crossed the rest of the distance, her hands reaching for him.
Saxon let her draw in, let her find her own way; and when their lips met, hers were as cool as fresh water. Together, they drifted out of the light
and into the shadowed corner, descending into darkness.
U.S. Secret Service Headquarters—Washington, D.C.—United States of America
At this time of the evening, the building was sparsely populated; but then, cops never slept, and the agents of the Secret Service were no
different. There would be more than enough people still on duty or working late to steal a march on their investigations, others preparing
details to deal with VIP escorts while the demonstrators were in town. More than enough of them to make this a difficult endeavor for Anna
Kelso. Everyone on her floor, at the very least, had to know about the cover story Temple had put in place—Kelso's so-called medical
suspension. She knew that others would have been told everything, and how those people would react if they saw her here ... It would not go
well.
All that she pushed aside as she went in through the front doors. In her head Anna was going through the same warm-up techniques she used
for undercover work; it was peculiar to do it here and now, but she was pretending to be something that she wasn't—an agent with a right to be
there.
The security guard at the desk gave her a wan smile. Anna cursed inwardly; he knew her, in a nodding kind of way. She had hoped someone
else would be on duty tonight.
"Agent Kelso." His face showed faint confusion. "I'd heard you were taking some medical leave?"
She smiled back at him, playing into the moment. "That's right. But I've got to drop some paperwork off for the guys picking up my caseload."
"I'll need you to sign in." He offered her a touch pad, and she ran a stylus over it in a quick scrawl. Anna couldn't help but glance over her
shoulder, back out to the parking lot where her car was waiting. She thought about running.
A soft beep sounded from the guard's panel. "Thanks."
She was through the security arch before it caught up to her that she had been allowed in without question. Anna resisted the urge to reach up
and touch the badge in her pocket; whatever D-Bar had done to it on the drive from the conference center had worked.
The elevator took her to the seventh floor, and all the way up she fought back the twitchy sensation in her fingers, folding her arms, unfolding
them, shifting her weight from foot to foot. The dose she'd convinced herself she needed, the shot of stims that had propelled her through her
confrontation with D-Bar, was waning. She could sense the dark clouds of the comedown encroaching, like a thunderstorm just over the horizon.
Anna blinked; her eyes were tired and gritty.
When her phone hummed in her pocket, she almost jumped. Quickly she thumbed the wireless headset from the dock on the back of the
handset and inserted it in her ear; she wasn't about to let D-Bar access her mastoid comm. "Talk to me," she said.
"Are you there?" asked the hacker. "1 ghosted you via the entry subnet, blanked the sign-in as soon as you were through. Can't go any
further without your help, though."
"Working on it," she replied. "Now shut up and let me concentrate." Anna muted him as the elevator let out a melodic chime and the doors
opened. She stepped out, and for a second, force of habit took her in the direction of the main office bullpen. Across the tops of the open cubicles,
the desks and glassy partitions, dimly lit by glow strips and the occasional active monitor screen, she saw her work area. A bright orange
storage crate was on top of it, crammed with her personal effects. She thought about the marksmanship plaque, the photo of her and the rest of
the team after the Anselmo case bust, and fought down the irrational urge to risk discovery in order to salvage those little, trivial mementos.
Then she saw Agents Tyler and Drake walking between the desks toward her, and Anna's purpose snapped back into sharp, cold focus.
Chiding herself for the moment of inattention, she turned on her heel and went back around the elevator bank, heading away. The corridors
leading to the server room on floor seven went past the conference areas, and they were all dark and unlit. Anna hoped that Tyler and Drake
would enter the elevators, but they were coming her way, their conversation reaching her. They were talking about the Redskins game, both
men dour and serious about matters of yardage and field goals.
Fear bubbled up inside her, threatening to flood out into panic. She pressed it down, and her hand found a door. Anna slipped into an empty
conference room and closed the door behind her, pressing her back to it. She held her breath.
It seemed to take forever for them to pass, the echo of their mundane discussion hanging in the air; then they were gone, and she was moving
again.
The server room needed another identity pass, and Kelso showed the sensor her badge. The door opened with an obliging click and she was
inside.
"I'm there," she said, toggling the mute on the headset. On the drive over, D-Bar had told her what to look for. From her pocket, she fished out
a data rod the size and thickness of her thumb.
"You know what to do," D-Bar said, his tone a mix of eagerness and annoyance.
"Here we go." She found the correct input socket and slid the rod home. A sleeping monitor screen immediately flashed into life, and a cascade
of information panels unfolded across it.
In her ear, the hacker muttered under his breath. "Wireless link established. Greentooth is handshaking ... Okay, here we go ..." He cursed
and she heard the distant rattle of a keypad. "Damn it. You know, this would be a lot easier if I had both hands free."
Anna eyed the door. "What can I say? I'm the cautious type."
On the drive from the conference center, D-Bar had brought out a customized laptop from his backpack; the thing had the shell of an off-the
shelf business machine, but even her inexpert gaze could tell it was tricked out with multiple hardware modifications and bespoke black-market
tech. The airstream casing was ruggedized and covered with laser etching and decals; it reminded her of a racecar.
She pictured D-Bar out there in the parking lot, hunched over the keyboard in the passenger seat, watching the feed as his machine talked
through the rod's encrypted wireless link to the Secret Service mainframe. Before she had left him in the car, Kelso had asked the youth to
show her his right hand; with a flick, she'd snapped a cuff around his wrist and tethered him to the steering wheel. After all, she was putting a
lot of trust in the Juggernaut hacker, and there was nothing to stop him from copying what he needed from the secure server and leaving her to
take the rap.
"Okay" he went on, "I'm injecting the seeker worm program ... now." One of the information panes on the screen flickered red-white and
vanished. Search routine is running. I've preloaded the seeker with parameters related to the leaked information and the Tyrant targets.
It'll automatically flag anything it finds and upload it to a saved file."
"Good." Anna's hand snapped out and she yanked the data rod from the interface socket. D-Bar called out in surprise as he lost his remote feed,
but she ignored him, dropping the rod to the floor and breaking it in two with the heel of her shoe.
"Was that you?" D-Bar demanded. "What did you just do?"
Anna's hands twitched, making it difficult to gather up the broken pieces in one go. "Cut you off," she confirmed, dropping the fragments into a
cup of cold coffee some errant technician had left on a nearby desk. "This is not my first rod
eo, kid. I let you drop the seeker, but I'm not letting you keep an open conduit into a federal law enforcement agency's mainframe, not for one second more than I have to."
"And how exactly are you going to get the data out?" he retorted.
"Way ahead of you." Anna rooted through a storage locker and found a case of blank media units, flash drives of the same model she'd used to
store her own information. Working as swiftly as she could, she connected a drive in place of the data rod and let the unit fill with the seeker
program's digital harvest.
D-Bar was too interested to stay silent for long. "What are you seeing?"
"A lot," Anna admitted. Data flashed past her eyes, much of it in formats unfamiliar to her, some immediately recognizable as U.S. Secret
Service and Department of Justice files. There were operational schedules, transport routes, profiles of agents on duty and principals to protect;
but there were other documents as well, evaluations and surveillance records, the kind of materials that Kelso's agency didn't use. Then she
saw information that bore digital watermarks from Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Diplomatic Corps; other pages
were not even in English, and it took her a second to realize that she was seeing memos and documentation from security agencies outside the
United States. Whoever the leak was inside the service, they had been tunneling through the agency's link to the DOJ, and from there out to
the shadowy nexus of information shared by the global law enforcement community.
As abruptly as it had begun, the search ended and the data parsed itself into the flash drive. Anna felt a cold impulse down her spine and she
reached for the keyboard in front of the monitor, inputting the name "Skyler" and a date string as the parameters for a sweep of the stolen
data. Instantly, the complete scope of all the supposedly secure transit information about Senator Skyler's detail on that fateful day was there
in front of her. Every last bit of it, from details of what pool vehicles would be used and their maintenance records, through the receipts showing
how many bullets the agents on the detail had logged out from the agency armory. Everything an assassin would need to prepare a flawless
attack.
The file bore a validation code, a digital fingerprint tying the requested data to the terminal and agent identity of the person who had copied
them. Anna knew the code; she'd seen it a hundred times appended to her own after-operations debriefs and memos. But still she clicked on the
text string, hoping that she had read it wrongly. Hoping she had made a mistake.
The display opened a panel and showed her Ron Temple's authentication.
"You son of a bitch." The words slipped out of her in a shallow breath, drained of all anger and fury. Anna felt nothing, just a chill numbness at
the core of her gut.
A man she had trusted, a man she had served with, and before her lay proof that he was a traitor, proof that he had sold out whatever integrity
he had to the faceless figures who had their hands on the leash of the Tyrants.
Then the emotion came, breaking the icy dam of the dead feeling in her chest, engulfing her. Anna's eyes prickled and her vision misted. She
staggered a little and reached out a hand to steady herself. Temple had sold them out—Kelso and Ryan, Byrne, Laker, and Connor, everyone on
the Skyler detail, along with all those other men and women he had given up. Her hands drew into hard, tight fists. She wanted to know why.
More than the fury, more than the rush of potent despair, Anna wanted to know the answer. How a man could betray his oath and his
colleagues.
For money? Out of fear? No answer she could imagine seemed good enough.
A repeating tone dragged her back from her reverie, and she blinked owlishly. D-Bar was yelling in her ear, and Kelso glanced back at the
server monitor; a warning panel was blinking there, a string of text in livid red letters telling her to stand by and wait for security.
"Are you listening to me?" D-Bar shouted. "Kelso, can't you hear that?"
She pulled out the connector leading to the flash drive, then shoved the data device in her pocket, moving swiftly across the room to the door.
Outside she could hear voices.
Fighting down the tremors in her fingers, she stepped out calmly into the dim corridor and walked at a steady, unhurried pace toward the
elevator bank. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, but she knew that the agency's internal security monitors possessed
subroutines that looked for abnormal body kinetics—if she ran, they would see it. She smothered the urge with a grimace and metered her
pace. Just a few more steps.
Behind her, she heard a voice call out. Drake. She knew it was him without having to turn around. Anna ignored him, kept moving. In a few
more seconds, she'd turn the corner and be at the elevators.
"Hey, stop!" called the other agent. "I'm talking to you! Stop right now!" Anna heard the rustle of a holster being snapped open, the click of a
safety catch flicking off. "I won't tell you again!"
She fled. It wasn't a conscious choice on her part, not something she was aware of doing on anything but the most base, animal-brain level; but
suddenly she was sprinting the rest of the distance down the corridor, her thoughts clattering inside her mind, the rush of new adrenaline
warring with the tidal drag of the stim crash. She couldn't think straight, she couldn't process. All she could do was run, run, run—
Anna raced around the corner and came face-to-face with Agent Tyler, wandering out of the break room past the elevators, stirring a cup of
dark coffee. "Kelso?" His face registered a moment of confusion.
"Stop her!" shouted Drake. That was enough to galvanize Tyler into action, and he let the cup drop, going for his service weapon.
Anna ignored him and dove for the open doors of the elevator, hand reaching for the controls. Her feet were just across the threshold when
Tyler snatched at the collar of her jacket and pulled hard. Some of her hair caught in his grip and sent a shock of pain through her head. A kick
landed in the back of her right knee and her leg buckled. She went down, catching a glimpse of herself falling and Tyler right on her in the
mirrored back of the elevator car.
Then she was on the floor, half in and half out of the lift, with a federal agent's handgun pressed into the small of her back. "You're under
arrest," said Drake.
Romeo Airport—Michigan—United States of America
The aircraft put down on the runway just as the sunset bled away across the landscape. No visible-spectrum landing lights were in operation,
and the pilot brought them in using a virtual headset rig that made it seem to him as if he were touching down in the middle of the day.
Romeo had gone back and forth between active and inactive over the last four decades, until it had quietly slipped into the hands of a minor
corporate consortium that, via a labyrinth of blinds and shell companies, was one cog in a far larger machine. The surrounding area was remote
enough that the local populace were sparse, but it was close enough to Detroit for the glow of the city's skyscrapers to be visible on the horizon,
the colors reflecting off the bottom of the low cloud base.
Deus Ex - Icarus Effect Page 14
