The Machinery of Light Read Online Free PDF

reading.” Sarmax pauses. “Where are you going with all this anyway?”
    “Trying to get a line on the handler’s file,” says Spencer.
    “The book.”
    “Yeah, the book.”
    “Any luck?”
    “Not with the part that counts.”
    The thing that’s been turning in Spencer’s head contains three. The first is the location of the base they’ve penetrated. The second is the nature of the Eurasian secret weapon they’re inside. Both of those have now been cracked. Neither holds a candle to the third part: the final section of the pages scrawled in languages the last American agent in Hong Kong invented for the sole purpose of better hiding the secrets that had driven him mad. Secrets he committedto the most archaic medium of them all, the only one that’s safe from zone … paper. A whole book’s worth, and now it’s been burned, but not before it was photographed and uploaded by the men who killed him—Spencer and Sarmax—who were even more desperate than the handler was, and who can’t afford to take the precautions he’d been taking. Spencer mulls it all over once again. He exhales slowly.
    “It’s definitely what we’re after,” he says.
    “Rain,” says Sarmax.
    “Yeah. I’ve been able to suss out the section headings, made some inroads on the rest of it. I’ve figured out its source.”
    “Its
source?”
    “Its author.”
    “You mean the handler? Jarvin?”
    “I mean who he stole it from.”
    “Oh.”
    “Oh. We’re talking about the
key files
, Leo. Precise records of the Autumn Rain experiments, right? Sinclair had to keep track of it somehow. And somehow his onetime handler went and got himself a copy.”
    “An
alleged
copy.”
    “Sure. May be a fake. But I doubt it.”
    “Because?”
    “Because I think it really
did
do something to his mind.”
    Sarmax starts to reply—and stops as a faint noise filters in from several rooms above … followed by an unmistakable
creak
as a hatch swings open. There’s the sound of boots coming down a ladder.
    “The access shafts,” says Spencer.
    “We need to make ourselves scarce.”
    C laire Haskell keeps on running, pursuit hot on her trail, and she’s ever more certain that Carson’s leading that pursuit—that Montrose hasn’t had him liquidated for failing to capture her. Or just liquidated on general principles: because Haskell knows damn well what Carson is doing working for Stephanie Montrose. She wonders if Montrose knows too—wonders if Montrose has used her possession of the executive node to build up some means to protect herself from the world’s most dangerous assassin.
    But mostly Haskell’s wondering about the door she’s about to reach. It leads to a shaft she’d really like to get to. One she’s pretty sure isn’t known to Montrose. She wonders if it’s known to Carson. It’s barely known to her—even with her maps, it’s not easy to find. That’s because it’s hidden in the bottom of an empty water pipe, looking like part of the wall within. She traces her hand along the frame—finds a switch and hits it.
    Nothing happens.
    The door’s not opening. She hits it again. Same result.
    She tries to hack the systems of the door, but she can’t even find a zone beyond it. She’s getting frantic now. Because she can feel the pursuit coming in behind her, moving in to cut her off.
    And suddenly she gets it—a flash of insight or just some leering thought of his flung through rock for her reception: Carson knows about this door for sure—knows it’s a way to the
really
deep shafts—and that’s why she’s just managed to get herself trapped against it. He knows damn well that she can’t get through it. The codes she has are wrong. Or maybe they just got changed. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she can’t get through. And that the hunters are approaching along vectors that leave her with no way to get beyond them, back into the base’s larger sprawl. She turns away from the door—
    And looks