Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) Read Online Free Page B

with
the Imperial authorities, after he had decided that the Emperor did not need
killing, his name was anathema in the Underworld.  Now his hide was wanted by
both sides of the law.
    And what the hell is
Sergiov going to think when I give her the information I have , he thought.  Ekaterina
Sergiov, recent Director of the Imperial Intelligence Agency, now overall Commander
of Imperial Intelligence, had wanted him to come in and serve the Empire.  She
had said the Emperor need not know that he was now on her team, since the
Monarch might still want his neck.  He didn’t really trust her enough to put
his life in her hands, since with a word the most powerful man in the Empire
could overrule any deal she made.
    He thought of what had
been waiting in the interrogation room located under a small building fifty
kilometers from where he now stood.  Was she serious? he thought,
thinking of the woman who had been his prisoner for some months.  Or was it
just the delusional thinking of a madwoman?  Fucking time travel?  Who the hell
would try fucking time travel?
    As far as he could tell,
Countess Esmeralda Zhee had been telling the truth.  Or what she thought was
the truth, which wasn’t always the same thing.  He had questioned her for
months, using every technique in his repertoire.  He had been a master of his
trade, and getting information out of unwilling subjects had been a useful
tool.
    Well, Countess, your days
of manipulating people in the Parliament are over , he thought with a
slight smile.  They would never find Zhee.  Her disappearance would remain a
mystery.  High powered lasers had taken care of the body, incinerating it down
to the molecular level.  Those molecules had been whisked away and dumped into
the city sewer system by his filtration system.  Not even a cell remained, and
absolutely no DNA.  She was gone as if she had never existed.
    Am I a monster? he thought.  He didn’t
think he had been one when he still served the Empire.  The Lasharans he had
killed had butchered some of his men, after wiping out an entire missionary
village of their people who were trying to distance themselves from their death
cult of a religion.  When he had killed those guerillas, burning them at the
stake, it had been an act of rage.  The killings he had done since were without
passion, simply cold and calculating.  He had thought he had lost all of his
emotions.
    Zhee had changed that perception. 
He had hated her, and had brought untold agony to her before her demise at his
hands.  That had been satisfying at the time, hurting the noble who had tried
to have him killed for failing in his mission to take out the Imperial Family. 
Now he had to wonder if he had lost touch with reality himself.
    Time to make the call , he thought with a
slight feeling of anxiety.  His com system was supposedly untraceable, but he
also knew the capabilities of the people he was dealing with.  He took one last
look around the luxurious townhouse, then summoned his car to the rooftop
landing pad.
    Five minutes later he was
in his vehicle, cruising at random through the air pathways along the traffic
patterns.  With a thought he coded his com unit to contact the central hub
installed in his townhouse.  It was connected to another hub ten kilometers
away by supposedly untraceable laser optics.  After use the cable would be
disassembled by the built in nanites, and while it might be possible to
eventually trace its former path, it would be difficult and time consuming. 
That secondary hub would send coded signals out to forty external connections
that would route into the citywide com net.  One at a time, switching around
every couple of seconds, it would be a nightmare to try to trace any one of
them.  IIA could and would do so, given a few minutes, and then would come the
toil of tracing up the path.  All they would find in the meantime would be the
townhouse that was no longer his habitat.
    “Director Sergiov,”