Deus Ex - Icarus Effect (9 page)

him, but the reason why wasn't clear.

"Just making conversation," he demurred.

"Joe Wexler was good," Hardesty insisted. "I could trust him. I don't know you. So I don't trust you."

Saxon moved to the cooler and took a bottle of water. "Trust this; Namir didn't invite me in because of my sparkling personality."

"Dead weight gets cut loose very fast around here," said Hardesty, pushing past as he made his way down the compartment. "Keep that in

mind, limey."

As the aft door closed behind him, Saxon shrugged. "Friendly fella."

"Wexler was ex-CIA, like Hardesty," Barrett noted. "You know spooks, they like to stick together." "Right."

Hermann blew out a breath, his hand folding closed once again. He gave it an experimental flex, and Saxon saw where the knuckles and the

proximal phalanges were heavily reinforced. Hermann noticed his attention. "A custom-designed modification," he explained. "In time, I hope

to enhance the rest of myself in a similar fashion."

"Metal, not meat, eh?"

Hermann nodded, as if any other idea would be foolish. "Of course."

A soft chime sounded from the intercom, and Namir's voice issued out of a hidden speaker in the wall. "Final approach in ten minutes" he said.

"Prep your gear and be ready. We're on the clock for this one, so mission brief starts the moment the wheels stop. That is all"

Saxon glanced out of the window. The outer suburbs of the Russian capital flashed by, the city below shaking off sleep and awakening.

Pier 86—New York City—United States of America

Widow leaned back from the monitor and made a low, self-amused grumble in the back of her throat, the spider-hands reordering themselves

into something closer to the order of human fingers. She looked up at Kelso and gave her a sour smile. "Thanks for the paper," said the hacker,

nodding toward where Denny stood off to one side. "I always love doing these fun little jobs." Her tone made it clear the opposite was true.

Anna kept her hands inside her pockets. Jags of annoyance pulsed through her like twinges of pain from a pulled muscle, and she thought about

how much she would enjoy slapping the smirk off the thin, spindly woman's face.

Widow gestured at the screen, where the captured image of Matt Ryan's killer was surrounded by a halo of search windows and subroutine

panels. "This guy is a ghost."

"A name," she snarled. "I paid you for name."

"No." The hacker got up, pointing a too-long finger. "You paid for a search for a name. Not the same thing."

"Did you even do anything with that data?" Anna retorted. "Or did you just sit with your virtual thumb up your virtual ass for the past hour?"

Widow's face darkened. "Pay attention, slow-drive, because I'll only explain this once. I did a webwide trawl of all public-access video

databases, plus a thousand more private imaging servers, parsing a data mesh based on Blondie here"—she waved at the screen—"and ran a

match search using a collective of bloodhound info-seeker programs. The fact that he didn't even get the slightest of hits should be a wake-up

call."

Kelso paused, the hacker's words catching up with her. Widow had a point; even the absence of data was a kind of data itself. The problem was,

the absence of data was all that she had to go on, a whole damn pile of it. "He gotta be high military or corporate," added Denny. "To cull someone's past like that? Outta our league." That drew him a sharp glare from

Widow.

Everything they were telling her dovetailed with her own information. Whoever this man was, he had never been muscle-for-hire working kills

for the Red Arrow triad. But who, then? The old, familiar frustration bubbled up inside her, the tension gathering at the base of her skull.

And then Widow did something Kelso didn't expect. She grinned. "Do you want to know how good I really am?"

"You do have something." Anna stepped closer. "Let me guess, you're gonna shake me down for more yuan?"

Widow gave an arch sniff. "No. I got standards. You paid top dollar for the gold service, so you get it." She giggled. "I just like, ha, building a

sense of drama."

"A name?"

"Yeah," Widow said, "but not this guy's, not exactly." She returned to the monitor and pulled up some panels. "Got some puzzle palace stuff

here, up on the Konspiracy Krew boards and over at Glass Curtain. Your mark, the data on the hit he was part of? The tactics match an open

search those guys got running at their end."

Anna had heard of the groups Widow mentioned; they were fringers, part of the wide-eyed and credulous flying-saucer crowd, busy posting

proofs that the moon was hollow or some other Twilight Zone crap. "You're not taking those mouth-breathers seriously?" The jitters were in

her hand again, and she tightened her fingers, the nails digging into her palms.

Denny chuckled. "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, neh?"

"Ever heard of the Tyrants?" Widow cocked her head.

She shook her head. "I quit listening to the Top 40 the same time I stopped wearing a training bra. Talk to me!" Anna's temper flared again.

She could feel her tolerance level dropping along with her focus.

"They're a black-ops cartel," Denny offered. "No oversight, so it's said. Richer than shit. And hard-core, like you wouldn't believe. Stone killers

through and through."

"Glass Curtain have them linked to a bunch of spook house stuff," Widow explained. "Regime change. Political murder. Intimidation. Corporate

assassination."

The last phrase brought Anna up sharp. She thought about Dansky, there on the sidewalk. The killer going back to him, the second bullet placed

to end his life instantly. She could feel the synchrony of the act in her mind's eye all over again. Everything Widow was saying fell into line with

all the information Kelso's investigation had uncovered to date. It couldn't be a coincidence.

The earthy taste in the back of her throat was strong and she wanted to make it go away. "I want all you can get me on them" she said.

Widow smirked. "That'll cost extra."

In the next second, the million-candlepower glare of a night sun blazed through the thin ballistic fabric of the dome's roof, turning the gloomy

interior into a starkly lit arena filled with sharp-edged shadows. A booming voice resonated through her rib cage, broadcast from overhead.

"This is the NYPD. Stay where you are. This area is under lockdown. As of this moment, all rights have been suspended" Beneath the words,

she heard the familiar rising hum of sonic screamers winding up to discharge.

Denny broke into a run, but Widow was red-faced and shouting. Anna lost her words in the building wall of sound, but she knew that the hacker

was blaming her for this. She thought Kelso had brought the police here.

Widow grabbed at her, knife-sharp nails emerging from the tips of the spidery fingers, but she punched her down, vaulting away through the

panicked mass of the dome-dwellers as they ran about her. They tore up their decks from where they were mounted and yanked fists of

glowing fiber-optic cable out of server farms, desperate to leave nothing behind that would incriminate.

Anna had just as much reason to run as all the rest of them. She reached the dome wall and slashed a new exit for herself with the collapsible

push-dagger that dangled from a lanyard about her neck. Falling out onto the deck of the Intrepid, she was deluged in the white glare;

overhead, a pair of silent police blimps drifted in the breeze. Clusters of cameras, sensors, and guns were barely visible amid the drowning wash

of hard light. Down on the river and on the shoreline, red and blue strobes came on. For one long moment, she found herself wondering if

Widow was right—had she brought this with her?

Kelso joined a throng of people running toward the old carrier's fantail just as the screamers went off. The wave of noise slammed into them and

she fell as they did, her skin crawling with the burn of infrasonic sound.

The cops came across the deck of the old warship in a line, heads concealed by the mirrored masks of riot helmets, webber guns and restraint

dispensers in their hands.

Sheremetyevo International Airport—Moscow—Russian Federated States

The aircraft parked at a discreet hangar on the far edge of the airport, distant enough to be out of sight of any prying eyes. The fuselage

currently displayed the livery of Skye Secure Aviation, a transport subsidiary of Belltower typically used for the transit of sensitive cargoes; it

was the ideal cover, but the mimetic hull could just as easily mimic the insignia of any civilian airline or military air force.

The operations room was a high, narrow chamber that filled both decks. Thinscreens were arranged on every surface, and hanging down from

above, a cluster of holographic projectors resembled the splayed legs of an impaled insect. Folding seats among the control consoles and comm

desks provided space for everyone to sit, but most of the Tyrants stayed on their feet. The air of barely contained tension was thick in the

room; all of them wanted to hear the go-command.

Namir worked a panel, bringing the holograph to life. Nearby, seated in a way that communicated casual disinterest, the sixth member of the

Tyrants toyed with a loose belt length, hanging from a half-jacket patterned with triangular armor plates. If Yelena Federova was actually capable of speech, she made no effort to show it. When Saxon saw her, the woman was padding silently around the aircraft, almost a ghost.

Most of the time she kept to Namir's company, and Saxon had been content to leave it at that; still, he couldn't escape the sense that she, too,

was measuring him.

The dusky-skinned woman graced him with a cool nod, sullen eyes briefly looking up from under a cascade of dark hair that hung down over

her face from a half-shorn scalp. Federova had a dancer's physicality to her, an aura that Saxon could describe only as "grace"—but she hid a

lethal edge beneath it. Her augmented legs were crossed in front of her; long and perfectly machined, they resembled the framework of racing

motorcycles, curved and finely balanced. Standing, she seemed to balance en pointe like a ballerina.

The mutter of the holograph's activation pulled Saxon's attention away, and he watched as a vector-scan model of a blunt, modernist building

sketched itself in the air before them.

Jaron Namir stepped up to the edge of the nimbus of laser glow; the colors threw stark highlights over his craggy features. "Intelligence has

located one of our high-value targets," he began. "Here. The Hotel Novoe Rostov, off Zubovskaya Square." He touched a control and the image

blurred, re-forming into a series of phantom panes. Several of them showed digital photos of a heavyset man with a beard and thinning hair.

"This is the mark. Mikhail Kontarsky, a minister of the Russian federal assembly, and senior administrator of the RFS committee on human

augmentation policy."

Saxon raised an eyebrow at that, but said nothing.

"This man is corrupt to the core" Namir went on. "He's betrayed his country and the people who elected him. Kontarsky has been suborned by

an organization called Juggernaut. What we know of them is this: they are a decentralized anarchist terror group that uses information warfare

to further an antiglobalization agenda. Neutralizing Kontarsky is a first step toward eradicating these dangerous militants, and it will deny them

a conduit into the Russian Federated States."

The Juggernaut name was familiar to Saxon. He recalled intelligence briefings from his time with Belltower; one of the targets of the group had

been Tai Yong Medical, a major client for the PMC's security division.

"So the Russkies are incapable of dealing with Kontarsky themselves?" said Hardesty, throwing a look toward Federova, who ignored it. "Why