Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (27 page)

‘The nanotech research.’

‘Uh-huh. What better way to get it while the world thinks it was some terrorist grouping?’

‘It makes sense. Sandoval was with Wayden, yes? I used them for site security at Dallas back then, but they had no access to the research. Sandoval would likely be able to find out what we were researching, but he had no way to get into that research.’

‘Okay, so you flatly refuse to hand over the data. They can’t get past the security. I’m going to be sent in so NIX arrange for one of their people in the UNTPP to be placed in charge. Despite that, I get Terri out and blow the place, as you wanted. NIX cuts Caravel off and he’s forced to go to ground with Prentice, who has managed to get Marshall out somehow.’

‘And when Sandoval or his bosses discover I’ve restarted the research, they bring Caravel and his team in to get the new data. Hunt was the first attempt. You were
supposed
to connect his death to UA; they were going to be the fall guys again.’

‘But the data they got was incomplete.’

Jackson nodded. ‘And anything I give them now will be similarly incomplete. That’s why Teresa was going up there. And there’s the matter of the other murders.’

‘Oh, that’s revenge,’ Fox said bitterly.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If you take all the surnames of the victims, the initial letters spell out “TARA.” If you want to continue that, their next victim is Teresa Martins. M for Meridian. And they picked their first victim to be
sure
I’d be called in as primary on the case. They’ve been stringing me along with false leads, had me chasing shadows, and Sandoval has been in there to make sure some of those leads got chased when I’d have ignored them. They wanted me running around after that and not paying as much attention to the Hunt case, and they wanted me following Sandoval into a trap last night. Now they want me to deliver the data because they want me dead. Revenge for Dallas, pure and simple.’

‘Do you think my daughter is still alive, Fox?’ Jackson was looking even greyer now. Terri was all he had left of his wife, but she was also a constant source of pride for him and a loving, happy daughter too. Losing her would, probably, break him.

‘I think they’ll keep her alive until they get their data. They
want
that data and she’s about the only tool they think they have to get it. Alive, she’s a bargaining chip. When do they want the data delivered?’

‘You’re to go to a dead drop in Queens tonight at eight.’

‘Uh-huh. Run me around for a few hours and then get me somewhere they can kill me and take the data.’ Fox looked up at the screen and the videos still playing on it. ‘I’m going to lose my job again, Jackson.’

‘I did say I have a position open at Palladium.’

She laughed. ‘Canard has my pistol.’

‘Thank you for reminding me. Your techs should have finished recovering whatever data they need. That weapon is the commercially sensitive property of MarTech Group. I’ll send some lawyers around to retrieve it.’

‘You can do that?’

‘I can, and have, and they’ll be ensuring that no technical schematics have been recorded in NAPA files, which should annoy your captain.’

‘Okay. But I’m going to need some additional equipment if I’m going to pull this off.’

Jackson smiled. ‘I believe I can adequately supply you with the necessary tools.’

~~~

Canard looked up as Fox walked into his office. His expression was as sour as Fox had expected it to be and it was about to get worse. ‘What is it, Inspector?’ Canard snapped at her. He did not offer her a seat, but then she did not want to sit down.

‘Did I ever tell you why I quit the UNTPP?’ Fox asked in reply.

‘It was a question we asked at your interview, so yes, you did.’

‘Do you remember what my answer was?’ He scowled. She knew he was trying to remember, probably checking to see whether he had it filed away in an archive. She decided to put him out of his misery. ‘I found myself unable to work under a command structure which I could not trust to back me in the face of political pressure.’ She sent him the file she was holding ready; a gesture seemed to be necessary so she flicked her wrist as though tossing an envelope onto his desk, and the virtual interface obliged by popping up a virtual message indicator which appeared on his desk’s surface.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. Fox felt that it was a distinctly stupid question.

‘I can’t prove you knew Sandoval was a NIX agent, but the fact you’ve been doing everything you can to keep me out of the way since he died suggests that someone’s leaning on you. I find myself unable to work under a command structure which I cannot trust to back me in the face of political pressure. Also, you’re an asshole.’

Canard’s face turned red as she turned on her heel and started for the door. ‘I’ll see to it that you never work–’

‘A naive, stupid asshole,’ Fox said. The door opened in front of her and she wondered whether Canard would try to get another jibe in before it closed, but there was nothing and she connected to Kit on the way to the station. ‘Kit, situation report.’

‘Mister Martins has dispatched sixteen drones into the area indicated by the video captures. I am monitoring.’

‘Can you operate sixteen drones at once?’

‘They are autonomous. Their AIs are not complex, but quite sufficient for the task at hand. I am merely directing their activities and monitoring the video where they believe they have found something.’

‘Right. Anything positive?’

‘One possible. A disused factory building which is showing infrared activity of approximately the correct magnitude. I have one of the drones stationed over that building constantly to watch for one of the targets.’

Fox allowed herself a small smile. ‘Very tactical.’

‘I am running tactical and intelligence analysis packages.’

‘Uh-huh. Anything more on where those video clips came from?’

There was a short pause and then, ‘I found only one thing in all of the records which appears to serve no real purpose. This is a metadata tag, “thought and memory.” I believe this has been placed as a clue to the source of the data.’

‘Thought and memory? That’s it?’

‘Yes, Fox. I am attempting to decipher this now. If it
is not a clue to the sender, I believe we must wait for that person to make themselves known.’

‘Okay. I’m on my way back. Keep me updated if you find anything new.’

~~~

Fox stopped off on the way to her apartment, requesting access to Sam’s apartment as she rode the elevator up. It was usually wise to check with him before you arrived: not many of his clients came to his apartment, but the ones who did were actually ones he liked and they tended to stay longer.

He was alone and shirtless at two in the afternoon, and he took one look at her and went to his kitchen area to pour coffee. ‘You are not looking like your day is going well.’

‘I just quit NAPA. Terri’s been kidnapped by UA terrorists who want me to deliver data to them so they can kill me. Oh, and the entire thing was set up by NIX to get the data out of MarTech without anyone knowing it was them.’

Sam handed her the coffee and peered at her. ‘You’re sharing more than usual.’

‘You busy tonight?’

‘I wasn’t…’

‘Good, because I need a backup I can trust. I don’t want you going in, just being there to get Terri to safety once I’ve got her free of the place. I cleared it with Jackson; he’ll pay your standard fee and danger bonus.’

‘You know I’ll do it without. I
like
Terri. I
don’t
like the idea that you’re going in alone. You
are
going in alone, right?’

Fox gave him a smile. ‘Yes and no.’

~~~

‘We have target verification. Height is twelve hundred metres. Wind speed is thirty-five knots to five hundred and then dropping. Holding position, but flight control are going to get iffy about this pretty soon.’ The pilot was the same man who had flown her up to Boston. Fox had asked for him, knowing he had experience and could handle the job. From the way he had reacted, it seemed like he was rather pleased with the assignment.

‘Okay,’ Fox replied over their link, ‘you give me fifteen minutes once I’m on the ground and then you swing this thing in for the recovery. Sam? You know what to do?’

Sam looked across the rear bay of the vertol at her, his face hidden behind a helmet. He looked distinctly sexy in the full-body combat suit Jackson had supplied. Like Fox’s, Sam’s could take hits from small-calibre weapons with no trouble, but she was determined that he should not need to test that. ‘I’m ready,’ he told her. ‘Just make sure you get out of there with her.’

‘I intend to. Hit the rear hatch.’ The last order was to the pilot and, behind her, the big rear hatch of the military-model vertol began to open up like a huge jaw. The wind whipped at them, not too strong, but still buffeting at their bodies. The helmet Fox was wearing protected her from most of it, and the slim, dark red suit kept the rest off even though it was only a couple of millimetres thick. ‘Deploy transport drone.’ A large, torpedo-like pod which was resting on rails beside her slipped silently backwards and then dropped over the edge. Fox glanced at Sam. ‘See you soon,’ and then she was running down the ramp and out into the night air above Perth Amboy.

She let herself drop for six hundred metres or so, forming her body into an arrow as she chased the pod, which had already deployed fins to steer it toward its target. Satisfied with her progress, Fox opened her legs and stretched out her arms, and the web of fabric between her limbs gave her lift and steering as she turned and circled, getting her bearings via GPS. There were few street lights below; the buildings were mostly dark. Telemetry from the pod was telling her that nothing as complex as radar or ladar was watching the sky from down there. There was no moon to speak of and some low cloud. Fox and the pod were dark shapes in the night, falling through the air, unseen by those below.

At three hundred metres, she angled out in the direction of the shoreline and then pulled her chute at a hundred. The sudden slamming tension over her torso bit into her hard as she decelerated, steering herself around to a landing on a stretch of road just outside the industrial complex which was her target. A thought hauled the chute in to form a mass on her back. It was no use for jumping with in that state, but it was easier to carry. She unstrapped the harness and started in the direction of the pod.

‘Zorra to Skyhook. On the ground. Start the clock.’

Now all she had to do was get in, save the girl, and get out alive. No problem.

~~~

‘How long before she’s due at the first checkpoint?’

Prentice frowned at Killian. The younger man had been acting like a kid in the back seat of the family transport for the last hour. The ‘are we there yet’ questions were getting annoying, but Prentice did understand the problem: Killian had not been in on the revenge angle of his companions until now, but Remen’s capture had changed that. ‘Thirty-five minutes,’ Prentice told him.

‘I want her to pay,’ Killian added, his grip tightening on the rifle he had been carrying for most of the day.

‘You’ll get your shot at her,’ Caravel told him. ‘Sit down.’

‘I can’t sit down. I’m–’

‘Sit the fuck down,’ Marshall growled, ‘or I’ll break your fucking legs.’ The big man was sitting with his eyes fixed on the chair to which they had tied Terri. He sat there in a wife-beater T-shirt which showed off the bulk of his cybernetic arms and watched her with a degree of malice she found more frightening than all the guns and those powerful arms. She knew a bit about cybernetics and she could tell that the arms were over-engineered, grafted to a frame which could not support the power available. From the look of it, his spine had been reinforced, or maybe replaced, but his lower body was natural and his legs would probably collapse if he tried to use the full power of his arms. He was a big man with a powerful physique, but it was his mind that was frightening.

Terri had recognised Marshall from photographs more or less immediately. She had never met any of this bunch, but from what she had heard, she knew that they were UA and that they were connected to the Dallas attack somehow. The fact that Marshall was now working with UA people was not a great surprise. The fact that any of them were here and trying to pull the same stunt again…

‘Everyone, calm down,’ Prentice said. ‘We give Meridian some fog to chase for an hour, lead her to the ambush site, and then you can shoot her knees out, Marksman. When she’s down, the colonel here will have a nice chat with her and take the data off her body. Then we can see about springing Hash.’

Killian nodded from his new position on a chair. ‘And this one?’

‘We hold her until we’ve confirmed the data.’

‘And then you kill me, right?’ Terri asked, though she knew the answer.

‘And we send your dismembered body parts back to your father,’ Prentice said, smiling at her as he did so.

‘Fox is going to pull your guts out on hooks.’

‘Fox,’ Caravel said to her, ‘is so busy worrying over Marshall’s handiwork and your kidnapping that she can’t think straight. She hasn’t a clue where we are and–’ He stopped as a computer display on the desk beside him changed what it was displaying and chimed for attention. ‘We’ve got an intruder. Section three, the loading dock.’

‘You were saying?’ Terri said, smiling sweetly.

‘Got her. Lone female in cop armour. She’s got a rifle with her.’

Marshall sat up and looked across the office at Killian. ‘You’ve got armour-piercing rounds in that thing?’

‘Yeah, but how did she find–’

‘First, we don’t even know it’s her. Could be some random patrol officer doing a sweep of the building. Second, if it is her, she’s alone and you’re going to shoot her in the legs, and then we’ll find out how she found us.’ The big man’s attention turned to Prentice. ‘Might be wise to get ready to leave.’

‘She’s heading this way,’ Caravel said. ‘I’m guessing she’s got infrared or something. Radio jamming is up. Make sure your implant is using the right frequencies. She hasn’t found the holes or she isn’t trying.’