impulse down her spine and she reached for the keyboard in front of the monitor, inputting the name 'Skyler' and a date string as the parameters for a sweep of the stolen data. Instantly, the complete scope of all the supposedly secure transit information about Senator Skyler's detail on that fateful day was there in front of her. Every last bit of it, from details of what pool vehicles would be used and their maintenance records, through the receipts showing how many bullets the agents on the detail had logged out from the agency armory. Everything an assassin would need to prepare a flawless attack.
The file bore a validation code, a digital fingerprint tying the requested data to the terminal and agent identity of the person who had copied them. Anna knew the code; she'd seen it a hundred times appended to her own after-operations debriefs and memos. But still she clicked on the text string, hoping that she had read it wrongly. Hoping she had made a mistake.
The display opened a panel and showed her Ron Temple's authentication.
'You son of a bitch.' The words slipped out of her in a shallow breath, drained of all anger and fury. Anna felt nothing, just a chill numbness at the core of her gut.
A man she had trusted, a man she had served with, and before her lay proof that he was a traitor, proof that he had sold out whatever integrity he had to the faceless figures who had their hands on the leash of the Tyrants.
Then the emotion came, breaking the icy dam of the dead feeling in her chest, engulfing her. Anna's eyes prickled and her vision misted. She staggered a little and reached out a hand to steady herself. Temple had sold them out-Kelso and Ryan, Byrne, Laker, and Connor, everyone on the Skyler detail, along with all those other men and women he had given up. Her hands drew into hard, tight fists. She wanted to know why.
More than the fury, more than the rush of potent despair, Anna wanted to know the answer. How a man could betray his oath and his colleagues.
For money? Out of fear? No answer she could imagine seemed good enough.
A repeating tone dragged her back from her reverie, and she blinked owlishly. D-Bar was yelling in her ear, and Kelso glanced back at the server monitor; a warning panel was blinking there, a string of text in livid red letters telling her to stand by and wait for security.
'Are you listening to me?' D-Bar shouted. 'Kelso, can't you hear that?'
She pulled out the connector leading to the flash drive, then shoved the data device in her pocket, moving swiftly across the room to the door.
Outside she could hear voices.
Fighting down the tremors in her fingers, she stepped out calmly into the dim corridor and walked at a steady, unhurried pace toward the elevator bank. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, but she knew that the agency's internal security monitors possessed subroutines that looked for abnormal body kinetics-if she ran, they would see it. She smothered the urge with a grimace and metered her pace. Just a few more steps.
Behind her, she heard a voice call out. Drake. She knew it was him without having to turn around. Anna ignored him, kept moving. In a few more seconds, she'd turn the corner and be at the elevators.
'Hey, stop!' called the other agent. 'I'm talking to you! Stop right now!' Anna heard the rustle of a holster being snapped open, the click of a safety catch flicking off. 'I won't tell you again!'
She fled. It wasn't a conscious choice on her part, not something she was aware of doing on anything but the most base, animal-brain level; but suddenly she was sprinting the rest of the distance down the corridor, her thoughts clattering inside her mind, the rush of new adrenaline warring with the tidal drag of the stim crash. She couldn't think straight, she couldn't process. All she could do was run, run, run Anna raced around the corner and came face-to-face with Agent Tyler, wandering out of the break room past the elevators, stirring a cup of dark coffee. 'Kelso?' His face registered a moment of confusion.
'Stop her!' shouted Drake. That was enough to galvanize Tyler into action, and he let the cup drop, going for his service weapon.
Anna ignored him and dove for the open doors of the elevator, hand reaching for the controls. Her feet were just across the threshold when
Tyler snatched at the collar of her jacket and pulled hard. Some of her hair caught in his grip and sent a shock of pain through her head. A kick landed in the back of her right knee and her leg buckled. She went down, catching a glimpse of herself falling and Tyler right on her in the mirrored back of the elevator car.
Then she was on the floor, half in and half out of the lift, with a federal agent's handgun pressed into the small of her back. 'You're under arrest,' said Drake.
Romeo Airport-Michigan-United States of America
The aircraft put down on the runway just as the sunset bled away across the landscape. No visible-spectrum landing lights were in operation, and the pilot brought them in using a virtual headset rig that made it seem to him as if he were touching down in the middle of the day.
Romeo had gone back and forth between active and inactive over the last four decades, until it had quietly slipped into the hands of a minor corporate consortium that, via a labyrinth of blinds and shell companies, was one cog in a far larger machine. The surrounding area was remote enough that the local populace were sparse, but it was close enough to Detroit for the glow of the city's skyscrapers to be visible on the horizon, the colors reflecting off the bottom of the low cloud base.
Inside the hangar, a staging area had already been set up alongside a fuel bowser for the jet and a line of utility trailers. Robot forklifts swarmed around the rear of the plane, peeling back the vast curved blades of the cargo doors to gather up the helo nestled in its storage cradle.
In defiance of common sense and regulations, Hardesty stood at the thin sliver of open air between the tall hangar doors and smoked a cigarette. Saxon caught the pungent smell of the nicotine as he crossed the space, taking the opportunity to exercise his legs after hours aboard the jet. Federova was at the back of an unmarked van, picking her way through a set of armored, olive-drab cases. She was considering different models of grenades, picking them up, weighing them, exchanging them for others. He smiled thinly; she reminded him of someone at a market stall buying fruit.
After that night in London, he hadn't known what would come next. Even in the throes of their quiet, animated sex, he had still been on alert, waiting for the moment when she tried to stick a knife in his ribs or snap his neck. But that moment never arrived; and when they were both spent she left him there, as silent as ever. He couldn't help but wonder if Hermann had got the same treatment when he joined up.
On the flight, Federova looked right though him, her manner utterly unchanged from the one she had shown him before. Saxon decided to file their night together away as some kind of opportunist incident and think no more about it; but it wasn't easy. She had been… a challenge.
'Saxon.' He turned to see Namir beckoning him from a temporary workstation set up near the nose wheel of the jet. As he approached, he saw
Barrett and Hermann there with him, peering into a virtual map of the city of Detroit.
The young German's manner also remained unaffected toward Saxon, despite the moment in the fight room; but unlike Federova's cool affect,
Saxon could see the chink of something through Hermann's metaphorical armor. A new respect, maybe? Or perhaps it was something else: some kind of jealousy. Saxon had beaten him because of two things-endurance and superior augmentations. The former was something that had to be taught, but the latter… that could be bought. He wondered how badly Gunther Hermann wanted to surrender a little more of his meat to the machine. Saxon guessed he wouldn't hesitate if the offer was made.
He studied the map as he came closer. On the flight in, Namir had discussed the next operation in brief. Detroit was home to a corporation called Sarif Industries; Saxon had heard of it, a cutting-edge cybernetics research and manufacturing concern that specialized in boutique tech off the axis of most people's budget. According to Namir, Sarif had forcibly indentured a group of scientists, who were now being held against their will in the company's main research and development facility. The Tyrants were going to go in and extract these people, and 'restore the balance.' He wondered how much of that was true.
Barrett played around with the map control and shifted the image to a plan view of the Sarif facility. They were planning a rooftop assault, and the timing had to be perfect.
'We have a narrow window of opportunity to breach their perimeter,' said Namir. 'Some of the Sarif staff are heading out to Washington for a meeting with the National Science Board, and there's a weapons
