James Swallow - Icarus Effect

Hardesty leaned back in his chair. "As we're on the subject, maybe the limey can explain why it is he didn't just double-tap the creep the moment he found him?"

"I told you. I could have brought him in."

"You don't get to make that choice," Hardesty replied. "You're not in command of this unit.

We're not your little PMC scout troop, Saxon. You lost that, remember?"

Saxon studied the other man. "Maybe if you were actually on the deck with the rest of us, instead of hiding behind a camo net four hundred meters away, I might have some respect for your opinion, Yank" He gave the last word a sneer. "Don't make the mistake of thinking you see everything down that rifle scope."

"What I did see was you talking to the mark," insisted the sniper. "And someone else, too, maybe?"

"Kontarsky was the only one in the room," Saxon replied, a little quicker than he would have liked. From the corner of his eye, he saw

Hermann, Federova, and Barrett watching the exchange, gauging his reaction.

Do you know what you are doing, mercenary? The ghost-voice's questions returned to him. Do you know what master you serve?

The misgivings muttering at the edges of his thoughts were there, clear and undeniable. Saxon broke eye contact with Hardesty as Namir stood up and crossed the room to a window.

"I understand your intentions," said the commander. "But I need all of you to follow orders when I give them. We may not have allegiance to a flag anymore, but we all must share allegiance to the Tyrants. If we don't have that, then we're no better than Juggernaut or any of the other anarchists out there." He threw a look toward Saxon and Hermann. "You two are our newest recruits. You both understand that, don't you?"

"Of course," replied Hermann, without hesitation. In turn, Saxon gave a wary nod.

Namir went on. "There are reasons for everything we do. Reasons for every order I give you. Every mission." He smiled slightly, the craggy face softening for a brief moment. "We cannot bring stability if we don't have equilibrium in our ranks." Namir's gaze crossed to Hardesty, and his tone hardened again. "Clear?"

The sniper pursed his lips. "Clear," he repeated.

He will never tell us, Saxon realized. Whoever is pulling the strings, he's never going to pull back the curtain on them. The question that came next pressed to the front of his thoughts: Can I live with that?

In the months since Namir had plucked him from the field hospital in Australia, Saxon had earned more money than he had in years of service with Belltower and to the British Crown. The Tyrants had fitted him with high-spec augmentation upgrades, given him access to weapons and hardware that had been beyond his reach in the SAS or as a military contractor. Downtime between missions was spent at secure resorts, the likes of which were open only to corporate execs and the very rich. And the missions… the missions were the most challenging he'd ever had.

Putting aside Hardesty's irritating manner, Saxon meshed well with all the Tyrant team members. He couldn't deny that he liked the work.

They were free of all the paperwork and second-guessing he'd waded through as someone else's line soldier. None of the Tyrants wasted time saluting and sweating the trivial crap; they just got on with the business of soldiering, and the appeal of that simple fact held Ben Saxon tight.

He liked being here. Despite all the doubts, it still felt right. After all the two- or three-man operations, the tag-and-bags, the terminations and infiltrations, and then the Moscow gig, Saxon felt as if he had graduated. He was in; but part of him remained troubled, and it annoyed him that he couldn't fully articulate it.

Was it the secrets? It seemed foolish to consider it; as a spec ops soldier, he'd spent most of his career working in the dark… but with the

British Army and then with Belltower, he'd at least had some grasp on what he was risking his life for.

In the humid night air of the field hospital, Namir had offered him a second chance. He had offered the opportunity to make a difference, but more than that, Namir had offered Saxon trust.

Or perhaps, just the illusion of it. There were other operations going on, he was certain. Tyrant missions that he wasn't supposed to be aware of; he knew for a fact that Federova and Hardesty had been deployed to the United States, Japan, and India on untraceable black-bag jobs.

Once more, any question about who chose their targets or what they were was not going to be answered.

Do you know what master you serve?

He decided then that for the moment, the questions the shadowy hacker Janus had posed would go no further.

Namir turned from the window. "It's clear to me that we've reached an important juncture here." Hardesty, Federova, and Barrett abruptly stood up, with Saxon and Hermann reacting just a second later. For a moment, the ghost of a cold smile danced on Hardesty's lips.

"About time," said Barrett.

Namir nodded to the big man. "Open the study, will you?"

Barrett nodded and crossed to the wall where The Flute Player hung. He whispered something Saxon didn't catch and a seam opened on silent hydraulics. The wall retracted into itself to reveal more rooms beyond. Saxon caught sight of a dark, windowless space, weapons racks, and workstations.

"Yelena?" Namir inclined his head toward Federova.

The woman's hand blurred as she pulled a weapon from a pocket, a boxy plastic handgun lined with a yellow-and-black hazard strip. She turned it on Hermann and pulled the trigger.

A thick dart buzzed from the muzzle and hit the German in the neck; Saxon heard the hum of a tazer discharge and Hermann moaned, his body going rigid. The younger man fell, his watch cap falling from his head.

"What-?" Saxon looked up as a second dart struck him in the chest. He had an instant to register the bite of the contact needles in his skin before a second stun charge lashed into him.

The Ohama Center-Washington, D.C.-United States of America

The message brought her to the doors of the conference center, the fading light of evening lit by the glow from inside the glass-and-steel building. A gallery of holograms formed a promenade from the street to the main doors, each of them moving through cycles showing venue information and events listings.

She moved closer, her senses sharpened and acute; for the moment, the fatigue gnawing at her had been beaten back. Kelso knew she'd pay for it later-but for now she was focused and alert.

Over the entrance, a banner announced the name of the seminar that was about to begin: No Better-The Myth of Human Augmentation. She immediately recognized the title. The ebook that it was based on had been hovering around the top ten of the Picus Network best-seller list forever, along with its various audio and video versions, not to mention the frequent references to it on the chat-show news circuit. She glanced up to see the face of the author smiling down from one of the holoscreens. William Taggart's warm, fatherly eyes watched her from behind a pair of understated glasses, wearing the same expression of compassionate concern that graced the back cover of every copy of No Better, and every flyer for his lobby group, the Humanity Front.

Taggart had founded his organization with one goal in mind-to disabuse society at large of the idea that human augmentation technology was a positive development. As Taggart's people would put it, cybernetic implants served only to dilute a person's humanity, making them less than what they were instead of more.

Anna found the Humanity Front's rhetoric a little hard to take, though. The augmentations she possessed had improved her, and that was something she'd never been in doubt about-and when she thought about the facets of her life that made her feel less human, her implants weren't at the root of it. She frowned and pushed that thought away.