“You think you get a free pass because you’re a lawyer? You defend fascists. You defend Nazis. That makes you one of them.”
“I don’t! I’m not!”
But the Asian thug’s arm shot out, whipping a two-foot length of chain through the air. Gattor didn’t have time to duck. The chain hit him across the side of the head, opening up a huge cut that sprayed blood onto the platform floor. The second of the four thugs moved in immediately, punching the lawyer in the mouth with a fist hardened by a ring of brass knuckles. Gattor screamed, coughing out blood and teeth.
Bourne leaped for the nearest of the four assailants. It was one of the two heavy-set women, and he threw her head against a steel I-beam, where she groaned and collapsed, unconscious. The attackers spotted the new threat behind them, and two of them shifted their focus from Gattor to Bourne. One was the other woman; the other was the man with green streaks like lightning bolts through his messy hair. With a knife outstretched, the skinny man jabbed at Jason, who dodged the assault and used the heel of his fist to rap the man’s head sideways. Dizzied, the man stumbled, and Jason lashed out with his boot to kick the man off the platform onto the train tracks.
With Jason’s back turned, the woman with the Guy Fawkes mask unleashed a rebel scream and leaped at him with a lead pipe held high over her head. Jason twisted as she swung it down, but the blow landed hard on his shoulder, freezing it and shocking his brain with pain. The woman aimed for his head, but he grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground. He slammed her head against the platform floor, but she shook off the impact and fought back with insane passion, using her fingernails like blades on his back. Her head rose off the ground, and he had to rear back as she chomped her teeth and tried to bite his face. He drove his knee into her stomach, making her gasp, and then he punched her head down again, once, twice, three times. Finally, her eyes rolled back, and she lost consciousness.
Jason shoved himself off the woman and stood up, trying to keep his balance. He shook life back into his left arm. Twenty feet away, the Asian man stood over Gattor, who lay motionless on the ground. With the chain in his hand, the assailant lashed the lawyer repeatedly around the head, and there was so much blood now that Gattor’s face was unrecognizable.
“Stop!” Bourne shouted.
The Asian man saw Jason coming toward him. His eyes gleamed with something like amusement. Above his chin beard, his mouth broke into a coffee-brown grin. The chain dropped from his fingers and rattled to the platform floor. In one swift motion, the man dug a pistol out of a holster at his back and pointed the gun at Carson Gattor. His finger jerked, and a bullet burned into the lawyer’s throat.
Medusa!
Bourne already had his own gun back in his hand, and as the Asian swung the pistol around, Jason squatted and squeezed off a single shot that caught the Asian man between the eyes. The man’s body dropped on top of the dead lawyer.
Behind him, Jason heard running footsteps. He turned and saw the thug with the green-streaked hair climbing out of the well of the train tracks and staggering in a zigzag fashion for the platform stairs. Bourne charged after him. Just as the man got to the steps, Jason took him down hard against the concrete. Ignoring the pain in his own shoulder, he grabbed the man and wrenched him onto his back and shoved the barrel of his gun into the man’s forehead.
“Who sent you?”
The man spoke between bloody lips. “Nobody sent me.”
“You’re lying. You’re Medusa.”
“What the hell’s that? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“The Asian. The one with the gun. Who was he? What was his name?”
“His profile said his name was Cho. I never met him before!”
“Profile? What profile?”
“His Prescix profile. We got the alert that some white-power lawyer was in the neighborhood and a few of us got together to rough him up. There weren’t supposed to be guns. We weren’t going to kill him, just beat the shit out of him!”
Jason heard police sirens getting closer outside the station. He didn’t have much time. He dug in the man’s pocket until he found