Molehunt (8 page)

‘Here.'

For one wild moment Maximus thought Kilroy meant the Cut Throat. He restrained himself from scanning the place.

‘On Lykis,' said Kilroy.

Maximus imagined the man was savouring his discomfort. Maybe he did have a sense of humour after all. Now that was scary.

‘How do you know?' Maximus demanded. ‘She didn't arrive by normal transit.'

‘Dyson jump-gate, main dock.'

Maximus laughed. ‘I'll be. She has nerve. I'm starting to like her.'

‘Beautiful, too,' Kilroy said in a way that would make any woman run shrieking. He licked his cut lips.

‘Pleasing to the eye, yes,' agreed Maximus. He thought of the agent's olive complexion, her emerald, almond-shaped eyes, and her slick black hair. Genuine or renovation, she was a striker.

Kilroy's eyes flashed. Maximus saw his own death reflected there. Well now, there
were
some human vices that could tempt Kilroy after all. Maximus would remember. One day it might keep him alive.

‘Where is she?'

‘Hotel. Tagged her on Se'atma.'

‘You tagged her? Why the hell didn't you say so in the first place? What kind of tag?'

‘Worm.'

‘She'll find it. She'll know.'

‘Not this. Ekud worm.'

‘Ekud – where did you get an Ekud worm from?' Black asked. ‘You have dealings with the Ekud clan I'm unaware of?'

‘Dealings my business.'

‘You're just a bundle of surprises today, Kilroy.' Maximus leant forward again. ‘Okay, here's what we do …'

Kilroy exited the subway two stops from the hotel where Anneke's tag told him she was staying. Unlike Black, he had complete confidence in the worm, a microscopic device that literally wormed its way through the skin or could be placed in a person's drink or food. Once settled, it sent out a steady, discrete signal that could be picked up by a nearby e-tag receiver. The chances of Anneke becoming aware of it were exceedingly zero.

Kilroy knew the hotel where she was staying, and why she had chosen it. A lot of off-worlders stayed there. They were mostly government types, all with their paranoia and suspicions and security screens. The rooms were swept several times a day for remote viewing devices. The walls were solid metal, the ultimate Faraday cages, and discharge nodes sent out pulsed radio babble that would send electronic devices haywire. The windows were made of a special sound-absorbing material and would not pass sound waves even if laser beams were bounced off them to read the vibrations inside the room. The quantum matting roof sent off disguised heat, biochem and radar signals.

In short, the hotel was impenetrable to spying. It also came with its own cadre of security goons, mostly ex-mercs and off-world hunkies down on their luck or stranded without money.

But Kilroy didn't want to go inside.

He just wanted Anneke Longshadow to come out, and Maximus had come up with an answer to that. Kilroy moved into a shadowed doorway half a block from the main entrance of the hotel. There was a rear entrance, but Anneke was sure to assume it was being watched and would prefer to exit onto a large, well-lit street filled with people.

Kilroy checked his watch, wondered what the delay might be, and then spotted her. Her raven black hair made her distinctive, and very shortly would make her dead. He checked his worm, which was functioning normally. According to the satpic, she was heading down Arturo Street, towards the centre of town.

Kilroy followed her, keeping his distance. She was too good to be tracked by sight, but he knew he could rely on the worm. He maintained a steady 300-metre spacing from her, and with the crowds and the night that seemed safe. She would need the eyes of a hawk with an X-ray telescope to see him at this distance.

He broke left, moved into a side street, paralleling Anneke's path for a while, then caught her up and passed her. He loitered in shadows, looking like someone who merely had something illegal to sell. A few moments later she passed him on the other side of the street.

Kilroy stayed parallel to Anneke for the rest of her journey, but near the end he moved back into the side streets, knowing she would at some point be turning off the main road and heading towards him.

He backed up against a building to fade into some shadows, stumbled on something and suddenly heard a
whish
and felt something wrap around him. He did not cry out, instead he reacted, expanding his chest and thrusting out his arms so that whatever it was couldn't tighten around him.

It did no good. Within seconds he was enmeshed in an
ixsin
web, as strong as woven steel and designed to tighten if he struggled. He relaxed.

‘That's better,' came a contralto voice from the darkness.

Kilroy's eyes narrowed. Anneke Longshadow stepped out from an alleyway, smiling pleasantly at him.

‘I am ahead, two – one,' she said pleasantly. ‘Surely you didn't think I'd fall for a voice-dupe call?' She paused, reflecting. ‘It was good – sounded like Viktus. But not good enough.'

Kilroy's face showed no outward sign of surprise.

‘How?'

‘How did I detect and remove your worm?' She held up a small vial. Inside something metallic caught the light and winked. ‘Trade secret, Kilroy.'

‘You know my name.' It wasn't a question.

‘A worm like this is pretty hard to come by. Its signal is more like a medical tester rather than a tracker. People remember selling such exotic things. Then again, if you have the right tools, worms have molecularly encoded serial numbers on them. It didn't take long to track down the alias you used. From there …' She waited. Kilroy said nothing. ‘Well, here we are again.'

‘What now?'

She assessed him, noting the scars, the dead eyes, remembering the fanatical way he fought, as if he belonged to a long lost faith that guaranteed absolution in death. Sirens blared in the distance, and grew louder. Anneke tossed the vial at Kilroy's feet.

‘Worms can turn around and bite, Kilroy. Tell your boss, the mole, that I'm coming for him. Can you do that?'

‘Yes.'

She turned to go.

‘Why don't you kill me?' he asked. ‘I would have killed you.'

She turned and smiled. ‘Apart from the fact that I'm nothing like you?' she said. ‘Because I'm using you.'

She had already gone when moments later a police vehicle slammed to a stop nearby, disgorging armed hunkies. They were in for a truckload of trouble.

Black got back to HQ late. His unease was increasing, and he disliked the feeling intensely. Anneke Long-shadow had humiliated one of the most dangerous killers in the galaxy. This told him something that he had not wanted to hear.

His unease was about to get considerably worse.

He made his way to the maintenance cockpit by a different route. As usual he checked that no one had been there. He had a number of sensors that could even measure halitosis and perspiration, not to mention gases, radiation, proximity, voices, breathing and the human heartbeat itself. All was clear, but that only made him wonder if he had missed something.

He realised he was getting paranoid. Activating his communications monitoring system, he went first to the filtering cache. This was where anything incriminating about him was removed from the comm system, but recorded for his inspection. Only once had he found a message there, and it had only been an error of syntax.

Thus as he activated the system he didn't expect to hear anything. The shock of what he did hear made him sit down very quickly.

‘Hi, Mister Mole.' It was Anneke Longshadow's voice. ‘I'm betting you've got your tentacles into the comm system at HQ and that you have filters listening out for keywords. I bet one of those words is “mole”, so this message is for you.'

Black's face tightened with hatred.

He sat and listened, the rictus of his facial muscles slowly unclenching until there was no expression, other than the deepening shadow where his eyes were. At the end he leant forward and switched the recording off. He sat back, and for a long time his only movement was the rise and fall of his chest.

Finally, from the shadows beneath his eyebrows, his eyes gleamed with purpose, then he moved.

For the next few hours he worked furiously, sponging away every trace that he had ever been in the cockpit. He had expected to have to do this one day, and even had a back-up control base set up. It just needed to be activated.

He double-checked every feed, and even more importantly, the links where these feeds hooked into the station's comm system. These were the weak points, but he had designed them to operate remotely. There were no physical connections. His sensors eavesdropped on the supposedly secure lines by a process exploiting quantum tunnelling in quantum wires, the ability of sub-atomic particles to tunnel through physical objects and appear elsewhere.

Thus his quantum eavesdroppers were safe. No diagnostic run on the main lines could detect them, unless a highly trained engineer actually eyeballed the devices. They were, of course, booby-trapped. No fragment would ever be found, nor would the engineer. And, simultaneously, every other device would self-destruct. It would be quite a show.

It was the middle of the night before Maximus finished. He returned to his apartment, tired, annoyed, but oddly elated. He had been forced to take the first step into a game, rather than lurking in the shadows. Well, so be it.

Anneke Longshadow had started it. He would now finish it.

Fortunately, he had hours to weigh the different gambits. She was proving difficult to kill. So there was only one choice for his next move. He must discredit Anneke and make it impossible for her to act against him until such time she could be terminated.

Clearly, to do this, he would have to kill Colonel Viktus.

A
NNEKE stayed close-by. She needed to know what would happen with Kilroy. The hunkies arrived, read him his rights, which were very few, and after freeing him from the mesh, bundled him into a skimmer. Moments later most of the hunkies were dead or dying and Kilroy was sauntering away down the street.

She couldn't tell how he had done it. Most likely he had activated a subcutaneous viral gas to which he had made himself immune by antibodies generated by ‘viral shells'. Then again he might have used a neural whip, scrambling the brains of the unshielded. Neural whips were illegal, but then so was killing people.

Anneke was well guarded against both, but she now began to wonder whether she had beaten Kilroy by luck rather than superiority. She made a mental note:
Don't trust him unless he's dead
.

She tracked Kilroy for a while but he wasn't leading her anywhere. The secret weapon that any veteran always had over a newbie was patience.

At two in the morning Anneke went back to her hotel and again came close to death.

She had used one of the hotel's dozen entry points. By the time she got to her apartment she was sweating. She had been walking on pins and needles, listening, smelling, and expecting death to come at her from any direction, especially the one she was not expecting. She was young, immensely strong and fast, and her reflexes were little short of magical, but there was always something or someone faster. RIM drummed that into you during training. Don't get cocky.
You get cocky, you get dead. Real quick
.