Ragnarock Read Free Page A

them moving along at a safe, sedate speed. The car Talon was looking for was one of the rarer intemal-combustion models, a sign of conspicuous consumption on the part of the owner, but no more than he expected from a man like Nicholas Grace.
    He spotted it about a block from the intersection. A black Phaeton limousine with polarized windows, cutting its way through the traffic like a moving shadow. Only the bluish-halogen headlights gave it any color or depth whatsoever. It matched the image Trouble had forwarded to Talon's headware memory. That was the target, all right.
    Talon mentally keyed open Channel One of his headcom system.
    "Target sighted." he said. "I'm on it."
    As the limo turned the corner, Talon dropped his clairvoyance spell and gripped the handlebars of the Rapier. A few seconds later, the Phaeton cruised past the alleyway. Talon pulled smoothly out onto the street and began to follow.
    As he wove through the late-night traffic, he recalled planning for this run and Hammer asking him why he didn't just make himself invisible to follow their target. Talon reminded the ork mercenary how hard it was to drive in Boston even under normal conditions, to say nothing of dealing with traffic that couldn't even see you. No, when it came to running a tail, sometimes the old-fashioned methods worked best. Not that Talon's magic wouldn't come in handy on this caper. On the contrary, Talon was counting on it—just not yet.
    As he followed the limo, he glanced up into the night sky. The streetlights and the background neon glow of the city lights made it difficult to make out much of anything, even with the digital-enhancers in his helmet. But he knew that somewhere up there hovered a small surveillance drone, providing a realtime video feed of the area, including the limo and Talon not far behind. Val and Trouble were monitoring the feed, each deep into her respective virtual world. Valkyrie was jacked in to remotely control the drones needed for this operation, while Trouble navigated cyberspace to handle the informational side of things, keeping everyone coordinated.
    Using his headcom system, he called up a window in his field of vision. It was projected onto the retinas of his eyes by tiny lasers, using data fed to his headware by Val's drone. The head's up display showed a graphic overview of the streets and the traffic, with the target limo and Talon highlighted in red. The locations of the rest of the team also glowed on the display. Everyone was in place.
    He keyed open another comm channel with a thought. "Boom ol' buddy," he subvocalized through the link, "we ready to go?"
    "All set." came a Cockney-accented rumble. "Val's got our bird at less than a kilometer from rendezvous. Let's just hope Gracie doesn't decide to pull out the major mojo."
    "I can handle him." Talon said. "Not to worry."
    "Who, me?" Boom replied. "Worry? Not at all. The day you can't take some academic magic-geek is the day we should give up this business. The only concern I've got is what he might have going for him that we don't know about. I mean, we've never had a shadowrun not go down exactly as planned, right?"
    Talon ignored the sarcasm; it was just pre-run nerves. He had them, too, even after all his years as a shadowrunner. Their plan was good, but plenty of things could still go wrong. Talon understood Boom's concern, but there wasn't anything he could do about it now.
    The limo was headed for the airport, where Dr. Nicholas Grace, professor of applied thaumaturgy, would be boarding a UCASAir commuter flight t Washington
D.C.
, the home town of Grace's associates, the Illuminates of the New Dawn. The IOND was a big-league magical association, a kind of "mages union" that included plenty of famed academics and corporate magicians from all over the world. Grace was a senior member of the organization, on his way home from a very important meeting with IOND members in the Boston area. Talon and the rest of his team were being paid to