat in irritation and followed his cohort into the lift. They were leaving their posts; Hermann's trick with the communications blackout had spooked them.

Then the man with the radio gave a slow, owlish blink; Saxon recognized the action. He had implanted optics-he was changing vision modes.

The guard looked up, and for a fraction of a second Saxon saw a bluish glitter in his right eye. The tell gave away exactly what kind of optic the guard was using; a terahertz lens that could see right through light cover. In the next few seconds, everything happened with bullet-fast rapidity. The guard swore explosively and slammed his fist into the control pad, sending the elevator into an express plunge to the lobby. The other men in the car dragged their guns up, but they were armed with cut-down assault rifles and inside the close confines of the elevator, the size of the guns made them unwieldy.

Saxon held tight to the car's frame and felt his stomach turn over as the lift dropped away; in the next breath the guards would have a bead on him. A spray of blind fire, and he would be ripped to shreds.

He cursed and did the only thing he could, tapping the detonator key on the control bracelet around his wrist. The blobs of det-foam combusted with sharp, smoky reports and the roof of the elevator car collapsed inward, Saxon falling with it. The noise deafened him.

The confined space became chaotic. The guards cursed and struggled to deflect the debris, lashing out. Saxon had no time to draw a weapon; it was like fighting inside a coffin, with no room to maneuver; nothing to do but strike fast and give no quarter.

He punched the man with the t-wave optic into the wall and the guard's rifle snarled, discharging a three-round burst into the door. Then, spinning in place, Saxon drove the armor-plated pad on his elbow into the rib cage of the second guard. He shoved him into a thinscreen along the back wall and it fractured, webbing with cracks.

The third guard was still struggling with his rifle, shouldering aside the remains of a collapsed lighting rig. He launched himself at Saxon and slammed the frame of the weapon into his face, cracking his eye-shields. The soldier hit back with a punch from his augmented arm, and connected with the guard's ribs. Bones fractured with a sickening crunch and the assailant staggered backward, wheezing.

Then all three of them attacked him at once, using their guns like clubs to beat him about the head and shoulders. Saxon felt an impact at the base of his spine and he stumbled, losing his balance as the elevator continued to drop toward the ground floor. He had no doubts that the guards had reinforcements waiting there; he had to finish this quickly.

Locking his legs, Saxon pivoted and let his reflex booster implant ramp up to full. His nerves jangled with the sudden new input, the influence of the neuromuscular accelerator coursing through him. The guards were crowding in and he struck out once more. The man with the cracked ribs went back into the doors, slammed into place by the torso of the first guard. Saxon fired a low, fast kick at the leg of the other man and was rewarded with a pain-filled yelp. Natural bone broke easily under the turned steel of a heavy augmentation.

The giddy rush of speed made Saxon's skin prickle; he felt heat wash over him, and in a moment of sudden, shocking scent-memory, he smelled aviation fuel and smoke. The crackle of the fires around the crashed veetol were abruptly there in the front of his thoughts, the horrible tearing noise as Sam died in front of him Fury spread through Saxon like a wave, and he went in for the kill. The throat of the fallen guard he crushed with a brutal, stabbing blow from his cyberarm; then he pulled a broken piece of roof support up from where it had landed and used it to beat the next of the guards bloody. The last man, who fought back as he coughed and spat, struck out with a cyberhand that sprouted a fan of blades. Saxon took a cut across his cheek, but the pain seemed distant, edited from the moment. He took the guard's arm-a spindly model sheathed in pink, flesh-toned plastic, doubtless Federal Army surplus-and bent it back against the joint, fracturing the casing. The guard tried to struggle free, but Saxon took a clump of his hair and beat his head into the walls until he fell.

The elevator chimed and Saxon let the guard's body go, allowing it to fall out and onto the dusty marble floor of the lobby.

Three more men were waiting for him, standing in a semicircle around the elevator bank, each with a heavy-caliber automatic raised and aimed. The data feed from the wet-drive helpfully told him that these men were also members of the Bratva, each with a lengthy police record; but the tips of the prison tattoos that emerged from the open collars of their shirts made that clear enough.

Saxon slowly raised his hands, panting, the moment of animal fury he had felt in the elevator fading as fast as it had come. For a few seconds there, he had become lost, absorbed in rage-fueled guilt over Sam, Kano, and all the others. The edges of the dark anger he had first felt in the field hospital boiled inside him.

He knew enough Russian to understand that the men with guns wanted him to kneel down. Carefully, he did what they asked, biding his time.

One of them would have to come close enough to take the Hurricane from him, and then, if there was a chance

Something shimmered like oil on water in the corner of Saxon's vision and he turned toward it in time to see a shape emerge out of the air, a glassy, swift figure blurred by motion, abruptly becoming solid, real.

The military called it "mimeoptical active camouflage"; Saxon wasn't up on the full technical specs for the augmentation, but from what he knew, the system used a matrix of molecule-thin induction wires implanted beneath the epidermis and across cyberlimb plating that when activated, generated a local electromagnetic field that could render a human being into a walking stealth weapon. It was prohibitively expensive and delicate under battlefield conditions, and difficulties with the human augmentation interface meant that it was rarely deployed in combat.

Full synchrony between the user and the system was hard to achieve; to use it well, you had to be someone with a near-pathological focus of will.

The ghost figure became Federova, and she killed the first man with a slashing knife cut to the throat, dispatching the other two with quick, silenced bursts from her machine pistol. She trembled slightly as the camouflage effect bled away, the focused EM field dissipating.

Federova looked across at him as he stood up, her scalp beaded with sweat; and then she smiled.

"Go tactical" ordered Namir.

The elevator doors came off their mountings in a screech of torn steel, and Barrett swung out behind them, snorting with effort. He dealt with the guard closest to him with a savage backhand punch that drove bone shards up into the man's forebrain. The guard dropped to the unfinished concrete floor, twitching as he died. Namir and Hermann came in a heartbeat later, their machine pistols snarling. Armor-piercing rounds sprayed in fans, taking more kills.

One of the guards was still alive, and he stumbled toward a side corridor, bleeding heavily. The German was on him in a moment, and with a haymaker punch from his armored fist, he crushed the man's skull with single blow.

"Move," snarled the commander. The mission was entering its full active phase; now speed, not stealth, was of the essence. Namir glanced around, his eyes narrowing. The thirteenth floor did not match the spy photos captured by the intelligence sources of his patrons. Instead of fitted deep pile carpets and bright walls patterned with subtle murals, the surroundings were bare and undecorated. The floor had the dusty scent of old concrete and ozone. Where mahogany doors should have led the way to opulent suites and apartments, there were yawning open frames walled off by ragged sheets of industrial polythene.

Hermann gave him a quizzical look. "This is not right."

"No," admitted Namir. "Proceed. And stay alert."

"Company," snapped Barrett, raising his arm. A group of four more thugs sprinted into view from along one of the radial corridors, each of them armed with a heavy rifle.

"Take them," said Namir.

Barrett's right arm came apart on expanding frames, the plating folding back, the hand turning aside to allow the mechanism within to emerge; he tugged an ammunition belt from a hopper in his backpack, swiftly slotting it into the feed maw on the base of the reconfigured limb. From the wrist emerged the triple-head barrel of a minigun. The muzzles spun into a blur, and with a sound like the buzz of a heavy electric generator, the cyberweapon ejected a gout of yellow fire and a storm of bullets. Grinning, Barrett panned the cannon across the corridor, ripping through the flimsy flakboard the guards used for cover, tearing into them, blowing craters in the surface of the unfinished concrete.

"Advance! Kontarsky's rooms are just ahead." Namir surged forward, and the others went with him. Reaching the space where the grand suite should have been, the Israeli reached up and tore aside a curtain of plastic.

Inside there was only another echoing, half-built space. Festoons of cables hung from the ceiling or snaked across the floor from drumlike power cells; the room was hotter that the corridor outside, blood-warm and dry.

"What the hell…?" Barrett scanned the room, his scarred face souring. "This is the wrong goddamn place! He's not here… nobody is here!"

"Negative," insisted Hermann. "This is the correct location. Kontarsky should be in this room. We saw the thermographic scans…"

"Why would six men guard nothing?" Namir demanded. He stalked across the open space, his footfalls echoing. Something about the dimensions of the room seemed off; in front of the windows that looked out onto the Moscow dawn, there were long glassy panes arranged in a barrier, running wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The power cords ran to connectors, and as Namir came close, he felt a steady surge of warmth radiating from them.

"White," he said to the air. "Go to thermal. Target the thirteenth floor. Tell me what you see."

"I have three unit indicators" came the reply from the sniper. "Silver, Blue, Green. Multiple unidentified targets same locationHe paused, a note of confusion entering his tone. "Youre in the room with them …"

"No," Namir growled, reaching down to grab a bunch of the cables. "We are not." He gave the cables a violent yank and they tore free from the glass, spitting sparks. The glass panes shimmered and went transparent as power bled out of them.

Hardesty's gasp of surprise was transmitted over the open channel. "What the hell…? Silver, all unidentified targets have vanished. Repeat, vanished."

"They were never here," Hermann said aloud. "The panels. They were some form of thermal blind, projecting a decoy image."

"Real smart," muttered Barrett. "So where is this creep really hidin' out?"

"Find him " demanded Namir.

Saxon nodded distractedly, and glanced around the marble lobby. It was gloomy in here, the only light a weak morning glow through the fan shaped windows above the high front doors. Aside from Federova, the area was deserted.

He glanced back to find the Russian woman down on one knee, rifling through the pockets of one of the men she had just killed. A gasp escaped the guard's mouth as she turned him over, a last breath leaving his lungs as she shifted the body.

"If the target's not on thirteen, then he's got to be on a different floor, shielded from thermographic scan." Saxon gave voice to his thoughts, following them through. He cast around the lobby. "There are multiple lift shafts. One of these has to be a dedicated express elevator… Here"

He found a single set of doors off to one side, in a discreet alcove; everything about the positioning of it screamed Restricted Access.

"Use it," Namir ordered. "Well track your locators, vector to you."

"There's no call button here," he noted, finding a glass panel set in the wall. "It may need some kind of key, or maybe palm print recognition-"

A heavy, wet crunch sounded behind him, and a blade edge clanked against the marble; then Federova was sprinting to his side. In her fingers she carried something fleshy that left a trail of red droplets all across the tiled checkerboard floor.

"Never mind," Saxon reported, as she pressed a severed hand into the panel. "Red has, uh, improvised."

The elevator gave a hollow chime and opened itself to them.

It let them out on ten, right in the line of fire from a pair of security-grade boxguards. The machines were steel cubes the size of a washing machine, inert in a monitoring mode; but when their sensors detected something that did not match their programmed security protocols, the mechanisms unfolded like a complex puzzle, extruding weapon muzzles and targeting scopes. They were the smaller cousins of the large, vehicle-size versions deployed by the military or law enforcement, but they could still be lethal.

Saxon rolled out into the lavish corridor, bringing up his machine pistol as he moved. Federova launched herself from the elevator car on those racehorse legs of hers, so fast she was almost a blur of motion. The boxguards dithered, the simple machine-brains of the basic robots hesitating over which target to attack. Saxon used the moment to his advantage, coming up in half cover behind a cockpit leather armchair. He aimed with the Hurricane and squeezed the trigger, marching a clip of armor-piercing rounds up the frame of the closest boxguard, ripping it open. It stumbled into a wall and collapsed.

Federova was on top of her target, and she took off the machine's primary sensor head with a spinning crescent kick. The robot reeled, and the dark-skinned woman rammed the muzzle of her machine pistol into a gap between its armor plates, and fired point-blank.

"Tenth floor" Saxon reported. "We're splitting up to search for the target." He looked toward Federova, who gave him a curt nod and set off down the southern corridor.

"Copy, Gray" said Namir. "We're coming to you. Isolate and neutralize."

Saxon chose the northwest arm of the Y-shaped corridor and moved forward, low and fast, from cover to cover.

Something moved ahead of him, and he saw a squat, thickset shape roll out from a shadowed alcove. It was an ornate machine, plated with steel and sheathed with ceramic detailing-an elegant hotel service robot modeled on some arcane, pre-twentieth-century artistic ideal of what an automaton should be. It moved on fat gray tires, turning like a tall tank. A speaker grille presented itself to Saxon and spoke in Russian, then

Farsi and finally English. "This area is off-limits to guests," it declared. "Proceed no farther."

A fan of green laser light issued out and scanned the hallway, catching Saxon by surprise. The machine caught sight of his drawn weapon and reacted instantly. Ceramic panels opened up to allow the vanes of a pulsed energy projector to emerge. "Mandatory warning delivered," it said.

"Deploying deterrent."

A throbbing wave-front of force hummed from the robot and blasted down the corridor. Saxon went down as the pulse threw freestanding tables and flower vases into the air with the force of the discharge. The rush of the knockdown effect was powerful, like the undertow in an ocean wave.

He leapt from where he had landed, firing as he went. Bullets sparked off metal and inlaid wood, marring the elegantly worked surface of the machine. It fired again, dislodging pictures from the walls, blasting open the doors to empty rooms.

Saxon's free hand closed around a cylindrical object on his gear vest and he tugged it free with a jerk of the wrist. By feel alone, he found the primer tab and pulled it. The weapon buzzed in response and Saxon threw it hard, diving for cover behind a damaged door.

The Type 4 Frag-k grenade clanked off the casing of the robot and bounced to the carpet beneath it; a moment later the explosive core detonated, blasting the machine off its supports and into a smoking heap.

Bursting from cover, Saxon raced through the cloud of cordite smoke and the humming after-note of the explosion. He took down the door to the corner suite with a kick from the heel of his tactical boot and pushed through, leading with the Hurricane.

Inside, the room was wide and devoid of angles, all soft furnishings and bowed windows. A thick layer of metallized plastic sheet-doubtless some kind of sensor baffle-coated the window glass, bleeding out all the color and warmth of the dawn rising over Zubovskaya Square. Saxon found the power feed for the baffle and disconnected it.

Off to one side, folding panels opened out into a range of rooms bigger than the house Saxon had grown up in; on the other side of the suite, a second bedroom had been gutted to accommodate the racks of a compact server farm, an orchard of data monitors, and a complex virtual keyboard.

A man in a dark jacket rushed Saxon from a doorway leading to the bathroom, the lethally compact shape of a Widowmaker shotgun in his hands. The machine pistol in Saxon's ready grip chattered and the thug took the burst in the chest, crashing backward onto the tiles in a welter of blood. He ejected the clip, slammed a fresh load into place, and crossed into the bedroom.

Mikhail Kontarsky, his face lit by sheer animal panic, recoiled from the keyboard console and fumbled for a nickel-plated heavy-frame automatic pistol lying on top of one of the server pods. Saxon brought up the muzzle of the Hurricane and aimed it at Kontarsky's chest. "Don't," he told him.

The Russian wasn't the man he'd seen in the briefing picture anymore. That grim face and distant gaze were gone, replaced by raw terror. He gave a brittle nod and held his hands to his chest. "Please," he began, his voice heavily accented. "You must not stop me."

Something in Saxon's peripheral vision shimmered, and he realized that beneath the panes of complex, scrolling data on the screens, there was a recognizable shape, the ghost-image of a human face, peering out through layers of static. "He's here to kill you, Mikhail," it said. The voice was toneless, sexless, flattened into a brittle machine-timbre that was utterly anonymous; the only thing that could be considered any kind of identity was a data tag showing a name, Janus.

"You told me I would have more time!" Kontarsky spat, his lips trembling. He gave Saxon a pleading stare. "Please, I have to finish what I started, or-"

Saxon took a warning step forward. "Touch that console and it will be the last thing you ever do, Minister."

"Mikhail" said the video-masked figure. "This is bigger than you. We need the data on the Killing Floor, you must complete the upload-"

Saxon sneered and put a burst of rounds through the big screen, silencing the voice. Kontarsky howled and stumbled backward. "Enough of your pal." He grabbed the man by the collar and dragged him forward, propelling him out of the room.

"No." There were a dozen other monitors in the gutted bedroom, and screens in the main part of the suite; each one flickered into life, repeating the image of the static-shrouded face. The word repeated over and over as each one activated. "No. Not yet."

"It's over," Saxon told him, ignoring the voice.

A flash of resentment and defiance crossed Kontarsky's face, and he struggled in Saxon's grip. "You're not here to arrest me… You're not a policeman! What authority do you have?" The moment passed just as quickly, as the man's eyes fell to the machine pistol. "Please, I beg of you.

Do not kill me. I only did what I thought was right!" "He is not a criminal" insisted the voice. "You cannot judge him."

Saxon's jaw stiffened. "You're part of a global terror network!" he spat. "You're part of Juggernaut! And the people you sold out to are responsible for the deaths of my men!" The anger was coming back, and he felt the burn of it. "Operation Rainbird." He snarled the words at the cowering man. "You know that name? You know what happened out there? They were soldiers, doing their jobs-it wasn't even their damn war!" Saxon clubbed Kontarsky with the butt of the gun and sent him stumbling into the door frame. "Now move! I'm taking you alive! You can answer for what you've done!" He glared at one of the screens. "Are you watching this? Because we're coming for you next."

"N-no, no, no… That's not true," Kontarsky stammered, turning to the monitor. "Please, Janus!" he implored the video-ghost. "Help me …"

But the image's attention was on Saxon. "Do you know what you are doing, mercenary?" He thought he detected a faint edge of reproach in the words. "Do you know what master you serve?"

The question made Saxon hesitate and he shot Kontarsky a hard look, hauling him up to his feet, pushing him forward into the middle of the room. The man staring back at him was pale with fear, his eyes betraying no duplicity, no deception. "I don't know anything about your men," he whispered. "You must believe me!"

And for a moment, Saxon did. He was a good judge of liars; he'd met enough of them in combat and elsewhere, and he knew the look of a man too afraid to lie. And if "Rainbird" meant nothing to him, then "Green light."

Saxon heard the voice over the general comm channel a split second before the plastic-coated window crackled with fractures. Hardesty's bullet entered Kontarsky's head through the nasal cavity, blasting bone and brain matter across the wood-paneled walls. His body fell, jetting red, collapsing across a rosewood table.

When Saxon looked up again all the screens were dark.