His blood ran cold as the aircraft put on a burst of speed and fell toward Duarte, like a cheetah zeroing in on a wounded gazelle. "Sam!"
The soldier twisted and raised the revolver, the bright stab of discharge from the muzzle flaring in the low-light optics. The heavy cannon, slung in a conformal pod along the length of the drone's ventral fuselage, opened up with a sound like a jackhammer-and Sam Duarte was torn apart in a puff of white.
"Bastard!" Saxon rose from cover, screaming his fury at the machine as it looped and turned inbound once more, preparing to finish the job at hand. He broke out and ran as fast as he could toward the steeper slope where the trees were denser, the grenade launcher bouncing against his chest, his every breath a ragged, gasping effort. The cannon started up again as he reached the perimeter of the tree line, and Saxon turned as he ran, mashing the trigger. The remaining three rounds in the magazine chugged into the air one after another, exploding barely a heartbeat apart at a height just above the canopy. The drone's delicate sensors were blinded by the flashes and the scattering of shrapnel, and it lost its target. The flyer drifted off course and clipped a tall tree; in seconds it was spinning and coming apart, shredding into a new firestorm of burning metal. The detonation sent Saxon sprawling and he lost his footing. The soldier slipped over the lip of the hill and tumbled headfirst down the steep, crumbling face, bouncing hard. Unable to arrest his descent, he fell pinwheeling over the edge and into the muddy waters of the creek below.
Washington Hospital Center-Washington, D. C.-United States of America
Sensation returned to her by degrees, assembling itself piece by piece, line by line. She had the sense of being in a bed, the cotton sheets pressing against her legs, the prickly feel of the mattress cloth beneath. Her lips were cold and dry, a steady breath of oxygen flowing from a plastic mask resting on her face. Anna felt worn and old, broken and twisted. Her body seemed dislocated from her; she expected pain. Why wasn't there any pain?
With difficulty, she turned her head on the pillow beneath it and felt warmth on her face. Licking her lips, she tried to speak, but all that emerged was a hollow gasp. It was dark all around her, a strange dimensionless void that she couldn't grasp.
Then footsteps, people nearby. A voice. "Anna? Can you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Okay, just lie still. You're in the hospital. Try not to move."
The oxygen mask was pulled away and she licked her lips. "Why… is it dark?"
"Okay, nurse, thank you." Someone else coughed and she heard the familiar shuffle of expensive Italian loafers, a door closing. "Hey, Anna. It's me, Ron. I'm here with Hank Bradley from Division. Just take it easy."
"Ron?" Agent-in-Charge Ronald Temple was Kelso's supervisor, a decent guy with a long career in the Secret Service. She hadn't expected to hear him. "What's wrong?"
"Agent Kelso…" The next voice was Bradley's. Anna didn't know the man as well as Temple, just by hearsay and reputation as something of a hard ass; he was a senior agent working liaison with the Secret Service and the Department of Justice. His presence underlined the gravity of what had happened. "I'm afraid we had to take your eyes."
"What?" Her hand automatically reached upward. Pads of gauze covered her face, and in a sickening moment of understanding, she realized that the orbits of her skull were empty. Something hard and plastic protruded through the bandages from one of the sockets.
"We can't talk like this. Wait a second." Bradley came closer and Anna heard the whisper of a cable uncoiling. Something connected with a snap and she felt a sudden giddy rush of vertigo as an image exploded before her.
She saw a strange figure swaddled in bandages and crowded by electronic devices, like a hi-tech mummy. Monitors and an oxygen cylinder framed a bruised, puffy face. "I can see again." The figure mimed the words as she said them, and then the point of view shifted, taking in Ron
Temple at the window, framed by sunlight. His round face was tight with concern. "Me. I'm looking at me."
The view bobbed. "I'm running you a feed from my optic implants," said Bradley. A thin, brassy cable extended from inside his right-hand cuff and into a socket on the temporary eye interface.
"I look like shit," she managed, swallowing a sob.
Temple came to the bed and perched on the edge, taking her hand. "Yeah, sweetheart, you do. But you'll be okay. The doctors got the round out of you, it didn't hit anything vital. Tissue damage mostly. The Kevlar took the brunt of the impact, slowed it down some."
The next words fell from her in a breathy rush. "Matt's dead. Byrne and Connor, too…"
Temple gave a shallow sigh. "Anna… They're all dead. You're the only one in the detail to make it."
"We hoped Hansen, the Belltower guy, might pull through," said Bradley. "They lost him on the operating table."
"How long have I been in here?" She gripped Temple's hand hard.
"Four days."
"The senator?"
Bradley's point-of-view nodded again. "She's okay. We already got a statement from her. That, plus imagery from the traffic cams, and we're assembling a model of the incident. But that's why we had to subpoena your optics. You're the only one who got a good look at a face. I had tech forensics from the FBI reconstruct a few stills from the data in the image buffer."
"We'll get you replacements," Temple noted. "Good stuff, new Caidins or maybe Sarif…" He handed her a sip-bulb of water. "I'm sorry you had to wake up blind…"
"Thanks for being here, sir," she said, taking a drink of the cooling fluid. "Has someone-" Anna took a shaky breath and started again. "Has someone told Jenny?" Jennifer Ryan was Matt's wife of some sixteen years. They had two girls, Susan and Carole. She remembered their house as a warm, welcoming place.
Temple nodded gravely. "She knows. I'm sorry, Anna."
"I understand you and Agent Ryan were close?" asked Bradley.
The other man answered before she could. "Ryan was her… mentor."
"Something like that," said Anna, the words barely a whisper. She swallowed and straightened up. "Do you have the images with you? Can I see them?"
Bradley and Temple shared a look. "Okay," said the agent, and he drew a folding Pocket Secretary PDA from his jacket; it opened up, blooming like a metallic flower. Bradley hesitated, then held it in front of him, tabbing through the virtual pages. "We're sifting through witness statements at the moment, still building the picture."
"Leads are coming together," Temple offered. "We don't have any suspects as yet… These creeps just melted into thin air."
"We had a report about an unmarked helicopter putting down briefly in Montrose Park, but D.C. air traffic control have nothing on that," noted
Bradley distractedly.
"I never saw anything," said Anna, her thoughts churning. "What about evidence at the scene?"
Temple shook his head. "No shells-they used caseless ammo. Fiber traces are a dead end, too. We did get a line on the car they used, though.
License was fake, most of the registration marks were lasered off, but we got a partial from the engine block. Turns out it was listed as stolen from a shell company that's a known front for the Red Arrow triad."
"I killed one of them," she insisted.
"They torched the corpse before they left," he said. "Thermite grenade. All we got left is a heap of burnt scrap metal and some biological traces that come up blank on the Interpol register."
Bradley gestured with the PDA. "Here's the picture of the shooter."
Anna studied the grainy, ghostly image through the other agent's eyes. The blond hair, the hard, pitiless gaze of the man who killed Matt Ryan caught in midturn.
Suddenly she was back there again, collapsed in the street, wet with blood, racked with agony. Waiting for death. A shudder ran through her.