Limitless (19 page)

His mother had asked if I was all right. That was… uncommon.

My mother had died a couple years earlier, and while we’d been on good terms toward the end, it hadn’t exactly been the warmest relationship of my life. Not that I’d had a great many warm relationships. She and I had butted heads in my adolescence because I wanted to be my own person, grow and explore the world, and she wanted to keep me safe from monsters that would have used me for their own purposes. It was a long-running series of arguments that always culminated in her imprisoning me in a metal box she kept in the basement in order to keep me in line. And it worked. It was a beautiful limiter of my desire to rebel.

It had also cast something of a sour pall over our relationship once I had escaped said house and wasn’t subject to her authority anymore. Stunted our ability to get along as adults. Not that I was much of an adult, still, now twenty-one.

My phone rang, a harsh, discordant noise that sounded more than a little off-key compared to the ringtone I’d had yesterday. I pulled my broken phone out of my pocket and stared at the cracked faceplate, trying to read the caller ID through the shattered glass. I slid a finger across the screen and prayed it would answer. It did.

“Sienna?” the high, near-panicked female voice came from the other end of the line before I’d even said anything. “Are you there?”

“I’m here, Ariadne,” I said. Ariadne Fraser was the head of the administrative side of my little agency, putatively my co-head. We worked together and had for years. It was a relatively easy familiarity, though her hair had greyed more over the last few years than I would have believed possible. Or maybe she just hadn’t had time to dye it with all we had going on. She damned sure hadn’t had time for much of a life.

“Should only be a few minutes,” Webster said as he came back. I pointed to my phone and gave him that tight expression that you’re federally mandated to give when someone finds you on the phone and you don’t want to interrupt your conversation to tell them to shut it. “Oh. Right.”

“I saw the news,” she said, sounding a little more urgent than usual. “What’s going on over there?”

“Things are blowing up,” I said, nonchalant.

“I know, that’s why I called,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Things are blowing up.”

“Yeah, but—wait, why would you assume I’m not fine?”

She spoke slowly because apparently I’m an idiot. “Because things are blowing up.”

“It’s a big city, London,” I said, a little defensive. “How do you know I was even anywhere near that—” I just stopped. “Right. It’s me.”

“It’s you.”

“Well, I
am
fine,” I said. “Now.”

“What happened?” she asked. “Start at the beginning.”

“Some guy is hunting down old Omega, the folks we gave shelter to during the war,” I said. “He’s got a couple of accomplices, a bomb maker and a lady with knives. Seems like he’s got a personal problem with Omega and anyone associated with it.”

There was a pause. “Does that include you? What with your own fleeting association with them in the war?”

“Apparently,” I said tightly. “He says I’m last, though.” Webster looked a little alarmed at that but said nothing. I’d told him while he was taking my statement on the whole ordeal, and he hadn’t looked any happier about it then, either.

“What can you tell me about him?” she asked, all business again.

“Not much,” I said. “White guy, looked from the edge of his mouth and his eyes like he was twenties or thirties, but since he’s a meta he could be hundreds of years old and still look like that.”

“Any idea what his power is?” she asked. “Our database isn’t that impressive at this point, but it might be able to turn up something.”

“I won’t go holding my breath,” I said. “As for powers? Not a clue. He’s fast, though. Fast enough to dodge bullets.”

“That’s not normal,” Ariadne said, sounding like she was giving it some thought.

“I’m supposed to be at the top of the speed and power scale and I can’t dodge bullets,” I said. “Ever heard of anything like that?”

“No, sorry,” she said. “What about his accomplices? Anything on them?”

“The woman is pretty fast, but not as fast as I am,” I said. “She’s mean, though. Ruthless and efficient. Probably the one who’s cutting up the victims.” I snapped my fingers at Webster and he got it, picking up his phone and tapping on the keys. I assumed he was making up a note to check on this for later.

“I’ll run the government databases for a similar modus operandi,” Ariadne said, sounding like someone taking my order at a drive-through. “The FBI might have something on that. As for the bomb maker…”

“I’ll get you a copy of the report as soon as it comes through,” I said. “I’m assuming whoever’s in charge of the investigation over here will want all the help they can get.” Webster nodded absently. “Interpol might have some record of him if he’s been playing the game for a while.”

“Bomb makers tend to stick close to their preferred explosives,” she said. “Odds are good if he’s been active before, we’ll be able to at least trace him, and if not, maybe we can get an idea of who trained him.”

“Cool,” I said, and realized how out of place that probably sounded. “Did Reed tell you about Janus?”

“Yeah,” Ariadne said. “Obviously I don’t know him as well as you do—”

“Who does, really?” I asked dryly. “When I spoke to this guy last time, he pretty much admitted to having Janus. Seemed to indicate he might still be alive. There’s some pattern in the way he’s doing things. First he kidnaps and kills a couple Omega expats, then murders a Russian spy in his own home. He pulls an art heist this morning but creates more havoc in the escape than he has with the murders he’s been spending his time on. This has the feel of unfocused rage, but he’s disciplined in his approach to everything, covers his escape by blotting out London’s surveillance.” I said this all while looking solidly at Webster, who was nodding along and tapping occasionally on his phone as I spoke. “It’d be nice to know what his grievances are.”

“We don’t have much on Omega,” Ariadne said. “As soon as Reed got off the phone with you yesterday, he tasked J.J. to access the old Omega database in London. We have a copy on our local servers from a couple years ago, but the higher-level stuff is encrypted. J.J. is working on it, but he says to brute force it he’d need about a decade and a lot bigger team to do the grunt work.”

“What about local access over here?” I asked. “Me at Omega HQ, giving him an in at the servers themselves. Would it be easier if he could work on the original instead of the copy?”

“Based on his analysis of the encryption, he’s not hopeful,” Ariadne said. “But he did mention in his initial report that it might be worth a look. If Janus or Karthik had been anywhere near the computers on that side, it’s possible they opened them up for local work while using the firewall to block outside access. He said there’s been a definite change since last time we accessed it with Karthik’s help and downloaded what we have. Someone’s been in there.”

“I guess that leaves me with my next destination planned,” I said. “Thanks, Ariadne.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, with none of the frost I might once have expected from her. “I’ll call you if I have something.”

“So where are we going?” Webster asked, standing as the barman beckoned him over. A couple of baskets of fish and chips were waiting on the long, wooden bar, steam coming off them. I could smell them from here, a deep-fried slice of heaven.

“You’re going to get our food,” I said slyly. “Then we’re going to eat it.”

“I see,” he said with amusement. “And then, after that?”

“To the belly of the beast,” I said with a smile, as I pocketed the wreckage of my phone. “Right to the heart of where it all began. Omega Headquarters. Right here in London.”

Chapter 45

Philip was sitting in the darkness when she came in. He did not bother to open his eyes, because that would have necessitated looking at her, and he couldn’t quite stomach the thought of that. Not yet.

It was an odd thing, the nature of his sensibilities, and he would be the first to admit it. He could sit and gladly watch Omega operatives get their skin pulled off in fine strips all day long, with all the requisite screaming. But to watch her drag one of her knives across priceless pieces of cultural heritage…

It made him ill to think about it.

“Antonio is in his bunk, cradling the painting’s tube as though he’s ready to make love to it,” Liliana said, her low voice coming steady, completely unamused. “I think now he would follow you into the bowels of hell if you asked.”

“I don’t plan to go there anytime soon,” Philip said, leaning his head against the leather seat. “But it’s excellent to hear that if I needed to cross the Styx, I’d be assured of at least some company.”

“You would have worlds of company,” Liliana said. “All the souls of the capitalist swine would be with you in any such world.” She let out a little scoffing noise. “Of course it does not exist, so there is little to fear, but if it did… all the swine would be there. You would not lack for playmates.”

“You truly hate them, don’t you?” Philip asked, cracking an eye. “Do you still long for the good old days?”

She sniffed, and her eye twitched just barely in the dark. “I long for the days when men believed in the cause. When they were strong and willing to do what it took. Before the KGB and the Politburo all sold their souls so they could drive BMWs to work every day and listen to iPods filled with Western corruption in their dachas. For the days when the worker was—”

“All right, then,” Philip said, keeping his smile carefully concealed. “Are you ready for our next target?”

“And the one after and the one after,” she said, deftly switching gears. He had heard her on such ideological rants before. It was a fascinating dichotomy, really, to be fueled by such rage for a system that she felt had betrayed her, yet to be open to what he offered, well…

It was more than a little delicious, that irony.

“All right, then,” Philip said, and he pulled the felt-lined bag out from beneath the desk. He knew what he was looking for and his hand groped in the semi-dark until he found it. The light necklace chain was at the bottom of the bag, and as he pulled it out, it snagged on one of the other objects in the pouch. He tugged it free carefully, not wanting to break it. He laid it out on the desk before him and ran a palm over it, gently, letting his skin brush it.

The flood of images cut loose in his mind, and he could see the owner. She was out there, hiding, quivering, mewling in the dark. Her future looked painful, there was no doubt. Angela Tewksbury. An old name for a young lady. He knew her past by her file, knew she’d been just a secretary at old Omega, sitting in the middle of the most grossly criminal underworld organization man had ever seen. Right in the middle, rivers of filth and corruption passing all around her.

Even a lowly secretary could not help but get dirty in the midst of all that.

Philip focused his mind. He’d gotten quite good at this, the discipline part of it. It wasn’t terribly difficult, focusing in. He could see what he needed to see by looking past the fears, the terrors. Success lay in slowing it down through the lulls. The unemotional parts, the lowlights were never as exciting as the highs. It was easy to skip over them given how mundane most of what he saw was.

He did not skip over them this time, though, and was rewarded with a view of a street sign as the car carrying her to her destination rounded its last corner in the vision in his mind. He saw her dark hair as she looked around her before ducking inside, and over her shoulder was the house number.

“I’ve got it,” he said with a faint smile. Liliana was there when he opened his eyes, her own hungry at the thought of what came next.

Not many more now, he knew. Janus’s ability to resist was waning by the day. Soon, he’d have it all—a plan fulfilled, in spite of a thousand obstacles in his path.

Soon. He looked at Liliana’s uncultured face as he rose and met her smile with one of his own.

Chapter 46

I found Omega HQ right where I’d left it, down a back alley I was surprised I knew how to get to after all this time. It had taken a little work on Webbo’s version of Google maps, but I did it. I would have been happy with a congratulatory hug—or something—but he gave me a grunt and that was about it.

The place looked run-down, which wasn’t a huge surprise given it had been well over two years since I’d last been here and the building had (presumably) been unoccupied for most of that. Omega had owned it, I thought, probably through shell corporations and the like, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it completely undisturbed.

Well, it wasn’t undisturbed.

“Someone’s been here,” Webster said, drawing his baton. I gave him a shake of the head and pulled my pistol. I stared at the side of the barrel and cursed at the indentation in the smooth, shiny metal. “What?” he asked.

“My gun got damaged in the explosion,” I said, frowning at the Walther. “I really liked this weapon.” Not as much as I liked the Sig Sauer I carried as my primary, but still. I hadn’t noticed the damage when I’d reholstered it under my arm, which was probably a good indication of how tired I was.

“Looks like a ding,” he opined.

“On the slide,” I said. “Might have impinged the barrel.”

“Looks superficial,” he said with a shake of the head. Like he knew anything about guns.

“Here,” I said and spun it around to offer him the grip. “Try firing it and let me know how it works. Of course, if the barrel is damaged, it could blow up in your face, but you’re right, it’s probably superficial.”

“Ah… maybe try your backup,” he said, looking away from me.

“This is my backup,” I said.

His face creased. “Where’s your main one?” He stared at the silver, palm-sized piece in my hand. “That big, black beast of a gun.”

“The knife lady took it away from me,” I said, sliding the Walther back in my holster. It hung loosely in the leather casing meant for the bigger Sig.