2
IN THE DARK
Marianna Bonaventure eased herself through the access door into a darkness so absolute it seemed less a mere absence of light than a positive, palpable presence in its own right.
Nor did its inky weight lift even when Marianna flicked on her hand torch. Not till she’d powered up her goggles, that is, and then the torch was spilling out a narrow cone of what looked like broad daylight.
For her eyes only. Anyone not equipped with shortwave infrared receptors like the ones integrated into CROM’s night-vision goggles would still be in the dark.
Not that there was much to see even with the goggles. The false colors painted by the SWIR software showed her only the dull gleam of rust-eaten steel rails paralleling a tunnel wall cankered with mold. If her quarry—the last dregs of the erstwhile Shadow KGB—were here at all, they were waiting somewhere down that track.
Lying in wait for anything or anyone that CROM, the US Energy Department’s Critical Resources Oversight Mandate, might send in after them.
Lying in wait for her. But not for her alone, not this time.
Marianna took a breath of chill air and whispered into her headset mike, “Clear, come on through.”
It had taken her months of lobbying, even with the Grishin case to point to, before her boss Pete Aristos had agreed to muscle up CROM’s Reacquisition Branch with a small—okay, a very small—field force. But here she was at last: Deputy Reack Director Bonaventure at the head of her very own rapid response team.
The stairwell’s emergency lamps momentarily cast her shadow on the far wall as the door behind her swung open again. Then the other four team members were in, and it was full dark once more.
Marianna shivered slightly. It was time to get moving.
They had clear line of sight for maybe a hundred yards down-track from their entry-point. Further on, the tunnel curved, cutting off their view. No telling what was down there around the bend. Not without calling in the Marines.
The Marines’ DragonEye UAV, that is. At her signal, the team moved to circle round and pool their SWIR beams on the floor. Marianna unslung her backpack, then crouched in that circle of invisible brightness to extract the five modular components of the little unmanned aerial vehicle.
The Quantico engineers who’d designed the two-kilo DragonEye had envisioned it riding the night winds above foreign battlefields, tight-beaming back situational awareness to USMC commanders on the ground. They could hardly have imagined it swooping bat-like through this sunless subterranean cavern, this long-abandoned subway spur snaking beneath the slush-slimed February streets of midtown Manhattan.
In under two minutes Marianna had the little UAV assembled and cocked back on its bungee launcher. She checked the GCM computer built into the forearm of her suit: the Ground Control Module’s display was showing green. Punching a minimal flight profile into the autopilot, she engaged the propeller and stomped on the launcher’s foot release. The bungee cord snapped forward, catapulting the DragonEye up the ramp and off into the darkness.
Back when she was being checked out on the mission parameters, Marianna had worried that DragonEye might give the game away. That was before she’d seen it in action.
The vehicle’s one-meter wingspan gave it the radar signature of your average pigeon, and its electric motors were near noiseless. It didn’t take a pilot like Marianna to fly it, either. It pretty much flew itself, with a little help from the same GCM computer that was at this moment feeding back terrain imagery to the heads-up display built into Marianna’s visor.
And what that imagery was showing was hardly worth giving up a night’s sleep over, much less a night with Jon. Ever since CROM had shut down the Shadow KGB’s Antipode Project and killed or captured its senior leadership eighteen months ago, the remnants of the cabal had gone to ground, where they were proving harder and harder to root out. Meaning fewer and fewer of the leads were panning out. Like the ostensibly hot tip—anonymous, untraceable—that had led to tonight’s raid.
Which was looking like yet another high-tech snark hunt. Already far down the tunnel now, DragonEye wasn’t picking up more than what they could see from right where they stood. The way ahead was clean and clear: no movement, no signs of recent activity, no—
Wait one. Marianna punched the GCM’s instant replay, rerunning the last thirty seconds of scan. And there it was: a roughly rectangular seam in the mottled surface of the tunnel wall, possibly the door to a lair.
Marianna considered calling the UAV back for a closer look. But no, her guys could as easily check it out themselves. She left the DragonEye in cruise mode, but minimized the heads-up display—too distracting otherwise. Then she formed the team up and headed them out.
As they started down the tunnel, Luis Mondragon took point as usual. And as usual he was moving out a little further ahead of the team than caution would warrant.
Comm specialist Cherie LaSalle brought up the rear. It was Cherie’s job to scatter a trail of “electronic breadcrumbs”—miniature transmission relays—behind them, so as to ensure a tight communications lock on home base back at Federal Plaza.
Suddenly, up ahead, Luis’ torch flared blinding bright. Marianna’s visor darkened automatically to save her night vision, meaning the burst of light must have run up the spectrum into the visible range. Other polarized patches bloomed in her peripheral view. The rest of the team’s torches must be malfunctioning too, her own included.
“Lights out!” she whispered into her mike and switched off her torch. Waving this much illumination around the lightless passage would give away their position for sure, if it hadn’t already.
“Down!” she said, “and lie still.”
Straining every nerve, she could make out faint scuffling sounds in the darkness, then silence again. There was somebody out there, taking up positions to their front.
“Hold fire,” Marianna ordered. “Watch for flash.” The enemy might have knocked out her troops’ night sight, but that advantage would prove short-lived. The best flash suppressor made couldn’t totally eliminate muzzle flare, and here in pitch black even the feeblest glimmer would be enough to give a gunman’s position away. Unless the Shadow KGB intended to grapple hand-to-hand, they’d be pinpointing themselves the instant they initiated hostilities.
More scuffling up ahead. Then an oddly-familiar snick. Now, where had she heard—
Without warning, something whizzed past her ear. Whatever it was, it had been close. They were taking fire somehow, though her eyes had yet to register the least scintilla of light.
Another swish, then a sharp intake of breath and a muffled groan came from the darkness in front of her.
“Everybody okay? Talk to me, people!”
“It’s me,” someone gasped, Luis by the sound of him. “—I-I’ve been hit.”
“How bad?” That was Dave Rostov, their paramedic. Marianna could hear him scrabbling over the rough ground toward his wounded teammate. “Upper arm.” Luis’s voice was tight with strain. “Right through the armor.”
“Got it,” Dave said. He must have started probing the injury, because his next words were, “it’s—Jesus Christ!—it’s a fucking arrow!”
Not an arrow, a crossbow bolt. Marianna knew she’d heard that sound before. She also knew they were in deep shit.
Even medieval crossbow quarrels could pierce chain mail at three hundred meters, and the enemy’d be using the new diamond-tipped carbon bolts, with more penetrating power than even Kevlar could stand up to. As Luis had just found out.
Definitely deep shit.
How deep was evinced by the snicks of at least three more crossbows being cocked at widely-separated points along the impromptu skirmish-line. She could almost feel the enemy’s own unimpaired infrared beams playing over her exposed back, over her team where they lay hugging the ground.
Too bad her night-vision goggles couldn’t see those beams, trace them back to the enemy’s position. But, no, the Shadow KGB’s IR torches had to be using a different modulation, or they’d have been knocked out together with CROM’s in the first place.
Somewhere close by in the dark, Cherie was trying to raise home base. From the increasingly desperate tone of the comm specialist’s whispers, Marianna guessed that the relays she’d scattered had gotten fried along with the rest of their electronic gear.
Clean sweep, game over.
The darkness, laden now with death, pressed in on her, crushing down like the weight of deep water. She couldn’t get enough of the tunnel’s cold, musty air into her lungs.
“OhChristOhChristOhChrist,” someone was moaning behind her.
It came to her then that she could die down here, far from light and open air. They all could, could wind up unsung casualties of a minor engagement in the global war on terrorism, just a few more nameless stars hung on some clandestine memorial wall somewhere.
She imagined she could see the gleam of her own commemorative star. Far off, at the outer edge of night. Just a single star to show that she had lived.
And that she had died, with no one knowing how or why.
Not even Jonathan Knox, for all his eerie insightfulness, would ever guess what had become of her.
☯
Truth be told, at that moment in time Jonathan Knox didn’t even know what had become of himself.
That might be putting it too strongly. He knew, for instance, that he was currently cooling his heels in an antiseptic antechamber somewhere on the sprawling San Jose campus of Archon Consulting Group’s largest client, Psyche Industries. What he didn’t know was why.
More specifically, he didn’t know why Archon CEO Richard Moses had ordered him aboard the redeye out of JFK, for delivery on said client’s doorstep at one-thirty a.m., local. For that matter, he wasn’t sure if Richard knew all that much more himself. If he did, he wasn’t sharing.
As best as Knox could piece it together, sometime yesterday afternoon Archon’s West Coast in-charge had reached out to the home office for help—Knox’s help. No specifics, but it wasn’t hard to guess it had something to do with what Archon was working on for Psyche—something called “the QuMRANN Project.” No specifics on what that might be either, though.
And beyond that meager amount of guesswork, Knox was totally in the dark.
“Hello?” he called out. “Anybody there?”
“Good evening, Mr. Knox,” a booming basso echoed down from an overhead speaker grill. “Sorry to have kept you waiting—you can go in now.”
Knox turned to see a panel in the far wall gliding open to reveal another, larger chamber beyond, albeit with no more by way of amenities than the one he was in. Save for one thing:
In the indirect lighting, the artifact taking up the middle of the new room resembled nothing so much as a chair, though not one that Knox, even jet-lagged as he was, would want to kick back in. Because this was a chair that could have been designed by H.R. Giger of Alien fame: a sleek, black, articulating power recliner fitted out with multiple gleaming appendages and crowned by a bulbous black hood hovering above and to the rear of the contoured spine. The overall effect managed to be both vaguely familiar and repellently sinister.
Not just a chair, then—a Chair.
With or without capitalization, the thing would have been at home in a twenty-first century torture chamber, lacking only padded wrist and ankle cuffs to complete the picture. Or perhaps those lay coiled within its molded metallic arm and leg rests, waiting to spring out and snare the unwary?
Knox reined in his rampant imagination and turned to a more relevant question: what could the grotesque device possibly have to do with him? Could it somehow be related to whatever problem he’d been brought out here to work on?
Well, when all else fails, try a direct question.
“Hello?” he said to the ceiling. “Does somebody want to tell me what this thing is supposed to be for?”
“Welcome to Psyche Industries, Mr. Knox.” His invisible friend was back. “There are a few formalities to complete before you are cleared to visit our San Jose facility.”
“Listen,” Knox began, “I didn’t ask to—”
“If you would step over to the Chair, please.”
Knox approached cautiously. Up close, what he’d taken for a futuristic hairdryer hood revealed itself to be a supersized skullcap of black ceramic composite, with adjustable padding on the inside and a strip of ribbon-cable running down to a socket integrated into the back of the recliner. And that, in turn, accounted for the earlier sense of familiarity—Knox had seen a setup like this once before, half a world away, at the bottom of the sea.
“You’ve got one of those miniaturized MRIs in there, don’t you? What the devil for?”
“If you will sit down, please.”
No sooner were these words spoken than the Chair shook itself and, with a series of chitinous clicks, whirled to face him. And unfolded. The hood craned back, the prehensile attachments hinged up and out of the way, all as if to invite easier access. Something about this performance conveyed the aspect of a Venus flytrap gaping wide its jaws to welcome in its prey.
“You have got to be kidding,” Knox said under his breath.
“It is mandatory that you be scanned while reading the Non-Disclosure Agreement.” In synch with these words, a panel slid open in the Chair’s left armrest. Knox watched as a glowing notepad screen, easily the brightest object in the room now, rose up and swiveled to face him. Leaning in closer, he could see it was displaying the fine print of Psyche’s NDA.
“The functional MRI will image your brain-states,” the voice rumbled on, “to establish a comprehension baseline in the event of court challenge to the undertaking.”
“Undertaking be damned. I’ll keep my brain-states to myself, thanks.”
That produced a brief pause. Then a new, decidedly female voice issued from the hidden speakers. “Come on, Jon, it doesn’t bite.”
Those sultry tones conjured up a host of memories, few if any of them suitable for family viewing. “Jazmine?”
Jazmine McGovern. Of course—how could it have slipped his mind that Jazmine was Archon’s on-site for the Psyche engagement? Suddenly, it all made sense. Sort of.
Because he and Jazmine had worked together before. It had been years ago, but the association had gone on long enough and been close enough that she’d formed the impression—the erroneous impression, in his opinion—that Jonathan Knox was some sort of a last-resort resource: the guy you went to with a problem everybody else had given up on.
“You’ve come all this way, Jon,” Jazmine crooned. “Don’t make them send you home now. It’s just this one more thing, then you can get some sleep.”
Yes, he and Jazmine had worked together, and played together too. It had been fun for a while, till Knox saw through it: saw their hot-and-cold relationship for just another of Jazmine’s career-advancing stratagems. It had ended then, and they’d been studiously avoiding one another ever since.
But she evidently needed him now.
And that in itself spoke volumes about the situation here. Because Jazmine never would have called him in to help with some minor glitch, some routine speed bump on the otherwise smooth-paved path to a turnkey delivery.
No, Jazmine McGovern was one lady who knew how to steamroller over speed bumps, to smash flat any obstacle that stood in the way of her relentless rise to the top. As Knox knew only too well, having nearly gotten flattened himself.
“Don’t be a wuss, Jon. Hey, the rest of the Archon team has all been through it.”
“Through what? What is this thing, exactly?”
“Trust me,” she said, “it’s nothing to get freaked about.”
“I am not freaked,” he muttered, and to prove it he turned and lowered himself gingerly onto the seat.
“That’s it, now lean back.”
As Knox did, he felt the helmet descend, then stop. The padded liner inflated till it was cupping his skull tightly, holding his head immobile. “Now what?”
“Now, just sit there and read,” Jazmine said.
With a barely audible shush, the notepad’s arm telescoped up till the screen was at a comfortable distance and angle, and Knox began dutifully studying the nine pages of boilerplate that were Psyche’s standard Non-Disclosure Agreement.
As he trudged on through the legalese, his scalp began to tingle. The itch seemed to originate at the crown of his head, right where the helmet gripped tightest, and radiate outward from there. It was distracting, and getting more so by the minute. Soon it was all he could do not to rip off the high-tech headgear and scratch the itch. But that would probably abort this read-through, meaning he’d have to start all over again. Knox gritted his teeth and kept going.
“Okay, done,” he said finally. “Is that it?”
“In a moment. First, take this stylus”—one came sliding out of the recesses of the armrest even as Jazmine spoke—“and sign in the signature bloc.”
Knox scrawled his name across the screen and tapped the Accept field. “Now get this thing off me.”
“In a second, Jon. We just—”
The tingling was rising to a crescendo, even as it seemed to be penetrating deeper, down into his braincase. That did it.
“No, Jazmine, no more of this. Get it off now!”
No sooner had he uttered this protest, then Knox was seized by the oddest sensation. It felt like déjà vu—it had that same quality of this-has-happened-before conviction to it, only the feeling didn’t attach to anything, past or present. Instead, there was a blank spot where the experience he was supposed to be reliving should have been.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the sensation went away. Rather, it was washed away in the blinding burst of white light that was exploding soundlessly behind his eyeballs. Then that too was gone.
“What the hell—?” No longer caring if it voided Psyche’s protocols, Knox yanked his head free and heaved himself up out of the Chair. He stood there staring at the strange apparatus, wondering if it could have malfunctioned and shocked him somehow.
“Are you okay, Jon?” Jazmine’s voice took on that warm, throbbing quality he remembered only too well—the one she used when she was conning someone. “It’s nothing to worry about. Four or five percent of the subjects experience some sort of reaction to the scan. Just forget about it.”
She’s right, of course, he heard himself thinking, Nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all. Forget about it.
Surprisingly, that was exactly what he did.
☯
With invisible missiles weaving an ever-tightening kill zone in the midnight air just above her head, Marianna Bonaventure flattened against the cold, broken ground of the abandoned subway tunnel and tried to think.
From the sound of the crossbows being recocked up ahead, there couldn’t be more than three, maybe four, shadow KGBsters facing them. On the down side, at least two of her Reack team had been hit, she couldn’t tell how bad. And now Cherie had gone quiet too. Either the comm specialist had given up trying to call for reinforcements, or one more bolt had found its mark.
Marianna’s thoughts kept cycling back to a single desperation play: hit the lights, rise up guns ablaze—and go out in a blaze of glory themselves, most likely. But what else could they do when the enemy could see everything and they could see nothing at all?
Or almost nothing. Maybe it was her mind’s delusional attempt to impose meaning on the random firing of neurons against a blank black visual field, but through it all the phantom starlight she’d conjured up—that imagined gleam of her anonymous cenotaph hung on an anonymous wall—flickered forlornly at the edge of perception, as if to mock her.
She blinked, shook her head to clear it, but the residual glimmer didn’t go away. It was still out there, far down the tunnel, far out in the darkness. And … could it be moving?
A shock of recognition jolted through her. And with it a spark of hope. It was their wayward DragonEye.
She’d all but forgotten the little UAV when things had gone to hell. But it was still flying, still patrolling on automatic, exploring the maze of tunnels per its preprogrammed instructions. Its infrared emitter must have gone into overload along with their torches. And that accounted for the faint glow she was seeing: the DragonEye’s search beam was shining in the visible band.
She had no clue where it had got to by now. She maximized the heads-up display, but the resulting panorama of sagging walls and peeling girders still told her nothing of the UAV’s actual whereabouts.
That was the beauty part, though: it didn’t have to. Another of DragonEye’s user-friendly features was its built-in boomerang mode. At the touch of a button it would return to its Ground Control Module—and would no matter where the controller was at the time, since it homed in on the GCM signal itself.
If only it could make it back in time.
☯
Eighty miles south of Psyche Industries’ San Jose campus, in a soundproof cell buried deep beneath the moonlit gardens of Pairidaeza, there stood another Chair, twin to the one Jonathan Knox had lately occupied.
Unlike Knox, however, the occupant of this Chair was compact and powerfully built, with muscles that rippled as he strained against the wrist and ankle manacles.
Also unlike Knox, this man was screaming.
Psyche Security Chief Hamza Nassiri shifted his gaze from the writhing form to glance again at the readouts. He stroked his beard, a scowl deepened the already-harsh lines of his deeply tanned face. At moments like this, Hamza wished the Holy Quran did not forbid cursing. Circumstances surely warranted it.
The scream cut off abruptly. The man slumped, as much as the restraints would allow. His eyes still bulged out of their sockets, but they no longer held any flicker of awareness, only a vacant stare. Mirroring the vacancy within. Things had been going so well, too. This would have been the very last subject scheduled for processing. And then it had to happen: tabula rasa syndrome. What had been a living mind was now a slate wiped clean.
A regrettable mishap, though not altogether unexpected: the nanometer scale electrodes now circulating through the subject’s brain had only been engineered to administer micro-stimulation therapies. And while these same nanotrodes could deliver enough power to erase inconvenient memories, it meant amping them up to the brink of overload. Small wonder, then, if the procedure occasionally misfired, especially with a subject who resisted as fiercely as this one had.
The instantaneous discharge, dealt from deep within the brain, made old fashioned electro-convulsive therapy seem a mere cold-weather static zap by comparison: rather than losing his memories of the last few hours, the man in the Chair had had all the annals of his life expunged, in less time than it would take to reformat a computer’s hard drive.
This, Hamza’s nominal superior Davoud Ansari would whine, was what came of pushing a technology so far beyond its design parameters.
Hamza hit the switch that released the Chair’s helmet clamps. Deprived of support, the man’s head flopped forward. Blood from his now-slack mouth trickled down his chin to splatter his shirt and tie. The man must have bitten through his tongue when the convulsions hit.
Hamza scowled again. Design parameters, inherent limitations of all kinds, were made to be exceeded. Machines—no less than men—must be pressed into service, into submission to the will of God. He, Hamza, would see to that, if Ansari would not.
No—at best, Ansari was a frail reed. And he was far from being at his best tonight. The Psyche CEO was so distraught over his daughter’s disappearance as to be all but useless.
Hamza was concerned as well, of course, but not like Ansari, not to the point of virtual incapacitation. God willing, they would get the girl back in time. And then …
Well, it would not be the happy ending the grieving father longed for. Far from it. Sometimes submission to the will of God required the sacrifice of innocents.
As it had so many years ago, with that other girl—that whore, Mehri. So very long ago, yet Hamza remembered what he had done as though it were yesterday. And would not hesitate to do the same today or tomorrow.
For just a moment he saw before him once again the wreckage of her lovely face, Mehri’s face. And in it, a ruined, accusatory eye. An eye of blood. Hamza shook himself. He still had the present problem to deal with.
And a call to make. He invoked Ansari’s private, find-me-anywhere line. “Yes?”
Ansari, Hamza knew, was in the Pairidaeza compound this night, up in the residence not so many levels above where Hamza now sat. Even so, his voice seemed to issue from a great distance, from somewhere out on the ragged edge of exhaustion and despair.
“You asked to be informed of the results on this last procedure,” Hamza began. “I regret to advise it did not go well.” He steeled himself for yet another tiresome lecture on the uses and abuses of technology.
It did not come. Instead, Ansari merely asked, “The subject?”
“—Is being disposed of. I am having the garage ready an ADAS vehicle for the purpose as we speak.”
“An ADAS—are you sure that’s the way to go?”
Hamza understood the hesitation. Honda’s Advanced Driver Assist System was a pricey piece of technology in its own right, all the more valuable once Psyche’s techs had got done adding some enhancements of their own.
That, however, was evidently not what was troubling Ansari tonight. “A crash is going to raise suspicions, this close to the visit.”
“The moon sets and the coastal road is lonely,” Hamza intoned. “In darkness and fog its curves become more treacherous still.”
Hamza waited for a reply. When none was forthcoming, he added, “This will be seen as but an unfortunate accident, provided we act swiftly.”
Another long pause. Finally Ansari said, “Everything the way it was?
Identification all in order?”
Hamza reached over and plucked a small block of black leather from the table: the soon-to-be-dead man’s wallet. He flipped it open and glanced at the ID.
There, captioning a holo of the man’s face, was the legend:
Protective Services Battalion 701st Military Police Group (CID)
Department of Defense
“All in order,” Hamza confirmed.
☯
Best guess, the DragonEye was still half a minute out. Marianna’s best guess was none too good, though, since her semi-fried Ground Control Module had stopped picking up ranging signals. She wasn’t even getting visuals now that she’d toggled the UAV’s search beam off to maximize the element of surprise. She just had to hope the light would come back on when and where she needed it.
Meanwhile, the KGB archers up ahead in the darkness had gone silent, likely forming up for one last all-out attack. Sure enough, she could hear them rising from their crouches, recocking their crossbows.
Where in hell was her DragonEye? Could its onboard guidance system have been crippled like the rest of their gear in the enemy’s e-assault? Could it have malfed altogether and flown into a wall? Could it—
Wait one.
If Marianna had been able to see, she’d never have heard it. As it was, her hearing must have been working overtime to compensate for the total lack of visuals, because she could just make out the faintest of whirrs echoing down the midnight corridor.
Hoping to God she wasn’t imagining the sound of the DragonEye’s approach, Marianna keyed the light-up command into her control module. The beam came on full force, directly behind the enemy position. The Shadow KGB foot soldiers wheeled to confront this unexpected intrusion, but there was nothing there to fire at—certainly not with crossbows.
Her own team had no such problem: The DragonEye’s search beam had backlit their erstwhile invisible adversaries into five perfectly silhouetted targets.
“Fire!” Marianna screamed, and cut loose with a blast from her shotgun by way of example. One of the targets cried out and went down for the count. The flexible baton rounds her team had been issued wouldn’t kill you, but a direct hit from a beanbag filled with an ounce or so of number-nine lead shot would make you wish it had.
Dave and Cherie had joined in firing now. Echoes and cordite and after images assaulted her senses, but didn’t stop her from pumping the twelve gauge and scanning for another sitting duck. But there were no more takers. The last comrade standing had his hands so high in the air they nearly brushed the tunnel’s low ceiling.
Hmm, a fully functioning KGBster could have his uses. Marianna switched her torch back on, not caring any longer that it was shining in the visible. She walked through the aftermath of the melee, past where Dave and Cherie were flexicuffing feebly protesting comrades, and right up into the face of the one with his hands up.
He eyed her a moment through the holes in his ninja mask. Then he bolted.
Marianna took aim at the fleeing man, then thought better of it. Sometimes a flight path told you more than an interrogation could. She shifted her twelve-gauge to port arms and took off in pursuit.
By the time she caught up, her quarry had darted through that break in the tunnel wall the DragonEye had spotted earlier. She followed cautiously, wary of booby-traps. But there were none, just the comrade himself, his back to her, bent over a table in the middle of what looked like the dorm-room from hell: unmade bunk beds, empty Stoly bottles, fast-food wrappers everywhere—the Shadow KGB cleaning service must be on strike.
A step to the right and she could see what her subject was doing: tapping at the keyboard of a ruggedized sub-notebook.
“Ostanovis’!” she shouted—Russian for stop—then threw in a “Ruki vyerkh!” (hands up) for good measure.
The guy ignored her, just kept pounding keys. The computer didn’t seem to be cooperating with whatever self-destruct sequence he was trying to initiate, judging by the stream of nonstop curses he was emitting.
Rather than give him time to get it right, Marianna took aim and shot him in the back.
The comrade pitched forward, expelled a gasp, and dropped to the floor, taking the laptop with him. He lay there in a crumpled heap, moaning. The computer lying alongside him looked to be in marginally better shape.
Holding her breath—bodily hygiene didn’t seem to rank much higher than good housekeeping on the fugitive KGB value scale—Marianna knelt and bound her captive’s wrists and ankles with injection-molded nylon cuffs. Then she turned her attention to the laptop.
Her gamble had paid off. The machine’s die-cast magnesium alloy case had absorbed the brunt of the crash landing, and the data, stored on nonvolatile solid-state memory, was never in much danger to begin with. Not from the fall, anyway. The comrade might have wiped it given a few more seconds to overcome whatever software roadblock he’d run into. But to attempt that, he’d had to key in the sysadmin password first.
Intercepting him between the first action and the second meant that Marianna was now the proud possessor of a Shadow KGB datastore, intact, decrypted, and wide open to CROM’s inspection.
She’d have to hand it over to CROM’s techies in short order, but a brief peek first couldn’t hurt. Not after she’d carefully canceled the final Erase-All command her friend on the floor had been trying to invoke.
She called up a root directory listing. The filenames were all in Russian, of course, but over the past few months she’d seen enough other seized Shadow KGB machines to judge that the contents of this one were all pretty run-of-the-mill.
Save that there, midst the sea of Unicode Cyrillic, a lone string of Latinate letters had surfaced. It conferred upon a multi-megabyte file a strange unRussian-sounding name:
QuMRANN.