Spin State - Chris Moriarty [210]
She cursed her own slowness. That one shot could set Kintz on her before she had time to take care of McCuen. And even if it didn’t, she no longer had surprise on her side. Now they would know she was coming for them.
She brushed her regrets aside to focus on the job in front of her. McCuen was crippled. Not just by his lack of internal wetware or his broken wrist, but because Li could push back her mask and breathe freely, for a few moments at least, while he had to keep struggling to suck air through the cumbersome mouthpiece. He’d never fought her either. Not for real. He had no idea what he was up against.
Forty seconds into the fight she landed a clean kick, and McCuen’s leg collapsed under him with a grinding snap that told her she’d found her target. She was on top of him before he hit the ground, thumb and forefinger locked on his windpipe.
She lifted her knife hand to his face and ripped off his infrared goggles, leaving him blind. Then she straddled him, got a good purchase with her boot soles, sat on his stomach. As she did it, she had a flash of Voyt doing the same thing to Sharifi, and it turned her stomach.
“Who did Haas send?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play with me, Brian.” She dug her fingers under his windpipe and squeezed. “Who’d he send? Kintz? He the one who cut Mirce’s throat for no fucking good reason? Nice friends you’ve got.”
He was choking. She let up a little—just enough so he could talk.
“I didn’t know they were going to kill her,” he said when he could breathe again. “I would never have . . .” He swallowed, Adam’s apple jerking. “It’s not like you think it is.”
“Oh? How is it then? What’s Haas paying you?”
McCuen’s face twisted in anger. “No one’s paying me.”
“Then talk to me.”
McCuen put on a resisting-interrogation face. A little boy playing at cowboys and cybercops. Li could have screamed with frustration.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said. She flicked her knife under McCuen’s rebreather feed, pulling the thin tube taut.
“God, no!” he pleaded. He was panicking, a trapped animal thrown back on instinct and adrenaline. She felt his legs twitching under her as if his backbrain believed he could overpower ceramsteel-enhanced muscles, outtwitch hardwired reflex. “Don’t make me die like that. Please, Li!”
She remembered her father, blue-gummed, drowning in his own bile. The growth had filled 20 percent of his remaining lung when they took the last X ray. The doctor had said it was bigger than most of the babies born in Shantytown that year.
Her knife hand was shaking. She took the information in coldly, as if it were someone else’s hand. Dealt with it. Rerouted. Adjusted. “Then talk,” she said, and let the blade scrape along the thin sheathing of the feedline.
“Okay! Okay. Shit. It’s Kintz. And two more.” He said two names she didn’t recognize. “They weren’t supposed to kill anyone. They were supposed to wait until Korchow and the AI were taken care of, and then take you and Bella in. Alive, if they could.”
Li’s breath caught in her throat. “What do you mean until the AI was taken care of?”
“I don’t know.”
She twisted the knife.
“I swear I don’t! All she said was that she’d get rid of it. That we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
All she said?
Of course, she realized. It had been right there in front of her all the time. The answer that she had blinded herself to because she didn’t want to see it, couldn’t afford to see it.
This was a chess match, and one that had gone on far too long to be anything but a deadly fight between two equally devious and experienced opponents. Haas wasn’t the player on the other side of the chess board from Korchow. He never had been.
All along, every time Haas railroaded her or sabotaged her investigation, she had gone running to Nguyen like a little