James Swallow - Icarus Effect

A ring of consoles, server units, and eclectic computing hardware circled the cable trunk. Every one of the decks was alive with screens and holos showing complex, overlapping panes of data. D-Bar dropped into a canvas chair and set to work. Lebedev and Powell watched like a pair of sentinels, faces grim.

Anna saw the flash drive, the case broken open and festooned with jury-rigged connectors. Nearby, another of D-Bar's team had Saxon's vu phone wired up to a console, which in turn was cabled to a collapsible satellite antenna.

"Here we go," D-Bar said, cracking his knuckles. "Data sources are linked in parallel. All we need to do is ping the main Tyrant server and the rest is easy."

Lebedev folded his arms. "How much risk is there to us? We're opening a live connection to the Tyrants. What's to stop them backtracking it to this location?"

"Agreed," Powell added. "We could be calling an air strike down on ourselves."

D-Bar made a face, as if those were the dumbest questions he'd ever been asked. "Okay, forgetting the fact that I'm bouncing our signal through a hundred other locational IPs around the country before we even send it, forgetting the copious layers of active subnet masks being run in real time by my troop of monkeys here"-he threw a wave at his team-"not to mention nigh-invulnerable firewalls written by yours truly, there's this." The hacker laid his hand on a black box lined with glowing indicators. "It's a speed-imager. I need to get only a couple milliseconds of access to duplicate what we need from the Tyrant server. Then we can disconnect and run a virtual analog of it right here, without them ever knowing we were there."

"So there's no chance we'll be detected?" Saxon asked.

D-Bar grinned. "I never said that. But if I screw up, the last thing we'll see is the sky going white as some orbital laser array burns us off the face of the earth. So why worry, yeah?"

"Yeah," Saxon replied flatly.

Lebedev sighed. "Do it."

Anna stood back and watched. She really didn't know what to expect; on the screens, timer windows opened as a web of virtual system nodes unfolded, depicting a representation of the connection, the servers, the target. D-Bar's face became a study in calm as he plunged into the lines of code. His augmented hands were a blur across the keyboard in front of him, and flashes strobed down the connector cables that wound from a terminal behind his ear to the console.

Saxon looked up at the grimy skylights over their heads. "Nothing yet."

Rods of data reached from node to node across the screen, the alarm timer falling with each passing moment. At zero, the network would go into lockdown and the tiny window of opportunity to invade the server would slam shut. It would be the virtual equivalent of sending up a flare in front of the Tyrants.

Nodes turned green where the hacker team had been successful, others blinked red where the invading code was not taking root. Anna realized that D-Bar and the others here in the warehouse were not the only members of Juggernaut working on this digital attack; other inputs from across the globe were leading their own assaults. But of Janus, there was no sign.

"Ten seconds," Powell said, reading off the time. "Can you do this or not?"

"Do it?" D-Bar sniggered. "It's already done!" With a flash, all the nodes went green, and the hacker lolled back in his chair, jerking the connectors from his skull socket. "Piece of cake." The film of sweat over his pale face put the lie to his words.

With five seconds left on the clock, the connection was severed; but now a new construct was blossoming on the holographic screens. A meshing of three complex clusters of information-the flash drive, the vu-phone's memory core, and the duplicate server.

D-Bar saw her staring into the display. "We still gotta work fast," he said. "The ghost copy of the Tyrant server won't maintain parity for long.

It's like trying to catch an echo. Longer you hold on to it, faster it degrades."

"Open it up," said Saxon. "Let's see what I almost died for."

A fourth data node emerged from the shared flux and blossomed like a flower made of newsprint, petal-pages spilling out. "The Killing Floor," said Lebedev. "This is the means through which the Illuminati commune with the Tyrants, the method they use to give them their targets and their missions."

Anna glimpsed vast libraries of files as they swept past. On some of them were names she had seen from her own investigations, but many were unknown to her. "We have to get a drop on them," she said, thinking aloud. "We need to know the name of their next target before they attack it."

"Exactly," agreed Lebedev. "Find us a face and a name," he told D-Bar.

"Look for something connected to an operative named Yelena Federova, code name 'Red.'" Saxon pointed at the display. "She was deployed separately from the rest of the Tyrants. That has to mean something."

Anna tensed with a moment of memory. "I think… she was the one who tried to murder me."

"Likely," Saxon agreed, with a grim nod. "She enjoys the close-up work."

"Got something," D-Bar announced. On the screen, a single blue-haloed file moved to fill the image. The image seemed grainy and hazed.

"Parity is starting to drop quicker than I expected. Better make this fast."

Powell stepped closer to read the data presented before them. "Operative ident 'Red' tasked to shadow target-designate 'Alpha,' " he read aloud. "Action: terminate with extreme prejudice."

"That's it," said Lebedev. "But who is Alpha?"

"Gimme a second…" D-Bar typed in a few commands, and on a tertiary screen a new image appeared; a publicity still of a man in his sixties, with gray hair and glasses. He wore a dark suit and an expression of patrician earnestness, both of which were impeccably tailored.

Anna had seen him before, from a skybox balcony in downtown Washington. "That's William Taggart. He's the founder of the Humanity Front."

Saxon raised an eyebrow. "What, that anti-augmentation bunch? The ones always whining about 'science gone too far'?"

"Why would the Tyrants be targeting him?" She turned to Lebedev. "He wants the same thing as the ones holding their leashes! Restriction and regulation of human augmentation technology. Why kill him?"

"More important," Powell broke in, "why haven't they done it already?" He glanced at Saxon. "This Federova woman. If she's already shadowing Taggart, could she ice him?"

He nodded. "In a heartbeat. She's a phantom. Could make it look like natural death and no one would ever know she'd been there."

Anna saw something on Saxon's face as he said the words. "What is it?"

"Powell's got a good point. If Taggart's the next mark, why isn't he a corpse?"

She studied the image for a moment, thinking back to what she recalled from the last series of briefings she'd had at the agency. "Search for a connection between Taggart and the United Nations," she told D-Bar.

New data unfolded before them. Anna saw images of the Palais des Nations, the foundation and European headquarters of the UN in Geneva.

"There's stuff here from a sealed memo to the Secret Service from the U.S. State Department," said the hacker. "Designating Taggart as a citizen of note. He's going to be part of the American delegation in a meeting with some of the movers and shakers at the UN."

"The vote," Lebedev muttered. "Taggart's going to the United Nations to spearhead the push for a ballot on augmentation control."

Saxon gave a dry chuckle. "Huh. Oh, yeah, now I get it. Makes sense." He glanced at Anna. "You want to know why Taggart is still breathing?

Because they don't want to kill him quietlike. They want to do it out in the open, in front of people. They want an event."

"The founder of the Humanity Front, murdered by an augmented killer in full view of the global media, on the steps of the Palais des Nations