Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 056

The first two mission achievements were straightforward enough. Thirty kills, fifteen simultaneous opponents, both brutal in their own way but at least legible. The third one was the problem.

Ensure the safety of Asset X-017.

Soren turned the phrase over as he moved. What was Asset X-017? A document? A drive? A person? He had no idea, and the system hadn't seen fit to elaborate. What he did know, based on the way the other doctors had greeted him this morning and the easy familiarity in their voices, was that he'd been working at Briarcrest Medical Center for a while. Long enough to have a routine. Long enough to have a home.

And if he had a home, there was a chance he'd left something there worth finding.

________________________________________

The open-air car park outside Briarcrest Medical Center was quiet in the way that places go quiet just before something goes wrong. Soren came through the hospital's side exit at a jog, his white coat still on, his personnel file tucked under one arm. He hadn't stopped to change. There hadn't been time, and frankly, a man bleeding institutional calm from every pore was less suspicious than a man who'd just killed a MI6 operative and sprinted for the exit.

He clicked the key fob. Across the lot, a compact car answered with two flashes of its headlights. Blue, vintage, and old enough that its rounded silhouette looked like something a child would draw when asked to picture a car.

"You've got to be kidding me," he muttered, slowing to a walk as he approached it.

The Beetle sat there looking cheerful and completely unbothered by his opinion of it. He ran a hand along the roof. The paint was clean, the chrome trim polished, but the body lines belonged to a different decade entirely. He had no idea how it still had a remote locking system.

He got in anyway. Westbridge was too large to cross on foot, and standing still in a monitored car park wasn't a strategy. He turned the key, and the engine turned over with a low, slightly asthmatic rumble that did not inspire confidence.

He pulled his file open across the steering wheel as he reversed out of the space.

"Address is..." He scanned the page. "18 Eaton Street, Apartment 018."

He pulled up the navigation on his phone, set the destination, and eased toward the hospital gate. The map put it roughly fifteen minutes out in normal traffic.

He didn't get fifteen minutes.

The rear window exploded inward.

Soren dropped his head below the headrest on instinct, the glass raining down across the back seat in a bright, glittering scatter. He heard the engines before he saw them in the mirrors: two motorcycles, both dark, both moving fast, weaving through the cars behind him with the practiced ease of people who did this for a living. Each rider had a pistol in hand, fitted with a suppressor, and they were not being subtle about their intentions.

The rounds kept coming, punching through bodywork, spiderwebbing what was left of the rear window. The surrounding traffic gave them cover from bystanders but gave Soren nowhere clean to maneuver. He ran the angles in his head, discarded three options in under a second, and wrenched the wheel hard left.

The Beetle lurched off the road and into a narrow side alley beside a noodle shop, the wing mirror clipping the brick wall with a shriek of metal. The alley was barely wide enough. The riders followed without hesitation, their engines bouncing off the walls in a compressed, furious roar.

Soren's driving was functional at best. He knew it. The Beetle's rear end skidded on the damp cobblestones and he corrected, overcorrected, corrected again, buying distance in increments while the gap behind him closed. They were faster. They were going to catch him.

The c***k of a single shot cut through everything else, sharp and distant and perfectly placed.

In the mirror, the lead rider's helmet snapped sideways. The motorcycle veered hard, completely out of control, and plowed straight into the second bike. Both machines went down in a grinding, skidding tangle of metal and sparks, blocking the alley completely.

Soren stared at the mirror for a full second.

A sniper. Someone had just taken out a MI6 rider to keep him alive. He didn't know whether to feel relieved or more unsettled than he already was.

He filed it under problems to solve later and drove out of the alley.

The main road was a disaster. Every light ahead was red, and the traffic had stacked up in both directions in a way that looked less like rush hour and more like a deliberate choke. Soren looked at the gridlock, looked at his mirror, heard the distant wail of sirens already building somewhere behind him, and made a decision.

He mounted the pavement.

The Beetle bumped up the curb and accelerated along the pedestrian walkway, scattering a bin and clipping a sandwich board outside a coffee shop. People scrambled clear. He kept his hand on the horn and his foot down, blew through two red lights at the intersection, and was doing well right up until the moment a black SUV rolled sideways across the pavement ahead of him and stopped.

Three men in suits stepped out. They had their weapons up before their feet hit the ground.

Soren floored it.

The Beetle hit one of them at the front quarter panel, the impact launching the man sideways and off his feet, and then the car buried itself into the SUV's flank with a sound like a steel drum being hit with a sledgehammer. The engine died. The airbag didn't deploy. Soren was already moving, rolling across the center console to the passenger side, shouldering the door open and dropping out low onto the pavement before the two remaining agents had recalculated their angles.

The one on his side hadn't expected it. He was still adjusting his aim when Soren came up from below his line of sight and fired twice into his chest. The man folded. Soren was already pivoting, tracking the third agent around the nose of the Beetle, putting rounds downrange to force him back. The agent was good. He rolled behind the rear wheel arch, using the car's body as cover, and started pushing forward with a steady stream of suppressing fire that chewed through the SUV's windows above Soren's head.

Glass and fragments rained down. Soren pressed himself against the SUV's far side and ran a tactical reload, moving on feel, keeping his eyes on the Beetle's undercarriage to track the agent's feet. He watched the footwork. Measured the pace. The agent was advancing, confident, expecting to find Soren pinned.

He came around the engine end of the Beetle with his weapon up and found nothing.

Soren had already gone around the other way.

Two shots, center mass. The agent dropped.

He moved quickly through all three bodies, delivering finishing shots to the two he'd already put down, then crouched over the last one. He pressed the suppressor of his Glock 17 against the man's teeth, not gently, and asked his question in a voice that carried no particular emotion.

"What is Asset X-017? And who else is after it besides MI6?"

The agent's eyes were sharp and steady despite everything. His right hand twitched, reaching for something at his side. Soren pulled the trigger before the motion was half complete.

He straightened up and looked at the mess around him.

"Damn it."

He'd known it was a long shot. MI6 trained its people to resist interrogation, and a man lying on a Westbridge pavement with a g*n in his mouth wasn't going to break just because the situation was uncomfortable. But he'd had to try.

The unknown weight of Asset X-017 pressed down on him. The system had listed it as a standalone achievement, which meant it mattered in a way the kill counts didn't. And that sniper, whoever they were, had intervened once already. They weren't MI6. That meant a third party, and a third party meant the intelligence had more than one set of hands reaching for it.

He still had to go home. There was no way around it. The address in his file was the only lead he had, and if there was anything in that apartment that explained what X-017 was, he needed it. The fact that MI6 almost certainly had the address too, and had almost certainly already sent people there, was a problem he'd deal with when he arrived. Probably more than once, given how the day had been going.

Looks like I'm going to die a few more times before this is over, he thought, with the particular resignation of someone who had already been shot in the head once today.

He stripped two spare magazines and a combat knife from the agent who'd been carrying the same Glock model, tucked them away, and looked up at the street ahead.

The sirens were closer now. He could see blue lights strobing off the buildings two blocks back, at least three units, and one of them had the distinctive profile of a tactical response vehicle. He had maybe ninety seconds before the cordon closed.

According to the navigation still open on his phone, Sable Plaza was roughly five hundred meters ahead. The map showed it as a large open square, busy at this hour, the kind of place where foot traffic ran thick enough to swallow a person whole.

Soren pocketed the phone, checked his magazine, and ran.

The evening crowd at Sable Plaza was exactly what he needed: dense, distracted, moving in every direction at once. If he could get in among them, put enough bodies between himself and the cameras, he might just find a way out of this city that didn't involve getting shot first.