Dead Man Running (8 page)

‘Was there something else?' she said, without looking up.

‘No.' Six left, closing the door behind him.

Not just ex-girlfriend, he thought. Ex-friend.

He was walking away when his phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and read the text message – just a series of digits. Nai's phone number, Six thought. That was quick. There was no sense putting this off. He dialled the number and pressed the phone to his ear.

Nai picked up on the second ring. ‘Who is this?'

‘It's Six.'

She hung up.

Six dialled again. There were five rings this time before she answered.

‘How did you get this number?' she said.

‘From the gun shop's phone records,' Six said. He couldn't ask her to be honest with him if he wasn't prepared to do the same. Without giving her time to hang up on him again, he said, ‘Did you kill eighty-nine people, including three Deck agents?'

There was a pause. ‘Not that I know of,' she said. ‘Why?'

How could she not know? Six wondered. Has she killed so many people that she can't remember them all?

‘Four years ago,' he said. ‘A makeup artist was minding his own business, watching TV at home. Two shots, one to the back of the head, one to the heart.'

‘Wasn't me. Why would I kill a makeup artist?'

‘Why did you kill me?' This wasn't supposed to be personal, but the words slipped out before Six could stop them.

Nai hung up again.

Six called her back.

She picked up immediately. ‘You were the favourite, okay?' she said. ‘Our father tried to trade my life for yours.'

Six shut his eyes. He could imagine that. He should have guessed that it wasn't about anything he had done – it was about his mad creator.

‘So when I was gone,' he said, struggling to keep the bitterness from his voice, ‘did that make him love you?'

‘I left,' Nai said, after a pause. ‘I was sick of being his garbage collector.'

That's a no, Six thought.

‘Lerke decided whether to be proud of us or ashamed when we were infants,' he said. ‘Just like all parents do. Nothing we did since then could have changed his mind. You can't build your life on someone else's judgement – you have to live so you can be proud of
yourself
.'

‘And where has that got you, exactly?'

‘Someday you'll be punished for what you did,' Six said.

‘Don't call this number again.' She hung up.

Six put his phone away. She says it's not her, he thought. But how far can I trust my murderer?

Ten's flash drive gleaming in his hand, Six trudged back towards the lift. His job had always required lots of reading, and he didn't usually do it at the Deck. It had been invaded so many times – by the Lab, by the Spades, by Vanish – that he didn't feel safe there. But if he went back to the Stillbank apartments, Ten would follow him. And he wasn't comfortable with the new agent reading over his shoulder, even though the files had come from him in the first place.

Four rooms up from Ten's office was a door adorned with a silver heart, the number 6 engraved in the centre. Six tried the handle, but it was locked. As he was searching his pockets for the keycard, he heard a voice from inside: ‘Come in.'

With a click, the electronic bolt withdrew. Six stared down at the handle. Why is there someone in my office? he wondered.

Because I'm dead, he realised. When I died, they would have replaced me. That's the new Agent Six of Hearts in there.

He didn't want to meet his successor. A chair squeaked inside and footsteps approached the door, but Six fled, running back down the corridor towards the lifts. As he rounded the corner, he heard the door open. There was a moment of silence, just long enough for someone to look both ways. Then it closed again.

It didn't take long for Six to find a cleaning closet. He used to hide in them at the old Deck whenever he had work to do and didn't want to see anyone, which was almost always. He liked the fact that no-one ever came in during the day, and that there were a number of things which could be turned into weapons if the need arose. A mop would make a serviceable quarterstaff. Ammonia-based cleaning fluids could be mixed with iodine to create nitrogen triiodide – an explosive so unstable that a pebble or shell casing tossed in its direction would trigger it.

Sitting on an upturned bucket, Six took out his e-reader and slotted in the flash drive. An index of ninety files flashed up on the screen, apparently in the order they were last accessed. There was one file for each victim, and one containing Ten's overall conclusions. Six decided to read Ten's conclusions last so that he wasn't prematurely influenced by them.

The first three documents were about Jack, Sammy and Queen. They didn't tell Six much that he didn't already know. Each had been shot in the back of the head and then through the heart. Queen had been found face down on the bathroom floor of her home. Sammy had been slumped over the steering wheel of his car, which was parked in a friend's driveway, the keys still in the ignition. The killer must have been waiting on the back seat.

At least it was quick, Six thought. They went straight from alive to dead, with no time in between for fear or pain. And the City has become so much worse since then – maybe they're lucky to be gone.

The Deck victims had died before any of the others on the list. In fact, Six saw, they had all been killed within a few weeks of his disappearance. Was that significant? Had Nai killed him and then started on the other Deck agents? But if it was her, why would she stop at those three? Why not kill all the other Deck agents? Jack had been the third victim. Maybe the new Deck had been built just after his death. The biometric security would have made the agents harder to get to.

Six was shocked to realise that he knew the names of the next few victims, too. The first had been an informant of his. The second had been his antiques dealer – she'd sold Six old electronics that were manufactured before Takeover, and therefore didn't have ChaoSonic chips in them. The third was a man named Hoz who had given Six his motorbike after Six had saved his life from Earle Shuji, the murderous, robot-building megalomaniac. The fourth was Earle Shuji herself.

Six thought of Harry, the robot he'd stolen from her. Harry's body had been destroyed, so he existed only as a system backup on Six's computer. Now that Six's house had been sold, that computer could be anywhere. Six felt a surge of guilt at the thought that Harry, who'd saved his life several times, might now exist only on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere, or, more likely, had been erased altogether.

The last victim on the list was another informant, albeit one Six had never met. They'd exchanged emails about top-secret ChaoSonic breakthroughs in microwave-based weaponry. Six opened the informant's mug shot and found himself face to face with the man whose head he'd cut off in the Deck's morgue.

Six stared at the image for a long time. He'd always pictured him as being thinner, and older.

Closing the mug shot and scrolling through the other names, Six realised that
all
of his informants were on the list – all but one, Pic Guerye. Why not him? Six wondered. Goosebumps rose on his forearms. Maybe Pic was next.

Six pulled out his phone and dialled. It rang twice, three times, four times, five . . .

Maybe he's changed his number, Six thought. It's been four years.

Or maybe Double Tap has already found him.

‘Hi, this is Pic.'

‘Pic!' Six cried. ‘Listen to me –'

‘I can't get to my phone right now,' Pic interrupted, ‘but leave a short message and I'll get back to you.'

The phone beeped. Six said, ‘Pic. As soon as you get this message, I want you to take your SIM card out of your phone and go somewhere you've never been before, as far away from home as possible. Buy a new phone with cash when you get there and call me. Don't tell anyone what you're doing. You're in danger.' He hung up and pocketed the phone.

Selecting a file with a name he didn't recognise, he peered at the mug shot. It wasn't someone he knew, but it was someone he'd met – a stranger who'd once given Six a coin for a payphone after his mobile had been destroyed by an EMP. He opened another unfamiliar file and found a photograph of a woman he'd once seen pulling survivors from a car wreck.

It's not just the informants, Six realised. I know every single one of these people.

The only link we could find between them was that they were all generally well liked.

I'm the connection, Six thought. Double Tap is killing everyone I've ever met. It's like he's trying to erase me from history.

But why? Why would anybody –

He felt the air shift behind him.

Two days earlier, Six might have hesitated. He might have thought he'd imagined the movement. But having seen the video of Jack's execution – the killer hiding in the darkness for hours, the gun lowering towards the back of the skull – Six
knew
that Double Tap was here, right behind him, about to pull the trigger.

He threw himself sideways off the bucket, grabbing the handle as he did so.

BLAM!
A bullet hole bloomed in the door. Heart racing, Six swung the bucket towards his assailant's face. Only when it connected did Six see that Double Tap didn't have a face – the front of his head was blank and shapeless, like a department store mannequin.

The killer grunted as the bucket thumped against his skull. He squeezed the trigger again, blasting another two holes in the door and the wall.

How did he get in here? Six thought wildly. What about the biometric security?

Lurching to his feet, Six charged, trying to crush Double Tap against the shelves. But the killer recovered quickly. He braced himself against the wall and kicked Six in the sternum. Six felt the air burst out of his lungs and one of his ribs splinter as he flew backwards, crashing into the door with enough force to smash it to pieces. He hit the floor of the corridor, wheezing. Double Tap stepped out of the darkness of the closet and aimed the pistol again – the same pistol that had killed almost everybody Six had ever known. A bloody red mouth was growing across his non-face, and Six realised that he had a stocking pulled over his head. The bucket must have broken his nose.

‘Agent Six must die!' the killer hissed.

Something about the voice gave Six chills – or maybe that was the gun. The person sounded male. At least it isn't Nai, Six thought.

He rolled aside as Double Tap fired again. Bullets dug scars into the linoleum.

‘Freeze!' someone yelled.

Six saw the killer whirl around and take aim at the newcomer – and then hesitate, as though he wasn't sure whether to fight or run.

There was a
crack
, and a spray of blood spurted from Double Tap's arm. The pistol tumbled from his grasp. A second shot punched a hole in his shoulder. Seizing his chance, Six scrambled towards the fallen gun. Grabbed it. Pointed it at the killer –

But he was gone.

Six looked to the left and saw a fire door swinging shut. Then he looked to the right, and saw his saviour. Ace was running towards him, holstering her pistol. Six grabbed his phone and dialled King's number.

‘Hello?'

‘King,' Six said. His voice came out unexpectedly raspy. ‘Lock down the building. Double Tap is here.'

‘Are you okay?' Ace asked, crouching down next to him.

He shrugged her hand off his shoulder. The movement set off a firework of pain in his chest. ‘I'm fine.'

‘You have to pass a biometric scan to get out,' King said. ‘He's not going anywhere.'

‘Don't you get it?' Six hissed. ‘
He's one of your agents.
How else could he be inside?'

Ace said, ‘Six – you're bleeding.'

Six looked down and saw a dark stain spreading across his shirt. Lifting it up, he found the jagged tip of a rib protruding through his skin. He was beginning to feel dizzy.

‘What's happening?' King demanded.

‘Nothing,' Six said. ‘Lock those doors. Nobody gets in or out.'

Ace snatched the phone out of his hand. ‘And get a stretcher to the Hearts corridor ASAP,' she told King. ‘Six has been badly hurt.'

I'm fine, Six tried to say. But the world was spinning around him and sparkling at the corners. His blood pressure was plummeting. If an artery had been ruptured, he knew, it would take less than a minute for him to bleed to death.

‘Don't worry, Six,' Ace said. ‘You'll be okay.'

Forget about me! Six thought. Find Double Tap! But he couldn't find the strength to voice his thoughts, and soon even those were gone.