Part of her wondered if she was overreacting-anything could have happened, some mechanical fault, a delayed train on the rails ahead of them, any one of a number of nondangerous reasons why they had stopped-but Kelso knew her own instincts. Throughout her career, every time she had ignored them she had regretted it.
Opening the door to the connecting alcove at the end of the carriage, Anna found herself at the foot of the stairwell leading to the upper deck.
On either side, doors at platform level looked out at the blank gray tunnel. She flattened herself into the wall and tried to peer down along the length of the train.
Faint illumination from glow strips cast flat shadows around the tunnel floor, but there was motion in the distance-flashlights, bobbing as they came closer.
Anna forced the door, but it refused to open, mag-locked until the train reached the next station. Without hesitating, she braced herself in the crook of the door and kicked out with her feet, aiming her heel at the corner of the glass. After three or four hard impacts, the window webbed and fractured. Scraping her fingers on the bent frame and sharp edges, Anna put all her bodyweight behind it and the glass finally gave, shattering into blunt fragments.
It was a longer drop to the rail bed than she had expected it to be, and Kelso landed poorly, hissing with pain as her ankle twisted. Cold, rain damp air filled her lungs and she scrambled across the opposite track, crunching over the gravel between the rails. The lights were coming her way, and now she heard voices. The only escape route was back along the length of the train in the opposite direction. Anna hugged the side of the carriages and stole forward, as quickly as she dared.
She was only a few steps from the mouth of the tunnel when she heard a voice call her name.
She ignored it and broke into a run, wincing with the ache from her ankle. A halo of white glared around her as she fell into the beam of one of the flashlights, and she threw up a hand to shield her eyes. Anna stumbled backward, and she was looking for another means of escape when she heard the voice again.
'Kelso! Damn it, where the hell are you going?'
She squinted into the light. 'D-Bar?'
The young hacker became visible, flanked by a couple of thuggish men who had the watchful, grim manner of career leg-breakers. They had machine pistols as well as the flashlights. 'You are a real pain in the ass to pin down, do you know that?' D-Bar beckoned her to follow him.
'C'mon. We don't have long until the railroad signals reset, and then this will not be a safe place to stand.'
Anna hesitated. 'You left the package.'
That got her a nod. 'You're predictable, Agent Kelso. Juggernaut ran your psych profile, figured where you'd most likely go. 'Course, the
Tyrants figured the same thing, didn't they?'
She returned his nod. 'I suppose I should thank you, then.' Anna followed them toward the far side of the tunnel, where an archway led to a branching conduit.
He grinned wolfishly. 'That's twice now I saved your pretty little backside. Honestly, being your white knight is getting to be a habit.'
'Don't get a swelled head over it…' Anna halted. 'Because I'm not going anywhere with you until I know where we're heading.'
One of the thugs, a tall Hispanic man with acres of tattoos and chromed augmented hands, stepped toward her in an obvious gesture of threat, but D-Bar waved him away. 'No, no. Agent Kelso's got a point. If she wants to stay here and chance it with the cops, she can do that.' He leaned in. 'Or, you can come with us and finally get a freakin' clue. What's it gonna be?'
Her first instinct was to cut and run. Trust had never come easily to Anna, and after everything that had happened, it was harder still to find that conviction inside herself; but she knew that she wouldn't make it another day without some kind of help. 'I guess when you put it like that… I don't have a lot of options, do I?'
D-Bar gave a smug smile. 'About time you caught on.'
Aerial Transit Corridor-Northeastern Sector-United States of America
The transport jet settled into its heading, angling into a course that would follow the Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland before turning to strike out across the Atlantic. Once they were at stable altitude, all the members of the Tyrant team had taken Namir's orders to heart and returned to their cramped cabins in the aircraft's midsection. The lighting dimmed to night-flight levels; they would not see day again until they reached the airspace of the European Union.
Saxon waited twenty minutes, listening at the wall to be certain of no other movement out in the corridor. Then, with care, he eased open the door to his cabin and slipped back out, moving forward with all the stealth he could muster. The only weapon he had on him was a Buzzkill stun gun, although he wondered if the tazer pistol would be enough to put down any of the Tyrants. He was on a mission of his own making now; discovery would mean failure, and worse.
In another pocket he had the disposable vu-phone. Waiting in the cabin, he had read and reread the message sent by Janus, committing it to memory before erasing the text.
Melina; he turned the name over in his thoughts. Saxon tried to imagine a younger Jaron Namir, a man and not the lethal cyborg that he knew.
He tried to picture that young Namir dealing with the death of someone close to him. Had it hardened him, he wondered? Made him callous to the suffering of others, put him on the path to who he had become? Saxon frowned and dismissed the thought. Whatever secrets Namir had, if this worked, he would learn them soon enough.
He threaded his way along the length of the jet, to the stairs dropping to the lower level. Crouching, Saxon carefully placed each silent footfall, keeping in the lines of shadow along the main corridor. Blinks of light, from the wingtip navigation indicators on the jet's wings, cast faint halos of color over his shoulders through the oval windows. Saxon knelt in the lee of a support frame and cycled through the variant modes of his optics.
Through the partition walls, he picked out the faint heat-blobs of the two-man flight crew up toward the cockpit area, while at the aft, in the operations center, the only colors were the dull green-blue glow of the idling computer systems.
Saxon entered the ops room and closed the door behind him. Keeping low, he threaded his way to Namir's console and tapped the glassy surface. The panel came to life, immediately demanding a pass code. He let out a breath to steady himself, and tapped out the first string of symbols. Melina's date of birth.
The panel chimed a warning; the code was wrong. The sound seemed like a shout in the quiet of the dormant room, among the low murmur of the computers. Saxon waited for a moment, one hand on the stun gun, but no one came to investigate. He went on; the second code string was also incorrect. A fail on the third attempt would lock down the console and doubtless trigger some kind of alert-but the list of potential passwords Janus had provided had more than three variations. He ran them through his thoughts again.
Namir's sister. His daughter. A simple code. It would not be complex, Saxon realized. Namir wasn't that kind of man, not one to waste time on needless subterfuge. He was direct. There were no shades of gray to him.
Saxon thought about people he had lost, people he had felt responsible for; and then he typed in the name of the dead woman as it might have appeared on her gravestone, plain and unaltered.
The console unlocked and bloomed with new display windows, welcoming him into the main lines of its data store. Saxon's eyes narrowed as he saw line after line of files, labeled with places, dates, names
…
Targets. There were hundreds of people listed here, and they were all objectives for the Tyrants. He scrolled through the names, looking for points of commonality, struggling to understand. There were men like Mikhail Kontarsky, high-profile figures linked to criminal groups like the
Hong Kong Triads and the Russian Bratva, others tagged as in collusion with terrorists and activists- Juggernaut, L'Ombre, Purity First, and others. On the surface, people who looked like bad guys, up to their necks in illegality. But Saxon had only to scratch the surface to find lists of action orders ranged against the names of civilians, politicians, scientists-people the
Tyrants had no business going against. Some of the orders were straight kill commands, others ghosted under setups that would appear as suicides, robberies gone wrong, accidents. A few were tagged as 'coercive'-no deaths there, instead the application of violence and intimidation.
