Deus Ex - Icarus Effect (43 page)

Inside, D-Bar stared blankly into nothing, his face ashen. A purple-black contusion discolored the flesh around his throat where his neck had

been twisted and broken.

She swore and jerked back. Dive weights clattered out of the duffel and onto the deck. For an instant, Anna's anger at the young hacker boiled

over and she allowed herself to hate him for his betrayal; but then the emotion bled away and all she could see before her was the corpse of a

frightened youth who had got in over his head.

He was not long dead, she guessed, examining the body. Only a matter of hours had passed since the double cross on the Mont Blanc bridge,

and while Anna had been left to ride out her dreamless chemical sleep, Namir and the others had doubtless put D-Bar to the harshest of

questions. Looking him over, she found more bruising and contusions; she tried to imagine what he had gone through, perhaps believing himself

the equal of the Tyrants for the dispatch of Croix and the gift of her as his prisoner, believing that right up until the moment they decided to

torture him.

The hacker would not have lasted long, and for all that he told Namir, all the secrets he gave up, the killer would have hurt him all the same,

just to be certain he had not lied. What did he tell them? she wondered. The names of his Juggernaut cohorts? The locations of the New Sons

of Freedom? It was troubling to think what could be done with such information.

"Patrick" she said, gently closing his eyes, "you stupid kid."

The words left her mouth as a ripple shimmered on one of the puddles across the deck, in the corner of her sight; and a coldly familiar sense of

no longer being alone raced through her. Anna reached into the launch and her hand tightened around the shaft of a boathook.

Without warning, she spun in place and swung the wooden rod out in a fast arc. It swept through the air and collided with something invisible,

splintering. In the next second, a ghost formed out of nothing and Federova batted the boathook away, sneering as she came in to attack the

other woman.

Federova was so fast; in the apartment, the EMP charge had leveled the ground between the two of them, but here and now Anna Kelso was

totally outclassed.

Out of blind fury and raw fear, Anna grabbed the gear rack above her head and hauled herself up. She kicked out to meet Federova as the

other woman came in, and her heel connected with the assassin's face, knocking her aside. Before Federova could recover, Anna was running for

the stairs, crashing up toward the main deck.

The assassin was directly on her heels as she emerged into the middle of an observation space, walled in on three sides by elegant glass

windows. Velvet couches and master-crafted faux-Elizabethan tables were side by side with minimalist holographs and inset data consoles.

Anna grabbed at a footstool and hurled it behind her, trying to slow Federova down, but she missed and stumbled. The Tyrant woman was

suddenly on her and she heard the soft hiss of augmented muscles. Anna came off her feet and Federova pitched her into the air.

She spun and crashed through a glass lamp, bouncing off the half-moon bar at the back of the room. Pain flared along her side as she plowed

through an arrangement of glasses and liquor bottles. Air blasted out of her lungs in a croaking howl and she tipped over and down.

Dizzy, blood wet on her face where her earlier wound had reopened, Anna struggled into a crouch. There was broken glass everywhere she laid

her hands. Blinking owlishly, she saw a bottle of bourbon lying on its side, and she grabbed it by the neck.

Anna rose as Federova came in to hurt her again, and brought down the bottle like a club. The assassin tried to deflect the hit away, but the

glass shattered on her arm and she hissed in pain.

Despite herself, Anna showed teeth in a feral grin; to get something from the silent woman, even the smallest of utterances, was a little victory

in itself.

The rich, brown liquid spattered across Federova and the curved bar, and she staggered back a step. That was all the time Anna needed to

yank the flare launcher from her pocket.

She squeezed the trigger bar and a smoking dart chugged out into the air, skipping off the bar in a blare of sputtering phosphorous. Federova

went for cover as the flare ignited the bourbon spills and carried on across the room, battering itself against the inside of the windows. Orange

smoke, acrid and cloying, choked the air.

Coughing, Anna fired off another shot and clipped the Tyrant woman with it. Federova's bolero jacket instantly caught alight, red flames leaping

up at her face.

Through the thickening haze and shrieking of the trapped flares, Anna stumbled blindly toward the windows, desperate to escape. Behind her,

she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and the crackling chugs of a fire taking hold, as one of the couches became a torch.

Federova came out of the roiling smoke ahead of her, a furious revenant blocking her path. Her skin seared and her face twisted in hate, the

Tyrant looked like something spat from the fangs of hell.

The stolen jet ski rode low and fast over the wave tops, leaving the water in skipping blasts of power as it skimmed across the wake of the

Icarus. The stern of the yacht loomed high before Saxon, just as a glint of bright light flashed along the mid-deck. For a moment, he thought it

was a reflection from the sun, but then it happened again, and this time thin plumes of orange smoke coiled from the cracked windows.

Saxon twisted the throttle and gunned the motor, bringing the jet ski around to approach from the near side, where the haze would hide his

approach.

The voice on the radio repeated itself in French, English, and Mandarin, warning the Icarus to cut power and heave to, by the authority of the

Swiss civil police.

Namir's lip curled and he silenced the speaker, shooting an angry glare across the yacht's flying bridge as Barrett entered.

The big man's face was thunderous, and his scarred cheek was red with lines of blood, spilled like tear tracks from his eye. "What the hell is

going on down there?" he demanded, jerking a thumb toward the aft. "The fire alarms are going crazy! Kelso wasn't on the mid-deck, so—"

"Yelena has her," Namir snapped. "She's cleaning up your mess."

"The bitch got the drop on me!" Barrett roared.

"Imbecile!" Namir shot back, with such force that the other man fell silent. "You underestimated the woman and she made you pay for it!"

Coils of smoke, black threads joining the flare fumes, drifted past on the wind. Fire-suppressor lights blinked across the control boards and

Namir could hear an alarm bell ringing somewhere beneath them. He advanced to the helm control and pulled the throttle levers back to the

zero mark.

"What are you doin'?" said Barrett. "Where's the pilot?"

Namir nodded toward the rearward sky deck where the unmarked Tyrant veetol was waiting. "He's warming up the helo. We're abandoning

ship." He ground out the words in annoyance. "This operation is turning into a clusterfuck! We have to extract now, while we can still salvage

something." He glared out of the bridge's canopy. "Police launches are on the way. Our mission security has been compromised. Apparently

someone alerted them as to our extralegal status."

"Saxon?"

"Does it matter?" he snarled. "Our objective was achieved, even if Taggart didn't die. The Humanity Front is in disarray, the media will report

what we want them to say. We are done here."

"We're just gonna cut and run?" Barrett replied. "First we lose the jet and now this tub?"

"Let it burn," Namir told him. "The cost is nothing against the gains. We'll be across the border before the Swiss realize what has happened, and

by the time they've doused the flames, the group will spin the truth to whatever best suits their needs."

Federova's fingers were like iron rods where they bored into Anna's flesh through the smoke-dirtied sleeves of her blouse, and each motion of

her pushing and shoving her across the decks was a new flash of pain. The assassin worked a nerve point in her arm and it was like her skin had

been doused in acid.

She gasped and kept moving, tasting blood in her mouth. Anna caught a brief glimpse of herself in the curve of the Icarus's gray glass windows

as she passed; once upon a time she would have loved to find herself walking the decks of an elegant vessel like this, but now she looked like an

apparition, some walking wounded left behind by the passing of a war.

Federova marched her to the upper tier and shoved her forward. The wind across the open sky deck caught her and she staggered. Across the

flat space, the unmarked black flyer that had gathered her up from the Mont Blanc bridge was poised, ready for takeoff, rotor rings humming at

idle. Namir and Barrett were waiting, and the big man's face lit up with a dark, hateful smile as he saw her approach. He took a step forward,

flexing the thick, heavy digits of his machine hands.

Anna tried to back away, but there was nothing behind her but a curved line of steel rail and the slope of the flying bridge. The silhouette of the

yacht angled away down to the main deck and the prow, the profile like a knife blade edge-on. Smoke wreathed the drifting vessel.

Namir held up a hand to halt Barrett before he could tear his payback from her. "I want Kelso intact," she heard him say, over the drone of the

rotors. "If we can't interrogate her here, we'll do it at a black site."

"No ..." She struggled again as Barrett grabbed her and pulled her along until she was almost off her feet. "No!" Anna threw punches and kicks,

but they battered off the other man without effect.

A dark pit of terror opened up inside her chest. Until this moment, Anna had been able to hold on to the thinnest thread of hope, the slimmest

chance that she could still find a way to escape from the Tyrants and survive. That hope disintegrated as she was dragged toward the helo, the

hard, unflinching certainty falling down upon her that she would have no future, no respite, no escape—

"Hey!" Ahead, Namir rapped on the cockpit hatch, calling to the pilot. "Answer me!" He tugged at the handle and the canopy opened; the pilot's

lifeless body shifted and spilled out onto the helipad. The dead man's neck was canted at an unnatural angle.

Anna saw a figure drop from the cover of the tail fin and jam a shotgun barrel into the meat of Namir's neck.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" said Saxon.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

M V
Icarus—
Lake Geneva—Switzerland

Namir froze, the weapon resting at the base of his skull; even with the nonlethal rounds loaded in the shotgun, a blast from point-blank range

would still be enough to put him down.