A map on one of her console screens showed Kieran’s icon moving slowly along the concourse toward the main exit. He ought to be thirty meters behind Kazimir, monitoring the throng of passengers for possible tails.
“He’s stopped,” Kieran said suddenly.
“What do you mean, stopped?” Marisa asked.
Adam immediately straightened up. Please, not again.
“He’s shouting at someone,” Kieran’s puzzled voice said. “What in the dreaming heavens…?”
“Give me a visual,” Marisa told him.
Adam hurried over to stand behind her chair, bending to look at her console portal. The link from Kieran’s retinal inserts delivered an unsteady picture, a poor view through a crowd of people. A cluster of dark out-of-focus heads bobbed around directly in front of him. On the other side of them a figure was running. The image flared white as an ion pulse discharged.
“Fuck!” Kieran yelled. Smeared strands of darkness slashed across the glare of light as he whipped his head about. For a second there was a blurry black and white image of a man flying backward through the air, arms and legs flung wide. Then Kieran zoomed in on the man with the gun who was now turning to run.
“Bruce!” Marisa cried out.
“Who the hell’s Bruce?” Adam demanded.
“Bruce McFoster. Kazimir’s friend.”
“Shit. You mean the one that was killed?”
“Yeah.”
Adam slapped a fist against his forehead. “Only he wasn’t. The Starflyer’s done this to your prisoners before. Goddamnit!”
The screen showing the feed from Kieran flashed white. “He’s shooting again,” Kieran said. All the portal showed now was a pair of shoes, their wearer lying flat on a white marble floor. Kieran lifted his head and the shoes sank off the bottom of the portal; beyond them, Bruce McFoster was racing down the concourse, people ducking for cover on either side of him as he kept on firing. Two men and one woman were chasing after him, holding pistols and yelling at him to stop. They were dressed in ordinary clothes.
“They aren’t CST security,” Adam said grimly.
A shot from somewhere above and behind Kieran struck Bruce McFoster. His force field flared briefly, but he never slowed.
“Dear God, how many people knew Kazimir was on this run?”
Red icons started to flash up across Marisa’s console. “Someone’s attacked the local network with kaos,” she said. “Bad strike; this is high-grade software. The RI can barely contain the contamination.”
“That’ll be Bruce, or his controllers,” Adam said. “It’ll help him get clear. They must have known the navy was watching Kazimir.” Which is more than we did, he thought miserably.
The link to Kieran’s inserts was dissolving; all that remained was his secure audio channel.
“What do we do?” Marisa asked.
“Kieran, can you reach Kazimir?” Adam demanded. “Can you retrieve the memory crystal?”
“I don’t…oh, what…there’s someone…armed…standing beside…that’s no way, I can’t get…more people…alarms triggered…”
“All right, stay put and see what happens. See where they take him.”
“I’m on…okay.”
“Can you see where Bruce has gone?”
“…shooting still…chase…platform twelve-A…pursuit…repeat, platform twelve-A…”
Adam didn’t even need to consult a console map. After twenty-five years working in LA Galactic, he knew the massive station’s layout better than Nigel Sheldon. He sat at the console beside Marisa and opened the dedicated landlines he’d carefully installed over the last few years using bots to spool out optical cable through ducts and along pipes, spreading their invisible web across the massive station’s landscape. Each one was connected to a tiny stealthed sensor; they’d been placed on walls high above the ground, lamp-posts, bridges, anywhere that provided a good field of view.
Two of them covered the large junction area west of the Carralvo. The images came up just in time for Adam to see Bruce sprinting out from under the huge arching concrete roof that covered the platform. The Starflyer agent turned sharply and began leaping over tracks. Adam actually drew in a sharp breath at one point as a train hurtled toward the speeding figure. But Bruce cut clean in front of it with perfect timing. He ran past a second train that was traveling more slowly and in the opposite direction. It completely threw the navy personnel following him.
CST security staff were drifting into the images, jogging along dangerously close to trains as they tried to look past the flashing wheels. Adam suddenly realized that none of them had any contact with traffic control. Bruce jumped over a maglev track, and changed direction yet again. His pursuers were slowing now. They’d become wary of the trains rushing through the junction, switching tracks without warning. Despite their caution, they were deployed in a simple circle that was slowly contracting. Adam knew they must have access to some kind of communications.
He ordered a sensor to focus on one of the navy personnel. Sure enough, the woman was emitting a faint electromagnetic micropulse, well outside the standard civil cybersphere node spectrum. They were using a dedicated high-order encryption system to keep in contact. “Damnit,” Adam whispered to himself. No wonder his team’s scrutineer programs, so carefully infiltrated into LA Galactic’s network nodes, hadn’t spotted any surveillance around Kazimir. Which meant navy intelligence suspected their countersurveillance capabilities; that or Alic Hogan was being seriously paranoid.
One of the navy people was closing on Bruce along a narrow corridor formed by two moving trains. They were only a couple of hundred meters apart. Bruce seemed oblivious to his pursuer.
“…Paula Myo…” Kieran said.
“Repeat please,” Adam told him quickly.
“I…see Myo…concourse…charge…talking…the Senator.”
Paula Myo! Not off the case after all. Damnit!
It was a tiny distraction, but enough for Adam to lose sight of Bruce down amid the tracks and speeding trains. “Where the hell did he go?” It looked like the pursuers didn’t have a clue, either. A whole line of them were now walking along the track where he’d been moments ago, shouting at each other and waving their hands about. The trains were coming to a halt all around them.
It took three replays of the sensor recordings before Adam was really certain. He watched the enhanced image of Bruce in slow motion: a collection of blurred gray pixels that made a crazy jump straight at a freight train as it slid alongside. A dark square on the side of a freight container swallowed up the smudged figure. Seconds later the square had vanished, closing up into an ordinary sheet of metal.
“Son of a bitch,” Adam grunted. “We’re up against a real bunch of Boy Scouts here.”
“Sir?” Marisa asked.
“They came very well prepared.”
***
Four centuries of experience and objectivity counted for absolutely nothing as the Pathfinder began its terrifying plummet; Ozzie started screaming as loudly as Orion, both of them audible even over the thunder of the falling sea. Spray whirled around the rickety raft with brutal force, wiping out all sight of the sky in a gray haze. Ozzie clung to the mast as if that alone could save him from certain death as he fell and fell and fell without end. The spume soaked his clothes in seconds, stinging his naked skin.
He drew a breath and screamed again. When he ran out of air he sucked down more, half of which was fizzing water. He coughed and spluttered, an automatic action that overrode the wild impulse to keep on screaming. As soon as his throat was clear and his lungs full again, he started to open his mouth for the scream that would surely end in an awful explosion of pain. Right at the back of his brain, an insecure, puzzled thought began to register.