Inside, the horribly familiar smells of spent cordite and blood reached her nostrils. A man in a suit lay against the staircase leading upward, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Anna felt for a pulse; there was nothing.
She moved on, hugging the walls, finding her way into the open lounge. More of Temple's guests were here, some of them caught still sitting in chairs with glasses of wine in their hands, others shot in the back as they tried to run. Anna saw the telltale patterning of close-range shotgun blasts.
On the floor above, a floorboard creaked and she froze. She very clearly heard a shuffling footstep; then in the next second, a strangled, pained gurgle and the heavy fall of a body.
Cold certainty gathered in her thoughts. An assassin-or more than likely, a team of them-were stalking through Temple's home, systematically executing everyone they found. It could only have been the Tyrants; the brutality and precision of the attack bore all their hallmarks. Above, she heard the creaking again. They were sweeping the house, floor by floor. She had little time; once they had completed their search, they'd double back and look for stragglers.
She scanned the corpses again; he wasn't among them, and if Ron Temple was anything like the man she thought she knew, he would have had a plan for something like this. He was methodical to the last.
The house hadn't changed much since she had visited it, and she concentrated, pulling up her memories of that day. Temple had shown Matt around; she remembered him mentioning something about the basement…
Anna found a doorway in an alcove, behind a privacy curtain. In the dark, it would be easy to miss. Slipping inside, she followed the weakest sliver of light her optics could detect, and with care, descended a shallow set of steps. She blinked back to a normal vision mode. There, half hidden behind a few wine racks reaching from the concrete floor to the low ceiling, was a work area. A desk, a monitor, a rudimentary office. It was cool down here, and the carnage above seemed miles away.
She was two steps into the room when she heard a faint breath. 'Temple,' she whispered. 'I know you're here.'
There was a gasp of surprise, and he gingerly emerged from behind the desk, a small pistol in his trembling hand. 'You…' he whispered. 'Are you… Was this a test?' Temple's face was a mess of conflicting emotions. 'Did… Did I fail?'
'What the hell are you talking about?' she hissed, throwing a worried look at the stairs. If the hit team heard them, it would be all over.
He kept muttering to himself, thinking aloud. 'No… No, it's not that. It's you. It's all your fault!' Temple rose up and aimed the gun at her.
'You should be dead! How did you get away?'
'I had help,' she admitted, holding her hands open to show she was unarmed.
'That's why they're here… Because of you, you stupid bitch! They know! You compromised me and they know it! I'm worth nothing now!
Nothing…' He choked off in a sob. 'Oh god. Everyone is dead. They're coming for me… They're cleaning house.'
Temple's self-pity grated on her and she stepped toward him. 'This is the price you pay for betrayal. I'd kill you myself if I could, but that would let you off easy!'
'You can't know what it was like…' Temple looked down at the pistol and studied it, turning it toward himself. 'They'll find me
…'
'No!' Anna lunged at him and backhanded the man across the face. For a moment they wrestled, and then she knocked the gun away, sending it skittering out of reach under the wine racks. 'I need you alive, you bastard. We have to get out of here!'
'And go where?' He met her gaze and Kelso saw a side of the man she'd never seen before. He was falling apart before her eyes. 'You can't run.
You can't hide.' Temple snorted. 'What do you think is going to happen, Kelso? That you'll get your day in court like all good citizens? They won't let the Killing Floor be exposed!'
'The what?' She'd never heard the term before.
He wasn't listening. 'We are already dead!'
'Not yet,' she said. 'You're my proof.'
He went to the desk and tore through the papers scattered across it. 'You want proof? Here. You came back for it, so take it' Temple thrust something into her hands, and she realized it was the flash drive he had taken from her back at the office. 'See how far you get!' He was blinking back tears.
Somewhere above them, she heard the crunch of broken glass. Anna grabbed Temple's arm and twisted it. 'I don't give a damn what you say.
You're coming with me. Move!'
She went back to low-light mode as they emerged into the kitchen. Temple gasped at the carnage and she saw him lurch toward a knife block.
He pulled out a butcher's blade and cradled it in his hands, his breathing fast and shallow.
Across the room, a door opened onto the garden beyond. Anna heard movement in the lounge and she made for the exit. Her hand closed around the latch and she tested it: locked.
From the other room came a metallic click and an egg-shaped object rolled over the threshold, rattling as it came to a spinning halt on the tiled floor of the kitchen.
'No-!' Temple cried out just as Anna's mind caught up to what she was seeing; she rocked off her feet and slammed her shoulder into the door, wood splintering around the lock and frame. It came open as the grenade detonated with a shriek of combustion. A churning wall of heat and gas picked her up and threw her the rest of the way, sending Anna spinning into the soft, damp grass outside. She rolled as a torrent of glass and splinters rained down on her. Smoke and flame gushed from broken windows and the cracked doorway. Temple was still in there. Too late now.
Anna pulled herself to her feet, the hot stink of the fire choking the air around her; the blast had to have ruptured a gas line. Without looking back, she took off toward the trees flanking the house. As she sprinted away, two figures in matte black combat gear emerged from the smoke, panning their weapons this way and that.
Saxon swore as the explosion from the house caused his night vision to flare out, and he switched modes to ultraviolet. Crouching on one knee a short distance from the silent helo, he peered down the sight atop his rifle and tapped his comm pad. 'White, this is Gray. Respond.'
'Don't get your panties in a bunch ' came the terse reply. 'We're on the way out. Prep for dust off.'
'That's your take on covert action? Blow the shit out of something?'
Hardesty ignored the comment. 'If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you. Meantime, keep your eyes open. We got a possible runner, heading your way. Intercept and execute, if you can handle that.'
Saxon cut the channel without bothering to answer. Rising from the ground he came forward, the rifle at his shoulder, sweeping back and forth.
He heard the woman before he saw her, a moment before she emerged from the tree line. She was running across open ground, the last stretch before the rear wall of the Temple estate. On reflex, Saxon pulled the FR-27 tight to his shoulder and flicked the fire selector to single shot; at this range, he couldn't miss. The assault rifle would put a titanium-tipped flechette round directly on target, enough to tear open an unarmored human body.
Then she saw him and stumbled, staggered, almost lost her balance. Saxon's finger was on the trigger. The smallest application of pressure and she would be dead; an unarmed woman, a civilian, executed in cold blood.
She stood, frozen, waiting for the kill shot to come.
Ben Saxon was not an innocent. There were more than enough deaths that could be laid at his feet, kills he had made in the heat of battle and through cold, calculating aggression. Lives he had ended from afar, and some so close he heard the escape of their final breath. But then he was a soldier, and that had been war. But this…
The realization crystallized for him. What he was doing now went against every moral code Saxon believed in.
He let the rifle barrel drop slightly, and the woman saw the motion. In a few moments, she was at the wall
