The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (13 page)

Ward heard Revolution grunt.
He isn't
indestructible after all.
A wave of guilt washed over Ward. He'd failed to
warn him. And now he knew how easily he could be hurt.

“Damn it,” Ward said.

With a few more steps the limp
disappeared. As did Revolution into the darkness.

Ward turned the throwing star
over. It had more script on it. It read:
Don't follow me.

Later that night, three members of the Brown
Recluse tried to stall and board the train carrying arms for India. There was
no way they could know that they'd been double-crossed. Fiddler had been
feeling the heat for the Spider Wasp disaster. These three remaining members of
his gang had been quietly questioning his leadership. Trying to fan the flames
of dissent. Hoping to move up the ranks if and when Fiddler was deposed. But
Fiddler ran a tight ship. Nothing in the gang happened
that
quietly.

Fiddler watched from a safe
distance as Council Guardsmen gunned them down.

They never stood a chance.

The Freedom Council, for its part,
had wanted some positive press to counteract State Street. The deal they struck
with Fiddler was neat and tidy. They would claim credit for the takedown. The
two sides, accustomed to working together when the situation called for it, had
found a common cause.

Meanwhile, local Council bureaucrats
had planted a rumor on the street. The story went that the shipment was
actually headed to a Boston-based militia leader who had taken a contract out
on the Revolution, complete with a supply route for the weapons, contact
numbers, and people. It was all a fabrication. They staked out the spots. They
hoped this would attract his attention and spur him into action. They hoped to
catch the Revolution if it did. They hoped it would make them famous.

Revolution failed to bite.

The next morning Ward read a headline that made his
heart stop cold: THREE KILLED IN RAIL YARD INCIDENT.

He was soon relieved to find no
mention of the Revolution. Well, of course. That would have been the headline,
after all. No mention of Fiddler either, though. One thing was certain. Alison
had probably just saved his life.

Again.

CHAPTER
22

D
avey
Timbeck lay on the hospital bed, a blood-soaked bandage affixed to the deep
wound on his neck. He did not look good. His skin was pale and blotchy. Tubes
jutted out of his nose and mouth and into the air, snaking around his bed to
various machines. All of them fighting to keep him alive. A fight they would
lose.

Davey Timbeck's pulse monitor
flatlined.

The nurses and doctors came
rushing in. They did what they could. The younger Timbeck had no living will to
prevent them. They tried reviving him. They tried the defibrillator. They tried
everything. All to no avail.

Emergency services had been
understaffed the night he was brought in. It had taken them twice as long to
respond to the call as was advisable by the state medical statutes. But they
had been dealing with gunshot wounds, traffic accidents, fire victims, and, of
course, state cutbacks. The Revolution's call had come in time, had a
sufficient number of paramedics been on staff that night. As it was, they'd
done their best.

No one could blame them.

Across town at a dingy police precinct, run
unofficially by the Timbeck brothers themselves, the party to blame was clear.
Watson Timbeck entered the room shell-shocked and drying his eyes. He was in no
mood to be fucked with.

“Sammie just called down from the
hospital. Davey didn't make it.” 

Watson had loved his brother
Davey. But they had shared the kind of sibling bond that meant he would have tried
to kick Davey’s ass to prove it. So, as he gritted his teeth when he made the
pronouncement that his little brother had been killed in the line of duty,
anger seemed the appropriate emotion.

The dozen male officers in the
room shared enraged glances. This moment had been building ever since the call
had come in that Revolution had ambushed them. Every officer was on his feet in
a matter of seconds. An eerie silence overtook them. They waited for their cue.

No one needed to speak. Watson
stalked toward the gun case, and the group erupted. Revenge split the seams of
the room as the men followed, snatching up weapons from the cabinet in the
adjacent hall. Some grabbed the weapons
behind
the gun case, where the
Timbecks kept the unsanctioned
fatties
that only former military guys
had access to. They headed out en masse. An old-fashioned lynch mob.

“Bastard can't take us all!”
someone growled.

If there was an unofficial voice for the
Resistance, it was the small independent newspaper,
Common Sense
. In an
age of Internet dominance,
Common Sense
still printed on paper. Still
had them delivered to friendly newsstands and restaurants, bars, and clubs.
That act itself was one of defiance, since Media Corp owned the Internet, and
Media Corp meant the Freedom Council.

Common Sense
had been kept
alive by two main factors. The Velvet Glove policy allowed pragmatic
alternative publications to exist. It made the Council look open, honest, and
democratic. Something it was not. Second was the hard-charging tenacity and
political astuteness of its editor-in-chief, Blake Lane.

On that night she oversaw a
skeleton crew working in the large, empty office. As usual she chain-smoked her
Marlboro Reds, overflowing an already very full ashtray. She emptied it into
the trash as she eyed her staff. She was by all accounts a very attractive
woman whose long hours, heavy smoking, and pressures for deadlines had pressed
themselves into the lines of her face. She was equally at home in an elegant
evening dress, trudging through the press room in jeans, or riding a Humvee
through a war zone. She was not one to be fucked with in any of those
scenarios. She glanced up at the clock and frowned.

“Thirty minutes to deadline,
folks. Let’s pick it up.”

Outside, four patrol cars
screeched to a stop. The dozen officers piled out in a frenzy. The staff inside
the office heard the commotion and peered out only to be shocked at what they
saw as the gang of officers charged for their door.

Watson led the men and never
paused in his gait. He didn't stop to see if the door was unlocked. He just
unloaded on the goddamn thing.

The door splintered off its hinges
as Watson kicked it down. It slammed on the concrete floor, and the dozen
officers trampled in over it. The staff just stared, still in shock.

“Everyone up against the wall
right now!  Hands up!”

If Blake Lane was shocked, she
didn't show it. She was out from behind her counter and headed straight at the
red-faced officer in the lead. She put herself between the cops and her staff.

“You gotta lot a balls bustin' in
here. You got a warrant?”

Watson approached her almost as an
afterthought, as he surveyed the place, and shoved a pistol under her chin.

“Yeah. I got a warrant. A warrant
to do whatever the fuck I want. Now get up against the
goddamn
wall!”

The staff didn't need any extra
coaxing. They did exactly what he said. Most of them were straight out of
college. Watson meant business, and a good number of them were about to do
their business…in their pants.

Blake killed Watson with her eyes.
She didn't like taking orders. Her years as a reporter had put her in more
dangerous fixes than this. War zones, rape camps, hostage situations. She knew
to respect the gun, but the man behind it was probably less war-tested than
she. Watson kept the pistol under her chin and pushed her forcefully up against
the counter where the phone and the ashtray were and where she had been only
seconds before.

Her spine hit the edge of the
counter, and she let out a high-pitched grunt.

“All right, missy, get on the phone
and get your pal, the Revolution, over here.”

“Not like I have a hotline to
him!” she hissed.

“Just make the call. I'm sure
he'll find out. He always does.”

“Can I get a cigarette?” she
asked. It was a challenge, not a question. Watson knew it. He'd play along. He
had the bitch anyway.

“Sure, babe, whatever you want.
Full service here.”

Blake Lane might not have had a
gun, but she believed firmly in the idea that the pen was mightier than the
sword. Brain over brawn. That kind of thing. And she knew she was a lot smarter
than this prick of a cop. She gave him a fake smile and strolled over for her
pack. She made it clear that she was going to smoke
first
—and think over
her options. She noticed one of the officers giving her an admiring once-over.

She lit a cigarette. Slowly.

The officer watched her with a
dumb grin as she took a long draw. She was clearly doing it for him. Watson
watched her too, bemused at her moxie. 

She rolled her eyes and thought,
Stupid
pig.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number. Watson wasn't even
smart enough to notice what it was or to ask her who she called.

That should have been his first
sign that he was, once again, outgunned.

“Now we wait,” was all he said.

CHAPTER
23

W
ard
crouched in the covey of the church, reading the latest edition of
Common
Sense
by flashlight. He was often an issue behind. This issue, like several
before it, was mostly dedicated to the State Street attack on the protesters.
There was also a special piece on the Revolution’s role in stopping it. He’d
leapt from a rooftop to do it.

Why was Ward one of the only
people who seemed to realize the guy traveled by rooftop? That was his MO. It
was why he had been able to catch up with him several times. Ward even knew
several of his normal routes. Why hadn’t the Council Guard figured that one
out? That was one of the things on his list to mention to Revolution when he
sat down and had his heart-to-heart with the big guy.

A flurry of movement suddenly
caught his eye. Darting across the horizon was the Revolution. Leaping from
roof to roof. Ward’s mouth dropped open. How ironic was that?

He was moving fast.

“Shit!”

Ward slipped on his helmet. Locked
it down. Peering up into the heavens, he launched skyward. He could track the
Revolution from above. He knew it was risky trying to follow him. He was sure
Revolution could be a real danger to him had he wanted to be. His darts would
have no effect on his armor. There were no soft spots to hit. And he did not
relish the idea of abusing his trust. It occurred to him that if he could track
the Revolution, then wouldn't the Revolution know it? Be able to detect it?
Ward figured that was part of how Revolution had eluded capture all these
years. He must have had some kind of detection system in that armor of his.
Ward had to warn him, though. He would just have to take that
chance.       

Besides, Spider Wasp was just a
guy in a flight suit. Too small to show up on most radar systems and
specifically designed to play havoc with those on which he did. Most would read
him as a flock of birds, if anything. The smallest flying object Revolution had
ever dealt with was probably an X-1. So Ward was banking on being too small of
a data point to matter. And if things took a turn for the worse, he had his whole
speech memorized about The Source, the arms shipment, and how he was really
just worried about Revolution.
Not
that he was stalking him.

I'm not stalking him. Am I?

He shrugged the thought off with a
chuckle and continued his climb.

Blake Lane's ashtray was full again. She exchanged
glances with her terrified staff. She was not intimidated. And that fact was
freaking the rest of them out. What was she planning? they wondered.  The
young staffers mostly just wished that she would stop looking at them.

Suddenly the room plunged into
darkness. It caught everyone off guard.

Almost everyone.

Blake Lane made her move. She
stabbed her stiletto down into her admirer's foot and pushed him backwards. The
poor fool tumbled back, dominoing the officers behind him.

Watson spun, startled.

“Run!” Blake screamed at her
staffers, who, in the confusion, darted past the officers.

The officers rose to give chase.
But Watson stopped them.

He pointed above them. “Let 'em
go.
He's
here.” There were at least eight floors to the building above
them. Watson knew where Revolution would go.

A floorboard creaked above them.

“Upstairs. Let’s go.”

Watson flipped on his flashlight,
and the others followed suit. As they turned to go, a sound like rushing wind
whistled past them in the darkness. Two of the men screamed and fell. Shurikens
jutted out of their shoulders.

“Shit!”  Watson yelled,
glaring toward the door. “Just stay down!” he yelled back to the injured men.

The rest of them charged out of
the room, guns drawn. A dark spiral staircase was the only way up. No elevator
in sight. They began the climb, two down in numbers. More than one of them
thought the staircase now looked like a death trap. Even Watson's flashlight
trembled.

Davey was killed by a throwing
star
.

“Ten versus one!” Watson bellowed.
“Remember that!” Watson knew exactly what he was looking for. What he was
listening for. And then he heard it. Just a creak in the stairwell. He opened
fire. The others did the same. They sent a tornado of bullets into the black
for ten seconds straight. Watson held up his hand, and they all ceased.