Deus Ex - Icarus Effect (37 page)

"Saxon!" Powell snarled, coming up behind him. "Stay off the channel unless it's important!"

He frowned and climbed up the staircase, staying low.

The highway traffic coming into the city across the Rhone from Lancy was mostly commercial at this hour, and there was a moment of

uncomfortable recollection when Anna watched a massive automated truck thunder past them. She'd insisted on taking the shotgun seat,

kneading the grip of the Zenith automatic Croix had given her while the Frenchman sat behind the wheel of their black sedan. He had a

connector running from one of his augmented arms into the dashboard, and he scanned the road ahead, his face set in concentration.

The interior of the car was dark, but in the backseat, D-Bar was lit by the glow of the laptop computer; the screen's pale light gave his face a

corpselike pallor.

"I see him," said Croix. "Five hundred meters ahead. Confirm?" He threw the question over his shoulder.

When D-Bar didn't reply, Anna turned in her seat. The hacker blinked and looked at her. There was a mix of emotions on his face that she

couldn't read. "Oh. Yeah," he managed. "Confirm."

"He's turning off the motorway," Croix noted as the van slipped into a feed lane. "Heading into the city. We need to know where he's going."

Anna listened, but she was watching the glow of the taillights from the target vehicle with almost feral intensity. In her mind's eye she could see

only the face of Gunther Hermann, that and the moment of Matt Ryan's murder, over and over.

Geneva International Airport—Grand-Saconnex—Switzerland

"We're in," said the other team leader. "Tail section clear. Moving to secure lower deck." "Copy," whispered Powell. "We're moving aft."

Saxon pressed himself into the wall and strained to listen. They had found no one in the cockpit, nothing but the jet's controls set in standby

mode. It rang a wrong note in his mind, and he hesitated, frowning.

"Something's not right," he said as Powell came to his side.

"What, that we got the drop on your Tyrant buddies?" he husked. "Keep moving." He gestured with the silenced FR-27 in his grip.

With Powell and another two of his men following on behind him, Saxon moved down past the galley to the doors of the ops room. He felt an

unpleasant chill on his skin. Walking the halls of the jet so soon after having nearly died there did not sit well with him.

On a three-count, he tore open the door and fell into the room, looking for a target.

The ops center was empty, the consoles working quietly, screens showing a steady train of data as it scrolled past. He moved carefully into the

middle of the room, a cold sweat forming between his shoulder blades.

"Clear," said Powell, a note of disbelief in his voice. He tapped his comm. "Unit two. Move to the cabins. They could be sleeping. Execute

whoever you find."

"They're not sleeping," Saxon muttered. Something caught his eye and he moved to one of the control panels. It was part of the jet's encrypted

communications suite. The screen showed a series of active broadcast nodes. The first was highlighted on a map, moving through the Geneva

suburbs. Hermann in the van, he thought.

Over the radio, he heard the voice from before report in. "Sir, got something here in the cargo bay... Looks like chemical drums. Commercial

grade ammonium nitrate. Accelerants. Everything youd need to build a backyard IED."

Powell's brow furrowed. "Why the hell would they need that crap? We know the Tyrants have access to military-grade explosives ..." He

turned to the soldier with him. "Cooper, check everything in this room. We don't want any surprises ..."

Saxon's attention was still on the comm system. He found a second node display; this one was a stream of encryption, shifting and moving. The

location was static. He realized he was looking at a virtual icon for the jet and the ops room.

"Sir" said the operative on the lower deck, "whatever they were making here, they built it already. All we got is leftovers."

The color drained from Powell's face. "A truck bomb ..." He tapped his comm bead again. "Patch me in to Croix, right now!"

Saxon distantly registered the conversation, hearing Powell shouting an urgent warning to the L'Ombre field commander. He didn't hear the

words, instead tracing the line of the signals between the first and second Tyrant communication nodes; and beneath them both, he found a

third.

It was isolated, away from either of the others. Saxon frowned, trying to interpret the complex web of signal and encoding; and then with a

sudden, cold clarity, he understood what he was seeing.

None of the communications to Hermann had originated from the jet. All of them were coming from the third, concealed comm node, the

identity and location displayed only as a single codeword—Icarus.

Wherever Namir and the Tyrants were, it wasn't here. They were broadcasting to the jet, then letting the automated systems on the aircraft

relay the signal to the van. Namir had to know that the Tyrants were being monitored.

They had never been here.

"We've been set up!" he shouted.

Rue de Lyon—Geneva—Switzerland

Powell's voice sounded from Croix's hand radio as they passed the Pare Geisendorf, heading east. "The vehicle Hermann is driving has

explosives on board. The Tyrants have put together a fertilizer bomb ... They're going to detonate it in the city!"

Croix swore. "That's perfect. They blow up a piece of Geneva and then fake a claim from some transhumanist radicals; they get what they want

and Taggart dies ..." "Where's Taggart now?" Anna asked D-Bar. The hacker hesitated again before he answered. "The, uh, hotel. The Metropol Grande, downtown."

"The Grande has a large underground parking garage," Croix went on. "A big enough explosion in there could collapse the whole building."

"We've got to stop him now!" Anna snapped, working the slide of the Zenith. But Croix was already pointing down the road ahead. "He's making

a run for it!" Anna saw the van's lights flare as it leapt away at high speed, jumping a stop signal, tires squealing as it veered past a car crossing

the highway. Croix flattened the accelerator and the sedan surged forward.

"Floor it," Anna snapped. "Get us closer!" "What the hell are you talking about?" demanded Powell.

"We've got to get off this plane, right fucking now!" Saxon told him. "Namir and the others are somewhere else, bouncing the signal off the

comm gear on board!"

"Why?" Powell shot back.

"They knew we were coming!" he roared.

Powell's rifle was coming up, his face split with an angry snarl. "Did you—?"

But in the next second another voice was speaking over both of them. "Sir?" They both turned as Cooper backed away, his face pale. "Saxon's

right."

The other man had bent down to open an access panel; concealed behind it was a fat brick of gray, claylike material, with a series of silver

detonator pins wired into it.

Powell shouted into the radio. "All units, disengage, disengage, disengage—!"

The first of the remotely triggered charges went off at that moment, blowing the jet's tail into a cloud of metal shrapnel.

A gust of hot gas and smoke came rolling down the length of the aircraft toward them as they ran. Inside the spaces of the fuselage, a second

charge detonated, then a third. The churning inferno blossomed into a deadly flower.

Rue de Chantepoulet—Geneva—Switzerland

The two vehicles roared across the junction and cut through the sparse traffic, jockeying for position as they turned back toward the river.

Taggart's hotel was across the Mont Blanc bridge, less then five minutes away.

Anna shouted "Closer!" and dropped the passenger-side window. Her actions were dislocated somehow; it was as if she were watching herself

from a long way away. She shrugged off her seat belt and dragged herself out the window as Croix brought the sedan alongside the van. Anna

got a quick look at Hermann's incredulous expression in the wing-mirror before she raised the Zenith and unloaded four rounds into the vehicle,

aiming for the engine block.

The van skidded and recovered, turning as the feed lane to the Pont du Mont Blanc opened up before it.

The next thing she did was a moment of pure instinct, without conscious thought; Anna kicked off and threw herself at the van as the two

vehicles bumped. Her foot found the running board and her free hand snagged the mirror. She ignored the winds battering at her and fired

blind, shooting out the glass and firing into the driver's side of the van.

Hermann shot back with a burst from a Hurricane machine pistol, spraying bullets into the air. His shots were wide; despite all his

augmentations, driving the wounded vehicle, aiming, and firing at the same time were beyond him.

Her neurovestibular implant went hot and she felt the rush of new focus shiver through her; the feed-forward system augmentation tightened

her aim to the point between the muzzle of the Zenith and her target. Anna let the ice-cold flood of her anger take over, let it ride the aim point.

Time slowed as the van hurtled across the bridge. Anna brought up the pistol and fired again. The shots struck Hermann in the head, carving

across the front of his skull, ripping flesh and breaking bone. The impact trauma was massive, throwing him off the steering wheel.

The van skidded again and this time there was no one to stop it. Anna's grip was torn away by the hard pull of gravity and she instinctively fell

into a roll as she struck the highway. The pain was breathtaking; Anna screamed as the road tore at her, her forward velocity shed in agonizing

impacts as she tumbled.

The van veered into the guide rail and cut straight through it, bouncing over the pedestrian path to slice through the side barrier. Engine

roaring, the vehicle plummeted toward the Rhone river and clipped the rear quarter of a barge passing below.

As the van hit the water, something in the makeshift bomb broke. Perhaps a connector damaged by Kelso's gunshots or a vital component

short-circuited by the force of impact; the effect was the same.

The bomb went off in a howling, thunderous discharge of water and air, tearing the vehicle apart with the force of concussion.

Blood streaming down her face, Anna lurched to her feet as Croix came running. In the light from the streetlamps she saw the remains of the

van spin into the froth of the river and vanish from sight.

Saxon heard Powell die as the last detonation took him off his feet and threw him across the hangar and out onto the runway. Powell's scream

was torn away by the roar of the fire and then Saxon's world spun around him.

He landed hard, scraping his skin across the tarmac, pain lighting him up all over. The great ball of fire ejected a rain of steel fragments and

burning debris, and Saxon dragged himself to his feet, trying to get clear. The heat rolled over him and he coughed, smoke and the stench of

burning jet fuel searing his lungs.

He cast around, and his heart sank. Again ... Not again ...

No one else moved among the devastation and the flames; he cursed himself for being the survivor once more. Powell and his team were gone,

the jet and any chance of finding Namir and the Tyrants obliterated... Saxon stumbled and collapsed on the grassy verge across the runway. In the distance he could see the flash of lights from approaching fire