Nexus (28 page)

  There was motion behind her. Sam turned. Kade was on the ground. The first thug, Tough-bitch, was charging her, knife swinging, face enraged.

  Sam dropped low, stepped forward inside his swing, and drove the barrel of the rifle like a spear, deep into his abdomen. He collapsed forward onto it, his momentum impaling him. The end ground into bone inside him. The man groaned in pain and anger, his eyes still fierce, and tried to push himself back and off of the impaling rifle.

  Sam pulled the trigger, fired the taser round into his savaged guts. He spasmed, roared. She fired again. The man groaned louder. His eyes were still open. He was still struggling to get free of her. She pulled the trigger again and again until it clicked empty. The thug screamed and finally collapsed against her.

  She was sweating. Her heart was pounding in her chest. The one she'd impaled was still breathing. They both were. Good. She had a lot of questions for these two. It wouldn't do for them to die too soon. It wouldn't do at all.

  There was still one more out there. Sam looked down the alleyway. The tall hooded figure was retreating into the shadows. The rifle she'd impaled the thug with was spent. Another rifle had fallen to the ground across the alley. She dropped the man slumped against her, dove for the other side of the alley, came up on one knee with the fallen taser rifle, aimed, fired.

  The move saved her. Twin explosions came from where she'd been, knocking her over. Dust and smoke filled the alley. The wall where she'd left the fallen thug had been blasted open, revealing a jagged hole into the building beyond. The third-floor balcony above her and down the alley had collapsed in a third blast, taking much of the building wall with it.

  The hooded man was gone.

  Fuck. Kade.

  She found him in the smoke, bleeding from multiple locations, unconscious, still breathing. There were plasticuffs on his wrists and ankles.

  She scrambled for one of the knives, found it slick with blood and gore, used it to cut Kade free. The explosions had burst the thugs open at midsection. The explosives had been
inside
them. Their bodies were burning. Someone didn't want them talking. It was time to get the fuck out of here.

  Sam hoisted Kade over her shoulder, sprinted toward the main street, pulled her phone as she went, pounded the emergency buttons, shouted into it as she ran. "Extract, extract! Man down! Extract, extract!"

 

Wats was back on the ground in the alley network and halfway to the main street when he heard it. Had that been a yell? A human scream? Or had he imagined it? He paused for a moment, listened. There. Another yell of some sort. Then gunfire. He turned back towards where he'd last seen Kade and Cataranes and broke into a run. Another scream. A man this time, not Kade. Another. And then the thuds of explosions. Fuck!

  He yanked his pistol free, sprinted two blocks, turned a corner where he guessed the sounds had come from, saw smoke and dust and flames ahead, passed someone running the other way. It was a tall hooded figure. Wats got a fleeting impression of a hooked nose inside the hood, a bald head. Wait! The monk who'd followed Kade the previous night. Wats spun. The figure was retreating in the other direction, almost around the corner. He leveled his pistol.

  "Stop!" he yelled.

  The hooded monk kept running.

  Fuck. He aimed low to take the man in the legs, fired twice. Too late, the man was around the corner, shielded by the brick.

  Fuck. Forget him. Find Kade.

  He turned, sprinted the rest of the way to the source of the smoke. There were bodies, burning, burst from the inside. Gore covered much of the alley. Brick walls had collapsed. Suicide troopers, whether they'd known it or not. Their facial structures looked Thai. Their muscles were grotesquely large. A shattered rifle lay near one of the bodies, its business end covered in blood, the stock of it destroyed as if by impact. Another rifle lay against the opposite wall. He checked it. Taser rounds. Someone had wanted to take Kade or Cataranes alive.

  There were no other bodies in the alley. Either Kade and Cataranes had gotten away, or someone else had taken them. He looked again at the dead men. Their presence suggested that Kade and Cataranes had escaped.

  He stepped into the intersection between alleys, turned around. Four choices. Where would they have gone? Would they have hidden in this maze? Or would they have headed back towards the relative safety of public places?

  He heard shouts from down the alley, in the direction of the main street. There. He sheathed the knife and loped off in that direction, gun at the ready. Shapes ahead. Do or die time.

 

Eighty miles to the south, the USS
Boca Raton
held station in heavy seas in the Gulf of Thailand. Monsoon waves splashed over the rounded, matte black upper surface. The submersible covert operations craft rode with its conning tower just two meters over the sea to avoid detection. Despite the
Boca Raton
's huge size, Thai defense radars slid off its smooth surface, disappeared into its radar-absorbent materials.

  A Thai Royal Navy ship patrolled these waters. An Indian-built Kolkata class destroyer. The captain of the
Boca Raton
would rather be thirty meters under, but his orders were to stay in continuous uplink, except in the case of imminent detection or harassment by the Thai Royal Navy.

  The Kolkata could only find them by dumb luck, the captain knew. Despite its hundred and thirty-meter length, the
Boca Raton
presented a radar cross section the size of a rowboat, and a sonar signature even smaller when still. The high seas and surface sounds of crashing waves made the ship effectively invisible. Still, dumb luck had killed plenty of men. His crew was on constant alert.

  Atop the conning tower, a directional maser powered through the monsoon rain and clouds, bouncing a narrow beam of data off a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites, hopping from one to the next as they hurtled through the sky at eight kilometers a second. Unless something should fly directly into that narrow beam, the uplink was undetectable.

 

Two decks below the bridge, in a cramped control center covered in displays, Garrett Nichols analyzed data Cataranes had produced from the walk down Sukchai Market. Next to him, Jane Kim sifted through databases and the web, looking for additional information on two of the students at the party, the anarchist Baroma Nantakarn and the loose-lipped Chuan Suttikul. Another console showed a deep net trawl for data on the monk who'd followed Lane and Cataranes. Bruce Williams was off duty, back at his bunk.

  "Combat! Combat!" Jane called out.

  Nichols jerked his head up in time to see most of the data feeds from Cataranes cut out. He moved his eyes to the feeds from Lane. Most were down. GPS from both phones remained up. They were in an alley between the Buddha's Kiss and the main street.

  "What the hell?" he said.

  Jane rewound, played the last few seconds. Two assailants. Three. Four. Combat. Fuck.

  "Get the fireteam there, stat!" he ordered.

• • • •

Sam ran down the alley, Kade across one shoulder, her phone in the other hand. The blasted thing claimed to be transmitting, but there was no sound from the speakers. She had no idea if her support team were hearing what she was saying, no idea if they had any data from her at all.

  The alley mouth was just two blocks away. Wait. Figures there. Three, four of them, backlit by light from the street. Were those rifles? She ducked into a side alley. Were they her backup? Or more assassins?

  She still had the knife she'd taken from the thug. She looked around for a place to hide Kade. There, a dumpster.

  "Blackbird! Blackbird! We're from the nest! Here to get you home."

  Voices speaking good English. The right code name.

  "Today's word is golden calf. I repeat, golden calf!"

  The right daily password. She relaxed fractionally.

  "Coming out!" Sam yelled.

  There were four of them, all local contractors vetted by the CIA, dressed as businessmen, dark pants and dark shirts, with conservative dark blazers over them. The automatic rifles and bandoliers of ammo gave them away. She knew that underneath the blazers they wore armor, packed more ammo and more weapons. They were mercenaries, not regular forces, but at this point she just didn't care. Thank god for well-armed support teams.

  "I've got a man down," she said.

  Two of them came forward, took Kade's unconscious form from her, ran back towards the main street.

  "I'm Lee," the point man said. "Our car's at the alley mouth. We can take him. What's the sitrep?"

  "Ambush five blocks back," Sam reported. "Three Thai muscle, taser rifles, trying to take us alive. I think he was the target, I was a surprise. There was a fourth guy, not muscle, headed off…" She paused to get her bearings. "…east. In a hood. The muscle had implanted explosives, detonated after I disabled them. All KIA."

  "You get samples?"

  Sam looked down at the splatter of blood on her hands and clothes. More blood was dripping into her eyes. "Not intentionally."

  "You hit?"

  "Minor," she said. "But I'm going with him."

  Lee nodded. "Roger that. We'll get samples and sanitize the site."

  "Fuck the sanitize," Sam replied. "That was a fucking explosion. Bangkok Metro cops will be here soon. Get in, get out, don't get caught." There could be no contact with the local authorities.

  Lee nodded. "I'll confirm with command." He jerked his head towards Soi Samahan. "Car's back that way, sooner you're in it, sooner they can roll." He gave Sam a smart salute.

  Sam returned the salute, ran for the alley mouth. There was a four-seater Toyota there. The two on her team were standing by the front, their guns gone from sight, eyes scanning the perimeter, hands inside jackets. The back door was open, Kade slumped inside. Sam dove in the back, slapped the interior roof of the car.

  "Let's go!"

 

Wats froze, flattening himself against the wall of the alley, deep in the gloom. He held still, let the chameleonware blend him into the wall, shield his IR emissions as it dumped his body heat into its onboard heat store. They were shouting in English, good accents, passwords of some sort. Four newcomers and Cataranes. The newcomers wore business garb and automatic rifles. He recognized them, American made, all ceramic and composites, x-ray invisible and non-magnetic, perfect for sneaking across a border. At a guess they were loaded with graphene-tipped rounds, harder than diamond, able to punch through any conventional body armor.

  Two of them carried Kade away, carefully, like a patient rather than a sack. That was a good sign.

  The other two new arrivals jogged his way as Cataranes headed out of the alley. Wats froze, held his breath. They passed right by him without noticing. Short hair. Bulky builds. Military bearing. These were CIA or Special Forces. Maybe local mercenaries. Something along those lines. They matched the description of the men who'd lounged most of last night in the lobby of the Prince Market Hotel.

  Wats waited for the two military types to recede into the distance. He counted to sixty, then crept silently forward to the mouth of the alley. Gone. Kade, Cataranes, the other two – they were gone. This whole night had gone belly up. What the fuck had happened here? Who was trying to kidnap Kade?

  One thing was certain. Getting the kid out was going to be a royal bitch now.

 
 

Kade swam in and out of consciousness. He was in a car. Sam was with him. His head was in her lap, her hand on his brow. Lights raced by. There had been a fight… Explosions. He caught flashes of conversation. Tasers. Kidnapping. Abduction.

  He could just barely feel Sam's mind through a haze of static. She was concerned. For him. And she was angry. Someone was going to pay.

  Then he was being moved, carried out into the night, through a doorway. There was a woman's face. Thai. A stranger. And then a coffin lid closed down around him.

  He tried to fight, found he had no strength. They'd buried him alive. He blinked hard and the world swam back into focus. Strange noises all around him. Then the lid came away and bright light filled his eyes.

  He was in a compact surgery. An operating table with lights and two insectoid robotic surgeons occupied one wall. An emergency metabolic suspension tank was against a second wall. The coffin he was in was an imaging bed. They'd been scanning him.

  The Thai woman was at a console, looking at diagnostic results. Kade tried to sit up, failed. Sam gave him an arm and he managed it on the second try.

  The Thai woman looked over at him. "You have a concussion. Not very serious. No significant brain bleeding. You do have a linear fracture of the skull on your right side, but it's faint, and not impinging on the brain. You're going to have major bruising of the side of your face."

  Kade grunted.

  She loaded up a syringe and approached him.

  "What now?" Kade asked.

  "I'm going to inject you with growth factors. Trust me, you want this."

  Kade followed her instructions without further demur, letting her treat his wounds. He was lucky to be alive. If Sam hadn't been with him, or if she'd been a little bit slower, or if that guy had smacked him just a little bit harder…

  
Then again, if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be in this mess at all.

  The last step was a lumbar puncture. The Thai woman slid a needle into his back, between his vertebrae, sucked out a tiny sample.

  Cerebrospinal fluid. They're looking for signs that Shu inserted something else into me. They won't find any.