maybe twenty if she was a day; old for a keyboard queen. All it would take to turn this around was to apply pressure to her vanity.
'I'm better than any K-towners,' Widow said, doing the job for her. 'Better than those Juggernaut dinks and that day-player Windmill.'
Gotcha. 'Prove it,' Anna demanded, handing her a data spike. 'Denny asked me to come here because he said you people could cut ice for me.
Can you do it or not?'
Widow snatched the spike from her hand, pale fingers with red enameled tips flashing. Inside it was every piece of information Kelso had, carefully stripped of any identifying markers that might show its origins from a law enforcement agency database.
'Get her money,' growled Widow at Denny, and stalked over to a desktop setup.
The other hacker blew out a breath. 'So we do it like you asked, right? Run the face on the file through the net, see what comes up.'
'I need to know who he is.'
Denny shrugged. 'No guarantees, Kel. It's pay-for-play. Outcome is what it is. I told you that already.'
'I need to know' she said, nerves bunching. Anna felt her mask of self-control slipping and took a moment to center herself. 'If she's as good as you said…' Her mouth went dry and she drifted off for a moment. The jittering in her hands was coming back again, and she buried her fists inside the pockets of the hoodie. The other tell, that weird chemical taste in the back of her throat, like dry earth, was getting stronger.
Anna resisted the urge to reach for the ampoule pen in the pocket on the arm of the fleece and hunched forward. 'Are we doing this or not?' she demanded, off the odd look Denny put her way. 'Tick tock,' she added, irritably.
Denny held out his hand. 'Cross my palm.'
She fished inside an inner pocket and came back with a credit chip imprinted with the logo of the People's Republic. The arfid strip in the card had been scrambled-a low-tech approach, to be certain, but enough that it rendered the transaction untraceable. The hacker made it vanish.
'How long is this gonna take?' Anna went on, her tone turning brittle.
'Not long,' he offered, eyeing her, catching her manner. 'Hey, Kel… If you, like, need something, I can speak to some of my people-'
She turned away, walking toward the fabric walls of the dome. The offer tempted her more than she wanted to admit. 'You know what I need,
Denny,' she said over her shoulder. 'I need a name for that face.'
Aerial Transit Corridor-Smolensk Oblast-Russian Federated States
Through the oval window of the pressure door, Saxon could see the morning light crossing the landscape far below, chasing the aircraft as it flew eastward. By the time they reached their destination, the dawn would have overtaken them, but for now the rising sun was still at their backs, visible in lines of color that illuminated the thin strips of clouds passing beneath. The view tilted as they banked gently, and Saxon put out his right hand to steady himself. He was still being careful with the cybernetic limb; it was a military specification model manufactured by Tai Yong
Medical, one of-if not the-biggest augmentation conglomerates on the planet. Along with new Hermes legs to replace those he'd damaged in the veetol crash six months ago, the upgraded Samson-series arm and a few other implants were all part of what Namir had called his
'welcome bonus' for joining the Tyrants. The arm could be twitchy, though. Twice now, on the first few operations Namir had deployed him on, the Samson had shown a trigger delay. Saxon reckoned he had it tuned well enough by now, though. Still, he resolved to up his neuropozyne dose a little, just in case.
'Thinkin' about a skydive?' said a voice. 'You itchin' to try out that new high-fall aug?'
He turned. Filling most of the corridor behind him, Lawrence Barrett had Saxon fixed with a wolfish grin. The American was big, and he was ugly. A flat buzz cut framed features that were burn-scarred and bold about it. The only part of the man's face that was unblemished was the synth-skin along a reconstructed jaw. Saxon understood that Barrett's looks had been given to him by close proximity to a bomb blast, but he knew little more than that. The big man wore his disfigurement like a badge of honor, highlighting it with a brass bull ring through his nose.
Saxon wasn't a small guy by any means, but he carried himself differently from Barrett, with this thuggish swagger; he didn't feel the need to look threatening every second of every day. But then again, men who looked as tough as they were could be a useful tool in the spec ops game.
Saxon was more a student of the subtle approach, though.
'I don't like flying,' he offered. 'Bores the hell out of me, yeah?'
'I hear that.' Barrett nodded, toying with the wrists of his black-and-steel cyberarms. 'This is the shittiest airline ever. No damn stewardess and the in-flight movie sucks.' Outwardly, the jet they were aboard resembled any one of a number of conventional private airliners-but under the mimetic fuselage was the mobile operations center for the Tyrants, easily the rival of any military forward air command unit in the world.
Barrett wandered toward the galley and Saxon fell in behind him. He'd been on a couple of sorties with the American-surveillance jobs in
Bucharest and Glasgow-and all along he'd felt like he was being watched himself. It wasn't surprising, Saxon thought. They'd invested time and money in headhunting him from Belltower, so it made sense to have him pass through a few rookie assignments before stepping up to the real thing-but to be honest, he chafed at it. He wasn't just some grunt in off the street. He knew how to do the job as well as any of them. He was tired of the small- scale, low-threat gigs. Still, the Tyrants paid well, and they had good funding, that was clear-although he'd learned straightaway that asking questions about that side of things was off-limits. Namir had made that very plain.
He'd seen some of the other Tyrant operatives here and there over the past couple of months, usually just in passing-but this was the first time they'd all been gathered together for a mission. Saxon felt an itchy tingle of anticipation in the palm of his gun hand. The gloves were going to come off when they got to Moscow-he could sense it.
They emerged in the open common area on the aircraft's upper deck. A gleaming steel galley ranged along one wall, and there were chairs and monitors facing it. Barrett pawed through a food locker like a hungry bear and Saxon glanced away, finding another member of the team engrossed in maintenance on a heavy cyberhand.
The German was the other new guy in the Tyrants, although he'd been in a while before Saxon's arrival. Beneath a dark jacket he had the spare, rippled physique of a bodybuilder, a thick neck and natural eyes that still seemed somehow lifeless. A black watch cap was pulled down over his hair. He didn't show many augmentations aside from the hand, but Saxon had seen him moving and was willing to bet the legs were metal. The guy was the youngest of them, somewhere in his twenties.
'You're Saxon,' he said. His accent was deep and resonant. 'We have not formally met.' He nodded at the dismantled mechanism at the end of his arm. 'Forgive me if I do not shake your hand. I am Gunther Hermann.'
'I know.' Namir had mentioned Hermann in passing; from what Saxon had learned, the younger man had been part of Germany's GSG-9 police counter-terror unit until the Tyrants had recruited him. Something in the way that Namir had glossed over that fact made Saxon wonder about the reasons for Hermann's departure from the Bundespolizei.
Hermann put down his tools and took a careful drink from a can of orange soda. 'You are the replacement for Wexler, then?'
'I guess so.' There had been little said about the operator whose boots Saxon was filling. He hadn't wanted to push the issue. People died in this line of work as a matter of course.
'He was slow,' offered Barrett. 'Got himself killed 'cause of it.'
He decided to venture the question, caution be damned. 'What happened?'
'Now, why do you need to know that?' Saxon looked up as a third man entered the common area from the forward compartment. His lips thinned. In any group there was always a place where the dynamic created friction, and it was right here, between Ben Saxon and Scott
Hardesty, the team's dedicated sniper.
Hardesty was rangy and tall, so much so that he seemed in danger of scuffing the top of his bald scalp on
