“Nice shoes,” Nick said, judiciously pinning his gaze to her feet. “I’ve always liked that slingback heel style. And the olive green really completes your ensemble.”
“Thanks,” she muttered, realizing he was trying to put her at ease. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working. “What if the assassin’s using scanners?”
“Then it’ll find you fast. But don’t think about that. Concentrate on being silent. Even if you get a muscle cramp, swallow the pain and remain perfectly still.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll play possum out there with your staff. If the Paratwa asks where you went, I’ll make up some crap, tell it you went into a safe room when the alarm went off.”
“The building has no safe rooms.”
“Yeah. Remember that deficiency when this is over.”
He started to close the door.
“Wait!” she blurted out. “I’m scared.”
“I know. And that’s entirely normal.” He smiled. “The human who doesn’t fear is the human who’s lost her boundaries.”
Somehow, the words proved calming, took the edge off her terror. She wanted to ask him more questions, but a distant scream short-circuited the urge.
“Good luck,” Nick said, sliding the door shut and sealing her in the cramped darkness.
Six
Nick exited Bel’s office, leaving that door wide open to suggest that someone had left in a hurry. He positioned himself face down among the staffers, choosing a spot closest to the main aisle and next to the woman who’d been crying. She was obviously trying hard, but she couldn’t control her fear, couldn’t keep still. Muscle tics were causing her legs and arms to spasm. At times her whole body quivered as if ready to explode.
One of the male staffers also noticed. “Goddammit, Renee, stop moving! You’re going to get us all killed!”
“I can’t help it,” Renee whimpered, on the verge of fresh tears.
From somewhere on the floor came the bark of an automatic pistol. The Shonto Prong had reached their floor.
Nick identified the gunfire as coming from a ninety-round Smith & Wesson with laseguide bullets. It was Security’s favorite and a formidable weapon. But it was no match for tways protected by crescent webs and skilled in the deadly arts of the Cohe wand.
The gunfire ended, replaced by overlapping screams – probably civilian staffers in panic mode. By making such noise and no doubt running, they were likely signing their own death warrants.
Nick silently cursed the poor preparations of E-Tech Security, which long ago should have instituted emergency drills for just such a scenario. Instead, the department issued periodic and often contradictory memos advising staffers what they should do in a crisis. Some of the protocols favored by Bull Idwicki, Security’s director, had been out of date when Nick was a kid.
Renee began weeping hysterically. “Oh God, please! Please make it stop!”
“Shut up!” another woman hissed.
“I don’t want to die!”
Nick realized that Renee wasn’t going to get through what was coming. Fortunately he had a Plan B. He dug the safak out of his pocket and withdrew the detachable hypodermic needle from between the scissors and hacksaw. Flipping open the med griddle, he located the fast-acting tranquilizer from the row of emergency drugs. He stabbed the hypodermic into the tiny dot, instantly withdrawing the medicine.
“Ouch!” Renee cried out, as Nick plunged the tranq needle into her neck.
Her eyes opened wide, and tear-stained cheeks went oddly pale.
“I feel funny,” she said.
“Everything’s good,” Nick whispered. “Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
The drug took effect before she could respond to the childhood ditty Nick’s mother used to say as she tucked him in. Renee’s eyes fell shut and her head lightly smacked the floor. Depending on her metabolism, she’d be out between fifteen and twenty minutes. By then, the assassin would be gone.
More screams erupted. Fresh rounds of gunfire from Security personnel followed, this time sounding much closer. There came a long moment of unsettling silence. Nick had a moment to consider whether the attack had something to do with his meeting with Ektor Fang last night, but his gut told him that the proximity of the two events was likely coincidence, nothing more. Something else was behind the assault.
He planted his ear to the floor, heard the vibrations of footsteps carried through the sheet carpeting that extended out into the hallway. Four legs were approaching in swift tandem, a synchronized gallop.
The outer office door whipped open. Nick had positioned himself facing that direction. Through slitted eyes, he watched the Paratwa rush in. It moved in primary attack posture, back to back. The head that faced him, the albino tway, panned across the frozen bodies, scanning for threats. The taller ponytailed one gazed backward, covering its rear.
Each tway gripped a Cohe wand in one hand and a thruster pistol in the other. Although Paratwa choice of weaponry beyond the omnipresent Cohes varied from breed to breed, many preferred the wand-gun combo. The tways had also donned thin-profile slant goggles to bounce invisible photon streams off surrounding walls, enabling the Paratwa to see around corners.
A soft hum filled the office, the telltale sound of two active crescent webs. The defensive energy shields protected the fronts and backs of the tways and were invisible except for occasional crimson sparks when the tways brushed against one another or some other object. A web could not only repel bullets and deflect energy blasts from thrusters and Cohes, but could protect the wearer from gases, poisons and a wide range of high and low temperatures.
Weak spots existed at the sides of the webs between the front and rear vertical crescents. Some types of weaponry could penetrate there. But even if Nick had managed to smuggle his Glock into the building, no way would he have made the attempt. Paratwa assassins had genetically modified neuromuscular systems that gave them scary fast reaction times. He could think of better ways to commit suicide.
The Shonto Prong addressed them in alternating tway-speak.
“Where”
“is”
“Anna-”
“bel”
“Ba-”
“kana?”
“She was called away suddenly,” Nick said, injecting a flutter of fear into his voice for authenticity. “She ran out just before the alert sounded.”
He felt rather than saw the albino tway glaring down at him. He kept his face on the floor, avoiding looking directly at the creature. In its heightened state of combat awareness, eye contact could be perceived as a challenge.
A Security man lunged through the door. Before he could even think to fire his thruster, a Cohe beam lashed into his side just below the right shoulder. The fiery energy severed his gun arm and sliced halfway through his torso. He crumpled to the floor. The hand and arm, still clutching the thruster, bounced off a desk and landed centimeters from the face of a male staffer. The man let out a panicked shriek.
Fortunately for the staffer, the Paratwa ignored his outburst. The tways trotted past Nick into Bel’s office suite. He was surprised when they emerged a moment later. It had been a cursory check at best. The assassin hadn’t even bothered looking in her conference room or bathroom.
The Cohe wands flashed, this time in tandem. Albino flicked his wrist, causing his beam to perform a hairpin turn and align itself with Ponytail’s. The two beams, in parallel centimeters apart, made a ninety degree turn around the corner of the open hallway door.
Sharp grunts sounded from outside. An instant later, two Security men collapsed face down just beyond the door, victims of the Paratwa’s slant-goggle technology. The beams had pierced their chests. Whiffs of smoke rose from smoldering spots in their backs. The energy strikes had gone clean through their standard body armor with the ease of knives through gelatin.
They should have been wearing crescent webs. Without the energy shields, anyone going up against an assassin was hopele
ssly outmatched. It was yet another failure on the part of E-Tech Security to prepare for a worst-case scenario.
Still, even crescent webs probably wouldn’t have saved the Security men. Most Paratwa assassins had incredible mastery of the tricky Cohe wands, could whip or curl the beams to hit unprotected areas. And the Shonto Prong, originally created by an offshoot tribe of the Navajo Nation but later sold to a French-German armaments firm, were among the more dangerous of the breeds.
The Paratwa reversed locomotion. With Ponytail now facing front, it galloped back out into the hallway. Nick waited until he could no longer hear its quartet of retreating footsteps before glancing around and whispering to the staff.
“OK, good job everyone. But let’s keep pretending we’re koalas on quaaludes.”
Faces gazed at him in confusion. Nick realized the analogy was too twentieth century and rephrased.
“Stay in position and stay quiet. Don’t want to give it any reason to come back this way, right?”
Maria Jose and a couple of others responded with fearful nods.
New sirens wailed in the distance, these emanating from outside the building. It signaled the arrival of troops, probably a battalion of US Marine commandos from the nearest local base on Philly-sec’s north side. Nick would have preferred EPF as first responders, who had more experience fighting Paratwa. But the nearest EPF station was in Berks County, about a hundred klicks to the northwest. He figured it would take them at least another ten or fifteen minutes to be onsite.
Nick froze. The Shonto Prong’s footsteps were again approaching, this time at full gallop.
“Freeze!” he hissed. “It’s back!”
He got the warning out just in time. The back-to-back Paratwa rushed past them, its four boot heels pounding the floor, Albino again on point. The assassin headed straight through the open door of Bel’s office.
Nick risked craning his head to watch. Ponytail had spun around so that the tways faced the same direction. Now side by side, they fired their thrusters in unison at the window wall they were approaching at breakneck speed.
The glass fissured into hundreds of tiny cracks. An instant later, their twin Cohe beams etched a pair of man-sized circles in the weakened section.
Without slowing down, the tways crashed through the glass and plummeted downward.
“Stay here!” Nick ordered.
He dashed into Bel’s office and eased close to the shattered windows. His caution was unnecessary. The Paratwa was already more than a block away and some ten stories below the executive floor. The seemingly crazed leap from hundreds of meters above Filbert Street was the finale of a well-executed escape.
The tways had landed face down, one atop the other on the narrow surface of a skyboard drone. The unmanned aerial vehicle, shaped like its simpler cousin, the surfboard, had probably been put in flight prior to the attack and exquisitely timed to be in position at the moment of their leap. Nick watched with a mix of anger and frustration at the creature’s getaway.
The Paratwa headed southeast at high speed. The skyboard flew over Independence Hall. It took a sharp dive between a pair of towering office buildings and vanished from view.
Seven
The timed tranquilizer Bel had ingested after midnight awakened her at 6:30 am as planned. She gazed out the window of her office bedroom. This morning’s smog layers had dulled the dawn into a typical brooding miasma, bleak and gray. She wanted to roll over and go back to sleep.
It was the fourth day since the vicious attack and Bel had managed little natural slumber. She’d resorted to tranqs every night, which she normally opposed on philosophical grounds. E-Tech called for reducing human dependence on most pharma as part of its overall mindset for reining in runaway technology, and she tried adhering to those sanctions. She took only her nightly ToFo drink and tried to avoid most other nanomeds. She stayed away from recreational drugs and limited alcohol consumption to an occasional glass of wine.
But every rule had exceptions and she’d needed the sleep, most of which she’d gotten here in the office. She’d ventured to her city-center condo a few times for changes of clothes but hadn’t stayed there since the attack. There was too much to get done, too many official reports to be parsed and issued, too many coworkers with whom to commiserate.
Too many funerals to attend.
Forty-one E-Tech employees had died in the assault, including Director Witherstone. He was believed to have been the primary target. The media was speculating that he’d been killed for his unvarnished and often publicly stated views that the Paratwa assassins were the single greatest menace to human civilization since the Nazis of the mid-twentieth century, and that their rampant spread needed to be contained. Bel had heard through the grapevine that the Board of Regents had been urging him to tone down his rhetoric. In retrospect, it was advice he probably should have followed.
The rest of the fatalities, with one exception, had been office staffers who hadn’t had the benefit of Nick’s advice, or Security people who’d bravely tried to stop the killings. The exception, an elderly woman who’d been about to exit the building when the first Paratwa stormed the lobby, had suffered a stroke and died a day later in University of Penn Hospital.
Bel’s shock and grief over the massacre had been augmented by a seething anger. The Paratwa could just as easily have assassinated Director Witherstone at home or while he was flying around the world drumming up support for E-Tech’s mission. Instead, the monster had elected to carry out the attack in bold fashion at global headquarters, and with callous disregard for bystanders. The newsphere was speculating that the assassin was sending a message to everyone in the organization that no E-Tech employee was safe.
Bel did her morning stretch under the covers, swiveled her legs onto the floor and stripped off her pajamas. Behind her, the muted whirr of autosheets made the bed. The sheets were one of her few guilty pleasures, something she’d grown up with and loathed surrendering. E-Tech’s internal policies were flexible enough to permit its employees a handful of tech luxuries as long as ostentatious displays were avoided. The E-Tech official who last year had been found to secretly own fourteen automobiles had rightly been fired.
Bel’s pad chimed as she sauntered toward the bathroom. She unrolled it and palmed its back surface for authorization, but the pad was glitchier than ever this morning. She gave up after five tries and reminded herself to have someone from the Tech-Apps department retrieve it for repairs or get her a new one. There were frustrating disadvantages in having to utilize older technologies.
She headed into the main room to answer the call on her secure landline. She couldn’t help glancing at the replacement sheets of glass in the window wall where the assassin had escaped. The metallic borders were a tad shinier than the surrounding panes.
“Annabel Bakana,” she answered.
The male caller identified itself as a bot and uttered the A-prime code sequence. In turn, she recited the authentication, an equally convoluted string of letters and numerals; a new one requiring memorization at the beginning of each week.
Her identity confirmed, the bot instructed her to be at an address on Philly-sec’s west side in twenty minutes. She didn’t know what the summons was about or which individual had issued it, but there was no disputing the urgency of an A-prime directive. E-Tech’s highest echelon required her presence.
She dashed back into the bedroom to dress, hoping she’d make it in time.
Eight
Nineteen minutes and forty seconds later, the driverless limo deposited Bel in front of a two-century-old Queen Anne house with wraparound porch, overhanging eaves and fancy trim work atop its steep roofs. The front lawn, like most in this modest neighborhood, was withered and patchy. Although strains of genetically modified grasses able to withstand the relentless air pollution were available, over the years Bel had noticed fewer and fewer people making efforts to keep their lawns and exteriors in topnotch condition. The doomsayers claimed it was yet another sig
n that people had stopped caring about the world and that an apocalypse was imminent.
Bel didn’t believe that. There could be no doubt that the world was in serious trouble. But she was convinced it would ultimately come to its senses and pull through.
She rushed up the stairs and knocked on the door. An elderly man opened it. For a moment, Bel was too astonished to utter a word.
He had a wild thatch of white curly hair, a matching beard and old-fashioned spectacles. He was hunched forward, a bit precariously she thought, his hands folded on the knob of a twisted cane formed from a gnarled tree root.
The man smiled warmly and motioned her to enter.
“Annabel Bakana, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. It’s a delight that we can finally meet.”
He extended an arm and she shook his hand. For a ninety-five year-old, his grip was surprisingly robust.
“Sir, the pleasure is all mine. I have dreamed of meeting you since I was a little girl. I carried an autographed photo of you in my wallet all through middle school. I used to show it to my friends. It bored them silly, but I did it anyway.”
Bel knew she was fan-gushing but couldn’t help herself. Standing a meter away from her lifelong hero, the man who’d inspired her to join E-Tech, was the last thing she’d expected upon coming here. She’d seen him once across a crowded room at an E-Tech function years ago. But face to face, the experience was extraordinary.
“I used to brag about you all the time,” she said. “I’d tell everyone that you were one of the greatest minds of the twenty-first century.”
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