Blades of Winter (35 page)

We’ve practiced this next move in our agility classes. It always reminds me of a sequence I’ve seen cheerleaders perform. I get down on one knee and hold my arms over my head. Trick puts his hands on mine, steps onto my knee, and climbs onto my shoulders. Then I stand up and guide him headfirst into the ventilation pipe. I grab one of the vent covers and pop it back in place.

A key clicks in the lock. I grab the other cover and leap toward the Out vent. While I sail across the office, I adjust my body’s orientation and slide feet first into the pipe. The office door opens before I can properly snap the vent cover back in place. I hold the cover in front of my ventilation shaft and try to breathe as quietly as possible.

Kazim Nazari enters the room and shuts the door. He looks up at the lights.

“Damn!” I comm to Patrick. “I left the lights on.”

“Maybe he’ll think it was one of the other guests.”

Kazim crosses the room to the desk. The desk’s chair creaks as it takes his weight. My hand that grasps the vent cover is only a few inches from my face and blocks most of my view. I peer between my fingers and watch Kazim’s hand reach across his desk, pick up the black telephone’s receiver, and rapidly punch in a number.

After a few moments he says,
“Sind Sie fertig? Gut. Ich auch.”
Ready? Good. Me too. He turns on the computer terminal. I say a quick prayer that Trick covered his tracks correctly. Kazim logs in and opens a complicated-looking spreadsheet.

I hear the office’s door open. Through my fingers, I see two pairs of men’s feet walk in and stand to either side as a third man strides in. Then the first two men step back into the hallway and shut the door.

Kazim stands up and obediently offers his seat to his visitor. I can’t see the visitor’s face as he takes the seat behind the desk, but Kazim’s head and legs move into my striped field of vision as he relocates himself to one of the guest chairs. I tilt my head to try to see who sits behind the desk, but all I can see are his elegantly manicured hands poking out from the sleeves of his dark gray suit jacket.

“Solomon,” I comm, “can you see these guys?”

“No, I’m on my back, so all I see is the ceiling. What’s happening?”

“Some big shot and his bodyguards just walked in. The goons went back out to the hall, and the big shot took Kazim’s seat behind the desk.”

“What does the big shot look like?”

“I can’t see his face from here.”

Mr. Big Shot speaks to Kazim in rapid and authoritative Arabic. I can’t follow a word of it, but my comm-phone’s recorder is capturing the conversation so it can be translated later. Trick’s commphone is also recording everything, and he knows enough Arabic to comm me snippets like

“… finally acquired the completed Gen-2 formulas …”

“… will work much faster on such small organisms …”

“… Darius Covenant … can now move forward again …”

“… make sure no one links the calamity to the Blades, even after it’s done …”

Then Mr. Big Shot recites a list of words I can understand. They’re the names of places in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the United States, and others all over the world. Kazim makes a note of each place on a little pad.

Trick comms, “He’s laying out a specific sequence of locations.” Mr. Big Shot reels off a few more places, and my partner comms, “Jesus, they’re all major oil fields.”

Mr. Big Shot finishes his list. The desk chair creaks as he leans back. Kazim whips out a Zippo and holds it across the desk, out of my view. I hear the distinctive click of the lighter opening, the sharp rasp of Kazim sparking it up, and then the metallic note as he flips the lighter’s lid back into place.

Mr. Big Shot mutters,
“Danke.”
A thin stream of smoke issues from his side of the desk.

Kazim sits back down. He says,
“Bitte schön, Herr Winter,”
which draws a low chortle from both men.

Winter?

I comm, “Solomon, did you hear that?”

“You mean
‘Herr Winter’
?”

“Yes!”

“I sure did. Can you get a picture?”

“No, he’s too far to the side.” As I try to slide my eyes around my fingers, the smoke from Herr Winter’s cigarette wafts in through the ventilation cover in my hand. I stifle a cough. The cigarette smells incredibly bad, like it’s made of dead rodent—

Wait a minute …

—and rotten fruit.

 … The sidewalk café in Paris. That shit smells like a dead mongoose. Tell me what you already know. Darius Covenant? Score
.

Winter exhales another mouthful of smoke and ominously comments, in English, “As sey say in America, ‘Sey will never know what hit sem.’ ” His accent is a singular blend of Arabic, German, and British English. I’ve only ever heard one person talk that way.

Oh, my God, I know who Winter is!

“Solomon, you know how Imad Badr is so well informed about Winter?”

“Yeah, why?” Then it dawns on him, “Oh, no way.”

“They’re the
same fucking guy
!”

More cigarette fumes drift into my vent.

“Solomon, the smoke is gonna make me cough!”

“Hold your breath or something.”

I press my mouth against my sleeve and try to use my jacket as a filter, but the leather isn’t porous enough. I stop breathing as long as I can. When I finally take a breath, the smoke jams in my throat like a lump of hot coal. My eyes water, and my lungs burn.

“Shit! Solomon, I—”

Cough!

The conversation in the office screeches to a halt. Kazim jumps out of his chair. He stares right at my vent and shouts a sharp command. The door bursts open,
and the two bodyguards charge inside. They follow Kazim’s eyes to my position. At first I think it’s Buzz and Ponytail, but these two have different hair. One has a crew cut, and the other has long hair. Crew Cut growls and reaches for something on his hip.

I blast my bloodstream with Madrenaline and drop the vent cover. My modified arms launch me out of the ventilation shaft like a missile. I smash Crew Cut with a flying head butt and ride him to the floor. I jump to my feet, block Long Hair’s punch, and grab his wrist and arm. I’m so hopped up that I barely hear it as I wrench his elbow ninety degrees the wrong way. I pop Long Hair in the nuts with my knee, and I’m about to pick him up and throw him at Badr when the door behind me flies open and all hell breaks loose.

It’s more guards. There must be six of them. They all look like Buzz and Ponytail, except they each wear their hair differently. I’m about to carve a death tunnel out of there when I remember that I’ve got to bust Patrick out, too.
Dammit!
Fortunately, the office is so small that they can’t all grab me at once. I need to deal with only two or three at a time. As I bash and smash these fools, Trick comms in, “Scarlet, I just heard an automatic being cocked.”

I turn toward Badr/Winter as he takes a point-blank shot at me. I duck under the bullet, but the concussion still stuns me. I’m blind and deaf for a second, and that’s all these guys need.

The next thing I know, each of my limbs is in the grip of a twin and Winter has a pistol stuck in my face. Bodies sprawl all over the floor. Some are draped across the furniture, and there’s even a couple out in the hallway. Man, I must have really hammered them to send them flying way out there.

I’m about to demolish all these dumbasses when Winter points his gun away from me and up at Trick’s vent. Trick is smart and has stayed in the vent while I’ve taken care of the fighting. My system is at full speed, so I’ve actually got some time to think. Winter’s mouth moves
in slow motion. He obviously knows how we do deep-penetration work at ExOps, that we work in teams of one Interceptor and one Info Operator. If I didn’t have all these fucking guys galhandling me, I could easily disarm him before he got a shot off.

“Solomon,” I comm, “you still in the vent?”

“Don’t worry about me, toots. I’m sliding toward another office down the hall.”

I comm, “Keep going!” Then I extend my limbs as much as possible, breathing in. I exhale sharply and snap my body into a ball. The goons’ heads all clack into one another like coconuts. Winter fires into the vent as I jump to my feet, push up as hard as I can, and slam two of the twins into the ceiling. The flash and boom of Winter’s gunshots fill the room as I leap into the air and kick a full circle around me. Another twin goes down.

Winter looks up into the vent he’s fired into. He sees there’s no one in there and barks an order at Kazim, who hurries out the door. There are only two twins left between me and the Blades’ leader, but they’ve both got giant semiautomatics loaded up and pointed at my head.

Winter swings his pistol around and aims at me, too. Three guns in my face and Li’l Bertha in her holster. This situation doesn’t have too many positive outcomes for me. I’m sure I can take down two of these jackasses, but the third buttsmoker will almost certainly shoot me before I get him.

“Solomon, what’s your status?”

“Kazim’s grabbed one of my arms! I was climbing out the vent in the next office, and he ran in.”

“He’s got you?”

“Yeah. You’d better take off.”

“Solomon, you must be crazy if you think I’ll leave you here!”

“Scarlet, you have to.” He quotes from the ExOps field manual: “ ‘In the event that an IO is captured—’ ”

“Fuck that shit, Solomon!” Our objective here was to gather intel, which we’ve done. I’d love to smash Badr/Winter
into his component organic pieces, but it’s time to get the hell out of here. I jack even more Madrenaline, which makes my teeth taste like copper and the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but I’ve got plenty of time simply to turn and run out of the office. The three guns fire, but all they hit is air and wall. I sprint down the hallway and burst into the next room.

Kazim Nazari is dragging Trick out of the vent. My partner is trying to crawl back in, but Kazim has his hands clamped around Trick’s wrist. As I charge into the office, the big man lets go of Patrick and pulls a revolver on me. I whip out Li’l Bertha and splatter Kazim’s brains onto the wall. His body collapses to the floor.

Trick slides himself out of the vent and lands on Kazim’s chest. He drags his bag out of the vent by the shoulder strap. We dash back into the hallway. Twins in both directions, but Winter and his molls are to our right. We run left. I keep Li’l Bertha in front of me and spray a light fog of small-caliber suppression fire to keep them all hiding in their rooms or offices while we get the fuck out of Dodge.

Trick has his infrared goggles on and helps me identify targets. He hardly needs to; there’s someone to shoot everywhere we go. We fight our way past the elevator to a door labeled
notausgang
at the end of the hallway. Perfect, because this is an emergency and we need an exit.

Li’l Bertha changes to .50-cal, and I blast away the door’s latching mechanism. The shot also shoves the door open, which triggers a piercingly loud
whoop-whoop
from a wall-mounted speaker with the word
FEUERALARM
stenciled beneath it. We run up the gray metal stairs, illuminated by naked light bulbs in the ceiling, with me up front and Trick in the back. For the moment we’re alone in here as we pound our way up one flight after another.

I comm, “Who the fuck
are
all these guys?”

Trick comms back, “I think they’re the mass-produced Gen-2 clones.”

“There’s a shitload of ’em!”

We’ve ascended to the ground floor. Patrick has pulled out his little millimeter-wave radar device and points it through the door to the lobby.

He comms, “Dammit, there’s a bunch of people out there.”

I ask, “Are they more goons or just students?”

“It doesn’t matter. We can’t risk a firefight in a room full of civilians.”

An idea pops into my head. I comm to Trick, “Let’s go all the way to the top. They won’t expect that.”

“What do we do from up there?”

“I’ll carry you down the outside. They won’t expect that either.”

Trick thinks for a second and comms, “Roger, let’s do it.” We race back to the stairs. This building has five stories belowground and ten stories above, so by the time we reach the top, we should be able to build a huge separation between us and our pursuers.

We soar up the stairs. Trick gasps for breath, but he keeps going. I may have to pay for all this frantic activity with another visit to Chico or Dr. Herodotus, but for now I feel fine. We can’t hear the posse chasing us over the wail of the fire alarm, but it’s a safe bet that
someone
is coming after us.

We reach the door to the roof. I kick it open and we emerge into the Swiss sunshine. Trick reaches into his bag and pulls out the high-stress line we’ll use for our external descent. I scan the area while he gets the line secured. Most of the people down on the ground have moved away from this facility because of the fire alarm. A group of determined-looking men run toward it, but I don’t think these fellas are here to douse any blazes. That is, unless Swiss firemen carry assault rifles.

As Trick hands me the line, I spot something coming from the roof of a neighboring building. It’s hot, fast, and headed right for us.

I shout, “RPG! Solomon, get down!”

He doesn’t get down.

He pushes me off the building.

I turn as I fall and watch the rocket-propelled grenade explode right next to Trick’s position and blow him to bits.

“PATRICK!!!”

The grenade’s blast wave wallops me, and I streak toward the ground. My synthetic right hand grabs the rappelling line as tightly as possible. The line burns into the metal and plastic of my right palm as I arc toward the wall. I hit a window and crash through in a shower of shrieks and shattered glass. For a moment I watch all this action from outside myself, like I’m someone else. I land at the end of a hallway, skid all the way down the long linoleum floor, and bash through a door into a broom closet.