Allie's War Season Three (7 page)

Truthfully, he was still pretty much a full-fledged lunatic.

A brilliant, prescient lunatic who happened to know a lot of things that he couldn't explain how he knew, and who could draw both the past and the future...but a lunatic regardless. I honestly couldn't see him bringing a lot of clarity to the situation, at least in the actual planning and working end. Sure, he'd helped me with my dreams...and he was a bit less dangerous than he had been as Terian, but only because a lot less focused in his crazy.

My adoptive brother, Jon, kept trying to reach him, though.

He even seemed to develop an odd sort of rapport with him over the past year. It was ironic, really, that Jon of all people would end up being Terian's lifeline to sanity, given that Terian had tortured and nearly killed Jon before he'd turned back into Feigran. I knew Jon's boyfriend, Dorje, wasn't too thrilled with the arrangement, but since no one else could reach Feigran, I kept my mouth shut. I was pretty sure we needed some kind of line into the scrambled brain of Feigran/Terian, and right now Jon was it.

Jon seemed to know that too, because no matter how pissed off Dorje got, Jon continued to visit the psychotic seer whenever he had the time. I could tell Balidor didn't really like it either, but, like me, he didn't try to intervene.

Balidor did confide in me that Terian's interest in Jon didn't seem to be as innocent as Jon claimed. Balidor said he'd seen the seer masturbating after Jon left his room...more than once. Although it pretty much raised the ick factor to a +10 or +11, I didn't tell Jon that part, either. Needless to say, I also didn't tell Dorje.

Revik and I still had no idea who the fourth of our little quartet might be.

I felt his light charge up again once we'd descended to a few floors above the lobby. That stripped-down, business-like feel encased his light in a narrow wall. He glanced at me, handing me back one of the guns, then put his hand up to indicate he wanted me by the wall, once more out of sight of the doors when they opened.

"Anything?" he said.

He meant the upper floors. I'd been shielding from him too, I realized.

"What you expected," I said. "They've got the stairs covered. They found the cameras. They know we're seers...one of them even mentioned you. But they can't figure out a motive..."

"How many?"

"Ten humans...four seers. Two are contract employees. Two are regular, owned by the bank." I glanced up at him. "But we'll be seeing a lot more soon. They've called for backup. They still don't know for sure if we're here for the vaults or the corporate offices...they've split their people, looking for us upstairs. So the spook thing must have worked..."

I didn't know much about the program I'd fed into their network, in terms of how Wreg and Revik actually built it, but I knew what it was supposed to do. The program had been designed to emit a faux-aleimic field around the computers it infected. The virus had also been programmed to jump through all of the computers in the network, so that aleimic-like field emanated from most of the machines housed on the upper ten floors, where the corporate offices lived.

If nothing else, it should confuse the seers they had helping them.

"No chatter on the number of us?" he said.

I shrugged. "They think there are at least seven of us. The two who came out on ten, and five more that their lead infiltrator felt on fourteen and fifteen. They know we're obscuring our numbers, they're just not sure how, or in which direction..."

Revik nodded, not looking at me. I couldn't help wondering how much of what I'd told him he'd already confirmed on his own.

Then I decided that didn't really matter, either.

"Five seconds, Allie," he said, chambering a bullet in the gun he held.

I glanced up, watching the numbers change over the double doors. Even as he spoke, the number one went dark and the 'L' lit up. There was a pause that felt like forever after the car shuddered to a stop. Then the doors pinged and began to open.

Revik shifted his stance backwards as the door opened, following its smooth lines. I watched his eyes glow faintly, then realized mine were as well when I had trouble focusing my physical eyes on the dim room beyond the open door. The handicap didn't matter; my aleimi lit up the space so brightly that I could see every detail from the Barrier, down to the grid of lines making up the motion detector trips along the surface of the bank's marble-floored main lobby.

I felt Revik's light weave into mine somewhere in all of that, and his nudge for me to cover him while he left through the open doors. The instant I redirected my focus, he disappeared through the opening.

I followed him out, once he disengaged the floor grid, entering the high-ceilinged lobby for the building as a whole. Decorated with a wall-length mosaic of the statue of liberty, the high-ceilinged foyer boasted an authentic-looking art deco interior that matched the outer building's architecture. Everything with the exception of the security desk lay in near-complete darkness. The security desk itself sat empty by then, of course, the two posted guards lying on the floor from Revik knocking them out with his aleimi.

We were lucky. He'd expected to see at least one seer on this level. Even Revik couldn't knock out a trained infiltrator with his mind alone, and he didn't like shooting other seers. Besides, a seer could raise the general alarm in a millisecond.

I continued to cover the elevators and the security desk, glancing only minutely at Revik, who stood next to the organic-paned doors that led into the bank itself. The entire building belonged to the same international banking conglomerate, but only the one large suite at the lobby level acted as the primary customer-facing portal. On floors above lived brokerage companies and mortgage financiers and so forth...but we needed access to customer assets, not those of the bank. An advantage really, since security would automatically assume the opposite, which meant their protocols would deploy on that assumption, too.

The vault we needed lay below the banking branch office, in a compartment lined with five feet of concrete and organic sensor panels. Gaining entrance meant navigating a maze of DNA scans, motion sensors, facial and gait recognition software and time-release locks, as well as whatever surprises we found along the way. Most of those working for the branch didn't even know the below-ground chamber existed, and only had access to the regular floor of boxes at the lobby level. The below-ground vaults were only for the bank's most prestigious customers, and then accessible by appointment only.

Confusing the security team bought us time, but not much.

If we got trapped in the lower vaults, we were screwed. Revik had a contingency for that possibility, of course...he was contingency
guy,
really...but like with the elevators, none of our options appealed to me much. The main one involved Revik blowing a hole through the walls as close to where they met up with the sewers as possible. He'd seemed fairly confident he could pull it off...but it meant overloading the power grid to the extent that it would probably short out a good segment of the city's grid, if not ignite the gas mains of the nearby buildings and level a good five square blocks. Being Revik, he had the probabilities all mapped out, including a rough casualty count. He conservatively estimated fifty dead, if we went out that way. I was learning that planning this kind of thing with Revik meant adopting a whole different definition of 'collateral damages.'

More optimistically, if all went well, we'd go out the front door with few to no casualties at all.

Revik got through the lock in the seconds it took me to think this much.

Then I was backing towards him, my gun still held at roughly shoulder level as I scanned the lobby and the sidewalk outside the one-way panes, using both my eyes and my light. It was strange to feel normal pedestrians out there, even if few and far between. It felt like a different world. Four blocks west ran Fifth Avenue, filled with bright lights and honking taxis and foot traffic heading to clubs and bars, pretty much up until dawn.

I felt Revik's nudge and quickened my pace, still walking backwards as I entered the bank branch lobby through the organic doors. He'd already sweet-talked the organics into turning off the second set of floor sensors, but a number of non-organic security mechanisms continued tracking our movements through the bank's main lobby.

Fitting a silencer to the end of the desert eagle he carried, he immediately shot out one of the wall cameras, then two more. Since the telekinesis caused a flare in the Barrier, even with me shielding us, he'd decided to hold off on using it until the last possible minute, now that we knew for certain that seers monitored the space around the building.

After all, probably every seer on their team was using most of their light waiting for us to resurface. They likely hovered over the bank's construct that very moment, looking for the slightest ripple in the Barrier space. There was a good chance someone could have seen us on the cameras by then, too...or on VR feeds hooked into their headsets as part of a separate set of organics than the ones Revik now controlled with his aleimi. Revik outlined this and several other scenarios as possible during our planning sessions. Since most major financial institutions now employed seer contractors to advise them on security, they often had redundancies built into their systems. All we could do was hope that most of the team remained dispersed due the virus, looking for us on higher floors.

I had to remind myself, too, what Revik hammered into me at the beginning of every op.

It wouldn't go smooth.

Something would go wrong, no matter how carefully we planned. All we could do was hope it wouldn't be anything from which we couldn't recover.

Even being the fastidious planner that he was, Revik fully expected us to veer off plan to deal with something unexpected. He planned for this, as paradoxical as that sounded to me when I first started doing this kind of thing with him. The exact nature of the surprises we might face in any op varied pretty widely, so he always had multiple contingencies built in that didn't depend on the same factor or set of factors being present...whether that meant the telekinesis, our guns, our ability to use our sight, or whatever else.

He told me outright that if I hadn't been along on the Registry Job, it would have failed. He either would have been forced to do something drastic (like a frontal assault on the mainframe himself, using telekinesis, for example), or he would have been forced to go after the Registry system using more conventional weaponry.

Revik cautioned me about relying on things going 'smooth' before that job, too. He said all plans really did was provide an outline, a rough map to give the chaos some structure. A solid plan also helped you dig your way out again when things
did
shift off course.

That simple fact still proved the hardest for me to get my head around. It was difficult not to panic when things veered off into crazy at times like this.

Therefore, it took every effort of my willpower not to panic when I saw Revik suddenly vault up on top of the nearest bank counter, which stood at roughly the height of my chest. He moved so fast I found it difficult to hold the shield around him. A jolt of alarm rippled his light, and before he'd managed to turn towards me, I was already climbing on top of the standing counter nearest to where I stood.

Unfortunately, the counter by me was a lot narrower, and decorated with plastic bins filled with different-colored forms and pamphlets, so I had to struggle a bit to hold my balance as I planted a foot on either side of the racks. I'd also been stranded too far away to jump to Revik, as the counter formed an island between the rows of ropes and poles that indicated where people queued before each bank teller window.

"What?" I said in a whisper. "What happened?"

He indicated for me to be silent, pointing at the floor. I tried to follow his gesture with my eyes, then gave up and used flickers of my sight under the Barrier shield I'd somehow managed to maintain despite my panic.

Watching the space where his light indicated, I felt my stomach grow cold.

Whatever the thing was, it reminded me of those odd, organic machines Chandre used when we were running ops against Terian a few years earlier. Those had mostly been employed to detect explosives in the materials we'd been confiscating from Rook storage facilities. One also engaged in finding surveillance devices prior to our entering buildings.

They always struck me as more, well...
alive
...than most organics. The only thing I'd come across with even
more
of that quality was that sentient wall we'd run into while breaking into the Registry mainframe storage facility. Revik told me later that we were damned lucky that thing didn't kill us. He also said he never would have approached from that angle if he'd known it was there. But that was before we knew the basement of the Black Arrow building also housed a massive organics plant.