Free Sunfail by Steven Savile

was hiding.
    Jake didn’t move. He didn’t dare to so much as breathe.
    There was no sign of the man he’d followed in here. Either he was hiding or he’d already taken off when the shooting went down. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t Jake’s focus.
    The mission directive had changed. He’d gathered his recon, and at the heart of it found a killer. He might have come in here thinking this wasn’t his fight, but it certainly was now.
    He was a simple man. People didn’t get away with cold-blooded murder in Jake Carter’s world. It was that black-and-white.
    Where are the warriors? he thought. Right here. I am a fucking warrior.

CHAPTER NINE
    IT WAS BRAVADO.
    This wasn’t Kabul. He wasn’t packing. All thoughts of taking the killer down vanished as survival instinct kicked in. That was good. Nine times out of ten, pulling dumb shit like that was suicide. A different time. A different place. Yes. But not here. Not now. When the killer had real skill, which this guy had in spades, it nixed even that slim 10 percent element of chance—luck—that might have gone in his favor.
    Jake had seen firsthand just how well the guy knew his way around a gun: six men picked off in half as many seconds, head shots all around. Lethal.
    Size and strength didn’t matter against that kind of precision. One misstep and he’d be left having a religious experience he wasn’t ready for. All he could do was let the man walk out. It wasn’t cowardice. It was basic combat stuff. Priority one: stay alive.
    Jake waited a few tense seconds, not daring to breathe. The stairwell door eased shut on its hydraulic arm. He didn’t move.
    He gave the killer time to descend before he slipped through the door after him. Instead of following right behind the man, Jake ran down across the trading floor, avoiding the dead, to the banks of computer screens. He had no idea what he could learn from the terminals, but he had one shot here. Right now he knew nothing. Anything he could learn would be a start.
    Jake guessed he didn’t have much time before the NYSE security apparatus noticed its team was missing, so he didn’t linger as he stepped over the split skull of a dead man to get to his terminal. The screen filled with scrawling numbers and code that moved too quickly for him to fix on any of the command lines being executed by the machine. He wasn’t a programmer. He couldn’t scan the streams of code, and unfortunately there was no handy Press Enter to Destroy Western Civilization icon on the screen to make sense of it all.
    Whatever they’d come here to do was done. Nothing he could do to stop that, apart from maybe yank out a cable. His technical know-how only stretched that far. Done, he turned his attention to the corpse.
    It was a mess. The entry wound was clean, though the exit wound was anything but. It had opened a hole in the man’s forehead the size of Jake’s fist. Some sort of hollow-point ammo designed to cause maximum damage on the way out.
    Jake rolled the dead man over. His arm fell uselessly at his side, smearing the blood across the outer edge of the trading floor. The smell of death was already beginning to gather around the room; it began with blood and shit as the bowels emptied. No one ever talked about that. It wasn’t like in the movies. When the guy went down, hole in his head, the hole in his ass opened, the last and most brutal humiliation of murder leaving the victim to rot in his own shit.
    Jake hunkered down beside the dead man and went through his pockets. There were no wallet or other clues to his identity. No distinguishing features or marks. He was, quite literally, a dead end.
    Jake looked up, scanning the vast room for movement. The quiet was getting to him. He tried another corpse, which had likewise been stripped. It was the same for the others.
    If someone came in now there’d be no way he could talk his way out of this. He was alone in a room with a lot of dead men and most likely the only working