Free Ellie Quin Book 3: Beneath the Neon Sky by Alex Scarrow Page B

administration’s dirty work carried out with ruthless precision and efficiency. He acknowledged there was once a time that he would have been equally horrified at the sight of children, women being gunned down in their own homes.
    What has been done, has been done out of necessity.
    And then there were the three hired guns. They sat in silence, two of them appeared to be asleep, the third gazed wearily out of one of the windows at the passing terrain. Professionals, mercenaries….each of them had been used many times before by the Administration to do its most grisly work. They were functioning on only the minimum amount of information required. Like bloodhounds, all three of them had been given the scent of Ellie Quin, and nothing more.
    When this job was done, they too, like the two younger men sitting beside them, were loose ends that would need tidying up. When this job was done, there would be only Deacon heading back to Liberty on a star ship to make his report to the committee.
    So far, seven candidates and their families had been eliminated. On one unfortunate occasion, a couple of hapless passers-by who had been unlucky enough to witness one of these executions: altogether a body count of about thirty people by Deacon’s reckoning.
    By the time he had gone through the complete list, he guessed approximately another fifty or sixty lives would have been terminated. When the last name on the list for this world had been eliminated, and the DNA samples collected, Deacon would take them back to the Department labs alone and have each sample analyzed in detail. It wouldn’t take long to spot which of them was the handiwork of Doctor Mason.
    Deacon had a strong feeling about this particular one though. The girl, Ellie Quin, had come from strong genetic stock. Studying the notes on the Quin Paternity Request, both parents had robust genetic profiles, with little or no evidence of regression or chaotic mutation, something of an increasing rarity in itself these days. Putting himself in Dr Mason’s shoes, Deacon would be looking for a well matched and healthy pair of gene sets like those of the parents, Jacob and Maria Quin. Their child would need to be healthy and fit, and unimpaired by any kind of physical frailty. They were good starting stock for Mason to work from.
    Deacon had hoped to find her quickly enough in the city. Her ID card, and transactions used against that ID, had helped him narrow down the area in which she was living. It was only when she had set up a merchant’s bank account, in the last few days and used the address of a tenement tower in the Service Sector, that they’d been able to instantly zero in on her.
    But the clever girl had already fled by the time they got there.
    They had found the habi-cube empty. Deacon and his team had trawled through the things that had been left behind; some clothes, some very cheap furniture, and a sink full of food-encrusted washing up. He guessed from the detritus lying around that the Quin girl had been sharing with another female. Whether they had both left and gone their separate ways or gone together, he didn’t know.
    He wondered whether this child had been smart enough to realize she was already being hunted and had consequently fled. Or perhaps someone had informed her that the Administration’s
bloodhounds
were closing in on her? But he couldn’t think who.
    Maybe Mason hadn’t acted alone?
    The thought was a concern. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Mason had prepared the way for his child, had agents of his own out in the field watching over it, to ensure its safety.
    Or maybe you’re just jumping at shadows.
    Deacon smiled and nodded his head. He was jumping unnecessarily. The Quin girl most probably simply run out of money and been forcibly evicted. It was just bad luck on his part that they had arrived a few days too late to catch her then and there.
    He censured himself for thinking that Mason had his own army of like-minded