with the stims and grimaced at it. 'And don't make things any worse for yourself.'
After he left her alone, the restraint loop gave a buzz and fell off her wrist. Anna picked up the packet and something slipped out. A brass coin clattered to the table; her sobriety chip. For a long moment, she thought about leaving it where it had fallen. Angrily, she snatched it up and jammed it in her pocket.
Zubovskaya Square-Moscow-Russian Federated States
The night-black helo circled once over the buildings along Burdenko Street, the ducted rotor-rings turning, the sound-deadening baffles humming. The boxy little flyer hugged the angular tops of the offices and apartment blocks, skimming over old tiled roofs cheek-by-jowl with modern polyglass domes and sheets of solar paneling. The nose of the craft dipped as Hardesty dropped from the starboard side; then they were rising up and away, describing a wide circuit around the lines of the plaza at Zubovskaya.
Saxon straightened the Kevlar balaclava over his face and peered through his polarized eye-shields. Ahead he could see the roof of the Hotel
Novoe Rostov. The team had reviewed the deployment on the way from the airport, and they were ready.
He took a breath and ran through his own internal checklist, ending it with a last look at the ammo selector on the Hurricane tactical machine pistol that hung from his shoulder strap. The compact submachine gun was all ABS plastic and black-anodized steel, the blunt muzzle lost behind a triangular suppressor.
'Twenty seconds.' Namir's words came over his mastoid, buzzing in Saxon's skull. The subvocalized radio message had the peculiar echo to it that made encrypted comms sound as if they were being beamed down from space.
Saxon frowned. They were cutting it fine. The sun was rising, and the morning light would cost them good cover if they didn't move fast. Then
Hardesty spoke over the general channel.
'Inposition'he said. 'Three targets. Green light.'
Namir gave an imperceptible nod. 'Execute.'
Saxon turned to the window in time to see a man on the roof of the Rostov looking up at them, raising a handheld to his ear; in the next second the man jerked violently backward as if pulled by an invisible wire, a jet of red spurting from his chest. As the helo descended, he spotted the other guards on the roof, collapsing in puffs of pink mist.
The helo fell into a hover ten meters up, and the rest of the Tyrants deployed, Barrett and Hermann leading, then Namir and Saxon, with
Federova last.
Saxon tensed; he was used to fast-roping, but his new high-fall aug-part of the 'recruitment package'- meant he could drop straight into the thick without a descender cord. The whole thing was counterintuitive, but it worked. He jumped, and a moment before he landed, a brief pulse of electromagnetic energy flared around him, cushioning his fall. He landed squarely, the crackle of the effect generated by the augmentation taking the shock and bleeding it off to nothing.
Federova put down a heartbeat later, cat-falling with little more than a crunch of gravel. She had her hair back behind an Alice band studded with data loops, but no hood. Federova saw him looking and gazed back, languid and unconcerned.
With a gust of downwash, the helo powered into the sky. He looked away, scanning the rooftop. The Rostov was a shallow, three-lobed tower that had been thrown up in the boom years of the early 2010s, but never completed. There were whole floors of the building that were locked off, still unfinished over a decade later.
'Blue, Green,' said Namir, using Barrett and Hermann's call signs. 'Secure the roof. Check for stragglers.' He glanced at Saxon. 'Gray, with me.'
'Roof is clear' Hardesty said, from his firing nest across the square. He didn't like the suggestion that he'd missed someone.
Low and quick, Saxon followed the Tyrant commander toward the boxy service shack in the middle of the roof. He passed the corpse of the man the sniper had shot in the chest, and scanned the body. The dead man had a look of frozen surprise on his face, a foam of red froth on his lips. Hardesty's bullet had punctured the heart, the exit wound ripping open the guard's back.
The man's face triggered a connection to the mission data Saxon had shunted to a temporary memory store in his implanted neural hub; the modified wet-drive was another 'bonus' from the Tyrants. He blinked up an image from an arrest record. The man lying in the pool of crimson was immediately identified as Oleg Pushkin, a minor enforcer with the main Moscow crime syndicate, the Solntsevskaya Bratva. 'This guy's a mob hitter,' Saxon murmured.
'They all are,' Namir replied. 'Keep up.'
Barrett was at the service shack as they reached it. Air-conditioning equipment, heat exchangers, and cable gear for the Rostov's elevator banks hummed inside.
Namir nodded at a secured maintenance hatch on the side of the shack. 'Open it.'
Hermann leaned close and used a digital lockpick to neutralize the security latches; when he was done, Barrett stepped in and curled his fingers around the lip of the hatch with a grimace. The bunches of myomer muscles in his arms stiffened, gathered-and then with a low howl of tortured metal the hatch came away, shearing the bolt heads clean off.
As Namir peered inside, Saxon glanced over his shoulder and his brow furrowed in confusion. 'Where's… Red?' There was no sign of Federova anywhere on the rooftop. She had been only a few steps behind him.
Barrett chuckled. 'She's around.'
'Green,' said Namir. 'Deny their communications.'
'Complying.' Hermann nodded, drawing a thick, disc-shaped object from his backpack. It resembled a land mine. Acting quickly, the German set it on the ground and flicked a yellow-and-black-striped activation switch. A flicker of interference momentarily stuttered across Saxon's cyberoptics.
'Target comms are dead,' reported Barrett, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. 'Ready.'
'Insertion,' said Namir. 'Go!'
One after another, they threaded in through the torn-out hatch and into the mass of machinery crowding the interior of the service shack.
Inside, a triangular cluster of running gear fell away into a series of shafts that ran the length of the Rostov, down to the basement parking levels sixteen stories below. Saxon toggled his optics to low-light mode and the space became visible in shades of green and white. The shapes of elevator cars were visible, most of them static, others gently rising or descending.
Namir and Saxon took point, working their way down past the slowly turning drums of support cables and the rumbling lift gears. According to their information, Kontarsky and his people were on floor thirteen; outside, the pilot of the helo was watching the windows of the apartments on the thirteenth floor, scanning through the vision-opaque glass with a thermographic sensor, watching the body-heat traces of the minister and his staff. At this time of day, most of them were asleep; only the guards were supposed to be awake. They had to take care, though; their intel wasn't clear on how many, if any, civilians were in the building. Collateral damage was to be kept to an absolute minimum.
Securing nylon cords to the cable frames, the two of them fast-roped down in silence, pausing at each level to sweep for magnetic anomaly detectors or beam sensors. Saxon watched Namir work with speed and delicacy, rendering security systems inert with the skill of a veteran.
The central lift of a three-block cluster was locked in place at the thirteenth. The plan was to enter through its roof and fan out along the three radial corridors-Namir, Hermann, and Saxon taking one each, Barrett holding the core as backup.
'Prep for breach' Namir sub vocalized. Saxon lowered himself to the top of the elevator car, disconnected his tether, and drew out a pressurized canister of det-foam. Dialing the nozzle to narrow feed, he put marble-size blobs of the khaki-toned chemical in the corners of the car's roof, then thumbed a set of slaved microdetonators into the congealing foam.
As he finished, he felt the elevator move slightly beneath him and heard voices. Three men, speaking in Russian. Through an air vent, he could see a sliver of what was going on.
'Shto sluchios?' said one of them. He was tapping the radio headset at his ear, frowning.
