look threatening every second of every day. But then again, men who looked as tough as they were could be a useful tool in the spec ops game.
Saxon was more a student of the subtle approach, though.
"I don't like flying," he offered. "Bores the hell out of me, yeah?"
"I hear that." Barrett nodded, toying with the wrists of his black-and-steel cyberarms. "This is the shittiest airline ever. No damn stewardess
and the in-flight movie sucks." Outwardly, the jet they were aboard resembled any one of a number of conventional private airliners—but
under the mimetic fuselage was the mobile operations center for the Tyrants, easily the rival of any military forward air command unit in the
world.
Barrett wandered toward the galley and Saxon fell in behind him. He'd been on a couple of sorties with the American—surveillance jobs in
Bucharest and Glasgow—and all along he'd felt like he was being watched himself. It wasn't surprising, Saxon thought. They'd invested time and
money in headhunting him from Belltower, so it made sense to have him pass through a few rookie assignments before stepping up to the real
thing—but to be honest, he chafed at it. He wasn't just some grunt in off the street. He knew how to do the job as well as any of them. He was
tired of the small-scale, low-threat gigs. Still, the Tyrants paid well, and they had good funding, that was clear—although he'd learned
straightaway that asking questions about that side of things was off-limits. Namir had made that very plain.
He'd seen some of the other Tyrant operatives here and there over the past couple of months, usually just in passing—but this was the first
time they'd all been gathered together for a mission. Saxon felt an itchy tingle of anticipation in the palm of his gun hand. The gloves were going
to come off when they got to Moscow—he could sense it.
They emerged in the open common area on the aircraft's upper deck. A gleaming steel galley ranged along one wall, and there were chairs and
monitors facing it. Barrett pawed through a food locker like a hungry bear and Saxon glanced away, finding another member of the team
engrossed in maintenance on a heavy cyberhand.
The German was the other new guy in the Tyrants, although he'd been in a while before Saxon's arrival. Beneath a dark jacket he had the
spare, rippled physique of a bodybuilder, a thick neck and natural eyes that still seemed somehow lifeless. A black watch cap was pulled down
over his hair. He didn't show many augmentations aside from the hand, but Saxon had seen him moving and was willing to bet the legs were metal. The guy was the youngest of them, somewhere in his twenties.
"You're Saxon," he said. His accent was deep and resonant. "We have not formally met." He nodded at the dismantled mechanism at the end of
his arm. "Forgive me if I do not shake your hand. I am Gunther Hermann."
"I know." Namir had mentioned Hermann in passing; from what Saxon had learned, the younger man had been part of Germany's GSG-9
police counter-terror unit until the Tyrants had recruited him. Something in the way that Namir had glossed over that fact made Saxon wonder
about the reasons for Hermann's departure from the Bundespolizei.
Hermann put down his tools and took a careful drink from a can of orange soda. "You are the replacement for Wexler, then?"
"I guess so." There had been little said about the operator whose boots Saxon was filling. He hadn't wanted to push the issue. People died in this
line of work as a matter of course.
"He was slow," offered Barrett. "Got himself killed 'cause of it."
He decided to venture the question, caution be damned. "What happened?"
"Now, why do you need to know that?" Saxon looked up as a third man entered the common area from the forward compartment. His lips
thinned. In any group there was always a place where the dynamic created friction, and it was right here, between Ben Saxon and Scott
Hardesty, the team's dedicated sniper.
Hardesty was rangy and tall, so much so that he seemed in danger of scuffing the top of his bald scalp on the ceiling. Saxon never saw him
wearing anything other than a combat overall, sometimes with a gear vest or equipment belt. He was long and thin, like the spindly extreme
range rifles he carried on-mission, and augmented across all his limbs. His eyes were high-specification optics of a kind Saxon had never seen
before.
At first Saxon had found it difficult to adjust from being a team leader, as he had been with Strike Six, to being a line operator once again—and
Hardesty seemed determined to make it harder by being as big a pain in the arse as he possibly could. The man had taken a strong dislike to
him, but the reason why wasn't clear.
"Just making conversation," he demurred.
"Joe Wexler was good," Hardesty insisted. "I could trust him. I don't know you. So I don't trust you."
Saxon moved to the cooler and took a bottle of water. "Trust this; Namir didn't invite me in because of my sparkling personality."
"Dead weight gets cut loose very fast around here," said Hardesty, pushing past as he made his way down the compartment. "Keep that in
mind, limey."
As the aft door closed behind him, Saxon shrugged. "Friendly fella."
"Wexler was ex-CIA, like Hardesty," Barrett noted. "You know spooks, they like to stick together." "Right."
Hermann blew out a breath, his hand folding closed once again. He gave it an experimental flex, and Saxon saw where the knuckles and the
proximal phalanges were heavily reinforced. Hermann noticed his attention. "A custom-designed modification," he explained. "In time, I hope
to enhance the rest of myself in a similar fashion."
"Metal, not meat, eh?"
Hermann nodded, as if any other idea would be foolish. "Of course."
A soft chime sounded from the intercom, and Namir's voice issued out of a hidden speaker in the wall. "Final approach in ten minutes" he said.
"Prep your gear and be ready. We're on the clock for this one, so mission brief starts the moment the wheels stop. That is all"
Saxon glanced out of the window. The outer suburbs of the Russian capital flashed by, the city below shaking off sleep and awakening.
Pier 86—New York City—United States of America
Widow leaned back from the monitor and made a low, self-amused grumble in the back of her throat, the spider-hands reordering themselves
into something closer to the order of human fingers. She looked up at Kelso and gave her a sour smile. "Thanks for the paper," said the hacker,
nodding toward where Denny stood off to one side. "I always love doing these fun little jobs." Her tone made it clear the opposite was true.
Anna kept her hands inside her pockets. Jags of annoyance pulsed through her like twinges of pain from a pulled muscle, and she thought about
how much she would enjoy slapping the smirk off the thin, spindly woman's face.
Widow gestured at the screen, where the captured image of Matt Ryan's killer was surrounded by a halo of search windows and subroutine
panels. "This guy is a ghost."
"A name," she snarled. "I paid you for name."
"No." The hacker got up, pointing a too-long finger. "You paid for a search for a name. Not the same thing."
"Did you even do anything with that data?" Anna retorted. "Or did you just sit with your virtual thumb up your virtual ass for the past hour?"
Widow's face darkened. "Pay attention, slow-drive, because I'll only explain this once. I did a webwide trawl of all public-access video
databases, plus a thousand more private imaging servers, parsing a data mesh based on Blondie here"—she waved at the screen—"and ran a
match search using a collective of bloodhound info-seeker programs. The
fact that he didn't even get the slightest of hits should be a wake-up
call."
Kelso paused, the hacker's words catching up with her. Widow had a point; even the absence of data was a kind of data itself. The problem was,
the absence of data was all that she had to go on, a whole damn pile of it. "He gotta be high military or corporate," added Denny. "To cull someone's past like that? Outta our league." That drew him a sharp glare from
Widow.
Everything they were telling her dovetailed with her own information. Whoever this man was, he had never been muscle-for-hire working kills
for the Red Arrow triad. But who, then? The old, familiar frustration bubbled up inside her, the tension gathering at the base of her skull.
And then Widow did something Kelso didn't expect. She grinned. "Do you want to know how good I really am?"
"You do have something." Anna stepped closer. "Let me guess, you're gonna shake me down for more yuan?"
Widow gave an arch sniff. "No. I got standards. You paid top dollar for the gold service, so you get it." She giggled. "I just like, ha, building a
sense of drama."
"A name?"
"Yeah," Widow said, "but not this guy's, not exactly." She returned to the monitor and pulled up some panels. "Got some puzzle palace stuff
here, up on the Konspiracy Krew boards and over at Glass Curtain. Your mark, the data on the hit he was part of? The tactics match an open
search those guys got running at their end."
Anna had heard of the groups Widow mentioned; they were fringers, part of the wide-eyed and credulous flying-saucer crowd, busy posting
proofs that the moon was hollow or some other Twilight Zone crap. "You're not taking those mouth-breathers seriously?" The jitters were in
her hand again, and she tightened her fingers, the nails digging into her palms.
Denny chuckled. "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, neh?"
"Ever heard of the Tyrants?" Widow cocked her head.
She shook her head. "I quit listening to the Top 40 the same time I stopped wearing a training bra. Talk to me!" Anna's temper flared again.
She could feel her tolerance level dropping along with her focus.
"They're a black-ops cartel," Denny offered. "No oversight, so it's said. Richer than shit. And hard-core, like you wouldn't believe. Stone killers
through and through."
"Glass Curtain have them linked to a bunch of spook house stuff," Widow explained. "Regime change. Political murder. Intimidation. Corporate
assassination."
The last phrase brought Anna up sharp. She thought about Dansky, there on the sidewalk. The killer going back to him, the second bullet placed
to end his life instantly. She could feel the synchrony of the act in her mind's eye all over again. Everything Widow was saying fell into line with
all the information Kelso's investigation had uncovered to date. It couldn't be a coincidence.
The earthy taste in the back of her throat was strong and she wanted to make it go away. "I want all you can get me on them" she said.
Widow smirked. "That'll cost extra."
In the next second, the million-candlepower glare of a night sun blazed through the thin ballistic fabric of the dome's roof, turning the gloomy
interior into a starkly lit arena filled with sharp-edged shadows. A booming voice resonated through her rib cage, broadcast from overhead.
"This is the NYPD. Stay where you are. This area is under lockdown. As of this moment, all rights have been suspended" Beneath the words,
she heard the familiar rising hum of sonic screamers winding up to discharge.
Denny broke into a run, but Widow was red-faced and shouting. Anna lost her words in the building wall of sound, but she knew that the hacker
was blaming her for this. She thought Kelso had brought the police here.
Widow grabbed at her, knife-sharp nails emerging from the tips of the spidery fingers, but she punched her down, vaulting away through the
panicked mass of the dome-dwellers as they ran about her. They tore up their decks from where they were mounted and yanked fists of
glowing fiber-optic cable out of server farms, desperate to leave nothing behind that would incriminate.
Anna had just as much reason to run as all the rest of them. She reached the dome wall and slashed a new exit for herself with the collapsible
push-dagger that dangled from a lanyard about her neck. Falling out onto the deck of the Intrepid, she was deluged in the white glare;
overhead, a pair of silent police blimps drifted in the breeze. Clusters of cameras, sensors, and guns were barely visible amid the drowning wash
of hard light. Down on the river and on the shoreline, red and blue strobes came on. For one long moment, she found herself wondering if
Widow was right—had she brought this with her?
Kelso joined a throng of people running toward the old carrier's fantail just as the screamers went off. The wave of noise slammed into them and
she fell as they did, her skin crawling with the burn of infrasonic sound.
The cops came across the deck of the old warship in a line, heads concealed by the mirrored masks of riot helmets, webber guns and restraint
dispensers in their hands.
Sheremetyevo International Airport—Moscow—Russian Federated States
The aircraft parked at a discreet hangar on the far edge of the airport, distant enough to be out of sight of any prying eyes. The fuselage
currently displayed the livery of Skye Secure Aviation, a transport subsidiary of Belltower typically used for the transit of sensitive cargoes; it
was the ideal cover, but the mimetic hull could just as easily mimic the insignia of any civilian airline or military air force.
The operations room was a high, narrow chamber that filled both decks. Thinscreens were arranged on every surface, and hanging down from
above, a cluster of holographic projectors resembled the splayed legs of an impaled insect. Folding seats among the control consoles and comm
desks provided space for everyone to sit, but most of the Tyrants stayed on their feet. The air of barely contained tension was thick in the
room; all of them wanted to hear the go-command.
Namir worked a panel, bringing the holograph to life. Nearby, seated in a way that communicated casual disinterest, the sixth member of the
Tyrants toyed with a loose belt length, hanging from a half-jacket patterned with triangular armor plates. If Yelena Federova was actually capable of speech, she made no effort to show it. When Saxon saw her, the woman was padding silently around the aircraft, almost a ghost.
Most of the time she kept to Namir's company, and Saxon had been content to leave it at that; still, he couldn't escape the sense that she, too,
was measuring him.
The dusky-skinned woman graced him with a cool nod, sullen eyes briefly looking up from under a cascade of dark hair that hung down over
her face from a half-shorn scalp. Federova had a dancer's physicality to her, an aura that Saxon could describe only as "grace"—but she hid a
lethal edge beneath it. Her augmented legs were crossed in front of her; long and perfectly machined, they resembled the framework of racing
motorcycles, curved and finely balanced. Standing, she seemed to balance en pointe like a ballerina.
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