He had the mass and the muscle. He was genetically engineered to be a superior soldier. Faster and stronger. More durable.
Cutting-edge genetic science made him a monster.
I used one of the oldest bits of practical physics. A turnbuckle. It’s torsion and leverage. Only simpler machine is the wheel.
I turned the cloth loop until he gagged.
Until he choked.
Until there was not enough room inside that loop for a human throat to exist in any useful structure.
And then I tightened it some more.
If the bones and cartilage made any sounds as they collapsed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound of my own screams.
Chap. 9
When I let him go, empty meat fell sideways.
I lay there. Gasping. Hurt. Flooded with adrenaline. Seeing exploding stars in the darkness.
I lay there for maybe a full minute, unable to move.
When I finally peeled myself slowly — so damn slowly — from the floor, all the lights in the building switched back on.
And Echo Team — my own goddamn team — came pouring out of the stairwell, guns up and out, shouting, yelling, staring.
I was covered in blood, naked as an egg, and I still held the coiled flag in my hands.
I looked down at it.
It would have been extremely cool if it was an American flag. Very poetic.
It was from the Rotary Club.
Less poetry. Still effective as a son of a bitch.
Chap. 10
The postscript is brief.
Bishop’s great escape plan was South America, a face job, a false identity, and a villa in Argentina. Bug picked that apart in seconds.
They carted Bishop off to the hospital, and then he headed off to Gitmo for a long, long time of soul-searching and water sports.
He should have taken the deal.
Really should have.
Borrowed Power
NOTE: Parts of this story are set between the novels Assassin’s Code and Extinction Machine. If you haven’t yet read Assassin’s Code, there are some spoilers in this story.
Prologue
They say that gods cease to exist when people stop believing in them.
Others say that the gods of Olympus and Valhalla and all of the other pantheons are merely sleeping, waiting for that one person in whose breast a spark of belief is rekindled.
Secrets are like that. Particularly the kinds of secrets governments hide and people like me kill to either defend or destroy.
A secret doesn’t stop being important because it’s forgotten. Or buried.
These secrets wait like dreaming gods until one person reaches into the darkness to stir them to wakefulness.
Part One
1983
Chap. 1
The killer descended from the glimmering lights of Paris into a black underworld of rushing water, stagnant pollution, raw sewage, savage rats, and forgotten bones.
He carried no map, but the route was imprinted onto the front of his mind. He went deeper and deeper into the underworld, carrying with him the tools of his trade. A gun, a knife, a silver garrote, and a mind far colder than the waters that rushed through the bowels of the earth.
It had been the work of four weeks to obtain legitimate permits and credentials from the correct departments within the streets management offices, then copy those documents, and return the originals. If anyone ever checked, everything would be in its proper place. The level of proficiency at which the killer worked was both a source of amusement among his peers and the reason this man had never failed in a field mission. The jokes at his expense—“My grandmother’s slower, but she’s old”—were swapped out of his earshot. Or, at least, so the jokers thought. The killer usually heard what was being said, though through means that were only ever supposed to be used on the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans. Never on the home team.
The killer did not recognize most of his peers as being on the same team as himself. He had a separate and entirely personal agenda that he chose not to share.
Even the members of his own team — none of whom were on this particular mission — knew only what he wanted them to know. Just as his superiors knew only what he wanted them to know, and that included many of the details in his personal file. Most of it was a fabrication that had taken years, much thought, and a great deal of money to construct. Everything there — photos of his childhood, his school records, his medical history, even the samples of blood and hair on file for DNA testing — belonged to other men. Dead men whose lives he had borrowed, combined, and then otherwise erased.
The killer was as certain as he could be that his real name existed in no database in any computer on earth.
Except Pangaea.
His computer.
A computer the killer had obtained in the way he’d obtained many useful tools in his personal arsenal. He’d killed the man who built it and the men who guarded it.
And then he completely rebuilt the computer to suit his own needs.
Now Pangaea was a killer, too. Like him in many ways. It intruded where it did not belong and destroyed things that were too valuable to let stand. For Pangaea the path of destruction was through the memory banks of other computers. It sought certain information and retrieved it, often deleting the information on the target mainframes, then it deleted all traces of its own presence.
The killer spent a great deal of time erasing all records that a computer system called Pangaea ever existed.
One of Pangaea’s secret weapons was a new feature that the killer had developed and added to its operational system. A subroutine called “Kreskin,” designed to search for patterns and collate any relevant information into a set of projections as close to human intuition and guesswork as a binary computer mind could achieve. At least with the current technology.
That pattern search had located a target the killer had sought for a long time.
It was why he was down here in the sewer.
It was why he was hunting in the darkness like the predator he was.
He moved as quietly as possible, running lightly along the narrow ledges to avoid splashing through the sluggish runoff from last night’s rain. The storm drains were vast, stretching for twenty-one thousand kilometers beneath the sprawl of the city above. These tunnels held the drinking and non-drinking water mains, telecommunication cables, pneumatic cables, and traffic light management cables. Following the tunnels took planning. Getting lost was simple. Dying down here was common.
He took care. He planned every step.
If his information was correct, he was near the target.
The killer slowed to a walk and then stopped at the entrance to a chamber that was part of the channeling system that took water from dozens of culverts and combined it in a larger chute that flowed to the Seine. He crouched in the shadows, silent and unmoving, allowing his senses to fill him with every bit of detail about where he was and what was here. He was not a man to make assumptions, even about an empty tunnel.
There was a rusted service door in the far wall. A weak bulb in a grilled cage mounted above the door threw dirty yellow light over the churning water. A child’s ragdoll bobbed in the current, and the killer paused for a moment to look at it. The doll was dressed in the checkerboard clothes of a harlequin jester, with bells on its hat and a broad smile of stitched red silk.