Grayman Book One: Acts of War

By Michael Rizzo

Grayman chronicles a daring and disturbing experiment to decisively end the tenacious threat of global terrorism. A group of powerful corporate and political players lever a desperate world to create a multinational force of surgical strike teams, authorized to cross borders and pursue targets with impunity; armed with advanced weapons, technology and armor; and directed by a cutting-edge artificial intelligence. But more than simply employing high-tech military might, this new army is designed to fight a true “information war” by operating completely in the public eye, their missions crafted for maximum marketability, their operatives shaped into Hollywood-style action heroes.

The series focuses on the man being groomed to be the wired public’s greatest hero: Given the “stage name” Mike Ram, he’s charismatic, talented and damaged unknown, pushed by circumstance to become a merciless predator. Initially little more than a trauma-driven serial killer, he’s given a new identity and is re-programmed to kill on cue to satisfy the media’s thirst for violent and visible retribution against an equally vicious enemy. Ram quickly rises from being a murderer on the run to being an untouchably popular celebrity and global leader, as his every action plays out on the public stage.

In Book One: Acts of War, the enigmatic “Grayman” has been killing known terrorists throughout Europe in spectacularly brutal fashion. Captured by Coalition forces, he is recruited by a joint military and intelligence project to create the ultimate counter-terror force, only to find himself being carefully groomed into something unthinkable: a popular hero.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Rizzo
• Release date: Jan 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301800292

Michael Rizzo

In addition to writing dark speculative fiction, Michael Rizzo is a graphic artist (yes, all those covers are his), a martial scientist, a collector and frequent user of fine weaponry, and a pretty good cook. He continues his long, varied and brutal career as a mercenary social services consultant, trying to do good important work while writing about very bad things.His fiction series include Grayman and The God Mars. (The research he’s done for the Grayman series has probably earned him the attention of Homeland Security.)Check out his Facebook pages ("The Grayman Series" and "The God Mars Series") for lots of original art and updates.He causes trouble in person mostly in the Pacific Northwest.

Book preview

0

You finally see her. And you feel sick. Because you know you won’t be able to save her, only stop her. Assuming you still can.

You were stupid to try to anticipate the route she would take from the small apartment she shares with her father to her target, thinking you could position yourself on her most likely course and head her off early, maximize your opportunity to stop her bloodlessly. You should have just stayed put and covered the café. But now, because of hope—the hope of saving one life so determined to end itself—you may have just killed dozens of innocent people.

Because now she’s gotten past you. She’s well between you and her target, and heading for it at a determined but cautious pace.

You try to hope you’re wrong, but you really have no doubt it’s her. You knew it was her as soon as she emerged from the narrow alley almost a full block behind you, even with only a quick glimpse of her face as she glanced both ways—looking for the obvious official kind of interception—before she turned her back to you and started walking with the fatalism of someone who is mostly sure that death will mean nothing bad. You’ve been studying her photos and videos obsessively for the last twenty-four hours, while you rehearsed how you would save her, how you would be the hero. How you would not have to kill her yourself. (Can you kill a child? Even if it means saving so many others?)

She’s got almost a fifty-yard lead on you, weaving her way through oblivious pedestrians. No way you’ll be able to catch her in time. You’ll be lucky to get close enough to get a shot before she does what she came to do.

Still, you don’t discard the retaining pin clutched in the fingers of your left hand, unwilling to discard your fantasy of hope along with it.

You spend the few seconds you have while you chase her trying to rationalize your failure, how your neat little plan went wrong: Cautious, nervous (and very probably terrified despite the resolve her father’s been programming into her since he won sole custody two years ago), she apparently chose to take a more circuitous path to her fate. Or maybe she just wanted to buy herself a few more precious moments of life (hope again: because she might hesitate, might let you save her).

You consider blaming others: You left ample intel at your last little act of justice for them to find. They—the local authorities, NATO, CENTCOM, whoever should be responsible for making sure atrocities like this don’t happen—they should have already intercepted her, neat and quiet and safe and hell-and-gone from this crowded urban neighborhood. But then, you’re here now because they’ve apparently ignored your previous helpful hints, left you to do their work for them. (Maybe that’s somehow what they want. Maybe one day you’ll get to ask them why.)

You’re distracting yourself. Stay in the moment.

Her sandy hair is tied up modestly, too adult for her age. You only get glimpses of her round innocent features as she keeps darting her gaze from side to side, vigilant for any sign of police or anyone who looks like they suspect her (or expect her). She pulls her heavy coat tightly closed, even though her device is well-concealed. The coat is much too thick for the mild weather—she has to know it will make her look suspicious (hope again: that she wants someone to stop her).

You impulsively consider running her down, trying to make it happen the way you rehearsed it: Grab her right hand, clamp down so she can’t release the dead-man switch, slip the pin into the mechanism to immobilize it, cut the wires in the right order, and somewhere in that sequence manage to render her unconscious with minimal injury. Then leave her to the local authorities while you go see to her father.

But you know you can’t reach her in time. If you run, if you start shoving through the pedestrian traffic, she will hear, she will turn and see you. And then she’ll either run for her target or freeze and detonate where she is. If you shoot her down, she’ll detonate as she dies. You reflexively count the number of oblivious pedestrians in the likely kill radius of her device. She’ll take at least a half-a-dozen unsuspecting innocents with her. (But if she makes it to the crowded café…) All because daddy insists that’s what God wants. (And martyrdom is one of the few ways a female can gain entrance to that particular perversion of heaven.)

Your stolen intel can’t be faulted. She’s timed it to maximize her target: fifteen minutes into the professional lunch hour. The large open-air café is packed. It looks like there could be over a hundred people in there, sitting at small tables behind the chest-high concrete safety wall that surrounds the dining area (they don’t call it a blast shield, at least not officially—that might discourage customers). Your only consolation is that the street-traffic (which is all pedestrian since this old cobblestone street has been closed to vehicles) has thinned. If you kill her right here, maybe three or four die: A young couple, an older gentleman, a kid hanging out in a doorway…

(And you get to decide: Trade three or four for thirty or forty.)

You’re hesitating. She’s almost there—half-a-block to go—and you’re almost that far again behind her. You really don’t have a clear shot. She could make a run for it right now and you wouldn’t be able to stop her.

But then you get lucky—a lot luckier than you deserve.

Chalk it up to the fact that this neighborhood favors foreigners: Even with the street vehicle-free, most of the pedestrians are habitually clinging to where sidewalks would be rather than walking down the middle of the avenue, leaving a relatively clear space that she must cross to reach the cafe. This slim window of opportunity gets expanded when she decides to cut across diagonally, forgoing her cover in the foot-traffic in favor of a more direct path. If you can cut her down right in the middle of the street…

Discarding your hopeful fantasy (but not the retaining pin, not yet), you smoothly but discreetly draw the gaudily engraved and gold-appointed Browning, trusting its natural point to hit a moving target (even though you haven’t had much practice with it since you killed its former owner). You hold the pistol low in the folds of your cape-like coat, speed up your pace, get as close as you can because you can’t afford to miss, get…

She freezes. Right in the middle of the street.

Something’s startled her, stopped her in her tracks maybe fifty feet from the café wall. But she’s not looking at you—her back is still to you—she’s…

Fuck.

A four-man team of military police is coming from the opposite direction, a show-patrol to convince the tourists and foreign businessmen and diplomats that they can prevent this very thing. And they see her (probably only because she froze so blatantly in the open at the sight of them). And they take two full dull seconds to realize why she’s so nervously holding her big coat closed around her. And then the fuckheads raise their weapons and start shouting at her.

And just to make this as bad as it can get, they almost immediately shift targets and start shouting at you. You realize you’ve also stepped out of the flow of foot traffic right into their line-of-sight, and absolutely look scarier than a young girl (who they probably don’t want to believe is doing what they have to know she is).

Assault weapons point at you. (At least the raised guns get everybody else ducking for cover.) You have just enough time to wonder if they’re loaded hot enough to penetrate the layered armor of your overcoat, when the girl—Sarah, her name is Sarah—takes her opening and makes a run for the café.

The patrol guns shift back to her, but they hesitate, hopeful…

You don’t. You drop the retaining pin and sweep up your pistol and point and track and breathe and squeeze. Let go. Let it happen.

One shot, one life.

You feel the bang and see her head jerk and don’t wait to pull the protection of your HAMAS-made overcoat over your face.

You are over thirty feet away, but the explosion still hits you like a truck, takes you off your feet and throws you backwards. You feel the bomb-belt’s shrapnel pepper the coat’s shell like hateful hail. The blast wave feels like it wants to crush your sinuses—it kicks the wind out of you and pounds spikes of pain into your ears despite the protective plugs. You hit the street on your ass and try to roll with it, and succeed in flopping around in your cloak-like coat like a fish in a net.

When you can see again, the first thing you see is meat and bone scattered on the cobblestones, some in bits of clothing. And a girl’s shoe. The smells of hot coffee and fresh breads and good cooking have been smothered by the stink of C4 and blood, so thick you can taste both. But then mostly you see intact bodies: bloodied and thrown around and disoriented, but clearly alive.

You stopped her. You kept her from getting to her crowded target and you dropped her in the best possible place to minimize casualties. You saved the fucking day.

Somehow you don’t feel at all good about it.

You manage to get up like a drunk. You find your hat in the street. The police are still on their backs, stunned, flailing and rolling in slow motion, bloodied in the places their armor wasn’t. Everyone who isn’t knocked down is hunkered, cowering behind whatever cover they can find in case there’s another blast. Or running away.

Which is what you do, before the wounded police can get themselves together enough to send pursuit after you.

You run away like you’re the bad guy, the villain.

You realize bits of a thirteen year old girl are sprayed all over your armored coat.

1

October 26th 2018.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Richards, US Army, NATO/JSOC CTC, EU Theater:

Datascan, load the Wiesbaden reconstruction simulation for me again.

I almost say please, but catch my social programming before I feel stupid for being polite to a machine. (Artificial intelligence is still artificial—not alive, not real, no matter what impressive tricks it can do to convince the TGs and the easily impressed otherwise.)

SIMULATION IS READY, the thing’s deadpan voice simulator tells me almost immediately, not waiting or caring for any human ritual civility. It just does what it’s told, what it was made to do. There isn’t even a sense of annoyance at the fact that I’ve insisted on repeating this one particular simulation—what?—the log says twenty-three times.

I sink back in the new VR chair that the McCain Foundation delivered unrequested to my office last week (less than twenty-four hours after Incident One). I still feel awkward and more than a bit foolish strapping myself into it like some kind of bondage marionette: legs, arms, torso, even my head secured in its fully jointed and motorized frame. The visor automatically lowers over my head like a bucket, and I settle my hands and feet into their respective natural motion interfaces like I’m an old hand at this. And then key that I’m ready even if I know I probably really never will be.

The chair hugs me and jerks me into a standing position so I can realistically walk through the simulation, so fast and rough I feel like I’m on an amusement park ride. And then the visor comes on, and flashes somewhere completely other than my ordered and familiar little office over my eyes. I already feel motion sick, still not ready for the disorienting transition from real to 3D virtual. I can’t imagine how the TGs and high-end gamers love this so much.

But I’ve got terrorists—well, dead terrorists, at least—and something possibly much worse (both tactically and politically speaking) right in my operational back yard. And a mystery group of Pentagon Brass, Joint Intel and DARPA suits pushing more than my base’s annual budget in new tech on me, to… I’m still not sure what, and they won’t tell me. (It can’t be just to hunt this one monster.)

Now my eyes are telling me, with impressive veracity, that I’m no longer in my on-base office; that I’m standing in the shadowy concrete-gray dinginess of German public housing. That I’m standing in blood. I can almost feel it sticking to my boots as the chair’s contact surfaces simulate the floor under my feet. I take a few seconds to get my bearings, or at least get the rising nausea under control.

I’m really not sure why I keep coming back here, specifically: back to Incident One, back to the beginning. It’s not like their hot new AI hasn’t made simulations of the other messes our friend in the Film Noir costume has made. I haven’t run any of those twenty-three times yet.

Thinking I’m going to learn something, maybe: something else, something more, something I’ve missed on my last two-dozen visits to this massacre. (Twenty-four includes counting when I was standing in this flat, in this blood, for real and not in VR, just seven days ago.) As if I have any real chance of understanding what goes on inside his head, why he’s apparently taken it upon himself to personally butcher every terrorist in the Union.

Killing the girl today… I understand that, the necessity of it. But he could have warned us, let us deal with it instead of insisted on handling it himself. But the rest… The rest are just excessive. I can understand hating them—thousands of reasons to hate them. But he’s making Grand Guinol out of them, horror movie set pieces.

And he isn’t stopping. We’ve been getting reports of more of his theatrical little slaughters every few days. Three Union countries now, and no one’s even gotten close to catching him—not us, not the locals, not whatever Joint Intel has put on this, not even with all of this supposedly magic new tech they’ve been talking up.

I just got screwed by luck of the draw, that he started in my operational back yard. Otherwise, I might even be rooting for the sick piece of work. (Haven’t we all wanted to do exactly what he’s doing?) But priority for finding him is going to keep burning on my desk, and this bizarre experimental joint-op is going to keep pushing me on point to find and intercept, unless he decides to take his bloody mission or whatever it is well out of my command jurisdiction. Until then, duty is duty.

At least in the simulation there’s no smell. The smell was the first thing that hit me when I walked through the door of this cave-like hive-flat one week ago: the unmistakable stink of blood. It was almost choking in the dark, tight hovel they’d been using as their safe house, already going stale and mixing with the other human stinks: Shit. Piss. Sweat. Death.

And I remember thinking for a second that it was just the Wabs, the way they make themselves live, holed up in urban slum bunkers like this—I guess I do still have this programmed image of them as unwashed greasy lefthanders. But it wasn’t the Wabs that made this stink. Well, it was. Just not as a result of the hygiene challenges that usually come with the gone-to-ground lifestyle, because they still do manage their mandated ablutions, even in the worst rat-holes we’ve driven them into.

It was because of what they’d done to him, and what he’d done to them.

The Gray Ghost.

That’s what the wag analysts behind their Company screens unofficially named him. It probably came from that stereotype kid-genius Becker, the barely-post-puberty TG who apparently designed this hot new AI they’ve got running shakedown for some unexplained reason on this little nightmare (the same AI—Datascan—that both generated and is running the incident reconstruction simulation I’m diving into for the twenty-fourth time right now).

But I refuse to grace their geek fantasy that our target’s not human, that he’s some kind of slasher movie super monster, no matter what he seems to manage.

Gray Man. I’m calling him Gray Man. But only because the mission needs a working codename for the file.

One positive: The incident reconstructions have gotten infinitely better with this new machine. It’s been getting harder and harder to tell the VR from the real thing in the last few generations (at least until the pop-ups and animations kick in), and between the Ultra-Def and the new chair, even an old hater like me almost feels like he’s in a real place. And more impressive: this new AI does a frighteningly good job of making sense of what happened here just from the mess he left, better than I’ve ever seen done by human SI pros, reconstructing everything that went on in these rooms blow-by-blow from a few (well, more than a few) smears of assorted bodily fluids and weapons trace.

The reconstructs of the bodies are the most intense: they look so real down to the last hair and pore and wound that I can’t help but remember the stink of them. It’s a medical examiner’s dream—every detail gorily perfect and readily accessible for fully interactive viewing. I even catch myself stepping over them again as I walk through the VR, knowing full well that I’m not really here (or is it that I am here in my office and none of this is?).

My feet move in their interface rests, and in the simulation I walk like I’m really in the flat, only I can move through solid objects, just a ghost in a ghost world, stepping over the dead. I almost have to keep reminding myself I’m still in my office, that there’s no blood on my boots, that escape from this charnel show just a click (or voice prompt) away. It’s very much like being in a lucid nightmare.

It strikes me, though: Everything about this is like a nightmare—it’s not just the VR reconstructs. It’s him. And it’s more than just what he does. It’s how he looks, how he moves through reality. Like a nightmare.

Because we’ve finally seen him. Today. Four hours ago. On video feed from Rome.

Blowing a thirteen-year-old girls’ brains out.

I break the incident down again from scratch, looking for whatever it is I imagine I’ve missed…

Clinical description: The Wabs’ safe-house is a two-bedroom cast-concrete industrial flat, in one of the bigger public projects in a reclaimed industrial neighborhood in Wiesbaden, not five miles from this base (probably by design—the Rads love that right under your infidel noses jiz).

The housing project is a human hive, forty-five hundred drab units. The security systems had been gutted months ago—maybe it was the Wabs keeping themselves out of sight, or maybe it was just the locals wanting the privacy to flush their lives further—either way, the lack of site surveillance let the Wabs come and go fundamentally unseen. And with all the concrete and apathy, nobody heard the shooting.

The flat is almost claustrophobically tight—600 square feet all together—with only a few little slit windows that made it an ideal prison. They all took turns crashing on futons in the bigger master bedroom, and kept him in the smaller bedroom: a barren six-by-eight with one foam camp mat on the bare floor—DNA smears say the mat was probably used by whoever was on shift guarding him, while they just left him to sit on the cold sealed concrete. Greasy smudges and dark stains on the walls and floor give a rough impression of where he spent his time (which trace-smear chemistry guesses was about a week, give or take). And he wasn’t the first prisoner they’d kept in there—old DNA links them to at least three UN workers and a German soldier executed on video over the past year. More reason to cheer for the monster.

There’s nothing in the room for them to actually tie him to, so they just left him sitting in zip-cuffs. No sign of any used spares, so he most likely wore the one set until he broke them. Smart SOB: he must have spent days rubbing the nylon strap on the concrete walls—real slow with his back to the wall so they didn’t see—until he felt a spot get thin enough to give. Still, there’s blood and tissue to say that the zips bit his wrists in the process of snapping, and analysis of the snapped cuffs says the feat took an impressive amount of leverage and pain tolerance.

That blood and tissue also gave us a DNA tag so we could tell whose juice was whose when it was all sorted out. And it turns out there really wasn’t much of Gray Man’s, which is saying something.

Speaking of blood: I’ll start in the bedroom this time—the cell—just like Gray Man did.

Two bodies in there. I key the reconstruct popup, and the AI animates what it put together: Suddenly two roughly animated figures are standing on the far side of the room, shimmering like phantoms over the much more realistically rendered body of one of them. One of the phantoms is drawn to roughly resemble its dead version. The other is much more ghostlike: only a featureless opaque animatic, because not even the magic AI could form any guess as to what he—Gray Man—actually looked like at the time it made the sim (though I’m surprised it hasn’t bothered to update it yet, using the Rome video).

I key the animation to run, and the two figures dance in a flash of violence that the machine calculates lasted barely two seconds. It figures Gray Man was on his feet when he broke loose of his cuffs, standing in his corner furthest from the only door, with the one guard that was originally with him in the room right up on him with a Glock to his head (for security or execution nobody knows, but I think if they were planning to pop him they’d have waited for the camera, unless of course he’d really pissed them off). Maybe they were just taking him to the head when he went off (at least the Wabs have those cleanliness mandates, so they didn’t leave him stewing in his own piss and shit). Either way, putting that gun to Gray Man’s head apparently didn’t help his poor guard in the least. Probably is exactly what got him killed.

The animation makes it look cleaner than it probably was, but Datascan swears it’s in realtime (less than two seconds!). I’ve watched this one sequence alone almost a dozen times already, and I still can’t take my eyes off of it:

Gray Man—estimated as somewhere between five-six and five-eight and maybe one-fifty—breaks the zip-cuffs and swats the gun away, taking control of the guard’s arm holding it, and Gray’s arms are instantly whipping alternately in a short snaky dance like he’s playing a shell game between the guard’s arm and face. In nothing flat, the guard—identified as a low-level recent recruit known as Hajaf since he changed his name from Hans Henkels—lost both his eyes to a pair of particularly brutal gouges (autopsy says Gray Man drove his fingers straight in almost to the brain, one socket at a time, about as fast as I can type), and in between them his right elbow gets made to bend the way it isn’t designed to, hard enough that his shoulder also separated in the process. Datascan even provides the juicy sound effects.

Blinded and broken, Hans (I’m reluctant to humor them by using their Wab-names) only managed to get one shot off into the wall before he got a chop through the windpipe that slid straight into Gray winding an arm around his neck like a python, across the front and wrapping back. The shot brings the guard’s one backup—known as Akbar, which may have been his actual name—running in, just in time to see (and hear, I expect) Hans’ neck breaking backwards as Gray’s coiling left arm cranked his head back and down pretty much all the way to his spine. This spectacle makes Akbar hesitate about half-a-second (that, and his already-dead partner is still on his feet being a human shield) before he remembers he’s carrying an AKS and raises it to shoot.

Unfortunately, his panicked burst hits his own man Hans square in the heart, punching it out the back of him and all over the walls. By luck or design, Gray Man was just far enough sideways to not be in the way as the round came through his shield.

By design (probably not luck), Gray had kept control of Hans’ broken gun arm this whole time. The impact of the 7.62 AK rounds actually helped him spin his gruesome puppet, so that the Glock is pointing at Akbar when a dying twitch sets it off again. Poor Akbar catches the round in the bladder (I’d rather hope by luck and not design), so his vest didn’t do him any good. Worse for him, the Wabs had been loading their sidearms with Talons (for the shock value when they pop an innocent), and instant karma rips a hole so big between Akbar’s legs that it almost castrates him in the process.

The AKS fires wild into the floor (at which point I’m sure the neighbors are grateful that the place is made out of concrete), giving Gray Man plenty of time to get his own hold on the now definitely dead Hans’ Glock and finish the job. But he doesn’t kill Akbar, at least not right away.

The AI shifts back to the hi-rez of Akbar’s remains on the floor, text-arrows counting off a systematic dismemberment as he gets a Talon blown through both upper arms and both thighs. He looks like a bloody marionette dropped in a tangle of shattered limbs, dead eyes (this sim is really disturbingly good) staring up at the ceiling. Combining the autopsy with the footprints left in the small lake of blood that promptly covered the floor, Datascan calculates that Gray Man squatted down real close over the top of his second target and spent a good five minutes just watching poor Akbar go into shock and bleed to death.

Or maybe interrogating him. Some of the bullet wounds show signs of additional unexplained trauma, and some of Hans’ DNA was in the wounds. Only logical way that could happen was if Gray Man stuck his already bloody fingers into the holes.

Then he went and took a shower.

The other four bodies are in the common room.

According to the witness (the hysterical Iraqi national they’d caught working contract labor on the base—my base—and had planned to add to their little chop-the-hostages web series), the Wabs realized something was off when they got back from their kidnapping foray and found the door ajar. Then they noticed the bloody fingerprints on the knob, and actually managed to hold it together enough to do a fairly pro leapfrog to sweep the place.

Unfortunately, the two who took point went pretty promptly to check out their prisoner’s bedroom, and froze screaming and cursing when they scanned the gory mess Gray Man had left in there. It makes me wonder just how long and how well they had known Hans and Akbar.

The witness—Tariq—says he remembers a lot of screaming and shouting and general losing it at that point, and admitted somewhere in there to pissing himself (as it looked very much like they would take it out on him, as the bloody open door suggested that the true object of their rage had long since fled the scene). That was when the Claymore went bang.

Gray Man had taken the time to hide it behind the sofa facing the bedroom door, calculating (maybe during that nice hot shower) that at least one of them would do the obvious thing and head straight for his cell without considering the possibility of the place being rigged (and pretty professionally rigged at that). The two Wab pointmen took most of the antipersonnel charge at close range in the legs and pelvic regions, the mine placed and aimed to spare the rest of the room (apparently Gray Man knew or guessed that the four who had gone out were fishing to bring home more victims, so he didn’t want to just spray the whole place as soon as they walked in).

Tariq says he didn’t even hear the shots after that initial blast, but suddenly the Wab holding him—Yusuf Al-Nahl, their apparent leader—just wasn’t holding him anymore. Tariq (and probably the Wabs as well) didn’t even realize Gray Man was still home until what was left of the two by the bedroom door stopped screaming and dropped, their brains adding to the new wall-art. Al-Nahl was dead from a similar head shot almost instantly thereafter. Three shots, three kills. All with an antique Browning Hi-Power that Gray Man had apparently found (along with the Claymore) in their small arsenal.

Tariq says he just ran and ran at that point—hands still zipped behind his back—and kept running, until he nearly got turned into a speed bump three blocks away, screaming for help in three different languages to no response the whole way. He swears all he saw of our mystery man was this gray rippling blur (probably the coat combined with the extreme palor, as we saw on the Rome feed today) like a ghost coming from what must have been the bathroom (ballistics confirms the trajectories), and then he promptly got all devout again. The rest of his interview sounds like some kind of Muslim evangelical testimonial.

That left one.

Delilah Ansar. 23. Very pretty girl—I can still see that, despite the mess Gray made of her. But her looks were the whole point of her.

Serb descent, grew up as a minor diplomat’s brat, schooled all over the world. In trouble since she hit puberty, rebelling against daddy by going the obnoxious civil disobedience route. Got bailed out on a diplomatic six times after stupid theatrical crap like pelting riot troops with blood bags and dousing herself with what she thought was dry Anthrax at a corporate crasher. She fell in with the Balkan NeoWabs just after Chechnya, and let herself get seduced into the EU Qaeda remnants. They put her to good use, too: seducing young foreigners at clubs and luring lonely soldiers and contract workers away from their green zones, setting them up to be kidnapped for their nostalgic little snuff videos. (The old techniques still work to grab the media.)

The AI figures that’s how they snagged our Gray Man, whoever he is. Probably at a club, given what happened in the next twenty-four hours after he was done here.

We’d have a better idea who he is, I’m sure, it’s just that nobody’s come up missing that we know of anywhere in this local Wab-cell’s effective hunting range. And we also can’t figure out why the Wabs would keep him so long without publicly announcing who they’d scooped.

We found Delilah by the kitchenette.

She had a weapon, also a Glock. It looks like she threw it away. Maybe figured her best play was to use her pretty face and lean body. Too bad for her that Gray apparently wasn’t in the mood to forgive her from the last time she used that tactic on him. Footprints in the blood show him backing her up against the wall. (I notice she would have been in reach of one of their laptops, which had been password unlocked just about the time she died, her prints on the keys and the reader). That’s probably when (and why) he cut her.

The face, of course. One cut. Odd angle, though (at least it was before we got the Rome video today): diagonally down the left side of her face, splitting her brow and continuing through her cheek. Autopsy says it was quick—it doesn’t even look like he laid a violent hand on her until after, until the last, when he took her head in one hand and stuck some long-assed fighting knife (he’d probably taken it off one of his guards—the Wabs seem to like those big showy fantasy daggers—they may have even threatened to use it to head him during his stay) up under her jaw and threaded it up into her brainstem. Very pro: he knew what he was doing with the knife, minimal hesitation.

I look down at the sim of her body, discarded against the wall like an abandoned doll: The look on her face isn’t what I would have expected at all. It’s almost