The jet shivered and the nose dropped abruptly; up in the cockpit, the aircraft's autoflight system would have detected the loss of cabin pressure and immediately attempted to compensate by descending to a lower altitude. Barrett lost his grip and flailed, colliding with a support pillar. Saxon fell against a stowed cargo net and grabbed on to it, the polar cold through the hatch ripping at the skin of his face. Across the threshold, a dash of moonlight glittered off the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
How high are we? How far from land? It was impossible to know.
"Ben" Namir s voice hummed through his skull. "You can't escape. I'm not going to let that happen." As he said the words, the hatch juddered to a halt, half open, and then reversed, sliding toward closure.
If he stayed here, he would die. Saxon knew it with utter certainty, the same pure clarity of thinking that had come to him in the Australian wilderness. He would die, this would end, and there would be no justice for Sam and Kano and the others.
Saxon threw himself at the gap and leapt into the darkness.
Dundalk-Maryland-United States of America
When Lebedev returned to the communications tent, the videoscreen was still active, the same display of smoky digital mist hazing a vaguely human shape. Not for the first time, he wondered what Janus really looked like-if he or she was someone he knew out in the real world. Part of him was always disappointed that the shady hacker could not trust the New Sons enough to drop the mask; but then, these were difficult times, and not everyone had millions of dollars at hand to ensure their own security.
"How is our new recruit?" asked the nonvoice.
Lebedev sighed. "We shouldn't have pushed her so hard, so fast. She's having trouble assimilating it all."
"Anna will come around '," said Janus. "She's resilient. She just needs to see it for herself. Let her process."
"We need her." He ran a hand through his hair. "God knows, we need every ally we can get."
A moment passed before Janus replied. "Her skills will be of great use to the cause, Juan…"
He frowned. The hacker sounded distracted. "Is something wrong?"
There was another pause. "Forgive me. I'm monitoring another… situation at the moment. Go on."
"We're running out of time," Lebedev went on. "If we're going to disrupt this thing, it needs to be soon."
"Agreed. I'm working on another approach to access the Killing Floor as we speak. But it's risky."
Lebedev smiled ruefully. "We have to try, my friend. And we can't fail. If we do, the future will never forgive us."
"You re wrong," Janus replied. "If we fail, our enemies will make sure no one will ever know we existed."
Thirteen Kilometers East of Newfoundland-North Atlantic
He never felt the impact when he hit the rolling surface of the sea. It was the only mercy he had; perhaps it was the shock of the fall, perhaps his battered body shutting down for a brief moment in some attempt to protect him from greater trauma.
At first, Saxon saw only flashes. The silver of the moon on the wave tops below him. A flicker of light from the jet as he spiraled away from it, the navigation lights in the dark.
Then he was in the cradle of the shouting winds, snared by gravity. He couldn't see the ocean rushing up to meet him, and for long moments
Saxon felt himself disconnect from the real. He could have been floating in the roaring darkness, lost in the starless space.
The cold embrace leached the heat from his bones; Saxon squinted through the windburn and made out what he thought was the surface of the water, coming up fast, dappled by the moon's glow.
He extended his arms like they had taught him in parachute training, making his whole body an aerofoil, trying to slow himself as much as he could. And then, when he couldn't chance it any longer, he triggered the high-fall augmentation implanted in the base of his spine.
The device stuttered into life and cast a writhing sphere of electromagnetic energy about him, lightninglike sparks flashing where the field interacted with the air molecules. The implant ran past its tolerance limit, but Saxon retriggered it, cycling the device over and over. He felt it go hot, smoldering and heavy like a block of newly forged iron embedded in his back. The high-fall was never designed to do the job of a parachute; it was a short-span, low-duration technology, a mechanism spun off from safety implants for racing drivers, firefighters, steeplejacks.
He screamed as it burned into him, and the blackness engulfed everything. For a moment, at least.
Then he was in the frigid rise and fall of the waters, the salt brine smothering him with every new wave. He spun and turned, numb from the waist down. Warning telltales displayed in the corners of his optic field, function indicators for his cyberlegs showing red. He choked and shivered, feeling the weight of the augmented limbs pulling on him, robbing him of all buoyancy.
The ocean toyed with him, and then grew bored. Saxon began to sink, and he couldn't find the strength to fight the icy embrace of the waters.
All his defiance, his determination… it was bleeding away, second by second.
Then he saw the lights below, rising. The waters parting as something as large as a truck broke the surface. He saw a shiny, beetlelike carapace, an arch of what might be shell. Just beneath the water, ropes of steel moved past his damaged legs, ensnaring him.
Saxon's mind filled in the gaps; he imagined a massive nautilus coming up from the seabed to gather him into its tentacles, the giant monstrous thing festooned with glaring, sodium-bright lamps.
He blacked out for the second time as it pulled him toward it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dundalk-Maryland-United States of America
Through the dirty glass of the window, Kelso watched the lights of Baltimore turn dim as the sky grew lighter, losing herself in the passage of the clouds overhead and the never-ending wash of the water against the concrete pilings out on the old, abandoned docks.
Sleep, when she'd been able to snatch a little of it, was a fitful and troubled thing. Anna couldn't settle. She dreamed about skies full of squawking ravens, and vast black wings that wheeled and turned in the sky, blotting out the watery glow of a sullen sun. In the end, Anna stayed awake, keeping to the margins of Lebedev's compound while the men from the New Sons worked at tasks she could only guess at, and
D-Bar's hackers pored over the sealed files in the stolen flash drive. The inside of the warehouse looked exactly like what it was-a staging area for an antigovernmental terror group-and it ground against all Kelso's training as a federal agent to stand among it and do nothing.
So she went to the windows and watched the march of the morning approaching. Looking out at the distant city, Anna wondered who was out there, looking for her. Drake would be leading the capture team, she imagined. He would have considered it a personal slight that her escape had happened on his watch. Sorrow crossed her face. What are they saying about me? She didn't want to know the answer, didn't want to imagine the looks in the eyes of the men and women who had served with her. All of them would believe the lie about the death of Ron Temple and the murders at his home. They would hate her.
She wanted so much to run, to give in to the base impulse that tensed in the muscles of her hands. But out there, she would be prey. If
Lebedev's stories were true, she had nowhere to go. Even if they were not, the fact did not change. Anna Kelso was alone, and she had been forced into a single choice she did not want to make.