Outlaw, page 15
‘He’s got a bloody Dalek,’ said Marc, half to himself.
Kara’s intel had mentioned the presence of automated security drones inside the penthouse, but still the sight of the machine came as a surprise to him. Pearl-white and sinister in its lines, the robot looked every inch the sci-fi monster.
‘Overwatch ready,’ Lucy said in his ear. ‘I have movement but no joy. Light it up!’
‘Back off!’ Marc hissed, pushing Malte away from the open window so the sniper would have an unimpeded line of fire right into the sky lobby. He snatched a tactical penlight from a D-ring on his belt and pointed it at the robot, as the thing pirouetted in the middle of the floor and rolled towards them.
He thumbed the switch and a disc of light hit the machine. It stopped with a jolt and made a quizzical clicking noise.
‘Send it!’ said Marc, and a split second later he heard the buzz of a bullet streaking past. He couldn’t help but flinch at the sound. Too often, in his experience, that noise meant someone was trying to kill him.
Lucy’s shot made a crater in the security robot’s centre mass and it rocked on its rollers, but the thing remained functional. The clicking noise became strident, and the machine continued to approach.
‘You pissed it off,’ Marc said, into his throat mike. ‘Go again!’
He illuminated the robot a second time, and Lucy obliged.
The follow-up shot did the trick, blasting splinters of plastic and circuitry out through the back of the machine. It stopped dead, electronics fizzing inside its casing.
Malte didn’t wait, and swarmed through the open window, dropping cat-silent to the floor. Marc scrambled in after him, quickly and less elegantly than the Finn.
‘Did you get it?’ said Kara. ‘I don’t have eyes in the penthouse level, security up there is on a different server.’
‘I got it,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘Huh. Never killed a robot before. I’m like Sarah Connor up in here.’
‘Yeah, good job.’ Marc looked around. ‘About the other thing . . . I don’t see any cameras.’
‘Private,’ noted Malte, with a raised eyebrow.
Marc nodded back at him. Given the reputation Giovanni Da Silvio had, he wasn’t the kind of man who would want anyone recording what he did behind closed doors. It also explained the lack of human security guards. Robots couldn’t be coerced or bribed into revealing what they were witness to.
‘Just be careful in there,’ said Kara. ‘He has more than one of those machines.’ She paused for a second. ‘I’m orbiting the drone around the outside of the building.’
Marc nodded again. ‘Active One copies. Sing out if you see anything.’
*
He hesitated by the windows, matching the geography of the penthouse level with the stolen floor plan he’d memorised. Across the sky lobby, a private elevator led down to the lower levels, with an emergency exit doorway next to it.
According to the architectural plans, that door opened on to a stairwell which ran to ground level, and also gave access to the security office on the floor below. There was a ready room down there, where a team of armed ALEPH operatives were stationed 24/7 while Da Silvio was in residence.
If things go pear-shaped, those men will be up here in less than a minute, Marc reflected. All the more reason to go quiet-like.
On the other side of the sky lobby was the penthouse proper, an L-shaped apartment taking up the rest of the top floor of the Marine Luxe. Between here and there were sculptures artfully positioned throughout, each lit from below by its own spotlight.
Malte rocked forward, preparing to take a step, but Marc put out a hand and shook his head.
‘Motion sensors,’ he whispered, waving his hand in the air.
There were tiny detectors built into the floor that could register the movement of a person and would activate the sky lobby’s overhead lights accordingly.
He unlimbered the triangle bow and nocked another arrow with a jammer head. The sensor control pad was on the wall near the elevator controls, and Marc landed a shot right next to it. Once again the jammer did its work and the control pad darkened.
‘Last one of those I have,’ he noted.
Malte took a cautious step, then another, then slowly walked out into the middle of the room. The main lights stayed off, and his head bobbed.
‘Good.’
Marc followed him towards the doors to the penthouse, mentally counting them off. The first led into the guest bedroom, closest to their objective, but they couldn’t take the chance it might be occupied. The next door opened into a servants’ entrance into the penthouse’s galley-style kitchen, and through there, they would be able to access the dining room, living room space and the private office leading off it.
Malte crouched by the door and held out a gloved hand. Marc dropped the binary gel injector into his palm, and watched the other man squeeze a blob of acidic sludge into the electronic lock. Wisps of chemical smoke issued from it as the reaction began, but a familiar low hum pulled Marc’s attention away.
At the far end of the sky lobby, another conical shape rolled out from around a corner and executed a mathematically perfect right-angle turn. Green laser light flickered as the second robot scanned the walls and doorways, and then rolled across the floor, closing the distance towards the middle of the lobby.
Waiting at the door, Marc and the Finn were completely exposed, and if they broke for cover the machine’s sensors would detect them for certain. He pressed his hand to his throat mike.
‘Kara,’ he whispered urgently, forgetting radio protocol in the heat of the moment, ‘the lift! Get the lift!’
She didn’t understand what he meant. ‘Active, say again?’
‘Shit!’ The robot pivoted sharply in Marc’s direction as he swore, clicking and whirring. The damn thing had heard him. ‘Get the elevator!’
‘Oh.’ That seemed to register. ‘Operations copies, wait one.’
Marc jiggled the locked kitchen door in the vain hope that would help, but the acid gel could take anything up to a minute to eat through the mechanism, and couldn’t be rushed. But it would only take ten seconds for the security robot to roll close enough to detect the two intruders, and then everything would go to hell.
He thought about calling on Lucy again, to notch up her second robo-kill, but the angle across the room was wrong and the risk too great that he or Malte might get hit by accident. He swore again, swallowing the curse.
Across the sky lobby, a two-tone chime sounded out of nowhere, and Marc’s tension level was so high that the innocuous noise made him twitch. The elevator doors opened, a warm light spilling out from the empty car inside. The robot reacted instantly, twisting towards the new source of sound and movement, clicking intently as it rumbled towards it to investigate.
With a low crackle, the lock crumbled and came apart. Malte shouldered open the service door and Marc followed with haste, taking pains to shut it behind him as quietly as he could.
‘Close one,’ he breathed.
Malte jutted his chin at the door. ‘Will it follow?’
‘The robot? In here?’ Marc didn’t know for sure. ‘Let’s say no and hope I’m right.’
The Finn’s expression made it clear that he didn’t think much of that reply, and he moved away. Marc trailed him around an island worktop, the dim night-cycle lighting of the penthouse suite beyond glittering dully off the kitchen’s stainless steel panels. The galley-like space was spotless and clinical, more like an operating theatre than a place to prepare food.
It opened on to a two-function area dominated by a round table in dark wood to one side and a broad conversation pit to the other. Marc froze, catching a whirring noise coming from the direction of the leather sofas in the pit. Then someone coughed and he realised he was listening to the raspy snores of a half-dressed, rugged-faced man lying on one of the couches.
He chanced a closer look. The man lay deep in a stupor from an evening of hard partying. The debris of a busy night lay on the glass table before him: an ice bucket full of meltwater and empty Cristal bottles, flutes of flat champagne and a mirror tile speckled with flecks of cocaine.
Marc recognised the sleeper as one of the speedboat racers from the team that the Italian sponsored, and glimpsed another figure at his feet. A younger guy, half-lost in shadows, propped up against the sofa. It took a moment before Marc realised with a jolt that the bluish tinge around his lips wasn’t make-up. He did not appear to be breathing.
Marc’s gut twisted. In the months that the survivors of the Special Conditions Division had been gathering intelligence on Da Silvio and preparing to move against the Combine, disturbing rumours about the man had cropped up more than once – unconfirmed reports of people joining his social circle only to disappear without trace, police investigations into drug overdoses and missing persons that went nowhere. And now Marc was looking at a victim of this casual abuse, a life discarded and forgotten with as little thought as one of the empty champagne bottles.
‘Too late for him.’ Malte spoke quietly into Marc’s ear, his tone grave but firm.
‘We can’t just—’
Marc’s jaw clamped shut, cutting off his own words. His gaze snapped up, looking across the penthouse towards a sliding door in a wall of frosted glass and matte black tiles.
He knew that beyond that was the master bedroom, and in there Giovanni Da Silvio would be sleeping off his overindulgence, untroubled by the wreckage left in its wake.
It wouldn’t take much, Marc told himself. We’re close enough.
His hands tightened into fists. He imagined silently crossing the room, sliding open the door, and ending Da Silvio in his sleep.
It’s a better fate than he deserves.
Malte shared a mute look with him. The Finn still had his dive knife in his hand, and they both knew he could make the kill cleanly and in cold blood.
Ever since the collapse of Rubicon, the ruin of the men who controlled the Combine had been the shared goal of those who’d survived it. It was the justice that Marc, Malte, Lucy, Kara and Benjamin had devoted themselves to securing. It was the justice warranted by the victims of Da Silvio’s callous disregard.
But killing him here and now would alert his ALEPH guardians and make it virtually certain that Marc and Malte’s deaths would follow in quick succession. Glovkonin and the rest of the Combine’s committee would carry on with their schemes regardless of the outcome.
At length, Marc reached up and pushed the blade away.
‘Let’s get what we came for,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll add the rest to the butcher’s bill.’
*
The office was a small affair – cabinets, a teak table and a couple of chairs, with a view out over the yachts towards the city. Malte shifted a chair and rolled back a rug, revealing a hidden panel in the floor and the safe beneath that, while Marc moved straight to the data cradle on the desk where ‘the book’ recharged.
He examined it closely. Anti-tamper switches would set off an alarm if the digital tablet was removed prematurely, and the same would happen if he made any attempt to directly interface with it. But the charging cradle itself was a different matter. It was the weak link in the chain.
As Malte used the last of the acid gel to burn his way into the floor safe, Marc found a micro-USB port in the cradle’s casing and inserted a data cord into it. He connected the other end to his spyPhone, a twin to the one he’d left in the cable bus down in the basement.
‘Moment of truth,’ he muttered.
Marc ran the phone’s code-cracker program, deluging the cradle’s CPU with a torrent of commands, forcing the software into a reset cycle. If it worked, the cradle would be fooled into thinking the book had been inserted and obediently download its entire contents once again – only this time the data on the Italian’s movements and plans would be diverted to Marc’s smartphone.
With a clunk of retracting bolts, Malte opened the floor safe and gave an almost imperceptible whistle. Inside were shrink-wrapped bundles of euros, roubles and dollars, a dozen passports and what could only be a brick of uncut cocaine.
‘Take the cash,’ said Marc. ‘Make it look like a robbery, yeah? And we could use a top-up for our operating budget . . .’
His spyPhone vibrated in his hand and drew his attention. The forced reset worked like a charm, and the operating lights on the cradle blinked as it came back on stream.
‘Operations.’ Kara’s voice crackled in Marc’s ear, and she sounded uncharacteristically edgy. ‘Watch the clock. This is taking too long.’
‘It’ll take what it takes.’ Marc’s phone showed the word READY and he grinned. ‘Here we go.’
He tapped a tab on the touch-sensitive screen and waited for the download to begin.
And waited.
Malte sensed something was off, looking up from stuffing the bundles of money into his dry bag.
‘Problem?’
‘Oh, shit . . .’
Marc’s belly filled with ice. The screen of the docked computer tablet blinked awake and a dialog box appeared. What Marc expected to see was the familiar shape of a loading bar indicating the transfer of files from the book to his phone, but instead the device demanded a security validation.
BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED, read the screen, with a countdown timer rolling beneath it. The clock was already at ten seconds and falling.
‘The cradle has a biometric lock!’ He hissed the words into his throat mike. ‘Damn it, Kara, you never said anything about that!’
‘What?’ The hacker sounded dismissive. ‘No, that’s not right. There’s nothing in the intel about biometrics. The reset should—’
Marc cut her off. ‘The reset isn’t working!’ He searched around the sides of the cradle and found something he hadn’t noticed earlier. Mounted on the side of the frame was a tiny metal nozzle, resembling the tip of a spray gun. ‘There’s a breath print sensor on here. It must be keyed to Da Silvio’s assistant . . .’
‘Oh, then we are screwed,’ Kara said flatly.
‘So those dark net assholes you roll with left out that important piece of information, huh?’ Lucy made a sneering noise. ‘Nice job.’
‘Not my fault,’ retorted the hacker.
‘Take it and run?’ grunted Malte, swinging his dry bag over his shoulder.
Marc shook his head. ‘I pull the tablet from the cradle and it blanks the memory.’
He could hardly believe it. They were one step away from having the leverage they needed to tear down the Combine, and now everything was falling apart because of a single oversight.
Like the patterns of a fingerprint, a breath print was individual and unique, a combination of chemical markers in a human’s exhalation that the sensor could pick up and analyse. But without Willa there to unlock the device, the data they wanted was untouchable.
The countdown on the screen hit zero and the tablet turned black.
‘Abort,’ said Marc, the word weighing heavily on him as he uttered it. ‘It could have a time-out alarm programmed into it.’
‘Actives, confirm last,’ said Lucy, switching back to business in an instant.
‘Active One confirms mission abort, repeat mission abort.’ Marc swept his gear into his bag and jabbed a finger towards the door, getting a nod from Malte. ‘We’re on our way out.’
*
Malte dashed into the penthouse and Marc was on his heels, cursing their luck. They had left the office in enough of a mess to sell the lie of a theft gone wrong, and now the best result they could hope for was to get out in one piece.
The security robot waiting for them in the dining room had other ideas, however. Despite Marc’s thoughts to the contrary, the thing had followed them into the penthouse, taking up station here while it scanned for possible intruders.
Lights on the front of the thing blinked on, and it spoke in gruff, synthesised Russian.
‘Stoy!’ In the quiet of the penthouse, the voice sounded as loud as gunfire. ‘Do Not Move!’ It repeated the command in English.
Malte did not obey. He dived for the machine before it could react, stabbing his knife into the collection of lenses around its upper quarter. He managed to land two good hits before a panel in the front of the machine flicked open, and an electric stun prod telescoped out, clipping the Finn with its sparking tines.
Electricity shocked through him. Malte howled in pain and jerked back, stumbling over the dining table. Marc grabbed the first thing that looked like a possible weapon – a long piece of modernist sculpture in an alcove – and swung it like a baseball bat. He connected with the robot, and the machine backed off as a subroutine in its programming triggered a self-preservation protocol. But the luxury pile carpet in the penthouse wasn’t the best surface for the robot’s rollers and it skidded as it moved.
Marc saw the opportunity and gave it a hard kick with all his energy. It was heavier than it looked, but the blow overbalanced the machine, sending it crashing through a divider and into the conversation pit. The man who had been sleeping down there came to with a panicked yell, as Marc grabbed Malte’s arm and pulled him back to his feet.
They barrelled back out through the kitchen and into the sky lobby as an alarm began to sound.
‘The security detail is on the way up,’ Kara said urgently. ‘ETA twenty seconds!’
‘The window!’
Marc made for the open panel they had used to make their entry, but Malte struggled to keep up, still pale and shaky from the punishing voltage the robot had put into him.
Marc let the Finn go out first, shoving him ungently as the exit door across the sky lobby banged open to disgorge three ALEPH black-jackets. Marc vaulted after him and they scrambled across the roof, towards the stepped levels they had used to climb up.
‘Behind you!’ Lucy called, and Marc twisted, catching sight of an ALEPH operative emerging through the missing window.
