Deadlock Read Online Free PDF Page A

countdown one last time and then tossed the flashbang grenade towards the approaching guards, leaping to his feet as it detonated with a blinding white light and deafening thunderclap. Otto ran towards the window, taking advantage of the guards’ momentary disorientation and reached out with his mind for the four tiny explosive charges that he had placed on the window a few minutes earlier. With a tiny mental nudge he triggered their detonators, shattering the window just before he hit it. He dived through the shower of glass and felt his stomach lurch as he launched himself into the void, seeming to hang in the air for an instant before plummeting towards the street far below. Otto watched as the blackened asphalt of the street raced towards him at terminal velocity. He closed his eyes a split second before impact.
    He was just five metres from the ground when the ISIS suit rebooted, its variable geometry forcefield generators firing with a soft thumping sound, instantly slowing his descent and reducing Otto’s impact with the ground from undoubtedly fatal to merely painful. He hit the street with a crunching thud and lay there winded for a moment before picking himself up from the ground with a pained groan and staggering to his feet. He reached into the pouch on his belt, hoping that the object he had stolen just a minute earlier was still intact. If it had been damaged by his impact with the ground then all of this would have been for nothing. He gingerly pulled the rectangle of black glass from his belt pouch and examined it. Mercifully it still appeared to be in one piece.
    ‘Are you OK?’ a voice behind Otto asked. ‘That looked like a pretty rough landing.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Otto said as Raven approached. ‘We have to get to the car – we’ve only got a couple of minutes before they figure out what we’ve taken and shift their quantum encryption key.’
    Raven gave a quick nod and they both ran towards a multi-storey parking structure. Otto glanced over his shoulder as he heard raised voices behind them. On the other side of the street, security guards were pouring from the building that he had left in such dramatic fashion. One of the guards spotted Otto and Raven running into the parking structure and yelled to the others, pointing across the street. Otto and Raven ran past the exit barrier, heading towards the sleek, black sports car that was parked just inside the entrance. Otto ran around to the passenger side as Raven climbed into the driver’s seat and hit the ignition button in the centre of the dashboard. The car sprang to life with a throaty roar and Raven floored the accelerator, sending the low-slung machine rocketing straight through the flimsy wooden barrier and out on to the street beyond. She spun the steering wheel and sent the car into a power slide as the security guards who were sprinting towards them opened fire. The bullets didn’t even dent the shining skin of the car, much less penetrate it. Raven accelerated hard and the car surged forward, weaving through the traffic ahead of them as Otto opened the glove compartment in front of him and pulled out a jet-black tablet device. He pushed the black glass rectangle into a slot in the base of the tablet and its screen flared into life, displaying a logo that looked like a stylised image of a circle of barbed wire with a progress bar that was slowly filling beneath it.
    ‘Come on,’ Otto said impatiently as the sound of sirens started to come from somewhere behind them. As the progress bar slowly filled he could feel only the same incomprehensible buzz of encrypted data coming from the tablet that he had sensed around the vault door a few minutes earlier. The progress bar finally vanished and the barbed-wire logo disappeared to be replaced by a screen displaying an image of a stern-faced man with grey hair and cold blue eyes wearing a dark blue suit with a Stars and Stripes pin in his lapel. Otto’s eyes flicked to the name beneath the