Outlaw, page 43
‘Obviously,’ Roper replied.
The accusatory tone in the security officer’s voice was enough to switch Novick’s worry into annoyance.
‘Perhaps if you had kept those teams inside the building, we would have caught this intruder by now! Can you not just get her? Do you have any idea the kinds of damage she could do?’
‘I’m aware,’ Roper said firmly. ‘I’ve lost contact with a search team, we’re isolating that floor now . . .’ He halted as he realised that the other man wasn’t listening to him.
Something he’d spotted on one of the camera panels had captured Novick’s gaze. Two people, unlocking the door to Subsection 18 on the level beneath the ops centre, the very place he had specifically ordered no one to enter. One of them was Mooney, the other a total stranger. A man with a hawkish look in his eyes, glancing around to make sure they were alone.
‘Novick!’ snapped Roper. ‘Are you paying attention?’
‘Just get that intruder!’ Novick bolted up from his chair and pushed past him. His hands balled into fists as he made for the door. ‘I have to check on something . . .’
*
The bright green laser danced over the lens of the camera pod mounted on the low ceiling, and the red active light beneath it winked out as it cycled into reset mode.
‘Okay, we’re covered,’ said Marc, casting around the room. ‘How many more of these subsections are there?’
The space was filled with humming computer servers, the indicator lights on their systems blinking yellow, green and red as they ran through operational cycles.
‘A dozen more on this floor,’ said the woman as she moved from unit to unit, giving each one a practised, professional examination. ‘Two more floors below this one.’
‘Easy job, then,’ he deadpanned.
Marc knew that time was not on his side. Not just with the security teams prowling the building, but also from the risk of losing whatever ground he had gained with Mooney. She was a tech geek like him, and he had correctly piqued her innate interest in solving a hardware problem. He’d been able to get her on side temporarily, but that would only last so long.
She walked around behind another set of servers and he moved across to the other side of the room, looking up and down the racks. Mechanically, the systems appeared intact, but the constant flashing of crimson alert indicators showed that on the software level, things were amiss.
‘You do this a lot?’ Mooney’s voice carried to him. ‘This whole techno-espionage thing?’
‘Too often,’ he noted.
‘Does it pay well?’
‘Not as much as you’d think . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Perks are good, though – when you can take the time to enjoy them.’
‘You single?’
That brought Marc up short. He wasn’t quite sure how to reply.
‘It’s . . . uh . . . complicated. Why – you asking?’
‘You’re not my type.’ Mooney chuckled. ‘I like bad boys.’
‘I don’t know if I should be insulted by that.’ When she didn’t reply, Marc halted. ‘Margaret? You there?’
‘This interrupt gizmo . . .’ Mooney’s voice filtered back to him. ‘Does it look like a metal box? With a bunch of hard drives and cables inside?’
He rushed over to her. An aluminium flight case nestled between the server stacks, festooned with wired connectors feeding into the closest system. It had been carefully positioned so that anyone making a casual survey would miss it completely, and it was clearly not part of the standard set-up.
‘Hello, ugly,’ Marc said to it. He pulled the trank gun from his jacket and handed it to Mooney. ‘Here you go,’ he told her. ‘A promise is a promise.’
‘I could shoot you with this,’ noted Mooney, weighing the pistol in her hand. She flicked off the safety catch, but didn’t quite aim it at him.
‘Can you wait until we get this disconnected?’ Marc nodded at the interrupt. He fished his walkie-talkie from a pocket and squeezed the push-to-talk button. ‘Lucy, do you copy? I found the equipment. Get here if you can.’
He told her their floor and location, but when he released the button, all that came back was static.
‘Lucy,’ echoed Mooney. ‘Is she the complicated part?’
Marc’s lip curled. ‘I thought I was social-engineering you.’
‘Whatever you say, James Bond.’ Mooney stuffed the trank gun inside her jumper and eyed the device warily. ‘So you reckon Novick put this here? I mean, I don’t find it hard to believe he’s a misogynistic asshole and an opportunist, but committing treason? That’d take more balls than he has.’
‘Don’t mince words, Margaret,’ said Marc, feeling around the cables that fed into the server stack. ‘Tell me what you really think.’
‘Yes, Ms Mooney, please do,’ a snide, strident voice called out from behind them. ‘You don’t have to hold back. This is a safe space.’
A sweaty man in a cheap suit jacket emerged from the end of the server row. He aimed a Ruger pocket pistol at Marc and the woman, and the muzzle wavered back and forth between them.
‘Mr Novick, I presume?’ Marc pitched the question to Mooney, who nodded stiffly.
‘He has a gun. A real one.’
‘I noticed, yeah.’
‘Look at me, not at her!’ Novick snarled at him. ‘Where’s your partner? You figure you’d get the drop on me? You are sorely mistaken!’
Marc kept his hands where they were, holding on to the bundle of cables.
‘Take it easy, Walter. Don’t do something you can’t walk back from.’
He looked past the man with the pistol and saw, to his dismay, that the indicator light on the security camera was still dark.
‘Monitoring has been temporarily suspended on this floor,’ said Novick, noticing his attention. ‘Which means I’m free to deal with you as I see fit.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Move away.’
Mooney raised her hands, but Marc stood his ground.
‘You’re not going to shoot,’ he said, ‘because if you do, the round from that LCP will over-penetrate right through me and hit this server. Who knows what kind of damage it might cause?’
‘He’s right about that,’ said Mooney. ‘My dad taught me to shoot a pistol when I told him I was moving to New York,’ she added, by way of explanation.
‘No one fucking cares,’ grated Novick. ‘Where’s the woman?’
‘No idea,’ Marc admitted. ‘Causing havoc, I would imagine.’
‘Fine.’ Novick took a step closer. ‘I’ll deal with her later.’ He drew himself up and gave Mooney a haughty glare. ‘I’m disappointed, Margaret. I wonder what people will say when they find out you were in on this conspiracy with Harlow . . .’
‘What?’ Mooney blinked, uncertain of what he meant.
But Marc could see where this was going. Novick carried on, laying out his version of events, making it up as he went.
‘I don’t know – maybe you and Sean were lovers or something. He got lonely after his wife divorced him. That’s how you were drawn in. He took money to put the interrupt in place and you helped him. But his co-conspirators killed him. So sad.’
‘What is he talking about?’ Mooney turned towards Marc, and he saw a flicker of intent in her eyes.
‘Nice story,’ said Marc, covering for her. ‘You need to work on the details a bit, but it’s almost there.’ He shifted his weight on to his back foot. He would only get one chance. ‘Let me see if I can figure out the rest. You’re going to kill me, then Margaret, and set it up to make it look like you discovered us with the device. This Harlow bloke you’re on about gets blamed and . . . what? Instant promotion for Walter, yeah?’ He shook his head. ‘You have absolutely no idea who you’re working for, do you? You’re out for yourself.’
‘You did this?’ Mooney said, stiffening. ‘Sean and his boys are dead, you son of a bitch!’
‘Do you ever stop talking, woman?’ Novick growled out the words, then aimed the gun at her. ‘I’m sick of the sound of your voice!’
Now.
The instant the pistol was off him, Marc gave the cables a sharp jerk, yanking them out of the server. The interrupt came away with a fizzing crackle of static, and the racks in the room shut down at once, briefly dimming the lights.
‘No, stop that!’ Novick twisted back in Marc’s direction, the pistol coming his way again. ‘What did you do?’
‘He fixed it,’ said Mooney, as the servers came back to life and the lights blinked on again. She had the trank pistol in her hand, and shot Novick with it. At close range with good aim, she couldn’t miss.
The dart went into his neck, and Novick became still, making an odd gurgling noise. Slowly, he slid against one of the racks and sank to the floor.
‘Nice shot!’
Marc gave an appreciative nod and pulled the Ruger out of Novick’s limp, sweaty hands.
Mooney released a sigh. ‘Is it bad that I really enjoyed that?’
‘No judgement here,’ Marc replied, making a quick search of the unconscious man. He found Novick’s access card in one pocket, and a burner phone in the other. He palmed both before rising to use the walkie again. ‘Lucy? Target neutralised, repeat, target neutralised.’ This time a static-choked voice answered back, but he couldn’t pick out any words. ‘I’m moving to the secondary elevator shaft. Meet me there. How copy?’
‘Sol—opy.’
The buzz of interference cut up Lucy’s words, but he was sure she’d got the message.
‘Hey, look at that.’ Mooney indicated the server racks.
The tide of red warning lights ebbed, each turning green as the system purged the interrupt’s malignant influence. In a matter of minutes, the stalled reboot commands would propagate out across the whole of the grid, and the US financial network would come back online. The Combine’s gambit had been cut short.
‘So, you gonna tell me who you’re working for?’ Mooney gave him a long look. ‘British Intelligence? SHD? Interpol? Give me a clue.’
‘I could say No Such Agency,’ he deflected, using the old spy community nickname for the NSA. ‘Let’s say some threads are best not pulled on.’
Marc didn’t want to risk admitting he was part of Rubicon’s disavowed Special Conditions Division, a group that many still considered to be no better than criminals. He placed the interrupt device in Mooney’s hands.
‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ she asked.
Marc nodded at the insensible Novick. ‘How would you like his job? I’m sure a perceptive person like you could figure it out.’
The radio crackled. ‘Marc, you read me?’ He was relieved to hear Lucy’s voice once more. ‘I’m at the elevator, where are you? I got incoming, we need to be gone.’
‘On my way,’ he replied.
He made for the door and Mooney muttered a question after him.
‘Who are you guys?’
‘Thanks for trusting me, Margaret.’ Marc paused on the threshold. ‘In the next few days, you’re going to hear from people who’ll say we’re killers and rogues. You can make your own mind up who you believe.’
He threw her a wave and vanished into the corridor.
TWENTY-TWO
By the middle of the following day they had finally left Manhattan, starting from a cold, wet pre-dawn in the aftermath of the storm, joining the thin trickle of vehicles that still worked, up and across the Brooklyn Bridge.
The rusty old Econoline van had nothing in it that the EMP could affect, and it formed part of a convoy of aging cars, trucks and school buses ferrying people over to the other borough.
It was touch and go when they passed through a temporary National Guard checkpoint on the far side, but the fresh-faced soldiers who had been ferried in overnight were swamped with New Yorkers making the exodus, and Marc and Lucy used that to slip through the net. Their faces were on the watch lists of the CIA and the FBI, and after last night’s work, most likely the NSA as well.
The window of opportunity for them to get out of the country would not stay open forever. Kara and Malte had left by a different route, and if everything went to plan, they would meet them at John F. Kennedy International, with tickets in hand for separate flights to Europe.
Marc hoped that the chaotic fallout from the EMP blast on Wall Street would cause enough confusion that the Rubicon team would be able to slip out of the US before anyone caught up with them – but it didn’t stop him from worrying that every passing car might be carrying a pursuit team. The increased numbers of military and police helicopters passing overhead only served to rack up his tension.
He changed lanes through the sluggish traffic as the lines of vehicles oozed slowly northwards. In the passenger seat, Lucy had retreated into the depths of her hoodie. She had barely spoken two words to him in as many hours.
He looked past her, through the gaps in the buildings and across the East River to the streets they had left behind. In the light of day, beneath clear blue skies blown free of the storm, New York appeared as impressive and invulnerable as ever. Only the careful observer would note the damaged windows on some of the upper levels of the skyscrapers. The city had shrugged off another attack on its citizens and lived to tell the tale. Marc wondered what narrative would emerge from the reality of those desperate hours.
Back at the checkpoint, he heard a snatch of news over a radio from a parked car, a stern recounting of what was being labelled a terrorist cyberattack like the ones that had struck San Francisco and Seoul in previous years. He imagined any survivors from Connaught Cassidy’s crew would be in interrogation rooms right now, and most likely Margaret Mooney and the team from Titanpointe would be in a similar situation. Whatever they told the authorities would likely not be made public.
‘What?’ Lucy eyed him, thinking his attention was on her.
And now it was.
‘We’re almost in the clear,’ said Marc. ‘Couple of hours from now, we’ll be in first class, sipping sundowners.’
‘Not soon enough.’ She stared glumly at the buildings sliding past them. ‘We should’ve gone through Jersey.’
Marc realised what he’d been missing. In their haste to get out of the city, he had forgotten that their route would take them within a few miles of the streets where Lucy Keyes had grown up.
Idiot, he chastised himself. Should have thought of that.
Like him, Lucy was a virtual exile in her native country, wanted for breaking numerous laws by a government that had been happy to use her skills to their advantage when it suited them.
‘We’re close to being finished with this,’ said Marc, his tone softening. ‘When it’s over, we never need to come back here. You can be free of it.’
She gave a slow shake of the head. ‘That’s just it, I don’t want to be free of it, Marc. I don’t want to walk away and not look back.’ Lucy gave a sigh. ‘You know, I thought I could, but . . . Being here . . . It stings more than I ever thought it would.’
Marc focused on the road ahead, contemplating his own circumstances. He had come a long way from the South London council estate where he had spent his childhood. His own sentiments for home were bittersweet and hard to categorise. Some days he missed London like a long-lost relative – the familiarity and safety of it. Back home, he had always known who he was and where he was going. But since becoming part of Rubicon, that certainty had gone away. Liberating, but daunting all the same.
They drove along in silence for a while, and then he noticed Lucy lean forward in her seat, craning her neck to see something off the highway. She looked down at her past, at sidewalks she might have wandered along as a girl.
On an impulse, Marc pulled the van across as they came upon the next off-ramp, and instead of making the turn south in the direction of the airport, he took them on to the local roads cutting through Queens.
She jerked up in her seat.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Last time we were in London, I didn’t get the chance to look in on my old ends. Seems unfair to force that on you as well.’ He pointed over the top of the steering wheel. ‘Where to?’
‘This is a bad idea,’ she said. ‘People around here think I’m a felon.’
Marc didn’t need to press to know that by people Lucy meant her family.
‘You want me to turn around?’
‘No,’ she added, after a moment. ‘You’re right. Keep driving.’
Lucy directed him around side streets and residential roads, gradually opening up. She pointed out the site of the old cinema where she’d had her summer job, and the mini-mall that had felt like the centre of the universe in her teens.
But then they came up on a particular bodega – a compact all-in grocery store on a street corner – and her expression darkened.
‘Pull over,’ she demanded.
Marc felt a chill run through him.
‘Is that . . .?’
‘Where my dad died. Yeah.’
In the past, lost in a freezing Icelandic wilderness, Marc and Lucy had clung together for warmth in the cold of a pitch-dark night, and to stave off the effects of hypothermia they had talked about their old lives to keep up their spirits.
Lucy’s story was a heartbreaker: a young girl with a troubled older brother and a single mum, a father cruelly taken from them in a robbery gone awry. He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire when he tried to intervene. And it had happened here.
Marc put the van in gear, meaning to move off.
‘I’m sorry, I never should have—’
But Lucy’s reply was the slam of the passenger door as she jumped down from the vehicle and strode across to the store’s entrance.
*
She was already inside by the time Marc arrived, and as he entered, an older Hispanic man in a baggy shirt gave him a distracted wave from behind the store’s counter.
‘Card machine’s out of order,’ he said, indicating a freshly written sign taped to the door. ‘System’s down because of the power cut, cash only.’
‘Yeah, no problem . . .’
