Deus Ex - Icarus Effect (11 page)

will be held, and you will be discharged from the Secret Service, forfeiting pension and all privileges. At the very least." He stood up. "The ticket

will get you back to Washington. Do yourself a favor, Agent Kelso. Go home. Let this go. Let Matt go." He gathered up the evidence bag with the

stims and grimaced at it. "And don't make things any worse for yourself."

After he left her alone, the restraint loop gave a buzz and fell off her wrist. Anna picked up the packet and something slipped out. A brass coin

clattered to the table; her sobriety chip. For a long moment, she thought about leaving it where it had fallen. Angrily, she snatched it up and

jammed it in her pocket.

Zubovskaya Square—Moscow—Russian Federated States

The night-black helo circled once over the buildings along Burdenko Street, the ducted rotor-rings turning, the sound-deadening baffles

humming. The boxy little flyer hugged the angular tops of the offices and apartment blocks, skimming over old tiled roofs cheek-by-jowl with

modern polyglass domes and sheets of solar paneling. The nose of the craft dipped as Hardesty dropped from the starboard side; then they

were rising up and away, describing a wide circuit around the lines of the plaza at Zubovskaya.

Saxon straightened the Kevlar balaclava over his face and peered through his polarized eye-shields. Ahead he could see the roof of the Hotel

Novoe Rostov. The team had reviewed the deployment on the way from the airport, and they were ready.

He took a breath and ran through his own internal checklist, ending it with a last look at the ammo selector on the Hurricane tactical machine

pistol that hung from his shoulder strap. The compact submachine gun was all ABS plastic and black-anodized steel, the blunt muzzle lost

behind a triangular suppressor.

"Twenty seconds." Namir's words came over his mastoid, buzzing in Saxon's skull. The subvocalized radio message had the peculiar echo to it

that made encrypted comms sound as if they were being beamed down from space.

Saxon frowned. They were cutting it fine. The sun was rising, and the morning light would cost them good cover if they didn't move fast. Then

Hardesty spoke over the general channel.

"Inposition"he said. "Three targets. Green light."

Namir gave an imperceptible nod. "Execute."

Saxon turned to the window in time to see a man on the roof of the Rostov looking up at them, raising a handheld to his ear; in the next second

the man jerked violently backward as if pulled by an invisible wire, a jet of red spurting from his chest. As the helo descended, he spotted the

other guards on the roof, collapsing in puffs of pink mist.

The helo fell into a hover ten meters up, and the rest of the Tyrants deployed, Barrett and Hermann leading, then Namir and Saxon, with

Federova last.

Saxon tensed; he was used to fast-roping, but his new high-fall aug—part of the "recruitment package"—meant he could drop straight into the

thick without a descender cord. The whole thing was counterintuitive, but it worked. He jumped, and a moment before he landed, a brief pulse

of electromagnetic energy flared around him, cushioning his fall. He landed squarely, the crackle of the effect generated by the augmentation taking the shock and bleeding it off to nothing.

Federova put down a heartbeat later, cat-falling with little more than a crunch of gravel. She had her hair back behind an Alice band studded

with data loops, but no hood. Federova saw him looking and gazed back, languid and unconcerned.

With a gust of downwash, the helo powered into the sky. He looked away, scanning the rooftop. The Rostov was a shallow, three-lobed tower

that had been thrown up in the boom years of the early 2010s, but never completed. There were whole floors of the building that were locked

off, still unfinished over a decade later.

"Blue, Green," said Namir, using Barrett and Hermann's call signs. "Secure the roof. Check for stragglers." He glanced at Saxon. "Gray, with

me."

"Roof is clear" Hardesty said, from his firing nest across the square. He didn't like the suggestion that he'd missed someone.

Low and quick, Saxon followed the Tyrant commander toward the boxy service shack in the middle of the roof. He passed the corpse of the

man the sniper had shot in the chest, and scanned the body. The dead man had a look of frozen surprise on his face, a foam of red froth on his

lips. Hardesty's bullet had punctured the heart, the exit wound ripping open the guard's back.

The man's face triggered a connection to the mission data Saxon had shunted to a temporary memory store in his implanted neural hub; the

modified wet-drive was another "bonus" from the Tyrants. He blinked up an image from an arrest record. The man lying in the pool of crimson

was immediately identified as Oleg Pushkin, a minor enforcer with the main Moscow crime syndicate, the Solntsevskaya Bratva. "This guy's a

mob hitter," Saxon murmured.

"They all are," Namir replied. "Keep up."

Barrett was at the service shack as they reached it. Air-conditioning equipment, heat exchangers, and cable gear for the Rostov's elevator

banks hummed inside.

Namir nodded at a secured maintenance hatch on the side of the shack. "Open it."

Hermann leaned close and used a digital lockpick to neutralize the security latches; when he was done, Barrett stepped in and curled his fingers

around the lip of the hatch with a grimace. The bunches of myomer muscles in his arms stiffened, gathered—and then with a low howl of

tortured metal the hatch came away, shearing the bolt heads clean off.

As Namir peered inside, Saxon glanced over his shoulder and his brow furrowed in confusion. "Where's ... Red?" There was no sign of Federova

anywhere on the rooftop. She had been only a few steps behind him.

Barrett chuckled. "She's around."

"Green," said Namir. "Deny their communications."

"Complying." Hermann nodded, drawing a thick, disc-shaped object from his backpack. It resembled a land mine. Acting quickly, the German

set it on the ground and flicked a yellow-and-black-striped activation switch. A flicker of interference momentarily stuttered across Saxon's

cyberoptics.

"Target comms are dead," reported Barrett, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. "Ready."

"Insertion," said Namir. "Go!"

One after another, they threaded in through the torn-out hatch and into the mass of machinery crowding the interior of the service shack.

Inside, a triangular cluster of running gear fell away into a series of shafts that ran the length of the Rostov, down to the basement parking

levels sixteen stories below. Saxon toggled his optics to low-light mode and the space became visible in shades of green and white. The shapes of

elevator cars were visible, most of them static, others gently rising or descending.

Namir and Saxon took point, working their way down past the slowly turning drums of support cables and the rumbling lift gears. According to

their information, Kontarsky and his people were on floor thirteen; outside, the pilot of the helo was watching the windows of the apartments on

the thirteenth floor, scanning through the vision-opaque glass with a thermographic sensor, watching the body-heat traces of the minister and

his staff. At this time of day, most of them were asleep; only the guards were supposed to be awake. They had to take care, though; their intel

wasn't clear on how many, if any, civilians were in the building. Collateral damage was to be kept to an absolute minimum.

Securing nylon cords to the cable frames, the two of them fast-roped down in silence, pausing at each level to sweep for magnetic anomaly

detectors or beam sensors. Saxon watched Namir work with speed and delicacy, rendering security systems inert with the skill of a veteran.

The central lift of a three-block cluster was locked in place at the thirteenth. The plan was to enter through its roof and fan out along the three

radial corridors—Namir, Hermann, and Saxon taking one each, Barrett holding the core as backup.

"Prep for breach" Namir sub vocalized. Saxon lowered himself to the top of the elevator car, disconnected his tether, and drew out a

pressurized canister of det-foam. Dialing the nozzle to narrow feed, he put marble-size blobs of the khaki-toned chemical in the corners of the

car's roof, then thumbed a set of slaved microdetonators into the congealing foam.

As he finished, he felt the elevator move slightly beneath him and heard voices. Three men, speaking in Russian. Through an air vent, he could

see a sliver of what was going on.

"Shto slüchios?" said one of them. He was tapping the radio headset at his ear, frowning.

Another man, out of Saxon's sight line, spat in irritation and followed his cohort into the lift. They were leaving their posts; Hermann's trick with

the communications blackout had spooked them.

Then the man with the radio gave a slow, owlish blink; Saxon recognized the action. He had implanted optics—he was changing vision modes.

The guard looked up, and for a fraction of a second Saxon saw a bluish glitter in his right eye. The tell gave away exactly what kind of optic the

guard was using; a terahertz lens that could see right through light cover. In the next few seconds, everything happened with bullet-fast rapidity. The guard swore explosively and slammed his fist into the control pad,

sending the elevator into an express plunge to the lobby. The other men in the car dragged their guns up, but they were armed with cut-down

assault rifles and inside the close confines of the elevator, the size of the guns made them unwieldy.

Saxon held tight to the car's frame and felt his stomach turn over as the lift dropped away; in the next breath the guards would have a bead on

him. A spray of blind fire, and he would be ripped to shreds.

He cursed and did the only thing he could, tapping the detonator key on the control bracelet around his wrist. The blobs of det-foam combusted

with sharp, smoky reports and the roof of the elevator car collapsed inward, Saxon falling with it. The noise deafened him.

The confined space became chaotic. The guards cursed and struggled to deflect the debris, lashing out. Saxon had no time to draw a weapon; it

was like fighting inside a coffin, with no room to maneuver; nothing to do but strike fast and give no quarter.

He punched the man with the t-wave optic into the wall and the guard's rifle snarled, discharging a three-round burst into the door. Then,

spinning in place, Saxon drove the armor-plated pad on his elbow into the rib cage of the second guard. He shoved him into a thinscreen along

the back wall and it fractured, webbing with cracks.

The third guard was still struggling with his rifle, shouldering aside the remains of a collapsed lighting rig. He launched himself at Saxon and

slammed the frame of the weapon into his face, cracking his eye-shields. The soldier hit back with a punch from his augmented arm, and

connected with the guard's ribs. Bones fractured with a sickening crunch and the assailant staggered backward, wheezing.

Then all three of them attacked him at once, using their guns like clubs to beat him about the head and shoulders. Saxon felt an impact at the

base of his spine and he stumbled, losing his balance as the elevator continued to drop toward the ground floor. He had no doubts that the

guards had reinforcements waiting there; he had to finish this quickly.

Locking his legs, Saxon pivoted and let his reflex booster implant ramp up to full. His nerves jangled with the sudden new input, the influence of

the neuromuscular accelerator coursing through him. The guards were crowding in and he struck out once more. The man with the cracked ribs

went back into the doors, slammed into place by the torso of the first guard. Saxon fired a low, fast kick at the leg of the other man and was