Shadow of Freedom-eARC (39 page)

“Should I assume the rest of your murdering little band feels the same way?” Yardley asked finally.

“I’ve got you on speakerphone, General,” he replied, looking up to meet the others’ eyes. “You hear anybody disagreeing with me?”

“It’s still not going to happen,” Yardley shot back. “I let you go with Ms. Guernicke, and you’re not going to turn her loose. You’re going to hang onto her, and you’re going to keep on making demands that get steeper and steeper until there’s no way in hell you’re going to get what you ask for. And then you kill her anyway, and you blame it on
us
. I don’t think we’re going to play that game.”

“Up to you, General. But before you make up your mind—”

He beckoned to the woman holding the gun to Guernicke’s head, and she jerked the Trifecta executive to her feet and half-dragged, half-led her across to the desk. The leader looked at Guernicke for a moment, then pointed at the com terminal.

“For God’s sake, Yardley!” Guernicke screamed into the mike. “What the fuck are you
thinking?
Give these people whatever the hell they
want!
”

The leader nodded, and Guernicke was hauled back to her corner and shoved back onto her knees. He waited another moment, then turned back to the com himself.

“There you go—your mistress’ voice has spoken, General. Now you know she’s still alive, and you’ve got your marching orders. What’re you going to do? I don’t think Trifecta’s going to be very happy with you and Lombroso if she ends up dead in a firefight now that she’s told you what you’re supposed to do.”

The silence from the other end of the com link was profound.

* * *

“Jesus, General!” Colonel Tyler Braddock exclaimed. Colonel Braddock, who was very fond of his self-assigned callsign “Tiger,” was a good ten centimeters taller and far broader across the shoulders than Olivia Yardley. At the moment, his swarthy complexion was pale and sweat beaded his hairline. “They’ve really got Guernicke in there. What the
fuck
do we do now?!”

“Shut up, Colonel,” Yardley said in a flat, dangerous voice. Her hazel eyes were hard as she glared up at the taller Braddock. It was his Scorpions which had opened fire last month and touched off the May Riots, and she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable where he was concerned at the moment.

He looked down at her, opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again and nodded, and she snorted. At least the idiot had some sense of self-preservation.

“What we’re
not
going to do,” she told him then, “is let these bastards panic to us into promising them what they want. Not unless I can figure out a way to make it look like they’re actually getting it right up to the second we shoot them all in the head. If we let them out of that tower with Guernicke, this shit is just getting started. At the moment, we’ve got them penned up in there, and I want to make damned sure they aren’t going anywhere, so start moving your goddamned troops into position. And
try
not to kill anybody you don’t have to, this time!”

Braddock flushed angrily, but he kept his mouth shut, nodded, and climbed out of Yardley’s command vehicle. He stalked down the frozen slide-walk towards his own command post, and Yardley watched him go.

I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the bastards on the other side will manage to kill him for me
, she reflected.
I can always dream, though
.

In the meantime, she had to figure out what she was going to recommend to President Lombroso, and she grimaced at the thought. The president wasn’t a lot happier with her than she was with Braddock, and this wasn’t going to help. Maybe she could figure out a way to make it an intelligence failure and put it all on Friedemann Mátyás? She’d have to think about that.

* * *

The parking garage on the far side of Trifecta Boulevard, the surface level street east of the corporate tower, offered an ideal staging area for Colonel Braddock’s Scorpions. Each Scorpion individually exceeded the maximum vehicle weight for the garage by about twenty percent, but there were only thirty of them. Distributed across four floors, their weight was more than sufficiently spread out. Better yet, the garage had accesses on both its east and west sides, which meant the AFVs could be moved into the garage from the west without anyone in Trifecta Tower seeing them.

One might have wondered how useful armored vehicles were going to be in a situation like this one, but over the last few weeks, it had become the Presidential Guard’s policy to deploy overwhelming force in order to overawe and terrify potential dissidents. Besides, it was always possible there was a ground assault element involved in this insane plan after all, and having the firepower on hand to deal with one if it came along seemed like a good thing.

Braddock personally supervised the movement of his vehicles into the garage, then moved his own command vehicle to the roof. The vehicle crew was clearly uncomfortable sitting out there in the open as they remembered the anti-tank launchers they’d encountered last month. Braddock didn’t care about that. First, because he doubted these bastards were going to escalate the confrontation by using heavy weapons (assuming they had any) any sooner than they had to. And, second, because
he
wasn’t in the command vehicle. He’d moved to a better vantage point just inside the ground-level entrance facing the Tower, maintaining his connection to the command vehicle on a secure frequency while its position on top of the garage gave it the best transmission reach he could come up with.

Now he keyed the mike.

“Command One,” he said, and waited for the earbug tone to tell him the communications computer had automatically patched him through to Yardley. “Command One, Tiger is in position,” he said then.

“Good,” Yardley replied.

* * *

The desk com buzzed again, and the strike leader punched the key.

“What can I do for you, General?”

“You could start by cutting your throats and saving me the effort,” Yardley suggested.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going anywhere without Guernicke and we’re planning on killing a lot more of you bastards before you ever get into this office. So shall we move on to your second suggestion?”

“Let Ms. Guernicke leave the building unharmed, and we’ll let you and the rest of your murderers withdraw unmolested.”

The leader laughed out loud.

“Oh, I don’t think so!” he half-chortled. “As fairy tales go, it’s not bad, but we stopped believing in the tooth fairy a long time ago. Try again.”

“All right, third option. You stay right where the fuck you are, we sit outside here, and we starve your asses out. How does that sound?”

“At least a little more like you’re telling the truth. On the other hand, we brought a fair amount of food with us. Of course, we won’t be able to share any of it with Ms. Guernicke or the other Trifecta employees in here with us, so they’ll probably get hungry—and dehydrated—a lot faster than we will. If you want to try it, though, more power to you.”

“Oh, I’m just getting started,” Yardley told him. “There’s always the possibility of knockout gas through the environmental systems. Or we send in SWAT teams. That’s a damned big tower, and you can’t begin to put fire teams everywhere you’d need to be to stop us. We can work our way around you, get our own teams in position, then blow our way through walls and floors to take you out.”

“Probably,” the strike leader acknowledged. “I’d say the chances of your pulling that off without our killing Ms. Guernicke before you get in here are no more than forty-sixty, though, and that’s if you wait a couple days, until fatigue and anxiety start dulling our alertness. Of course, that’s also assuming we’re willing to wait that long before we just go ahead and shoot the bitch. For that matter, we’ve got somewhere around fifty more Trifecta employees up here, most of them pretty damned senior, and we don’t especially like any of
them
, either. You want some of them airmailed back? They’ll make an awful mess when they hit the pavement without counter-grav.”

There was silence from Yardley’s end, and the strike leader leaned back in Guernicke’s sinfully comfortable chair.

“I’ve been informed by President Lombroso that you’re not getting your air car, and you’re not getting out of that building, without handing Ms. Guernicke over to us unharmed,” Yardley said finally. “That’s not negotiable.”

“No, that’s not negotiable
yet
,” the strike leader corrected her. “And I didn’t expect it to be, either. But we’re not going anywhere, and you’re not moving anyone else into this building, until he’s had an opportunity to…rethink that position.”

“You think not?”

“Not unless you want to start getting bits and pieces of Trifecta’s senior management team back as greasy spots on the street.”

“You start throwing people out of windows, and I may just decide the only chance Ms. Guernicke has is for us to get in there before you throw
her
out one.”

“I’ll take my chances on that. Besides, what makes you think that’s the only string to our bow?”

“I know how many people got inside with you,” Yardley said. “That tower is lousy with security cameras, you know. I know about the people you’ve got covering your entry portal—and those tribarrels of theirs won’t do squat if I decide to send in the Scorpions, by the way—and I know how many people you’ve got covering the lift banks. I even know how many people got into Ms. Guernicke’s office with you…and that you lost somebody on the way in.”

“And are you getting very much information from them now?” the strike leader inquired in an interested tone.

He almost imagined he could hear her teeth grinding together in the silence from the other end.

“Yeah, we know about the cameras,” he went on after a moment and shrugged. “There was no way to take them out before we got inside, but you’re not seeing a damned thing from them now. Which means you don’t know whether we’ve pulled SAMS out of our van—or ATWs, for that matter—or not. You don’t even know if we’ve still got Guernicke in her office or staked out across the lift bank doors. Oh, and by the way, did you know Ms. Guernicke has the master codes to access all of the building’s surveillance and environmental control systems from her desk? She was kind enough to give them to us when we insisted. So if you want to try infiltrating SWAT teams into the building, you go right ahead.”

“Listen,” Yardley said, “I’m not going to send people up there after you—not
yet
. But I damned well
am
going to secure the lower floors of that tower.”

“You try to do that and someone’s going to get hurt,” the strike leader said flatly. He was watching the feed from the tower’s ground level security cameras as he spoke. At least two companies of the Presidential Guard were advancing across Trifecta Boulevard from the parking garage. “Even if you manage to get troops inside the tower, it’s not going to buy you any edge you don’t already have. But if they keep coming, you’re going to regret the attempt.”

“Are you threatening the hostages again?” Yardley laughed harshly. “You’re not going to kill Ms. Guernicke, or even any of the other management personnel with her, until you feel a hell of a lot more threatened than that! And if you do, you lose your bargaining chips, and we come straight in however hard and fast we have to.”

“Last warning,” the strike leader told her, still watching the advancing troops. “Call them off now.”

* * *

Yardley’s eyes narrowed. His voice was flat, unwavering. In fact, there was something almost like…satisfaction in it, and alarm bells sounded in the back of her brain. But she couldn’t back off. She had to shake his nerve, destroy his confidence that he was in control of the situation, calling the tune while she had no option but to dance to it. She had to assert
her
ability to control the situation, and so she simply sat back, folded her arms, and watched her command vehicle’s visual displays.

* * *

“Have it your way, General,” the strike leader said, and pressed a button.

* * *

The van which had parked so quickly at street level when Air Traffic Control ordered the local airspace cleared had been abandoned with unseemly haste. The driver hadn’t even wasted any time trying to straighten it out; she’d simply left it there, dumped across three parking slots with its nose pointing out across the street at a sharp angle. It was sloppy of her, no doubt, but other vehicles had been abandoned with equal haste.

There was, however, one difference between her van and any of those other vehicles, as the Presidential Guard discovered when it disappeared in a horrendous fireball.

The weapon was technically an “improvised explosive device,” since it had been manufactured for the purpose out of readily available components by largely amateur hands. There was nothing haphazard or slipshod about it, though. A solid partition, both sides concave in shape, had been run lengthwise along the van’s generous cargo space. The outer surfaces of the partition had been coated in explosives—civilian explosive compounds stolen from construction crews, not military-grade, but amply powerful for the task in hand—and the explosives, in turn, had been coated with a thick layer of screws, old-fashioned nails, bits and pieces of scrap metal, broken glass, and chunks of ceramacrete. The van had been transformed into a huge directional mine which sent a lethal sheet of shrapnel sweeping out in both directions simultaneously.

The driver hadn’t achieved a perfect angle, but she’d come close, and the strike leader had judged his moment carefully. He caught at least ninety percent of the advancing Presidential Guard infantry in the IED’s blast area, and destruction crashed over them like a thunderbolt. The blast front swept up weapons, helmets, equipment, and body parts on its fiery breath. It shredded its victims like toys…and painted the pavement and slide-walks in ghastly sprays of blood decorated with bits and pieces of mangled flesh.

* * *

“I told you to call them off,” the voice on Yardley’s com was cold and precise. “You should’ve listened. But since you didn’t—”