starless space.
The cold embrace leached the heat from his bones; Saxon squinted through the windburn and made out what he thought was the surface of the water, coming up fast, dappled by the moon's glow.
He extended his arms like they had taught him in parachute training, making his whole body an aerofoil, trying to slow himself as much as he could. And then, when he couldn't chance it any longer, he triggered the high-fall augmentation implanted in the base of his spine.
The device stuttered into life and cast a writhing sphere of electromagnetic energy about him, lightninglike sparks flashing where the field interacted with the air molecules. The implant ran past its tolerance limit, but Saxon retriggered it, cycling the device over and over. He felt it go hot, smoldering and heavy like a block of newly forged iron embedded in his back. The high-fall was never designed to do the job of a parachute; it was a short- span, low-duration technology, a mechanism spun off from safety implants for racing drivers, firefighters, steeplejacks.
He screamed as it burned into him, and the blackness engulfed everything. For a moment, at least.
Then he was in the frigid rise and fall of the waters, the salt brine smothering him with every new wave. He spun and turned, numb from the waist down. Warning telltales displayed in the corners of his optic field, function indicators for his cyberlegs showing red. He choked and shivered, feeling the weight of the augmented limbs pulling on him, robbing him of all buoyancy.
The ocean toyed with him, and then grew bored. Saxon began to sink, and he couldn't find the strength to fight the icy embrace of the waters.
All his defiance, his determination… it was bleeding away, second by second.
Then he saw the lights below, rising. The waters parting as something as large as a truck broke the surface. He saw a shiny, beetlelike carapace, an arch of what might be shell. Just beneath the water, ropes of steel moved past his damaged legs, ensnaring him.
Saxon's mind filled in the gaps; he imagined a massive nautilus coming up from the seabed to gather him into its tentacles, the giant monstrous thing festooned with glaring, sodium-bright lamps.
He blacked out for the second time as it pulled him toward it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dundalk-Maryland-United States of America
Through the dirty glass of the window, Kelso watched the lights of Baltimore turn dim as the sky grew lighter, losing herself in the passage of the clouds overhead and the never-ending wash of the water against the concrete pilings out on the old, abandoned docks.
Sleep, when she'd been able to snatch a little of it, was a fitful and troubled thing. Anna couldn't settle. She dreamed about skies full of squawking ravens, and vast black wings that wheeled and turned in the sky, blotting out the watery glow of a sullen sun. In the end, Anna stayed awake, keeping to the margins of Lebedev's compound while the men from the New Sons worked at tasks she could only guess at, and
D-Bar's hackers pored over the sealed files in the stolen flash drive. The inside of the warehouse looked exactly like what it was-a staging area for an antigovernmental terror group-and it ground against all Kelso's training as a federal agent to stand among it and do nothing.
So she went to the windows and watched the march of the morning approaching. Looking out at the distant city, Anna wondered who was out there, looking for her. Drake would be leading the capture team, she imagined. He would have considered it a personal slight that her escape had happened on his watch. Sorrow crossed her face. What are they saying about me? She didn't want to know the answer, didn't want to imagine the looks in the eyes of the men and women who had served with her. All of them would believe the lie about the death of Ron Temple and the murders at his home. They would hate her.
She wanted so much to run, to give in to the base impulse that tensed in the muscles of her hands. But out there, she would be prey. If
Lebedev's stories were true, she had nowhere to go. Even if they were not, the fact did not change. Anna Kelso was alone, and she had been forced into a single choice she did not want to make.
Trust or distrust.
But that was the corrosive nature of any conspiracy; it played on the fears inherent in all human beings, the terror of having your secrets known by the unknown, the vicarious thrill of keeping a sinister secret yourself. These people, this group Lebedev called the Illuminati… What they were doing lived in darkness, and the part of Anna that was still an officer of the law wanted to see them dragged screaming into the light.
She found herself back at the army tent, and ducked beneath the door flap. The place was empty, but the comms gear and the big screen were as live as they had been hours earlier. The snow of static on the monitor shifted slightly as she came closer, as if her presence were a breeze disturbing a scattering of leaves.
'I know you can hear me,' she said. 'I want to ask you something.'
After a few seconds, the static settled into the familiar pattern of dispersion she'd seen before, the phantom no-face. 'I will help you if I can,
Anna,' said Janus. 'But please understand that I don't have all the answers '
'These people… the Illuminati. The Tyrants. Back in D.C. there was something that D-Bar said to me, a phrase that I couldn't get out of my head.' She sighed. 'He talked about something called 'the Icarus Effect.''
'Ah, yes. A sociological construct, originally conceived in 2019 by Doctor Malcolm Bonner of the University of Texas. It's a very interesting theory, a societal echo of something that occurs in nature. Imagine a pack of animals, among which is a single individual exhibiting signs of nascent evolutional superiority. Not common superiority, that is, but a marked difference from the norm. A rare excessive.' The ghost-face shimmered. 'The individual's renegade nature threatens the stability of the pack. The others close ranks against it. Expunge or terminate it.
Stability returns, and the pace of evolution is slowed to a more manageable scale.'
'We're not talking about animals here,' Anna insisted. 'This is about people.'
'Indeed. But the principle is the same. Like brave but foolhardy Icarus, those who dare to go beyond the boundaries will fall to their deaths.'
'But who gets to choose where those boundaries are?' she asked. 'This group Lebedev talked about. I thought the Illuminati were just a historical curiosity, some kind of pre-millennium modern myth. But you expect me to believe that they're still around, and they've set themselves up as the… the stewards of humanity?'
'I couldn't have put it better myself' Janus allowed. 'They have been here for a very long time, Anna. They believe that gives them the right to run the world, and so they do not wait for the Icarus Effect to play itself out. They induce it wherever and whenever they deem it suitable. The Tyrants are one of the tools they use.'
A chill passed over her. 'How… how many times have they done this?'
'You mean, is this the first time they have manipulated global events to their own design? Oh, no. As I said before, the Illuminati have actively taken control of human history in this manner on many occasions. They have a long, long reach. World wars, disasters, famine, assassinations, cover-ups…all have been set in motion to deliberately retard the advancement of society when it threatened to go too far beyond the borders they created. We can't be allowed to fly too close to the sun, do you see?' Anna thought she detected bitterness in the artificially distorted voice. 'Imagine a vast steel hand enveloping the world. We must wear the invisible chains they have fashioned for us, because they believe only they have the right to judge when humanity can step from the cradle.'
The screen flickered and began to display a mosaic of images, video, and still photographs from the last hundred years. She saw soldiers on the battlegrounds of the Great War, Vietnam, the Pacific, Europe, the Persian Gulf. Grainy footage of a space shuttle blossoming into a fireball. A clip from the Zapruder film. The Berlin Wall midcollapse. Waves of dark oil across the Louisiana coastline. Gas attacks on the Tokyo subway.
Diagrams of what looked like a flying saucer. Blurry news camera shots of an airliner striking the second tower. Tanks rolling through the burning streets of Jerusalem; and there was more, but she couldn't recognize every fractional moment.
Anna thought about Janus's words and looked down at her hands, very aware that she was seeing them not
