Resistance (32 page)

‘Yes, Adept,’ she said quietly. ‘I would.’

‘Adept of War, eh?’ said Compt’n ur Threshrend. ‘A bit of respect from the maximum hottie, after all? I like it. Sounds cool. So, let me tell you a story. About how the most powerful of all the human sects kept getting their asses handed to them, over and over. By a bunch of busted-ass motherfuckers who made the dumbest Hunn look like Sun fucking Tzu.’

‘And who is this Sun Fuck’ng Tzu?’ asked the Diwan dar Sliveen ur Grymm.

‘Oh, him? He was a badass. Just like me. And he knew the last thing you want to do with a heavyweight is get into a stand-up punching competition. No. What you wanna do with a heavyweight is sweep his fucking legs out from under him. And when he goes down and he’s wondering what the fuck happened? You stomp his brains out.’

Compt’n ur Threshrend did a stompy little dance, just to demonstrate.

‘That’s what we gonna do,’ he promised. ‘No more standing round in a fucking kill box like idiots. Fuck honour and tradition. No, we’re gonna get Tet on these motherfuckers. We gonna bring the jihad and the motherfucking intifada. We gonna hit ’em where they think they strongest. We gonna show them just how weak they are. We gonna eat their fucking cities from the inside. Man gonna learn to respect the monster again.’

28

At 5.59 pm Dave Hooper winked out of existence.

He had been standing in the underground garage where the agents had delivered them to the building on E91st Street, holding Lucille, dressed in black coveralls, feeling like a bit of a dick. The OSCAR people had insisted on the outfit. They’d insisted on him carrying a pistol too, but he dropped that to the ground as soon as he could. As soon as he warped.

Dave was not comfortable with guns. He didn’t like them. Didn’t understand them. Unlike his brother Andy, he had no real experience with them. Better to just leave them out of the picture. This Karen Warat-Varatchevsky chick, he was sure, would have hundreds, maybe thousands of hours practice with all sorts of guns. He didn’t imagine he’d be able to match her in a shoot-out. He did keep the long-bladed knife strapped to his leg. As an occasional fisherman and camper he was more familiar and comfortable with a good workman’s blade. He didn’t imagine for a second he’d be able to cut another human being with it, though. Truth be told, he’d have been more comfortable with something like a Leatherman multitool. He could see it being more useful in a tight fix.

Lucille remained quiet.

In the other pockets of his coveralls Dave carried energy bars and gels and a couple of sets of flex cuffs. He’d eaten some more protein bars while he’d played with the virtual tour of the Russian consulate, and a packet of M&Ms because the protein bars didn’t taste that great. Trinder was still wishing him good luck as Dave hit the accelerator into warp speed.

The more he used the ability, the more he learned about it. For one thing, it had nothing to do with his own subjective speed. He didn’t need to run or sprint or even jog away from the OSCAR agents. He just needed to step into the
slipstream
as he now thought of it. He could stroll up E91st, but he would pass by the pedestrians and traffic, all but frozen in the moment of his acceleration, like a barely perceptible blur at the edge of their vision. He did wonder if they would notice the wind of his passage, but had begun to doubt it. Maybe he should ask, one day.

The gun he’d dropped to the floor back in the garage was still falling slowly, slowly, slowly through the air as he mounted the front steps of the consulate and slipped around a couple of visitors who were exiting moments before the front doors closed for the day. His pulse quickened and he had to swallow against a dry mouth, but that was just nerves. He put them aside.

The entrance to the grand old building, he was pleased to see, was exactly as he had experienced it in the walk-through on-screen. But then, if OSCAR couldn’t get that right, he was in trouble, wasn’t he. One security guard was caught mid-stride as he crossed the foyer, his eyes locked on a door which stood open. Trinder had told him to expect this. They had an asset in the consulate they were willing to burn to give Dave this small leg-up. Had the door not been open, he could have smashed his way through with Lucille, but that would have been the end of any hope he had of carrying off this caper without being noticed. Dave slipped past the open door, winked at the pretty young woman who was holding it open – Trinder’s burned asset, he supposed – and walked through into the secured area where the daily business of the consulate’s dealings with the city outside took place. It was still busy, with clerical workers and diplomatic staff tidying their desks, filing away the day’s papers, catching up on emails, making last-minute phone calls and so on, the familiar shutdown routines of any office.

Dave took a moment to breathe deeply and concentrate on the slipstream. Without speeding up, without hurrying across the office at a run, he found he was able to ‘tap the gas’ and increase his warp speed from – What? Three to four? Warp four to five? He didn’t know, but he could tell he’d done it. The stasis in which everyone around him was trapped seemed to deepen and become more profound. The background hum of the building and the city beyond it noticeably slowed and deepened. He rolled his shoulders to loosen up and hefted Lucille into a comfortable two-handed grip. She remained quiescent. Uninterested.

Something was bothering him. He looked around and his eye passed over the girl at the door. The door the security guard in the entry hall had been headed toward. Was she really gonna get burned for letting him in? He didn’t like the idea, or the casual way Trinder had mentioned it. Pressing the warp button again he carefully picked her up and carried her out of the building to the far side of the street. It’d put the zap on her head when she came to, but she’d at least have a chance of getting away.

With his conscience settled he hurried back inside, running up the steps this time, even though nothing had changed. Unable to use the elevators Dave called up his mental map of the ground floor and followed his memory into a corridor which led to the rear of the building where he found a rather grand-looking stairwell. It was guarded by two uniformed men wearing sidearms, but they were as deeply glazed as everyone else. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened intently for any sound of movement above him. Neither he nor Trinder had any idea whether Varatchevsky would be caught up in the warp effect, or whether she could travel through the slipstream like Dave. The OSCAR and FBI agents who’d attempted to take her during the aborted raid described her escaping them at ‘inhuman speed’ but that didn’t mean she was slipstreaming. After all, they’d been able to see her, even if she was just a blur. When Dave put the pedal to the metal, everyone who’d seen it said it was like he simply disappeared. Maybe zipping away like the Roadrunner was the extent of her ability? Maybe, like him at first, she had been unaware of what she could do. He had no idea. She could be frozen in aspic in a room upstairs. She could be waiting for him on the next landing with a magical sword or, even worse, a submachine gun.

Dave stopped climbing, frowning again. Would a gun even work in the slipstream? Again, no fucking idea. Those snipers in Omaha had been able to fire on the Djinn, and the Djinn’s archers had fired back, but he hadn’t gone to full warp then. He hadn’t even really understood it. Still didn’t. A gun was a mechanical device just like an elevator, so maybe he should assume it wouldn’t work in full warp. Then again, it was a relatively small piece of handheld machinery. Maybe that would make a difference? Maybe it could get dragged into the slipstream.

The only way to know was to find out. He started up the stairs again. They creaked underfoot and his heart jumped, before he smiled nervously at himself. It wasn’t like he had to hide from the two guards, or the other spies who doubtless worked in this building. When he stopped and thought about it, as he did now on the turn of the stairwell, there were only two possible ways this could turn out. Either she was already frozen and he could just throw her over his shoulder and carry her out like he had the other girl. Or she was not, but everybody around her was, and in that case she damn well knew he was coming. Or something was. She’d had just as long as Dave to get used to their changed circumstances, and even though Trinder was certain she’d been hiding in this building, probably until the Russians figured out what to do, she would not have been completely cut off. Hell, she was probably better informed than most about what was going on because she’d have had access to the information resources of the whole Russian government and her own agency. After all she was, as Trinder said, a very senior operator. She’d only run afoul of American counterintelligence because somebody else had fucked up.

Dave paused, his brow furrowed as he tried to think this through. If she knew he was coming, and she had picked up most if not all of the same powers as him, he was in the shit. Unlike him, she
was
a trained killer. She wouldn’t hesitate to pull a trigger or put a blade in his throat, and if it got down to trading blows he might find he had no advantage at all. Trinder said she had close combat training. Years of practice and years in the field. What did Dave have? A couple of messy bar fights under his belt, none of them worth bragging about. He swallowed nervously. Took a deep breath. Let it go. And pushed out his Spidey senses. He tried to feel her out within the walls of the building.

Nothing.

No. Of course, there wouldn’t be. She wasn’t normal. She was totally not normal in the way that he was totally not normal anymore, but she was different in other ways too. Well before the Longreach and Urgon, she probably could have slipstreamed him into a shallow grave before he knew he was dead.

Dave Hooper’s testicles tried to crawl up into his body.

Somehow he didn’t think he’d be charming Colonel Varatchevsky into bed. He called up a memory of her face. Not the severe-looking headshot from her passport – her
American
passport – or the grainy black and white image Trinder insisted the CIA had accidentally captured of her brushing past a known spy handler at an art show in Berlin a few years ago. He tried to remember her in the happier snaps the FBI had seized from her apartment and searched out via the greatest spy service on the planet: Google. She was anonymously pretty in the way of all fit, healthy blonde women. Her features had none of the hard angularity Dave thought a defining characteristic of women in big cities. They were soft and rounded without being doughy, unlike a lot of suburban women of her age. In his memory she looked like someone who could have traded on her looks, but had grown past that some unknown time ago. Her eyes were bright and round. Her smile warm. It was hard to think of her as being the sort of danger to him or anyone that Trinder had described.

He made a decision.

‘
Karen
,’ he called out, using the American pronunciation of her name, the name by which she’d been known most of her adult life. He stepped onto the second floor of the consulate. It reminded him of an upscale hotel, some place that specialised in wedding receptions. The corridors were painted off white and bright chandeliers twinkled from the high plaster ceilings. Striking floral arrangements stood in two jars halfway down the hallway. They seemed to be standing too far away from the wall. As if someone had started to move them, but then walked away with the job undone.

‘Karen Warat?’ he cried out again. ‘My name is Dave Hooper. I’ll guess you know who I am. They sent me in here to get you. But if you can hear me, perhaps we could just talk ab –’

He felt Lucille come alive in his hands just before he took the full force of the blow from his right. It came out of a darkened room. He hadn’t even noticed it, his eyes drawn to the bright splash of colour where those flower vases were placed so strangely away from the wall. He moved without knowing he’d done so. Or Lucille did. It would be fairer to give her the credit for saving his ass. Or his skull. He wasn’t aware of the blade flashing down toward his head until it was far, far too late to turn that awareness into anything useful. Split seconds, long minutes, many, many hours too late. But Lucille, who had remained dormant the whole time he’d been in New York, who hadn’t so much as hummed a single note since leaving behind the slaughter in Nebraska, awoke like a small nuke going off in his hands.

Everything was filled with pure white light and the real world seemed to fall away from beneath the soles of his feet, just like a plane hitting an air pocket and dropping thousands of feet in a couple of heartbeats. The splitting maul flew up from the casual position in which he’d been carrying her, as though walking out into the back garden to do a bit of yard work on a slow Sunday afternoon. She flew high and fast, up to the right, toward the glimmer of sharpened steel whistling through the still, suspended air to bite deeply into his neck. Dave resisted Lucille’s sudden movement, staggering in the opposite direction, losing his balance and overcompensating for the momentum.

He cried out, feeling all the muscles tear down his right side as he was wrenched this way and that by the violent discontinuity of his own motion. He immediately felt the unpleasant warmth of his flesh repairing itself at an even faster than abnormal rate. At the same moment steel crashed on steel and he squeezed his eyes shut against a shower of hot white and blue sparks that fountained off the maul head and katana blade. Dave was struck another great blow, this time at the base of his rib cage, and he yelled out in pain as he felt ribs shatter and other, softer things tear and shred.

No follow-up attack was possible however, because by then he was flying through space, propelled bodily across the corridor to crash into a wall. Into it, and through it in a dull roar that filled his head before the insane pain of more breaking bones and tearing flesh exploded through him. Dave had the unusual sensation of seeing his attacker –
the woman
– receding from him at great speed, as though he’d been snatched away from her. But he hadn’t. She’d just kicked him through a fucking wall!

Everything was bright and hot and then it was dark and hot and, for a half a second that seemed to last longer than every year he’d spent alive, he could see her advancing on him, murder in her eyes, an improbably long sword in one hand. She raised the sword in a practised two-handed grip, shrieking a war cry.

She was dressed like a motorcycle courier, all black leathers, and for a second his mind seized up and he wondered if maybe she was a motorcycle courier and he’d made a terrible mistake, cut her off in traffic, grazed her ride
. . .

‘Kiiiiaaaaiiiii.’

Then she was airborne too, but not like he had been. She was leaping and flying and descending on him like a dark angel from the seventh level of the Inferno. And he was reeling and dizzy and losing consciousness, as his body seemed to bake inside his own skin, repairing the terrible damage she’d already done him. And then Lucille was flying again, raised in his hands, but not of his will, and he felt himself pulled forward, and his arms braced against the contact as the heavy steel head jabbed forward and up, into the woman’s solar plexus. He heard the air rush out of her body and perhaps the sound of one or two of her ribs breaking just as his had a moment earlier. Without knowing to do it, Dave went with the flow of her energy, leaning back and thrusting up with the maul to throw her over his shoulders as though he were an engineer shovelling coal into an old steam train engine. Her low cry of pain turned into a higher pitched yelp of alarm and surprise as she picked up speed, flying over the top of him and into the room behind them.