Anna frowned. "The FBI investigation turned up evidence that one of Skyler's maids was paid off by the Red Arrow triad."
"Pled innocent, though, right? Then what?"
Kelso recalled that the woman had died in prison, killed during a violent scuffle. Like so much about the Skyler hit, Anna had never accepted what had become the official version of events.
D-Bar went on. "The Tyrants got their info someplace else. I reckon you've probably been thinking that for a while, but you don't wanna go there, do ya?"
She glared at him. He was perceptive-she had to give him that. "If you're so goddamn clever, say it."
"I can do more than that," he told her. "I can show you. We can show you the truth about what you've suspected all along. That the Tyrants have a source inside the United States Secret Service."
"It's not possible," Anna said, without conviction. A chill ran through her. The very real possibility of someone being compromised within the agency made her feel sick inside.
D-Bar studied her carefully. "We came to you, Agent Kelso, because we can't prove any of that. But you can."
She shook her head. "I can't do anything. Even if you're right, I'm suspended."
"I'll get you back inside," he told her, with absolute, unshakable confidence.
"All right." It was a second before Anna realized she had spoken.
Knightsbridge-London-Great Britain
Namir gave him a room at the top of the town house, in the converted attic where white pine floors ranged up to tall, arched windows that looked out onto the London skyline.
Saxon left the lamps off and cracked open the window a little, letting in the night air along with the steady rush of the traffic out on Kensington
Gore. The distant rattle of a police aerodyne reached his ears, and he saw a saucer-shaped advertisement blimp caught like an errant cloud, drifting east toward Mayfair. The glow of the video billboards flanking the airship reflected off the rooftops, strings of commercials for high-end fashion, cybernetics, and consumer electronics raining silently down over the city.
The night was uncharacteristically warm, and as soon as he had settled in the room, Saxon stripped to the waist and found a place to sit cross legged by the freestanding mirror, checking himself over in every place that Gunther Hermann had laid his punches and kicks on him. He had a collection of ugly bruises, shallow cuts, and minor contusions, but nothing that could have been a broken or chipped bone. Saxon ran his flesh hand down the length of his cyberarm, checking maintenance seals and actuators. He made a few practice moves; the arm felt slightly off speed.
With a grimace, Saxon filled a tumbler of water from the filter carafe on the nightstand near the wide, shadowed bed; then he loaded a fresh dose of neuropozyne into an injector pen and took the shot in his arm.
He drained the glass as he stood at the window. What the hell just happened? he asked himself. For a moment, it seemed as if he was hanging over the ragged edge, that everything he was or could be was about to be snuffed out in an instant; and then the gun and Gunther's life had been in his hands.
Were the rounds in the pistol really blanks? If I had pulled the trigger, put a shot between the German's eyes, what would they have done?
It chilled him to consider a different truth from the one Namir had laid down as he took the weapon from him. Saxon's disquiet should have been silenced; he had passed a test down there in that room. In some strange way, he had bonded with the rest of the Tyrants.
So why doesn't it sit right? He almost asked the question out loud.
Saxon glanced up and saw the airship drift overhead. Up there, a woman's face was lit by rainbows of color, showing off a cascade of diamonds around her wrist. Her mouth moved and a marquee of words appeared in sequence on smaller video-screens all around her. What master do you serve?
He blinked, uncertain if his eyes were playing tricks on him.
The woman on the screen, flawless and fashion-model perfect, was looking right at him, as if the billboard was a window through which she was peering. Over her shoulder, he saw a virtual skyline mimicking the view from the tenth floor of the Hotel Novoe Rostov.
What master do you serve? she asked once again. The words shifted and changed like drifts of sand, transforming into a string of numerals.
The groupings matched an international sat-comm code.
Before he was even fully aware he was doing it, Saxon reached for his gear pack and recovered the spare vu-phone he kept for emergencies. It wasn't the slick, cutting-edge device the Tyrants had given him, just a store-bought disposable. He entered the digits and thumbed the DIAL key. A string of swift tones sounded from the earpiece, followed by a hum as the line connected Behind him, the bedroom door clicked open, and he spun from the window, cutting the call short, letting the phone drop.
In the light cast from the airship's advert-screens, Yelena Federova resembled some kind of shadow-wraith, a creature made out of flesh and darkness straight from fable. She stalked silently toward him, her black-and-steel legs catching the glow. Her eyes were hooded and he could not read them. Slowly, like a knife being drawn from a sheath, a low smile crossed her lips. The sullen glower that characterized her neutral mode of expression was gone, and instead Saxon saw an echo of the predatory thrill Federova had shown in the Rostov's lobby, after cutting down three men in as many seconds.
It came to him that he had failed the test. She had come to kill him, quietly and discreetly. Sparing Gunther's life had marked him as weak; he was going to be cut from the pack…
She halted a few steps from him, and then, with care, Federova pulled at the tabs holding the ballistic-cloth blouse closed over her chest. She let it fall free to the floor; beneath she wore nothing, and Saxon's gaze was drawn to the rise of her breasts, a small ebon cross hanging in the valley between them. Her tawny skin was marred only by the scarred disc of an old bullet wound. Then she shrugged off her short breeches and 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 with
out 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 rodeo, 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.
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