… but she had lived in this building long enough to know her way around it with her eyes shut.
Staying low, moving as swiftly as she dared, she found the door and shouldered it open, feeling along the walls toward the stairwell. As she got outside, feeling faint traces of rain on her skin, her optics began to stutter through the restart cycle, her vision returning by agonizingly slow degrees. She broke into a loping run, and behind her she heard the strident whoop of a siren as the dormant police drone caught her silhouette.
She ignored it, picking up speed, and by the time she reached the street, she could see again.
Romeo Airport-Michigan-United States of America
The sun was coming up, the line of orange light at the horizon growing brighter with every passing minute. Saxon walked the edge of the runway, threading the points between the shallow domes of the embedded lights that flanked the long expanse of cracked asphalt.
His hands were buried in the pockets of his tactical over-jacket, his head hunched forward. Saxon tried to lose himself in the simple motion of step after step, but it didn't work. The questions and the conflicts churning around inside him refused to be silenced. He had the very real sense that he was standing on the edge of an abyss, at a point of no return. Looking up, Saxon saw the distant chain-link fence. If he broke into a sprint, he could be there in less than a minute. He could be over it and down to the highway in another five. If luck was on his side, Saxon would be miles from the airstrip before any of the Tyrants knew he had absconded.
He could turn his back on them and go. Leave all the questions and distrust behind, ditch this identity and start anew. He could do it; he still had contacts from the old days, people who might help him disappear.
But what would that get him? A lifetime of doubts and looking over his shoulder? Namir had never said the words, but Saxon knew that the
Tyrants and their masters in "the group" were not the kind of people you could just walk away from. The federal agent, Temple, had been a minor player for them and he had been wiped out just on the suspicion of being a problem. The Tyrants would not turn their backs and allow one of their number to walk away; Namir would see him killed first. Hardesty would do it and enjoy it.
But how could he stay? How could he look Namir in the eye and not wonder? What did he really know about Operation Rainbird?
Saxon turned back to face the hangar at the far end of the airfield. Wan light spilled from the open doors. He wanted to draw the Diamondback from its holster, bury the muzzle in Namir's neck, and demand he spill everything. He let himself ride on that moment of high emotion, seeing the faces of Sam, Kano, and the others. Remembering the promises he had made to those men, and to himself.
And then he remembered the vu-phone. Saxon opened the rip-tab on the gear pocket where he had stuffed the disposable. Gingerly, he replaced the battery pack and touched the activation button. The phone blinked on and buzzed in his gloved hand. A single message was waiting. He drew it up; it was an embedded video file, what appeared to be a clip from a local affiliate of the global Picus News Network. The footage unfolded, a voice-over explaining that police in Virginia had been called to the site of a fire in Great Falls. On the handheld's screen he saw the woman he had confronted in the grounds rendered in grainy, colorless video. She entered a room full of people and started shooting.
White flares of light spat from a shotgun-a Widowmaker Tactical-in her grip, and panicking figures fell like puppets with their strings cut. The footage paused and a close-up gave a better view of the woman. Anna Kelso, read the caption, Wanted Fugitive.
The lie of what he was seeing made Saxon's hand tighten around the vu-phone. For a moment he tensed, ready to dash the device to pieces against the ground; but then it rang with a soft, persistent hum.
Saxon raised it to his ear. "Yeah?"
"Hello again. Will you speak to me now?"
It was unmistakably the same synthetic, digitally masked voice he had heard in the Hotel Novoe Rostov; the ghost-hacker Janus.
He glanced around. There was no one in sight in any direction. "What do you want from me? The video… Why did you show me that?"
"I want you to understand. This is what they do. These are the people that you work for, Benjamin. I want to be certain you have no illusions as to what they are capable of."
"How do you know-"
"Who you are? I know all about Ben Saxon. And Anna Kelso. And Jaron Namir, Ronald Temple, Yelena Federova, Scott Hardesty-"
"Then what do you want with me?" he demanded.
"I want to help you" said the flat, toneless voice. "I want to open your eyes. Because when you know the truth, you will be able to help me."
"You're a terrorist. You and your Juggernaut mates."
He could almost hear a shake of the head. "That word is meaningless. Terrorism is the use of violence to achieve radical political or social change. Is that not what the Tyrants are doing, Benjamin? Do you know what master you serve?"
"Leave me alone!" he snarled. "I'm through with you!"
"No!" shouted Janus, with the first glimmer of what seemed like an emotional response. "Do not hang up. That would be a mistake. Listen to me. You are cutting into the reality behind the lie of the Tyrants and their shadow masters. You know it. You know there are secrets beneath the surface. I want the same thing you do. To be free of their lies. You want the truth about Operation Rainbird. I want to find and expose the Killing Floor. Together, we can succeed."
"I don't know what this… Killing Floor is."
"Jaron Namir controls access to a private server on board your transport aircraft. In the files it holds are details of what you and I seek.
The truth, Benjamin. The facts about the deaths of your men, and the location data I require. But the server is isolated, protected. It is impossible to access it by anything but direct physical means."
Saxon frowned. The wind carried the sound of gears to him, and he looked back to see the doors of the aircraft hangar shudder and slowly grind open. "You're asking me to risk my life for you," he said. "For a faceless phantom."
"Untrue" said Janus. "All I am doing is providing you with the means. It is your choice, Benjamin. I cannot force you into this." There was a pause, and he heard the whisper of encryption software flattening out the texture of the voice on the other end of the line. "Listen carefully.
When Jaron Namir was nineteen years old, his sister Melina was killed in a road accident in Haifa. Psychological profiling conducted several years later, after his recruitment into Mossad, indicated a deep-seated guilt over the death of his sister; he later named his daughter after her. The likelihood of his personal pass code relating directly to Melina Namir is over eighty-seven percent, plus or minus five percent.
I have transmitted the four most likely code strings to your vu-phone. Use them to access the server."
In spite of himself, Saxon laughed. "Just like that?"
"Yes. Just like that." There was no trace of sarcasm in the reply. "Once you have access, use the wireless link to download the data you find to the vu-phone's memory. But be careful. If you are discovered\ they will kill you."
Saxon considered the offer. "And what if I don't? What if I smash this phone to bits right now?"
The reply was instant. "You will never hear from me again. But one day, very soon, you will be so driven by your personal sense of anger and despair that you will attack Jaron Namir. And you will be killed." There was a pause. "I have also read your psychological profile,