The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (9 page)

FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF
BOSTON 

MORNING

P
aul
Ward had crammed himself into the most uncomfortable spot in all of Boston. He
was sardined into an air conditioner vent just above the vault area of the
bank. He was pretty sure this was how you stopped a bank heist. Had he wanted
to, he could have robbed this bank blind overnight.

“I'd make a hell of a crook,” he'd
said to himself as he'd waited there for hours.

But now morning had come, and more
importantly, the very event The Source had predicted was taking place. For more
than a year now, Ward had been monitoring the bank robberies committed by one
highly successful gang of criminals:
the Brown Recluse
.

Mostly they robbed banks, but they
weren't like other organized crime outfits. Sure, they staked out territory and
they sold drugs, guns, anything else that was hot on the black market, just
like any other crime syndicate. But they also committed big, flashy, brazen
crimes out in the open and dared the authorities to come after them.

No one was sure why the
authorities didn't. The rumor was the gang was on the Council’s payroll. Others
said they were just too mean to mess with.

Ward was there to trap them in
their own web, so to speak. For him it was personal...

He had worked long and hard to
figure out how they picked their targets. They had taken the extraordinary step
of publically announcing there was a pattern to their crimes. They sent
encrypted codes to the newspapers. Daring anyone with the smarts to figure out
how they did it. In the end, the former Harvard professor had cracked their
code.

Ward knew that the job ahead of
him was going to require a cold, steady, passion-free hand and head. He’d been
mentally going through the plan all night, thinking of every scenario.

Carefully, he removed the vent
cover and slid it silently into the vent beside him. Below him, the bank vault
lay wide open. A group of men were hauling out the cash in bags. There was
nothing but open air between him and the thieves.

He lifted both arms and drew a
bead on them. Large cuffs on his sleeves whirred to life as they rotated like
the canister of a machine gun. All he had to do was think about it—neural
transmitter and all.

Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!
 

Small darts zipped out, striking
the gangsters. In only seconds, the entire line had been hit. A few reached for
weapons, but before they could grasp them—in the span of a single
heartbeat—they collapsed.

Paralyzed and unconscious.

Ward's darts were the basis of his
new mission. The reason he was willing to get his hands dirty. Not just be an
aerial lookout for the authorities. His paralysis serum was the key. He had no
interest is killing anyone—didn't believe in it (another issue he had with the
Revolution). Just wanted to bring the people ruining this city to justice. He
had developed a blood accelerator that sent the serum from the capillaries to
the heart in a single beat. The darts only needed to pierce the skin to be
effective.   

Ward leapt from the vent. Around
him, men in brown jumpsuits and brown ski masks lay sprawled across the floor.
Area secured.

Then he heard a familiar voice.

Ward spun around. Fifty feet in
front of him, in the main lobby of the bank, where terrified patrons and
employees had been forced to sit in a circle around the oblong-shaped room, he
spied his real target. The man he had come to find.

His cool demeanor vanished. The
blood in his temples surged; his plans evaporated in the heat of his
adrenaline. He felt himself lunge forward. His body moved before his mind, his emotions
screaming. He felt cold sweat bead on his forehead.

The man they called Fiddler,
midthirties, athletic build, a violin on his shirt, stood in the lobby,
henchmen all around him. A hideous spider face adorned his ski mask. The leader
of the Brown Recluse gang was grasping the shirt of an obviously petrified
customer. Absolute, transfixing terror shown in the man’s moon-wide eyes.
Fiddler reached into his shoulder holster and pulled out the strangest gun Ward
had ever seen. The large weapon resembled a small crossbow and housed what
looked like a miniature harpoon with eight ghastly prongs on its topside
assembly.

Everyone in Boston knew what was
coming next. The Brown Recluse always left a macabre calling card in the form
of a dead and/or disfigured victim. The acid-filled harpoons were pointed dead
between the trembling man’s eyes. Fiddler dropped the poor wretch to the floor.
He thudded hard, and Fiddler cackled at the man and told him not to move.

“I haven’t decided if you’re our
lottery winner or not,” Fiddler said to the prone man. “Someone younger,
perhaps. More innocent.”

His voice was crisply British, but
with an odd Boston flair. He’d been born into the meanest streets of London and
raised in crime-filled South Boston. He’d grown up around Boston’s long
tradition of gangsters and bank robbers and had made it his own legacy. Created
his own legend.

Ward charged him, bloodlust
pounding in his head. “Fiddler!” he screamed, and the gang leader spun. Fiddler
cocked his head, unsure of what he was looking at, irritated he’d been
interrupted from his favorite part of the heist.

Ward's face scrunched with anger.
His mouth curled into a snarl. He rapid-fired the darts at the gang leader.

Fiddler, thinking fast, grabbed
the henchmen beside him and shoved them in front of himself as two unwitting
human shields. The darts stabbed into them, and the henchmen fell. This gave
Fiddler just enough time to take aim with the harpoon gun, and he fired it
directly at the sprinting Ward.  

The “harpoon” whisked past Ward's
face in a blur of speed. Consumed by his rage, he was oblivious to the danger.
He didn’t dodge; he didn’t flinch. He just kept running. Fiddler had simply
panicked—and missed.  

Behind Ward, the eight-pronged
stake of the harpoon lodged into the plaster with a s
hoop!
  Burning
acid instantly smoked out of the wall, and the concrete melted like an oil
painting on a burning canvas. The harpoon clanged to the floor amidst the goo
that had been part of the wall only seconds before. A large, yawning gap was
left, exposing a storage room on the other side.

Ward was unfazed. He raised his
arms again and aimed as he strode. The cuff darts clicked.

Empty. 

“Shit!” Ward breathed, and for the
first time since he’d leapt from the air vent, he felt fear.

CHAPTER
14

W
ard’s
thoughts turned to reloading the darts, and instantly a new barrage of ammo
slithered across his armor and reloaded into his cuffs. He reacquired Fiddler
dead ahead, still charging him. Fiddler was trapped. Ward prepared to fire and...

Whack!

All Ward could see was the
ceiling, getting farther away. He slammed into the floor as the air gushed out
of his lungs.

He looked up and saw a mountain
holding a large metal pipe looking down on him.

“Homerun, slugger!” Fiddler
chuckled to the huge man standing over Ward. Then his face turned serious
again. “Take care of that, would you, Fang. We’re on a schedule.”

Fang, early thirties, a huge,
muscle-bound brute, loomed over Ward, sneering. Ward wondered how they’d found
a ski mask large enough for his enormous head. The giant man seized Ward by his
wrists—the metal of the cuff-turrets actually caved under his powerful grip—and
hoisted him off the ground.

“You piss me off!” the big man
roared through his brown ski mask in a thick Boston accent. Fang hurled Ward
through the air, and he smashed through the fancy waiting room furniture,
sending splinters of wood lancing across the room.

Ward scrambled to his feet, his
head—and the room—spinning. Pain shooting like lightning though his body.

Fang ripped a desk out of its
floor bolts and hurled the whole thing at Ward. It smashed over him and cracked
in two, slamming him back to the ground. Fang wasn't done. He spun and grabbed
a large wooden chair, flinging it.

Ward dove across the floor as the
chair missed his head by inches. But just as he regained his footing an entire
filing cabinet smacked him back to the ground.

Fang kept pelting him until he ran
out of projectiles. The waiting room looked like a war zone. Debris was
everywhere. Terrified customers clung to the outside edges of the lobby, hiding
anywhere they could.

Ward’s forehead throbbed; the room
was spinning again. Something dripped into eyes and clouded his swimming
vision. Blood. He wiped it away. Tried to focus. Fang leered at him, but the
big man was done, out of stuff to throw. Thank Christ for that.

It was now or never. Fight back or
be roadkill. Ward stepped out and aimed at Fang. He closed his fist, and the
cuff darts hummed, they started to turn, and...

They just whined.

Fang's bombardment and tight grip
had taken their toll. The cuffs were good and jammed. Fang didn't need an
invitation. He glared at the trickle of blood running down Ward's face and
grinned. He charged. The room almost
shook
.

Ward stood there, a deer in headlights—of
a tank—while half his brain was cursing the cuff darts, trying to get them to
fire, the other half diagnosing what had gone wrong. Neither half told him to
look up...

The big man clutched Ward's throat
in his powerful claw and lifted him off his feet with ease. Ward could feel his
windpipe collapsing. He made a mental note to look into ways of reinforcing the
neck area between his chest plate and helmet. As it was, Fang had unfettered
access to his throat.  

Through his peripheral vision Ward
saw Fiddler escaping out the back of the bank. The bastard! Nothing he could do
about that now. He'd be lucky to make it out of here still breathing. Fang shot
him an evil smirk and tightened his crushing grip around Ward’s larynx.

Just as Ward felt his windpipe
giving in, a dart finally shot out of his whirling cuffs directly into Fang's
beefy chest. Ward hadn’t even been trying to shoot. The mechanism had simply
gotten jammed open and was waiting for the dart to fire before it could close
again.

The big brute's eyes saucered with
surprise as his breath stuck in his throat.

A heartbeat.

The two men crashed to the ground
with a loud thud as Fang’s three hundred plus pounds slammed onto Ward.
Thankfully, the armored flight suit took most of the impact. But now he had a
new problem. He was stuck.

As he frantically tried to pull
himself out from under the dead weight of the human boulder, Ward spied the
last of the gang members making for the back exit, uttering a long stream of
expletives to himself the whole way. His foul mouth echoed across the room.
What
an obnoxious little loudmouth!

Ward freed himself with a final
push just in time to take aim at Mr. Loudmouth. He was short and stocky and
Ward guessed him to be in his midthirties. Wrinkles were starting around his
mouth. He wore a signature brown Mohawk ski mask. Even under his mask Ward
could tell he had a pug-nosed face. An obvious underling saddled with the shit
jobs. It had been left to him to get the last of the cash, and he was trying
his best to get it all in one trip.

Despite the pain wracking his
head, Ward chuckled at the sight. Loudmouth was giving it all he had, but he
clearly had bitten off more than he could chew. Money bags fell from his arms
as he fought for the exit. If Loudmouth got to the getaway vehicle, all of
Ward’s efforts would have been in vain.

He tried the cuff darts again, but
they had fired their last it seemed. The turrets wouldn’t even spin. He changed
tactics. He pressed his fingers down onto the canisters and the end of a dart
popped up. He pried it out and flung it like a knife. It stabbed into
Loudmouth's back, and he yelped, dropping the money bags onto his toes.

Loudmouth spun, gun in hand. He
was a surprisingly quick draw. He shook his head at Ward. Pissed off. He cursed
a long list of profanity, some of which Ward was not sure he’d even heard
before, and stalked toward him.

“C'mon! Circulate! Circulate!”
Ward grunted to himself.

Loud Mouth blinked. Tried to aim.
Something was wrong. He scrunched his masked face, obviously wondering why
the world was starting to spin. He dropped the gun back down to his side. For a
millisecond Ward was hopeful, but the serum was taking hold too slowly. The
accelerators weren’t working. Ward, defenseless without his darts, kept his eyes
on the gun in the little man’s hand.

Loudmouth swung the pistol back up
toward Ward but then blinked and swooned. The gun fell back to his side again,
this time in a wide arc as he nearly lost his balance, and people around Ward
let out little screams of panic, afraid the thug would shoot them instead.

Ward looked around him. People
were everywhere. He couldn't run or he would endanger all the bystanders if
Loudmouth opened fire. He was stuck. A sitting duck.

Ward aimed the cuffs at Loudmouth
again and tried to fire them. They just whined. The thug set his jaw, raised
the gun with both hands, planted his feet, fixed his eyes on Ward, and aimed
right at his heart. This was it. Nowhere to run, no way to stop him. Ward
closed his eyes tight...

BANG!

Ward waited for the pain, but it
didn’t come.
What the hell?
Was he already dead? He knew that sometimes
in massive traumas the body just kind of shuts down. That would explain the
lack of pain. He didn’t want to look. He could also be having an out-of-body
experience, except he was still clearly in his body.

Had the armor held? Ward was no
expert, but Loudmouth’s pistol had looked to him like a .50 caliber. A far
larger bullet than Ward’s suit was rated to stop—according to his own
calculations. Calculations he had never tested...