Damnation Code (William Massa) - William Massa Page 0,21
bustle of San Francisco.
Talon combed the park and within minutes located Becky near the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Fountain. Spotlights inside the waterfall cast Becky in stark silhouette. Water gurgled as she paced up and down the shining slabs of glass inscribed with excerpts from Dr. King’s speeches.
Becky’s paranoid gaze swept the surrounding area and lingered on Talon. He sped up his approach and Becky turned on her heel, heading off in the opposite direction.
Shit! She’d made him.
As Becky surged up a nearby flight of stairs that led away from the fountain, Talon cranked up his pace. Had his over-eagerness betrayed him? Or was he not used to stalking targets within an American city?
Talon reached the top of the stairs and spotted Becky as she shot down a walkway.
She was crossing the next street when a black van zoomed toward her. Tires screeched as the van ground to a halt and the door was flung open. Two men decked out in black hoodies jumped out of the vehicle and snatched a shocked Becky. She immediately went limp in the kidnappers’ arms and Talon realized that they must’ve Tasered her. Bastards! The hooded abductors whisked Becky’s convulsing form into the van.
Talon considered his options. He could pull his gun and prevent them from getting away, but his rescue attempt was liable to backfire. There were too many witnesses, not to mention the possibility of the cops showing up before he could question Becky’s attackers.
Talon opted to follow the van instead. He’d deal with them in a more private setting. Nevertheless, he experienced a twinge of anxiety as the doors slammed shut and the vehicle burned rubber. If he lost them and something happened to Becky, her death would be on his conscience.
Talon rushed back to his motorcycle, eyes trailing the black van as it rounded the park. Seconds later, he eased into traffic and picked up the chase. He kept a safe distance but never lost sight of the vehicle in front of him. Talon prayed that Becky’s captors wouldn’t harm her in transit.
Hopefully he’d made the right call. A vision of dead Michelle popped into his mind, and this only sharpened his focus. He wouldn’t let these freaks get away with murder a second time.
He trailed the SUV for half an hour until it finally pulled up to a sleek, expensive-looking house. It was one of the growing numbers of eco-homes that were in vogue in the Bay Area: oblong windows, high-quality wood, solar panels and plants on the roof. The low-impact materials were designed to reduce the home’s carbon footprint.
Whoever lived here wasn’t hurting financially, that was for sure. The van rolled up the driveway and into the garage. Talon slowed down. His lips twisted into a merciless smile and his soul turned to ice. He was looking forward to getting better acquainted with Becky’s abductors.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BECKY OAKES EYED her kidnappers inside the moving van and knew she was staring at her future murderers. Her body ached and throbbed and she could barely move, muscles useless in the wake of the vicious Taser attack. When her abductors first snatched her, Becky had recognized one of them. His name was Jeff and he was a star engineer at Omicron. She suspected that the other men were her fellow co-workers, too. What had happened to these programmers to make them turn into cold-blooded killers?
She’d been asking herself that question since the moment she first walked into Omicron’s assembly hall and witnessed a murder unspooling on the HD jumbo screen. Her boyfriend George was one of the coders in the auditorium, busily programming away. Seeing him as an indifferent witness to the slaughter shattered her world and wounded her to the core.
To be fair, their relationship had been falling apart for some time now. George had become cold and they stopped making love. At first she assumed he might be dating someone else and the distancing was his passive-aggressive way of working up to an official break-up. But it soon became clear that something far more disturbing was unfolding here.
One clue was the strange binary tattoo on George’s forearm; a tattoo she noticed on a growing number of tech workers at Omicron. Becky confronted George about the tattoo, but this only pushed him away. He stopped calling her and soon she only saw him at work, when it couldn’t be avoided.
Their relationship was over. So what possessed her to follow her ex into the main auditorium that fateful night, when