'We can't talk like this. Wait a second.' Bradley came closer and Anna heard the whisper of a cable uncoiling. Something connected with a snap and she felt a sudden giddy rush of vertigo as an image exploded before her.
She saw a strange figure swaddled in bandages and crowded by electronic devices, like a hi-tech mummy. Monitors and an oxygen cylinder framed a bruised, puffy face. 'I can see again.' The figure mimed the words as she said them, and then the point of view shifted, taking in Ron
Temple at the window, framed by sunlight. His round face was tight with concern. 'Me. I'm looking at me.'
The view bobbed. 'I'm running you a feed from my optic implants,' said Bradley. A thin, brassy cable extended from inside his right-hand cuff and into a socket on the temporary eye interface.
'I look like shit,' she managed, swallowing a sob.
Temple came to the bed and perched on the edge, taking her hand. 'Yeah, sweetheart, you do. But you'll be okay. The doctors got the round out of you, it didn't hit anything vital. Tissue damage mostly. The Kevlar took the brunt of the impact, slowed it down some.'
The next words fell from her in a breathy rush. 'Matt's dead. Byrne and Connor, too…'
Temple gave a shallow sigh. 'Anna… They're all dead. You're the only one in the detail to make it.'
'We hoped Hansen, the Belltower guy, might pull through,' said Bradley. 'They lost him on the operating table.'
'How long have I been in here?' She gripped Temple's hand hard.
'Four days.'
'The senator?'
Bradley's point-of-view nodded again. 'She's okay. We already got a statement from her. That, plus imagery from the traffic cams, and we're assembling a model of the incident. But that's why we had to subpoena your optics. You're the only one who got a good look at a face. I had tech forensics from the FBI reconstruct a few stills from the data in the image buffer.'
'We'll get you replacements,' Temple noted. 'Good stuff, new Caidins or maybe Sarif…' He handed her a sip-bulb of water. 'I'm sorry you had to wake up blind…'
'Thanks for being here, sir,' she said, taking a drink of the cooling fluid. 'Has someone-' Anna took a shaky breath and started again. 'Has someone told Jenny?' Jennifer Ryan was Matt's wife of some sixteen years. They had two girls, Susan and Carole. She remembered their house as a warm, welcoming place.
Temple nodded gravely. 'She knows. I'm sorry, Anna.'
'I understand you and Agent Ryan were close?' asked Bradley.
The other man answered before she could. 'Ryan was her… mentor.'
'Something like that,' said Anna, the words barely a whisper. She swallowed and straightened up. 'Do you have the images with you? Can I see them?'
Bradley and Temple shared a look. 'Okay,' said the agent, and he drew a folding Pocket Secretary PDA from his jacket; it opened up, blooming like a metallic flower. Bradley hesitated, then held it in front of him, tabbing through the virtual pages. 'We're sifting through witness statements at the moment, still building the picture.'
'Leads are coming together,' Temple offered. 'We don't have any suspects as yet… These creeps just melted into thin air.'
'We had a report about an unmarked helicopter putting down briefly in Montrose Park, but D.C. air traffic control have nothing on that,' noted
Bradley distractedly.
'I never saw anything,' said Anna, her thoughts churning. 'What about evidence at the scene?'
Temple shook his head. 'No shells-they used caseless ammo. Fiber traces are a dead end, too. We did get a line on the car they used, though.
License was fake, most of the registration marks were lasered off, but we got a partial from the engine block. Turns out it was listed as stolen from a shell company that's a known front for the Red Arrow triad.'
'I killed one of them,' she insisted.
'They torched the corpse before they left,' he said. 'Thermite grenade. All we got left is a heap of burnt scrap metal and some biological traces that come up blank on the Interpol register.'
Bradley gestured with the PDA. 'Here's the picture of the shooter.'
Anna studied the grainy, ghostly image through the other agent's eyes. The blond hair, the hard, pitiless gaze of the man who killed Matt Ryan caught in midturn.
Suddenly she was back there again, collapsed in the street, wet with blood, racked with agony. Waiting for death. A shudder ran through her.
'Why… Why didn't he kill me?' she breathed.
Temple squeezed her hand. 'Best guess is, you lucked out. Black-and-whites from the Georgetown precinct were maybe ten seconds away at that point. Blondie there probably thought you weren't going to survive a gut shot and decided to buck out instead of hanging around to make sure.'
'But he didn't kill Skyler,' she insisted. 'Matt, Byrne, the rest of the team, even the guy the senator was meeting, Dansky… They murdered all of them, but not her. If it was the triads, why the hell is she still breathing?'
'A warning,' said Bradley. 'This is the Red Arrow telling Skyler to back off from chasing down the harvesters in SoCal. They're showing her that she can be got to, no matter where she is, or who's protecting her…' He trailed off and ran a hand through his hair. 'This whole thing is a mess. These people have made the Service look incompetent. Even Skyler's started distancing herself.'
'Sure she has. This is Washington,' said Temple, with an irritable snort, as if that were explanation enough.
'No,' Anna shook her head. She placed her hands flat on the bed and tried to gather her thoughts, tried to screen out the howling emotional pain clawing at the inside of her, forcing herself to think like a federal agent and not like a woman who had seen one of her closest friends brutally gunned down in front of her. 'You saw that creep in the picture. He's whiter than I am. I worked on a counterfeiting investigation against the Wo Shing Wo triad in Detroit, back in 2021. Those guys don't hire contractor muscle to send messages, and the Red Arrow are no different.'
'You can't be certain of that, Agent Kelso.' Bradley was studying her closely. 'Skyler's people have already had the Red Arrow taking shots at them back in Los Angeles. This is an escalation.' She saw her own expression tighten as he spoke.
In her mind's eye, the moment was unfolding again, and she grimaced. 'He shot Dansky,' Anna insisted. 'There was no reason to do that. The man was unarmed, no threat, not like the rest of us. And then the shooter went back, and he finished him off He executed him.'
Bradley was quiet for a moment. 'We've already interviewed the staff at Caidin.'
Temple nodded. 'It was like someone kicked over a hornet's nest in that place…'
Bradley continued. 'Garrett Dansky was meeting with Senator Skyler to discuss some details of…' He drifted off, glancing down at his PDA again. Anna saw panels of notes, the words 'United Nations' and 'rumors' leaping out at her. He looked away before she could read more.
'Apparently, the Caidin corporation are concerned about the possibility of some discussions going on at the UN. Something to do with the regulation of augmentation technology production. Pretty dry stuff. I don't see the Chinese mob having much stake in that kind of thing. Right now, we don't have anything to suggest that Dansky's death was anything more than just a collateral.'
'The fact is,' Temple said, 'we've got to work to keep on top of this. And you surviving is a break, Anna. I've got a couple of techs outside ready to debrief you if you're up for it. The more you can tell us, the more we can do about getting these guys. Okay?' He gave her a supportive smile.
Anna tried to return it, and she felt a sob rising in her throat again. Perhaps if they hadn't taken her eyes, she would have cried right then and there. She hated herself for feeling like this, barely able to control her emotions-the rage and the fury, the anguish and the sorrow that swept about her like a silent hurricane.
Matt Ryan is dead. The one person she trusted more than anyone else in the world, the man who had saved her life. The man who had given her a second chance. He had died and Anna had been unable to do a thing to stop it. Her hand instinctively reached for the pocket where the brass coin would be; but it wasn't there, and her
