The Valkyrie Project (28 page)

Her fears proved rational when
, after clearing the corner to the third side of the building, five explosives still to prime, she turned into an alternate corridor, and ran literally smack into one of Jarvis or Jacob.

The two of them
walked side by side, both of them very tall and carrying considerable bulk along with their sizable firearms. The extra weight slowed their ability to react, and after she bounced off the chest of whichever one she'd collided with, she simply aimed the gun already in her hand and opened up nine needle holes in him.

Unfortunately that gave the other one enough time to point the gaping maw of his barrel at Ana and pull the trigger. While the three-quarter
-inch rail hurtled toward Ana, she let her momentum spin her back around the corner and she plastered herself to the wall. The huge piece of metal smashed into the durostone wall opposite Ana, and while durostone was so named because it was more durable than regular quarried stone, it was not made to hold up to ferromagnetic durosteel projectiles flying at a thousand meters per second.

After the chips and chunks of durostone were resting safely on the ground, and the resulting dust dissipated, Ana
realized she was in a stalemate with the large man with an equally large gun. Really, it was the best she could have hoped for in the given situation. Neither of them could put a limb around the corner without the other filling them with high-velocity particulate matter.

"I've got one here," the remaining J-named guard said, presumably into a comm device of some sort. "Jacob is down. He's been shot." The only response was the whirring of the cooling system overhead. Ana hoped that meant Etienne would be following soon. She
felt a spring of cautious optimism that the silence meant there was no help on the way. Ana's small hope did not preclude the more realistic notion that guards communicated on a direct link to each other and she needed to take him out before the rest of the factory's security force arrived. The building had at least two guards per floor at any given time, and Ana did not look forward to mixing it up with ten more if they were all as large and well-armed as Jarvis and the late Jacob.

Jarvis called around the corner, "Give yourself up and we can say you accidentally killed Jacob. Much less jail time for you that way."

Ana remained silent. She considered some sort of slide tackle maneuver, but it would have to be perfectly placed and executed to incapacitate Jarvis the way she wanted.

"I know you're there!" he shouted.

Short temper. Perhaps Ana could bait him and hook him around the corner.

"How do you know I'm still here?" she asked, knowing it was a ridiculous question. That was the point.

"I would have heard you leaving." Jarvis provided Ana the most obvious answer.

"But what if I was like a ninja or had a teleportation device or something?"

"Then you wouldn't be here talking to me!" His bluster grew and Ana tried to figure out how to turn the screw once more. If she couldn't draw him out, Plan B involved stalling until Etienne could catch up. That plan hinged on Etienne having survived whatever defense the first pair of guards had put up, but the radio silence made it seem probable.

"So you want me to toss my little tiny gun out there and leave you sitting there with that thing that could take my head off in a single shot?"

"If you don't, then I'll blow your head off anyway. If you surrender, you live."

Ana slipped one strap of the little
pack she wore off her shoulder.

"Okay," she said, "I toss my gun and you don't blow me to bits."

Ana crouched, holding both straps of the pack together in her left hand with her gun ready in the right. It would be an awkward angle and she would have to be extremely precise.

She tossed the bag out right around Jarvis's eye level and leaned
low around the corner, aiming and firing as fast her reflexes would allow. Half of Jarvis's reflexes reacted as fast as Ana moved, but unfortunately for him, it was the half that allowed him to pull the trigger on his oversized rifle and not the half that would have allowed him to adjust his aim. Ana popped three needles into Jarvis's forehead, sending him stumbling backward to collapse on the floor before he could get another poorly aimed shot off.

Ana picked up the last of the explosives which had slipped from her backpack before she tossed it. She stood, taking a deep breath as she looked at the two large holes in the wall. She considered taking Jarvis's gun in case she encountered anyone else on the way out and need
ed more stopping power. She checked the clip on the Needler and decided the trade-off for the weight of the extra weapon was not worth it.

Then she listened for a moment, trying to pick up a hint of anyone coming from either direction. She heard the frustratingly familiar sound of the central air conditioning blowing from the ducts, but nothing more. Nothing to do but move on.

Ana set the rest of the charges without further trouble, weaving through the remainder of the maze of tunnels, following the plan as it had been laid out in the blueprint. In the solitude of her march around the remaining four hundred meters of the perimeter, Ana thought about how Etienne had phrased her reaction to the altered floor plan. Maybe she was reading too much into it to think that the Continuum would have used their time-travel technology to acquire something as simple as the blueprints to a factory on file with any number of government agencies. In order for the plans to have changed, the Continuum must have obtained them before the fully functional factory had made it past the first-floor construction.

Ana passed through the door that mirrored the one through which she and Etienne had entered and hustled toward the transport vehicle in which the two of them had arrived. She stopped short when she
spotted a pair of guards prowling through the rows of vehicles in the lot. Out of several levels available for hovercar storage, they had managed to trace Ana and her now missing partner to this one. Ana continued to hustle, but in a different direction, heading up a ramp that would take her to ground level. Still no sign of Etienne; no clue what might have happened to her inside the factory basement.

Ana avoided the
guards in the parking structure, but wondered how many security cameras bore witness to her scramble to the street. If the system had been fed with her likeness, surely they would be after her already. Even the most basic of video algorithms would match her up with the woman who had entered several hours earlier.

Sever
al hours. Ana checked the time. Talk about cutting it close. A bell called out from the factory. Even from the ground-floor sidewalk, Ana could see a commotion begin inside the building. The work day was over. Soon the structure that held the idle cars would be emptied of its contents and Ana could detonate the explosives and complete the mission. And either blow her partner up or leave her buried alive under thousands of tons of rubble.

If she had been
a real Continuum agent it might have been difficult, but her cold-blooded Continuum nature would leave her no other option. As a Valkyrie Project operative, she figured it was a good opportunity to take out a Continuum agent while still maintaining her cover. Ana harbored no illusion that Etienne would do the same if their positions were swapped. Even if she wasn't privy to the inside knowledge that Natalya had regarding Ana's status as a triple agent, Etienne would push the button. And while Ana visualized the ruthlessness with which another operative would view the situation, she waited until the workers piled into their cheap hovercars and even cheaper four-wheelers and flew or drove off to whatever made up the rest of their daily lives. While the cars swooped from the garage and tore off into the skylines that connected the factory with the outside world, Ana hunkered down at the commuter rail stop, established solely for the purpose of serving the factory, and hoped she would avoid notice. She wasn't sure what miracle of stupidity saved her from being caught, but she was still there after the people had evaporated into the air.

At that point, Ana concluded that the only
thing left to do was detonate the explosives and leave her so-called partner behind in the resulting hail of fire and durostone.

She pressed the button on the detonator and immediately knew she should have been further away. The explosives did not cause a graceful implosion as she thought they
would. Instead they threw everything used to construct the building as far as their stored kinetic energy would allow. Ana dropped to the durocrete sidewalk, but not before stopping the momentum of several pieces of debris with various parts of her body. There would be bruises in the morning, that was for sure, but the mission had been accomplished.

--

Ana stumbled like a bird with a broken wing to the emergency pickup location. Had she really taken out the whole facility? Etienne and everyone remaining inside? She fought the feeling of compassion for her Continuum partner. She was, after all, a Continuum agent, and therefore, an enemy. But she'd proven herself a worthy colleague and as Ana sat in a hovercar headed for the nearest Continuum facility, she kept coming back to the fact that she'd sacrificed Etienne and everyone else in the building when she'd blown the charges. She hadn't believed Natalya's threats about the Continuum's mind-control abilities when she'd accosted Ana in the locker room, but maybe Ana had just grown more detached and professional with respect to this new war. She knew there would always be something to fight for or against. Had the practicality earned over years of service brought her to this empty crossroads?

Ana
sank into the chair in the briefing room, wishing she could just go to bed. She knew it was too much to hope for a dreamless sleep, but it would still be sleep and not the nightmare of facing the dark eyes of the Raven Natalya.

"Congratulations, Ms. Anderson," Natalya said before she even made it through the door to the room. "Your work is to be commended!"

Ana found herself too tired for a retort.

"I don't even need to bother debriefing you, really. Our information says the factory is a pile of rubble and here you are, so mission accomplished!"

"You don't care that Etienne is buried at the bottom of that pile of rubble?"

"I do care
, actually. I care that you were able to let her go, to leave her behind, in order to finish your mission."

Ana winced. She had killed Etienne. Premeditated, calculated, and
then justified it. Etienne, like Natalya, worked for the Continuum. If Etienne had known that Ana worked for the United States Intelligence Agency, she would have been at her throat in a second, forcing Ana to fight for her life.

"We were pleased with your ability to react and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Especially such a dangerous situation. Have you ever tried to pull off something like that before?"

"Well, most of the time I try to avoid running into guys with rail guns and blowing up buildings. I prefer to prevent destruction rather than cause it."

"And that's why we had to see how far you would go."

The words slid from her mouth like a snake uncoiling. The sentence dug its fangs into Ana, paralyzing her with what she assumed was a look of dumbfounded shock on her face.

"No better way to assess your potential than in a real
-life situation."

"Why would you let her die just to test me?"

"You are more important than you realize. Etienne joined up with the Infinite Army when we recruited her. She knew what she was getting into and was ready to make the sacrifices that we asked of her. Fortunately, we will not need the same sort of loyalty from you."

Natalya rose with deliberate speed
like a cloud of thick black smoke. Ana sat frozen in place. The Raven swept from the room without another word, leaving Ana in a confusion of questions and absences of conclusions.

--

Ana's thoughts roiled in her head even as she sat numb while a Continuum doctor checked her for internal injuries. With the external ones judged superficial, and no sign of other physical trauma, she headed toward the exit of the unfamiliar building, her weary brain following recently constructed memories to find her way out.

Ana's
heart jumped and memories jumbled when she saw a woman exit a room at the far end of a long corridor. It seemed much longer than really necessary, and made it hard to tell if Ana was really looking at Etienne walking away, or if her imagination had conjured a vision out of guilt and grief.

"Etienne!" she called down the hall.

The woman, apparition or not, did not turn back. Instead she turned right, in the opposite direction of the exit that had been Ana's goal until the moment the lookalike went the other way. Ana found herself with no choice but to follow.

She
padded down the hall, the standard-issue rubber-soled athletic shoes turned her into a ninja compared to the thocking high heels worn by the woman ahead of her.

When Ana rounded the corner pas
t which Etienne had disappeared she caught sight of the familiar ponytail, slightly protruding posterior, and last kick of a heel before they were enveloped completely by an elevator.