Remote Control (13 page)

But climbing was already getting harder. He was thirty meters up now. He had lost nearly all of the original momentum from his run-up, and he was having to press his feet harder against the wall. His thighs were rapidly becoming sore as the repetitive pushing wore them down.

Forty meters up.

Fifty.

The Timeout was becoming a little darker down below, as the distance grew the fog concealed more and more. Six
was slightly relieved by this; the sight of the distant concrete, which he knew would shatter his bones and crush his flesh if he lost his balance for even a split second, was distracting. He kept running.

At sixty meters up, he estimated the horizontal distance between himself and the building at the end, where he would run out of wall: a hundred meters. He gritted his teeth—he hadn’t been climbing steeply enough! He would now have to run at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground—one vertical meter for every horizontal meter—or else he would hit the building and fall to his death.

He pushed harder, trying to ignore the signals from his aching legs.
Ninety meters to go
, he told himself.
Breathe in, breathe out. Left foot, right foot, hand. Left foot, right foot, hand. Eighty meters to go.

He could no longer see the soldier with the Ostrich. That meant the soldier couldn’t see him either, unless his goggles had thermal vision. Six was probably safe.

He was a hundred meters up.
Left, right, hand.
His calf and thigh muscles burned, and he could feel his strides across the wall getting weaker. “Left, right, hand,” he hissed, trying to focus all his energy reserves into the climb. He tightened his free hand into a fist and tried to halt the pain in his legs with sheer willpower. One hundred and ten meters up; fifty to go. More than two-thirds of the way there.

He looked at the building in his way again. Too close—fifty meters away. He was going to have to make his run steeper—almost fifty degrees—to reach the top.

The ground was now invisible in the black night fog, but he couldn’t see the top of the wall yet. With both ends of his journey cloaked by the inky blackness, and the Seawall stretching into
infinity above and below him, he felt a sudden flash of vertigo—as if the wall were actually horizontal and he were running on his side. He almost hesitated and lost his footing; he slapped his hand against the wall instead of his right foot. On the next step he nearly compensated for the mistake by pushing off too hard, before pulling back at the last microsecond as he realized that one over-industrious push would catapult him out into the void.

Breathe in, breathe out.
One hundred and twenty meters up now. His leg muscles were screaming and his eyes began to water with the pain.
Keep going
, he told himself.
Pain is mental, not physical—nerves reporting injuries to the brain.

Left, right, hand!
The building was coming up too fast—it was twenty meters away, and he still had twenty-five to climb. His shoes scraped across the concrete as if it were a chalkboard, slipping more and more as his coordination suffered. His hand, its palm now pink and sweaty, scrabbled desperately against the wall. His angle of ascent became shallower even as he tried to force his body higher. The building was ten meters away now; he was about to run out of wall to climb, and the top was still twenty meters above. His run became horizontal as his calves and ankles stiffened, and soon he was actually descending.

I’m one hundred forty meters up
, he thought.
If I fall, I’m dead—but I can’t reach the top! If I hit that building, my momentum runs out, and I die!

The logical part of Six’s brain shut down completely, and raw instinct took over. Instead of trying to run up the wall at a seventy-five-degree angle, he ran straight at the building and jumped up as high as he could. His body rushed through the air, curling into a fetal cannonball position, and hit the side of the building shoes first, seven meters below the top of the Seawall.

The momentum of the jump pressed him against the
building’s wall, but instead of grabbing on to it, he threw himself straight back into the air, spinning like a carelessly thrown battle ax, and leaped almost the whole remaining seven meters. He threw out one hand and grabbed the top of the Seawall.

His legs went completely numb as soon as the strain was taken off them, and their deadweight pulled painfully at his hips. His sweaty hand was slipping off the lip as he dangled in the air, and he tossed his other one over the edge as well.

His first attempt to drag himself onto the top of the Seawall failed, and he nearly fell. His shoulders and elbows made a muffled crack as he slipped backward, hanging on by his fingertips. He breathed deeply before trying again, his exhalations echoing off the Seawall all around him, chorusing out into the night.

He tried once more. His grazed fingers strained as they took all the weight of his torso and legs. When his shoulders were over the edge, he let go with one hand and slapped it against the concrete on the top. The Seawall was almost thirty meters thick, so there was no other side to grab hold of. Instead, he braced his elbow against the top and dragged his torso over the edge. When his weight was resting upon his chest, he dragged himself forward until he had room to lift his knee up.

With his last shred of strength, he rolled to one side, a safe two meters away from the edge, and rested.

Six lay on his back, eyes shut, thinking. The pounding of his heart in his ears had faded, and now he could hear the sea booming against the wall, each wave crashing forward, striking the concrete, then sliding back under to make room for the next. He still had the same objective: Find Kyntak.

But where was he? With 7.5 million square kilometers of City to search, Six had no hope of finding him without a lead.

Six’s eyes popped open. The monorail cars which had been resting above the Timeout when he’d arrived—he couldn’t see them anymore, but they’d been there when he started running up the Seawall.

If the monorail cars were there for a party, Six thought, would they have stayed once the snipers showed up? Maybe—he could imagine a few seconds of stunned silence, when no one had gathered the sense to drive them back along the rail to safety. Would they have stayed once the girl on the rooftop started slaughtering the soldiers? Six wondered. It was possible—perhaps everyone was ducking for cover, too scared to run for the controls. Would they have stayed once the Ostrich opened fire, ripping the road to jagged shreds and turning the buildings to rubble? No way. Someone would have had the sense to hit the reverse switch.

Six’s mind was racing now. The person or people inside the carriages had known that something was going to happen in the Timeout.

The only people who knew that the drop-off was taking place were the kidnappers and the Deck agents. And the monorail cars didn’t belong to the Deck.

They didn’t interact, Six thought. They were just there. Watching. A reconnaissance unit for Vanish. They would return to home base once their mission was complete.

Six leaped to his feet. He had to follow those monorail cars—they would lead him straight to where Kyntak was being held. He started running back along the top of the wall.

The black, inscrutable ocean swelled and deflated down below, crashing against the concrete with patient aggression. The
wind blasted at Six from the water side of the wall. He ran as close to dead center as he could. Even with fifteen-meter margins on both sides, the long drops made him nervous. If he fell back into the Timeout, the impact would kill him instantly—but falling into the ocean would be just as bad. He would be stranded outside the City until he drowned, froze to death, or was slammed endlessly against the wall by the waves.

It would be hard to follow the monorail on foot without being spotted. He took out the phone he’d taken from the teenager and dialed King’s office as he ran.

“King.” The voice sounded tense, but not cautious. Six didn’t think there was anyone listening in.

“It’s me,” he said. Normally he avoided statements like that, because they conveyed almost no information. But he didn’t want to incriminate King, so using his own name could be a mistake.

“Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I made the rendezvous, but they didn’t give him back,” Six said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“Put a trace on this phone. I’ll call you again in half an hour, so you can tell me where it ended up. Okay?” Six looked at his watch. 19:11:08.

“Yes.”

“And put the ransom money back in our account,” Six added. “He’s not going to take it now.” He was about to pocket the phone when King broke in.

“Wait. Six?” He sounded uncertain, or nervous.

“Yes,” Six said. “What is it?”

There was a pause. Six could see the end of the monorail line up ahead. “King?” he said. “There’s no time for—”

“You’ll be okay,” King interrupted. It wasn’t reassurance or a statement of fact. It was a compliment. King was telling Six that he was proud of him.

“Yes,” Six said. “I will.” He put the phone in his pocket, keeping the call connected.

The monorail line was directly underneath him, about ten meters down. It was an iron strip, eighty centimeters wide, stretching out across the Timeout in a straight line. Six aimed very carefully. If he missed, there was nothing to break his fall before the road a hundred sixty meters below. He took a deep breath and jumped.

Wham!
Six fought to control the instinctive shuddering in his muscles as he hit the line. His hands grasped wildly as he slipped backward over the edge. He managed to hook his fingertips around the edge of the platform and dangled there for a moment.

“Agent Six is alive, unharmed, and not in Vanish’s custody,” the girl said. She glanced reflexively over her shoulder. She was sure that Vanish’s forces were too decimated and distracted to come after her, but she didn’t like the feeling of exposure that came with standing on top of a building. She felt safest with her back against a wall and a gun trained on the only door. She slept in a room with no windows, an electronically locked trapdoor under her bed, and a concealed latticework of piano wire covering the door frame.

“Excellent work.” Lerke’s voice was filled with satisfaction rather than relief. As usual, the girl had the feeling that he sensed her words before she uttered them, and that events had transpired exactly as he had expected them to. “How many casualties?”

“Eight,” she replied. “All theirs.”

There was a pause. “And witnesses?”

“Forty-one hostile, eighty-eight civilian,” she said. Normally she operated invisibly. In an ideal job, no one saw her enter, leave, or do anything in between. But this mission had been different. Lerke had demanded spectacle. Unusual though this was, it had made her job easier. Subtlety was not Agent Six’s strong suit. He tended to draw attention to himself, and protecting him without being noticed at all would have been difficult.

“Perfect,” Lerke replied. “Shots fired?” She could hear a smile in his voice.
He’s expecting a good answer
, she thought.

“Nine,” she said. “All hits.”

“Hostile shots fired?”

“Six hundred and twenty-six. All misses.”

“Well done,” he said. “Your next task is to go to Vanish’s base of operations. I’ll upload the coordinates to your mobile.”

“What’s the mission objective?”

“For now, just observe. But go prepared. If things aren’t happening the way I want, I’ll expect you to change them so they are.”

“Yes,” Nai said. “I understand.”

Six could see the monorail carriages in the distance. Their shells glimmered a dull silver as the light from the streetlamps below glanced off both sides. He forced himself to run faster, his aching feet slamming down against the iron rail.

The monorail had a maximum speed of forty kilometers per hour, and Six estimated that the driver was at full throttle. But Six was gaining quickly. It wasn’t long before he was illuminated in the rear lights.

The City skyline rushed past as the track joined the greater web that spanned the continent. The carriages bent at their flexible couplings as the rail curved, sending the monorail car west. Six watched another monorail clatter past in the opposite direction, on a track overhead, as he advanced on the tinted window. The rear carriage looked empty, but he could hear noises inside the others—the thumping of footsteps as people moved in between cars, the crackling and buzzing of radios, and the faint rattling clicks of guns sweeping from side to side.

Six would have liked to climb inside the train, hide somewhere, and wait for it to reach the base where Kyntak was being held. But Vanish’s soldiers seemed cautious, and the two carriages were small. He would be found, and he’d have to incapacitate the troops. Then there would be no way of finding out where the base was.

He pulled the mobile phone out of his pocket and checked the screen to see that it was still connected to King’s line. Then he tightened his free hand into a rock-hard fist, drew it back, and punched through the rear window of the monorail car.

The glass was shatterproof. As soon as his fist connected, it was like static on an old television. Six’s view of the interior of the carriage disappeared, replaced by a matrix of white and grey cracks. He drove his hand through the glass and immediately tossed the phone inside. Then he started pulling at the edges of the hole to widen it.

Chunks of the cracked glass came away as he tugged at them, and soon the gap was wide enough for him to see soldiers running through the door between the two rear carriages. As soon as he was sure that they had seen him too, he stumbled and lost his grip on the glass. Springing up off the rails, he started sprinting after the escaping monorail car, but he didn’t push his speed. He
ensured that he was quickly falling back, apparently unable to keep up.

Six was about fifty meters behind the trundling rear carriage when the first soldier reached the window and fired at him. It would have been a nearly impossible shot, aiming at a moving target from a moving point at long range, but Six made the soldier think he was an excellent marksman. He hurled his body backward as if he had been hit in the chest, and fell on his rear against the track before pitching lifelessly over the side.