Operation Honshu Wolf by Addison Gunn Page A

circuit them with the power supply. ”
    Miller was vaguely familiar with the systems involved. In the event of an intruder attacking a building electronically, standard procedure was to command locks to short out their antennae. It severed them from the network, made them impossible to hack without literally cutting into the locks and soldering an access-port into the circuit boards.
    But it was a last ditch option, to lock the doors and ensure they stayed shut. Locking them open? While mobs of the Infected were rioting across the city?
    “I already know what happened, Northwind; the part I want to know is who did it.”
    The Northwind operator kept shaking her head, like she didn’t want to believe it. “ It’s that account with the S-Y internal security department again. Forty-six, seventy-two. ”
    Robert Harris.

 
    6
     
     
    L. G RAY M ATHESON put down the first printout and picked up the second. He scanned the emergency plan’s instructions, and picked up the next, then the next... at last he simply flicked through them, only paying attention to the parts that changed. Name and address.
    Nearly three hundred employees of various ranks and from various subsidiaries had been told to evacuate to the WellBeechBeck Washington Heights office block, and that security team Sabre would come to collect them.
    Gray tapped his lip with the corner of the stacked sheets, gazing blankly at the surface of his desk, recently installed into his Astoria Cove office.
    “I sent members of Switchblade to check a few of the employees’ homes, along with the Baxters’. Their building systems all crashed shortly after the meeting with you, Barrett, and Harris, last week. Just after the helicopter incident.” Miller crossed and uncrossed his legs uncomfortably—combat gear didn’t feel right for talking with his boss. He should’ve gotten back into a suit.
    “How many were in the building?”
    “Eighty-seven. They’d been losing people at a fairly rapid rate. Three died during the operation. Heart attacks or suffocation, we think.” Miller swallowed back bile. “The electroshock weapons. Some of them were too weak, malnourished.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
    Gray stuck out his jaw, tapping his face one last time. He didn’t seem to be listening. “And where are they now?” He put down the papers.
    “We cleared out one of the refugee quarantine blocks. They’re in there for now.”
    There wasn’t any real doubt, not to Miller, but Gray had to ask. “You’re sure Bob’s involved?”
    “Yes.”
    “You don’t have direct proof?”
    Miller puffed out a breath. “That’s why I’m here talking to you, Gray, instead of marching over to shoot the man myself. He deliberately isolated people, our people, in that building. And then he blew the damn locks so the Infected could tear into them. He wanted a captive Infected commune, probably for those fucking bioweapons of his.”
    “And the Baxters?” Gray asked, gently. “Why’d he put them on the Honshū Wolf list, then?”
    Miller shook his head. “Only Alphonse was on the Honshū Wolf list. The emergency plan was addressed to his wife, I don’t think he was supposed to be there.”
    Gray nodded, once. “I’ll look into it. You get back to whatever you were doing, Alex. I’ll let you know.”
     
     
    M ILLER’S BODY COUNT rose from three, to four, to twenty-seven.
    Sure, he hadn’t killed those three unfortunates who’d died after being shock-stunned to the ground—that was Bayonet’s work. Even so, he was responsible. He’d led the operation to go into that building, he’d called in Bayonet, it was his fault. The hundreds who’d been cut down by the helicopter, weeks before? That was on Harris’s head; but this, this was on Miller’s.
    The living had been cleared away, but blood had pooled in the refugee quarantine cell, an expanse of chain-link fencing stapled to the concrete floor of a storehouse.
    The fourth death on Miller’s head was