Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(64)

Eshton frowned. “How on earth is she going to manage that?”

Beck smiled. “By breaking into Science’s secure network. With those names as a point of reference, I can hopefully pull enough threads to uncover who is at the top of their organization.”

“That will mean timing our attack with you getting through their security and accessing their system,” Eshton said. “That’s going to be tricky and insanely dangerous.”

Bowers reached out and slapped both of them on the shoulder. “I have faith you’ll work it out. Now, we have to decide what to do with Mazur. Eshton is correct that we can’t allow him to speak with anyone.”

Beck gave him an unreadable look. “I’ll take care of it.”

Eshton cleared his throat. “I’ll help her make it look like an accident.”





30


Beck took no pleasure in Mazur’s death, but neither did she feel much guilt about it in the days that followed. The fact that it didn’t bother her more bothered her. This was not a Pale, after all, but a person. She felt as if she should have carried a great burden for the act.

He was, however, guilty of Tenet crimes. Mazur was responsible for at least three deaths—and every time she reminded herself of his role in her loss, the small measure of guilt was eclipsed by fury—and in all likelihood countless more. Eshton reminded her that the only difference between the sentence he would have received in open judgment from a member of Enforcement and what they had done was the lack of a public proclamation. That and the fact that Mazur got off easy considering how dire the punishments for Tenet crimes could be.

Despite how minor her guilt was, it persisted. Always there like a small muscle ache, forgotten when things grew hectic but always waiting when calm reasserted itself. As Beck clung to a wall hidden deep in the shadows of a Rez called Conway, that niggling little throb in the back of her mind kept right on going.

Getting here had been a chore. Conway was an old Rez, one of the first established outside the original safe zone on Manhattan island. It was more than a little bit of culture shock, coming from the Loop to find the local chapterhouse four times the size of the one in Brighton. Going outside was an exercise in confronting reality. Like most kids form rural locales, she had seen the older Rezzes in pictures and videos. None of which could have remotely prepared her for walking in one of them.

Here, there were actual streets just like in the old world. Paths of printed stone twelve feet wide, a scandalous waste of real estate for someone used to the narrower walkways of Brighton. Buildings that had decades to be expanded on and remodeled rose ten stories or more. Beck used tools in her armor—some standard, most added on by her—to check the local video networks and was shocked to find the coverage was more holes than not. In Brighton, the mostly uniform buildings created few blank zones. Here, very little above twenty feet off the ground was captured, even from the taller buildings looking down. Too many angles blocking views.

Which was how Beck found herself with the steel fingers of her armor gripping a stone ledge far above the pools of bright light from the LED lamps below. Her suit recorded everything in several parts of the spectrum, from normal vision to thermal imaging and infrared. One thing her training had begun to do was temper her worst impulses. Before she might have gone for infiltration without observing the place first. Now she wanted to know every detail. The urge to just break in and access their system was still there, but now held in check.

Barely.

“No outside activity for three hours,” Beck said into her mic. The notes helped her internalize the routine. This particular building housed what Bowers believed was the primary civilian Science manufacturing facility for Fade B. It was the only location that regularly carried out deliveries to known enemy agents like Mazur.

“Exterior security is minimal,” she dictated. “Probably because the walls are three feet thick. The entrance—the only entrance above ground—is proof of that. The night shift entered through it and I got a glimpse inside before I changed positions. The only windows are on the fifth floor—er, that’s the top floor. The glass is transparent rather than one-way, but thick. Probably the same polycarbonate they put in the visors of our armor. I’m not getting in trough there.”

She blew out a frustrated breath. “In fact, I don’t know how I could have been stupid enough to think I could just breeze inside unseen in the first place. This place is a fortress. With planning and the right equipment, I can make an entrance, but it’s going to set off every alarm in the place. Security will be there in no time. And I’d be shocked if the alarms didn’t trigger a lock down for their network, which would defeat the whole purpose of me doing this in the first place.”

Her frustration grew intense to the point of almost being painful. The only thing that kept her involuntary muscular responses, her nervous tics like making fists, from making suit respond and fall was the fact that she locked it with a voice command. Irritated mannerisms weren’t what she had in mind when taking the precaution so much as just not wanting to maintain pressure in all the right places to keep her grip, but it worked out well anyway.

“These defenses are ludicrous,” Beck continued. “Makes you wonder how they get anything shipped out in the first place...”

Wait. How did they get their poison out there? As far as she had been able to tell, every delivery of the stuff had to have come from here, but this facility did not exist solely for that purpose. The production of Fade B was parasitic, hidden inside a larger Science manufacturing center where it could be hidden in plain sight. This place made many kinds of medicines and housed a variety of offices and dedicated labs all run separately from one another. Which meant they had to ship a large volume—certainly more than could fit through that door.