fingers tensed. She thought about the call she'd made, the night before the incident. Matt had always been there for her, and asked for nothing in return.
'The Service will not stand to let this pass, Agent Kelso,' said Bradley. 'We will not let these men walk free.'
She took a shuddering breath and gave a long nod. 'Yes, sir. I'll do everything I can to assist the investigation.'
'Good-' Bradley leaned in to remove the wire, but she halted him.
'Before we do that, could I… Can borrow a cell? I need to talk to Jennifer Ryan. She needs to hear it from me.'
Temple handed her his vu-phone. 'Go ahead. Take your time.'
When she was alone, and everything was dark again, she spoke the number for the Ryan household into the device and listened to it dial.
Inside her thoughts, something hard, cold, and beyond anger began to crystallize, like black diamond.
Station November-New South Wales-Australia
He remembered bits of what happened in the time between the drone exploding and awakening in an SAF field hospital just south of the redline.
He remembered drowning, or something near to it. The slurry of muddy orange-brown water in the fouled creek smothering him like the shock foam. He remembered the horrible ripping sound of Sam Duarte's execution at the guns of some autonomous robot predator. And he remembered the shadow, the hulking shadow that waded into the river and dragged him out over the rocks. The voices, talking in languages he didn't understand.
Saxon lost a lot of time there, or so it seemed. Days and nights blurred into one another. He found it hard to keep the passage of them straight in his head. Dimly he was aware that they had medicated him. The doctors talked about how the burns that the crash had inflicted on him were severe. They talked about the damage his cyberlimbs had suffered from the fall into the creek. The Hermes leg augmentations were shot, little better than scrap metal now; and then there was the litany of malfunctions with his internal implants, the optics and the reflex booster, the commo and all the rest. All this, without even a mention of how the meat, the human part of him, was faring.
All these things seemed faint and far distant, though. Each time he slept-if you could call it sleep-there were ghosts waiting.
Sam, Kano, all the others from Strike Six, all watching him. They never spoke, they didn't curse him or cry out. Sometimes they were intact, the black tri-plates of their flexible armor vests pristine and bloodless, gold-faced helmets raised visor-up as if they had just walked in off the parade ground. Other times, they were burned things, shapes of red and black flesh on charred bones.
They didn't blame him or forgive him. They just watched.
Sometimes, in those moments when he couldn't be sure if he was dreaming it or if he was seeing the real thing through a veil of painkillers, they would be in the room with him. Sitting on the beds, smoking a cigarette, sipping from a cup. And the shadow was with them. In the room, watching him like they did.
Saxon had lost men before. He wasn't a stranger to it. But he wasn't used to the idea of being a survivor, of being the only survivor. It gnawed at him.
One day he drifted back to the surface of consciousness and found the shadow sitting in the chair next to his bed. Saxon knew he was real because he could smell him. The shadow smelled like rich, strong tobacco, and the scent triggered a sense-memory in the depths of Ben Saxon's mind. He remembered being a boy, maybe five or six years old, his grandfather taking him through the streets of London past impossibly old buildings, to a gilt- edged hole-in-the-wall shop, all paneled with mirrors and advertisements for cigars. A man in there, selling packets of raw pipe tobacco, and the strange exotic textures that smelled like the air of distant lands.
The memory evaporated and Saxon blinked. The shadow was a man, a few years his senior, but intense and muscled, with an angular face like carved wood. Rugged, handsome after a fashion… but hard with it. Saxon sensed that about him more than anything, like a ghost aura. The shadow was a soldier and a killer.
'You…' he managed, licking dry lips. 'You're the one… pulled me from the creek bed.'
That earned him a nod. 'You would have died' said the other man, the trace of an Eastern accent threaded through his words. 'That would have been a waste.'
Saxon eased himself up a little, blinking away the last of the fog from his chemical sleep. 'Thanks.'
'I did it because it was the right thing to do,' he went on, fixing him with an intense look, his right eye a striking silver-blue augmentation.
'And, it seems, because fate deemed it right.'
Saxon shook his head. 'Never believed in that stuff myself.'
'No?' The man drew out a cigarette, offered one that Saxon refused, and then proceeded to light his own with an ornate petrol lighter. 'I am a great believer in the notion of 'right place, right time, right man,' Mr. Saxon.' He took a long drag. 'And that is you, at this moment.'
Saxon noticed the man's arms for the first time; they were like images from old medical textbooks, skinless limbs packed with dense bunches of artificial musculature over steel bones. Top-of-the-range, mil-spec cyberlimbs. For a moment, he measured himself against the stranger, wondering if he could take him on. Saxon concluded that at best, they might be evenly matched.
He looked away, glancing around the ward. They were alone. 'Who are you?' He studied the man for a moment. He was wearing a nondescript set of black fatigues completely bereft of any identification tags or insignia. He was also unarmed… but then he showed a kind of careful poise that made Saxon suspect he didn't need a gun or a knife to be lethal. 'Are you Belltower?'
'I have a far wider remit than Belltower Associates.' He smiled and exhaled. 'You wouldn't know the name of my… group. And that's exactly how we like it to be. I suppose you could call me a freelancer, if you really felt the need to hang a label.'
Deep black. Saxon had crossed paths with men like this before, in his time with the SAS. Soldiers whose missions were so far off-book that they didn't exist on any official documentation, groups that simply did not show up on the radar. He had to admit, he was intrigued. If a unit like that was operating in the Australian conflict zone, what did it mean? Was this man even fighting for the same side as him?
'My name is Jaron Namir,' he said, at length. 'We share a similar past, you and I. Both of us have worked under, shall we say, special conditions for our respective homelands.'
The accent suddenly clicked with Saxon and he placed it. Israeli. Which makes him, what? Former Mossad? Someone who got out of there before the war with the United Arab Front flattened everything?
Saxon tried to keep the tension he was feeling from showing. This man knew who he was, and he'd revealed key information about himself, or at least laid out some false trail; that meant there was a good chance Namir never intended to let Saxon live.
'I wonder, would you let me make an observation?' Namir went on. He asked the question with all the certainty of a man who knew he would not be refused.
Saxon watched him carefully. 'Feel free.'
'You're wasting your potential here. Belltower offers a good career for men like us, I don't dispute that. But the chance to really accomplish something? To make a difference, to bring order to a chaotic world? Belltower can't do that.'
A chill ran through the soldier's veins. 'You're trying to recruit me?'
Namir studied him. 'I read the after-action report on the failure of Operation Rainbird. You survived against very long odds, Mr. Saxon. I am quite impressed.' He stubbed out the cigarette. 'I could use someone with your skill set. I find myself a man down after a recent incident, and you make a good candidate. Interested?'
'Maybe if you told me who the hell you are.'
'I told you, the name would not-'
'Try me.'
Namir gave a shrug. 'I am field commander of a non-aligned special operations unit known as the Tyrants. We are an elite, independent, self financing group dedicated to maintaining global stability through covert means.'
'A rogue cell?' Saxon frowned. Like any other, the spec ops community had its own share of urban legends, and in his time he'd heard stories of so-called rogues, operators who had dropped off the grid and gone into
