I stepped out into the main room and stopped, blinking, my jaw probably somewhere down around my knees from the sight of what was waiting.
Six big black barrels waited in the apartment’s entry, all arranged around a central device that looked like a couple of foot lockers stacked one on top of the other. There were wires crossing the whole damned thing, and one leading to the doorknob that was tight with tension. Even for an amateur like me, what I was looking at was clear.
It was a bomb.
One big enough to destroy the whole damned building.
Chapter 71
“You’ll need to look the part,” Philip said, watching Janus as the old man buttoned his own shirt with shaking hands. “You will do exactly as I say, in the moment I say it.” The old man nodded fervently, the lines of his face deeper than they had been only the day before. The shadows in the room lay long upon him, and his straw-thin grey hair hung limply over his forehead.
“How long will you be gone?” Liliana asked, her knives at rest and neatly sheathed. She did not look like she cared, but he could see the look in her eyes, the hungry one. This was what they had been waiting for, what he had promised her when he’d recruited her to his plan.
“A couple of hours,” Philip answered, not bothering to look into the probabilities for himself. They always shifted on trips such as these, and he preferred to keep the focus where it needed to be. The more probabilities he examined, the more convoluted things became in his head. The farther forward one looked, the easier it was to get overwhelmed, to watch the courses branch out on an ever-widening delta—
It hurt his head to even consider it. Clarice had gone farther in that realm than he, had told him one night with shaking hands of her own that she had seen it, had seen—
Philip felt his chest grow tight and put the memory aside. He forced the smile back to his face, remembering that the triumph was not far now. All he needed to do was focus on the near term, to keep a weather eye out for the close-at-hand probabilities. That would keep him safe, that and the knowledge and preparation with which he had approached the entire matter.
“Are you ready?” he asked Janus, who stood still, shuddering, while Liliana put a tweed jacket over his shoulders with surprising delicacy. The old man gave only the smallest hint of a nod. “Good,” Philip said. “Then let’s begin.”
Chapter 72
I’d nicked a card off Mary Marshwin’s desk, to use a word out of the British parlance. It had her number on it, and as I hurried my happy ass out the gaping hole in Philip Delsim’s booby-trapped flat’s wall, I dialed like mad. When she answered, I didn’t even let her get halfway through her greeting before I cut her off. “It’s Sienna. I tracked Philip Delsim back to his last known address and there’s a big-ass bomb here.”
Her Scottish accent came over the phone as comically exaggerated. “Who is this?”
“Sienna Nealon,” I said.
“Och, dear Lord,” she said. “You found what?”
“A big damned bomb.” I read off the address and could hear her scrawling on a paper, repeating everything under her breath as I spoke it. “It’s huge. Wired to the front door of the flat and big enough to at least level the building, if not a whole city block.”
“How did you find this place of his?” Marshwin asked. “How do you know so much about this?”
“We don’t have time to discuss it,” I said tightly. “A Cassandra like him can see the future, at least partially, and that means I need to figure out how to catch him. I need to come at him from the blind side.”
“None of that makes any sense,” she said on the other end of the line. “What the bloody hell is a Cassandra?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Just deal with the bomb.”
“Bastard just keeps widening his swath, doesn’t he?” I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one she was talking about, the curse was so deeply implied in her tone.
“He’s going to be widening a damned crater if anyone goes through that front door,” I said. “Have them come in through the adjoining apartment. I’ll leave the door cracked.” I adjusted it just so as I entered the smelly hallway, wrinkling my nose as I did so.
“Where will you be?” she asked.
“Trying to find his blind side,” I said, hurrying back toward the stairwell, my footsteps echoing down the empty hall. “I wouldn’t want to cause you any problems, after all.”
“A giant bomb in the middle of my city,” she said, “no, that’s no problem at all.” She hung up on me before I could properly protest that it wasn’t me who built the damned thing.
Philip had covered his ass again. He just kept doing that, I reflected as I thumped down the stairs. For every action I made, he seemed to have a plan in advance. Come at him at Angus Waterman’s house, he booby-traps the place and lets me blow my own leg off. Chase him after the gallery robbery, he and his Wonderfriends ambush me, toss me in a dumpster and leave me to die with a slit throat and more perforations than a serving of Swiss queso. I attack his headquarters, he falls back and tosses me one of his dogs without so much as a hint of remorse. Then he chucks some poor bastard off a rail platform so he can escape with his injured hostage.
I crinkled my nose at that one. He must have really wanted Janus to suffer if he was willing to drag him along like that. Clearly he didn’t care all that much about human life, given how quickly he’d dispatched the poor guy in the wheelchair, but to go to the inconvenience of making his escape with Janus in tow rather than just cutting his throat to the bone and being done with it? That was a serious level of loathing.
Where did it come from?
I hit the street and emerged in the middle of a construction area as I came out the front door. A bunch of guys in hard hats were working around me, and I felt the steady, thrumming vibration of a jackhammer going off to my left. The sidewalk was completely covered with tarps and scaffolding, and in addition to the work they were doing on the ground, they were also redoing the facade of the building. At least, for now they were. Once the bomb squad got here, they’d be on a layoff.
I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, not really caring about the hard hat regulations in Greater London, letting the vibrations seep in while I thought. I’d just nearly walked into a trap, a bomb big enough to maybe even kill me. Probably. No coming back from that. If I’d been just a hair or two more enraged and less cautious, I’d have flown in there at full speed for sure. A couple days of getting bushwhacked repeatedly had made me exercise more caution than was the norm.
Still, this whole thing, this whole trap, it had a different feel to it. And with the thrum of the jackhammer vibration, it occurred to me what it was.
I’d very nearly just been walked into it. By someone I trusted.
Like someone had turned the jackhammer loose on the back of my head to shake loose a stubbornly-wedged thought, it occurred to me why Karthik had sounded so stilted over the phone. I’d thought it had been because he had been sleeping, but he wasn’t sleeping at all—
I cursed myself for an idiot. After all, where would someone who had a mad-on for Omega, who hated Omega, where would they go if they lost their own headquarters…?
I felt a surge of fury, the burning feeling of long-accumulating anger and desire for sweet, sweet revenge. I glanced around the construction site around me, and my eyes fell on a pile of rebar, stacked neatly along one of the walls in lengths almost four feet long.
I made my way over to the pile and grabbed a piece, folding it neatly until it broke in two, leaving me with one for each hand. I swung them through the air, flurrying off a quick practice round in the way I used to use my eskrima sticks. They cut through the air with purpose, crisp as if I had been practicing for the last two years instead of letting everything slide, letting my skills get slack while the world came down around me.
It was time to get back to basics.
I flew into the sky, blithely ignoring the sonic boom that cracked through the air.
Chapte
r 73
Philip stood with Janus at the iron gate of the Highshire Bank when opening time rolled around. They were there a few minutes early, owing to Philip’s planning more than anything. Seeing the future was quite helpful when it came to predicting the best traffic route.
As the guard rolled back the gate and opened the path into the lobby, Philip stood as calm as he could manage, just behind Janus. The old man stood with his head down, and Philip kept a close watch on his immediate future. He only bothered watching the next twenty minutes or so, because that was all that concerned him. Any longer than that and he wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation or keep an eye on events around him, because of the immersive nature of the future. It was always in motion, and it was easy to walk down a street and try to take in the entire future of a person you passed.
Sometimes that was helpful, especially when it a lovely lass who might have a predisposition to immediate intimacy. Sometimes it was less helpful, such as when it showed you a vision of the horrific, soul-rending deeds that a person was off to commit. That had always bothered Clarice more than it bothered Philip, though. He’d long since learned certain actions helped abate any emotion that were dredged up by those sort of glimpses; for example, the first time he’d glimpsed the future of a pedophile on the street, he’d ambushed the man in a nearby alley and crippled him for life.
Clarice had never crossed such a line; he could read it in her future as surely as she had read what he would do in his own.
The gate clanking open cued Philip to poke Janus slightly in the shoulder, stirring the old man into motion. He walked slump-shouldered, his steps shuffling. Truly, he did look like an old man now. Philip had thought he had been worn before, but now he was a disastrous mess, a senior citizen walking with only the purpose that had been given to him by fear.
The bank was a small one, a prized front for less legitimate elements of society because of their failure to ask pertinent questions. Their reputation was well known in certain circles and probably whispered about in the realm of law enforcement. As yet, through either bribery or luck, the long arm of the law had not reached out for them at all.
After today, Philip did not care whether the law tap-danced on their bloody genitals with a pair of steel-soled shoes.
“Mr. Janus.” A man in a suit stood in the middle of the bank’s sumptuous lobby. For a small location, it was certainly posh: a two-story water feature fell over a stone inscription of the bank’s logo, with a private banking section upstairs behind white-clouded glass. “Is there something I can help you with today?” The man was an obsequious sort of bastard, inclining his upper body forward enough to appear solicitous to the needs of his client.
Janus cleared his throat, taking his time to speak. When he did, he sounded distinctly… frail. “Indeed, Mr. Glaser. I need to make a wire transfer.”
“Ah, please,” the helpful Mr. Glaser said, moving his head in such a way that a thinly obvious comb-over showed itself as he moved, “right this way, up to the private bank and we can accommodate that request.” He smiled and stretched an arm out to indicate an elevator in a private alcove. “Who is your associate?”
“My name is Mr. Baker,” Philip lied, giving Glaser a smooth smile. “I’m helping Mr. Janus iron out his affairs.”
“Are you his solicitor?” Glaser asked, not missing a beat.
“His successor,” Philip said as they stepped into the elevator. “I’m taking over for Mr. Janus and helping him close out his accounts.”
“Ah, I see,” said Glaser as the elevator door closed, locking them tightly in the box as it started to move. “How… fortunate for you.”
“Indeed,” Philip said, keeping his eyes on the steel doors in front of him and his mind firmly on the immediate future of Janus. “I can feel my fortunes rising even now.” The elevator thrummed as it carried them upward.
Chapter 74
I crashed through the window of the Primus’s office at Omega headquarters—my old office—not bothering to do much in the way of slowing down. The window shattered inward and I tilted as I came in, shooting right through the open door into the bullpen. I was pretty sure anyone who was here would be alerted to my arrival by the explosive nature of my entrance, but I was relying on surprise rather than giving a damn about sneakiness. There was no good way to sneak into this place anyway, other than maybe gently removing the glass from one of the windows and creeping in.
And maybe I just didn’t have the patience for that.
I didn’t hear anything, so I shot back into the Primus’s office and looked straight at the bookshelf. It was closed, the copy of Hard Times back in its place, so I pulled it and let the door open.
Then I drifted into the stairwell and hovered in place, looking down.
Nothing.
I could hear motion in the downstairs room, and I let myself drift slowly toward the concrete floor, threading my way through the staircase without touching anything. I made no noise, disturbing nothing but the air as I passed. I wondered if it was possible that my entry through the office window had gone unheard; this was several stories down, after all, and the bookshelf had been closed. It was possible all the distance and heavy insulation had kept them from hearing my approach, especially since now I was virtually silent.
I kept living in that hope until I reached the bottom of the stairs and peeked into the room to see Karthik chained to a chair, his eyes wide and staring straight at me in the entry.
He was missing—by a conservative estimate—about half of his skin.
I didn’t rush in to go to him, because that’s what unthinking fools do. While I had certainly played the part of an unthinking fool a few times in my life, in this case I was trying not to get hit by a sidewinder again.
And there were definitely a couple of them in play.
I kept my position, eyes barely peeking around the door’s frame, locked on Karthik. His moved, subtly, to my right, telling me exactly where my enemy was waiting.
Thanks, Karthik.
I pulled Wolfe to the forefront of my mind, knowing that if knife-lady was in there, I’d need his assistance more than anything. I thought about bringing Eve to the party, with her nets of light, and immediately dismissed the thought.
Liliana Negrescu was going to try to kill me. She was unlimited in her viciousness, cold in her approach, and skilled by her training.
I was behind in my training, only now becoming frosty in my approach again, and my viciousness had been constrained by my government job’s limitations for the last couple years.
One of those could go by the wayside immediately, and I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which I threw out the window before I came roaring into that room.
I smashed through the concrete wall, leading with my shoulder. I felt it break and felt Wolfe’s power stitch it back together even as I collided with something on the other side, knocking them down as I entered. I landed and staggered, the injuries from my surprise entry taking a few seconds to heal. I turned, placing myself between Liliana and Karthik.
“Whaddup, bitch?” I asked as I stood there, watching her pick herself up from beneath a pile of shattered concrete. Her dark hair had turned grey-white with the powder and dust from the busted wall, and her skin looked as white as mine had been when I’d done that damned TV interview with Gail Roth. Which I still regretted to this day.
Liliana rose, her knives still gripped tightly in her hands. She hadn’t lost them in my attack, which was both surprising and annoying. I’d broken through a concrete wall and hit her; you’d think that would have been enough to dislodge them, but no.
I gripped my makeshift eskrima sticks tightly in my hands, felt the ridges of the rebar against my palms, a little sweat and a little dust forming a layer of grit between me and my weapons. I came at her hard.
My first strike hit her wrist, but it didn’t break, surprisingly. It was a glancing blow that she pulled away from, letting out a little cry of pain. I expected the knife to go fly
ing, but to her credit, she still held on. She danced back, out of my range, and I followed, pursuing doggedly as she moved toward the door.
She stumbled on the wreckage of the concrete I’d left as I entered, and I swooped in on her. My speed was superior, and I tapped her in the ribs with enough force to hear them breaking from where I stood. She tried to riposte, but the range advantage was all one side, and she grunted in pain from the movement. This time I pulled back, leaving her to favor her side as she stood, slightly hunched, protecting the ribs I’d just broken.
“You’re different,” she said in a cold voice, keeping her distance from me, blades extended. The fact she hadn’t dropped one yet was incredibly impressive, really. Most people can’t hang on to something small like a knife through searing pain like she had to be experiencing. “You’re fighting differently.”
“Before I was playing by rules I didn’t believe in,” I said, meeting her eyes with my own. Before I might have looked away, but now I was anchored on them. I didn’t need to watch her body; her eyes told me everything I needed to know about her. They were the eyes of a predator.
Like mine.
“I know something of this myself,” she said, still hunched to one side. She watched me, carefully, and I knew she was going to make her move a second before she did it.
But I never could have predicted the move she made.
She jumped straight up as I settled into a defensive stance. I expected her to come at me, to go left or right and blindside me, trying to catch me with speed—even though we’d established I had her overmatched in that department.
Instead she went vertical.
And clung to the ceiling.
“Son of a…” I murmured as she began to skitter across the concrete ceiling like a spider. Now it made sense why she hadn’t let go of the knives. I’d seen her kind before in the form of a guy named Henderschott, a man whose skin could anchor itself to any surface. In his case, he used it to attach steel plates to his body with his power, keeping them effectively welded to his flesh as protection.
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