Clive cusslers dark vect.., p.17
Clive Cussler's Dark Vector, page 17
Emmerson had called him Guānchá, or the Watcher. Whether that was a joke or a warning, it certainly told her his function. He hadn’t let her out of his sight since they’d met, casting intense and suspicious glances her way anytime she moved too quickly or too far away.
“Why would we move now?” Guānchá asked. “There are still too many people here.”
The plan was to wait until the last round of bidding and move against Degra during the final phase, when everyone’s eyes would be on their own bids and the dwindling time left to enter just one more.
“Because American agents are going to interfere if we wait,” Yan said.
“The man at the bar?”
He’d clearly seen her speaking to Joe.
“Yes,” she said. “I know him. He works for their government. He won’t be alone. We move now or we’ll lose the opportunity.”
A low grunt signaled Guānchá’s understanding. He spoke to the other men in their party. “You know what to do,” he said. “Get in position.”
“I’ll make contact with Degra,” Yan said. “When he steps out of view, I’ll subdue him. Make sure you’re close by when I act.”
The men nodded. Two of them left the booth, headed toward the front of the ballroom and the elevators.
Yan-Li watched them go and left the booth in the opposite direction, heading for the stage. Guānchá and a man named Zhu trailed behind her, blending in with the crowd.
With her heart beating over a hundred times a minute, Yan did what she could to compartmentalize the situation. She had a task to complete, that’s all.
She spotted Degra in the crowd. At first, she thought he was headed for the stage, but he passed it without a glance, striding briskly toward the back room, bumping into someone in his haste and not bothering to even turn to acknowledge the incident or apologize. He’s distracted, Yan thought. And angry. That could play to her advantage.
She glanced back at Guānchá to make sure he’d seen her and changed course.
* * *
—
Degra pushed through the door into the back room, where a storage and staging area had been turned into the auction’s command center. Three men stood back there, two hired guards and one of Degra’s most trusted technicians, a hacker who called himself Ferret.
Ferret’s job was to monitor the guests in the ballroom and the highly encrypted links each of the bidders was using. Just to see what he might glean from their systems. He had two laptops working in front of him.
Degra stopped at Ferret’s desk. “New task,” he said, holding out the drive Kurt had given him. “Analyze the program on this unit. I need to know if it’s legit.”
“What’s it supposed to be?” Ferret asked.
“The operating system for the Hydro-Com servers.”
Ferret looked surprised. “We’ve been trying to break into Hydro-Com for weeks. How did you get this?”
“One of their competitors handed it to me,” Degra said while pumping sanitizer from a bottle on the desk onto the palms of his hands. “They want to trade the code for two of the machines and a large commission.”
“Pricey,” the man said.
“Not if it’s genuine,” Degra said. “Run it through the strongbox and look for anything that might cause a problem.”
Ferret pulled out a third laptop from underneath the desk. While the strongbox had multiple systems designed to look for viruses and Trojan horses, it was also air-gapped. And without any mobile communications power, it couldn’t be used to introduce a virus into their network.
Opening the laptop and booting the operating system, Ferret began the analysis. “It’s a huge program.”
“It should be.”
“Even if we overclock the CPU, it’s going to take a while to examine.”
Degra didn’t have a while. “Do what you have to,” he said. “I need an answer before we start the next round.”
Ferret offered a look that suggested that was impossible but went about attempting to make it happen anyway.
Degra let him work, turning away and heading for the exit. He put a hand on the door, pulled it open and came face-to-face with a vision in burgundy.
Yan-Li stepped boldly into the room. Instead of pretending she was lost, she demanded attention. “My employer would like to make a preemptive bid. Five hundred million and you end the auction now.”
The look on Degra’s face was pure shock. “You need to leave here,” he said. “If the other bidders get wind of this . . .”
“I will be heard,” she demanded, blocking the exit.
Degra reacted with incredible speed, lunging toward her and pinning her against the wall using his forearm. A stiletto knife appeared in his hand. He snapped it open and pressed it under her chin.
“Choose your words carefully,” he said. “You have thirty seconds.”
He had her pinned to the wall with her arms down. She was shaking with adrenaline but clearheaded. Her own weapon was already in her hand. A needle-tipped pen.
She thrust it forward and up. It punctured his shirt and went deep into the layer of muscle around his abdomen. As she thrust it into him, her thumb slid forward, depressing a plunger on the side of the pen and injecting him with a rapid-acting anesthetic.
He pulled back, grunting. “Foolish witch . . . I’ll have you fed to the . . .”
He never finished the sentence. His eyes rolled back, his legs buckled and he crumpled to the floor in a heap.
“Thirty seconds was more than enough,” she said.
As Degra hit the ground, his men reacted. The technician in the corner stood up, nearly knocking one of the laptops over, while the two guards rushed toward her.
Two soft pops from a well-silenced gun went off in rapid succession and both men fell to the floor. One had been hit in the heart, the other between the eyes.
Yan-Li turned to see that Guānchá and Zhu had entered the room behind her.
Guānchá pointed toward the man with all the computers, holding up a finger until the man froze in place. As the tension faded, Guānchá smiled and then shot him in the chest.
The bullet put the man on the ground, but he was still writhing in pain. To finish the job, Guānchá stepped forward, grabbed the man by the neck and snapped it with a violent twist.
Yan shivered, imagining him using the same ferocity against her. She turned to Zhu, considering the task at hand once again. “We need to get moving. The freight elevator is in the back. Tie and gag him.”
Yan helped Guānchá drag the dead men behind one of the desks in the corner while Zhu bound Degra’s hands with a zip tie and hoisted the unconscious man onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
With Zhu carrying Degra and Guānchá right behind her, Yan led them into a dark, narrow hallway, heading for the service elevator. Reaching the far end, she pressed the up button and the waiting began.
The car was seven floors away. And unlike the high-speed expresses servicing the lobby, this one was a local and slow.
Just as it began to descend to their floor, all hell broke loose in the ballroom behind them.
CHAPTER 30
Shouting and gunfire rang out from the express elevator vestibule at the front of the ballroom. As the remaining crowd turned toward the disturbance, a man in blood-soaked clothing crashed through the folding screen, knocking one of the delicate crystal statues to the floor.
The shattering glass stunned everyone. But when the lights went out and the ballroom was bathed in staccato flashes of machine gun fire, everyone dove for cover.
After an initial spate of chaos, CIPHER’s hired guns began firing back. Like all non-Hollywood combat, there was far more confusion than clarity. Glass wall panels soaked up shots, cracking and spidering in all directions. Bullets hit the chandelier in the middle of the room, lopping off its petals and dropping them to the floor in colorful crystalline explosions. Someone pushed a fire escape door open to start the exodus, setting off the alarm and adding flashing strobes to the madness.
Veterans of many firefights, Kurt and Joe dropped to the floor at the first sound of gunfire. Rolling beneath the table and lying flat against the marble tiles, they analyzed the scene.
“And it was all going so well,” Kurt said.
A couple stray bullets zipped past.
“This must be what Yan was trying to warn you about,” Kurt said. “Could have used a bit more notice. And some details.”
“Something tells me she’s not in charge,” Joe said. “But who is she working for? And why?”
“Has to be Emmerson,” Kurt replied. “CIPHER stole the Vector units out from under them. Who else would have any reason to turn this violent?”
“Makes sense,” Joe said. “But what’s her connection with him?”
“Other than they both live in Hong Kong, I can’t think of one.”
He scanned the ballroom. With only the emergency lights and the glow from the city coming in the windows, it was hard to make out much of anything. The flashing strobe lights didn’t help. “Do you see her out there?”
Joe squinted. “Nope.”
“What about Degra?”
“That’s another negative,” Joe said. “But if she’s working for Emmerson and he wants those computers back and Degra is the only one who knows where they are . . .”
Joe didn’t have to finish. He and Kurt were on the same wavelength. He crawled out from under the table and sheltered by the side of the booth. The fighting near the front of the ballroom had settled down into potshots and angling for position. “We need to find them.”
“Looks like her people are trying to blast their way to the elevators in hopes of making an escape,” Joe said.
Kurt shook his head. “Yan would know that’s a dead end. She’d have seen CIPHER’s people downstairs. I’m calling that misdirection.”
“Get everyone looking at the front of the house and sneak on out the back—is that what you’re suggesting?”
“That’s how I’d do it,” Kurt said. “I’d rule out the fire escape too. Hard to get a hostage to walk down eighty-five flights of stairs.”
Joe nodded. He’d studied the plans of the building in case they needed their own escape routes. “There is a freight elevator in the back but it covers only the top quarter of the building. While it won’t get you to the ground, it’ll get you past the blockade. Or take you up top if you have something else in mind.”
“Nice,” Kurt said. He stood up and grabbed the whiskey bottle and a cloth napkin off the table. “Lead on.”
Kurt followed Joe across the floor until they came to the staging area at the back of the ballroom.
Joe nudged the door open and glanced inside. “Empty.”
They pushed into the room, quickly discovering the bodies of the three men piled up in the corner. “They’ve definitely been here.”
“Look,” Joe said, pointing to one of the computers.
Kurt glanced at the laptop. The portable drive he’d given Degra was sticking out of the main USB port. “Leave it,” he said. “It’s still running. Maybe it’ll find something. Now, where’s that elevator?”
“Down this hall and back around to the right,” Joe said.
This time Kurt took the lead, with Joe a few steps behind. As they made the final turn, Kurt noticed a light at the end of the hall, a vertical column of illumination that was narrowing as the elevator doors closed.
He rushed forward, saw Yan-Li’s face and dove to the side as she raised a pistol and fired.
His last-minute dodge took him into a stack of silver-plated serving trays. They went flying, clanging against the wall and across the floor in an off-key symphony.
With the elevator door closed, the hall went dark.
Joe rushed over to Kurt to help him up. “Still think she’s not acting of her own accord?”
“More than ever,” Kurt said. “She missed me by a mile.”
* * *
—
Inside the elevator, Yan lowered her pistol and turned toward Guānchá. “We’re not going to have much time on the rooftop. Did you call in the extraction team?”
“Of course.”
“How far off is the helicopter?”
Guānchá glanced at the time. “Three minutes.”
Yan looked up at the numbers on the panel. This elevator wasn’t an express like the ones that had brought them up from the ground floor. In fact, it seemed interminably slow. At the same time, waiting three minutes on the open roof sounded like an eternity.
* * *
—
Back in the ballroom, the firefight in the elevator vestibule had settled into a stalemate, with the two groups trading shots while remaining undercover.
The two men Guānchá had sent to secure the elevator had done their job, making quick work of CIPHER’s security team and holding their position against the reinforcements. To boost their chance of success, they’d flipped the heavy table on its side, dropping behind it and using it as a shield and a position to fire from. That had kept them safe. But as the seconds ticked past, they began to worry.
The plan—as they knew it—was for them to take the elevator lobby, attract CIPHER’s men and then once Yan-Li had captured Degra, she, Guānchá and Zhu would take out CIPHER’s reinforcements from behind. If that didn’t work, the backup plan was to use Degra as a hostage, forcing CIPHER’s gunmen to stand down and allowing the whole group to escape the building safely.
Neither of these things appeared to be happening. Guānchá and the cavalry had not arrived to shoot CIPHER’s men in their collective backs nor had there been any sign of a cease-fire suggesting Degra had been captured.
The first of the two men, whose name was Gesh, spoke his fears. “Something’s gone wrong. They’re not coming.”
The second man agreed. “We need to get out of here.”
“Cover me,” Gesh said. He moved sideways, firing several shots into the ballroom and punching the button for the elevator as he reached the wall.
Seeing Gesh exposed, one of CIPHER’s men popped out to take a shot. But the man behind the table fired first, triggering a burst from his machine-pistol and riddling the target with several direct hits.
The man staggered backward and fell. Gesh dove back behind the table. He hit the floor as a wave of return fire came from the ballroom.
He covered his head as the sharp, thudding sound of bullets hitting the table assaulted his ears. Thankfully, the table was made of thick wooden planks laid over a metal backing. Each shot splintered the wood and punched a circular dent in the steel. But so far, no bullets had forced their way through.
“I’m almost out of ammo,” his partner shouted. “Where the hell is that elevator?”
Gesh looked up at the display on the wall. Glowing blue numbers indicated where each of the elevators was and what direction it was moving. The last elevator in the row was coming up.
“Slide the table back,” Gesh said, grabbing onto one side. “The elevator is almost here.”
Working together, they pulled the heavy shield backward, moving deeper into the lobby until they stopped next to the door of the approaching car.
A quick glance back toward the ballroom told them that the lobby was still empty, with CIPHER’s men remaining hidden but not yet brave enough to charge.
Gesh fired once again for good measure. “Come on,” he said, urging the elevator car to arrive quickly.
A soft ping.
The doors opened.
And a hail of bullets poured forth from within.
Gesh and his partner were hit with multiple rounds before they could even move. They fell without getting off a shot, winding up on the floor, sprawled out with trickles of blood leaking from beneath them.
CIPHER’s ground-floor security team stepped from the elevator, quickly surrounding the dead men. The man in the olive-colored suit shouted across the room. “All clear. Get the lights back on.”
The switch was found. The overheads flickered to life. The ballroom’s illumination came up seconds later.
The place was wrecked and nearly empty except for CIPHER’s men and a few guests and staff who had been injured or too scared to run for the stairs.
One of the other hackers came running forward. “Degra’s missing. Ferret and the others are dead.”
No one wanted to be there now. The police and the Army were probably on their way. But if anyone could answer their questions, it would be Degra. And having a few assailants to hand over to the police would help deflect any blame.
“These men were with the group from Macau,” the security chief said, studying the dead men’s faces. “There were five people in that group, including the woman in burgundy. Where is she now?”
The technician grabbed the laptop that had been knocked from the overturned table. It was linked by Wi-Fi to the wristbands. A quick scan was performed.
“Back of the building,” one of his men said. “Freight elevator. Heading for the roof.”
The man in the olive suit turned around. The main elevators at Taipei 101 were the fastest elevators in the world. They went all the way up to the observation deck. “Let’s meet them at the top.”
CHAPTER 31
The freight elevator jerked to a stop and Yan-Li slipped out the doors before they’d even fully opened. They’d come to the hundred and first floor, seldom visited, off-limits to the general public, where the management stored cleaning equipment, supplies and tools.
Yan stepped forward, found the exterior door and cracked it open, looking around for any sign of trouble. She saw the surface of the rooftop and the curved wall of the circular platform that made up the higher deck. Directly ahead lay a white crane that was used to lower the window-washing platforms. Other than that, the roof looked empty.
