Accelerated Read Online Free PDF Page B

everyone else, and the tickets were a lucrative way of making it. When the light changed, it also flashed a green WALK for waiting pedestrians. They surged across the intersection in a mob, with more always coming up behind.
    The masses of humanity made spotting a tail harder. The trick wasn’t to look directly, but indirectly. A trained operative let his subconscious spot the anomaly. I tried that, but saw nothing unusual around me. Maybe the better way to say it was that I spotted nothing strange that didn’t already belong in San Francisco.
    I didn’t believe Kay had practiced the trade long enough to hone her instincts to a fine pitch. It was like shooting hoops, like basketball. If you played long enough, if you practiced every day and took thousands of shots, you developed your instincts. You knew a second before a person was going to lunge for the ball to try to steal it from you. Most people never consciously learned why they knew such things. The Shop had taught me both the how-to and the why.
    I tailed Kay, and I studied her out of the corner of my eye. I suspected she had learned to sense someone watching too intently. Most animals do manage that trick, some lucky soldiers, too. In your gut, you felt someone’s hot stare, or it caused your neck to tingle. I had felt it more than once in Afghanistan. Sometimes, nothing happened and you forgot about it. But other times, a Taliban fighter jumped out of a doorway, with his AK-47 blazing. The second you saw the door open, however, you shot him. Your friends would ask how you knew. The answer was you must have felt him staring at you through a crack in the door, muttering his prayers, psyching himself up to take down the American.
    What organ in you sensed the intense stare? I wish I knew.
    I felt something then, and looked around. All around me the tourists surged, the folk of Frisco. I glanced back at the East Harbor. How hard would it have been for someone to trail Kay to my boat? If someone had, might they jump aboard my boat now and retrieve the box while I was gone?
    I rubbed my chin. I needed a shave. I should have been asleep in my bunk right now. With a shrug, and an “excuse me” to a man that I brushed too hard, I kept after Kay.
    She knew some of the tricks of the trade, the obvious ploys like glancing at a parked car to use its window-glass as a mirror to check behind her. Or she crossed a street at the last minute. It was minor-league stuff, but she did it smoothly.
    Kay had spoken about Polarity Magnetics. Doctor Cheng worked there, she’d said. Were any of the others there as well? The accident had exposed a chamber full of scientists to mysterious forces. Before the accident, none of them had been physically dangerous. Afterward, after they’d gotten over the shock of transformation, most of them had thought of themselves as deadly mutants. Each had different abilities. One could lift two thousand pounds over his head. Another climbed a concrete wall, digging her fingers into it as if it was sand. A third could phase out enough to swim through certain types of substances.
    Kay hurried, passing people in her stream. I lost sight of her for a moment, and then I saw her stop abruptly at a crosswalk button. She un-slung her purse and slipped her hand into it. It was hard to see with the mass of people between us, but she kept her hand in the purse for some time.
    Maybe I’d been watching her too intently and not focusing enough around myself. As her crosswalk sign turned green, I sensed something strange behind me and turned around. The man directly behind me was thickset, had long gray hair and tattoos on his neck that disappeared down his collared shirt. His rough clothes and snarl that revealed several missing teeth all indicated an ex-con or biker. His eyes were fixed on me. In his wide right hand held down low, he palmed a hypodermic needle containing a blue solution.
    “Tough luck, man,” he growled in a smoker’s voice, and he shot his hand