Blitz by Daniel O'Malley

Author:Daniel O'Malley [O’Malley, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

If there’s a human trait—hell, if there’s an animal trait—they’ll have someone who’s got that trait jacked up to fifty on a scale of one to five.

The words echoed in Lyn’s mind.

So how do I lose one of these ultra-trackers? she thought as she walked briskly down the street away from Apex House. Before she’d departed the office, a quick search of the Checquy database for tracking had yielded four London-based operatives. One of them was a Pawn who did something Lyn didn’t understand with Kirlian auras, but since he’d been sent to New Zealand temporarily, she was not going to worry about him. There was a woman in the Barghest commandos who could actually see back through time to follow someone’s movements, but her power had limited range. The other two, however, were Grafters who’d had their smell and taste augmented to an unbelievable extent. They could follow spoor that would have left a bloodhound shrugging its shoulders.

Visions of prison movies flickered through her head. Cool Hand Luke. The Shawshank Redemption. Scattering chili powder in her wake would only draw attention; she couldn’t swim the Thames, and wading down a stream in London, if she could find one, would probably create more problems than it solved. So use a different kind of river, she thought. The Underground seemed like much the best option. It held a mass of humanity with their own scents (some of them extremely potent) to help fog hers, and the trains would provide abrupt cutoffs in the trail as they whisked her away from station to station.

Will that be enough, though? She couldn’t see how the Grafter trackers could possibly trace her scent through the Underground, but she was aware of all the security cameras in London. If the Checquy tracked her to a station, then they could follow her progress via security footage. I’ll need to mix it up, she decided. Walk between stations, move erratically—anything that might delay their progress and buy herself time. I’ll also need to change my appearance, she thought. Different clothes, different… what? Hair? A wig? And all of that would take money. The cash from her go-kit, which had seemed an outrageous amount when she’d been handed it, was now looking like not nearly enough.

She stopped at the first ATM she came to and withdrew the maximum daily amount that her two cards would allow. It didn’t seem like that much, and she sighed. The bank cards could definitely not be risked again. Reluctantly, she bent them back and forth in her hands until she could tear them in half. The same would go for her Oyster card as soon as it got her to Oxford Street. From there, once she’d made some strategic purchases, she’d walk among the thousands of shoppers to Tottenham Court Road station, where she’d pay cash for a day travel card.

A stop by a pharmacist yielded a large pair of sunglasses and a pair of thick-rimmed blue-light glasses that changed the look of her face.

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