the ceiling. Saxon never saw him wearing anything other than a combat overall, sometimes with a gear vest or equipment belt. He was long and thin, like the spindly extreme range rifles he carried on-mission, and augmented across all his limbs. His eyes were high-specification optics of a kind Saxon had never seen before.
At first Saxon had found it difficult to adjust from being a team leader, as he had been with Strike Six, to being a line operator once again-and
Hardesty seemed determined to make it harder by being as big a pain in the arse as he possibly could. The man had taken a strong dislike to him, but the reason why wasn't clear.
'Just making conversation,' he demurred.
'Joe Wexler was good,' Hardesty insisted. 'I could trust him. I don't know you. So I don't trust you.'
Saxon moved to the cooler and took a bottle of water. 'Trust this; Namir didn't invite me in because of my sparkling personality.'
'Dead weight gets cut loose very fast around here,' said Hardesty, pushing past as he made his way down the compartment. 'Keep that in mind, limey.'
As the aft door closed behind him, Saxon shrugged. 'Friendly fella.'
'Wexler was ex-CIA, like Hardesty,' Barrett noted. 'You know spooks, they like to stick together.' 'Right.'
Hermann blew out a breath, his hand folding closed once again. He gave it an experimental flex, and Saxon saw where the knuckles and the proximal phalanges were heavily reinforced. Hermann noticed his attention. 'A custom-designed modification,' he explained. 'In time, I hope to enhance the rest of myself in a similar fashion.'
'Metal, not meat, eh?'
Hermann nodded, as if any other idea would be foolish. 'Of course.'
A soft chime sounded from the intercom, and Namir's voice issued out of a hidden speaker in the wall. 'Final approach in ten minutes' he said.
'Prep your gear and be ready. We're on the clock for this one, so mission brief starts the moment the wheels stop. That is all'
Saxon glanced out of the window. The outer suburbs of the Russian capital flashed by, the city below shaking off sleep and awakening.
Pier 86-New York City-United States of America
Widow leaned back from the monitor and made a low, self-amused grumble in the back of her throat, the spider-hands reordering themselves into something closer to the order of human fingers. She looked up at Kelso and gave her a sour smile. 'Thanks for the paper,' said the hacker, nodding toward where Denny stood off to one side. 'I always love doing these fun little jobs.' Her tone made it clear the opposite was true.
Anna kept her hands inside her pockets. Jags of annoyance pulsed through her like twinges of pain from a pulled muscle, and she thought about how much she would enjoy slapping the smirk off the thin, spindly woman's face.
Widow gestured at the screen, where the captured image of Matt Ryan's killer was surrounded by a halo of search windows and subroutine panels. 'This guy is a ghost.'
'A name,' she snarled. 'I paid you for name.'
'No.' The hacker got up, pointing a too-long finger. 'You paid for a search for a name. Not the same thing.'
'Did you even do anything with that data?' Anna retorted. 'Or did you just sit with your virtual thumb up your virtual ass for the past hour?'
Widow's face darkened. 'Pay attention, slow-drive, because I'll only explain this once. I did a webwide trawl of all public-access video databases, plus a thousand more private imaging servers, parsing a data mesh based on Blondie here'-she waved at the screen-'and ran a match search using a collective of bloodhound info-seeker programs. The fact that he didn't even get the slightest of hits should be a wake-up call.'
Kelso paused, the hacker's words catching up with her. Widow had a point; even the absence of data was a kind of data itself. The problem was, the absence of data was all that she had to go on, a whole damn pile of it. 'He gotta be high military or corporate,' added Denny. 'To cull someone's past like that? Outta our league.' That drew him a sharp glare from
Widow.
Everything they were telling her dovetailed with her own information. Whoever this man was, he had never been muscle-for-hire working kills for the Red Arrow triad. But who, then? The old, familiar frustration bubbled up inside her, the tension gathering at the base of her skull.
And then Widow did something Kelso didn't expect. She grinned. 'Do you want to know how good I really am?'
'You do have something.' Anna stepped closer. 'Let me guess, you're gonna shake me down for more yuan?'
Widow gave an arch sniff. 'No. I got standards. You paid top dollar for the gold service, so you get it.' She giggled. 'I just like, ha, building a sense of drama.'
'A name?'
'Yeah,' Widow said, 'but not this guy's, not exactly.' She returned to the monitor and pulled up some panels. 'Got some puzzle palace stuff here, up on the Konspiracy Krew boards and over at Glass Curtain. Your mark, the data on the hit he was part of? The tactics match an open search those guys got running at their end.'
Anna had heard of the groups Widow mentioned; they were fringers, part of the wide-eyed and credulous flying-saucer crowd, busy posting proofs that the moon was hollow or some other Twilight Zone crap. 'You're not taking those mouth-breathers seriously?' The jitters were in her hand again, and she tightened her fingers, the nails digging into her palms.
Denny chuckled. 'Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, neh?'
'Ever heard of the Tyrants?' Widow cocked her head.
She shook her head. 'I quit listening to the Top 40 the same time I stopped wearing a training bra. Talk to me!' Anna's temper flared again.
She could feel her tolerance level dropping along with her focus.
'They're a black-ops cartel,' Denny offered. 'No oversight, so it's said. Richer than shit. And hard-core, like you wouldn't believe. Stone killers through and through.'
'Glass Curtain have them linked to a bunch of spook house stuff,' Widow explained. 'Regime change. Political murder. Intimidation. Corporate assassination.'
The last phrase brought Anna up sharp. She thought about Dansky, there on the sidewalk. The killer going back to him, the second bullet placed to end his life instantly. She could feel the synchrony of the act in her mind's eye all over again. Everything Widow was saying fell into line with all the information Kelso's investigation had uncovered to date. It couldn't be a coincidence.
The earthy taste in the back of her throat was strong and she wanted to make it go away. 'I want all you can get me on them' she said.
Widow smirked. 'That'll cost extra.'
In the next second, the million-candlepower glare of a night sun blazed through the thin ballistic fabric of the dome's roof, turning the gloomy interior into a starkly lit arena filled with sharp-edged shadows. A booming voice resonated through her rib cage, broadcast from overhead.
'This is the NYPD. Stay where you are. This area is under lockdown. As of this moment, all rights have been suspended' Beneath the words, she heard the familiar rising hum of sonic screamers winding up to discharge.
Denny broke into a run, but Widow was red-faced and shouting. Anna lost her words in the building wall of sound, but she knew that the hacker was blaming her for this. She thought Kelso had brought the police here.
Widow grabbed at her, knife-sharp nails emerging from the tips of the spidery fingers, but she punched her down, vaulting away through the panicked mass of the dome-dwellers as they ran about her. They tore up their decks from where they were mounted and yanked fists of glowing fiber-optic cable out of server farms, desperate to leave nothing behind that would incriminate.
Anna had just as much reason to run as all the rest of them. She reached the dome wall and slashed a new
