"White," he said to the air. "Go to thermal. Target the thirteenth floor. Tell me what you see."
"I have three unit indicators" came the reply from the sniper. "Silver, Blue, Green. Multiple unidentified targets same locationHe paused, a note of confusion entering his tone. "Youre in the room with them …"
"No," Namir growled, reaching down to grab a bunch of the cables. "We are not." He gave the cables a violent yank and they tore free from the glass, spitting sparks. The glass panes shimmered and went transparent as power bled out of them.
Hardesty's gasp of surprise was transmitted over the open channel. "What the hell…? Silver, all unidentified targets have vanished. Repeat, vanished."
"They were never here," Hermann said aloud. "The panels. They were some form of thermal blind, projecting a decoy image."
"Real smart," muttered Barrett. "So where is this creep really hidin' out?"
"Find him " demanded Namir.
Saxon nodded distractedly, and glanced around the marble lobby. It was gloomy in here, the only light a weak morning glow through the fan shaped windows above the high front doors. Aside from Federova, the area was deserted.
He glanced back to find the Russian woman down on one knee, rifling through the pockets of one of the men she had just killed. A gasp escaped the guard's mouth as she turned him over, a last breath leaving his lungs as she shifted the body.
"If the target's not on thirteen, then he's got to be on a different floor, shielded from thermographic scan." Saxon gave voice to his thoughts, following them through. He cast around the lobby. "There are multiple lift shafts. One of these has to be a dedicated express elevator… Here"
He found a single set of doors off to one side, in a discreet alcove; everything about the positioning of it screamed Restricted Access.
"Use it," Namir ordered. "Well track your locators, vector to you."
"There's no call button here," he noted, finding a glass panel set in the wall. "It may need some kind of key, or maybe palm print recognition-"
A heavy, wet crunch sounded behind him, and a blade edge clanked against the marble; then Federova was sprinting to his side. In her fingers she carried something fleshy that left a trail of red droplets all across the tiled checkerboard floor.
"Never mind," Saxon reported, as she pressed a severed hand into the panel. "Red has, uh, improvised."
The elevator gave a hollow chime and opened itself to them.
It let them out on ten, right in the line of fire from a pair of security-grade boxguards. The machines were steel cubes the size of a washing machine, inert in a monitoring mode; but when their sensors detected something that did not match their programmed security protocols, the mechanisms unfolded like a complex puzzle, extruding weapon muzzles and targeting scopes. They were the smaller cousins of the large, vehicle-size versions deployed by the military or law enforcement, but they could still be lethal.
Saxon rolled out into the lavish corridor, bringing up his machine pistol as he moved. Federova launched herself from the elevator car on those racehorse legs of hers, so fast she was almost a blur of motion. The boxguards dithered, the simple machine-brains of the basic robots hesitating over which target to attack. Saxon used the moment to his advantage, coming up in half cover behind a cockpit leather armchair. He aimed with the Hurricane and squeezed the trigger, marching a clip of armor-piercing rounds up the frame of the closest boxguard, ripping it open. It stumbled into a wall and collapsed.
Federova was on top of her target, and she took off the machine's primary sensor head with a spinning crescent kick. The robot reeled, and the dark-skinned woman rammed the muzzle of her machine pistol into a gap between its armor plates, and fired point-blank.
"Tenth floor" Saxon reported. "We're splitting up to search for the target." He looked toward Federova, who gave him a curt nod and set off down the southern corridor.
"Copy, Gray" said Namir. "We're coming to you. Isolate and neutralize."
Saxon chose the northwest arm of the Y-shaped corridor and moved forward, low and fast, from cover to cover.
Something moved ahead of him, and he saw a squat, thickset shape roll out from a shadowed alcove. It was an ornate machine, plated with steel and sheathed with ceramic detailing-an elegant hotel service robot modeled on some arcane, pre-twentieth-century artistic ideal of what an automaton should be. It moved on fat gray tires, turning like a tall tank. A speaker grille presented itself to Saxon and spoke in Russian, then
Farsi and finally English. "This area is off-limits to guests," it declared. "Proceed no farther."
A fan of green laser light issued out and scanned the hallway, catching Saxon by surprise. The machine caught sight of his drawn weapon and reacted instantly. Ceramic panels opened up to allow the vanes of a pulsed energy projector to emerge. "Mandatory warning delivered," it said.
"Deploying deterrent."
A throbbing wave-front of force hummed from the robot and blasted down the corridor. Saxon went down as the pulse threw freestanding tables and flower vases into the air with the force of the discharge. The rush of the knockdown effect was powerful, like the undertow in an ocean wave.
He leapt from where he had landed, firing as he went. Bullets sparked off metal and inlaid wood, marring the elegantly worked surface of the machine. It fired again, dislodging pictures from the walls, blasting open the doors to empty rooms.
Saxon's free hand closed around a cylindrical object on his gear vest and he tugged it free with a jerk of the wrist. By feel alone, he found the primer tab and pulled it. The weapon buzzed in response and Saxon threw it hard, diving for cover behind a damaged door.
The Type 4 Frag-k grenade clanked off the casing of the robot and bounced to the carpet beneath it; a moment later the explosive core detonated, blasting the machine off its supports and into a smoking heap.
Bursting from cover, Saxon raced through the cloud of cordite smoke and the humming after-note of the explosion. He took down the door to the corner suite with a kick from the heel of his tactical boot and pushed through, leading with the Hurricane.
Inside, the room was wide and devoid of angles, all soft furnishings and bowed windows. A thick layer of metallized plastic sheet-doubtless some kind of sensor baffle-coated the window glass, bleeding out all the color and warmth of the dawn rising over Zubovskaya Square. Saxon found the power feed for the baffle and disconnected it.
Off to one side, folding panels opened out into a range of rooms bigger than the house Saxon had grown up in; on the other side of the suite, a second bedroom had been gutted to accommodate the racks of a compact server farm, an orchard of data monitors, and a complex virtual keyboard.
A man in a dark jacket rushed Saxon from a doorway leading to the bathroom, the lethally compact shape of a Widowmaker shotgun in his hands. The machine pistol in Saxon's ready grip chattered and the thug took the burst in the chest, crashing backward onto the tiles in a welter of blood. He ejected the clip, slammed a fresh load into place, and crossed into the bedroom.
Mikhail Kontarsky, his face lit by sheer animal panic, recoiled from the keyboard console and fumbled for a nickel-plated heavy-frame automatic pistol lying on top of one of the server pods. Saxon brought up the muzzle of the Hurricane and aimed it at Kontarsky's chest. "Don't," he told him.
The Russian wasn't the man he'd seen in the briefing picture anymore. That grim face and distant gaze were gone, replaced by raw terror. He gave a brittle nod and held his hands to his chest. "Please," he began, his voice heavily accented. "You must not stop me."