Anniversary Day (27 page)

With his left hand, he lifted a man from the floor behind the maître d’ station. Given the man’s powder blue tuxedo dotted with stars, he had to be the maître d’ himself.

The man looked almost catatonic.

“How about you take me instead?” Keptra asked.

“How about everyone stay?” the assassin said, in that very reasonable tone.

“All right.” She had no idea if she was agreeing too fast, but she didn’t care. That was for the review board to decide, days from now, when this entire ordeal was over. “We’ll get the hostages out of here.”

“Actually,” the assassin said, “they’re not hurt. They can leave under their own power.”

Her heart was pounding. This had better go well.

“You heard him,” she said to the hostages. “Please leave slowly and carefully through the nearest door.”

They scrambled out of the booths, the single adults nearly knocking over children in their haste to escape. The adults who were responsible for the children grabbed them, picking some of them up and carrying them, dragging the others out by their hands.

It was a relatively quiet evacuation, and quick. They cleared the restaurant in less than two minutes flat.

If hostage situations were judged by how many hostages survived, then Keptra had just negotiated a successful deal.

Somehow, she suspected that this wasn’t about hostages.

“I’m still willing to trade myself for your remaining hostage,” Keptra said.

The assassin shrugged. “But I’m not willing to make the trade. In fact, I think I should get rid of him, don’t you?”

He brushed a hand over the man’s face. Keptra, remembering the images of the dead Armstrong mayor, tensed.

“I don’t think anyone should be gotten rid of,” she said.

I have a shot from the back
, one of her team sent.

That’s just what he wants
, she sent back.

She had to be willing to let that poor maître d’ die. How often had she told her people that occasionally sacrifices needed to be made? It was so easy to say, so hard to do.

“I can kill him with a touch,” the assassin said.

“I know you can,” she said. “But you’re not going to.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because you still have something to say to me.” She was just guessing, but that assassin in Armstrong waited to talk to the cops before he died.

This assassin looked surprised at her words. “How did you know that?”

She shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “Because you people are running someone else’s game, and in the instructions, you’re supposed to tell me something before you force me to kill you.”

His mouth opened slightly. He was surprised. He hadn’t expected her to say anything like that.

He looked like he wanted to ask questions, but he didn’t. Instead, he flung the maître away from him, raised that laser rifle, aimed it at her, and paused, as if he was waiting for someone to shoot him.

“We’re just the beginning,” he said.

“I know that,” she said. “Your friends said the same thing. The beginning of what?”

He looked panicked for the first time. Then he moved the laser rifle slightly and shot. The bolt was brighter than any she had ever seen. It shattered the window next to her—the supposedly unbreakable window—and before she realized what was happening, he sprinted toward her.

She ran for him, but she hesitated before touching him. She didn’t want to die like Armstrong’s mayor and she couldn’t get that image out of her head.

Other members of her team were swarming around her, but somehow the assassin eluded all of them. He launched himself through that window and into the emptiness at the top of the Dome.

His scream faded as he fell, then cut off abruptly.

“Son of a bitch,” Strom said beside her. “Son of a bitch.”

Forty-seven

Flint had Selah Rutledge summon Talia to the headmistress’s office. Both Flint and Selah had talked about it, and they determined it was best not to interrupt class nor have Flint show up at the classroom door. Too many strange things had already happened today, and since the school had—so far—elected not to go into lockdown and not to send the children home early, Selah thought it was best to keep things as normal as possible.

As normal as they could be with guards everywhere and other children—children of “important” people—already leaving.

Flint waited outside the headmistress’s office. He shifted from foot to foot, ready to leave. DeRicci had made him nervous with both her secrecy and her willingness to use him at the Security Office. He would have understood if she wanted him to do some work in his own office. But she didn’t. She wanted him to work in a government building, doing something her staff couldn’t do.

He heard a rustling down the hall, and then Talia appeared. Her height always struck him first. She had grown tremendously since he had brought her to the Moon two and a half years ago. Her curly blond hair tumbled around her face, and her copper skin accented her blue eyes, making them seem exceptionally bright.

His daughter was beautiful, and he knew it, and it worried him more than he could say. He didn’t want to tell her how worried he was—she thought he worried too much already (and maybe he did)—but a girl that beautiful got into trouble easily because men found her so attractive.

Of course, Talia was one of the most brilliant students the Armstrong Branch of the Aristotle Academy had ever had, and she had street smarts as well. Flint knew that of all the beautiful girls in this school, Talia was probably the one to worry about the least.

But she was here, and she was his, and he did worry. More than he could say.

When she saw him, she rolled her eyes.

“No one’s coming after me, Dad,” she said. Leave it to Talia to have already sussed out the situation.

“I didn’t say they were.” He sounded defensive and knew it. So he decided to move past that. “I just got notice from Noelle DeRicci. She wants me in the Security Office to help with something, and she told me to bring you as well.”

She hadn’t exactly requested Talia, but Talia didn’t need to know that.

Talia’s expression changed from a gently tolerant one to one that was suddenly both serious and frightened. He had worried about that. His daughter, for all her brilliance and street smarts, was very fragile emotionally.

“It’s really bad then?” Talia asked.

“I don’t know,” Flint said. “But it is unusual.”

She didn’t ask why he was at the school and he didn’t tell her. He didn’t really want her to know how long he had been there. He put his hand on her back and led her to the parking area.

He always parked near one of the exits—a long-standing habit that had saved his life more than once. He was more or less retired right now, but that didn’t stop him from maintaining his old habits.

“This is serious, isn’t it, Dad?” Talia asked as they left the building, passing three guards who stared at them with an intensity that Flint didn’t like.

“This is very serious, Talia,” Flint said. “I have a hunch we’re about to find out just how bad it is.”

Forty-eight

Unlike the rest of her team, Keptra didn’t look out that broken window to see what had happened to the assassin. She knew what had happened. He had leapt through the window in the circular restaurant, fell, and hit the clear ledge the engineers eventually built to keep suicides from falling all the way down to the city below and killing someone on the ground.

The ledge was far enough down that the suicides would get hurt, not too far that they would die (unless something went terribly wrong). The idea was to give them some second thoughts the next time they decided to try to kill themselves in a public place.

She scurried to an interior door that led to a service staircase. She probably could have taken an elevator, but she didn’t think it would save any time. She still had to go into the service hallways.

Her team was discussing the assassin on the links:

…didn’t expect him to land so close…

…he didn’t either…

…didn’t take anyone with him…

She was grateful for all of those things as well, but she didn’t participate in the discussion. Instead, she reached the landing that led to the area around the ledge.

Unlike the public parts of the Top of the Dome, the service parts didn’t have great views. There were no clear windows, only solid gray walls. Not because the builders felt that employees didn’t deserve a spectacular view; she had no idea how the builders felt about employees. No. It was because someone outside—even, apparently, someone who had just tried to commit suicide—didn’t need to look inside and see the unsightly service sections of the building.

She used her police identification to unlock the door. Then she stepped onto the ledge.

It wasn’t really a ledge. It was more like a balcony. It was open several meters up, but it ended on this floor. A clear wall blocked the exterior side, so that the possible suicide couldn’t drag himself to the edge and then fall again. He was trapped here until someone got him out.

She had already sent for back-up—both from her team, and medical back-up as well. If this guy hadn’t landed wrong and died, then he would be hurt. But it would be just their luck that he had landed wrong—hit his head, cut an artery, something that would kill him, even though he wasn’t supposed to die.

Or he would figure out what happened and use that weird poison on himself.

She pushed open the door, her heart pounding. That weird poison really did scare her more than anything. She didn’t want it near her.

She peered out, saw legs twisted in the wrong direction, suggesting breaks in the bones or at worst, a shattered spine. She eased out, making certain she stayed out of reach.

His left arm was outstretched, his right tucked against his face as if he had just fallen to sleep. His eyes were closed, his skin even whiter than it had been before.

She didn’t want to touch him to see if he was still alive. She didn’t want to get close to him at all.

But she was supposed to be the tough one, the strong one, the one who ran the team. So she grabbed a protect suit from her gear, pinched the small button, and the suit enveloped her. Then she put on extra gloves for good measure.

She willed herself to be calm as she stepped forward.

His chest wasn’t rising or falling, that she could see anyway. She had no idea if he was alive.

She crouched next to him, and put a finger on his neck. The chip inside her fingertip recorded his heart rate at 51 beats per minute, his blood pressure as low and falling, and his respiration too slow. He was probably bleeding internally. She didn’t have a sophisticated enough chip to tell her that.

But he was alive.

He was alive.

He was the first of the assassins to be caught alive.

She forgot all about her hesitation at touching him. She cuffed him with hands away from his body so that he couldn’t poison himself if he came to, then she sent for back-up all over again, reminding them that they had to do everything to keep this one breathing.

She took his weapon, which had fallen a meter away, and then she leaned against the gray interior wall.

Her first hostage situation and everything had gone right. The hostages were free and uninjured (except maybe for that maître d’), the potential assassin didn’t assassinate anyone (not even himself), and none of her people were injured.

Those thoughts didn’t calm her any, but they did make her smile for the first time since she’d arrived at the Top of the Dome.

She had done it. She had given not just Tycho Crater a break in their case, but United Domes Security a break in all the cases.

She hoped the break turned into some very real lead. Because she knew from all the chatter that they needed a lead right now.

Particularly with the assassin’s warning.

Since this was just the beginning, after all.

Forty-nine

The interior of Terminal 81 looked very different from the interior of all the other terminals. There were no floating signs to point to important sections of the terminal, no announcements drifting along the bottom of one eye offering an audio tour, no colored lights leading to a particular ship.

Instead, warnings assaulted Nyquist from the moment he stepped inside:
Make sure your hazmat suit is sealed; Do not approach any ship without authorization; Touch nothing with your bare hands
.

And on and on and on.