This indicated to Maurice that the shaman must be masking his aura, and to do that he must be a powerful magician, an initiate, in fact.
This changed things considerably. It made Bandit a potentially dangerous opponent, and it urged Maurice to caution. The ward could certainly be defeated, but that would likely cost Maurice energy, and he had not come prepared to begin any sort of conflict at anything less than his full measure of vitality. The appearance of this unexpectedly powerful ward warned him to wait and watch.
The Brigade's troopers stormed the house, smashing down the rowhouse's rear door and entering like soldiers. The ward of course had no effect on their entrance, providing only a barrier against spells and astral surveillance. No form of sorcerous traps appeared to be keyed to it.
They seem confused, master, Vera Causa remarked.
They?
The soldiers.
An insightful observation, Maurice thought, for a spirit so recently conjured. Vera Causa's rapid progress along the learning curve gave him cause to wonder yet again. The raid of the safehouse soon ended. The runners were not found. Maurice projected onto the astral and moved into the alley to watch and listen to troopers there. They appeared disturbed.
The runners, it seemed, had not been observed since they had entered their safehouse. They had gone inside and stayed there. They had not departed via their van or any other vehicle. They had not climbed out through the roof and made their way across the rooftops to another location. How, then, had they escaped? Maurice circled the safehouse, stepping through the walls of the adjoining rowhouses and out to the street in front of the safehouse, then around and back to the alley. The building walls adjoining the safehouse were intact, so the runners had not simply broken into an adjoining structure and slipped away. Only one direction remained in which they could have gone, and that was down.
Maurice descended into the earth, and here he found the answer to the Brigade troopers' questions.
The runners included an ork, and that implied some connection to the ork underground-and that could mean many things. The Newark sprawl had a population of orks the equal of any city in the urban Northeast, perhaps the whole of North America, and they were always busy. Maurice had information indicating that many had begun going underground shortly after the Awakening, the better to escape the oppression of fanatical humans. Their subterranean constructions had since become quite extensive. Some sections of the city were honeycombed with tunnels and passages that appeared on no official schematics. And the orks had dug deep in many places. Deeper than any rational human would care to descend.
The deeper one went, the greater the sense of claustrophobia the tunnels bred. It posed a threat to sanity that Maurice did not care to challenge. And tonight there was no need.
A tunnel passed directly beneath the safehouse, a mere few meters below ground level. It appeared to be an old tunnel, braced by wooden beams. In places the walls were crumbling into mounds of sawdust and earth. The runners had doubtless used this tunnel to escape the perimeter set up by the Brigade.
Maurice considered. He doubted that the runners would remain in these tunnels long. Their leader would not allow it.' To do so would be to invite forces like the Executive Action Brigade down into the tunnels, and that would put others, innocents, such as orks, at risk. The runners would therefore surface as swiftly as possible and seek other accommodations, a new safehouse, before continuing on their course.
The Executive Action Brigade was obviously at a loss. Their technological methods had failed. It would, therefore, be Maurice's task to find the runners' new safehouse. Fortunately, he had the means to do so.
He returned to his waiting limo.
The heavy metal grille of the storm drain was set into the ferrocrete of the gutter, but it also had an opening set into the curb like a shallow arch.
That arch gave a good view of the fronts of the rowhouses opposite, but only to someone jacked into a Mitsuhama control deck and using the sensors of a modified Sikorsky-Bell microskimmer for eyes. That someone was Thorvin-who else? The moment he saw the pair of dark blue vans turning the corner down by Hamilton, he fired a signal to Filly.
"Showtime!"
Her signal to get the hell out.
The vans came rushing up the block and squealed to a sudden halt in front of the safehouse. To say Thorvin had been expecting this would be a freaking understatement.
He'd been expecting exactly this kind of a commando-style raid ever since he'd discovered the microelectronic bug some piece of scag had glued to the underside of the van. A nasty little piece of silicon that bug was. The sneaky kind. A real snitch. Virtually undetectable until it was activated, at which point it fired a microburst location signal.
The minute that snitch came on-line, the van's detection system went wild, and the rest was history.
Getting out had been a problem. They couldn't just leave. They'd needed someplace to go to and not just anywhere would do. They had a flabby scientist and a weak-limbed corporate biff to chaperone around. And the moment Rico told L. Kahn to eat squat, the whole world would come down on top of them. Including their backup on the job, or whoever had been tailing them. Move in to grab Surikov and Farris and ace the team. That's why corps hired backups. And that's why Rico had decided on the trick. Keep everyone concentrating on the house in Sector 20's North Caldwell for as long as possible, and meanwhile get Surikov and Farris to safer precincts, which they'd done last night.
The van behind the house was an integral part of the trick. It was a decoy, of course, a virtual twin of Thorvin's super-charged vehicle, though only from the outside. Thorvin had thought Rico must be frizzed when he ordered up a twin of the Rover, but what the frag? That's what bosses were supposed to do. Plan ahead. Prepare for the unexpected. Even if it meant looking brain-numb. This particular part of the plan hadn't cost much. A day of hunting around through the sprawl's scrapyards, some welding and paint, and he had put together a look-alike, right down to the registration tags. The decoy's engine barely had enough power to drag the body more than a block at a time, but then motivating power didn't matter.
The rest of the trick was easy. Leave someone in the safehouse to move around, turn lights off and on, talk to themselves. Act like a crowd of people. Shank and Filly volunteered. They'd be moving now to the trapdoor in the basement, which led into the tunnel under the house. If Shank and Filly had any sense, they'd be moving extra-fast, because the commandos out front were already out of their vans and applying a portable ram to the safehouse's front door.
Thorvin watched the commandos go through the safehouse door. A close-up view got him a look at the flash on their uniforms. No black annis patches here. Nothing even hinting of Daisaka Security. The logo of the freaking Executive Action Brigade appeared on every left shoulder, every one that Thorvin could see. That was interesting. Thorvin had heard of the E.A.B. They'd recently been involved in clearing gangers outta certain parts of Sector 17 where certain corps had condoplexes. The E.A.B. made decent commandos, but they weren't exactly specialists at being subtle.
Why would anyone hire the effing E.A.B. for backup on a job like this? Thorvin wondered while descending to the concrete conduit that shuttled rainwater down the length of the block. It joined up with the sewer line running along Hamilton Drive. Before long, Shank and Filly came up the shaft from the tunnel below.
Thorvin keyed his mike. "How'd it go?"