Limitless (29 page)

“But I did what you wanted,” Karthik said, in faint disbelief. “I did what you wanted!” Liliana pulled him, dragged him toward the center of the room.

“Indeed you did,” Philip said mildly. “But you don’t actually have what I truly want.” He pointed at Janus. “He does. So I suppose now we’ll see if he favors you more than he values himself.” Philip did not blink, the words sounding harsh even to his ears. “Because so far I’ve yet to break him enough to guarantee that he’ll give me what I want.”

Chapter 68

When I hung up with Karthik, I realized I had no frigging idea where the address he’d given me was. I had no money with which to pay for a cab, or a map, and so I did the next best thing I could.

I went into a corner store and asked.

The guy behind the counter looked at me from beneath dark eyebrows. He looked Russian maybe, or eastern European, and when he opened his mouth he confirmed it for me. I had a hell of a time understanding what he was saying, and he gestured emphatically with his hands as he spoke, telling me to go this way two streets, that way for four blocks—

The gist was that I wasn’t far away.

I thanked him and headed in roughly the direction he’d faced me. I walked quickly, trying not to attract attention to myself. Not sure how well that worked, since I was missing my right sleeve all the way to the elbow. My clothes were shredded, and I had a dozen or more holes in my coat. Not the small kind, either.

I wandered for about forty-five minutes before I got frustrated. I pictured London in my head. I couldn’t quite get it.

So I went down a back alley, made sure it was clear, and went supersonic as I shot into the sky.

After I did it, I realized it probably wasn’t the best idea to let off a sonic boom just before I tried to get high enough into the air to see the whole city, but whatever. I’d been playing by the rules as laid out before me for two whole years. I’d dealt with a string of assholes like Ryan Halstead, U.S. Ass-ador, except they’d all had titles like “The Distinguished Gentleman from California” and “the Senior Senator from New York.”

I’d eaten enough of their shit to have a bellyful.

It was all grating on my nerves now, the sum and total of it, set to a boil by sitting in that office across from Mary Marshwin, watching her get the edict dumped down on her from above. That was me, in my own seat. Not nearly as bad, but the vampires from Washington wanted to tell me what to do every day of my life, and I had to listen.

For the job.

For the last couple years, I’d been playing softball with the kids I’d been up against. I ran into a real meta once every three months, and they were almost all kids. Almost all. Kids waking up to their power and pushing the limits. Society’s limits. The limits of decency, in some cases. And I was the one who was there to push back.

But without even realizing it, I’d hit limits of my own. Limits to my patience. Surprisingly, they were farther than I would have guessed them to be. I didn’t even care at this point that I’d originally entered government service because I’d been blackmailed into doing it; I had a job to do, and it was an important one. I’d bought in.

When they said, “Do it this way,” I’d said yes.

When they said, “Don’t kill anyone,” I’d said yes.

When they said, “Go here, do this, don’t tell anyone, now go here—”

You get the point.

Somewhere along the way I’d become a slave to the job, to the voices up the chain who told me what to do. The person I’d been before wouldn’t have eaten a spoonful of what they fed me on a daily basis, let alone the acres of it I’d ingested since the war ended.

But everybody has limits.

And now I’d reached mine.

I visualized London in my head, saw the river with the wavy line run through it like I’d seen on an internet map ages ago, and again in the tourist shop just a few minutes earlier. I pulled out my phone and looked at the cracked screen. I wondered if…

It still said “Vodafone UK” in the upper right hand corner, even this far up. Three bars.

I typed the address into the search bar of the web browser, and it took about a minute before it came back to me with a map. I clicked the directions button and it laid it out. Two point one miles away.

I let myself drift downward, easing toward the dot on the map that indicated where I was supposed to go. The map compensated, then compensated again, alternating the route as I drifted in a straight line, as the crow flies, straight toward my target.

It was time to stop letting other people put limits on me. If the UK government didn’t want me around, that was fine. I’d be on my merry way.

But I’d be damned if I was going to leave town before I solved their problem for them.

Because there was a limit to how much crap I’d put up with from Philip Delsim, too, and he’d gone long, long past it even before he’d put the first guy I’d been interested in for a long while into the hospital.

Chapter 69

The screams were exquisite, the sound and volume filling the stone room, seeping into the walls. Philip wondered, not for the first time, if a telepath came into a room where something like this torture had occurred, would they be able to feel it later? Would there be residue of the emotional horrors left behind for others to witness? Could the mind detect the echoes of screams and pain?

He stood idly by while Liliana did her work on Karthik. It was definitely her usual standard of care, and Philip paid close attention for the first ten minutes or so.

Then his attention shifted to Janus at his right, as he reached out with his powers and felt the probabilities shift.

Since this endeavor had begun, he’d been reading Janus at every opportunity, watching his resolve. It was an easy thing for a Cassandra-type; you merely looked into their future. The future was a fluid thing, with multiple possibilities in many cases. As the event you were watching drew closer in the present time, the probabilities often shifted, something he could both see and feel, a sort of overlay he had never been able to explain to anyone.

Except Clarice, of course.

He had watched Janus as the old man endured torture of his own. He had watched Janus and the probabilities as he went through an endless cavalcade of former Omega operatives whom Janus had worked with, cared for. He never once made mention of what he was looking for from the old man, not even a whisper.

Because he didn’t need to.

All he had to do was focus on the old man and run the scenario in his brain.

If we go to the Highshire Bank and attempt transfer of all of Omega’s accounts, what will he do?

The answer had come back in pieces, fragmented, as it always did when there were so many probabilities in play. For a while, the leading contender was for Janus to inform the manager through body language or a passed message that he was a captive, and the silent alarm was pressed. No trouble for Philip, really, being able to read the cracks in the bank’s defenses and escape safely, but that wasn’t exactly the point, was it?

But now, in this very moment, the probabilities were shifting. They were dropping lower as Philip watched the event in question. Now he was docilely going along, doing as he was asked, making the transfer.

And Philip could not help himself from smiling as the sound of screams across the room intensified and the probabilities all hit zero.

This was it.

Janus had broken.

This was the moment he had been waiting for.

Chapter 70

I entered the building via the back alley. I did it quietly, breaking the lock and slipping in. It was an apartment building, with shoddy carpeting that looked like someone had tracked oil in on muddy shoes and just danced a conga all around the hallway. The place smelled, too, like someone had come in and peed into every electrical socket. You know, to hide it in the walls.

I wondered why you would even lock the back door to a place like this, and I snaked my way through the hallways in quasi-stealth mode. What did that look like? Basically, walking normally. Trying to hide and darting from corner to corner is a dead giveaway in an urban environment. Pretty suspicious.

So instead I roamed the hall of the building looking like a homeless person, shuffling in my torn and burned clothing. I heard movement ahead, around a corner, and I knew there was nowhere to hide so I just kept walking. Two guys in hard hats with construction vests that glowed with fluorescence passed in the hallway ahead.

I looked around, wondering if this place was slated for demolition or something. It wasn’t quite to the level of a condemned building, but it wasn’t too many degrees off, either.

I found a staircase and ascended, the wooden steps squeaking underfoot as I rose. I thought about flying, but if there’s one thing that looks even more suspicious than a person darting about, it’s a girl levitating. The way people look at you, you’d swear they’d never seen anyone defy gravity before. Which means they should probably watch more Idina Menzel musicals.

I climbed in a hurry, darting up the stairs and coming out on the second floor. This hallway was no better than the last, just a long, narrow corridor with piss-poor lighting. It still smelled, and the air barely stirred as the door closed behind me. It had an eerie feel to it, but nothing exactly screamed trap at me. It wasn’t like Admiral Ackbar burst out of a nearby door to shout or anything.

Okay, maybe I was getting just a bit of a trap vibe.

It could have just been the building, though, or the upkeep of the place. It was certainly rough around the edges, which may have explained the construction guys. I didn’t hear any pounding or sawing, though, which made me wonder what the hell was going on. Maybe one of the downstairs residents was carrying on a renovation.

I arrived at the door in question and stood outside it, looking at it warily. It looked a little weathered but not battered, like it had aged about as well as the rest of the building. This was it. The last known address of Philip Delsim.

And I knew as I stared at it that there was no damned way I was going in that front door.

The guy had a fricking bomb maker on his team. He had to know that the police could eventually get a lead on him and tumble to his last known address. What would be their next logical step?

Kicking in his door.

I went to the side, to the next door in hallway. I knocked politely and it opened without effort, squeaking on its hinges as it cracked a couple inches.

I wasn’t a vampire, so I considered that an invitation to come inside.

I swept in and closed the door behind me, making my way through a kitchen that had been stripped of all appliances, to the wall bordering Philip’s old apartment. I put my head against the wall and listened, just listened, waiting to hear anything on the other side.

Not a damned noise.

So I placed my hand on the wall and pushed. Plaster cracked under my fingers and palm, and I gently applied pressure until it shattered and my hand passed through. Once it had, I hooked my arm inside the drywall and pulled, ripping it open. I grabbed each side and made myself a little entrance, opening the wall like a surgeon until the studs were exposed and I could see Philip’s wall on the other side.

Then I cracked three of the studs and removed them before smashing very delicately through Philip’s wall.

I made just enough of an entrance to pass through without wasting my time, leaving a gaping hole big enough to drive a truck through. I found myself in a kitchen that didn’t smell nearly as bad as the one I’d just been in. The smell of piss had faded, replaced by that scent of stale, undisturbed air that builds up in places where no human has trod for some time.

The walls were stark, with empty brown stains where things had obviously hung once upon a time. There were no curtains, and the light of the rising sun lit the whole place with an orange hue. I tried to wipe the drywall dust off my shoulders but failed. I quit bothering after a moment, resigning myself to the fact that my construction dandruff was just the icing on my homeless girl cake.

I stepped out into the main room and stopped, blinking, my jaw probably somewhere down around my knees from the sight of what was waiting.

Six big black barrels waited in the apartment’s entry, all arranged around a central device that looked like a couple of foot lockers stacked one on top of the other. There were wires crossing the whole damned thing, and one leading to the doorknob that was tight with tension. Even for an amateur like me, what I was looking at was clear.

It was a bomb.

One big enough to destroy the whole damned building.

Chapter 71

“You’ll need to look the part,” Philip said, watching Janus as the old man buttoned his own shirt with shaking hands. “You will do exactly as I say, in the moment I say it.” The old man nodded fervently, the lines of his face deeper than they had been only the day before. The shadows in the room lay long upon him, and his straw-thin grey hair hung limply over his forehead.

“How long will you be gone?” Liliana asked, her knives at rest and neatly sheathed. She did not look like she cared, but he could see the look in her eyes, the hungry one. This was what they had been waiting for, what he had promised her when he’d recruited her to his plan.

“A couple of hours,” Philip answered, not bothering to look into the probabilities for himself. They always shifted on trips such as these, and he preferred to keep the focus where it needed to be. The more probabilities he examined, the more convoluted things became in his head. The farther forward one looked, the easier it was to get overwhelmed, to watch the courses branch out on an ever-widening delta—

It hurt his head to even consider it. Clarice had gone farther in that realm than he, had told him one night with shaking hands of her own that she had seen it, had seen—

Philip felt his chest grow tight and put the memory aside. He forced the smile back to his face, remembering that the triumph was not far now. All he needed to do was focus on the near term, to keep a weather eye out for the close-at-hand probabilities. That would keep him safe, that and the knowledge and preparation with which he had approached the entire matter.