The Valkyrie Project (16 page)

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Moments after the pair of Valkyries departed, before Jrue even had a chance to lift the hovercar off the ground, it was smashed against another parked car by someone who was either drunk or looking for trouble. Fortunately the attack—Jrue knew it was no accident—had come toward the end of his car, and while the undercover military transport looked like a mild-mannered civilian vehicle, it absorbed the contact and bounced back raring to go.

Jrue looked back and spotted his assailant already backing up to take another run at him. He picked up as fast as the controls would let him, and the other vehicle plowed through nothing but air, able to just stop short of the car that Jrue had mangled in the first collision.

Sweat started to spread across his palms. He dodged traffic that wailed at his cross-pattern movements. He watched the rear cam with the corner of his eye to see the instigator pull back like an arrow on a bowstring, ready for another volley at its durosteel target.

They had to know this was a fully outfitted government vehicle, didn't they? No one would willfully attack a Valkyrie Project operative
—even one in a contractor position—without knowing what they were getting into. Unless the man—Jrue had been able to confirm it was a man before swooping into the rush hour jammed skylanes—did not know what he was getting into. If that was the case, he should be an easy takedown for the police who would be on the scene in, well, not long now that Jrue had cut across several lanes crowded with commuters. But his pursuer pulled closer, and the fact that he drove well enough to close the distance told Jrue it would not be pretty when the police arrived. He could just make out the image of the man as the rear cam struggled to maintain clarity. Bulky shoulders propped up a large head, a crooked nose leaning into a scar that ran from the middle of his cheek almost to his ear.

T
he distant howl of sirens indicated the approach of law enforcement vehicles. Jrue swooped through another lane of traffic, hoping that the car behind him wasn't armed. An inexperienced police vehicle would get blown to bits if the man chasing him could shoot anywhere near as well as he could fly. Jrue was not going to take his chances with the experience level of the officers inside whatever patrol car happened to be in the area. He opened up a comm channel to the Agency.

"This is Jrue Gueye, authorization 860149. Need back up at 3000 N Halsted. Unknown vehicle attacked and pursuing. Assisting Valkyrie Project agents, other possible opposition personnel inside the research laboratory at Halsted and Wellington."

He said it all without taking a breath, knowing that even if the agent on the other end couldn't parse the data, the machines that had tuned in as soon as he'd given his authorization code would collect, slice, analyze, process, and execute before their human counterpart could even get a word in.

The voice on the other end crackled a bit as it came over, probably just parroting whatever the display had sp
at up.

"Assistance is on its way."

His pursuer probably wouldn't take a shot through all the traffic, but that was only an educated guess. And if he didn't, it would only be because he didn't want to waste ammunition. Jrue knew it because he had been trained that way too. If the man behind him did have guns or rocket launchers tucked away in the cavities of his hovercar, Jrue was very worried about his chances. The giant hunk of metal he was steering—you couldn't really call it driving at the speed he had pushed it to—was as tough as a skyscraper on a fault line, but it fought like one too.

He veered again, his body sending sweat through every pore available, soaking the underarms of his base layer, rivulets running from hairline to eye line, palms slipping a bit on the controls. He leaned the hovercar through an arc to point back in the direction of the building from which they had departed. He had been ambushed, and Marisol and Ana might be facing something even worse. He hoped he could get back to them before the man with the long scar could catch him.

The hovercar teetered as it sped through traffic, halting other vehicles in several of the skylanes. The stopped hovercars provided nice cover and served as good obstacles, but the Takuro Spirit behind Jrue weaved through them like the ephemeral entity for which it was named.

Jrue dove once more as he rounded the corner of the building containing Ana and Marisol. Back to ground level, hoping he could scoop up his team and, if they were lucky, even their target, Dr. Portofil. He slowed as much as he could get away with as he passed the entrance, but there was no one outside, and no one waiting inside the glass doors of the lobby.

The transport blasted back up to Lane 5, flipped as tightly as Jrue could make it and went back across the front of the building just above the roofline while Jrue tried to decide if the less crowded side streets would make it easier to lose his pursuer, or if he should just maneuver through the throngs of commuters again and hold out until backup arrived.

--

There was an audible crack as Ana slammed back against the man in the elevator. She hoped it was a bone breaking, but guessed it was just the stems of the roses. She knocked him back into the elevator, broken bone or not, but he bounced off the back wall and came at Ana faster than she would have thought possible. She parried an initial blow and held off another.

"Go!" Ana yelled at Marisol and her partner ran down the hallway.

The man fielded Ana's knee as it headed for his groin. With him no longer on the offensive, she stretched back and slapped the key on the elevator panel that would get them to the top of the building.

Ana rebalanced herself on both feet just as her opponent attempted to sweep her leg. He connected with her right leg, just above the ankle, with enough force to dislodge her foot from the floor of the elevator. Ana wobbled a bit as the muscles in her left stiffened, holding her position.

His arm shot out and slammed a flat palm straight to her sternum
, knocking her even more off balance, and her left leg decided to give up its hold rather than tear itself apart trying to keep her upright.

The door to the elevator slid open as she toppled backward and Ana rolled through a reverse somersault and popped back to her feet in a wide berth of hallway almost identical to the one where she'd let Marisol off to find Dr. Portofil.

Marisol might have gotten away, but the man with the hook nose continued to come after Ana. He leapt from the elevator and took a lunging swing. He struck faster than a man his size should, but Ana turned the blow aside, used the transferred momentum to dodge away from her attacker and then sprinted for a door with a red exit light above it.

The light flashed as she barreled through the door, but it opened.
There was no alarm—at least not an audible one.

Ana bounded up the stairwell on the other side of her escape hatch and heard a crash as her pursuer came through the door after her. A moment later, Ana burst through another door onto the flat gray roof of the ten
-story structure. She turned and drew her gun, knowing she'd have only a few seconds to train her sight and draw a breath.

Ana pulled the trigger twice as her pursuer burst through the door, making him stumble awkwardly as he charged toward her. She backed up a couple steps
, but then he veered away and toward the edge of the building. Ana wondered if it was too much to hope that the two shots she'd fired would somehow send him over the edge of the roof some thirty meters away.

It was. He stopped five meters short and turned to face her. The man whipped a gun from the jacket of his dark suit, and had it pointed at her too fast for her to shoot it from his hand. The gun almost disappeared when he pointed it at her. It was one of the smallest and slimmest Ana had ever laid eyes on. The bullets had to be needles to fit in something that size, but she wasn't about to underestimate the effectiveness of anything coming at her at
five hundred kilometers an hour. He didn't shoot, though, and Ana used the break to draw a quick breath and size up her enemy.

She did not see any blood coming from the places where she'd hit him. The concept of invincibility jumped to the front of her mind. She had considered mind control a science fiction trope until a few days before. Was the ability to withstand high
-velocity slugs that unbelievable?

No. Ana often wore under
-armor made of thin, light material, and while it came at some cost of encumbrance and bulk, the Continuum had demonstrated an array of high-tech weaponry that exceeded the capabilities of what the Agency produced. Ana had not felt any sort of body armor underneath his suit during their earlier skirmish, but she couldn't discount the possibility that it was there. The design of the gun the man held proved that.

"How did you know?" he said, his baritone growl carrying across the roof.

"Ali doesn't have a husband."

He nodded, conceding the point.

"Who are you?"

"I should ask you the same thing."

Ana had a flashback to the hotel room where she'd captured the last Continuum agent. If there were telepathic agents and they had any sort of range, she stood close enough to be in it.

A gust of wind blew across the flat expanse of roof, not strong enough to knock either of them off their guard, but tousling his hair and splaying Ana's out behind her. Ana thought she caught the sound of police sirens, but it could have been just the whistling of the wind. The door to the roof might have set off a silent alarm, though. Bringing in some police at this point might not be a bad thing.

The man stepped around the roof in a cautious circle maintaining the distance between them. Ana wondered for a moment if he was getting in position for an extraction, but the wind died down and all she heard was the faint rush of traffic from a few stories down.

The hook
-nosed man took another couple steps on the circumference he had drawn around Ana. The arc circumscribed inside the square of the roof brought him closer to the edge while staying the same distance from her. A few slugs in his center of gravity might be enough to topple him over the side whether they penetrated his hidden armor or not. She realized too late that he had the same thought, except he intended to go over the side under his own inertia.

The tiny gun in his hand made three small pops and Ana was able to fire back with two rounds before jumping out of the way. She managed to keep him in her range of vision while scrambling to make sure whatever came out of his gun didn't hit her. One of her blind
-fire bullets cut across the landscape of his face, creating a dark red valley as it went. Ana hoped it would be enough to stop him long enough for her to recover, but he had a running start and jumped straight out over the empty space, a thin spray of blood trailing him as he went. Gravity pulled him toward the Halsted skylanes and out of her view in under a second.

Ana sprinted to the edge of the roof and looked down. She expected to see him smashed on the street far below, or maybe on the roof of a hovercar if he'd been lucky. She didn't see him anywhere. He could not have disappeared into any sort of transport that fast even if someone had been waiting below to catch him. Ana should have been able to spot him scrambling to get inside the extraction unit somewhere along one of the skylanes. But he wasn't there.

She peered down the side of the building to see if he had managed to stick to the side. She scanned the faces of the other adjacent buildings. Ana looked down at the ground again to double-check. She had seen him jump and watched him heading down.

Any further attempt at investigation was interrupted when a hovercar zipped down between the buildings, dipping and climbing through skylanes like a bee across a flower bed. It looked identical to the one that Jrue
had used to escort them to the building on top of which Ana stood. Except this one had a beaten-up Takuro Spirit chasing after it.

The lead vehicle shot through Lane 5, just missing several cars, bringing a halt to the high
-speed commute for which they had purchased an expensive pass. It had to be Jrue and his government vehicle's skeleton key pass that allowed him to zoom from lane to lane faster than even the priciest of fare cards would permit. The pursuing car must have had the same unfettered access, a privilege that rivaled illegal weapons for the price it fetched on the black market. Especially for a pass that worked in the overcrowded lanes of Chicago.

Without even thinking about it, Ana flicked a telemetry switch on her gun and took stock of the distance between where she stood and the vehicle that was chasing Jrue. The gun followed the movement of the trailing car, but Ana could not squeeze a shot through the traffic that Jrue was using as obstacles to slow his pursuer. She needed Jrue to draw him out like a crawfish crank so she could sink her hook in him. Of course, he had no way of knowing she was out there ready to take out the twin engines that flanked the Spirit. The heavy government car dove again, speeding around the corner toward the entrance of the building. Jrue must have been worried that the Valkyries were waiting for him. In a sudden flash of panic Ana remembered Marisol and Dr. Portofil. Perhaps they had made it down there and were waiting for him.

She cut an angle across the roof so she could check for her friend while keeping an eye on her man. The thought sliced through her mind so fast she almost didn't catch it. No time to consider a Freudian slip.