“I hope you’ll do me the courtesy of giving me some kind of reasonable notice before you quit,” he said. Was his voice actually trembling? Impossible. But apparently true.
“I wasn’t aware I was an employee,” Li said coldly. “But I’ll get you safely back Ring-side. Glad we got that clear.”
She left, closing the door behind her with a deliberate precision that made Cohen certain she wanted to slam it. He walked across to the window and stood there, one of Roland’s fine-fingered hands splayed on the glass, until he saw her walk out the front door of the hotel and turn down the street toward the Old City. He felt sick. He felt like he was dying. He could feel Roland’s heart pounding in his chest like a wounded bird. Who knew how many years Cohen’s conflicts were taking off the boy’s life? He hadn’t been so out of control since DARPA. And he’d been a hell of a lot smaller and weaker back then.
He slipped into the hotel’s network almost without thinking and shut down its power grid for just long enough to see the lights brown and dim overhead. That didn’t make him feel any better, though, so he bit into the citywide power grid and gave it an experimental squeeze. The results were gratifyingly spectacular. A black wave rippled across the skyline, lights dimming and winking out, the noises of the nighttime city giving way to stunned silence. A murmur rose from the adjacent rooms as his fellow guests chattered excitedly and stepped to their windows. And best of all, he caught a glimpse of Li on a storefront security camera a few blocks away, glancing fearfully over her shoulder into the deepening darkness.
For Christ’s sake,she snapped across the intraface. There are hospitals around here, Cohen. Get a grip on yourself.
In retrospect, he would decide it was the note of disdain in her voice that had really driven him over the edge. An icy wave of fury welled up from the hidden layers of his networks, and in an instant too fast for thought or doubt, he swept it all together, let it cascade down through his systems, gaining power and momentum like an avalanche roaring down a mountainside, and flung the whole lethal storm of data downstream.
He stopped short of actually letting it reach her. And even if he hadn’t, her safety override would have seen it coming and activated her cutouts. But none of that made it all right.
Catherine?he probed. But he was whistling into the wind. The other side of the link was down. And something told him it wouldn’t be coming back up again anytime soon.
He was pulled back to real time by a warm, tickling sensation that turned out to be blood streaming down Roland’s arm. He held up his hand and saw that the palm and wrist were crisscrossed by several vicious and alarmingly deep cuts. The floor beneath his feet glittered with broken glass, and the windowpane in front of him had been reduced to a lethal jigsaw puzzle.
The alarm had gone off when the window broke, of course, so he didn’t have to call anyone. Just stand there holding his wrist and watching poor Roland’s blood puddle on the floor until hotel security arrived to clean up his mess for him.
“I’m sorry,” Arkady said. “It’s difficult for me to tell humans apart. Perhaps if you showed me a photograph…?”
“If I showed you a photograph, then how would I know you weren’t just telling me what you thought I wanted to hear?”
Moshe had been all over Arkady since his return from the other side of the Line. Osnat was nowhere in sight. But behind him, her white suit glimmering in the shadows, her coldly beautiful face just visible at the edge of the lamplight, sat Ashwarya Sofaer.
Moshe stepped out of the room and returned with half a dozen pieces of paper. He fanned them out on the table like playing cards. Head shots. Old ID photos of men in uniform, none of them much above twenty.
“No,” Arkady said with relief. “None of these men are him. I’m sure of it.”
But then he saw it. The fourth photograph from the left. The face was thinner and firmer, but the calm brown gaze was the same one that had made him give up his soul and his secrets to Safik.
He looked up to find Moshe’s glasses glittering at him. The mouth beneath the lenses was intent and unsmiling and deadly serious.
And then back to his cell, and back to the waiting.
Osnat was nowhere. Was she gone? Had she been found out? Had she betrayed him to Moshe?
But no. She came in with his dinner. And before he could quite adjust to the idea of her actually being there, she was talking quick and low, telling him to shut up and listen when he tried to interrupt her because there wasn’t time for questions.
“At 1:52 A.M. the lights’ll go out. When they do, count to ten. Then go. Your door will be open. Turn left, count three doors down on your right hand, and take the third left turn—that door should be open too. It takes you into a corridor. Follow it straight ahead and take the fifth right. Go straight ahead through two fire doors, then up half a flight of stairs, and you’re outside. There’s no moon tonight. You’ll have decent cover. But move fast anyway. Your ride out of here will be waiting just past the wire.”
“Osnat—”
“Remember. Left three, left five, right and up the stairs. Don’t waste time and don’t even think about getting lost. If you get yourself caught, there’s not a thing on God’s green Earth I can do for you.”
Arkady woke to the feeling of rough hands on his body. For a split second he thrashed against the pressure. Then someone’s knee slammed into the small of his back, and when he regained his bearings he was on the floor, face pressed into the concrete, with one guard sitting on him and another’s boot planted solidly on the nape of his neck.
A few painful breathless minutes later he was sitting on the floor of a locked and empty cell staring at an ominously disheveled-looking Osnat.
“What happened?” he asked as soon as they were alone.
“Someone sold us out. Obviously.”
Arkady’s eyes flew to the room’s corners.
“There’s no surveillance here. If there was, I’d know about it. Though I could be wrong about that.” She laughed bitterly. “I’ve been wrong about a lot, it seems.”
“What happens now?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it is I’ll handle it better after I get some sleep. So stop asking me questions, will you?” She rolled over on her side and pillowed her head on her bunched-up shirt. “And don’t look at me,” she added, giving him one last baleful stare over her shoulder. “I fucking hate it when people watch me while I’m sleeping.”
In the end they did leave in a helicopter…though Arkady seriously doubted it was the one Osnat had hoped they’d be catching. It touched down just before sunset, a bright corporate bird of paradise in the GolaniTech colors, piloted by two hard-faced ex-Sayeret something-or-others. If they recognized the former Captain Hoffman, they weren’t showing her any love.
“Buckle up,” Osnat told Arkady over the rotor noise. “Tight.”
Arkady never really understood what happened next. Were they shot at by someone on the ground? Was it a missile? An RPG? A simply mechanical failure? All he heard was a sharp pop somewhere out in the wind about ten minutes after takeoff.
The chopper jerked sideways, walloped by its own rotor wash, Arkady’s head slammed against the bulletproofed window with a sickening crack, and time took on a stretched surreal quality.
They hit the ground nose first and sideways, sliding through the final feet of their descent with deceptive, almost casual slowness. There was a first jolt, and then a second. And then came the wrenching, shrieking, screeching settling as the rotors began driving them into the ground and tearing the fragile craft apart.