“You realize the intelligent thing to do would be to abandon your Assistant, right?” S said, looking down at the corpse of the Yellow Spider. She gave it a light kick for good measure.
“Some of us haven’t quite abandoned our morality completely.” It was a false statement. Morality had nothing to do with this. I wanted Marissa to continue to be in my life and I would kill anyone who stood in the way of that happening.
I wondered—was that love? I had no context for that emotion.
“Would you be saying that if you weren’t fucking her?” S asked.
“Probably not, no.” That let some of the emotion out. It was true, if nothing else.
“I need to focus on finding the renegade Letter.”
“Any ideas which one it might be?” Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit right now. Persephone and the others could go to hell and be poked with a pitchfork.
S glared at me. “Well, clearly it’s an amoral mercenary who has reason to hate the Society.”
“So, no.” I was already focusing on ways to rescue Marissa. Even, God help me, turning myself over.
As unlikely as that was to end in anything other than a bullet in both our heads.
S nodded. “I’ll try and help if I can, but my priority is the traitor.”
“Do what you have to do.”
S nodded. “Need a weapon?”
“I’m good.” I still had my “assembly kit” gun.
S pulled out a grenade from her pocket and tossed it to me. “Take this anyway.”
I caught it, and then stared at her in shock. “Low profile is not your strong suit, is it?”
“Says the man who just set off a bomb in an airport.”
She had me there. “Touché. Watch out, they’ve cut the feed to the CCTV systems, which means the Renegade is probably advising them now.”
“Renegade? I don’t like it. Sounds too classy.”
I gave her a mock salute and headed out from the ladies’ restroom into the terminal, which was already on lockdown. Say what you will about the response by security; they were doing an excellent job sorting everyone in the massive facility into groups to be checked. There were contraband-sniffing dogs, police sirens in the distance, and other signs they weren’t going to let their would-be bomber escape.
Which is why I knocked out one of the security guards, tied him up with duct tape in a janitor’s closet, stole his outfit, and used his walkie talkie to give false orders to the teams in the area. This gave me a free pathway to the rooftop just above the section of tarmac where I had started my little odyssey.
The cold air was intense and a freezing rain was pouring down, uncommon for Boston during the summertime. The rooftop was covered in commercial air conditioners, vent stacks, and other things that made it very hard to get a good look at the place. A CCTV camera was overlooking it from a nearby pole, but that wouldn’t give me any tactical information about what, or who, was still up here. I could, however, see the plane.
The rooftop was conspicuously absent of any security and then I saw why when I passed over the bodies of two officers. They’d had their throats crushed and there was a vague handprint as if someone had grabbed them by the throats and then smashed them like a Styrofoam cup.
“Shit,” I muttered, pulling out my gun and crouching before slowly shutting the door behind me.
Somewhere down there on the tarmac were Marissa and her captors. I didn’t have any doubt in my mind that they were being covered by a sniper, nor that the moment I came out, they would kill us both. The Carnevale’s transparent lie was just a last-ditch attempt to salvage their botched plan. The thing I didn’t understand was, why me? Why were they trying to kill the Society’s agents at all? There were too many unknown factors and what I needed to focus on was getting Marissa to safety.
Moving around one of the air stacks, I saw that the sniper I’d seen earlier in the airport’s CCTV feed had returned to her position overlooking my plane. I recognized the assassin as Michelle Thompson, an ex-member of the Canadian Armed Forces, per her file. She’d been kicked out for reasons related to substance abuse and for assaulting a superior officer. Thompson was built like a weight-lifter on heavy steroids and had a burn scar under her left eye.
Right now, she didn’t see me, but I didn’t want to risk a pistol shot. All good snipers had friendlies monitor their position, and even with my gun’s suppressor, it was possible they’d hear it. Worse, as I approached, I saw she had an earpiece communicator, which meant they’d definitely hear everything that transpired. Dammit. I guess I was doing this the old-fashioned way.
“Any sign of the target?” I heard a voice on her earpiece ask.
“No,” Michelle said, growling as she surveyed her surroundings one more time. “You know he’s not going to come, right?”
I crouched and crept up behind her. A single misstep could alert her and her fellows, resulting in Marissa’s death.
“He’ll come.”
The voice she was talking to sounded familiar. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female from this distance, though. Was it the Renegade? Either way, I pulled out a garrote wire from my cellphone and wrapped it around my hands.
“We should just kill or take the girl,” Michelle said. “I know people who’ll pay top dollar for someone her age and build.”
“She’s worth far more for her insights into the Society’s computer systems. Now shut up and keep a watch out for him.”
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“No need to worry about that,” Michelle said, looking positively eager to pull the trigger. “No one sneaks up on me.”
I waited for her to finish her sentence before wrapping the garrote around her neck and pulling. The razor-wire in my grip was so that it cut her throat as I pulled. Michelle struggled and thrashed, biting at my hands and moving to get at my arms. She wasn’t cybernetically enhanced around the neck, though, and there was a reason the garrote continued to be a preferred weapon of assassins since the Renaissance. After twenty seconds, she was dead, and I let her collapse on the ground. It was one of the few times I’d ever taken pleasure in a kill.
I felt shame as well.
And didn’t understand why.
“Focus on the objective,” I muttered. I picked up her earpiece and slipped it on before picking up the rifle to assume her position. The weapon was a K2015 sniper rifle with a color night-vision modified scope, auto-targeting system, and an option to enhance the sound from a target’s position. The K2015 had a suppressor of a kind I hadn’t seen before, as well as a larger-than-normal clip. It was a magnificent weapon and just what I needed to protect Marissa, if that was even possible.
Unfortunately, what the nightvision-enhanced scope revealed wasn’t reassuring. Carlos Mendez, John Chambers, and Joshua Harland were standing with Marissa between them. She was held at gunpoint by the airstair, looking decidedly pissed off. Glancing up to the plane’s door, I saw the hand of one of the flight attendants lying limply over the side. It seemed the Carnevale had taken my Assistant by killing everyone nearby.
Crude but effective.
And all the more reason to kill them.
The Zombie and Renegade weren’t present, but the majority of the Carnevale’s killers were gathered in one place, telling me they were ready to ditch their Homeland Security disguises and make a break for it.
The arrival of the real authorities meant this already complicated situation was about to get much, much worse. Soon the U.S. government’s operatives would arrive on scene, and that would be game over for everyone, myself included. Federal attention was like a drunken hippopotamus. It was slow to make an appearance, but when it did, it made its presence unambiguously known.
“Michelle, are you there? You haven’t responded,” Carlos said into his earpiece.
Fuck. I must have missed some communication. I had only a few seconds to respond. I was good with a rifle but not exceptional, and the files on these morons stated they had adaptive armor plating inserted into their chests.
Headshots only.
If I missed all three, Marissa was dead.
Dammit.
“Jesus, you don’t owe me any favors, but if you could send Saint Michael my way for Marissa’s sake,” I said, shooting the one with his gun trained on her first. The back of Chambers’s head exploded backward, but I didn’t bother to look because I was already aiming at Mendez’s head. The second shot went through his skull as he turned around to see what had happened to Chambers. Harland wasted no time drawing his pistol and aiming it at Marissa, only for her to hit the ground.
I fired at Harland’s head.
I missed.
A gunshot followed seconds later, then a second.
Marissa had grabbed Chambers’ gun, shot Harland in the chest to stun him, and then put a bullet in his face.
“Clever girl,” I said, smiling. A sense of immense relief passed over me and all the tension inside me was released like a deflating balloon.
Marissa knelt down again to steal Harland’s earpiece. “G, is that you?”
“It’s not Simo Hayha.”
“Who?”
“World’s greatest sniper. Listen, I’d explain, but I don’t know how I know that. Ditch the gun, your fingers aren’t even in the system anymore, and follow my instructions. The police were already arriving when I got up here and they’ll move to secure the tarmac for the Feds next.”
“Right.”
“Are you OK?”
“I’ve killed people before.”
Huh. I hadn’t known that. It seemed her file was incomplete. “Listen, move down the side to the 747 in front of you and proceed—”
I was interrupted by a meaty fist grabbing the back of my shirt then slamming me up against the side of an air duct, knocking the wind out of me. Looking up, I saw the bare-chested form of a one-armed man with horrible but shallow burns across his chest and face.
The Zombie had returned.
Hugo Alvez smelled worse than he looked, giving off an odor of burnt flesh with chemicals that reminded me of the horrible memories of my own enhancements. The place where his arm should have been looked like a combination of charred flesh and leaking piping, wires visible through the burnt end of his forearm. He was a cyborg, all right, but not a partially modified human one like myself. No, he was something I’d only heard about a few times. A full-body replacement cyborg. A Shell.
“I’m really going to enjoy folding you in half,” the Zombie said, smiling. With one simple squeeze of his hand, I was going to have my neck broken, like how he already killed the security guards.
So, I pulled my hidden gun from my pocket and shot him in the face between the eyes. Alvez dropped me, but aside from more damage to the flesh on his body, he didn’t seem to be anything other than angry. On the ground, I even saw the deformed remains of the bullet.
Holy shit.
“Fucking bastard! You’re not even the target!” the Zombie shouted. He swung his arm around in a blow that would have taken off my head if I hadn’t ducked. “You were just a bonus for the Caesar.”
The head of the Carnevale. Interesting.
“I’ve got some friends here in Boston who would love to talk to you about that,” I said, trying to figure out how to take this son of a bitch alive. I was enhanced in other ways than the IRD implant in my brain, but that didn’t mean I was prepared to take down a fucking bulletproof super-soldier.
And who was their target?
I didn’t have time to work out a plan, because at that moment, a spotlight shined on us both from above. The sound of a helicopter’s rotors followed it. A Boston City police helicopter was hovering above us with two snipers hanging out the right side. The second officer had a bullhorn, and I couldn’t help but grimace at how much of a shit storm they’d unwittingly wandered into.
“Put your hands in the air and surrender. You are under suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities.”
The Zombie responded by reaching down with his good arm, grabbing the K2015 on the ground, and aiming it up at the helicopter. He didn’t even bother to use the scope, firing it in the air twice.
“Fucking gringos,” the Zombie growled, looking away from me.
Much to my horror, I saw the helicopter start to spiral out of control and realized the Zombie had killed both the pilot and co-pilot. With that, I made my decision to forego trying to disable the bastard and left a present for him attached to his belt.
The Zombie turned his attention back to me. “Now, where were we?”
I was already running.
“Don’t run away!” The Zombie laughed. “We’re just getting started.”
He then exploded. Pieces of metal, flesh, and gore flew in every direction.
By the time I reached the doorway to the terminal, I was out of breath. In my right hand was the pin to the grenade S had passed to me in the restroom. Behind me, there was a horrible crashing noise, and I tried to avoid thinking about how the International Refugee Society would spin this to our backers. One of the few rules they operated under was we weren’t supposed to make much noise. It was our job to be invisible and not let our business spill over into the world of civilians. Fat chance of that now.
Realizing this place was about to be swarming with cops, I tapped the side of my earpiece and said, “Marissa, are you there?”
“Oh God, G, are you okay?”
I paused. “I have no witty comeback.”
“Wow, that’s a no, then.”
“I’ll give you instructions in a few minutes. I need to get past the cops right now.” I set myself down against the bodies of the dead security guards and cradled myself into a fetal position.
“Can you?” Marissa asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to break contact now. We’ll speak in five minutes. Just stay out of sight until then.”
A group of SWAT team officers burst through the door with their weapons drawn. What they found, lying on the ground, was a babbling man in a security guard’s uniform talking about a terrorist with a gun that killed his friends and shot at the helicopter before blowing himself up. They sent me down with two plainclothes officers to take my statement. I managed to ditch them easily. I was, after all, a Letter.