Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (6 page)

Using his longer-than-average arms, he grabbed her by the
hair, stood up as tall as he could and suplexed her—head-first—into the nearby
stove-top.

The powerful attack somehow failed to render her
unconscious, but it did break her posture enough that he was able to reposition
his shoulder and create the requisite space for continued blood flow to his
brain. Like the trained professional she clearly was, Sasaki released the
choke-hold and attempted to isolate Jericho’s right arm between her iron-hard
thighs while grasping his right palms in her hands and pulling it straight
between her small, firm breasts.

To say he was surprised by her raw strength would have been
an understatement, but he still managed to react quickly enough to grasp his
right wrist with his free hand. Pain rioted up his broken arm, but he managed
to ignore it as he effectively neutralized her unnatural strength by
maintaining a grip on his right wrist. He lifted her into the air and prepared
her for another head-first slam—this one intended to introduce her black-haired
head to the nearby, concrete countertop.

She released her arm-lock just before he had brought her to
the apex of his posture and she stomped down on his chest with her right foot,
driving her stiletto heel into his thick, hard, pectoralis major. But the
footwear, dangerous though it was as an improvised weapon, was unable to break
through his ribcage.

And when her heel dug into his chest, Jericho knew the fight
was finished.

She was too light, and the quarters were too close for her to
use her superior speed and power-to-weight ratio against him. In one, smooth
motion, Jericho wrenched her foot free from his chest and drove her body toward
the floor. As she struck the tiled floor, he kneed her in the midsection with
his left leg hard enough to audibly break several ribs.

A gasp escaped her lips, but Jericho knew this particular
foe was more dangerous than she appeared. So he drove a hellacious, overhand
right down across her jaw, snapping her head to the side with enough force to
possibly kill a normal person of her physique outright. Sasaki’s eyes rolled
around as she staggered into the concrete counter. Her hands flailed about for
an improvised weapon—an eventuality Jericho had already taken into
consideration, having previously placed all such utensils in the cupboards
prior to his target’s entry to the flat.

Jericho reached out with his good hand, grabbed her by the
hair, and slammed her face-first into the concrete countertop once—twice—three
times before her body finally went limp.

He added another pair of bone-shattering introductions of
her previously exquisite features to the kitchen’s prep area before letting her
limp body
crumple
to the water-covered floor.

She coughed spasmodically and blood poured from her mouth as
Jericho knelt beside her. Using a well-practiced combat maneuver, he snaked his
arms through her own, grasped his hands behind her torso, and broke her back
midway up her chest to permanently immobilize her before propping her up
against the lower tier of cabinets.

“Who sent you?” he growled between ragged, panting breaths.
Deep down, Jericho knew the universe was telling him that he was getting too
old for this shit, but he was too stubborn to listen.

The woman attempted to respond, but all that came out of her
mouth was a muffled croak accompanied by a gurgling stream of blood.

“I need a name, soldier,” he said sharply as he gently
lifted her chin with his left hand and saw the rank tattoo of a Southern Bloc’s
Rikugun Taii—roughly translated to ‘Captain.’ “You’re already dead, Captain
Sasaki, but I’ll spare you an unnecessary hour of suffering if you tell me who
sent you.”

She fixed her eyes on him and for a moment he thought she
would make her final act one of defiance—a gesture he would not have found
altogether less than admirable—but she nodded stiffly as she worked to swallow
a mouthful of blood before spitting a pair of teeth onto the floor.

“You fight well,” she grudged slowly, and her words were
forced and deliberate as she struggled to enunciate with a horribly broken jaw,
“especially for a…normal.”

“The name, Captain?”
Jericho said
evenly. If she had any more tricks up her sleeve than what he had seen, she
would have used them already. The conflict was already over; all that remained
was to get whatever he could from her before leaving her broken corpse on the
kitchen floor.

“How?” she challenged as she looked at the wound in his
chest. “How…did you not…die?”

He looked down at the still-painful, but far from
life-threatening hole in his chest, and smirked. “It’s a congenital condition
called
situs inversus viscerum
,” he explained. “It flipped all of my
organs around and put my heart on the other side of my chest. I discovered I
had this rare inversion of internal anatomical structure twenty years ago…then
I had a few minor alterations made for situations precisely like this one. The
name, Captain?” he pressed again after answering her question.

She seemed to consider refusing, but finally relented,
“Boris Kardashev, Interior advisor to…Philippa’s Governor Keno.” She winced in
obvious pain as she worked her way through the words.

Though it was difficult to be certain due to the tremendous
trauma she had suffered, Jericho saw none of the telltale behavioral or
physiological signs that she was lying. “Thank you, Captain Sasaki,” he said
levelly as he opened a nearby cupboard containing a set of steak knives.

“Let me do it…our way,” she said after fixing him with a
hard look.

He considered the request and nodded, since he had nothing
to lose by doing so. Baxter had already cut off Angelo’s flat from the
building’s security systems, along with all access to outside communications.
In effect, Jericho’s target had locked himself in the perfect cage—a cage which
Jericho had already checked for weapons and found empty.

Jericho placed her hands on her lap and reached up to the
zipper on her neck, and unzipped her skintight, armored bodyglove down past
her belly button to expose her milky-white skin. He noted that her rib cage was
horribly deformed from his earlier knee strike as he laid her belly bare,
before reaching up and taking one of the steak knives in his hand.

He had never actually killed a person using this particular
technique, and while he couldn’t trust her not to turn the weapon against him,
he allowed her to grip the weapon in her own hands while he kept a firm grip on
her wrists. She drove the knife into her belly on the left side of her abdomen,
and to her credit she winced but did not cry out. In a single, quick motion she
drew the blade through her belly and Jericho saw a spray of blood gurgle out of
her abdomen when she successfully severed the abdominal aorta.

The light in Captain Sasaki’s eyes faded after just a few
seconds and then they closed as her body slumped in a scene with which Jericho
had become far too familiar. After he was satisfied she was truly dead, Jericho
deliberately placed her hands on the hilt of the knife to give her remains some
measure of repose. He then stood and made his way to the parlor to retrieve
Captain Sasaki’s tanto before proceeding to his target’s bedroom door, knowing
that the heavy lifting of this particular Adjustment was already done.

He tapped out the security override sequence Baxter had
relayed to him into the door’s access console, and the mag-locks disengaged
causing the door to swing open into the bedroom.

Mr. Janus Angelo, the head of the New Lincoln branch of the
Environmental Protection Bureau, was cowering in the corner of his room in a
puddle of his own fluids.

“Mr. Angelo,” Jericho said in a measured tone as he entered
the windowless room with Captain Sasaki’s blade in hand, “I’m here to enact the
will of the people you’ve betrayed.”

Angelo’s eyes were wide as saucers, and he shook his head so
rapidly that his jowls jiggled comically. “B-b-betrayed?!” he blurted, his
voice half-indignant and half-terrified. “I am no t-t-traitor,” he protested
quickly, “you have the wrong man!”

Jericho produced the Timent Electorum Mark, the insignia of
his ‘office,’ such as it was, and placed it on the bed before tapping the iconic
all-seeing eye depicted at its center. This caused a small, meter-tall
holographic image to appear, which was populated with images and statistics
which Jericho and Baxter had gathered over the previous months. “Your signature
is affixed to each of these orders,” Jericho explained, as he had done every
other time the situation had allowed, “
is
it not?”

Angelo’s fearful, rodent-like eyes flipped back and forth
between Jericho and the holographic image before nodding.

Jericho tapped the concealed button on the edge of the
insignia, and the previous images were replaced with those of an industrial
complex, and recognition dawned on Mr. Janus Angelo’s face. “This is the Five
Peaks wind farm, correct?”

“Now…wait just a minute,” Mr. Angelo began, but Jericho continued
with his presentation despite the man’s protestations.

“Four years ago, this facility was deemed hazardous to a
strain of local wildlife,” Jericho pushed on, desiring nothing more than to be
finished with his latest task. “That wildlife—a form of avian best known for
circular patterns of pigmentation displayed on its feathers—was later proven to
have been introduced to the area by acquaintances of yours no more than
eighteen months prior to your office’s order to cease construction on this
vital source of sustainable electricity. Is that correct?”

Angelo began to protest as Jericho flipped to the next pair
of images. The first was a low-tech, solar energy harvesting array while the second
was a picture of Janus Angelo shaking the hand of a well-dressed executive, “I
had no way of knowing—“

“The Five Peaks wind farm failed to deliver its quotient of
power on schedule as a result of your office’s corruption,” Jericho continued
as though the other man had not even spoken. “This required a significant
investment on the part of its backers in order to complete the project without
access to its original source funding. That investment,” he pressed on as a
flood of statistics populated the screen, “forced the backers to consolidate
their other holdings to raise the necessary capital, resulting in the closure
of nearly a dozen of New Lincoln’s industrial entities. This has cost the city
of New Lincoln nearly two billion credits worth of revenue—revenue which now
flows into the coffers of this man, Hisashi Iwakuma, and his Tsushima-based
industrial conglomerate.”

Janus Angelo seemed to have found some much-needed steel for
his spine, as he stood to his feet and leveled an accusing finger at the holographic
image. “I cannot be held responsible for the economic repercussions of carrying
out the charge of my office!” he cried indignantly.

“Indeed…you cannot,” Jericho agreed before flipping to the
last set of images, which were bank records showing literally hundreds of
separate transactions. The transactions were highlighted one by one—and each
was affixed with three, distinct, Judicial Seals of Authenticity—and their
totals were tallied in the lower corner of the screen while a new graphic
showed the planet Virgin, which was quickly criss-crossed by an increasingly
convoluted web of money transfers.

The dazzling display went on for nearly twenty seconds, and
with each new line that sprang up to indicate the origin of the monies which
had been transferred to the accounts—accounts which were then shown to have
been opened by acquaintances of Angelo’s—Janus Angelo wilted. Nearly thirty
seconds after the graphic had begun its impressive, complex display, the source
of the money was shown to have originated from Hisashi Iwakuma’s various
Tsushima-based holdings.

But even that would not have been enough to execute Mr
Angelo for his crimes against the body politic. The final nail in Angelo’s
coffin was the fact that he had physically accepted a collection of rare earth
minerals—minerals which were the real reason Jericho had accepted this
particular Adjustment in the first place. And the final image generated by the
insignia was one of Angelo accepting the small pouch of minerals from Mr.
Matsumoto—the same man Jericho had killed with the kitchen knife in the parlor.

The projector then went dark, and Jericho allowed the
silence to linger for several moments before taking a step forward. “You have
grandchildren…yes?”

Angelo, whose eyes were now misty as his hands moved to
cover his mouth, nodded in resigned affirmation.

“If you give me a name I can use, I’ll let you say goodbye
to them before they learn the truth about their grandfather’s betrayal from the
news feeds,” Jericho promised. He neither relished nor recoiled from this part
of the job; it simply was what it was. Angelo had evidence which Jericho
desperately needed for his primary assignment, and he had little doubt that
Captain Sasaki and her chess-playing cohort had, in fact, been sent to kill
Angelo before someone of Jericho’s ilk could reclaim said evidence. Like
everything else in life, Jericho had been in a race against those who would
deny him what he needed—and like every other race of his adult life, Jericho
had won.

“I…I…” he began as his lip began to quiver uncontrollably,
and he nearly fell over when his legs threatened to give out but managed to
lower himself onto the edge of the bed. He then began to sob uncontrollably.

“One luxury I cannot provide you is time, Director Angelo,”
Jericho said impatiently as he took another step forward. “Make your choice and
do so now.”

Angelo looked up, and Jericho knew the man before him was
already broken. So he relaxed his stance fractionally as he waited for the
other man to give him what he had come for. “I…I only dealt with one man,” he
explained tremulously.