"welcome bonus" for joining the Tyrants. The arm could be twitchy, though. Twice now, on the first few operations Namir had deployed him on, the Samson had shown a trigger delay. Saxon reckoned he had it tuned well enough by now, though. Still, he resolved to up his neuropozyne dose a little, just in case.
"Thinkin' about a skydive?" said a voice. "You itchin' to try out that new high-fall aug?"
He turned. Filling most of the corridor behind him, Lawrence Barrett had Saxon fixed with a wolfish grin. The American was big, and he was ugly. A flat buzz cut framed features that were burn-scarred and bold about it. The only part of the man's face that was unblemished was the synth-skin along a reconstructed jaw. Saxon understood that Barrett's looks had been given to him by close proximity to a bomb blast, but he knew little more than that. The big man wore his disfigurement like a badge of honor, highlighting it with a brass bull ring through his nose.
Saxon wasn't a small guy by any means, but he carried himself differently from Barrett, with this thuggish swagger; he didn't feel the need to look threatening every second of every day. But then again, men who looked as tough as they were could be a useful tool in the spec ops game.
Saxon was more a student of the subtle approach, though.
"I don't like flying," he offered. "Bores the hell out of me, yeah?"
"I hear that." Barrett nodded, toying with the wrists of his black-and-steel cyberarms. "This is the shittiest airline ever. No damn stewardess and the in-flight movie sucks." Outwardly, the jet they were aboard resembled any one of a number of conventional private airliners-but under the mimetic fuselage was the mobile operations center for the Tyrants, easily the rival of any military forward air command unit in the world.
Barrett wandered toward the galley and Saxon fell in behind him. He'd been on a couple of sorties with the American-surveillance jobs in
Bucharest and Glasgow-and all along he'd felt like he was being watched himself. It wasn't surprising, Saxon thought. They'd invested time and money in headhunting him from Belltower, so it made sense to have him pass through a few rookie assignments before stepping up to the real thing-but to be honest, he chafed at it. He wasn't just some grunt in off the street. He knew how to do the job as well as any of them. He was tired of the small-scale, low-threat gigs. Still, the Tyrants paid well, and they had good funding, that was clear-although he'd learned straightaway that asking questions about that side of things was off-limits. Namir had made that very plain.
He'd seen some of the other Tyrant operatives here and there over the past couple of months, usually just in passing-but this was the first time they'd all been gathered together for a mission. Saxon felt an itchy tingle of anticipation in the palm of his gun hand. The gloves were going to come off when they got to Moscow-he could sense it.
They emerged in the open common area on the aircraft's upper deck. A gleaming steel galley ranged along one wall, and there were chairs and monitors facing it. Barrett pawed through a food locker like a hungry bear and Saxon glanced away, finding another member of the team engrossed in maintenance on a heavy cyberhand.
The German was the other new guy in the Tyrants, although he'd been in a while before Saxon's arrival. Beneath a dark jacket he had the spare, rippled physique of a bodybuilder, a thick neck and natural eyes that still seemed somehow lifeless. A black watch cap was pulled down over his hair. He didn't show many augmentations aside from the hand, but Saxon had seen him moving and was willing to bet the legs were metal. The guy was the youngest of them, somewhere in his twenties.
"You're Saxon," he said. His accent was deep and resonant. "We have not formally met." He nodded at the dismantled mechanism at the end of his arm. "Forgive me if I do not shake your hand. I am Gunther Hermann."
"I know." Namir had mentioned Hermann in passing; from what Saxon had learned, the younger man had been part of Germany's GSG-9 police counter-terror unit until the Tyrants had recruited him. Something in the way that Namir had glossed over that fact made Saxon wonder about the reasons for Hermann's departure from the Bundespolizei.
Hermann put down his tools and took a careful drink from a can of orange soda. "You are the replacement for Wexler, then?"
"I guess so." There had been little said about the operator whose boots Saxon was filling. He hadn't wanted to push the issue. People died in this line of work as a matter of course.
"He was slow," offered Barrett. "Got himself killed 'cause of it."
He decided to venture the question, caution be damned. "What happened?"
"Now, why do you need to know that?" Saxon looked up as a third man entered the common area from the forward compartment. His lips thinned. In any group there was always a place where the dynamic created friction, and it was right here, between Ben Saxon and Scott
Hardesty, the team's dedicated sniper.
Hardesty was rangy and tall, so much so that he seemed in danger of scuffing the top of his bald scalp on the ceiling. Saxon never saw him wearing anything other than a combat overall, sometimes with a gear vest or equipment belt. He was long and thin, like the spindly extreme range rifles he carried on-mission, and augmented across all his limbs. His eyes were high-specification optics of a kind Saxon had never seen before.
At first Saxon had found it difficult to adjust from being a team leader, as he had been with Strike Six, to being a line operator once again-and
Hardesty seemed determined to make it harder by being as big a pain in the arse as he possibly could. The man had taken a strong dislike to him, but the reason why wasn't clear.
"Just making conversation," he demurred.
"Joe Wexler was good," Hardesty insisted. "I could trust him. I don't know you. So I don't trust you."
Saxon moved to the cooler and took a bottle of water. "Trust this; Namir didn't invite me in because of my sparkling personality."
"Dead weight gets cut loose very fast around here," said Hardesty, pushing past as he made his way down the compartment. "Keep that in mind, limey."
As the aft door closed behind him, Saxon shrugged. "Friendly fella."
"Wexler was ex-CIA, like Hardesty," Barrett noted. "You know spooks, they like to stick together." "Right."
Hermann blew out a breath, his hand folding closed once again. He gave it an experimental flex, and Saxon saw where the knuckles and the proximal phalanges were heavily reinforced. Hermann noticed his attention. "A custom-designed modification," he explained. "In time, I hope to enhance the rest of myself in a similar fashion."
"Metal, not meat, eh?"
Hermann nodded, as if any other idea would be foolish. "Of course."
A soft chime sounded from the intercom, and Namir's voice issued out of a hidden speaker in the wall. "Final approach in ten minutes" he said.
"Prep your gear and be ready. We're on the clock for this one, so mission brief starts the moment the wheels stop. That is all"
Saxon glanced out of the window. The outer suburbs of the Russian capital flashed by, the city below shaking off sleep and awakening.
Pier 86-New York City-United States of America
Widow leaned back from the monitor and made a low, self-amused grumble in the back of her throat, the spider-hands reordering themselves into something closer to the order of human fingers. She looked up at Kelso and gave her a sour smile. "Thanks for the paper," said the hacker, nodding toward where Denny stood off to one side. "I always love doing these fun little jobs." Her tone made it clear the opposite was true.
Anna kept her hands inside her pockets. Jags of annoyance pulsed through her like twinges of pain from a pulled muscle, and she thought about how much she would enjoy slapping the smirk off the thin, spindly woman's face.