She shrugged. "She said I'd recognize her."
"ICAP, then."
"I'd bet on it. She knows me and Sakura and trusted you enough to reach out. She's got to be either a former Aug or an office weenie… which narrows it down to two hundred and eight people, incidentally."
"Well," Matt pulled on his belt. "Let's go find out which."
* * *
The Dragonflies had indicated no hostiles as Matt waited a block away for their quarry to arrive. The only gunpowder residue came from a few cars and nearby hotels, and no more than you'd expect for an urban area in Virginia. No snipers hid on rooftops, and no getaway cars or spotters idled with binoculars on the restaurant.
An early-nineties Chevy Corsica pulled in, blue paint peeled back in patches to reveal white primer beneath, a clunker for which someone received no government cash. It idled in a parking space long enough for a Dragonfly to land and video the occupant. Janet tapped the screen, zooming in on the face, and thrust it into the front seat so Matt could see. "Looks familiar."
Matt nodded, pulling details from his eidetic memory as he set the car rolling. "Marcia Stein. Two classes above me. Level three musculoskeletal enhancements, five on neuro – almost as fast as Sakura. Trained at Quantico for game theory and Monterey for linguistics, took a desk job at the Farm before ICAP picked her up for field work. Stationed at ICAP HQ NYC for Augged combat, armed and unarmed; want to guess who her instructor was?"
"All right, let's do this."
Marcia had made it halfway across the parking lot before they pulled in, her gray wool pantsuit out of place against the venue and her vehicle. The whispers screamed in Matt's head, urging him to jerk the wheel sideways and run her down, then leap out and gorge on the crushed and splattered entrails. Instead he cut her off and let Janet reach forward and pop open the passenger's-side door. Even the parking lot smelled of old, half-rancid grease.
"Get in, Marcia." Janet pulled back, out of her way.
Marcia hesitated, hands clasped in front of her waist. "How long have you known it was me?"
"About twenty seconds. Now get in the car."
She got in, head brushing the ceiling of the SUV. Janet stood almost six feet, and Marcia had her by a good four inches. She kept her hands on her knees, in sight, almost relaxed with a slight quiver in long, delicate fingers.
Matt turned forward and hit the gas, letting inertia close the door, and letting Janet handle the interrogation as he pulled onto the highway heading north, toward nowhere in particular.
"Who are you working for?"
"The Shed."
"For how long?"
"Over a year."
"And in what capacity?"
"At ICAP I'd taken over for Isuji Sakura assessing new recruits in their combat abilities, grading their capabilities as they got used to their Augs. After… after she'd been reassigned to your team, Mr Rowley. I have a… similar role at OPD."
"OPD has Augmentation technology?"
She shook her head. "No, not really. They're doing a lot with exosuits and endoneuropathic implants, real clunky stuff compared to Augs but without the whispers. DNSP allows for a certain level of control—"
"DNSP?"
"Direct Neural Signal Processing. Computer-aided reflexes and muscle control. When the shit hits the fan the computer overrides your instincts to make you better, stronger, faster. Combined with a hydraulic exosuit you get—"
"Murdock Yardley." Matt kept his voice neutral.
She grunted. "What about him?"
"He had a big suit like that, and incredible reflexes."
"Huh. I thought he was in the hospital."
Janet took over again. "Do you know anyone named Keene?"
Marcia raised an eyebrow. "There's a tech named Keenan in the neurointegration lab."
"How about Shane?"
She shook her head.
Janet produced a full-color photo from a manila envelope, Shane Keene's fake FBI badge with the credentials scrubbed. "What about this man?"
"No. He might work there, but I haven't seen him."
"All right," Janet said. "Enough of that. We're happy to debrief you on everything OPD is doing later. The real reason we're here is because we want Sakura."
"I confirmed where they're holding her."
"Can you get Matt in there?"
"Not a chance. Everyone there knows what he, and you, looks like."
"Why the hell would they know me?"
Marcia shrugged. "Why wouldn't they?"
Matt stifled a growl of frustration. "Then what's the plan?"
"The place is like Raccoon City. She's on R&D, third floor below ground. They've got her restrained, but she's healing, and she's fast, and they don't even know I know she's there. You make enough noise topside, I'll get into the lab and get her free."
"They're packing a lot of hardware."
She shrugged. "Most of them are normals, and while they think they're prepared for the eventuality, they won't know you're coming. Off-site response will be at least ten minutes, maybe longer. I'm on shift tomorrow night, and the forecast calls for thunderstorms. You bring the noise, we'll meet you outside."
Janet exchanged a look with Matt through the mirror. "Sounds okay. Last question for now: you and Blossom weren't exactly friends. So why are you helping us?"
Marcia closed her eyes. "Isuji Sakura is the most formidable woman I've ever met. She broke me and built me back up like no one ever could, made me a thousand times more than I could have been without her. She's a good agent and I owe a great debt to her, and…" She swallowed. "…and no one deserves to have done what they're doing to her."
Matt closed his eyes just long enough to swallow his rage, then turned his attention back to the road.
"Okay, we go in tomorrow night."
CHAPTER FOUR
Lightning flashed as Matt released the harness and fell the last twenty feet. He extended his hand as his feet hit the rooftop, taking the first guard in the throat with the tips of his fingers before the normal had opened his eyes. The guard fell to his knees, clutching at the blood gushing from his ruined throat, as his partner finished his sentence.
"—wouldn't even call me!"
Matt spun and caught the talker with a boot to the side of the head, steel toe caving through his temple and out the back of his skull. Two orange double-triangles blipped to light gray on his HUD as thunder shuddered across the rooftop of building three, the tallest in the OPD complex.
He crumpled his parachute into a ball and stuffed it into the air vent, then spun left around the large metal to take in his next targets. Lightning flashed so he fired twice, whirled, and fired twice more, each puff of air no louder than a staple gun. He didn't care for the pre-charged pneumatic rifle, but the PCP beat conventional suppression for stealth every time, and without bothering with more than cursory aim the Dragonfly-guided smart bullets found their own targets with better accuracy than most expert snipers.
Four more triangles turned gray, the last of the rooftop snipers.
He took cover and waited, but heard no alarm, no sounds of pain or panic.
"I wonder if killing everyone counts as a diversion."
If Janet heard him over the COM, she didn't bother with a reply.
* * *
Marcia Stein took a long gulp of coffee as the clock hit nine twenty-four. "This stuff is going right through me."
Jack Castleton looked up from his computer. "Sheesh, Stein. A man's man's bladder can hold six hundred ccs. You've got to be rocking out at what, two-fifty?"
Three minutes early, but worst-case she could always visit the bathroom. "Yeah, yeah, 'man's man’, all this talk of bladder size is making you irresistible."
She set down her mug and walked out as he called, "So Friday, seven-thirty? Your place?"
"Your dr
eams!" Some rumors didn't spread fast enough.
With a wave to the security guard she walked out of the training area, into the common hall, and instead of turning left to the bathroom she cut right into the stairwell. No alarms beeped, and the doors weren't locked.
To get this far you had to have passed through four layers of security and a background check invasive enough to make a proctologist squirm. Somewhere between here and Sakura's lab she'd hit a roadblock, but at that point Matt better have created her diversion.
She came out of the stairwell into a long hall blazing with fluorescent lights, peppered with sporadic doors for a hundred-odd feet before hitting a T-intersection. It smelled like hospital antiseptic and microwaved macaroni and cheese.
End of the hall, to the right, down two more flights of stairs. Sixty more feet to Gina's lab, and one more door to Sakura.
A pang of guilt tugged at Marcia's conscience. Gina meant nothing to her, but over the past month she'd come to mean something to Gina, and tonight one way or another that façade would come crashing down. A blood tech, her ‘girlfriend’ didn't appear to know anything about the source of the miracles she'd uncovered in her tests, had no idea of the cruelty wrought to get those samples.
She took the right and smiled at a pudgy man in blue suspenders, his wisp of a comb-over doing nothing for his frumpy appearance. He smiled back, and his head turned as she passed by, though from suspicion or a desire to check out her ass she couldn't be sure. At the bottom of the stairs Jake Farmers leaned against the door, sucking on an e-cigarette. Mint filled the enclosed space, mingling with too much aftershave.
"Hey, Jake." She stepped up to push past him and he didn't move, instead blowing vapor in her face. Her height, Gina's boss outweighed her by a good eighty pounds and liked using his physicality to intimidate everyone.
"Hey, back. Your girlfriend's not here. Might as well go back upstairs."
Marcia frowned. "She said she's working tonight. Excuse me."
Jake rolled his eyes and didn't move. "I said she's not. So why don't you take your dyke ass back upstairs where it belongs?"
Heat flushed her face. "Excuse me?"
He stuck the e-cigarette in his shirt pocket and spread his stance to better cover any avenue through the door. "Look, you want to munch rugs on your own time, company policy says we turn the other way. But you distract my employee when she's on the clock? Now we've got a problem."
She put her finger under his nose. "Now you listen to me: our relationship is none of your damned—"
He grabbed her wrist, smiled. Then he squeezed.
Pain shot up her arm as his fingers dug into her wrist, red-hot shockwaves over the duller throb of grinding bones. She tried to jerk free and he didn't budge – the little shit had to be more than just a middle-management employee. Through gritted teeth she said, "You're hurting me."
"Am I?" He squeezed harder, and she gasped. Jagged memories of broken wrists filled her mind, the countless times Sakura had put her down on the mat, shattered, and let her heal just to do it again. Only this time she wouldn't heal, couldn't regenerate bones in hours or days.
Through wet eyes she stared at him, pleading. "Please let go. I'll go back upstairs, leave Gina alone. Just please let go."
Instead he pulled her close, inches from his hot breath on her face. "Maybe you will and maybe you won't. Maybe instead I'll show you what a man can do for you. You have no idea what it is we—ah."
The last came out a faint gasp as hot red fluid gushed over her left hand. He looked down and she twisted the razor-sharp knife, pulled it up, jerking to draw the four-inch blade through the abdominal wall and the intestines beneath. His grip slackened even as his face deformed into an inhuman snarl. Strength, reflexes, mental acuity; the OPD had been able to recreate some of what Augs could do, but hadn't gotten anywhere close to regeneration.
"You bitch. You fucking stabbed me."
She patted his face with her now-free hand and forced the knife up further, between his lungs and under his sternum. "Sorry, Jake. I don't have time for your shit today."
Blood dribbled from his bottom lip, and his voice gurgled, speech slurred. "You fucking stabbed me."
She tore the knife free as he sat, hard, legs splayed out, back against the door. Two swipes on his shirt to clean it, she flipped it closed and put it back in her pocket. Grabbing his head with both hands, she dragged him out of the way and pushed through the door.
The blood lab sat almost at the end of the hall, and the room where they'd held and tortured Sakura for months on end just beyond it. With nowhere to go but forward, she took a step, then another, then stalked down the hall, trying to ignore the red stain soaking her blouse and pants.
A security guard stepped out of the break room, tall and dark, his lips covered with powdered sugar, a doughnut in one hand, coffee in another. His eyes widened when he saw her and his meal tumbled to the floor. He reached for his pistol.
* * *
Crawling to the rooftop, Matt took in two more targets through his sights, and waited for another flash of lightning. The whispers chittered their insatiable glee at hot metal shredding his skull and brain and he rolled to the side, warned by their psychotic precognition. Light erupted from one of the pillboxes on the ground, and bullets chipped brick from the roof where he'd been laying.
Stealth moot, he dropped the PCP and unslung his AA-12, the fully-automatic combat shotgun at home in his sure grip. The drum magazine held thirty-two rounds of fin-guided, directionally-triggerable fragmentation rounds, networked to the Dragonflies and his Friend-or-Foe system to explode behind, over, or around cover for maximum casualties with minimal fuss. And in close quarters it made an excellent club.
"Janet? Hit it."
"Roger."
The whispers urged him to kneel, back turned to the roof access door, to take the high velocity metal and bleed out on the roof. Instead he charged the door as it opened, firing two rounds through the widening crack. The twin explosions blew the metal door wide open in a shower of red meat and pink mist the moment before he leapt through.
A string of bodies lay in tatters down the first flight of stairs, urban camo smoking in the astringent air. He leapt through the acrid smoke, slid down the bannister, and took the next flight four steps at a time before bursting through the fire door into an expanse of cubicles.
"Brace for impact." Janet's voice carried with a cool lack of passion, helped by the fact that she had arranged the Air Force strike on a ‘terrorist cell’ from the Motel 6, where she currently sat.
Matt opened his mouth as the building rumbled, and orange flames blossomed in the distance even as the night sky brightened much closer but out of sight. He ran toward the wall of windows even as they shattered from the explosion, peppering his visor and armor with shards of high-velocity glass. His boots crunched it to pieces as he reached the edge. He leapt, crossing eighteen feet over a rising fireball to crash through into the next building.
He stepped back the moment before a man rose and fired a handgun at where his head had been. Matt snaked out and crushed the man’s upper arm with one hand, turned, and threw him screaming toward the next target. A dark-skinned man in a plaid shirt collapsed under the writhing weight.
Matt leaped onto the dog-pile and punched, crushing through both bodies into the floor below. He pulled his fist from the hot, sticky mess, dusty red streamers of gore sloughing off of the hydrophobic coating on his gloves. Nothing moved.
The four Predator-pattern drones had four Hellfires apiece, and by his count each had fired one.
"Janet? Status?"
"Uh… we're getting cross chatter from Anacostia-Bolling. Someone's not happy about us commandeering their airspace. They're being ordered to stand down."
"Belay that order."
"Yeah, bud, trying." Her muttered, "dumbass" carried loud and clear through the COM.
The building shuddered, and shuddered again. And again. Footsteps.
Crouching low, he ducked behind a cubicle and took aim under the desk at door to the main stairwell. "I've got company. See what you can do."
The door exploded inward. His FoF lit up two human forms in the cloud of dust, sleek and black under infrared light. In the ultraviolet they glowed much as a human or statue might, with goggles scanning the room over raised carbines of an unfamiliar make, with short, fat barrels something between a rifle and a grenade launcher.
* * *
Marcia stumbled into the wall, bloody left hand clutching her bloody abdomen, and pointed to the stairwell with her right. "Hurry! She's getting away!"
A shrieking wail blasted thought from her consciousness, and through eyes clenched shut against the cacophony it resolved into an alarm loud enough to wake the dead. The door at the end of the hall burst open and four guards ran out, bolting past them toward the stairs.
Sugar-lips kneeled next to her. "Miss, let me see the injury. I'm an EMT."
She tried to wave him off. "No, no, I'm okay. Just go get the bitch."
He grabbed her by either side of the head, forced her to look at him. "Ma'am, I'm not asking. We're going to get you patched up, but you need to work with me."
With a deep breath she nodded. "Okay." Settling back, she took her weight with her right hand and reached into her back pocket with her left.
He tore open her shirt and scrunched his brow at her bloody but whole abdomen. Steel flashed, and his hand didn't make it to his pistol. A line of red erupted from his neck, splattering her with a stream of hot arterial blood before she shoved his twitching body to the side.
A high-pitched scream tore through the alarm, and Marcia looked up into Gina's eyes, so caring and innocent, now wide with terror and shock. Marcia jerked the gun from the guard's holster, a 9mm Glock with a detachable magazine, and choked it up.
"Gina, baby, I'm not going to hurt you. But you need to run. Now."
Jade Gods Page 3
