2023-12-03 07:14:22
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315 Thirty Minutes
The terrace was cold.Kate came out through the glass doors with two guards ahead of her and two behind, and stopped at the rail, and for a moment she did not understand what she was looking at.Sparta City ran downhill from the Emporium all the way to the harbour. She had flown in over it that afternoon. It had been white and orange in the sun, ten miles of low buildings and shipping cranes and one glass tower at the centre where the government sat.The glass tower was on fire.There were three columns of smoke west of it. She counted them and then a fourth started and she stopped counting. Something heavy went off near the port and she felt it come up through the stone under her feet, two full seconds after she saw the light.Sirens, everywhere, and under the sirens a sound she had heard exactly twice before. A city crowd, a very large one, all making noise at once.Behind her, through the glass, the auction floor had turned into three hundred wealthy people trying to leave a buildi
314 Madam Harper
Halloran had her by the arm.He had taken hold of her when the crowd first closed, and through all of it he had not let go. Kate could feel his thumb pressing into the muscle above her elbow.It was not a grip meant to hurt her. It was a grip meant to show the room that he could put his hand on her and nothing would happen.She could have broken it in under a second. She had been taught four ways to do it and two of them would have put him on his knees.She did not do any of them, because she was in a foreign city, in a dress, holding a hundred million dollars of Victor's property, and the moment she dropped a billionaire in front of three hundred witnesses she stopped being a buyer and became an incident.So she stood there and let him hold her, and she hated it."Nobody's going anywhere," Halloran was saying, "until this woman tells us exactly who she stole that card from.""Sparta City police," Castellane's son said. "Somebody call them now.""They'll take an hour to get here.""Th
313 The Black Card
Halloran got his voice back."Is this a joke?"He said it loud, and the room grabbed it like a rope thrown in water. Somebody laughed. Then somebody else. Within five seconds the whole floor had decided what it was looking at, and the tension went out of it all at once."She's playing with us," Castellane's son said, delighted. "She has no intention of paying anything.""A hundred million." Halloran spread his hands to the room. "A hundred million, from a girl who hasn't bid on a bottle of water all night."The laughter thickened.Kate stood in the aisle and let it happen."You think this is a game?" Halloran came closer. The friendliness was gone now, scraped off entirely. "That's a binding bid, sweetheart. Registered. Witnessed by three hundred people.""Sir," the auctioneer tried."No, let's do this properly." Halloran didn't look away from her. "Tell her what happens to people who bid money they don't have."The auctioneer swallowed."If the bid cannot be paid tonight, the Emporiu
312 The North Block
Kate Harper had been shot twice. She'd been thrown through a window. She'd been held at knifepoint by a man twice her weight.None of it had made her as uncomfortable as this dress.It was black. It was expensive. It fit like it had been sprayed on.Eva had chosen it. Eva had also explained, in that flat pleasant voice of hers, that the Sparta City Emporium didn't admit anyone in tactical leather. A bodyguard's coat would have told every man in the room exactly what Kate was.So now they didn't know what she was.That was worse.She could feel their eyes from three tables over. Six invitations to dinner. Two to private suites. One man had set a car key on the table in front of her and smiled like he'd already won.She'd said no to all of them without looking up from her catalogue.The Emporium's main floor sat under a dome of smoked glass. Three hundred of the richest people in the region, packed into velvet chairs, watching a stage.The auctioneer had been working through the small l
311 Radio Silence
Four months of nothing going wrong had made Springfield the safest city on the continent, and Atticus Mars still didn't trust it.The sublevel lab beneath NWO headquarters ran three floors under solid rock, accessible to fewer than a dozen people alive, its walls lined with instruments built to work on a body that shouldn't exist.Atticus worked with a thin blue laser scalpel and didn't look up from the open panel in Victor's chest."You almost burned through these," he said, tapping one of the four dull grey limiter nodes seated along Victor's sternum. "Almost unlocked the Thanatos trying to kill you in the process.""Where was the NWO when Sophia and Charles tried to take Springfield?" Victor stared at the ceiling. "I was overwhelmed. I used what was locked because nothing else was left.""Those were problems of your own making." Atticus swapped instruments without breaking rhythm. "Sophia was your former lover. Charles was your son.""Sophia was never my lover." Victor's jaw tighte
310 One Of My Own
Nobody answered."I'll help you," Victor said. "I am the man who declared this city a military zone and made it stick. I am the man who cancelled the election and then won the one they forced on me anyway.""Every officer on your lawn answers to me. Every licence in Springfield is signed by me. Every judge in this district sits at my pleasure, and there is not one person in this country who will pick up a phone for any of you."He let that settle."And you drugged one of mine."Krast broke first. He went for the back door, shoving through the crowd, made it four steps before Maverick Grimes caught him by the collar and put him face down on the carpet with one hand."The clubs are gone," Victor said, not bothering to look. "All four. Padlocked forty minutes ago, before I got out of the car. Everything in your accounts belongs to the city as of tonight, and everything you own is being catalogued while we stand here."Krast made a noise into the carpet."You will not be charged. Charges
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