Outlaw, p.35
Outlaw, page 35
A man like that was capable of anything. Delancort suppressed a shiver at the thought.
‘We need to consider our next move,’ Benjamin said distantly, distracted by something outside.
‘Should I wake . . .?’ Delancort nodded towards the adjoining room, where Solomon slept on a makeshift camp bed.
‘Did you hear that?’ Benjamin’s voice dropped to a whisper, and he stiffened. He was instantly on alert, although to Delancort’s mind there was nothing to note.
‘Hear what?’ he said, but the man was already moving.
‘Stay here,’ hissed Benjamin, as he vanished into the other room. ‘Keep low.’
Delancort slipped off the stool, glancing around the kitchen. There was nowhere to hide among the chipboard cupboards and the melamine table, and the only other door led out on to a staircase that descended into the gulley. He had nothing to defend himself, so he pulled open a drawer with the vague idea of locating a weapon, but found nothing more formidable than a blunt steak knife.
An egg-cracking sound issued out above directly him, up on the attic level, and his heart leapt into his chest.
Should I call out to the others or stay silent? He didn’t know what was right. Hide? Run?
He couldn’t fight. It wasn’t something he had ever had to do.
Boots scraped on concrete, and Delancort’s heart sank as he realised his hesitation would cost him dearly.
A shadow moved past the window in the kitchen door, then in the next second the door itself crashed into the room, propelled off its flimsy hinges by bursts of fire. Other blasts sounded in different parts of the house, and the lights flickered out.
He flinched away, dimly aware of a metallic cylinder clattering into the room through the gaping doorway. With a sound like caged thunder, the stun grenade went off, deafening him. The pain and overpressure rattled the window and hit Delancort with a physical blow that sent him down to his knees.
He could hear nothing but the whining scream of damage done to his eardrums. Hands shaking, he scrambled to pull himself to his feet.
Delancort was no longer alone in the cramped, smoky kitchen. A figure dressed from head to foot in black fatigues stood there, a compact sub-machine gun in both hands. A thread of bright emerald-green laser light from beneath the gun barrel connected it to a spot in the middle of Delancort’s sternum.
He raised his hands, blinking furiously. The figure in black had no face, its aspect concealed behind a mask and low-light goggles that gave the intruder an insect-like appearance. There was a single dash of colour on their black tactical gear, a red insignia flash on one shoulder.
Delancort knew that sigil. It denoted a hired gun with the private military contractor called ALEPH.
The green laser flicked up to Delancort’s face and dazzled him, blinding him to whatever would come next.
EIGHTEEN
They had no choice but to split up, with too much ground to cover and not enough people to do it. Malte vaulted out of the van at One Wall Street as they paused at a crosswalk, then Marc was next at the corner of New Street and Exchange. Grace followed a block after that, and Lucy left Kara in the van at Hanover Street, where the hacker could run overwatch.
She stepped out into the heavy, dense air of the evening at the foot of the Twenty Exchange building, and a familiar prickle ran up her spine. Lucy tilted her head upwards, past the blank, golem-like faces carved into the art deco structure, to the threatening skies. The towers of glass and granite on all sides vanished into the menacing clouds, as if trying to hold the coming storm at bay. The first drops of rain were finding their way down to ground level, advance scouts for the downpour that would inevitably follow.
Lucy had been away from home for a long time, but that sixth sense, that unerring knowledge of place gifted to her from growing up in New York, had not faded. She could taste it in the atmosphere. When the storm hit, it would hit hard.
‘All mobile call signs, sound off.’
Kara’s voice buzzed in her ear, and Lucy replied in the affirmative. Malte, Marc and Grace did the same, each giving their location with the same report – no sighting. If the suspect ConEd van was out here, so far it was undiscovered.
It stuck in Lucy’s craw letting Grace off her leash, but they had no alternative. She tried to convince herself it would be okay. Grace had come back in Sochi when she could have fled.
But that only deepened Lucy’s distrust of the other woman. Grace never did what Lucy expected her to do, and it bothered her greatly.
Frowning, Lucy looked at her phone as she proceeded towards the far end of the financial district’s sprawl, turning on to Wall Street proper. She rechecked the photo of the van from Saito’s final message as she walked, scanning the avenue for any sign of the vehicle.
If the Combine assassin was dead, if this was on the level, it was a chilling prospect. Lucy had a whole boatload of issues with Hiroshi Saito, starting with the fact that he had once stabbed her in the belly and left her for dead in Mogadishu. But the man had a code, for all the twisted logic of it, and with his daughter’s rescue, the assassin owed the Rubicon team. If preventing a terrorist attack in NYC was how he repaid it, she was good with that.
Lucy paused on a street corner, closing her eyes to listen. The chorus of the city moved over her – the rumble of a subway train beneath her boots, the growl of passing traffic and the murmur of voices – and it was stark how much had she missed it. A lonely thread of melancholy pulled on her and she had to cut it dead.
Not the time to get nostalgic.
Lucy kept up the pace, moving west, intent on the mission. After the horror of the 9/11 attacks a few miles from where she now stood, New York had hardened itself to resist any repeat performances. Security barriers, cameras and monitoring systems kept a day and night vigil, with chemical and radiological sensors discreetly retrofitted to street lights sniffing the air for potential dirty bombs or biological weapons. But those technologies would not detect the presence of the EMP weapon. Even a terahertz-wave scanner at full power would see only a block of inert hardware, a meaningless jumble of mechanical components.
The insistent rain ticked off the roof of a greasy little trailer selling Turkish coffee and baklava. Lucy threaded around, past the bulk of a high-sided truck wreathed in steam flowing from a grille in the sidewalk. She stopped and stared in the direction of Broadway, a few blocks distant. Groups of men in suits who had stayed in the office until the last moment were urgently finding cabs or ride-shares to whisk them away before the bad weather started to bite. Other, less moneyed types and the odd determined tourist were trooping towards subway entrances. Wall Street was emptying, even though the operation of the banks and finance hubs never stopped.
In every building around her, trillions of dollars in currency, stocks, shares, futures, bonds and whatever the hell else churned and flowed like the storm clouds overhead. Invisible lines of monetary force radiated out of this place, up through the grey towers, reaching out across the country and to the world beyond. For a moment, Lucy tried to hold that image in her head. It was hard to connect a crumpled fold of cash in her pocket to that other, rarefied reality, to the place where the mega-rich existed. That was the realm of people like Solomon and Glovkonin, where they played their chess games, and soldiers like Lucy were the pieces on the board.
The idea of that made her shudder. Even as someone who had given her life to the system, who had served in its wars and fought its battles, she still detested it on some level.
But Lucy Keyes was a realist. She knew the first step towards something better was to keep those without morals as far from the levers of power as possible – and that meant opposing Glovkonin and his scheming Combine drinking buddies wherever they raised their heads.
‘You don’t get to come to my town and fuck shit up,’ she said to herself.
‘Say again?’
Kara had caught some of Lucy’s words through her concealed throat mike.
‘Disregard my last,’ Lucy said, more firmly, walking on to avoid the gaze of a beat cop looking in her direction.
Then, as the downpour began to hiss across the asphalt in earnest, Grace said the words Lucy had been dreading.
‘I found it.’
*
They regrouped on Grace’s position, past the intersection of Nassau and Pine in the shadow of the museum at Federal Hall. Usually Nassau Street was closed off to vehicular traffic by pop-up barriers, but one of them was down, with the white ConEd van parked on the sidewalk halfway along, nestled up to the Grecian columns of the venerable old building.
Lucy had a dim memory of her Aunt Dani taking her and her brother to visit the landmark when they were kids, showing off the place where George Washington had been sworn in as the first president. In the rain, it remained an imposing structure, even hemmed in by the corporate towers overshadowing it.
‘Plates match,’ said Malte. ‘No one in the cab.’
Marc grimaced. ‘I don’t see any obvious hostiles outside.’
Lucy nodded in agreement. Aside from a trickle of foot traffic passing down the street, the only other people in the immediate area were some construction workers in the process of locking down a closed site at the foot of a nearby building.
‘They’ll be monitoring,’ she noted. ‘Maybe by remote, but somebody will have eyes.’
‘Could be anywhere,’ noted Grace, gesturing at the towers around them.
There were hundreds of windows looking down on Nassau Street, and an observer – in person or otherwise – could be behind any one of them.
‘I don’t like this.’ Marc’s frown deepened. ‘Kara, you got anything?’
‘Negative,’ said the hacker. ‘No spikes in radio transmissions. But they could be operating via the cellular network, and finding something out of place in phone traffic in this part of the city would be like plucking a whisper out of a cheering crowd.’
‘Fine.’ The Brit steeled himself. ‘Direct approach, then.’
‘Yeah.’ Lucy resigned herself to the unavoidable. ‘Watch my back.’
‘Understood,’ said Malte.
He moved away, with Grace trailing him to a position where they could see the whole of the street and the parked van. Lucy shook out her hands as she walked purposefully towards the vehicle.
‘Could be rigged,’ offered Marc, falling in step with her. ‘Ready for that?’
‘Sure,’ she said, with more confidence than she felt. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘We set the van on fire and hope that does the trick?’
‘No. The fact that no one’s around means this thing is ready to pop.’
‘Oh. Yeah. There’s that.’
‘Here we go.’
She stepped up, and grasped the handle on the van’s rear door.
The expected resistance wasn’t there. The door was unlocked, and it opened easily. No cables or wiring were connected to the handle on the inside; there was no booby trap in place to trigger the EMP device, no improvised deterrent.
There was nothing. Nothing at all. The entire cargo compartment of the van was bare, down to the white-painted metal floor.
‘What the hell . . .?’ Lucy let go of the door handle as if it had been electrified, and pressed a hand to her throat mike. ‘Target vehicle is empty, repeat, empty.’
At her side, Marc stared into the vacant interior and the colour drained from his face.
‘We’ve got to—’
‘Hey!’ An angry shout cut over his words. A broad-built white guy in a hard hat and orange high-visibility vest stood behind them, getting in their faces. ‘What are you doin’?’
Lucy automatically retreated a step, taking the measure of him. He had a scarred, slender chin and hard eyes. Something about the guy rang a wrong note.
‘I’m talkin’ to you,’ he barked. ‘Why you touching that van, huh?’
‘Just a mistake,’ Marc said, keeping his tone even.
‘That right?’
A second man, with the same hat-and-vest get-up, came out from around the front of the parked vehicle. He’d used his loud companion as a distraction so he could flank them. The new arrival had a brisk and equally aggressive manner.
She wondered why Malte hadn’t warned them that this pair were coming across from the construction site, but when she glanced towards the street corner where the Finn and Grace had been watching, they were gone.
The caution that had escaped her moments earlier suddenly registered. The two men in the hard hats both wore heavy boots, but they were barely scuffed. Hardly the footwear belonging to workers on a construction site.
The man with the scar saw the change in Lucy’s expression and he knew she’d made him. He snatched at something under the vest and she saw the barrel of a sound suppressor peek out from beneath the orange material.
‘All right,’ he said, his tone turning businesslike. ‘Don’t do anything dumb. You two are gonna come with us or else this turns messy.’ He aimed his gun towards the oblivious people walking past them, clustered together under umbrellas or sticking close to the cover of the buildings. ‘Get me?’
‘Move,’ said the second man.
He opened his vest enough for Marc and Lucy to see a Micro Uzi SMG hanging beneath it on a single-point sling.
‘Set-up,’ whispered Marc, as the men escorted them towards the construction site.
‘Set-up,’ agreed Lucy.
‘Quiet,’ said the man with the Uzi, as his companion opened a gate. ‘Get in there.’
The work site was a partial excavation at one corner of an office block, where a section of the ground had been cut away for old supports to be replaced. To Lucy, it looked as if some giant rat had gnawed a hole in the foundations, exposing a section of the underground parking lot in the basement. Shielded from view of the public by tarps, the area was lit by hissing electric lamps that cast orange light into the workspaces, and scaffolding covered the building’s lower floor.
Grace and Malte were waiting for them, both with their hands on their heads and guns at their backs. Another four men in hard hats surrounded them, each with a weapon at the ready. They moved in and disarmed Marc and Lucy, as they had the others.
Lucy stepped into the gloomy space, and then turned sharply on her heel to face the scarred man.
‘You guys know what’s going on here, right?’ Making it look like a casual gesture, she reached up to rub her neck, making certain the microphone pad concealed at her throat would pick up her words. ‘They tell you what it is? The bomb, I mean?’
‘What part of quiet don’t you get?’
The man with the Uzi pulled the gun forward on its sling and aimed it at her.
She sneered. ‘It’s a goddamn nuke. Eight kilotons.’ Lucy made it up as she went, hoping to find a way to turn the tables on the gunmen. ‘Trust me, you better have some Factor Four Million sunblock when that goes off.’ She let out a low whistle.
‘Is she right?’ said one of the other men, paling considerably.
‘It’s not a nuke, for cryin’ out loud.’ The scarred man gave the other gunman a withering look. ‘Would I be standing here with you if it was a fuckin’ nuke? She don’t know shit.’
‘Feds are gonna be here any second,’ she continued, and waited. Lucy’s performance was as much for the radio as it was for the thugs, and she kept waiting to hear something from Kara via the comms bead in her ear. ‘They’re up on Hanover,’ she added, ‘watching everything.’
But Kara remained resolutely silent, and finally Lucy had to accept that the hacker had heard the capture and abandoned them to save herself. She glanced at Marc and he read that thought in her eyes. He shook his head.
‘Enough. Move.’
Scar-face jabbed her with his pistol and nodded towards a slope.
The armed men forced them down over dust-caked platforms, below the level of the street and into a blocked-off section of the basement. The wide space had a low ceiling supported by thick cylindrical pillars, the floor marked up into dozens of empty parking spaces. More work lights illuminated the area around them, and Lucy saw other excavations where wide holes had been cut into neighbouring tunnels. The air stank of sewers.
To one side, folding tables had been set up – it was obviously a staging area, piled high with nylon gear bags, one for each man. Another fake worker in an orange vest was busy with a portable monitor, the screen flickering with an image of a city street.
Lucy let herself drift in that direction as she walked, turning her head to get a better look. The guy with the monitor had tapped into the city’s CCTV grid, getting a view down on to Wall Street from a camera cluster atop a street sign.
‘Stand there,’ said Scar-face, addressing the four of them. ‘Don’t talk and don’t move.’
The other men with guns stood in a loose circle around the Rubicon team, weapons at their sides. Lucy had half-expected to be lined up against one concrete wall for a makeshift firing squad, but apparently that wasn’t the plan. They were captives, not targets – at least for the moment. Which meant there was still a chance to turn this around.
After a minute or so of silence, the man with the Uzi called out to his companion.
‘What’s the hold-up?’
Scar-face looked at his watch. ‘Almost time.’
Lucy rocked on her feet, shifting a step closer to the guy with the monitor. He moved slightly, and she took a better look at the image on the screen. She recognised the little Turkish coffee stall she had passed by earlier. The unmarked truck parked next to it was in the middle of the frame.
Her breath caught in her throat. The truck was easily the same dimensions as the ConEd van, and whatever fitted in one could easily have fitted in the other.
