Molehunt Read Free Page A

officer who insisted the agent who got ‘first call’ ran it the whole way – advised of course by those more experienced. But was that unlucky? No, not at all. If sidelined, he could slip off, take some leave, and sort the matter out personally. On the other hand, he could achieve his own ends just as easily by staying at the centre of the storm.
    He did not have to get his hands dirty to take care of every Luton that came along. There were other ways.
    Quickly he called up the file on Anneke Long-shadow. Parts of it were beyond his access level, but what he read quelled internal alarm bells.
    She was no mere Luton, but neither was she a formidable old-field agent, the kind they called ‘unkillable’.
    She was not much older than him. What he could see of her record showed a pre-organisation history of rule breaking, insubordination, and ‘excessive initiative’. To her credit, she had one small success in the field. She had caught an assassin by the name of Bodin, who terminated the President of Zos in the Cygnus Sector. That was probably what kept her in the agency, given her ‘problem with authority’.
    Maximus stared at her schematic image and the potted bio implanted in it: Anneke Longshadow. Born on Normansk, as he thought. Tall, athletic and dark-haired, she had the high cheekbones and flawless olive complexion that suggested Mediterranean ancestry (temperate zone, Old Earth). She was smart, beautiful and potentially lethal, like all graduates. She would still be burning with the cadet agent’s need to prove herself, which was easy to exploit. And only nineteen years old.
    Not someone to get overly alarmed about, just someone to kill.
    After all, he had a reason. She was a threat to him. Now all he had to do was prove that she was a potential hazard to RIM.

A NNEKE Longshadow ran for her life. Accelerated water slugs blew chunks out of the wall where she had been a split second earlier. She ducked, spun round a corner, dodged a hail of num-darts, and made for a narrow gap between ventilators. She was racing across a dark rooftop. Not far behind, Quesadan hunkies were in hot pursuit.
    Jeez, some people lose their cool over nothing
, she thought. Just because she had broken into their high-security complex and made off with a tightly encrypted and probably embarrassing datt wafer file. Had the alarm not sounded nobody would have cared. Did the file contain the identity of a mole within RIM who was trading sensitive information? If not, this was a lot of trouble for nothing.
    Maybe the Quesadans just want to congratulate me on my resourcefulness
.
    A heat-seeking nerve-demyelinator spat towards her out of the darkness.
Or maybe not
, she added mentally.
    Somebody had flanked her. Anneke leapt, spun in mid-air, twisting over backwards, and fired as she twisted. She got lucky. The nerve-demyelinator exploded four metres away.
Too close
.
    She landed, rolled onto her feet and kept going. She could hear the heavy beat of air-subs. Any second now they would be cresting the rooftop, spotlights casting about, pinning her in their cone of illumination for num-darts, or worse. That depended on who was in charge and whether they wanted her dead or alive.
    â€˜There she is!’ The voice was too close for comfort. She forced a burst of speed. A quick look at the directional locator band told her she was approaching the edge of the building. The distance to the next building was ten metres.
    â€˜Okay legs, over-boost or die.’ She leaned in and charged at the dark knife-edge of the rooftop. Somewhere ahead, in the grey fogginess that enshrouded this cloud-bound city, was another rooftop – unless the locator was wrong, which sometimes happened.
    Anneke leapt.
    She had a dizzying glimpse of an endless drop below her, legs cycling, arms pin-wheeling, then she thudded down, rolling back to her feet. She had made it.
A centimetre less and … well, who knows?
Either way, the