The Courier (San Angeles) (27 page)

O
NCE KRIS RAN
past him, Miller concentrated on the door Quincy had ducked through. One of the police had reached the opening and stood just outside. If Quincy had decided to shoot, she would be dead; indoor walls just didn’t stop bullets that well. She rushed in, swinging her gun wildly, while her partner ran toward Miller’s bed.

Had Kris made it out? If there were any more cops outside, there was a chance she would have made it past them, lost in the general rush of doctors and nurses and patients. He clung to the thought, allowing himself the feeling of relief it offered.

Something had happened. The job had changed from simply protecting and delivering Kris to . . . to something more. He wasn’t sure when it had happened; it wasn’t as though someone had flicked a switch. Could he be falling in love with her? There was a four-year
difference between them, and with her being only sixteen years old (another part of him chimed in, almost seventeen) the age gap was way too big. So what was it then? He’d never had a sister. Was this how you felt about a sister, protecting her? Somehow he didn’t think so.

His wound had opened up again, and blood oozed slowly through the white bandages wrapped around his shoulder. He lay back down and closed his eyes, too weak, too tired to keep looking at the door anymore. Exhaustion plus the drugs they gave him were working their magic. If Quincy didn’t get him, the cops would anyway. At least with the cops he had a chance. Quincy would probably just gut him.

He heard voices beside his bed, and the slight click of the wheels unlocking.

“We need to talk to him.” It was one of the policemen. The other was on her comm unit by the room Quincy had run into.

“You’ll have to wait a minute. I need to check his bandages. Can’t you see he is bleeding again?” A woman’s voice, used to giving instructions by the sound of it. The policeman wasn’t cowed though.

“Can I talk while you work?”

“He’s lost a lot of blood, and he needs to sleep,” she said.

Miller felt his good arm being lifted and moved to the side of the bed. Hard plastic wrapped around his wrist, pinning it to the steel frame.

“Fine. He ain’t going nowhere now.”

The bed started to roll.

“And I think I’ll stay with him as well.”

Tenacious bastard. Not like he was going anywhere soon. Miller’s whole body felt light, as if it could float to the ceiling. The motion of the bed rocking slowly down the hall brought on a new feeling. His stomach churned. He turned his head and vomited.

“Fuck!”

The cop . . . good.

Sleep came again, wrapping him in a soft blanket of warmth. His last thought was of Kris’s face. An angel asleep on the pillow back in the safe house.

The vid screens showed Earth, overlaid with dots of color and text. Jeremy stood watching it, watching the world’s military and paramilitary organizations move through their daily routines.

From here, everything seemed normal. His distance from the action induced an almost euphoric feeling, as though he was in control of each and every piece in play. But the information displayed here was nothing without the knowledge contained in his head. Knowledge gained through years of being down there. Moving through the ranks. Obtaining the power and control he needed to end up where he was: in charge of the next superpower’s security forces, a complete military in its own right. And now, with the added support of the jump drive and a president willing to fight to move up the ladder, he was set.

Supplying SoCal and Kadokawa with the jump drive plans had been motivated by pure greed. He knew that. But it was a greed that he controlled, not one that controlled him. Having it look like SoCal had killed the Kadokawa representative proved that. A protracted corporate war, and one that Kadokawa wouldn’t join, meant that his domain, his control, would only expand.

And now he felt it all slipping away because of a courier, a fucking sixteen-year-old girl.

He hadn’t interrogated a prisoner in over a decade. It would be fun to get his hands dirty again. By the time he was done, she’d do and tell him anything. He would crush her spirit, crush her will,
until she was his. Then he would kill her. Jonathon wouldn’t have a chance to see her.

His anger bubbled through to the surface, and he smiled. Enough bullshit, enough hiding behind facades. He was Jeremy Adams, dammit, Jeremy fucking Adams! And he had worked too hard and too long to lose everything now.

He moved away from the vid screen and looked at his desk, papers and file folders still strewn across it. All of it useless. Interoffice memos and company hierarchical charts. Simple diagrams displaying fake information. Hell, over half of the paper was blank, put there to make the piles bigger and messier. The same thing with the data chips. All of them were empty, labeled with important-sounding names.

Jeremy put his arm across his desk and slid it from one side to the other. Everything, the papers, the data chips, everything, moved and fell off the end into a box he’d had delivered earlier in the day. Beneath the mess lay a desk as pristine as the day it was installed. He moved around to the chair and touched the display that still sat on the corner.

“Yes, sir?”

“Get maintenance to remove this garbage.”

“Yes, sir.”

He pulled open a drawer and removed a pen set and name tag given to him when he’d first walked into this office. The name tag moved to the far end of his desk, in line with the door. The pen set slid just behind it.

“Welcome to the real Jeremy Adams,” he whispered.

A comm unit beeped and Jeremy removed it from the open drawer. He glanced at the screen: full encryption and routing protocols were on.

“Yes?”

“We got some trouble.” Quincy’s voice cut through Jeremy’s new sense of freedom.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Abby’s dead. I think the cops got the courier and Miller.”

Jeremy took in a long slow breath and released it. His voice hardened. “You think, or you know?”

“The cops came in right after Abby was shot, so I ran. I barely got out myself. I had to climb out the ceiling tiles.”

“You
think
, or you
know
?”

After a short silence at the other end, Quincy answered. “I think. I didn’t hang around to find out, you know?”

“Wait.”

Jeremy muted the call and started using his display. A knock came from the door and a tall man in a green jumpsuit walked in.

“Get out.”

“I’m here to get the garbage.”

“I said get . . . the fuck . . . out.”

The maintenance man turned and ran out the open door like a scared chipmunk.

“Close the door!”

The door snicked quietly shut.

The police bands didn’t show too much. They picked up the guy, what was his name, Miller? The police had him in custody, still at the hospital. There was no sign or mention of the girl. He started a watch on her tracker. If the cops had her, the first thing they would do is get rid of the blocker. He’d pick up her signal right away.

The display stayed blank.

He reached for his comm unit and unmuted it. “They don’t have the girl.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re not questioning me, are you, Quincy?” Jeremy’s voice had turned into a soft purr. “That wouldn’t be good for your health.”

“No. No, sir. I . . . no.”

“Good. Now find the damn girl and bring her here.”

“Yes, sir. What about the guy?”

“He’s just an ACE gun for hire. Leave him to the police.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jeremy closed the link and put the comm unit back into his desk drawer. He stood, moving back to the vid screens, and zoomed in to the city. His city.

Abby was the best he’d had. She’d gotten the job done countless times, and now that asset was gone, a gap in his infrastructure that would be difficult to fill.

What the hell, it would make him feel good to pay back the man who killed her. He walked back to his desk and spun the display on it around to face him, touching the top corner.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get me the Level 6 Police Chief. What’s his name?”

A slight pause, then, “Philip Beard, sir. He’s coming through now.”

Yes, getting rid of Miller would make him feel good.

“And get my shuttle ready. I’m going to the city.”

With some luck, Quincy would have the girl soon as well. He could take care of her while he was down there. He grabbed the comm unit and dialed Quincy as he walked to the door.

Devon’s screens blanked and displayed a map of the area surrounding his office. It took him a minute to figure out what was going on; he hadn’t seen these maps since everything was installed.

The proximity sensors had triggered.

Three green dots moved along three different corridors, all of them toward his office. Two more appeared along two different corridors.

It was time.

One by one, the green dots turned red. The sensors had picked up weapons.

Devon moved as though he had done this every day of his life. When he first moved into the office, that’s exactly what he had done. Practicing until he could escape in less than a minute.

Now he typed in the reset command on his computer, his finger hovering over the enter key. Back then, he had simply told his systems to erase themselves, but he couldn’t do it with the cube. He pulled the box away from the wall, yanking the cables out as he did it. He took his lunch kit and emptied it on the floor, replacing the contents with his computer. The hard line rang.

Devon ignored it. He had to get out. He pushed at the ceiling in a place that looked no different from the rest. A section of it clicked and dropped down on hinges and pneumatic sliders, a rope ladder falling with it. Devon slung his lunch bag over his shoulder and started up, taking one last look at the room that had become his life. He pulled the rope ladder up behind him and pressed a button. The ceiling section moved back into place.

Climbing over the small railing, Devon moved to a catwalk suspended above his office. The sensors were embedded up here as well, but with the computer gone, no one would be able to track him. He moved quietly in his running shoes, following the catwalk to safety.

They’d finally found him. The knowledge filled him with joy and shame. He’d known it couldn’t last forever. He only wished he knew who had managed to outsmart him, who had tracked him down. Though in the end it didn’t really matter.

He stopped where the catwalk turned into a ladder, steel rebar rungs set in the concrete when they built the place. He reached down underneath the catwalk and searched. There it was. He got a firm grip and pulled, ripping the small bag off the fasteners holding it in place.

This was his lifeline. He’d created it when he first started working for ACE, and updated it with newer information every year. More often than that, recently. The packet contained a new life, a new identity. One ACE, SoCal, Kadokawa, or anyone else didn’t know anything about. With this, he’d be long gone before anyone figured out what had happened. And they’d never find him again.

He thought about his mother, his only link to the world of ordinary people. She’d never see him again either. Still, he had set her up pretty good, too. It would take a while for his “death” to be discovered, but when it was, all of his known assets would go to her. His mother’s life would be a good one. Devon didn’t feel any remorse.

He climbed the ladder and pushed open the top hatch, emerging into a corridor much like the ones around his office. He’d only used this route once, when he set everything up. He closed the hatch behind him and walked down the corridor, a smile on his face.