Chrysalis

61

Roz had followed Wrigley’s orders and made a quick circuit of the customer service area. It was as busy as when she’d walked through nearly an hour earlier, if not more so. She glanced over a few shoulders of the people operating the workstations, looked at a dozen screens, and listened in on some conversations taking place between Chrysalis employees taking a coffee break in the adjoining canteen. She picked up no anxiety, no whispers of dangerous gossip. Either they were lucky, and the clients with sabotaged implants didn’t line up yet with those participating in the Voyager rollout… or there were too few for anyone to start noticing.

Finishing the circuit, some instinct told her she could be of more use back in the lab. They’d done so much jury-rigging, and almost anything could go wrong — in an operation where everything had to take place in the right order, with no errors, to have any hope of success.

She moved quickly back down the corridor, stopped at the heavy door of the production lab, and gave two raps. It was cracked open by Dafna, who eased it back enough to allow Roz to enter.

She gazed around as Dafna closed the door. Everything was more or less as it had been when she’d left. Logan was still in the cage, all too obviously — from the jerky, awkward movements a mime might envy — within the simulacrum. Wrigley was monitoring him in a distracted fashion, and when he heard her return he glanced over, clearly relieved when she signaled so far, so good. Mossby was at the command workstation, and Snow was just joining him: they exchanged a few quick sentences; high-fived each other; then sat down together at the terminal, Snow handing Mossby his Sentinel and the hacker quickly syncing it to a data port on the far side of the desktop.

Peyton, she noticed, was still pacing the room. The blood from the wound in his shoulder had soaked through his jacket — he really should not have been moving. He was just approaching the rear door leading to the maintenance hallway.

At that moment, as if animated by her thoughts, the maintenance door opened. Peyton stopped pacing just before colliding with it.

Purchase stood in the doorway. He’d looked strange enough when he dashed out of the lab in a fit of nausea, but now he looked even stranger. His eyes were bulging, almost rolling in his head. A towel was wrapped around his neck and chest, like he was heading for a sauna. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was sleepwalking.

As she stared in confusion, the implants director suddenly lurched forward and sprawled onto the concrete, the towel unfurling into a field of red. He had been shoved from behind by someone using him as camouflage, or shield, or perhaps both. The stranger behind Purchase was wearing the outfit of an electrical engineer, with a circle beard and dark hair. But he moved with such horrifying quickness she could make out no other features. Turning toward Peyton, rooted in place with surprise, the intruder administered a quick, knife-hand chop to his injured shoulder. As the infrastructure chief gasped in pain, knees buckling, the stranger grabbed the submachine gun from Peyton’s shoulder, raised it while performing a one-eighty visual recon of the room, and then aimed a long burst at Dafna. Roz, just a few feet away, felt herself abruptly drenched in a spray of warm blood. Dafna had swiveled her machine gun into position, but with her boss in the line of fire she’d hesitated just long enough for the assassin to shoot her first.

For Roz, time began to slow down. As Dafna crumpled beside her, Roz saw Mossby dive from his chair and crouch beneath the console, arms rising protectively over his head. Wrigley dove behind a heavy equipment cart. Snow was leaping behind the console adjacent to Mossby, one hand balanced on its upper housing while the other pulled a handgun free. But even as she watched him, explosions of red began to blossom: first on Snow’s left arm and then his left side, and what had begun as an agile leap turned into a tumble, ending brutally as Snow fell amid the equipment behind the console.

The intruder looked directly at her, barrel smoking, as if deciding whether to expend a few more rounds. He smiled faintly, or so she thought, and let his gaze continue past her, eyes registering Dafna bleeding out on the floor, passing the supine form of Purchase, then stopping at Peyton — who was rising to his feet, reaching into his jacket. The intruder let go with another sustained burst that dropped the security executive in a ghastly cloud of blood.

At last, the man turned toward the cage that held Jeremy Logan. For a moment, the device itself seemed to confuse him. But then, Roz saw something kindle in his eyes. And as he raised his weapon toward the oblivious Logan, Roz found her voice and began to scream. The man turned back toward her, and in that brief moment of hesitation the mortally wounded Dafna rose on one elbow, automatic weapon rising with her; Snow appeared over the upper edge of the command console, left hand bloody but right hand full of a big nine millimeter — and twin eruptions of noise and smoke shrouded the scene of carnage as Roz dropped to the floor like a wounded bird, a dead faint claiming her.