Toys

I swung my weapon around and fired as I dove to the ground. The glowing spray of the bodyguards’ automatic weapons raked the room at waist level. But my shot went wide or-was it possible? Had Devlin somehow dodged my bullet?

I watched in slow-motion horror as the feet of the VIPs pounded through the far doorway. After all this…

“Go ahead, be heroes for your boss,” I shouted at the bodyguards as Tazh Khan, Lucy, and her platoon of human commandos took up position behind me. I’d never heard a sweeter sound than the kerchink, kerchink of the rounds as they were racked into the old-fashioned, but nonetheless deadly, metal weapons.

“Maybe he’ll give you a pay raise in hell,” I continued. “Think about it. You’re outnumbered ten to one! Easily. You’ll all be dead in seconds.”

The Elite guards looked at the dozens of dull metal barrels aimed at them and only hesitated a second before tossing their guns aside and backing away toward the door and their escaping leadership. Despite all the deadly technology and strength of the Elites, there were advantages to fighting them: loyalty didn’t stand a chance against their massive drive for self-preservation.

But one of them hadn’t dropped all of his weapons-Devlin. As I got to my feet, he flung some sort of ceramic projectile that skimmed past my head and landed with a crunchy, thunking noise in something behind me.

As a hailstorm of at least a hundred rounds turned Devlin into a pink mist, I turned to see what the projectile was, and instantly wished I hadn’t.

The weapon, a small knife, was buried to its wicked hilt in Tazh Khan’s forehead.

Chapter 112

Lucy embraced her fallen friend. I’d never seen a human expression of pain that held a candle to this one. Not even my own when my parents had died.

My heart screamed at me to comfort her, but now was not the time. I leaped through the door after the disappearing Elites and sprinted into the parking area, where they were spreading out toward their vehicles.

I immediately spotted my mark, President Jacklin, running a good dozen yards ahead of the others. My God, he was running fast. Top-of-the-line-Elite fast.

He must have been doing forty miles an hour-and was just a split second from his stretch limo when I dropped to a knee and took the surest shot I could manage, right at his center of gravity.

The burst of fire hit him in the small of his back and knocked him sprawling, but I hadn’t delivered anything near a fatal blow. He must have been wearing body armor. I was actually glad for it-I wanted him alive.

I cast aside my assault rifle and quickly closed the gap. He wheeled to meet my tackle in a neat blocker’s stance.

And oh, how he met me. It was like running into a pile of steel rebar… that really didn’t like me.

We grappled and rolled in the immaculate genetically modified grass of the presidential mansion.

I quickly discovered that Jacklin was enhanced more than any Elite I’d ever encountered. With some sort of double-jointed throw that sent me sprawling, he freed himself and backed up against the presidential transport, feeling for the door.

“So, my knuckle-dragging friend,” he said. “You see, you aren’t the only one allowed to have secret implants. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little piece of classified information: I’m the most enhanced being ever to walk the face of the earth-the docs tell me I’m eighty-seven percent tech, by body mass.”

“Judging by your general psychology, I’m guessing one of the first organs they ‘upgraded’ was your dick,” I quipped. I was hoping to get under his skin and cause a distraction. But his reply rendered me the more distracted party.

“Your Jinxie could straighten you out on that matter of speculation,” he said. “Personal experience and whatnot.”

I tried to will my mind silent, but it was no use. How had he known her nickname? Sure, he could have gotten that fact somewhere other than from her, personally. Who knows what kind of information our fellow agents may have kept on us. But was there anything to his innuendo? I didn’t want to care; I shouldn’t care-there was no time to care!

But even as I tried to compose myself, he yelled out, “Evac!”

His security-enhanced limo immediately recognized its master’s voice and sprang to life, hovering up off the ground as its doors flew open.

Oh no.

He leaped into its dark interior, and the vehicle lurched skyward. I barely managed to hurl myself after him in time to have the automated doors slam down on my hands.

Chapter 113

Thank God for safety features: the car was programmed not to injure any high-tech Elite hands, and the door politely refrained from severing my fingers.

“Foreign object occluding rear starboard hatchway. Please clear immediately,” chirped the autopilot.

Expecting one or both of Jacklin’s immaculate Italian leather shoe soles to come down on my hands, I did the most energetic pull-up of my life, heaved the door wide, and sprang into the passenger compartment.

Fortunately, the vehicle was so large that Jacklin-assuming I had missed the departure-had moved forward in the cabin to a control console of some kind. He managed to wheel around just as I tried to tackle him again, demonstrating that patented human inability to learn lessons.

“You’re doomed,” he said, easily dodging me. I slammed into a credenza covered in crystal goblets and decanters, all of which probably had been pirated from some human antiquities museum.

I struggled to stand as the vehicle lurched into a steep climb.

Meantime, Jacklin began to yell. “Require immediate airborne tactical assistance, alpha priority-and all forces reclaim presidential mansion im-”

Something banged into the roof of the limo and sent us both to our knees.

“You hear that!” he screamed. “You thought somehow my defense department might not manage to notice your little insurgence on the fucking presidential grounds? That’s a commando squad, and I’ll say it again-you, Hays Baker, are doomed! You and your whole filthy cave-evolved species!”

Just then the passenger door, which had by now resealed itself, peeled back-the wrong way! The noise of the twisting metal was quickly lost in the roaring wind and the noise of the jet engines outside.

A wicked-looking segmented grappling hook plunged into the cabin and dug its sharpened fingers into a leather seat. And then, as I vainly looked around for something beyond antique glassware to use as a weapon, the first commando burst through the open hatch, two pistols leveled, and began blasting away-

At Jacklin!

Chapter 114

Back on the ground, Lucy and I stared down at the wounded Elite president, whose fear and disbelief were waging an epic battle on his artificially perfect face while synthetic blood and lymph oozed from the torn biotech conduits of his flesh.