He inhaled again, deeply, and closed his eyes for just one heartbeat. They were no longer actively hurting her, but she hovered weakly on the very brink of unconsciousness from what they'd already done. This close, the link between them clawed at him with talons of fire, and he knew exactly where she was. Above him and to the left. The virtual tour replayed itself in the back of a mind that was ice and steel over a roiling sea of lava, and his eyes opened once more. The exercise room, he thought. The third-floor, east end of the building. There were three ways he could get there from here, but two of them led through the main foyer and past several “public” rooms on the ground floor. The third was a little longer, but the back stairs led past what had been designated as staff bedrooms when the lodge was built. It seemed unlikely that anyone was simply sitting in his room in the middle of the day. He might be wrong about that, but he had to pick a route, and he turned towards the stairs.
* * *
Allison Chou raised her head weakly. Red waves of agony washed through her, and her arms felt broken, aching with the strain of supporting her weight. She was barely conscious, but something . . . something had reached into her hopelessness and despair. She felt it. It was coming closer, and it was focused with deadly purpose upon her . . . and filled with a terrible, burning anger.
Her brain was barely working. She didn't have the least idea what these people wanted from Jacques, but she'd already realized they were going to kill her in the end. It was the only way it could end, and after the last two hours, part of her hoped that end would come soon. But it was only a part of her, and the rest reached out to that flame of hatred. Its searing fury ought to have terrified her, a tiny fragment of her mind reflected, but she'd learned what true terror was. And, even more than that, she knew that furnace flame's purpose. She rolled her eyes to one side, seeing the back of the man who had hurt her so terribly, and as she felt that seething tide of hatred come steadily closer, she smiled.
* * *
Alfred went up the final flight of stairs with the pulse rifle at his shoulder, trained up the stairwell. He reached the top and stepped out into the third-floor hallway.
* * *
Allison licked her lips. It had to be now, she thought. She couldn't be wrong about what she was feeling, and there was a pulser on the desk beside the HD her torturer was watching. He had the audio turned down, but she recognized the sound of her own screams, and her mind flinched away from the memory of what had wrung them from her. But that pulser was too close to his hand.
“Please,” she managed to whisper. “Please, let me go.”
He heard her, and he looked up, his smile evil and hungry as he realized she was conscious once more.
“Sure, honey. We'll let you go,” he sneered, and she twisted weakly as he picked up the neural whip and stepped towards her once more. “We just can't let you go yet, though,” he told her, and she moaned as he pressed the button and the whip began to hum once more, but every step towards her was one step away from the pulser. “First you have to do a little something for us.” His eyes glittered. “Don't worry, I'm sure it will come to you.”
“Please, don't!” she moaned through a sudden choking surge of terror, but he only laughed and raised the dully gleaming baton of the whip.
* * *
A sudden, sharper stab of fear went through Alfred. It wasn't his; it was hers, but he tasted a spike of panic all his own as he realized she was doing something. He didn't know what, but he'd felt the flare of her determination. She was . . . she was deliberately goading her tormentor!
He was in two worlds at once. In one, he raced down a hallway on feet which were preposterously quiet for a man of his size; in another, his throat closed with another's terror; and in both of them, the monster was awake and hungry.
* * *
Giuseppe Ardmore paused for a long, lingering moment, savoring the fear in her eyes, tasting the whimpers she couldn't suppress however hard she tried, watching her try to shrink away from him, letting her hear the hum of the whip and remember what it had already done to her. The power burned through him, sweeter and more addictive than any drug, and he cocked his wrist.
The door crashed open behind him, and he spun in disbelief as a complete stranger, at least twelve centimeters taller than he was, came through it with a pulse rifle in his hands.
* * *
It hit Alfred Harrington with an instant totality and clarity that he knew even then would live in his nightmares forever. Allison Chou stood in the center of the large, sunny room, surrounded by exercise equipment, with her hands held above her head by a tightly knotted rope. Her wrists were raw and oozing from the rope's bite, she was three-quarters naked, hanging heavily from those wrists, and he recognized the red, ugly marks stippled across her skin. He would have recognized them even without the hard, painful muscle spasms wracking her long after the marks had been inflicted.
Even without the neural whip in the hand of the big, fair-haired man between her and the door.
The pulse rifle was at Alfred's shoulder, but Allison's torturer was directly between the two of them. If he fired, the darts would rip straight through his target and hit her. He saw the shock, the total surprise, on the other man's face. Saw the panic which followed the surprise. But whatever else he might have been, his brain obviously worked quickly. His eyes widened as he, too, realized Alfred couldn't shoot without hitting Allison. He spun towards the door, simultaneously circling to be sure he remained between her and Alfred, and the neural whip shrilled as his thumb shoved the rheostat to lethal levels.
Alfred never hesitated. He took one long stride forward, and his eyes were ice. His left hand retained its grip on the pulse rifle's forestock, and his right hand brought the butt down from his shoulder, swinging it below his left.
Giuseppe Ardmore's scream was cut short as the rifle came up in a short, vicious arc that shattered his jaw. The impact was so powerful it lifted him from his feet, and he flew backward, losing his grip on the neural whip as he crashed to the floor. The pain was worse than anything he'd ever experienced. It exploded through him, smashing any vestige of rational thought, but pure survival instinct took over. His hands pushed at the floor, shoving as he scrambled away from the door on his back.
Alfred Harrington took two more long, quick strides. His eyes were cold, focused, and the pulse rifle rose in his hands again. He slammed one foot into the other man's chest, driving him flat on the floor once more. A hand clutched at his ankle; another rose in a useless gesture of self-defense . . . or an even more useless plea for mercy. But there was no mercy in Alfred Harrington. Not that day, not for that man. He was retribution, and he was justice . . . and he was death.
The butt of his pulse rifle came down on Giuseppe Ardmore's forehead like the hammer of Thor driven by all the power of his back and shoulders and hard, hating heart.
* * *
Alfred glared down at the dead man, and all he felt in that moment was regret. Regret that he couldn't kill him all over again. The monster roared within him, seeking fresh victims, and Alfred's soul quivered with the need to feed it.
But then he closed his eyes. He made himself inhale and he turned away from that hunger to something infinitely more important.
* * *
Allison felt her head wobbling as weakness, shock, fear, and pain washed over her, yet even as she hovered once more on the edge of darkness, she recognized him. She'd known—known, without question or doubt—who that flame of hatred had been. Who'd been coming for her. She had no idea how she'd known, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that she knew no power in heaven or hell could have stopped him from coming for her.
“Alfred,” she whispered, and then his hands—those strong, deadly, gentle hands—were there. She felt them freeing her, felt them gathering her close, and behind them she felt him. She didn't even know him, yet she was the most precious thing in his universe, and she let herself sink into the cleansing furnace heat of his need for her.
* *
*
Alfred felt her droop in his arms. She weighed so little. How could someone so small be larger than all the rest of the universe put together?
His jaw tightened as he felt the uncontrollable residual muscle spasms lashing through her. He gathered her close, pressing his face against her sweat soaked hair, feeling her cheek against his chest, and he wanted—needed—to hold her there forever. To soothe her until the spasms faded and the pain vanished. But he couldn't. There was too little time.
He set her gently in a chair. It was hard—hard to let go, and hard because her hands clung to him so tightly—but he did it. Then he stripped off his windbreaker and draped it around her. She looked so small inside its vastness, but it least it covered her, and he recovered the pulse rifle and slung it over his shoulder. Then he gathered her up once more, laid her gently across his other shoulder, drew his pulser with his right hand, and headed back down the stairs.
* * *
“Rinaldo, you asshole,” Kuprian Grazioli growled as he trudged around the corner of the building, “you're supposed to be at least halfway awake! The next time I com you, you damned well better—!”
Grazioli's complaint chopped off as he realized why Rinaldo Mönch hadn't responded to his com request about the sound which had drawn Grazioli's attention. And he knew what that muted “Crack!” had been, as well. Lost as it had been in the sound of the wind in the trees, he'd half-thought he'd imagined it when it wasn't repeated again. Now he knew better.
He could see only the back of the chaise lounge, but that was all he needed to see. White stuffing had been blasted out of its back, just at head level for someone sitting in it. Whatever had done the blasting had obviously been traveling at a very high velocity, and the center of the tufted white flower of ruptured stuffing was a dark red, glistening rose.
He ran towards the chaise lounge and grabbed for his com again.
* * *
“Tobin!”
“What?” Tobin Manischewitz looked up from his paperwork as his name crackled from the com.
“Kuprian,” the voice identified itself. “Rinaldo's dead! Somebody put a pulser dart between his eyes!”
“What?!” Manischewitz exploded out of his chair. “You're sure?”
“Of course I'm goddamned sure!” Grazioli shot back. “I'm standing here looking at what's left of his head! And I tried Riley before I tried you—he didn't answer.”
Manischewitz' expression tightened. If Brandão hadn't answered, that meant whoever had killed Mönch was already inside the lodge. Not only that, he'd known enough to go for the security post in the kitchen first!
For just a moment, his brain refused to function. This couldn't have happened. It just wasn't possible! Even if Benton-Ramirez y Chou had gone straight to the authorities—even if he'd convinced the BSC to back an operation right here on Beowulf despite Prescott-Chartwell—he couldn't have found them yet!
Could they have somehow traced the com signal after all? But that's crazy! We put our own com satellite into orbit and bounced the first signal off of it, and that's the best software in the galaxy. We bounced it through so many nodes God couldn't've unraveled it yet. There's no way they could have back-traced it this quickly! Unless she had a tracer on her we didn't know about? But we checked. And even if she did—
He shook himself. How they'd done it mattered far less than the fact that someone had done it. But if it was the SBI or the BSC, where the hell was the rest of the attack? No SBI SWAT team would have taken out one perimeter guard and then penetrated the lodge without backup! And while the BSC was capable of finesse, it also believed in overwhelming firepower delivered in a single, finely focused strike designed to paralyze its intended victims before they could even begin to think about responding. So what kind of—?
He stabbed the all-stations button on his com.
“Com check!” he barked, and made himself stand motionless as the startled members of his team responded.
They came up four men short: Brandão, Mönch, Sugimoto . . . And Ardmore.
Shit! The damned power receptor! Manischewitz thought. Whoever this bastard is, he sucked one man out to check the receptor, took him, and made him talk. And then he walked right through our perimeter, killed Riley, and—
Then the implications of Ardmore's silence hit him squarely between the eyes. If he'd taken out Giuseppe, then that meant he had to've—
His brain was still racing after that thought, his thumb already stabbing the all-stations button again, when Kuprian Grazioli came back up on the com.
“Tobin! Somebody's coming back out the—!”
Manischewitz heard a pulser whine over the com, and then Grazioli's shout chopped off with abrupt finality.
“Somebody's gotten inside the lodge and the bastard is headed back out!” he barked into the com. “Whoever it is, he's breaking for the west! Palacios, Tangevec, Mészáros—you three hold the perimeter. He may try the ravine—if he does, kill his arse! The rest of you, head for the back veranda! We'll link up there!”
He went on talking as he jerked open a desk drawer and snatched his own pulser out of it.
“Whoever the bastard is, he's already taken out four of us—five with Grazioli—so watch your arses! I'm guessing he got through to Giuseppe before Grazioli found Mönch, so he probably has the woman with him. I want her back alive if we can get her, but the main thing is to make sure this son-of-a-bitch is dead. If that means losing her, too, that's just the way it is.”
* * *
Alfred swore as the man standing beside the chaise lounge tumbled backward. The Descorso's dart had struck just above his upper lip and hydrostratic shock blasted a cloud of bone splinters, finely separated brain matter, and blood from the ruined back of his skull. But he'd been shouting into a com when Alfred fired, and Alfred's heart turned to ice as he heard someone else shouting from the wind-tossed woods to the north.
His only real chance had been to get in, find Allison, get her back out again, and reach the waiting taxi before the Manpower killers realized what had happened. Only he hadn't, and he had few illusions about the kind of men he faced.
He almost turned to make a break for the woods, but a burst of pulser fire ripped over his head in the long, rippling crack of the darts' supersonic passage. He snarled another curse and took the only option he had, sprinting not for the woods but to the south, circling to put the power receptor's shed between him and that rifleman to the north.It covered him for a few, precious moments; then another burst shrieked past him. He jinked and swerved as he ran, then flung himself down into the ravine.
A third burst ripped into the inside of the ravine's southern wall, pulverising grass, dirt, and leaves, but the shooter could no longer see them. He had to be shooting blind, not that it was going to matter much in the end. They knew where he'd gone into the ravine, and that bastard to the north was closer to its western end than he was. They'd post that one to watch that end, send someone else to watch the eastern end, and then they'd systematically close in on him.
He slid Allison off his left shoulder as gently as he could and snatched the captured pulse rifle off his right shoulder. At least the man he'd taken it from had been carrying three spare magazines. That meant he was unlikely to run out of ammunition before they closed in and killed both of them.
He elbow-crawled up to the brink of the ravine and raised his head cautiously. The dry water course was almost two meters deep at this point, which was good, and he had wide fields of fire in all directions. Unfortunately, he could only cover one of them at a time, and yet another fusilade of pulser darts screamed overhead. These had come from a different direction, farther east than the other fire, and his eye caught a flicker of movement as the man who'd fired darted towards another of the lodge's outbuildings, closer to the ravine.
The pulse rifle was at his shoulder, like an old, familiar companion, and his right forefinger squeezed.
The running man seemed to trip in mid-air, then went down in the bone-breakin
g slide of eighty kilos of dead meat, and the monster snarled inside him. That was five of them. At least they'd by God know they'd been in a fight!
The thought flashed through him, and it was poison bitter on his tongue as he darted a glance over his shoulder at Allison before he turned back towards the enemy. It didn't matter how many of them he killed before they killed him, for he'd failed, and she was going to die anyway.
Stop that! Maybe you have, but she's not dead yet, and neither are you! Keep it that way, you stupid bastard! And—
“Alfred?”
His eyes widened as Allison called his name weakly.
“Yes, Allison. It's me.” He was astounded by how gently his voice came out, but he dared not look back at her.
“You . . . came for me,” she said.
“Of course I did.” He considered lying to her, telling her everything was going to be fine, but he knew she would read the lie the instant he said it, and so he shook his head. “It's not looking too good just now, though.”
She astonished him with a ghost of a laugh, but the laugh ended in a sob. A sob of hurt, he knew, but also of inner pain. The pain of knowing he was going to die, as well.
“Here!” He pulled the uni-link from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Screen the cops and tell them to home on your signal. Maybe they'll get here in time.”
He knew there was no hope in hell of that, but he was astounded by the sudden explosion of excitement which echoed through their link as she caught it in trembling fingers. He started to say something more, then whirled as a burst of fire came from the direction of the main lodge. He returned fire and heard someone shout in alarm, although he was certain he hadn't hit anyone. There were at least four or five of them coming from that direction, though. He was going to have to take his chances on what might still come from the woods, and he flung himself across to the south side of the ravine. He got there just in time to catch one of them rising to dart forward while the others covered him. Darts screamed everywhere, but they were firing blind, without a hard fix on his position, and he squeezed off a quick three-round burst.