The Shiva Objective Read Online Free PDF Page B

fruit.
    Damn , she thought.  Didn't see that coming.  Got lucky… 
    The hunter saw her and reached for something at his belt.  Now he had a gun in his hand and the proprietor was shouting, grabbing the hunter's wrist.  Two other men – bearing a resemblance to the merchant and possibly his sons – appeared on the scene just as the hunter pulled free.  He aimed at Nina, but the men were on him, pummeling him, punching his face.
    Nina didn't stay to watch.
    Found me again.   That was too fast.  Maybe they had cameras in some areas and scouts at others, but still…  There had to be something else.  They didn't have a psychic, not anymore, so what else could it be?
    As she ran, she stumbled and then suddenly she saw it:
    The bald man, earlier, in the bazaar. Leaning against a post while he looked at his smartphone's screen.  The screen – a red dot moving around a map of the city's streets.
                  Her mind ripped back to the present.  And as she ran, she felt around her pockets, sure they had put a transmitter in her clothes somewhere.  Or the shoes.  It could be anywhere, but…
    No, they wouldn't have trusted that she'd keep these clothes.  It was something else.
    The dart…
    A microchip.  In her bloodstream.  That was the only thing that made sense.
    It was likely something of a transitory nature – lasting about twenty-four hours before dissolving.  They'd tagged her like a deer and released her into the wild, knowing they could locate her signal and find her anywhere.
    She stopped, taking a breath. The sun beat down on her face and she tasted the sweat trickling past her lips.
    Not much she could do about it then.  They'd locate her, no matter how well she hid.  So there was only thing left to do.
    They could track her, but she could also track them. 
    Smiling, she turned around.  The Taj could wait. 
    Time to improve the odds.
    FIVE
    When she finally made it to the grounds of the Taj Mahal, the sun was setting over the rooftops of the sprawling city, out beyond the old Agra Fort where the Mogul emperors once held court.  She turned her gaze ahead to the awe-inspiring Taj Mahal, even more incredible up close, where the pillars, the minarets and the onion-shaped dome seemed to be lit from within the very marble, presenting a reddish-pink glow at once soothing and inspiring.
    The past seven hours were now only a blur.  Her head ached, but she felt surprisingly good.  Normally, whenever she suffered migraines, she liked to go shopping.  It somehow soothed her.  With the surprising amount of cash lifted from the dead hunters' wallets, she had indulged herself at a little black market dealer to the southeast.  She had taken the last hunter's cell phone too, and just for fun she fired off a couple of mocking texts to recent numbers that had sent him updates. 
    She had confirmed that they were indeed tracking her with a microchip and were leading a well-coordinated process that was ultimately marred by a bunch of overexcited yahoos with guns – some of them drinking at the same time.
    She had taken two out where they waited in a locked apartment building by tossing a homemade smoke bomb through the window and then picking them off as they came running out.  After the smoke cleared, she went in and rounded up whatever ammunition and weapons were still usable, including another sniper rifle.
    Three more she caught off guard by using the limitations of their tracking technology.  The program could only tell where she was horizontally in relation to the user, but told them nothing about what altitude she was at.  So she had climbed to the fourth floor of an adjacent building, perched on a fire escape with the sniper rifle, and as they wandered the alley, checking their phones and looking around various ground-level hiding places, she dropped them one by one.
    Like fish in a barrel.
    The last three had had been more difficult.  She had used her sight to tell that their