Lone Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page A

of sources, and they all corroborate it,” I babble on. He nods his acknowledgment, and I shut the frag up.
    Blake looks at Vladimir, and Vladimir raises one eyebrow a hair. Then Blake’s eyes are back on me. “I’d like to hear your opinion, Larson,” he says. “Do we go to war or not?”
    And suddenly every fragging eye in the place is on me— some surprised, some curious, two differentially dilated, and some with looks that could kill. I try to think of something to say, but the only thing that keeps running through my head is Paco’s comment from the night before— Whafuck ?— and somehow that doesn’t seem appropriate. “Well, I . ..
    I stammer, and then stall.
    But Blake’s still looking at me, so I mentally give my head a shake. Rick Larson, zero defects. “No war,” I croak.
    “Ranger disagrees,” Blake points out.
    “Ranger’s wrong,” I say.
    Not a politic comment, I guess. Ranger’s on his feet, his cheeks so flushed he looks like he’s hemorrhaging, and I’m suddenly a scapegoat for all the anger he doesn’t have the cojones to direct at Vladimir or Blake. “What the frag do you know about it, you snot-nosed punk?”
    The wire’s different today—I’ve slotted an escrima chip instead of one for my H & K smartgun—but it still wants to kill Ranger. And that’s my excuse for snapping back, “More than you, drekhead.” My hand slips into my jacket pocket. No firearms at councils—a rule applying even to bodyguards like Box (not that he needs firearms)—and some electronics I shouldn’t be carrying tell me that the ops room has hardware built into the door frame to detect smuggled holdouts.
    Null sweat, though. Chem-sniffers and metal detectors don’t pick up my “click-stick,” a collapsible baton like the Jap cops use. It’s made of a modified densiplast that’s as dense as iron and lets it pack some heft, but it’s totally nonmagnetic. Collapsed, the stick’s a cylinder about twelve centimeters long, and just the right diameter for a comfortable grip. Snap your wrist and it extends with a triple click out to about thirty centimeters, with enough mass in the bulbous tip to crack bone.
    Ranger clouds up even more, growling something that sounds suspiciously like Whafuck, and then lunges. His big right hand whips behind his back, re-emerges with a composite blade, his own nonmetallic holdout.
    I reach for the wire, and the brutal simplicity of escrima fills my mind. It’s from the Philippines, escrima is, and I wouldn’t classify it as a martial art because there’s nothing artistic about it. There are no forms, no formal rules or competitions. It’s about as brutal and pragmatic as the military-style hand-to-hand taught at the Academy, but it’s better for my needs because it assumes your opponent’s armed. Apart from the balisong “butterfly" knife, the only weapon it teaches you to use is a short stick or wand—the kind of “weapon of opportunity” you can pick up just about anywhere—which just happens to be about the same size as my click-stick. What a coincidence.
    As Ranger lunges, out comes my click-stick. Snap the wrist, clickity-click and I’m ready for action. I want to growl out something chill, something like, “Okay, sunshine, let’s see what you’ve got,” but I don’t have anywhere near enough time.
    He comes in low, aiming to drive the blade straight toward my gut, one of the toughest knife-moves to stop. I leap back half a meter, catch his wrist ir. the vee formed by my left wrist and the click-stick in my right hand, deflecting his thrust past my left side. (Just past: I feel the blade tug at my shirt.) Then I snap a quick backhanded shot at his head with the baton. The sharp crack as the stick hits Ranger’s forehead echoes in the room, and blood sprays from his scalp. For an instant he’s frozen, eyes defocused, wide open. It’d be so easy to drive the tip of the baton into his throat, shatter the hyoid bone and rupture his larynx, then