For a moment, they wrestled over command of the shotgun, but then Saxon got the angle and shoved hard, slamming the butt of the weapon into the officer's faceplate. It shattered and he cried out again.
Saxon snatched the shotgun and used the gel-round to put him down; the fat plug of bright pink resin frothed and foamed, expanding into a gooey, stringy mass that only a tailored solvent could dissolve. The lawman swore in a torrent of violent, gutter French to Saxon's back as he made for the stuttering ATV, where it lay upended on the lawns.
The quad bike was still operational, and Saxon flipped it, gunning the motor. As he set off down the slope, the vu-phone in his tac vest buzzed.
He slapped at the device, opening the channel. "What have you got, Janus?"
The reply was relayed to the mastoid comm. "A possibility. You must understand the situation is fluid and there's a lot of virtual traffic in this quadrant-"
"Save it," he snapped, leaning into the handlebars, fighting to control the pain from the wound in his gut. "The Swiss cops are throwing a net over this city and I don't have long before they take me down. I need answers now!" "I understand'," said the hacker. "Cross-referencing the code name 'Icarus' with known Illuminati holdings and surrogates yielded a large number of returnsbut only one of consequence. Statistically, it's your best shot at locating Anna Kelso, if she's still alive."
Saxon took the ATV across a service road and out across the railroad running parallel with the parkland. "Go on." In the distance, he could heard the rattle of approaching police helicopters.
"A vessel, registered to the DeBeers Foundation, a private yacht owned by a corporate interest Juggernaut has long suspected to be an
Illuminati front."
"Icarus is a boat? Namir must be using it as a secondary command post…"
"Exactly. And it's currently five miles from your present location, heading northeast at four knots. I'm sending you an image now."
Saxon toggled the brake and the quad bike skidded to a halt. "How the hell am I going to get out there?"
When Janus spoke again, there was a hard edge under the hacker's words. "Listen to me. I can't help you with this anymore. I've already gone well beyond my own… limits in order to assist you. There's a marina on the far side of the botanical gardens, close to your location. I suggest you appropriate some waterborne transport there and attempt to intercept the Icarus."
"What limits?" Saxon demanded, with a wince. "You know who these people are, Janus. You know what they are capable of. You can't back off now. You're in too deep. We all are."
The line was silent for a long moment, and Saxon began to wonder if the hacker had cut the connection and gone dark for the last time; but then the response came again. "I have done questionable things." The strange non-voice wavered, static lacing the tones, pushing them back and forth between male and female, high and low. "It's disturbing."
"I know what you mean," said Saxon with feeling.
"I'm trying to make amends. I don't know if I can do any more…"
"You can. Help me," he insisted. "Help Kelso. Help me save at least one life today."
The reply was firm. "This will be the last time. I'm tapping into the civil police network. I'm going to flag the Icarus with an Interpol stop and-search warrant, alert the Swiss. But I can't do any more to disrupt whatever plans the Tyrants have. That's up to you."
"Thanks." He hesitated. "Look, Janus…"
"No," said the hacker, anticipating the question forming in his mind. "You're never going to know me. I'm not ready to reveal myself yet.
Good luck, Ben."
Saxon frowned. "Yeah. You too," he replied; but the line had already been severed.
M V Icarus- Lake Geneva-Switzerland
The yacht's name was emblazoned on a brass plaque near the sundeck, between a spray of crystal ornaments and antique loungers. She frowned and kept moving aft, shouldering open a slatted door that led into the boat's tender garage.
The small bay extended across the width of the Icarus's hull; scuba gear, water skis, and a compact motor-launch hung from a complex set of lifting gears and equipment racks over her head, while a curved staircase led to the passenger decks above. One wall was a retractable gate for deploying the smaller craft, and inset in the wooden decking there was a circular dive hatch made of heavy-gauge polyglass, looking down a drop tube to the frothy waters of the lake. She hesitated over it. The rebreather implant in her chest was capable of keeping a human being going for several minutes without the need to take air, but could she risk exiting the boat this way? Through the glass she saw a churning chop of dark blue and white foam. The dive hatch was never designed to be used while the yacht was in motion-the second she hit the water, Anna would be exposed to the riptide from the powerful hydrojet motors propelling the Icarus. She had to find another escape route.
Skirting the patches of seawater on the slatted wooden deck, Anna scanned the space for anything she could use. With her elbow, she broke open the emergency case on the dash of the motor-launch, and greedily snatched up the flare launcher inside. The device was shaped like a pistol grip with no barrel; it was hardly a weapon, but she was in no position to be choosy.
Anna stuffed the flare gun into her pocket and pulled at a heavy duffel that lay discarded along the launch's keel, hoping that the contents might be something more useful. She pulled at the rope ties and the bag opened up to her.
Inside, D-Bar stared blankly into nothing, his face ashen. A purple-black contusion discolored the flesh around his throat where his neck had been twisted and broken.
She swore and jerked back. Dive weights clattered out of the duffel and onto the deck. For an instant, Anna's anger at the young hacker boiled over and she allowed herself to hate him for his betrayal; but then the emotion bled away and all she could see before her was the corpse of a frightened youth who had got in over his head.
He was not long dead, she guessed, examining the body. Only a matter of hours had passed since the double cross on the Mont Blanc bridge, and while Anna had been left to ride out her dreamless chemical sleep, Namir and the others had doubtless put D-Bar to the harshest of questions. Looking him over, she found more bruising and contusions; she tried to imagine what he had gone through, perhaps believing himself the equal of the Tyrants for the dispatch of Croix and the gift of her as his prisoner, believing that right up until the moment they decided to torture him.
The hacker would not have lasted long, and for all that he told Namir, all the secrets he gave up, the killer would have hurt him all the same, just to be certain he had not lied. What did he tell them? she wondered. The names of his Juggernaut cohorts? The locations of the New Sons of Freedom? It was troubling to think what could be done with such information.
"Patrick" she said, gently closing his eyes, "you stupid kid."
The words left her mouth as a ripple shimmered on one of the puddles across the deck, in the corner of her sight; and a coldly familiar sense of no longer being alone raced through her. Anna reached into the launch and her hand tightened around the shaft of a boathook.
Without warning, she spun in place and swung the wooden rod out in a fast arc. It swept through the air and collided with something invisible, splintering. In the next second, a ghost formed out of nothing and Federova batted the boathook away, sneering as she came in to attack the other woman.
Federova was so fast; in the apartment, the EMP charge had leveled the ground between the two of them, but here and now Anna Kelso was totally outclassed.
Out of blind fury and raw fear, Anna grabbed the gear rack above her head and hauled herself up. She kicked out to meet Federova as the other woman came in, and her heel connected with the assassin's face, knocking her aside. Before Federova could recover, Anna was running for the stairs, crashing up toward the main deck.
The assassin was directly on her heels as she emerged into the middle of an observation space, walled in on three sides by elegant glass windows. Velvet couches and master-cra
fted faux-Elizabethan tables were side by side with minimalist holographs and inset data consoles.
Anna grabbed at a footstool and hurled it behind her, trying to slow Federova down, but she missed and stumbled. The Tyrant woman was suddenly on her and she heard the soft hiss of augmented muscles. Anna came off her feet and Federova pitched her into the air.
She spun and crashed through a glass lamp, bouncing off the half-moon bar at the back of the room. Pain flared along her side as she plowed through an arrangement of glasses and liquor bottles. Air blasted out of her lungs in a croaking howl and she tipped over and down.
Dizzy, blood wet on her face where her earlier wound had reopened, Anna struggled into a crouch. There was broken glass everywhere she laid her hands. Blinking owlishly, she saw a bottle of bourbon lying on its side, and she grabbed it by the neck.
Anna rose as Federova came in to hurt her again, and brought down the bottle like a club. The assassin tried to deflect the hit away, but the glass shattered on her arm and she hissed in pain.
Despite herself, Anna showed teeth in a feral grin; to get something from the silent woman, even the smallest of utterances, was a little victory in itself.
The rich, brown liquid spattered across Federova and the curved bar, and she staggered back a step. That was all the time Anna needed to yank the flare launcher from her pocket.
She squeezed the trigger bar and a smoking dart chugged out into the air, skipping off the bar in a blare of sputtering phosphorous. Federova went for cover as the flare ignited the bourbon spills and carried on across the room, battering itself against the inside of the windows. Orange smoke, acrid and cloying, choked the air.
Coughing, Anna fired off another shot and clipped the Tyrant woman with it. Federova's bolero jacket instantly caught alight, red flames leaping up at her face.
Through the thickening haze and shrieking of the trapped flares, Anna stumbled blindly toward the windows, desperate to escape. Behind her, she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and the crackling chugs of a fire taking hold, as one of the couches became a torch.
Federova came out of the roiling smoke ahead of her, a furious revenant blocking her path. Her skin seared and her face twisted in hate, the
Tyrant looked like something spat from the fangs of hell.
The stolen jet ski rode low and fast over the wave tops, leaving the water in skipping blasts of power as it skimmed across the wake of the
Icarus. The stern of the yacht loomed high before Saxon, just as a glint of bright light flashed along the mid-deck. For a moment, he thought it was a reflection from the sun, but then it happened again, and this time thin plumes of orange smoke coiled from the cracked windows.
Saxon twisted the throttle and gunned the motor, bringing the jet ski around to approach from the near side, where the haze would hide his approach.
The voice on the radio repeated itself in French, English, and Mandarin, warning the Icarus to cut power and heave to, by the authority of the
Swiss civil police.
Namir's lip curled and he silenced the speaker, shooting an angry glare across the yacht's flying bridge as Barrett entered.
The big man's face was thunderous, and his scarred cheek was red with lines of blood, spilled like tear tracks from his eye. "What the hell is going on down there?" he demanded, jerking a thumb toward the aft. "The fire alarms are going crazy! Kelso wasn't on the mid-deck, so-"
"Yelena has her," Namir snapped. "She's cleaning up your mess."
"The bitch got the drop on me!" Barrett roared.
"Imbecile!" Namir shot back, with such force that the other man fell silent. "You underestimated the woman and she made you pay for it!"
Coils of smoke, black threads joining the flare fumes, drifted past on the wind. Fire-suppressor lights blinked across the control boards and
Namir could hear an alarm bell ringing somewhere beneath them. He advanced to the helm control and pulled the throttle levers back to the zero mark.
"What are you doin'?" said Barrett. "Where's the pilot?"
Namir nodded toward the rearward sky deck where the unmarked Tyrant veetol was waiting. "He's warming up the helo. We're abandoning ship." He ground out the words in annoyance. "This operation is turning into a clusterfuck! We have to extract now, while we can still salvage something." He glared out of the bridge's canopy. "Police launches are on the way. Our mission security has been compromised. Apparently someone alerted them as to our extralegal status."
"Saxon?"
"Does it matter?" he snarled. "Our objective was achieved, even if Taggart didn't die. The Humanity Front is in disarray, the media will report what we want them to say. We are done here."
"We're just gonna cut and run?" Barrett replied. "First we lose the jet and now this tub?"
"Let it burn," Namir told him. "The cost is nothing against the gains. We'll be across the border before the Swiss realize what has happened, and by the time they've doused the flames, the group will spin the truth to whatever best suits their needs."
Federova's fingers were like iron rods where they bored into Anna's flesh through the smoke-dirtied sleeves of her blouse, and each motion of her pushing and shoving her across the decks was a new flash of pain. The assassin worked a nerve point in her arm and it was like her skin had been doused in acid.
She gasped and kept moving, tasting blood in her mouth. Anna caught a brief glimpse of herself in the curve of the Icarus's gray glass windows as she passed; once upon a time she would have loved to find herself walking the decks of an elegant vessel like this, but now she looked like an apparition, some walking wounded left behind by the passing of a war.
Federova marched her to the upper tier and shoved her forward. The wind across the open sky deck caught her and she staggered. Across the flat space, the unmarked black flyer that had gathered her up from the Mont Blanc bridge was poised, ready for takeoff, rotor rings humming at idle. Namir and Barrett were waiting, and the big man's face lit up with a dark, hateful smile as he saw her approach. He took a step forward, flexing the thick, heavy digits of his machine hands.
Anna tried to back away, but there was nothing behind her but a curved line of steel rail and the slope of the flying bridge. The silhouette of the yacht angled away down to the main deck and the prow, the profile like a knife blade edge-on. Smoke wreathed the drifting vessel.
Namir held up a hand to halt Barrett before he could tear his payback from her. "I want Kelso intact," she heard him say, over the drone of the rotors. "If we can't interrogate her here, we'll do it at a black site."
"No…" She struggled again as Barrett grabbed her and pulled her along until she was almost off her feet. "No!" Anna threw punches and kicks, but they battered off the other man without effect.
A dark pit of terror opened up inside her chest. Until this moment, Anna had been able to hold on to the thinnest thread of hope, the slimmest chance that she could still find a way to escape from the Tyrants and survive. That hope disintegrated as she was dragged toward the helo, the hard, unflinching certainty falling down upon her that she would have no future, no respite, no escape "Hey!" Ahead, Namir rapped on the cockpit hatch, calling to the pilot. "Answer me!" He tugged at the handle and the canopy opened; the pilot's lifeless body shifted and spilled out onto the helipad. The dead man's neck was canted at an unnatural angle.
Anna saw a figure drop from the cover of the tail fin and jam a shotgun barrel into the meat of Namir's neck.
"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" said Saxon.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
M V Icarus- Lake Geneva-Switzerland
Namir froze, the weapon resting at the base of his skull; even with the nonlethal rounds loaded in the shotgun, a blast from point-blank range would still be enough to put him down.
"Benjamin…" He let out a sigh. "I take it Scott won't be making the rendezvous, then?"
"You'll see him soon enough." Saxon's finger tightened on the trigger. Adrenaline and pain coursed through him, and he
had to work to keep himself in check; all he wanted was to kill the man in front of him. But he had come this far, and across the sky deck he saw Barrett hoist Kelso off her feet, holding her in front of him like a human shield.
"Do you really want to do this now?" Namir asked him, his tone almost reasonable. "You can't win this."
Saxon's eyes narrowed. "Your wife. Your kids. Do they know what kind of man you are, Namir?" he snarled. "Do they know how much blood there is on your hands?"
Namir's voice was ice cold. "If you were a smarter man, you would understand. Every life I've taken has been to make theirs better. You and the woman? That's a cost I'll pay without even a moment of doubt."
The stink of smoke was everywhere. Belowdecks, the fire was taking hold, overwhelming the automatic suppression systems-but no one was leaving the Icarus until Saxon had what he came for.
"Ben" Kelso cried out a warning. "Federova-!" Barrett silenced her with a jerk of his wrist.
Crouched behind the helo, Saxon hadn't seen the Russian assassin. She did her ghost trick again, shifting visibility as the EM aura of her cloak hazed the air around her. In a split second, he sensed the prickle of the stealth augmentation's field as she came at him. He shoved Namir away and turned the shotgun before Federova could plunge a fractal-edged combat blade into his chest. The weapon boomed twice and glutinous plugs of tangler-gel hit the assassin in the gut and sternum. The impact force was enough to blow her back off her feet and send the woman skidding over the polished deck.
Spitting like an angry cat, Federova tore at the sticky mess, downed and for the moment out of the fight.
Namir didn't hesitate to use the assassin's distraction and whirled on Saxon, the crimson musculature of his augmented arms bunching as he threw a blow at the other man. The joints pivoted in unnatural ways and he swept down two high-low arcs, the first fist clipping Saxon's temple, the second knocking the police-issue shotgun from his grip. The weapon rattled away and vanished over the side.
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