EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER
LABORDE, TEXAS
“Hey,” said Harry, “look, there’s Joe.”
Toys barely heard Harry’s comment. He was busy defending a group of church lady types from a juiced-up Fixer, and that was proving to be much harder than he’d thought.
Harry saw Joe Ledger edging around the far side of the crowd, and that made him frown. Was Joe leaving? And … why had he stopped to change his clothes? Some kind of disguise?
He ran across the room, calling Ledger’s name. Joe finally heard him when Harry was a dozen paces away. He turned.
And that quickly, the man stopped being Joe Ledger.
He was the same height, build, color, even down to the eyes.
The man smiled. “Hey,” he said, “are you a friend of Joe’s?”
“Yeah,” said Harry. “Are you with the RTI?”
“Not exactly,” said Michael Augustus Stafford as he raised his pistol and shot Harry Bolt twice in the chest.
* * *
Toys shot the Fixer in the eye with the Snellig. Twice. Once in each red eye. The man reeled back, screaming, clawing at his face even as his knees buckled. He lingered there, blood and mess running down his cheeks. Toys shifted his weight and balance and kicked the Fixer in the Adam’s apple.
He turned away from the dying man just in time to see Harry Bolt get shot.
And he immediately recognized who it was who’d fired those shots. The anti-Ledger. Stafford. The world’s most sought-after assassin.
Toys glanced around for Violin, but she was in the thick of it.
“Bloody hell,” he growled and went running, making maximum use of cover behind the flailing, fighting people.
Stafford did not see him coming, because he was looking for a different face in all that madness. Toys came up directly behind a burly Latino who was trying to load a pistol but kept fumbling the magazine. Toys gave him a sharp push that crashed him into Stafford. The Latino’s gun and Stafford’s went flying.
Toys brought up his Snellig, but Stafford was cat quick, and he blocked Toys’s gun hand and hit him twice—sternum and high in the chest. It had been an attempt to stall with one punch and crush the throat with the other—a technique Toys himself liked. But it was the kind of thing one did with the great unwashed. Not with another professional.
Toys turned his head and dipped, forcing the punch to land on his cheekbone. It hurt, but he knew it would hurt Stafford a good deal more.
The killer snatched back his hand but wasted no time complaining about the pain; instead, he snapped out a very fast toe kick that, had it landed, would have done terrible damage to Toys’s crotch.
Toys took that on the hip and whipped out with a snapping backfist that knocked blood from Stafford’s nose.
There was the tiniest pause—much less than a second—where the two men saw each other, less for who and more for what they were.
And then the battle was joined with savage, murderous intensity.
CHAPTER 176
THE PAVILION
BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER
STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON
Bunny staggered back, his chest on fire from that blow over the heart. Fireworks exploded in the air, and he knew he was in real trouble. The Fixer was superhumanly strong, and that blow had done serious damage.
The choices were slim. Backpedal and try to run, or attack like a sick bear and try to drag the man down to the ground and see who knew the best dirty tricks. In both cases, the Fixer had the edge. He was stronger, faster, and he was not yet hurt.
The killer solved the matter by rushing Bunny, howling like a monster.
* * *
Top Sims was in hell, and the fires were really damned hot.
He fought to clear his head, to make sense of what was happening, and clarity of mind brought no comfort. He lay inside Hot Mama, and the fighting machine was wreathed in flame. Most of it was burning debris from when the Fixer in the body armor had exploded, and even though the shell of his cybernetic battle suit was heat resistant, the driver could still cook.
Top fought to make the K-110’s arms and legs move. They did, but not well. The blast had seriously damaged the servos. He threw all his muscle into turning over. It seemed to take an age, but he finally thudded down on his chest. Next he brought the hands up. No … just the left was working. The right arm of the machine wouldn’t move at all. Lifting the ponderous suit one-handed was agony. His back was burning in a different way. Something was wrong. A sprain, a strain. He prayed to god it wasn’t worse. When the blast happened, he’d been thrown and hit rolling. The suit was never intended to protect the driver from something like that.
He heard gunfire and knew the battle was still going on, so he couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds. Where was Andrea? He’d been by the pump house but had no tech to shield him from either blast or blaze.
Top got to his knees, and after ten thousand years, to his feet.
Walking was a special kind of hell, but with each step, the burning debris fell away, and after ten steps, he was out of the fire.
He hit the release, and the dying K-110 spilled him out into the dirt.
* * *
Mia Kleeve clung to the roof of the cab, fighting to steady herself, sloughing off the extra momentum from her jump while compensating for the semi’s acceleration. She grinned. They didn’t teach this in the regular army.
The truck was heading out toward the main road. Once it got there, it would accelerate to sixty or seventy, and that would be the end of her. She had to stop it now.
With her hand braced against an exhaust stack—the heat intense even through her gloves—she knelt above the driver’s seat, drew her pistol, and aimed the barrel straight down.
She knew the consequences. The Fixer was wearing body armor, and there was every chance it was going to blow up if she scored a kill shot. Could she kill him and have time to get clear?
The roof of the cab was thirteen or fourteen feet in the air, and the truck was now going at least forty miles an hour. The jump would probably break every bone in her body.
“Yeah,” she said, “well, you can kiss my ass.”
And she fired. The Sig Sauer P226 had a twenty-round extended magazine, and she fired every last bullet she had. The slide locked back, and the truck instantly began to slew sideways. Mia had to let go of the empty gun to hold on. There was a patch of grass coming up fast on the right, and she scrambled to the passenger side, tensed to spring, and …
Her first bullet had punched down through the top of the driver’s head, stopping thought, control, breath, and life. His body armor reacted to the sudden drop in pulse, and it blew up.
The explosion punched backward, blowing out the rear of the cab and killing four of the Fixers in the back. Their suits blew as well. Mia never made it off the roof of the cab. She was caught inside a thermobaric fireball that lifted the entire semi, the crated and uncrated fighting machines, all the Fixers, and three-quarters of an acre of road and forest, and threw it all burning into the air.
* * *
At virtually the same moment, in one of those cosmic coincidences that seem to be part of the life—and death—of tier-one special operations, there was another explosion nearly three thousand miles away. Two blasts, really, seconds apart as a pair of AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles hit the Fixer troop transport planes. One missile struck just as the first K-110 was trundling toward the cargo hatch, ready to drop into the concert stadium.
Eighty-eight Fixers and sixteen fighting machines, along with the planes and flight crews, filled the sky with fireballs that could be seen for fifty miles in every direction.
* * *
Belle walked out of the woods, her rifle raised but no one left to shoot.
Top Sims sat on the ground, his back to the pump house wall, with an unconscious Andrea leaning against him. Except for skin color, they could have been father and son. Belle checked on them and was relieved to find ou
t that, though hurt, they were still alive.
It took longer to find Bunny.
He was on a slope, wrapped in a tangle with a Fixer. Both men were unconscious. Both were battered into bloody hulks. Belle could not wake Bunny up; his pulse was thin and his breathing too quick and shallow.
The Fixer’s breathing was labored and kept stopping. That alarmed her, and she ran down to the buildings and found a tarp. It took every ounce of her strength to get Bunny onto the tarp and then pull him down the slope and into a drainage ditch. When the Fixer’s heart stopped and his suit detonated, Belle covered Bunny with her own body.
It was nearly fifteen minutes before the first choppers arrived.
CHAPTER 177
EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER
LABORDE, TEXAS
Santoro’s smile was genuine, but it wasn’t happy. It was a rictus grin, and in it were stress and anger, grief and shock, and a hatred so palpable it was like a fist. I’d killed his pet, his adopted daughter, his—well, whatever else she was.
I’d also blundered right into the heart of his operation. He had no idea that there was maybe 5 percent skill and the rest either blind, dumb luck or the perversity of the gods of war. Or some combination thereof.
What mattered was that I was here to end his plan and end him.
We’d fought twice before. The first time was aboard a cruise liner for the Sea of Hope event. Another charity fundraiser like Going Viral. We’d fought, and he whipped me and Ghost. If Mr. Church hadn’t come along at the right moment, that would have been the end of us. Church kicked Santoro’s ass and then threw him into a black site prison.
The second time was late last year at the D9 conference in Oslo. We’d beaten each other half to death, and maybe I’d gotten the upper hand at the end of it. Not sure, because right as things were going my way, I took a blast of Rage in the face. Next thing I remember is waking up cuffed to a bed because, apparently, I’d tried to kill Church and Belle. However, Belle shot me with Sandman.
This was round three, and the math had changed a lot since last year.
Santoro had murdered my entire family. He killed everyone I was related to by blood or marriage. The bomb that killed them all nearly killed Junie. And in that moment, something died in me, and something was born.
Church thinks that Nicodemus infected me with the Darkness. Maybe he did, but if so, it was an infection laid down on top of something already boiling out of the lowest places in my soul. Maybe the reason that the Darkness did not turn me suicidal or make me take innocent lives was that it was not wholly a product of Nicodemus’s magic—if magic was even the right word. Whatever that trickster son of a bitch did to me was added to what Santoro had already conjured in the dark soil of my damaged psyche. The poet Baudelaire wrote about flowers of hate. Yes, they have grown wild in me, yielding strange fruits.
I didn’t rush at Santoro, or he at me.
It was as if the madness outside this room no longer belonged to either of us. This hallway was the whole world. I raised the Snellig, barrel pointed to the ceiling. He had a Beretta in his waistband, and he took it out with two fingers. We nodded and each set our weapons down on the floor and kicked them away. Then I took the Wilson knife and drove the point an inch deep into the wall. Santoro nodded again and removed a stiletto from a concealed sheath and did the same.
Now we were unarmed.
I have plenty of soldier friends who would think this was stupid. Two grown professionals in the middle of a war fighting a duel. But those people weren’t here. They weren’t Santoro or me. They weren’t in our heads or hearts. They didn’t share our histories. They couldn’t and wouldn’t understand. Nor would their understanding matter. They, like the rest of the world, did not exist for us as we walked slowly toward one another.
There were no taunts, no gibes, no trash talk. His eyes were filled with strange lights. I could once more see shadows creeping into the corners of my awareness. In my heart, the Darkness was struggling to break free. It wanted this as much as I did. The Darkness did not share its reasons with me, and I did not allow it to see into my mind.
There were fewer than six feet between me and Rafael Santoro.
I think we both moved at exactly the same moment.
CHAPTER 178
EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER
LABORDE, TEXAS
Toys had never fought anyone as brutal and quick as Stafford.
Of course, he’d never fought Joe Ledger, and he imagined this was what it would be like. No flashy moves, no concessions to style. Just combat.
Stafford’s technique was basic, but his speed and power were incredible.
From the beginning of the fight, Toys realized that he was very likely going to die.
Stafford feinted high and ducked low, throwing a short, vicious hook to Toys’s groin, but the young man twisted aside and once more forced the punch to hit bone. Same hand. First the cheekbone and then the hip. This time, Toys saw pain flicker across Stafford’s face.
The man shifted left and kicked at Toys, catching him on the thigh with the flat of the heel and knocking him eight feet back. It was a ploy, Toys realized even as it was happening, so Stafford could catch a breath because a few seconds ago Toys had tucked a nice one into the assassin’s gut with a straight right.
Toys got his balance but did not charge right in. He needed a moment, too. They’d traded a flurry of crushing punches in the first two seconds, and both of them had knuckle cuts across their faces. Toys spat blood onto the floor between them.
“Who the hell are you anyway?” asked Stafford.
“The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come,” said Toys.
“Okay, sure,” said Stafford. “Whatever.”
And midway through that last word, he moved, darting forward almost like a fencer with a step-drag motion that closed the gap while giving him a springy and balanced stance for a left-jab, right-hook combination.
Which was exactly what Toys expected him—wanted him—to do. He’d shifted to look like his weight was resting on his heels and let his arms sag as if too weary to keep his guard up. Stafford, the faster boxer, blitzed in.
Toys crouched a little and leaned away from the jab but into the line of the hook. The punch was so fast that Toys hadn’t yet braced his balled fists against his head so that his whole body would absorb and slough off the foot-pounds of impact. Stafford’s punch knocked Toys’s own fist into his left eye socket.
But Stafford’s already damaged right hand hit the bent elbow. The hand, for all the powerful things it can do, is remarkably fragile and made up of many small bones. The elbow, when bent double, is a club, a big knot of bone. Stafford’s fist hit that unyielding bone at thirty miles an hour. His knuckles exploded, driving sections of bone deep into the muscle and cartilage of the hand. Splinters of bone shot out through the skin, and all those bundles of nerve endings shrieked.
Stafford reeled back in agony, and Toys, dazed and bleeding, took his moment. He skipped forward with an instep snap to Stafford’s groin, and, as the man folded, Toys grabbed his hair with both hands and dropped into a low squat. The motion, the sudden deadweight drop of his body, slammed Stafford face-forward onto the concrete floor.
Toys fell sideways, his elbow on fire, and his head ringing so loudly it was like church bells on Christmas morning. But he knew he could not stop, so he got to his knees and crawled to his enemy, swung a foot over so he straddled the man at midback, looped an arm under Stafford’s head, and cinched it tightly around the neck. But he was not trying to choke the man. Instead, he clamped his other hand around the wrist of the looped arm and simply sat down. He did it as a limp drop and then jerked backward with all his strength. The motion jerked Stafford’s head up and back. Too far back and too quickly. There was a double crack-crack as the man’s neck broke and then the spine between the shoulder blades.
Toys let go and collapsed onto the floor beside the man he’d just killed.
* * *
Violin sh
ot a Fixer four times before the Sandman took him down, but he collapsed before he reached her, his hands brushing her boot as he landed facedown on the floor.
Behind him, a tall, slender Black woman and a shorter, heavier white woman were fighting like cats, snarling and biting and rolling around on the floor. Violin shot them, too.
It occurred to her that it would simply be easier to shoot everyone instead of trying to pick who was a Fixer, who was a duped militiaman or radical, and who was a civilian caught up by the hysteria of violence. She had six magazines for her gun, each of which carried thirty darts. That was more than enough to put a third of the room down.
So, she began firing.
Violin’s weapon of choice was a sniper rifle, and she had been the one to train Belle in the art. But Lilith had required that she be proficient with every kind of gun, long or short. Just as she was highly skilled with any edged weapon. Years of experience had given her timing and savvy and refined her battlefield judgment.
And so she put her back to a wall and targeted the people with guns first, taking them down before they were aware of her. Then, as bodies began to pile up around her, she shot whoever was closest and the person directly behind them.
Civilians scattered, and she let them go. The patsy militants tried to outshoot her, but she was the better, faster, more accurate, and less emotional shot.
Fixers took several rounds each, but she had darts to spare.
It was only after she’d built a landscape of drugged bodies that she saw two distinct things that broke her concentration.
To her left, Toys sprawled next to a clearly dead Michael Augustus Stafford. Oddly, Toys reached up and patted Stafford’s cheek before that hand flopped back down.
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