As Liane crawled out of the narrow opening in the wall, she looked around their sanctuary, reflecting grimly on how much her life had changed. As an Agent, one of the most valuable
commodities within Libertas’ arsenal, she’d been safely ensconced within expensive flats and state-of-the-art training facilities. A far cry from this crumbling, abandoned building devoid of any measure of comfort. There were two mattresses on the floor, a supply of canned food beside a solar-powered hot plate, and a carefully maintained stock of weapons. Nothing else; there was no point. They would move on soon enough to reduce the chance of the Agency finding them and could risk having nothing but the bare necessities.
Seth sat on the floor, stripping off his soaked boots and socks and breathing hard from the short climb. He pulled up his shirt, revealing a large, healing scar across his middle. To the left of it were two angry red marks from the electric prongs. He touched them and winced, saying, “That’s going to bruise.”
Liane fetched a small black case from their supplies, returning to sit cross-legged beside him. Drawing out a fresh needle, she filled it with clear liquid from a vial and said, “This will max you out on painkillers for today. You need to start weaning yourself off this stuff.”
Seth extended his arm to her, grimacing even from the small movement. “I’ll try.”
Liane injected the contents of the needle into his vein, teeth sunk into her lower lip as she focused on the task. Seth let out a sigh, relaxing as the drugs took effect. She removed the needle, capping it and putting it in a disposal bag, “Next time we’re in the city, we should try to get into a hospital and steal a tissue
regenerator. Chances are we’ll need it in this fight.”
Seth nodded, pulling his shirt back down and saying, “Let’s talk before we do anything else.”
Liane shifted to face him, regarding him expressionlessly.
“You’ve had more time to think about my idea. Have you
reconsidered it?”
Liane shook her head. “I’ve told you before that you’re free to run, but I’m not going to leave England. Not until the Agency is gone for good.”
“I know you want to stop them,” Seth said. “But you’re talking about going to war with the most lethal force in the country, and we barely survived our last encounter with them.”
“They still have the technology to make more of the Strain, Seth. Just because I burned down one lab doesn’t mean they can’t rebuild and make more soldiers like me.” Her gaze pierced into him as she asked, “And apart from us, who else is there to stand against them?”
Seth sighed. “No one.”
“Then I’m staying,” she said, “Until the job is done.”
He glanced over at their meager stash of food, noting, “Looks like beans and rice again tonight.”
“And more rain,” she added, standing to pull back a ragged curtain and look out into the darkness to the ruins beyond. Above them, dark clouds were swirling, flashes of lightning illuminating the night sky.
Seth sighed, standing as he said, “Right; you work more on getting into the Agency’s system. I’ll make dinner.”
He headed to the hot plate while Liane began peeling off her wet clothes, spreading them out to dry. When she was down to just a tank top and leggings, Liane sat on the edge of her mattress and pulled one of the computers towards her. The battery was running low; their solar chargers had been bought on the black market and were so piss-poor, they only offered sixteen hours of power at most. Liane sighed, knowing she’d have to venture into the city soon and risk capture to fully charge it. There was no avoiding it, not when she was working on hacking into the Agency’s computer systems. It had been her constant task since their escape, though she hadn’t made much progress. Frowning down at the line of green code, she cracked her knuckles and went to work.
She was still bent over the laptop an hour later when Seth
carried over a steaming bowl of food. He handed it to her, sitting down and asking, “How’s it going?”
“I’ve found a path,” she said, blowing on the food to cool it. “But everything is password protected. Even with a brute force program, it would take months to crack, so I’m trying to gain
super-user status.”
Seth shoved a spoonful of beans and rice into his mouth, asking around his mouthful, “Pretend I’m not a machine and explain again.”
Liane smiled. “It means we’re close, but I’ll have to be very careful in covering my tracks. They have tech Supporters who comb through the logs to watch for evidence of tampering.”
“How much longer will it take before you have access to their files?”
Liane shrugged. “I don’t know. There might be additional safeguards to bypass.”
“Once you’re inside, what do you plan on looking for first?”
Her voice hardened as she answered, “I want to find out just how close Damian is to tracking us down.”
Seth went quiet for a moment at the mention of her former Handler, seeming to consider his words carefully before asking, “And if he’s too close for comfort…?”
Liane glanced towards the broken window, to the rain lashing down outside. Her tone was reflective as she said, “I’ll have to
consider what I’m willing to do to stop him.”
“You were willing to kill him before,” Seth pointed out.
Liane shook her head, hair spilling over one shoulder as she looked at him. “Not to kill; to wound. There’s a difference.”
“You know he’s not going to stop.”
“I know,” Liane murmured. “But for the last ten years of my life, he was everything to me. I can’t just… I’m not ready to think about killing him. Not yet.”
Seth regarded her with what might have been a look of pity. Settling back, he said, “You can put off thinking about it for a bit longer.”
Liane went back to her dinner, hoping that he was right.
CHAPTER 2
Several kilometers away from the ruins, an enormous skyscraper stood in the heart of the newly reconstructed city. The rain did nothing to the edifice of steel and glass, other than provide a faint, rhythmic pattering that echoed through the silent rows of cubicles. The show work, the type that convinced normal citizens that the building housed mere offices, was done for the day. To anyone who would have looked, the building stood empty.
But below the earth, the real work of the Agency continued.
The floors below ground were busy, hectic with Agents readying for missions, captured targets being hauled into interrogation rooms, and Handlers and techs running from task to task. The brightly lit hallways and minimalist chambers were alight with sound and activity, save for the office of the Chief Handler. The door was closed, and no one dared approach it when it was.
Within the wide office, Damian sat slouched in his chair, frowning at the computer screen without seeing it. Imposingly handsome with dark hair and equally dark eyes, Damian’s face usually seemed impassive to the world around him. Not so now; alone, he allowed some of his frustration and irritation show.
Finding Liane had seemed an easy enough task in the beginning. She had been his Agent, after all. He knew her better than anyone else in the world. Her habits and behavior were as familiar to him as the intricacies of the Agency itself. Besides, he’d hunted plenty of targets within his lifetime. Dangerous politicians, international arms dealers, anarchists...none of them had been easy to find, yet he had found them all, in the end. So why was a single rogue Agent proving to be so elusive?
Because she was mine, Damian thought as he leaned back in his chair, his eyes on the ceiling. By showing her how I hunt down targets, I taught her how to hide. She’s using her knowledge of me just as much as I’m using my knowledge of her.
In a way, it was almost admirable.
He wasn’t missing her, at least not at that moment. No, that happened late at night, when he lay awake in bed unable to sleep or stop his thoughts from racing. When he stum
bled upon a book or a performance she would have enjoyed; when there was no one to share the notions, she had always seemed to understand…
Damian felt a sudden pang of loneliness; of weakness. He pushed it aside, as he always did, unwilling to permit even a
moment of it. Better to think of the hunt. Instantly the longing and loneliness burned away, replaced by a ferocious desire to
pursue, to capture. It was a savage feeling, one that had always served Damian well.
On familiar ground once more, he leaned forward, minimizing the various open programs and pulling up an image. It was the Agency’s identification photo of Liane, her face emotionless as she stared into the camera with those strangely colored eyes.
He looked at the photo, considering. Patterns; that’s what
mattered most when dealing with targets. Patterns of behavior that arose even when one was trying to be unpredictable. Everyone had them, Liane included. Yet she was keeping away from her usual haunts, from the neighborhoods he knew she roamed and places he’d predicted she’d visit. Her continued absence proved that he didn’t know her patterns as well as he’d thought.
An ache went through Damian’s right knee, and he shifted
uncomfortably in his seat. The pain was courtesy of the bullet
Liane had shot through his leg, a physical reminder of how she had turned her back on him. He didn’t begrudge her that; as far as he was concerned, Seth Laski was the one who had pulled the trigger. The officer had been the one to lead Liane astray, and he would be the one held accountable for her rebellion. Damian was looking forward to the day when he could send Laski to enjoy the hospitality of one of the Agency’s many torture chambers.
As for Liane, the first thing he planned to do once he had her back was to have her mind wiped of everything that had happened over the past six months. She would be a clean slate, unaware of what she had done and unknowing of anything but what Damian wanted her to know. And that didn’t include the Titan Strain, the mod murders, or the existence of a certain police officer.
A phone rang, shattering the silence within the office. Damian picked it up, his voice terse as he said, “Yes?”
“Sir,” said Maddox, his lead tech, a note of excitement in his words, “She’s been spotted.”
Minutes later, Damian walked inside the dark room that housed the surveillance unit. It was bustling with techs, the only light coming from computer screens. Despite the circulation fans spinning overhead, the air was stale with the scent of too many bodies and reheated coffee, the room permeated by the nervous, frenetic energy of the tech Supporters. Damian spotted Maddox from across the room, who waved him over to the wall of computer screens that was his workstation. Damian joined the tech, towering over the smaller man whose face hadn’t lost the softness of boyhood yet.
Adjusting his dark-rimmed glasses, Maddox said, “Our facial recognition software picked her up in an alley near Camden Road.”
Damian leaned against the back of the tech’s chair, his eyes on the screens as he ordered, “Show me.”
Maddox’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and soon all the screens were filled with grainy footage of an alley in the pouring rain. Two masked figures exited one of the abandoned buildings, weighed down by heavy duffel bags. He recognized one as Liane immediately; even with her pale hair and face hidden, he still knew her build and how she carried herself. The other figure could only be Seth, who Damian afforded only a small, murderous glance.
But the figures soon stopped, setting down their haul and
raising their hands. Damian watched as two more figures—police officers—walked on screen. Words were exchanged, lost to the tech and Handler because the video feed had no audio. Then one officer lashed out at Seth with a stunning weapon, and he collapsed on the ground. While Laski lay prone and useless, the two officers closed in on Liane, pulling off her mask. Damian leaned forward, eyes locked on the grainy pixels that comprised his Agent’s face. The officers were pawing at her, weapons held as an unspoken threat. But Damian smiled, unworried; he could see her drawing in on herself, like a snake coiling before a strike. When she finally did, the fight was over in seconds. Yet she didn’t kill them, pausing to look at Seth as he shouted something at her. Whatever he said seemed to make an impact, as she left the officers alive and unconscious before vanishing off-screen with a recovered Seth and their belongings.
“Where did they go?” Damian asked.
“That’s the problem,” said Maddox with a grimace, pulling up more footage from other street cameras. Seth and Liane were
visible at the periphery of the screen for a moment before they vanished again. “They put the masks back on; that means we can’t track their faces. We can follow them for a few streets with the regular cameras, but then the feeds become spotty; it’s a bad part of town, the city never replaces them when they break.”
“Then using the last sighting as your starting point, go through all the footage from every operational camera in each surrounding street manually,” Damian ordered, straightening.
Maddox looked up at him, brow furrowed. “Do you realize how long that will take in a city this size?”
Damian bent at the waist, eyes level with the tech as he said with quiet menace, “Do I look like I care how long it takes?”
Unnerved, Maddox nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll get my people on it now.”
“Good,” said Damian, gaze drifting back to the computer screens. The footage of Liane’s encounter with the police had looped back, and Damian watched it again as he asked, “Where are those officers now?”
“Uh…” Maddox trailed off, scrolling through an electronic
report for a moment before he answered, “The Royal London
Hospital. Critical care.”
“Dispatch a team to question them,” Damian ordered. “Get a full and detailed statement from them about the encounter. When it’s certain we have all the information they possess, kill them.”
Maddox nodded, nonplussed as he began typing up the
orders.
The video of the encounter between Liane, Laski, and the police had looped back, and Damian’s eyes drifted to his Agent as the scene played out yet again. Patterns were important. But what if hers weren’t the ones he needed to worry about? On the screen, Seth was shouting at her to stop, and Liane was listening to him. Damian’s eyes glinted; if she was following Seth’s lead in all this, then what Damian needed to do was learn how the officer thought. So where would a civilian go if they wanted to disappear from the surveillance of the city without leaving it?
On the desk, a cell phone vibrated and rang, and Maddox
answered, listening for a moment before hanging up and looking to Damian. “The Director wants to see you. Now. I’ll start working on this. When I have something, I’ll let you know.”
Damian nodded, already moving towards the doors to answer the summons of the head of the Agency.
He had to take two elevators to reach the Director’s office at the top of the skyscraper, and the second one was keyed to the thumbprints of certain high-ranking Handlers and
Administrators. Damian’s print cleared in seconds, and the
elevator rose the last ten stories to the office.
The room was dark when Damian walked inside, the only light coming from a gas fireplace and the lightning beyond the
windows. He spotted the Director standing by the massive, story-high panes of glass behind his desk. The man’s arms were clasped behind his back as he looked out across the rain-soaked neon of the city. Damian walked over, standing at attention several feet away and saying, “You asked for me, sir?”
The Director turned, the firelight dancing over half his face. He was only a few years senior to Damian, but the worry lines and dark circles around his eyes made him look decades older than he was. His voice was hoarse and tense as he asked, “Have you learned anything new?”
“No,” Damian shook his head. “If the Libertas Party is
&nb
sp; tampering with the Agency, they’re being very careful about it. I’ve found no obvious signs that the Prime Minister is even interested in how we operate.”
“I know Morrigan wants me replaced,” the Director said, his face seeming even more haggard as he went on. “The Party is watching me; I’m certain of it. I’m being followed, and my files have been hacked at least once.”
Damian stepped forward, his voice light but concerned as he said, “Sir, have you considered taking time off? You’re not well, and perhaps aren’t thinking clearly. Given a chance to recover yourself—”
“If I step away, then this place truly will be lost to them,” the Director said angrily. “The Agency answers to the Party, but we are what stands between the country and oblivion. We can’t afford to be leashed and controlled by politicians when London is only just now recovering.”
Damian inclined his head. “As you say, sir.”
Almost to himself, the Director murmured, “They have to be working with someone inside the Agency...it’s the only way they could monitor me like this.”
Damian went still, his hands clasped behind his back and inching towards the gun he kept there. If the Director guessed that Damian was involved, if he realized the truth at long last, then there would be no other option…
But the Director was shaking his head, his voice only weary as he ordered, “Report to me in a few days. And be careful that they don’t turn their attentions to you as well.”
Damian nodded and left to return to the elevator. He had
almost reached it when the Director called after him, “How is the search going for your Agent?”
Damian turned back, answering, “We’re making progress. She was spotted on camera tonight.”
The Director regarded him with a grave expression, warning, “Don’t become distracted from the real fight. We can lose one Agent; we can’t afford to lose the Agency itself.”
The Osiris Contingency Page 2
