Ghost:

by James Swallow

  He fired without aiming, putting two wild rounds in Lucy’s general direction. One bullet missed widely and cratered a video screen on the wall, but the second hit the security guard below her clavicle and the woman howled in pain, sagging back against Lucy with the shock of the impact.

  Hite’s eyes widened behind his glasses and he panicked, breaking into a run, dashing back toward the elevator bank.

  Lucy felt the guard’s warm blood on her cheek as the woman’s weight descended on her, legs buckling. From behind, she heard the sound of movement inside the security room, but Lucy ignored it. Carefully, she lowered the injured guard to the floor and held the woman’s hand over her bullet wound. ‘Keep pressure on that,’ she told her.

  Crimson blossomed wetly across the grey of the guard’s uniform shirt. ‘He fucking shot me!’ gasped the woman.

  ‘It’s a through and through,’ Lucy told her, surveying the injury with the cold certainty of hard-earned field experience. ‘Didn’t hit anything major. You’ll be okay . . .’

  The guard made a rough, animal cry of agony, and shivered. Lucy’s initial instinct was to find an emergency medical kit, but expedience had to come first. She quickly disarmed the woman, took her radio and the keys to the cuffs, disengaging the restraints with bloody fingers. Off across the floor, she heard the elevator chime and the doors hiss shut. Hite was getting away, but she couldn’t leave someone to bleed out.

  ‘Whoa, what the hell?’ Marc was at her side, eyes widening at the sight of the blood. ‘Who did—?’

  ‘None of it is mine. This is Hite playing the goddamn cowboy,’ she hissed, answering him before he could finish. Lucy looked over his shoulder and saw the other guard lying slumped against the SCIF’s door.

  ‘So he’s our rat in the nest,’ said Marc. ‘Makes sense. Hite’s the CTO. That means he has top-level access to all the software developed here. If anyone knew about zero days in their code, it’d be him.’

  She nodded. ‘Now we just have to catch the son of a bitch.’

  *

  Hite’s hands were shaking as he rode the elevator down to the executive offices. He had fired the Nano dozens of times on the range and got pretty good with his groupings, but when the moment had come to open up on a human, that had left him. He cursed himself for botching the chance to kill the Rubicon agent. Now he would need to find another way out of this escalating mess before it overtook him.

  He fiddled with the signet smart-ring on his finger. Everyone on the top tier of Horizon Integral’s management got one, but he hated the thing. It looked ugly, too retro and clunky for Hite’s tastes. Now it might save his life.

  The ring glowed blue when he tapped it on the lift’s intercom panel. ‘Recognise: Charles Hite, Chief Technology Officer,’ said the building’s control system. ‘How can I assist you this evening?’

  ‘Emergency executive override!’ He barked out the words as the lift came to a halt. There could still be a way for him to come through this and maintain control of the narrative. But he had to be ruthless about it. ‘Access systems on floor twenty! Close safety doors and activate fire suppression systems on that level! Do it now!’

  ‘Mr Hite, that operation conflicts with a number of safety protocols.’

  ‘Emergency override,’ he said, louder this time. ‘You heard me! Do it!’

  ‘Override accepted. Proceeding.’

  ‘Ha!’ Hite gave a savage grunt of defiance and pushed out of the lift, past the planters full of cacti and toward his wide corner office.

  *

  The fire alarms sounded across the entire level in a keening refrain, emergency strobes flashing in time with the wailing chorus.

  Marc rushed to the nearest exit door, and his heart sank as he put his weight on the push-bar to no avail. ‘It won’t budge. The magnetic locks are engaged.’

  ‘Did Hite do that?’ Lucy called out.

  ‘Reckon,’ managed Marc, but the word caught in his throat as he tasted a rough chemical tang in the air. In the next second, concealed nozzles mounted in the hung ceiling above his head began dispersing jets of white vapour. He coughed, catching a tainted breath. ‘That’s CO2! Ah hell!’

  ‘We’ve got to . . . get out . . .’ The female guard gasped through her pain, and tried to raise a hand to point.

  ‘She’s right, this gas is used to smother fires,’ said Marc. ‘We’ll suffocate in here.’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’ Lucy stooped to gather up the guards’ SIG Sauer pistols, and took one in each hand. She squinted through the falling columns of mist and fired a salvo of shots from both weapons at the nearest window. The glass fractured and split, but it didn’t break. ‘What the fuck?’ Angrily, she discarded the guns and went at the damaged window with an office chair, smashing at it over and over.

  ‘Won’t work,’ said the guard, her eyes losing focus. ‘Polymerised. Unbreakable.’

  ‘Forget that!’ Marc bent down to gather up the insensible guard in the SCIF and beckoned Lucy to follow him. ‘Bring her!’

  He half-dragged, half-shoved the semi-conscious man to the elevator bank and dumped him there, before grabbing the gold signet ring Lucy had stolen. Slipping it on, he jammed it into the sensor pad by the call button.

  ‘Recognise: Martin Wehmeyer, Chief Executive Officer,’ said the building computer. ‘How can I assist you this evening?’

  ‘Elevators,’ Marc almost choked as he blurted out the word. It was getting hard to breathe.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Can you please repeat it?’

  ‘Open the elevators on twenty!’ Marc bellowed, and he hoped that a low-priority system like this one wouldn’t need the CEO’s voice print or optic scan that the SCIF’s doors had required.

  The smart-ring seemed to be enough. The synthetic voice told him to ‘Wait a moment,’ and then the doors to a lift car obediently opened. Marc shoved his semi-conscious charge in, as Lucy followed right behind with the wounded guard supported on her shoulder. The elevator doors shut again and they gratefully gulped in air that wasn’t fogged with fire retardants.

  ‘Hite,’ said Marc, eyeing the injured woman. ‘Where’s his office?’ The guard hesitated, instead pushing away from Lucy to crouch next to her comrade.

  Lucy glared at her. ‘He shot you. Are you really gonna look out for him?’

  The guard hung her head and pointed downward. ‘Floor sixteen. The forest atrium.’

  Marc stabbed the number into the keypad and the lift descended. ‘You have to get medical attention,’ he told her. ‘And you may want to stop on ten. There’s a mate of yours in the men’s, cuffed to a toilet.’

  ‘Who are you people?’ demanded the guard.

  ‘Concerned shareholders,’ offered Lucy, and then she halted, placing a finger to her ear, listening to a voice that only she could hear.

  Marc belatedly remembered that he had lost his own ear-bead communicator in the fight with the Samoan, and he gave her a questioning look.

  ‘Assim,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘He had a call from Delancort. Apparently, the fire alarms are going off down on the ground floor. The reception’s being evacuated. Emergency services are on the way.’

  ‘Good,’ Marc nodded, pulling the tablet and manipulating the screen. ‘We still have a chance to isolate Hite, but we have to do it fast. If he gets out of the building, we’ll lose him.’

  ‘Open to suggestions,’ said Lucy.

  ‘We flip it around.’ Using Wehmeyer’s stolen authorisation, he tapped back into the building’s wireless network and brought up the subroutines controlling the door locks on level sixteen. ‘He tried to trap us . . . so we trap him.’

  Hite had a vintage one-sheet from Top Gun, complete with Don Simpson’s autograph, hanging on the wall of his office, and behind it was a small safe locked with a thumbprint reader. He tore the framed poster off its hook in his haste to get into the secure box, and hastily pulled out everything inside. Papers, passports and identity papers in more t
han one name, a bag of uncut conflict diamonds and some wads of US dollars; all of it went into a shoulder bag. But what he wanted the most, what he had really stopped here to get, was a simple brass key on a metal chain. He looped that over his neck and tucked the key down the front of his T-shirt, then ran back out into the hall, pointing the way with the Nano pistol.

  He ducked around another of the oversized planters that were home to a dozen painstakingly cultivated miniature palm trees decorating this part of the floor. Green was everywhere on this level. It was like working in a fucking rainforest, and Hite quietly loathed it – just one more reason why he wanted to make his own mark and get himself shot of Horizon Integral as soon as bloody possible.

  He was halfway down the corridor, heading back toward the closest elevator bank, when every closed door around him let out a metallic clack. Hite knew the sound; the magnetic locks had been activated. That could only have been done by someone inside the building’s command system.

  Light spilled out of an elevator as it slowed to a halt and the arrival bell chimed. He didn’t wait to see who was inside. Hite spun around and started running as the doors opened. He threw a passing glance over his shoulder and fired the Beretta, cracking off two shots to discourage pursuit.

  His thoughts raced. Rounding a corner, he skidded to a halt and pulled at the handle of a fire exit door, but it remained resolutely shut. He slammed his fist uselessly against it. These pricks were using his own tactics on him!

  There were other banks of elevators he could try for, but they were on the far side of the faux-forest atrium in the middle of this level, and it was likely they too had been locked off. It was exactly what he would have done.

  Hite jammed his smart-ring signet up against the nearest intercom pad. ‘Emergency override! Open this door!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the nannying synthetic voice. ‘That function has been taken offline by a higher operational clearance. Would you like me to contact reception for you?’

  Footsteps were coming closer, moving at a runner’s pace. Hite’s face twisted in annoyance and he rushed away. They were trying to trap him. He patted his chest where the key was hanging, making sure it was still there. It was his lifeline. His insurance. But it was meaningless if he couldn’t get out.

  Hite sprinted through a series of elegant glass arches and into the open, elevated space of the sixteenth floor’s forest atrium. It resembled a square of woodland that had been transplanted from some idyllic countryside landscape, but the reality was an engineered stream and a swath of force-cultivated dwarf grass, carpeting a space between carefully neutered trees. Hite disliked it as much as he did the rest of the falsely ‘green’ environments in the building. They were expensive wastes of time, more of Wehmeyer’s ridiculous eco-friendly pet projects.

  But he could still make use of it. Hite knocked a wooden chair out of his way as he crossed a clearing set aside for recreation and outdoor brainstorming, finding a control podium hidden in a stubby steel bollard. His signet clacked against the glassy surface of the display. ‘Access atrium settings,’ he demanded. ‘Uh . . . water management!’

  ‘Accessed,’ came the reply, and he grinned. This was good. It meant that whomever Rubicon was using to screw around with the building’s systems didn’t have them all under lockdown. They didn’t know the tower as well as Hite did, and that would be how he would escape them. There are other ways out, he told himself, you just have to be willing to take the risk.

  He leaned over the screen. If the gas nozzles hadn’t slowed his pursuers down, then maybe this would. ‘Emergency dump,’ he commanded. ‘Vent atrium water tanks.’

  ‘That operation conflicts with a number of—’

  ‘Just fucking do what I tell you!’ bellowed Hite, jabbing at the keypad.

  ‘Override accepted. Proceeding.’ As the voice spoke, the first fat drops of artificial rain began to fall from sprinkler arrays on the ceiling twenty metres overhead. In a few seconds, it became a drizzle, then a shower, and finally a torrential, hissing deluge.

  Hite ran toward the edge of the atrium in big, splashing steps. Behind him, he heard voices. They were closing in.

  He turned in the direction of the sound and saw ghostly shapes outlined in the hard rain. He aimed the Nano and squeezed the trigger, firing off the remaining rounds in the clip.

  *

  They sent the elevator carrying the two guards down and continued their pursuit of Hite. Lucy caught sight of the man as he fled into the fake woodland in the centre of the office tower.

  She pulled the ML-12 pistol and stayed on his heels, wishing that she had kept hold of one of the SIGs.

  One shot and she could have put this asshole down – but they needed him alive and chatty. Charles Hite was the best chance they had to close the net on Ghost5, and in the back of her mind Lucy thought of the ways she could make him talk. The digital take Dane had secured for them was good, but there was no substitute for old-school human intelligence. And having someone try to choke her to death always brought out the worst in her.

  ‘Out here,’ said Marc, indicating the arches that led into the atrium. ‘They got their own park . . .’

  ‘And a storm, too . . .’ Lucy squinted through the rainfall, trying to find their target.

  ‘Shit! Get down!’ Out of nowhere, Marc crashed into her and shoved Lucy to the ground as bullets sizzled through the wet air where she had been standing. They skidded behind a stone bench as the deluge sluiced down around them.

  ‘Thanks.’ Lucy shrugged Marc off and peeked over the edge of the bench, irritated that she had almost taken a hit. Her reactions were still slow from breathing in the CO2. ‘Where’d he go?’

  ‘He was heading toward the edge.’ Marc moved out of cover and pointed. ‘There.’ He blinked. ‘We’re halfway up a skyscraper. You think he jumped?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s not gonna kill himself.’

  The two of them ran to the edge, scrambling over chest-high safety barriers of toughened glass and through the waterlogged foliage bordering the atrium space. The downpour became a flood, with streams of muddy fluid gushing over the verge and into the air. Behind them, the lower quad in the middle of the atrium was already awash, ankle-deep with the overflow from the overhead tanks.

  Marc risked a look over, bracing to jerk back if Hite waited below them. ‘I don’t see him. But there are open windows.’

  ‘He’s on the next level down,’ Malte’s voice muttered in Lucy’s ear. Her head jerked up and found the office block across the street, where Dane had crossed over. She saw a figure in black on the rooftop, waving a hand. ‘I saw him climb out.’

  ‘Got it,’ she replied. ‘You need to get out of there. This op is falling apart fast and we need to be ready to extract.’

  ‘Copy that,’ said the Finn, and the figure in black vanished. ‘See you on the ground.’

  ‘Hopefully not the quick way down,’ Lucy said, under her breath.

  Marc pulled on a bunch of twisted vines that grew through a polymer net cladding on the outside of the building, trying it for strength. ‘This webbing can support our weight. So we keep on him, right?’ He nodded out at the long drop.

  ‘Can’t stay here,’ she agreed. ‘You ever done free-climbing?’

  ‘A couple of times, yeah,’ Marc replied.

  ‘This won’t be anything like that,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Great.’ He took a deep breath and swung out over the ledge, into the evening air.

  *

  There had been a moment when he almost lost his grip and ended it all, but then Hite tumbled through the window he had opened on the fifteenth floor and landed in a heap, twisting his ankle as he face-planted on the carpet.

  Now, limping and cursing with each painful step he took, he ejected the Beretta’s ammunition magazine and discarded it, slamming a fresh one into place and cocking the gun. Enough was enough. If anyone else tried to get in his way, he was going to put a bullet in them and worry about
the consequences later. He was rich and he was smart, and he was going to sail through this unscathed. Hite kept repeating that to himself like a mantra.

  The only obstacle is this fucking building. He had to get out. Get away. Hite entertained the fantasy of setting the place alight on his way out, grinning at the image in his mind’s eye. Drown it and burn it, he thought. Poor old Marty would have a heart seizure.

  Hite found what he was looking for. Floor fifteen was one of the levels where the executive express elevator stopped off, a discreet shaft built into the tower’s central structure for anyone who wanted to avoid the public eye and bypass the big atrium to the street. He cracked his signet ring to the authorisation panel with enough force to splinter the plastic, but still it lit up. The express lift would take him straight down to Horizon Integral’s underground car park.

  He fell through the open doors and against the far wall, and felt relief wash over him as the lift started a rapid descent. Soft New Age music, all tinkling wind chimes and soothing pan pipes, serenaded him as the level numbers dropped. The elevator worked independently of the rest of the tower’s subsystems, so even the fire alarms and the CEO’s personal authority would not be enough to take control of it.

  Change of plans, he told himself. Get out now, deal with this shit later. Hite was close now, close to freedom. A burst of elation swept through him. Screw them, he thought. Marty and his bleeding heart. That snotty bitch daughter of his. Screw them, screw the board, and screw this company.

  ‘I’m out!’ he spat, wet and shivering in the chill of the lift’s air-conditioned interior. Hite reached inside the damp confines of his jacket and brushed his fingers over the chain and the key once more, before pulling out the Ghost5 burner phone.

  He turned it over in his hand, thinking. Madrigal had promised him that her group would honour their agreement, that they would cover for him, even get him out of the country if the situation warranted it.

  There were plenty of places he could go. Hite had money hidden in the Caymans, in London and Zurich. He’d been quietly sewing his parachute for a long while now, waiting for the right moment.