Or perhaps, just the illusion of it. There were other operations going on, he was certain. Tyrant missions that he wasn't supposed to be aware
of; he knew for a fact that Federova and Hardesty had been deployed to the United States, Japan, and India on untraceable black-bag jobs.
Once more, any question about who chose their targets or what they were was not going to be answered.
Do you know what master you serve?
He decided then that for the moment, the questions the shadowy hacker Janus had posed would go no further.
Namir turned from the window. "It's clear to me that we've reached an important juncture here." Hardesty, Federova, and Barrett abruptly
stood up, with Saxon and Hermann reacting just a second later. For a moment, the ghost of a cold smile danced on Hardesty's lips.
"About time," said Barrett.
Namir nodded to the big man. "Open the study, will you?"
Barrett nodded and crossed to the wall where The Flute Player hung. He whispered something Saxon didn't catch and a seam opened on silent
hydraulics. The wall retracted into itself to reveal more rooms beyond. Saxon caught sight of a dark, windowless space, weapons racks, and
workstations.
"Yelena?" Namir inclined his head toward Federova.
The woman's hand blurred as she pulled a weapon from a pocket, a boxy plastic handgun lined with a yellow-and-black hazard strip. She
turned it on Hermann and pulled the trigger.
A thick dart buzzed from the muzzle and hit the German in the neck; Saxon heard the hum of a tazer discharge and Hermann moaned, his body
going rigid. The younger man fell, his watch cap falling from his head.
"What—?" Saxon looked up as a second dart struck him in the chest. He had an instant to register the bite of the contact needles in his skin
before a second stun charge lashed into him.
The Ohama Center—Washington, D.C.—United States of America
The message brought her to the doors of the conference center, the fading light of evening lit by the glow from inside the glass-and-steel
building. A gallery of holograms formed a promenade from the street to the main doors, each of them moving through cycles showing venue information and events listings.
She moved closer, her senses sharpened and acute; for the moment, the fatigue gnawing at her had been beaten back. Kelso knew she'd pay for
it later—but for now she was focused and alert.
Over the entrance, a banner announced the name of the seminar that was about to begin: No Better—The Myth of Human Augmentation. She
immediately recognized the title. The ebook that it was based on had been hovering around the top ten of the Picus Network best-seller list
forever, along with its various audio and video versions, not to mention the frequent references to it on the chat-show news circuit. She glanced
up to see the face of the author smiling down from one of the holoscreens. William Taggart's warm, fatherly eyes watched her from behind a
pair of understated glasses, wearing the same expression of compassionate concern that graced the back cover of every copy of No Better, and
every flyer for his lobby group, the Humanity Front.
Taggart had founded his organization with one goal in mind—to disabuse society at large of the idea that human augmentation technology was a
positive development. As Taggart's people would put it, cybernetic implants served only to dilute a person's humanity, making them less than
what they were instead of more.
Anna found the Humanity Front's rhetoric a little hard to take, though. The augmentations she possessed had improved her, and that was
something she'd never been in doubt about—and when she thought about the facets of her life that made her feel less human, her implants
weren't at the root of it. She frowned and pushed that thought away.
Smartly dressed young men and women were handing out flyers to the attendees and anyone who walked within arm's reach. Anna noted that
a fair few of them were sporting simple mechanical prosthetics in place of limbs. These were people who had taken to what some called
"disaugmentation," freely giving up cybernetic implants in an attempt to move back to being fully human again; the only thing was, losing an
augmentation wasn't like getting a gang tattoo removed or ditching your piercings. She didn't know quite how to take someone who'd made that
choice willingly. Maybe life with a basic leg prosthesis was easier, with less maintenance to deal with and no weekly regimen of neuropozyne
doses to keep the nerve contacts crisp, but Anna wasn't buying it.
Here, though, she seemed to be in the minority. A lot of the downtowner crowd were filing in to hear Taggart give his lecture, and after having
heard the man on television, Anna had to admit he had charisma enough to hold your attention, and the kind of academic gravitas that many
people admired. Along with plenty of his supporters, he was here to make his voice heard at the National Science Board meetings, to continue
his campaign to decry augmentation; he would doubtless be a fixture at the pro-flesh demonstrations taking place over the next few days.
As she entered the conference center atrium, as if on cue, a recording of Taggart's voice issued out of a hidden speaker. "Some people believe
augmentation is the wave of the future. That replacing part of yourself with machines will make you superhuman ... But the truth is, for
every part of yourself you sacrifice, you are less than you were before. That's why I created the Humanity Front. Tonight, Fll tell you why
you should be apart of it, too."
Anna scowled slightly. The name made Taggart's anti-aug crusade sound like a paramilitary group, and Anna wondered if that might have been
a deliberate choice. Some of the people who shared Taggart's views did a lot more than write books or give speeches; episodes of violence
against augmented humans fanned the flames of a new breed of intolerance. Groups like the militants of Purity First were more than happy to
twist Taggart's message toward aggressive ends.
There were more than enough people who couldn't afford augmentation in the States and elsewhere—and she doubted any of them could have
paid the extortionate ticket fee for the seminar either—as well as those who felt threatened by the new technology, just like they were by
anything unfamiliar to them. The Humanity Front was selling itself as two things: a caring group out to show augmentees the error of their
ways, and a force for retaining the status quo. Anna wondered if men like Taggart would ever understand that you couldn't put the genie back
in the bottle.
"Can I help you?" A tanned young guy sporting a blandly neutral prosthetic hand stepped up to greet her. He gave her a once-over,
immediately spotting her cyberoptics, and his expression became almost pious. "Everyone is welcome."
Over his shoulder, a shimmer passed through one of the holograph banners, the text changing. A new string of words formed: Kelso. Upper tier.
Section G. Box 3. She gave him a tight smile. "Actually, no. I know exactly where I'm going."
Anna had her hand on the butt of the Zenith as she entered the skybox. It was well appointed, with an excellent view of the stage below. The
house lights were just starting to grow dim, and as the door closed behind her, William Taggart stepped out into the pool of light cast from
above, to a tide of applause. She hesitated; the skybox's illumination was low and there were deep shadows everywhere.
Down on the stage, Taggart began with some carefully rehearsed platitudes, and from the shadows, Anna heard someone make a spitting noise.
"Yeah, that's enough from you, Billy." The voice was young and male.
She went to low-light and a figur
e in a bulky jacket and baseball cap became clear in one of the low, dense seats. With a wave, the youth cut off
the sound feed from the auditorium and turned to face her. "Let me guess. You're D-Bar?" He was a youth, no more than nineteen, slouching
and cocksure.
"Wow," he replied. "You're more of a looker in the real."
"Whereas you are far more disappointing." She backed off a step. "I'm not in the mood for games, kid." Automatically, she started to profile him
in her thoughts. He had an accent that didn't fit; it had a European twang, maybe French-Canadian.
D-Bar stood up. He was gangly, and the puffed-up jacket hung badly on him, making him look even thinner than he was. A collection of data
goggles and audio buds lay in a complex tangle around his neck. "Kid? Oh, come on, Agent Anna Kelso. Book by a cover and all that static? And
here I was thinking you were a professional..."
She looked around the room, searching for anything that screamed out ambush, and found nothing. "Fair point," she conceded. "It's just that
the name 'Juggernaut'... well, it conjures up a
different kind of person than you."
D-Bar nodded sagely. "Oh, I hear you. I get that a lot."
"Where's the rest of the 'we' you mentioned on the phone?"
He tapped his hat, and she saw what looked like a minicam clipped to the bill. "Watching. If you try to ice me or anything, they'll wideband the
pix to every screen in a five-block radius."
"Cute trick." It was likely a threat he could make good on; Anna had read up on the Juggernaut Collective's impressive hacking expertise. It
was a matter of public record that they had bankrupted two Fortune 500 companies, crashed the Syrian intelligence agency's mainframe, and
brought the Seattle traffic grid to a standstill. "Maybe I should just arrest you, then. I could use a win right about now."
That got her a flash of real worry; but then the youth shuttered it away. "You don't want to do that, Anna. We're the good guys, yeah? Like you.
Serving the cause of justice and all that stuff."
This time she snorted. "Now who's being patronizing? You expect me to buy into the whole 'white hat' hacker thing? Juggernaut are
information terrorists. You're not Robin Hood, you're a cybercriminal."
D-Bar gave a mock shudder. "Ooh, yeah. Don't you think things always sound cooler when you put the word 'cyber' in front of them?" He gave a
short, nasal laugh. "Okay, so we rob from the rich and we keep it. Can't deny. But what we also do is oppose inequality."
"By breaking the law?" she snapped.
"We're the thorn in the side of heartless megacorps who wanna turn the world into their personal chum-bucket!" he insisted.
"What, is that your recruitment speech?"
D-Bar chuckled. "I don't have to recruit you. You're already on our side."
"Don't count on it." Kelso licked her lips, an earthy taste in the back of her throat. Her hands tightened as her annoyance built. "You've got ten
seconds to tell me why the hell I am here, or I'm dragging you out in cuffs."
"I thought the choice of locale was, y'know, ironic." When he saw the hard edge in her gaze, he paled a little. "Okay, okay. Look, for a while now,
we've been bumping up against the edges of something ..." D-Bar paused, feeling for the right word. "Shadowy. There's a group out there. An
organization with a long reach and a lotta patience. They've been systematically using info-war and assassination to target midlevel corporates
—"
"Isn't that what you people do?" she broke in.
The youth's eyes flashed. "Juggernaut doesn't kill people, lady. And if you let me finish, I was gonna say it's not just corporations getting the
knife. Other free groups like us are going dark. These bad guys are taking people down with blackmail, extortion, entrapment, absorption ..."
Anna's patience was wearing thinner by the moment. She folded her arms across her chest. "And this concerns me how?"
"The Tyrants," D-Bar sounded out the name, and she couldn't stop herself from reacting to it. "Yeah, that get your attention? The Tyrants are
their attack dogs, Agent Kelso. This ... group, whoever they are? Those black-ops bastards are doing their dirty work for them." He leaned
closer. "We're both looking for the same thing. We're both asking the same question." She was silent for a long moment, her irritation warring
with her curiosity. Finally, she gave it voice. "What do they want?"
Knightsbridge—London—Great Britain
Saxon felt cool, clammy concrete against his back and he rolled slightly, his head swimming, clearing from the effect of the stun-dart.
He heard a woman's voice, distant but light and playful. Gradually, he leaned up from where he lay and caught sight of a short, unfinished
corridor stretching away from him. He was inside the hidden spaces behind the picture on the wall, under the stark light of a fluorescent bulb.
At the edges of the shadows around him, he glimpsed Barrett, Hardesty, and the Russian woman. Hermann was nearby, slowly pulling himself
into a pained crouching position. The chamber they were in was no bigger than the conference room, but it was sparse and had the feel of a
place one might use for a purpose that needed a little space, like a sparring court. Or an interrogation room.
Hermann tried to get up, but that drew a guttural, negative noise from Barrett. "You stay right there, son," he told him. The German frowned
and ran a hand through his short, dirty-blond hair.
The woman at the far end of the corridor was talking to Namir, and in that moment he knew who she was: the wife. He didn't understand
Hebrew, but he recognized the rhythm of it. Their voices had the casual, easy pace of two people who knew each other intimately. Saxon closed
his eyes for a moment and tried to marry the voice he heard with the Jaron Namir he knew from firsthand experience. Just as with the picture
on the landing, the two things refused to mesh. He was listening to a warm and personable man, a father joking with the mother of his children,
not the stone killer he knew from sorties into the deep black. Saxon had seen Namir kill men in the time it took him to blink, and do it calmly
and cleanly. He wondered how he could be both of those people at once.
A child called out and the wife stepped away. After a moment, Namir came back down the corridor and Saxon saw Hardesty grin in the
darkness, in anticipation of something.
Namir saw it, too, and drew a handgun, throwing the American a flat look. "Scott. Go see to Laya and the children, would you?"
The sniper's face fell. "I thought—"
"Do it now," said Namir. "I'll handle this."
There was a moment when it looked like Hardesty might argue; but then he grimaced and walked away. Saxon heard the sniper call out and a
child laugh in reply; then the hidden door closed and the sound died.
Namir worked the slide of the automatic pistol and ejected all but one round into the palm of his hand, then pocketed the bullets.
At last, Saxon spoke. "What's going on?"
"One of you is disloyal," Namir said, without looking at them. "I know which. And the other needs to prove himself." He gestured with the gun.
"So, two birds and one stone."
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