Deus Ex - Icarus Effect (4 page)

His gaze turned inward, and Saxon's lip curled in cold amusement. How could they ever expect him to do anything else but reenlist? It was a

joke that they would even ask him. What purpose would a man like him find in the civilian world? The truth was, half the augmentations in him

were classed as lethal weapons in more than a dozen countries. If he stepped out, what would happen to him? Would he be stripped down,

defanged? A predator hobbled so it could fit in with the outside world?

Saxon had never connected to anyone outside; his family was long gone. He had no life beyond the unit, no loyalty to anyone but the unit. The

paper made him angry. Offering him the choice was almost an insult.

"Jefe?" His attention snapped back to the moment; Duarte was speaking to him, and he'd tuned the young man out.

"What is it?" He covered his moment of reverie by checking his rifle once again.

Sam ran a hand over his shorn scalp, across the wine-dark lines of an intricate angel design, wings spread across his temples. "These northern

guys, they're tough, yeah?"

"Not so you'd notice."

The words had barely left his mouth when the deck of the veetol tilted sharply without warning, and a scattering of loose items tumbled away.

Saxon grunted as the bulkhead at his back pressed into him, and the straps holding him to the acceleration rack pulled tight, forcing air from his

lungs.

The countdown clock read one minute twenty-six; they were still a long way out from the drop point. Another second dropped away and the

cargo bay was filled with the dull bray of an alarm.

Amid the sound of it, every member of Strike Team Six heard the fear in the voice of the pilot as he broadcast over their mastoid comms.

"Drones!"

Saxon's gut flooded with ice. Flying low and fast kept the veetol well out of the detection envelope of any surface-to-air missiles, but drones

were a different story. Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, the northern forces had taken to layering them in sleeper pods along the line of

the border, where they would sit dormant until something that didn't match their preprogrammed library of friendly silhouettes passed

overhead.

But this sector had been swept for drones. Belltower's near-flawless intelligence corps had given

Saxon the briefing. No drones. A clear run. Direct line of assault.

"What the hell?" Kano snarled, doubtless mirroring Saxon's train of thought.

He turned toward the African in time to see the first of the heavy rounds from the attack drone's cannon puncture the hull and the tall man's

chest. Blood misted the cabin's interior as more armor-piercing shells ripped fist-size holes in the fuselage and flight systems.

Acrid smoke filled Saxon's lungs as he felt gravity snare the veetol and pull it toward the ground.

CHAPTER TWO

Georgetown—Washington, D.C.—United States of America

Anna rose up from where she had fallen, her arm tight with pain in a line of new bruises, all along the points where she had collided with the

heavy planters. She felt woozy and her hearing was flattened and woolly from the concussion of the grenade blast. She could smell smoke and

dirt and the cloying scent of crushed flowers.

The agent made it up to her knees and blinked; her optics were blurred like a poorly tuned video image, the delicate subsystems of the

augmetic eyes cycling through a reset mode. Her vision hazed from black and white to color, and she saw her pistol lying among a drift of

broken window glass. Anna loped forward, and stooped to gather up her weapon, eyes darting around.

As her fingers tightened around the butt of the Mustang automatic, she felt a sharp jerk at her back that dragged her off balance. Kelso saw the

hood of the stalled town car coming up to meet her and she brought up her hand just in time to block the new impact. Slipping down over the

crumpled fender, cursing, she saw her assailant.

It was one of the figures from the car, dressed head to foot in black combat fatigues with a zip hood that closed like a mask over his face. The

man was easily twice her body mass, and protruding from the ends of his jacket sleeves were hands of dull machined metal. Her hearing was

coming back by degrees, and she heard his combat boots crunching on the glass as the attacker balled a knot of her expensive Emile jacket

between those steel fingers and hauled her off her feet. She struggled, but her arms felt like lead.

Blank eyes, shark-black and wet, measured her; this bastard was playing games, tossing her about like a rag doll—but now that was going to

end, now he was going to kill her. The other hand came up and clamped around her bare neck and squeezed like a vise. Anna tried to scream,

but the sound died in her throat, trapped there. A cascade of warning icons rained down across the inside of her eyes, fed from the implanted

biomonitor tracking her vitals. She heard her bloodstream thundering in her ears.

The Mustang was heavy and dead in her grip. It was a block of iron, dragging her down. It took all her effort to lift it, her exertion ending in

stifled gasps.

He saw the movement, and tried to deflect her, knock the gun away. Anna jerked the trigger by reflex and the pistol roared. The first discharge

missed, but the muzzle flash flared bright across the killer's eye line and he snarled; for a moment his grip slackened and Kelso pushed away,

turning. When she fired again, the round hit him at point-blank range through the base of his jaw. Her assailant dropped like a felled tree,

trailing a stream of blood from the back of his head.

Anna went down with him, landing hard for the third time. She pushed away and came up in a crouch, turning away from the mess she'd made

of him. A crawling, itchy gale of static was gnawing at the base of her skull—she'd lost the mastoid comm from the blast. Putting the dead man

out of her thoughts, she moved off, low and quick behind collapsed tables and fallen chairs, wincing with pain at each step.

There was thick smoke everywhere; all of Q Street was wreathed in it, the drifting haze of gray mist put out by the distraction grenades

churning with the dark black pall from the burning limo. The rebreather implant in her chest stiffened; she'd use it if she needed to. A strident

chorus of pealing car alarms was crying up and down the street, warning lights flashing. She glimpsed Connor lying at the curb, his torso a red

ruin of bullet impacts. The agent's eyes were lifeless, staring into nothing.

Anna kept moving. The crackle of automatic rounds sounded nearby, and she heard someone call out. The words were lost to her, but she knew

Matt Ryan's voice when she heard it. She could make out the vague shape of the SUV—he had to be there, with Skyler. The Secret Service's

first priority was always to their principal, and Ryan would be doing everything he could to get the woman out of danger.

A figure moved in the smoke, and she called to it, stifling a cough. "Matt?"

The gunshot that answered her struck Anna in the gut and she cried out. Burning, white-hot agony seared her belly and she recoiled, stumbling

against a low wall. Her legs turned to water and she slipped down, a blossom of stark crimson blooming across the white silk blouse beneath her

jacket. The round had gone straight through the Kevlar undershirt and buried itself in the meat of her. The agony was like nothing she had ever

felt before. Her hands tightened into fists; her pistol was gone, spinning away out of reach. She felt a tightness in her chest as her biomonitor's

active response system released protein threads into her bloodstream, racing to the source of the injury.

The SUV's engine rumbled, and the taillights glowed white as the gears shifted; they were going to get away, get Skyler to safety. Kelso felt

panic rising in her thoughts. She was going to be left behind.

The haze was thinning, and for one random moment, a breath of clear air passed before her. She saw Byrne and Ryan with Skyler between

them—the senator was slack, semiconscious—trying to maneuver the woman into the back of the SUV and keep a watch for the assailants at

the same time. Dansky was staggering after them, pressing a bloody kerchief to a nasty wound on his face.

Anna tried to get up, but the pain flared in her torso like another bullet hit, and it forced her back down. She was gasping for breath when she

saw the figure again.

Like the one she had killed, he was broad and thickset—a linebacker profile, black-clad and lethal. He lacked the obvious cyberlimbs of the dead

man, but he moved through the smoke without pause; he had to be tracking his targets with a thermographic implant. In the assailant's hand

was a large frame automatic, the length of it doubled by a cylindrical silencer.

Dansky caught sight of the armed man and cried out; the gun replied with a metallic cough and the executive went down. Anna's heart

hammered in her chest as she saw what would come next. She shouted Ryan's name, the pain rising with it, and he turned toward the sound,

pushing himself in front of Skyler to shield her from attack.

The next shots took Byrne in the throat and the face, ending him before he hit the asphalt. Ryan returned fire, his rounds going wide.

Anna's legs felt numb and unresponsive. She lurched forward, but the limbs were dead meat. The coppery stink of her own blood filled her

nostrils and she gagged. She wanted to look away. She wanted to, but she couldn't.

The assailant went in for the kill and Ryan threw himself at the figure. There was a scuffle, and the agent tore open the zip hood. Kelso got a

look at the face underneath—all fury and exertion, sallow and Nordic, with a shock of ice-blond hair. He clubbed Matt Ryan across the skull with the butt of the pistol, knocking him down. Then, with care, the killer took aim and ended him with a single shot.

Anna felt her friend die, the awful inevitability of it. She felt the horrific sense of the moment pass through her like an electric shock as Ryan

crumpled into a nerveless heap and was still.

Everything about him, everything he was, the good, honest man who had done so much to help her ... all of it gone in less than a second. Tears

streamed down her dirty, bloodstained cheeks as she struggled to hold on to consciousness, her pain overwhelming everything. It all seemed

impossible, unreal...

The killer halted for a long second, and she recognized the body language of someone conducting a sub-voc conversation. Then, very

deliberately, he turned to examine Senator Skyler, where the woman lay half in and half out of the SUV. She tried to hold up her hands to ward

him off. In the distance, sirens were approaching.

Anna waited for the next shot, but it never came. Even with all the madness unfolding around her, confusion rose in her thoughts as the

assailant walked away, leaving Skyler very much alive. Instead, he crossed to where Dansky was lying on the edge of the restaurant patio, and

shot the man again.

Then he turned to look toward her, and once more Anna got a good look at the sharp angles of the man's face.

It was the last thing she saw, as the thundering in her ears grew loud and dragged her down toward blackness.

The Grey Range—Queensland—Australia

Saxon never felt the impact.

A split second before the veetol collided with the hillside, jets of shock foam flooded the cargo bay with gouts of yellowy matter, reeking of

chemical stink. The fluid sprayed across him, the frothing mass instantly hardening as it made contact with the air. He gagged and coughed as

some of the foam made it into his mouth, his nostrils. It enveloped his body, smothering him.

The aircraft crashed down and ripped itself to bits as it drew a long black gouge of scorched earth across the tree line, the wings and rotors