Truth Engine Read Online Free PDF

to see him throw it at her head. It was a two-inch-high, circular object—a magnetic desk tidy designed to hold paper clips and drawing pins while they weren’t being used. Brigid reared back as the thing hurtled toward her, cried out as it struck her just beneath her left eye.
    She fell backward, and for a moment her vision swam. She ignored that, bringing up the TP-9 and peppering her attacker with bullets as he charged at her. The man fell forward, his long robes wrapping around his legs as he tumbled. Brigid leaped over his fallen body, hurrying across the room even as another of the strangers lunged for her from his position on the floor.
    Ahead of the titian-haired former archivist, another of the strange hooded figures had plucked a slingshot from his robe, and he leveled it at Brigid, preparing to shoot more grit at her. Suddenly, there was a blur of movement as Grant thrust his elbow into the interloper’s back, jabbing at his kidney. Grant snarled in pain as he connected, but the hooded stranger fell, crashing into a wall.
    â€œEither they’re wearing armor,” Grant theorized as Brigid joined him at the next aisle of desks, “or they aren’t human.”
    â€œThey’re certainly strong,” she agreed. “Could they be some new form of Nephilim?”
    â€œShit knows,” Grant spit. “Let’s keep moving.”
    Nearby, Kane was looking around the room, with Domi at his side. Among them, the foursome had at last managed to dispatch all eight of the invaders.
    Farrell lay in a pool of blood on the floor, his gold hoop earring glistening crimson. Part of the Cerberus team, Farrell sported a shaved head and a neatly trimmed goatee. Right now, his face was bruised and bloodied, and his eyes were closed.
    â€œFarrell?” Kane demanded. “You okay?”
    His teammate groaned, and Kane checked him more closely. He had a nasty cut at the back of his head where he had been coldcocked, but the wound appeared to have stopped pouring blood.
    â€œYou’ll be okay,” Kane announced, since his Magistrate training extended to basic medical knowledge. Farrell wasn’t listening; he was at best semiconscious.
    Across the aisle, Brigid and Grant did a similar check on the prone form of Beth Delaney. There was an ugly slash across her face, but she seemed otherwise okay.
    â€œWe have to find Lakesh,” Domi insisted, hurrying toward the doors beneath the Mercator map, which covered an entire wall of the ops center. Somehow, the streams of light that usually snaked across the map had all been replaced with an eerie red glow.
    Kane glanced about him. There were several other Cerberus people in the room, and he had a nasty feeling that at least two of them weren’t breathing. But Domi was right. They needed to keep moving, to worry about the living first. If Lakesh was still here somewhere, and still alive, then it looked as if it was up to Kane’s makeshift army to save him.
    The foursome hurried through the doors, emerging into the redoubt’s central corridor. The hallway appeared to be carved through the rock of the mountain, its high ceiling held in place by a network of thick metal girders.
    Nothing could have prepared them for what was waiting out there now, on the other side of the door.
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    K ANE OPENED HIS EYES , his breath coming with a suddenness that seemed to snap him out of his reverie. He was sitting on the floor of the cavern that had become his cell, his back pressed against the coolness of the rock wall, and for a moment he wondered just what it was that had shocked him so.
    Then he heard it again.
    There was a noise off to his left, coming from the wall itself. He strained, trying to make out what the sound was. It seemed to be some kind of scraping or grinding, as if two great rocks were being forced together.
    A few months back, Kane had been involved in an escapade that had featured a subterrene, a kind of boring machine that