Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour (8 page)

Aneka’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘How do you know he was alone?’

‘They went over the room with scanners. No genetic material from anyone else.’

‘You guys really
don’t
get many murders in this city, do you?’

‘Huh?’ Sharissa said, looking perplexed.

‘It’s a hotel room. How is it even vaguely possible that the only genetic material in it belongs to Wilcox?’

‘Uh… I hadn’t thought of that, but now you say it…’

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, her tone thoughtful, ‘what else… The laser burned through?’ Sharissa nodded. ‘What shape was the burn on the ceiling?’

‘Uh… Well, a laser burn. A point impact blurred by vapour diffusion.’

‘Short duration?’

Sharissa frowned thoughtfully. ‘No. There was some wobble. It must have been about a one-second burst.’

‘Yeah, when he fired his gun, his body tensed from shock, locking his finger on the trigger for a second, but he would have either shifted back or wobbled. The ceiling track should have been a line… or a spiral. Someone was there, holding him upright. I’m guessing a woman. Someone had to persuade him into a hotel bedroom.’ She looked up for a second. ‘Well, in my day it’d have been a woman, but we’re talking Jenlay…’

‘No, I checked up on him after the inquisition. He’s never been known to have a male partner. It’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely. He must have met her in a bar…’

‘Probably something not too far away. One or two blocks. Walking distance, maybe even short walking distance. A bit of an urgent need to be alone and naked.’

‘IA are already classifying it as a suicide,’ Sharissa said. ‘Stress induced. No further need to investigate.’

‘And you’re going to leave it at that?’

Sharissa grinned. ‘Vashma no!’

‘Okay, but be careful. I do
not
want to have to look at burn patterns on your ceiling and realise you didn’t commit suicide.’

‘They’d never do that with me.’

‘No?’

‘No one would believe it. First, that would be two high-ranking agents committing suicide in short order, and second…’ She turned to look toward the kitchen where Janna and Ella were giggling. ‘No one would believe it. If someone wanted to kill me they’d hit me on an op.’

‘You’d die when your subject was attacked.’ Aneka glanced at the kitchen. ‘Don’t let that happen either. Janna would never speak to me again.’

22.10.528 FSC.

Ella held up a small, red data card and Aneka looked at it a little suspiciously. ‘A blonde teenager bumped into me on the way home,’ Ella said. ‘She slipped this into my bodice, would you believe, while she was helping me up and apologising a lot.’

‘A teenager we know?’

‘Uh-huh. And it’s red…’

Aneka took the card and headed for the bedroom. Locked in her gun safe, hidden away at the back of one of the wardrobes, was a secure card reader. Despite being quite secure in and of itself, the device had no decryption system built into it; that was handled once the entire package had been uploaded to Aneka’s internal storage. It took her twenty minutes or so to go over the contents once it had been decrypted.

‘Basically,’ Aneka explained, ‘it’s from Justine. Someone claiming to know who killed Winter, and why, has come forward. They say they’re being hunted. They’ll come in, but they only trust Elaine Truelove. Sharissa will be handling the security and extraction.’

‘So it’s a trap,’ Ella said flatly.

‘Well, yeah.’

‘So why are they going to do it?’

‘In case it
isn’t
a trap, but with the stipulations for the meeting…’

‘Like?’

‘Hand weapons only. No more than three agents besides Sharissa and Elaine. The meeting is to take place in a wooded area about twenty klicks outside the city. Winter sent topographic maps and aerial photographs, and it’s prime ambush territory. It’s a trap.’

Ella’s hands clenched into fists and she bit her lip, worry written all over her face. ‘Can we do anything? And by “we” I obviously mean you.’

Aneka flashed her a grin. ‘Well, Winter’s given me a
lot
of information…’

22km North-North-East of Yorkbridge, 23.10.528 FSC.

‘TacNet up and running?’ Aneka asked silently.

‘Full tactical network orchestration is engaged,’ Al replied. ‘Data feeds from the passive sensor array are assimilated. I have hacked the communications network the agents are using, and included their bio-monitor feeds in the available data. I have also managed to patch into the air traffic control system for the city and I am monitoring the radar grid for this area. It is possible that Justine has detected my intrusion, but no one else has and she will say nothing.’

‘And your new software…?’

‘Is functioning perfectly. This is not the field trial I had planned for it. Something less critical involving a simple archaeology expedition would have been less of a stress test.’

‘Maybe, but I trust you and it’ll be useful. Give me a display of the area.’

It was not so much a display as an environment. Aneka was sealed away within her nanosuit; even her eyes were covered in a layer of living metal. Since she saw through the ‘eyes’ of the suit’s sensors it was easy enough to replace that with a virtual environment representing a bird’s eye view of the area, in three dimensions, stitched together from multispectral sensor images and manufactured data. It took a second or two to adjust to the sudden shift in perspective, then…

‘This is amazing. I feel like I can see everything. I’m a tactician, not a strategist, but this makes me feel like I could do both.’

‘If it were not for your comprehension speed, the influx of data would be overwhelming,’ Al reminded her. ‘You are rather more capable of handling this sensory load than a normal person would be.’

‘Huh.’

Sharissa, Justine, and Truelove were in a clearing within a large coppice of moderately aged trees. There were two more agents with them, taking up positions just outside the clearing to watch the two main ways in and out, to east and south-west. Aneka’s position was also marked, four metres up a tree on the north side of the clearing. Between her camouflage and the canopy she was invisible to anyone below.

‘Time?’ Aneka asked.

‘It is ten minutes until the appointed rendezvous time. No sign of the informant.’

‘I guess we just have to wait then.’

~~~

Fifteen minutes later they were still waiting and Aneka could tell from the radio traffic that Sharissa was getting restive.

‘Core One to Band Two, anything?’ The blonde’s voice was tense. That was unsurprising.

‘Nothing, Core. Quiet as the grave.’ That was the man on the south-west approach.

‘Band Three?’

‘Nothing. All quiet.’

Aneka frowned. Three was moving as she spoke, shifting from her place on the eastward track to a spot further north.

‘Her pulse and breathing are accelerated,’ Al commented.

‘Have we got a visual of where she is?’

‘Not that specific area.’

‘We give it another five minutes,’ Sharissa said, ‘and then we get out of here.’

‘I think,’ Aneka said, moving smoothly out from the cleft between the two branches she had occupied for the last two hours, ‘that we’ll go take a look at Miss Three. Drop the tactical, but keep monitoring.’ Her vision shifted to the view through her eyes, or the face of her suit anyway, and she located the descender which would drop her silently to the forest floor by way of a monofilament line.

Getting around the woods without making noise meant moving slowly, but the trees were not too close together and she had her suit’s camouflage system. And Three was busy prepping some sort of short-barrelled grenade launcher from a Bi-weave bag when Aneka found her. That took her attention away from her surroundings, which was either an indication of bad training, or that the woman was nervous about what she was up to.

‘Smoke or gas grenades,’ Al said. ‘Designed to incapacitate rather than kill.’

‘Huh.’ Aneka watched as the woman checked her watch and then shifted forward. Something was about to happen.

‘Movement on the north side,’ Al said. ‘They are camouflaged, but the passive sensors have too broad a spectral range.’

‘Movement!’ Two said. ‘I’ve got a lone figure approaching.’

‘Al?’ Aneka asked.

‘Sensors on that side are detecting nothing.’ And that meant someone had got to
two
of Sharissa’s people.

‘Three? Anything on your side?’

‘Nothing, Core.’ Three lifted to a more upright position and settled her grenade launcher.

Aneka moved, stepping forward to close range, her arms rising. One hand locked under Three’s chin while the other braced on the back of her skull, and then Aneka was swinging all of her weight around a pivot not designed for that kind of stress. There was a wet crunch and Three went limp.

‘It’s a woman,’ Two was saying. Aneka noticed that he had left his position and was moving in toward the clearing.

‘The northern team appears to be four individuals with carbines,’ Al said. ‘They will be in firing positions in ten seconds.’

Aneka bolted for the clearing. ‘Relay the data to Justine. Tell her to get down; the guy on the south side is her problem.’ She pulled her pistols. ‘And pop the smoke.’

‘That will reduce the effectiveness of the sensors.’

‘More important to blind them.’

There was a sequence of small detonations ahead of her and suddenly Aneka was running toward a cloud of white smoke which sparkled and showed up as a shifting, solid mass on her infrared overlay. Hot prismatic smoke; it would mask heat signatures, restrict the view in other frequencies, and reduce the effectiveness of laser weapons firing through it. Aneka burst through the cloud to see her three friends lying on the grass. Justine had a pistol in her hand and was facing the south-west side of the clearing. Sharissa was lying half on Truelove, who was looking displeased at the protective posture.

Not waiting to find out how that potential argument might come out, Aneka swung her pistols around and launched twin firing arcs into the northern side of the clearing. The cloud might make lasers less effective, and make targeting haphazard at best, but suppression fire using thousand-round-a-minute machine pistols had the primary effect of making people duck. Aneka walked forward, her arms swinging in smooth curves as she kept up the firing. She could hear small explosions as the darts from her pistols hit wood, flashed into plasma, and blew chunks out of the trees.

‘I am detecting radio traffic,’ Al said. ‘Attempting to isolate. Movement detected, right, thirty-eight degrees, five metres.’

Aneka shifted Bridget, her right-hand pistol, and fired into the smoke guided by a heads-up display marker which gave an approximate location for her target. Or not so approximate.

‘Target fully visible and down,’ Al said. ‘Movement away from the clearing. One target, left, twelve degrees, twenty metres. The tree density will make that shot impossible.’

‘He’s retreating, ignore him. What about the other two?’

‘Nothing detected. You may have eliminated them with the suppression fire.’

There was the crack of a laser firing, the explosion of gas around the beam as it lanced through the air. Aneka turned to see Two, a surprised look on his face, crumpling to the ground with a hole in his chest. Justine had nailed her target.

Something shifted in Aneka’s peripheral vision and she turned. The camouflage on the men’s suits was good, but the gunman had just emerged from the smoke and it clung around him, sparkling in the light from the lamps in the clearing, and his gun was not so well covered. Having one of them alive
might
be useful, even if they had had little luck with captured assassins before.

Aneka pushed the carbine upward with Bridget and rammed Clara, her other pistol, up under the man’s chin. She could see him making the decision. Her pistol was right there and his gun was going to be useless in this position, but she had not fired yet which meant she wanted him alive… He started swinging the carbine toward her face and she pulled the trigger. The top of the man’s skull exploded into a sizzling plume of blood, brain, and bone as the machine pistol’s deadly stream of darts punched through.

‘I didn’t want you alive that much, sunbeam,’ she commented silently. ‘What about the last one?’

‘I’ve located another corpse,’ Al replied. ‘It appears that you caught him in the open when you first opened fire.’

Nodding, Aneka slipped her pistols into their holsters and ordered her suit to contract. She turned toward the middle of the clearing, speaking as soon as her mouth was uncovered. ‘Anyone hurt? Aside from the bad guys, obviously.’

Truelove was climbing to her feet. ‘I’m okay, aside from the bruises where Sharissa tackled me.’ She stabbed a finger toward Aneka. ‘You are starting to make a habit of this.’

‘Janna would have beaten me to scrap if I’d let her sexy blonde get killed.’

‘The sexy blonde owes you one,’ Sharissa said. ‘I’d offer my body in payment, but Janna would be pissed she couldn’t join in.’

Aneka rolled her eyes. ‘I assume you managed to find something that marked Wilcox’s death down as murder?’

Sharissa gave a curt nod. ‘I had a full biochem sequence run on his body. It’s not easy to detect, but he had several psychotropics in his system. Inhibition reducers, sensory boosters, and also a sedative. Asking around the clubs we found a bartender who remembered him leaving with a woman about an hour before he died. I’m willing to bet the records of the investigation will be gone when I get back to HQ.’ She smirked. ‘Not that it matters. I’ve got duplicates with me. What happened to my other agent?’

‘Broken neck. She was going to hit you with smoke or gas grenades before the squad attacked. Not like you to let two bad agents on your team.’

‘They were assigned,’ Truelove growled. ‘Recent transfers to New Earth. Supposedly they had expertise in this kind of operation in wooded country.’

‘Dowler made the assignment?’

‘Yes, but I saw the field reports. If they’re faked then they’re good fakes. He’s covered. It
looks
like a prudent decision.’ Truelove shook her head. ‘No, if Dowler’s dirty then he’s got people behind him who are, quite frankly, a lot more competent than the Herosian military. This whole situation is too clever for them. If I didn’t think it was utterly ridiculous I’d say Winter
was
behind it. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who could organise something this complex and well hidden.’