by Greg Rucka
“This man,” Jo shouted. “He’s wanted for murder. He did a family of four back in Tokyo.”
The bouncer’s scowl quavered for a moment, then resettled, resuming its previous defiance. But the quaver had been enough, and Jo started to move past him. The bouncer started to move to block her, and she put her index and middle fingers against his collar bone, pressing in and down, and he was on his knees before he could offer either resistance or protest.
Jo went down the stairs, emerging in a hallway, its floor covered with worn red carpet, the walls coated in peeling wallpaper. Eight doors lined the corridor, four on each side, with small plasma monitors wired over their frames, displaying the action taking place on the stage above. Five of the monitors were lit, three were dark.
She slipped the Maas from behind her back, moving into a low-ready shooter’s stance. She wanted Leung alive, not only to prove to herself that she could bring him in, but also because the bounty was better on a living, breathing perp. But if it came to it, she’d put him down, and for some reason, that certainty didn’t bother her at all. She supposed it was because that, like so many others, it had been a lesson from her father.
“If it’s them or you, Jo, it should always, always be you,” he’d say. “That’s no contest.”
She approached the first of the doors from the side, keeping against the wall rather than moving in front of it, and tapped on its surface with the barrel of the Maas.
“Leung Cha-wei!” Jo shouted in Cantonese. “I’m here to take you in! Come out with your hands up!”
There was no response, but that didn’t surprise Jo. She’d yet to encounter a situation, either in simulation or real life, where the demand had ever worked. It was like stories about UFOs—maybe nice to believe in, but nothing you’d want to bet your life on.
After waiting three seconds, Jo stepped out from the wall, pivoted, and smashed her boot into the door, just below the knob. The frame splintered, the door separating, slamming open, and she had the Maas in high-ready, but there was no one within who needed shooting.
She moved to the next door, again taking position to the side of it rather than in front of it, prepared to repeat the process. With her back against the wall, she could feel the music from above thumping through the building, the bass trying to crawl into her chest and rattle her lungs.
Jo reached out to tap the door with the barrel of the Maas and make her demand, and she’d hit it once and gotten as far as “Leung—” when the response came, in the form of a shotgun blast. The door disintegrated to splinters, and Jo pulled back; despite herself, she could feel the smile coming to her face.
That’s more like it, she thought, and took three steps back, further along the wall. She did it just in time. The second blast tore through the wall where she’d just been standing.
On impulse, Jo screamed with as much pain and suffering as she could manage. “Son of a bitch! Ow! Ah, dammit!”
She heard the sound of the shotgun, another round being jacked into the chamber, and laughter from within the room.
“Bitch!” someone shouted in English from inside. “You think that cops-and-robbers bullshit works around here?”
“Oh, God, get me an ambulance,” Jo moaned piteously. “I’m bleeding here, God dammit!”
There was another laugh, and then Leung swung out of the doorway and into the hall, the shotgun at his shoulder, the barrel canted down in anticipation of where he would find his target. He was shirtless and heavily tattooed, and Jo could see the impressions at his temples and on his chest where he’d worn his VR rig.
He’d just realized that he hadn’t hit her at all when she punched him in the face with the palm of her left hand. His head snapped back into the doorframe, then bounced forward, and Jo kicked at his right knee while grabbing the shotgun with her left hand. Both moves worked precisely as she’d hoped, and she ended up with the shotgun, and Leung ended up on the ground.
She moved around behind him, taking a second to glance into the room before propping the shotgun against the hallway wall. A young Chinese woman was inside, dressed in bad lingerie, seated at the control deck to the hacked DeathMatch system. From the choice of lingerie alone, Jo could tell she wouldn’t be a threat.
With the Maas against the back of Leung’s neck, Jo said, “Hands around, asshole, you know the drill.”
Leung obliged grudgingly, and she cuffed his wrists together behind his back. Then she pulled the Maas away, tucking it once more into her pants at the small of her back, and picked up the shotgun. It was a Kangxi Armaments civilian model, the type VI, pump action. Nothing fancy, but more than capable of doing its job. Jo hefted the shotgun, hand around the stock and finger resting to the side of the trigger, keeping the barrel pointed at the ceiling.
“On your feet,” she told Leung.
“C’mon, don’t do this,” Leung said, doing as ordered. “It’s not what you think, I didn’t do those kids.”
“I don’t care, get moving. To the stairs, keep it slow and easy.”
Leung started forward, turning his head slightly, trying to look back at Jo without completely losing the ability to see where he was going. “The guy worked for Beck-Yama, lady. They’re setting me up.”
“Again, you mistake me for someone who cares.”
Leung shook his head. “I’ve got money. You want money? I can get you money.”
“I don’t want money.”
“Sure you do. You’re a hunter, right? You’re doing it for the clink, that’s it. Seriously, let’s deal. Anything you want, anything at all. You just tell me what it is you really, really want.”
“I really, really want you to shut up.” She gave him a shove forward to the base of the stairs, then started to ascend after him. They were about halfway up when she caught sight of the bouncer. He was facing them, blocking the head of the stairs and her view of the room beyond. That struck her as odd at the same moment she realized that the club now sounded wrong, off somehow, but she could still feel the music playing, hear it thudding through the floors and walls.
No voices, she realized. No one’s talking.
“Down,” she ordered Leung.
“Huh?”
“Get down!”
He started to turn to look at her, bewildered, and past him, at the top of the stairs, Jo saw the bouncer collapse, and then she saw the man who had been standing behind him. He was tall and broad-chested, and would have appeared so even if he hadn’t been wearing body armor and a tactical vest strapped over it. His uniform, head to toe, was jet black, as were his helmet and face-shield. He wore a combat knife—one of the new laser-honed titanium jobs—sheathed at his belt, a semiautomatic in a holster on his thigh, and held a Fairchild DW-P5, tricked out with laser sight, scope, and suppressor, in his hands.
It occurred to Jo that she wasn’t just in trouble. She was in very big, very deep trouble.
The man was a dataDyne Shock Trooper, not one of the response-team types she had dealt with before, not one of the CORPSEC guards, but a dataDyne elite, one of the cream of the crop of the hypercorp’s security apparatus. The Shock Troopers were recruited out of special-operations units from around the world. Everything about them was the very best, from their gear to their training to their tactics.
All of this imprinted in less than a fraction of a second, adrenaline feeding these facts and more into her brain. The stairs were a death trap, a fatal funnel, and the Shock Trooper wasn’t alone, there had to be at least three more of them, and that was only if they’d been deployed as a single brick. She had no means of retreat, she had no means of escape, and even thinking all of these things, she still found time to curse herself for getting cocky, for not securing an escape route before entering the club.
The Shock Trooper brought his submachine gun to his shoulder, and Jo winced as the beam from the laser sight crossed her vision, then settled on her forehead.
“Jesus Christ,” Leung said. “I’m caught already, Jesus Christ!”
“
Phoebe Charlotte,” the Shock Trooper said, his voice distorted through the speakers in his helmet. “You are being detained by dataDyne forces under the 2017 United Nations Charter on Global Commerce, article eighteen, subsection seven, paragraph seven. Throw down your weapon. We are authorized to use lethal force if you resist. Surrender and you will not be harmed.”
“I think he’s talking to you,” Leung told her.
“Shut up,” Jo muttered, and then, disgusted with both herself and the situation, she threw down the shotgun, letting it slide down the stairs behind her.
“Place your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers,” the Shock Trooper ordered.
Jo complied, trying to keep control of the situation. “You’ve got the wrong girl, gentlemen. I’ve no idea who this ‘Phoebe Charlotte’ is, but I’m not—”
“Remain silent, miss,” the Shock Trooper barked. “Any further attempts at communication will be considered resistance and dealt with accordingly.”
Leung stood a little straighter and said, “Uh, hey?”
“Yes?” the Shock Trooper said.
“Can I get out of the line of fire?”
“Is your name Leung Cha-wei?”
“Yes, yeah, it is.”
“Mister Leung, please come to the top of the stairs.”
Leung started up the stairs, turning his head to look back at Jo long enough to give her a big, canary-just-got-eaten grin. Jo watched the Shock Trooper step back far enough to let Leung pass, saw a second Trooper standing behind the first, just off to the right.
“Over here, please, Mister Leung,” the second Trooper said.
“Here?”
“Yes, sir, thank you,” the second Trooper said, and shot him in the chest with a burst from his Fairchild.
Leung toppled to one side, and from the main floor of the club, Jo heard a scattering of screams. She felt her senses broadening again, felt the dilation start once more, the sounds and the smells and sights all sharpening in her perception, and she didn’t want it this time, she tried to fight it, but it happened anyway. When the first Shock Trooper spoke, it was as if he was standing at her shoulder, shouting his orders.
“Turn around and back up the stairs slowly. Make no sudden moves, make no attempt to escape, or you will be shot.”
A sense of panic began to grow in her chest, the realization that she was trapped, that she was caught, that she wouldn’t be able to escape. She turned, fighting to control the emotion, stepping backwards carefully, one step at a time, and she was at the top when she heard the sound of metal rasping on metal, the sound of handcuffs, and she started involuntarily. They would cuff her, they would bind her, she wouldn’t be able to move.
She felt the barrel of one of the Fairchilds brush against the back of her neck, heard the first Shock Trooper telling her to hold still. A pair of hands touched her, starting at her hips, immediately finding the Maas and pulling it free. The hands returned, ran up her back, over her neck, through her hair, then down her arms. They reached around her front, moved with speed and deliberation down her chest, over her hips again, between her thighs, then down her legs.
“Clean,” she heard the second Trooper say.
“Cuffs,” the first one said, and she heard the squeak of plasticuffs being freed from their dispenser, felt the hands return, this time to take hold of her right wrist, and that was it, it was all she could stand. She was suddenly seeing herself pinned, unable to move, hearing herself sobbing as her spine was broken again, feeling the tremor and stab of vertebra after vertebra shattering in quick succession.
She screamed, a burst of outrage and fear and fury, twisting and ducking all together, turning her wrist in the Trooper’s grip until she was holding him. She heaved, flipping him over her shoulder, sending him crashing down the stairs. She began to spin around, and red light exploded behind her eyes, and she staggered, felt gravity trying to pull her down. Another blow hit her shoulder, just to the left of her neck, and she dropped to her knees.
She looked up to see the first Shock Trooper, and now two more, and behind them another two, all of them rushing at her. The stock of the Fairchild came down again, caught her in the jaw, and then she was lying facedown, smelling ashes and spilled booze. The hands came back, more of them, and again they were grabbing her wrists, and she began thrashing wildly, kicking, flailing, screaming, until the weight of two of the Troopers was resting entirely on her back, pinning her to the floor.
Once more they were trying to get her hands bound, and this time Jo had nothing left with which to fight. She tasted the blood leaking from her mouth. She lifted her head, seeing the combat boots of the Shock Trooper before her, seeing the club. The Lisboa was empty now but for them.
Except she thought she saw Jonathan Steinberg through the lingering cigarette haze, thought she saw him coming forward, coming toward her. She wondered how badly she’d been hit in the head, what sort of damage had been done to her mind that she would imagine him here, in his CI ops gear, raising a Fairchild of his own to his shoulder. She saw the line from the weapon’s laser sight cutting through the smoky air, saw it paint a dot on the side of one of the Shock Troopers’ necks.
She imagined him opening fire.
CHAPTER 17
Club Lisboa—48 Rua Praia Antonio, Macau, People’s Republic of China October 6th, 2020
There were two bricks, eight men, and he and Rogers had neutralized the two troopers outside before Steinberg made entry. Even with backup and the escape vehicle secured, he didn’t like the odds, but there were two factors that mitigated the scenario for him. The first, and most important, was that they had maintained the element of surprise. The second was Jo, his faith in her skill, his knowledge of just how lethal she could be when she chose to.
The sight of her shocked him as he came through the door, therefore, and made his heart ache and his throat tighten, made the taste of his adrenaline all the more bitter in his mouth. They had her on the ground, surrounded, two of them literally with their knees on her back. Six men in full tactical, six Shock Troopers in their body armor designed to both protect and terrify, and it made Joanna Dark look impossibly small to Steinberg; absurdly, it made him want to protect her all the more. He saw blood leaking from her nose and her mouth, saw her still trying feebly to get back to her feet, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
It was that she was begging them to let her move. The air in the club was still thick with the sound of music, a recorded techno beat that poured from speakers in the ceiling and on the stage. Steinberg lost her words in the noise, catching only fragments, but he understood that Jo was pleading, screaming incoherently, and he was certain she didn’t even know she was doing it.
“Hamburger, go hot,” he told Rogers over his throat mike, and then he drew a bead on the neck of the Trooper closest to him. Even the necks on the Shock Troopers were armored, Steinberg knew that from experience, but he’d expected Velez would send her best to apprehend Jo, and thus he’d prepared accordingly. The rounds loaded in each of his weapons, in each of his spare mags, were CI proprietary, developed by the Armorer’s partner in crime and assistant, Lawrence Foster. They were armor-piercing, high-velocity, with a high-density core of some exotic metal that Foster had gotten his devious hands on.
Generally, Steinberg avoided armor-piercing rounds. They sacrificed stopping power in exchange for penetration, and he’d much rather take one hit that put a hostile down than six that would cause the target to bleed out ten minutes later, after the fighting was over. But if his time in the Rangers had taught him anything, it was to take what he could get, and to always bring the right tool for the job. His Fairchild was set to three-round bursts, just to be on the safe side.
Rogers came back in his ear: “Hot dog, up and running.”
Steinberg opened fire and drove a cluster of rounds through the Shock Trooper’s neck. The element of surprise helped, and he was able to bead and fire another two bursts at the second of the six before they’d begun to scatte
r. The first burst hit the Trooper high in the chest, the second burst climbing to punch through the faceplate of his helmet.
Then Steinberg dove for cover as the remaining four poured return fire in his direction. He heard glassware shattering, wood splintering, but the reports from the weapons—his, theirs, all of them—were silent behind the incessant throb pouring from the speakers.
Steinberg ducked low behind a blackjack table, putting his shoulder into it and heaving, sending it onto its side. Pieces of green and red felt puffed into the air, and he felt the table vibrate with the impact of multiple rounds. In the nowdead monitors suspended above the stage, he saw the reflection of one of the Shock Troopers, saw him freeing a grenade from his harness. Steinberg lunged out from behind the table, loosing another three bursts, and two of them went to target, cutting the man’s thighs and belly. The Trooper fell, the grenade bouncing from his hand, handle and pin still firmly in place.
The move had cost him. The three remaining Troopers had all been moving from cover to cover, using tables, the dance stage, the bar to keep themselves concealed and protected. They were about to flank him. He cast around desperately, trying to find a way out, then broke his cover a second time and dove for one of the booths along the opposite wall. He felt, rather than heard, the shots that chased after him, and he thought he might make it, that he might survive the night.
He came up short.
Well, this is a damn stupid way to die, Jonathan Steinberg thought. His mind, fed with his adrenaline, drew time taut, made the seconds stretch longer and longer, until he found himself waiting for the bullets he knew were coming, found himself wondering why he hadn’t felt the punch of the killing round. What’re they waiting for?
He’d never stopped moving, had reached the booth and the cover provided by one of the benches. Steinberg turned, coming up on one knee, ready to fire again.
Except there was no need to, none at all. There weren’t three Shock Troopers standing; there weren’t any still standing.
