Her smile was cool. “Significantly less.”
The lights shifted more swiftly, Collator was irrefutable. Lugan planted a boot against the table edge, pushed the chair back and stood up.
“If ’e succeeds –”
“Lugan, I’ve spent over a decade working against the world that Pilgrim has wrought here, fighting for the return of our social freedom, warts and all. If he succeeds, Eliza will run her full – and proper – psychological diagnosis. She’ll design her Virtual Rorschach just for him, and he’ll get the treatment he actually needs. If he fails –”
“If ’e fucks this up, I’ll slit ’is throat myself. I already said so.”
In the silence that followed, he became aware that the Boss had turned her face, ever so slightly. She was looking over her bare shoulder at him in a manner that was almost... flirtatious.
“Lugan, you have so much alpha you leave a bollock dent in your fuel tank – but even you may find that difficult.”
“He’s my respo –”
“Collator will process and download the full mission briefing to Fuller at 21:46.” She turned back. “Ecko will move at 23:33. If he fails this mission, he’s mine. Go back to the Bike Lodge, Mister Eastermann, and explain to him, in words of one syllable or less, what I have just told you – and what will happen if he messes up again. You say you can manage him? Go and prove it.”
The screen went blank.
In the sudden darkness, Fuller’s voice came over their personal link.
Lugan didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he could.
2: RECONNAISSANCE
PILGRIM PHARMACEUTICALS RESEARCH FACILITY, LONDON
Ecko crouched against the back wall of the roof garden.
The cold March wind shrieked the length of the Thames, driving the grey water to white froth. The weather had grounded drones and aircars; on Blackfriars Bridge rain slashed viciously sideways into bright glass. Up here, acrylic greenery was driven to madness by the howling weather, it thrashed round where he hid as if it were trying to give him away.
He’d been cornered like a fucking rat – stuck here, with no way out of the shit Lugan’d landed him in.
He’d like to see Collator’s percentage on
Ecko’s recon was fucked and now he was trapped, eight storeys above the sidewalk, with no firearm, no aural link and no radio. The wall of the building below him was sheer glass, running with rain – too tough to break and too smooth for his vacuum suckers to hold. His usual Spidey tactics useless, the only way out was past the guard-’bot that blocked the stairwell door.
Through the rain, he could barely see it. Like his suckers, his oculars were trashed by the weather – the ’bot was a dark-grey blur against a bright-grey background. It’d set up camp like it was waiting for the opening of a BiFrost gig. Watching, Ecko hunched against the wall and wondered if Lugan would send the cavalry in time.
Salva, goon commander, knew he was up here. She was coming.
And once she found him, he was fucking toast.
“I know you can do this,” Lugan’d told him quietly after the initial briefing. “But listen up. This run is just recon – you get in, you get out. No mess. Fuller uploads the report at 06:48.
Ecko’d barely listened; he’d been so fucking cocky. He’d been given a chance to show what he could really do – and he’d grabbed at it like a dangled carrot.
“Like I’m as dumb as you look.”
“I mean it.” One of Lugan’s hands had clamped hard on his shoulder, holding him back. “You don’t understand ’ow important this is – an’ I ain’t explainin’ it, not now. Behave yourself.”
One of the potted trees went over with crash, ceramic shattering. A blood-red sheet of target-scan seared through the rain.
Ecko dropped flat in the lee of the wall and belly-crawled backwards, the puddles soaking his skin. The scan passed over him.
It was his only plan: if the ’bot scanned one hundred per cent of the potential hiding places and found nothing, it might just go for a cappuccino.
All right, already, so it was a long shot.
He’d thought this job was going to be so fucking simple!
Collator had pulled everything it could on Doctor Slater Grey; it had plotted Ecko’s approach carefully. They’d seen sat-cover of the South Bank – cafes, bars, galleries, theatres. Tourists and yuppies, he’d thought, a piece of piss, placid after dark. Grey’s pad was a zigzag of blue glass rising above its surroundings.
Getting in had just been too fucking easy.
He’d been a flicker of obscurity; they’d never seen him coming. His chameleon skin tone concealed him from visual security, his small physique radiated no heat, his stealth-cloak blurred his outline. His black-on-black eyes and black grin reflected no light. Mobile or stationary, he made no noise unless he chose to, he left no scent –
That fucking ’bot was moving.
Flicking his vision over to starlites, Ecko struggled to make it out. It showed up like a blotch of grey-green, one arm rising to point across the landing pad. Through the screaming weather, he made out a faint whirring noise.
Like a gyrocopter. Or an arm-mounted –
Unable to do anything else, he hugged the soaking gravel and prayed to the Bogeyman for luck.
The noise was phenomenal. Muzzle flashes dazzled his adjusted vision; rapid explosions chewed chunks out of the ferrocrete wall, dust and debris covered him. Already battered by the gale, the trees were shredded, pots exploding into splinters. Flying shards slashed at his face.
It stopped.
Breathless in sudden quiet, Ecko realised he was okay.
His first thought –
And if he’d get the chance to explain how the fuck he’d gotten himself up here...
* * *
Initial recon found Grey’s lair just as the briefing had described – soft carpeting to cushion footfalls, framed prints to inspire loyalty, a join-the-dots of pretty, neon pinpoints to light the corridors and conceal the security.
Shadow within shadow, Ecko waited, counting the time readout in his field of vision, watching the mottles of his skin shifting like disease. His black grin went unseen, his superiority unspoken. He mentally marked the IR trips, the UV tags. Then, without a breath of sound, he slid past the cameras and headed upwards.
He was the Bogeyman, the nightmare, the fantasy. Grey could dream on in all his plush Pilgrim naivete...
Until –
Goons passed him on a back stairwell; he heard them long before they came close. Their kit was good – gas-powered, close-assault weapons, nerve-contacted shades that imitated ocular scans – but they sauntered
