The Valkyrie Project Read Free Page B

they went. On the beach, where there had been a breeze, Ana had been comfortable running at high speed, but with the forest blocking the wind and trees trapping the heat from any sunlight that managed to get through, she was sweating even with their relatively unhurried pace.
    In front of her, she could see Jrue sweating as well as he struggled to limp through the tangle of roots, bushes, and undergrowth. His suit was beginning to stick to his skin. She'd already deduced he was in good shape from the cut of the suit itself, but she could now make out stron g muscles bulging from his back, legs, and butt. Too bad he'd been injured so severely in the crash or he could have been a great asset for the mission.
    Ana's mental clock ticked off another twenty minutes before they reached what she had feared: a dilapidated wooden shack. It would have been considered a relic of an age gone by if it were in any more populated an area. But it seemed strangely appropriate here in the middle of a forest on an uninhabited island. The tropical vegetation had started encroaching, but the building was raised off the floor enough to keep it protected. Whoever had built it had cut down the fewest number of trees possible in making room for it. The taller trees around it had grown over, protecting it from intruding satellite photography. When combined with the 'static' from the remaining radioactive hotspots that gave the Keys their nickname, the little hovel was well-protected from any sort of infrared sensor as well.
    "Welcome home!" Johnson said as he opened the door. A layer of dust covered everything in the single room. There was a bare -bones kitchen in one corner, a cot with a rolled-up pad in another, and a communications station in a third. It was outdated equipment, but it had been top of the line at one point, and it would suffice for his needs as well as hers—once she could get her hands on it.
    Jrue and Ana were ushered in and told to sit on the cot. The MP-11 stayed trained on them —at least close enough to take out a part of them—as Johnson fished electrocuffs from a trunk that looked like it might have been around since pirates had sailed the seas using only wind. The cuffs were modern enough though, just barely. Jrue put them on Ana, and then Johnson did the same to him. The criminal definitely wanted her to think he had it all planned out. It didn't really matter if he was bluffing or not—she'd find out soon enough.
    "You got a bathroom in this dump?" she asked.
    "Do you really think I'd believe you have to go? I'm sure you emptied your bowels before leaving for this mission, and if you didn't, then you're even sloppier than I'd thought."
    Ana had to push hard on the anger rising from her stomach to keep from charging him right then. Of course she'd gone empty before coming to this lonely island. They both knew she was testing the boundaries, but she was more upset by the little jab at the end. For a moment, she envisioned the MP-11 in her hand, blowing a hole through the side of the cabin and taking his head along with it.
    Johnson went to the comm station and flipped a few switches. The machine hummed to life, stuttered, coughed, spat up a little —not completely unlike a baby—and finally settled on purring like a kitten. It wasn't the most majestic of communications arrays, mashed together like a set piece for a short-form drama about "back in the days."
    Apparently it worked, though. After twisting dials—how long had this thing been sitting there?—and pushing some large mechanical buttons, Johnson seemed to connect to someone, because he began speaking.
    "Mirrorlake, this is Infinity Sixty-Three."
    Even more miraculously, there was someone on the other end. The voice was muffled, probably dampened by dust on the headset Johnson held up to one ear; the response crackled and hissed, too much extraneous noise for Ana to make out anything coherent.
    "Roger that, Mirrorlake. The predator has been neutralized. I