The Red Winter by Henry H. Neff

Author:Henry H. Neff [Neff, Henry H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-97140-2
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

Over the course of his career, William Cooper had been many things: a spy, thief, soldier, saboteur, inquisitor, rescuer, and assassin. Many jobs. Many hats. But all of them executed by a man who took his work very seriously. For William Cooper was a professional who did whatever was required to complete his mission. At the moment, that meant killing a man.

The engineer was no longer resisting. He stared at Cooper’s reflection in the gleaming boiler, stared with blank astonishment at the pale stranger who had suddenly appeared, clamped a strong arm about his throat, and brought his life to a swift and silent conclusion. When the eyes went dim, Cooper gently lowered the man’s body to the floor.

“Is it over?”

The voice was Hazel’s. She was huddled in the corner, her eyes averted from the scene.

“It is.”

Crouching, Cooper methodically stripped the man’s watch and security badge. The engineer was in his twenties, very fit, and possessed the blue-eyed, Eurasian features that were a common by-product of the Workshop’s eugenics programs. Removing a slim computer from the man’s breast pocket, Cooper pressed the engineer’s still-warm thumb against its biometric sensor. The dark screen illuminated.

“What are you doing?” Toby whispered from behind Hazel.

The smee had taken the form of a gray rat when the engineer entered the boiler room. The man’s unexpected appearance had startled Hazel, who’d knocked over a wrench that had been propped against a wall. It had clattered to the floor, causing the engineer to draw a sidearm and hurry along the boilers toward the dark corner where they’d been resting. Four steps later, the engineer was dead.

Ignoring Toby’s questions, Cooper studied the computer screen as he scrolled through a series of menus. He soon found what he was looking for—a detailed map of the Verilius Depot, an underground train station near what used to be Frankfurt, Germany. A tiny blinking dot appeared in a mechanicals room in the station’s northwest quadrant.

There we are. His eyes darted to a tiny grid of updating data. He checked the engineer’s watch and swiped past various screens to locate the latest train schedules.

Cooper was anxious to get moving again. They had already violated one of his basic rules by staying in one place for more than twenty-four hours. And now someone had happened by. Killing the engineer had not solved their problem; it was simply a stopgap as they sought a way into the Workshop.

Their problems had started with Max’s clones. The assassins had left Cooper badly injured—two broken wrists and a concussion that had him seeing double for a week. He had recovered at Shrope Hovel where Hazel had set his bones, accelerated their healing with spellwork, and Mum and Bob had cooked for him in their old, familiar way. The impatient haglings had not waited for him to mend. They had set out the morning after the Naming, clopping off in their little wagons to rescue their aunt Gertie from the Workshop museums, where she was on display. They’d taken

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