“You came alone,” I observed. “Where’s your puppy?”
She made a face. “First, stop calling him a puppy. And, second, Harry is fine, thank you. He is auditing a class in Florence.”
“A class? On what? How to find his ass with both hands?”
Harry Bolt — born Harcourt Bolton, Jr. — was the son of one of this country’s greatest intelligence agents, who became one of this country’s greatest traitors. It was Harcourt Bolton, Sr. who destroyed most of the DMS and damn near launched a pandemic that would have killed tens of millions of people, most of them children. We’d dismantled Bolton’s plans, and Harry had helped. So he was a good guy. He was also very possibly the most inept agent ever to work for the CIA. Clumsy, nerdy, not too bright, moderately unlikable, and a bit of a jackass.
However, he and Violin had bonded during the Kill Switch matter and have since been keeping company. I tend not to read fantasy stories, so I’m not sure I understand how the whole frog and princess dynamic works. She is a world-class beauty who is cultured, highly intelligent, and remarkably skilled, and Harry looks like a shorter, dumpier Matt Damon, but without the talent or the charm. I tried to make myself believe it was the fact that Harry had inherited a billion dollars, but since Violin isn’t that shallow I had to dismiss the idea. I’ve tried to make sense of it, but all I do is bruise my brain.
“Harry is auditing a lecture series on ancient mysteries and lost sacred artifacts,” said Violin. “It’s being given by an archaeologist in residence at the Pitti Palace in Florence.”
“Why?”
She gave me an enigmatic little smile. “Harry would like to be the next Indiana Jones.”
“Um… correct me if I’m wrong, but the last Indiana Jones was a fictional character.”
“Don’t be mean,” she said. “If this is what he wants to do, then what’s the harm? He’s his own man.”
Since Harry was now unemployed and rich, if he wanted to go globe-hopping to try and find the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant, he had the free time and could finance it. Who knows, maybe he’ll even find something of great historical value. It’s less likely that he’ll find a clue, but I didn’t say that to her.
Besides, I was too busy hanging on for dear life. You have to be right with Jesus if you’re riding shotgun with Violin behind the wheel. I’m positive I left fingernail marks on the door handle, and I almost fell on my face and kissed the ground when we arrived at our destination.
She drove us out of the city and into the country, to a densely wooded patch of forest on a mountain slope overlooking an industrial campus. We arrived while the sun was high, which gave us more than three hours of daylight to observe and plan.
We were looking for a place with the nondescript name of Podnik Ŕešení, which means “Business Solutions.” Pretty much the John Smith of business names. Luckily, the lab wasn’t in a sewer this time. I’m a big fan of missions not being in sewers. There’s something about splashing around in the toilet water of an entire city that doesn’t make one feel like James Bond. Instead, our target was a suite of labs leased in the moderate-sized industrial complex. More than forty businesses were based there, most of them involved in some kind of chemical or biomedical research. A couple of technologies companies, too. The DMS computer guy, Bug, had provided me with a floor plan from the local zoning commission, and we had satellite and thermal-imaging pictures. Violin and I studied the data and then surveilled the buildings using sniper scopes, locating access points, cameras, foot patrols, and guard stations. We counted one foot patrol and two in each of the gate stations.
“As far as we can tell,” I said, “most of the businesses in there are legitimate. Podnik Ŕešení is both the name of the whole building and the name of our target company. The name confusion lets them blend in. Our target lab is sandwiched between a firm working on a diet supplement and an independent blood-testing facility. Bug ran background on both, and they’re clean.”
Violin nodded, and I assumed she’d done her own background check through Oracle, the Arklight computer system. It was nearly as good as MindReader.
A shift change took place as we watched, and Violin spotted something.
“Joseph, look at the uniforms of the guards at the west gate.”
The west gate was the one closest to the building entrance, with easy access to our target lab. I studied them and saw what she meant. “Different uniforms,” I said. “Slate-gray instead of dark blue. Different company?”
“Dedicated security team,” she said. “They have better weapons, too. Kalashnikovs as well as sidearms. The guards at the east gate only have handguns. What would you like to wager that only the Podnik Ŕešení lab has access to that entrance?” mused Violin.
“Sucker’s bet.”
We lay prone under cover of a gorse bush. Violin set down her scope and turned to rest on her elbow, looking at me. “If I was one of your team members, this is where I would ask about the rules of engagement.”
“We need to walk out of there with hard drives, research data, and any biological samples we can carry.”
“You’re only talking about physical assets. What about the staff?”
“This science is used in over ninety sweatshops and fifty brothels in Southeast Asia and the poorer parts of Africa. These pricks have girls as young as nine on their backs and on their knees twenty hours a day, servicing anywhere up to forty johns every day of the hell that is their life. The people — and I use that word loosely — who work in the lab make the stuff that keeps those girls going like sex robots. They make the stuff that keeps thousands of slaves on the job round the clock, day in and day out, making phones, sneakers, and high-end electronics. These people will keep working until they die. The rest of the family usually works in the same factories or whorehouses, Violin. You tell me how many prisoners we want to take? Personally, I’m feeling moderately Old Testament right about now.”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “That’s the Joseph I remember.”
It was fully dark when we approached the west gate.
The two guards in the booth were big, and tough-looking. I didn’t know a thing about them, or why they were there. Or even how much they knew about the kind of horrors they were protecting. Maybe they were just hired muscle and had no clue about the atrocities their employers were inflicting on the world. Didn’t know, didn’t care. Violin and I circled the booth and then went through the door in a fast one-two. We gave the guards no chance at all. Violin rose up, as silent and unseen as a midnight wind, and cut one man’s throat. Before his blood could even splash the second man, I had a hand over his mouth and was using my rapid-release knife to screw a hole in his kidney.
They had key cards, so we took those and moved off, keeping out of sight of the rotating cameras, slipping in during split seconds of misaligned video sweeps. I removed a small device from my pocket and plugged it into the security-booth computer.
Violin nodded toward the device. “My mother says that MindReader is getting old. It’s been hacked too many times.”
“You have something better?” I countered. “Don’t forget, sweetie, but your Oracle system is based on MindReader.”
She shrugged. “Mother has played with it a bit since.”
Her mother was Lilith. No known last name, no known date of birth or place of origin. Not much in the way of human emotions, either. She was a survivor of a particularly brutal harem of sex slaves run by the Red Knights. Violin was born as part of a truly horrific breeding program. Lilith led a revolt that left the halls of that prison painted with the blood of her captors. I’ve heard some rumors of the things Lilith did to the ones she didn’t kill outright, and I’ve since seen evidence of her handiwork. She runs Arklight, the militant arm of the Mothers of the Fallen, the group of refugees who escaped with her. Arklight is on a par with the DMS when the DMS is at its very best. Its members are vicious, uncompromising, and unflinching in their war against men who do this kind of thing to women. Lilith has killed more ISIL and Boko Haram fighters than any single person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met all the top fighters. Do I agree with her methods? Tough question. Let’s just say that she makes a compelling argument, and I am neither fool enough, brave enough, nor chauvinistic enough to want to ever — ever — get in her way.