didn’t bear thinking about.
Katerina would probably try to get off-world. The surveillance networks were too pervasive for her to risk staying on Earth. Better for her to disappear into the outer worlds or hide among the Pallas Flotilla. If I flagged her biometrics, it would at least make it harder for her to pass through spaceport security. I closed my eyes and tried connecting to the system but couldn’t do it. Our network was still as isolated as it had been since the attack began.
The sun eventually set, and the basement became totally dark to my left eye. I closed it and stared at the ceiling with my right, watching faint shadows play across the brickwork. I waited down there for a few more hours, wanting to give StateSec as much time to give up on the search as I possibly could. They wouldn’t forget, of course, and in all likelihood it would make the news. Once I started moving, every person I passed could be a possible informant. That meant I had to make my move when there were as few people as possible on the streets of Bruges.
I waited until after midnight and then decided my odds were about as good as they were going to get. I went up the basement staircase and listened at the door, decided there was no one out there, and slipped out into the hallway. A moment later I was back out on the street.
I’d have to circle around, avoiding the main roads as much as possible. In many ways, it reminded me of Tower 7. I held back in the shadows as a car drove by. I passed through an alleyway where a prostitute was meeting up with a well-dressed businessman. I crossed through a small park where ragged-looking street kids built a makeshift camp. It took some time, but I reached the Hotel du Lac and returned to the nest just before dawn.
20
Headquarters was a ruin. I smelled a hint of smoke and wondered what might have caught on fire. I passed a dead technician lying face-up in the standing water just outside of the stairwell on level 2. I couldn’t remember her name, but I recognized her. She had helped me with a scheduling problem once when I was still in training. She had a Welsh accent she tried to hide, but it came through when she laughed. Someone had shot her in the head, and now she was lying here with her face frozen in fear and confusion.
I wasn’t sure if we could recover from the staff we’d lost, let alone any of the field team. No one ever spoke of it, but we felt Bray’s absence every day. Losing anyone else was almost unthinkable. I looked around in amazement, wondering how the hell this had happened to us. From the physical damage alone, it would be months at a minimum before this complex was whole again.
On the other hand, I wasn’t sure Andrea would want to stay. We’d been attacked once, and it stood to reason that it would happen again. Katerina knew everything about this place. She could strike where it hurt most.
As I walked through the bullet-scarred halls in ankle-deep water, I tried connecting to the network again. Flagging her on the no-fly database wouldn’t present an insurmountable challenge, but I wanted to give her at least some resistance. Katerina may have already escaped into space, but on the chance that was still on Earth, I wanted to make her work for it. I entered in my security key and got the exact same message as before.
CONNECTION TIMED OUT.
I wanted a change of clothes, a shower, and sleep, but for our network to still be unavailable seemed odd to me. I was already on the floor, so I decided to find Thomas and ask him what was up. It occurred to me that I had yet to see another living member of Section 9. I sent him a message to make sure I wasn’t alone.
Thomas, are you in here somewhere?
He answered right away. In my lab.
I felt a sense of relief when I saw that the lights were on in Thomas’s laboratory. I pushed the door open and went in, only to find him in the midst of methodically disassembling the Warwick node.
“So, they didn’t get it.”
“They did not. We did have to kill quite a few of them to make it so.”
He removed a panel and placed it carefully in an armored packing case.
“Katerina