Black List

by Will Jordan

  He followed her inside, and straight away was hit by a waft of chill, dry air. The smell of ozone made his nose wrinkle, while the low hum of countless cooling fans filled his ears.

  Occupying most of the room’s internal volume were rows of computer racks, eight feet high and surmounted by thick bundles of cables and ductwork. Each of these racks contained a server unit; a dedicated machine set up for the storage and movement of large volumes of data. The amount of information circulating in this one room was likely greater than the entire contents of the US Library of Congress.

  ‘It’s cold,’ Anya said, her breath misting in the cool air. There was an eerie quality about this strange underground world of data cables, blinking lights, air ducts and whirring fans that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

  ‘It has to be. These units generate so much heat they’ll melt down if they’re not constantly cooled.’ Glancing about, he started down the nearest row. ‘Follow me.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Anya asked as she followed close behind, watching his back and clutching the weapon tightly.

  ‘A way in,’ Alex explained, eagerly scanning the ranks of imposing looking machines.

  It wasn’t until he’d reached the end of the row that he found what he was looking for. Reaching out, he pulled open the metal cover protecting the server access terminal, then opened his satchel and reached inside for his laptop.

  ‘I can access the network from here,’ he explained, waiting a few moments while the laptop booted up. ‘Once I’m in, all I need to do is find the Black List and download it.’

  ‘How long will it take?’ she asked, keeping a wary eye on the doorway.

  ‘Not sure.’ He was distracted, busy connecting a serial cable between his laptop and the access point, and didn’t notice the look she gave him.

  ‘That’s not what I want to hear.’

  ‘That’s not what I wanted to say either,’ he said, crouching down with the laptop resting on his knees. ‘But this isn’t like logging into Hotmail. There are a hundred different factors outside my control.’

  He was staring at the screen intently as the laptop and server access system tried to establish a connection. They were essentially two different systems speaking in different languages, but Alex was prepared for that. The customized program on his laptop was there to act as a translator, hopefully allowing him to bridge the gap between the two systems.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he whispered, watching as the dialogue box flickered several times, the program behind it working to make the connection.

  Finally the status changed to connected.

  ‘We’re in,’ Alex hissed, tapping in a rapid series of commands. ‘Right, access server routing grid, locate file and … God, I’d kill for a cigarette right now.’

  ‘Bad idea,’ Anya said, nodding towards the fire sensor mounted in the roof nearby. ‘It will set off the Halon extinguishers.’

  With fire an ever-present threat in a room filled with highly stressed and expensive computer equipment, a powerful extinguisher system was vital. The moment any of the sensors detected heat or smoke, they would flood the room with Halon gas designed to chemically neutralize any fires while leaving the rest of the equipment undamaged.

  Alex glanced up at her. ‘We really need to work on your sense of humour when this is over.’

  *

  Armed with the most sophisticated tools of the trade available, it took one of Hawkins’ men less than thirty seconds to run an electronic bypass of the magnetic lock on the building’s main door, disabling the system and allowing Hawkins to stroll right into the lobby area beyond.

  ‘Secure the room,’ he said, gesturing left and right. Straight away two of his men peeled off to take flanking positions, covering him while he advanced towards the security room located behind the front desk.

  A similar effort from his technical specialist disabled the electronic lock barring his way, and he swung the door open to find what he presumed was one of the building’s security guards gagged and hogtied on the floor.

  ‘Anya, you’re getting soft in your old age,’ he remarked, shaking his head. The woman he’d once known would never have left this man alive.

  Ignoring the guard for the moment, Hawkins surveyed the rest of the room. The data-storage units for the CCTV system had been removed from their racks and now lay in a smashed pile on the floor, which was just fine with him. Neither he nor Anya wanted any record of what happened here tonight.

  The recording system might have been disabled, but the cameras themselves were still broadcasting their signals to the bank of monitors. Searching through the displays, he finally fixed on one showing a young man crouched down beside an equipment rack with a laptop balanced on his knees. Standing guard over him with a silenced automatic – an M1911, naturally – was a woman with short blonde hair.

  ‘Well, hello gorgeous.’

  Leaving the monitor blank, he knelt down beside the restrained guard, reached out and ripped the duct tape away from his mouth. The tape took a few hairs and a layer of skin with it, and the guard let out a grunt of pain.

  ‘Hey pal, you speak English?’ Hawkins asked.

  Licking his lips, the guard glanced at Hawkins’s weapon and nodded.

  ‘Cool.’ Hawkins gestured to the monitor showing Yates and Anya. ‘Know where those two are?’

  ‘The… server room. Basement.’

  Hawkins smiled and nodded. ‘Thanks, buddy.’

  Rising to his feet and stepping back a pace to avoid the resultant blood-splash, he took aim and put a single round through the man’s head, then left the room to rejoin his team.

  ‘They’re downstairs,’ he said, heading for the stairwell. ‘Let’s get them, boys.’

  Chapter 44

  Breathing hard and clenching her teeth against the pain of the ragged wound that was still oozing a steady stream of blood, Mitchell looked up at the young woman who had unknowingly saved her life.

  She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, if not younger. Short and petite – save for the swollen abdomen – with the dark hair and olive skin characteristic of people in this region, she looked as unlikely a saviour as Mitchell could have wished for.

  She surveyed the injured woman lying on her floor for several seconds, as if trying to work out whether she’d made a mistake by letting her in. Despite her diminutive size, there was a confidence in her posture and a shrewdness in her gaze that suggested this wasn’t the first time she’d encountered someone injured and bleeding.

  ‘American?’ she said suddenly.

  Such was the directness of the question, Mitchell could do little but answer in similar fashion. ‘Yeah.’

  The woman’s gaze rested on the wound in her side. ‘Wait here.’

  Turning away, she swept off into what Mitchell assumed to be the kitchen, moving with surprising speed given her advanced pregnancy. She returned only moments later clutching a white hand towel.

  Kneeling down beside Mitchell, she moved the woman’s jacket aside and peeled away the blood-soaked t-shirt beneath to expose the injury.

  ‘Hold this here,’ she instructed, pressing the towel hard against the wound. Mitchell winced in pain, having to bite her lip to keep from crying out. ‘It hurt. But pressure will slow bleeding.’

  Mitchell simply nodded, unable to say anything.

  ‘What happen?’ the young woman asked. Her English was accented but perfectly understandable.

  She swallowed hard, trying not to think about Argento. Trying not to think of another life lost because of her. ‘I was attacked. By a man. I ran in here looking for help.’

  ‘He rob you?’

  If that had been the worst thing that had happened to her tonight, she’d have been dancing a jig at this point. ‘Something like that.’

  The young woman looked at her with that shrewd, calculating gaze. ‘Then why he shoot you?’

  Mitchell’s eyes snapped up to meet hers. ‘What?’

  ‘I s
ee this kind of wound before. At hospital. I treat many myself.’

  Suddenly her calm, no-nonsense demeanour made a lot more sense. ‘You’re a doctor?’ she asked, sitting up a little. The wound in her side blazed with pain.

  ‘A nurse. At Alman Goz hospital. At least, I was. Soon I am mother.’ She was leaning in a little closer, examining the position and size of the wound.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘Sevde.’ She glanced up for a moment. ‘And you?’

  ‘Olivia.’

  ‘You are lucky, Olivia,’ she concluded. ‘Bullet miss vital areas. Towel will slow bleeding until you get to hospital.’

  Already she was rising slowly to her feet, no doubt about to reach for the nearest phone and call an ambulance.

  ‘No,’ Mitchell implored her, grasping her slender forearm. ‘No ambulance. No hospital.’

  The young woman’s expression of professional medical concern was rapidly giving way to doubt and suspicion. ‘Why not? You need help.’

  Perhaps, but she certainly wouldn’t get any at a hospital. By law, any patient admitted with gunshot wounds had to be reported to the police, in which case Hawkins would be on her before they could administer the first shot of morphine.

  ‘You’ve already done enough for me,’ Mitchell said, trying to rise to her feet. ‘I’ll go now, leave you alone.’

  ‘You not go,’ she said firmly, exerting surprising force given her petite frame. Then again, Mitchell supposed it said more about her current condition than it did about Sevde. ‘Get help. You need it.’

  ‘Listen to me, Sevde,’ Mitchell pleaded. ‘The men who attacked me tonight will find me if I go to hospital.’

  ‘They have guards, police,’ she countered.

  ‘It won’t matter. They’ll find me and they’ll kill me.’ She bit her lip and looked away for a moment, blinking back tears as the reality of the past few minutes at last caught up with her. ‘They already murdered my friend, right in front of me. And if I don’t do something they’re going to kill other good people tonight.’

  Sevde stared at her, torn between suspicion and compassion. ‘What can you do?’

  There was only one thing that came to mind. It was stupid, hastily conceived and more than likely to result in her own death, but that no longer mattered. They were into the endgame now, and she wanted Hawkins. She wanted him in her sights, to look into his eyes the moment she pulled the trigger.

  If that was how she had to go out, she could accept that.

  She looked at Sevde, her eyes hardening with cold-blooded resolve. ‘You got a gun in this place?’

  *

  He was getting close, he could sense it. His search program was trawling the server’s vast online storage space, searching the thousands of directories and folders for the one file that could mean the difference between life and death for him. It was in there somewhere, it was just a question of time.

  Clearly Anya was harbouring similar thoughts. ‘How much longer?’

  ‘A lot sooner if you didn’t keep—’ He paused as the computer chimed once, the search alerting him that it had returned a result.

  1 Result found: D1189 – Download Y/N?

  ‘Well, fuck me!’ Alex cried, clenching his fist. ‘Got you, you little bastard.’

  He couldn’t hit the Y key fast enough. Straight away a progress bar appeared on screen as the data was transferred into a memory stick on the side of his laptop, giving an estimated download time of thirty seconds. With a direct connection like this, there was nothing to slow it down.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ he said, barely able to conceal his excitement. ‘Twenty seconds and we’re out of here.’

  Anya nodded. She was a long way from opening the champagne yet. ‘Get ready to move. When we leave, I’ll lead. You stay close to me.’

  ‘Whatever.’ At that moment he would happily have formed a conga line and danced his way out of the building.

  Reaching for the radio at her shoulder, Anya pressed the transmit button. ‘Kristian, we’ll be outside in sixty seconds. Stand by to pick us up.’

  She was expecting an acknowledgement, but instead her call was met with nothing but the faint pop and hiss of static.

  Frowning, she hit the button again. ‘Kristian, do you copy?’

  Nothing.

  ‘It’s the walls,’ Alex explained, nodding to the thick concrete shell that encased the room. ‘They’re shielded against interference. Your radio won’t work in this room.’

  ‘You could have warned me.’

  ‘Would it have changed your mind?’ he asked rhetorically.

  Anya looked at him disapprovingly. But before she could speak, the lights in the room suddenly went out, plunging them into darkness. Only the glow of Alex’s computer screen and the green indicator lights on the rows of servers provided any illumination.

  ‘Anya, what the—?’

  ‘Hush!’ she implored him, slowly lowering herself into a crouch just as the electronic locks on the main door disengaged with a buzz and a metallic click.

  Clutching the automatic tight, she leaned her head out a few inches to survey the long computer-lined avenue stretching out before them.

  Her movement was answered by a rhythmic thumping sound coming from the far end of the room, and she hurriedly ducked back behind cover as a trio of 5.56 mm rounds slammed into the thin metal sheeting beside her. A shower of sparks and fragments of broken circuitry rained down on them as one server unit was blasted apart by the impacts.

  ‘Tangos in sight!’ a male voice called out. ‘Centre aisle.’

  ‘Copy. Move in!’

  Alex curled into a ball, trying to make himself as small a target as possible while his mind screamed at him in blind panic. ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck! They’ve found us!’

  ‘Jesus, what do we do?’

  Anya however had more pressing matters to attend to. Flattening herself against the floor, she leaned out just far enough to bring the automatic to bear and opened up.

  Whatever Alex had seen in the movies about the effectiveness of silencers was clearly way off the mark, because the loud, booming thud of each shot was enough to leave his ears ringing. In such close proximity, he could even feel the vibrations through the server rack as the pressure wave passed through them.

  Her flurry of gunfire was answered by a shouted command. ‘Cover! Cover!’

  She had bought them a momentary respite, but in the near-darkness her shots were unlikely to find their mark. In any case, the defiant hail of fire couldn’t be sustained for long. The M1911, for all its stopping power and impressive history, held only eight rounds in a single-stack magazine. There was no way it could compete with the firepower arrayed against them. After loosing one last shot, the slide flew back and locked in place to expose an empty breech.

  Her adversaries seemed to seize upon this immediately, and no sooner had she ceased firing than they returned the favour, spraying automatic fire down the room towards her. It was suppressing rather than lethal fire, intended to keep her pinned down while they closed in.

  Crawling back behind cover herself, Anya ejected the spent magazine from her weapon and placed it in her pocket, then hurriedly slapped a fresh one home. Already the air reeked of burned cordite.

  ‘Is the file downloaded?’ she asked, her voice low and urgent.

  Trembling, Alex looked at his computer screen. Sure enough, the Black List had finished downloading. Not that they were likely to live long enough to benefit from it.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Anya nodded, her jaw clenched as she weighed up her options. It took her all of two seconds to make her decision. Raising her weapon, she took aim at the smoke detector mounted in the ceiling and fired a single, well-aimed shot.

  Straight away the darkness of the room vanished, burned away by the bright red emergency lights that blazed into life. As the room was submerged in their crimson glow, a warning klaxon blared out, sounding the activation of the fire-suppres
sion system.

  And a moment later, it came.

  Alex had never experienced Halon gas before, though he’d heard it was widely used in situations like this where traditional sprinklers would cause more harm than the fire they were supposed to extinguish.

  Whatever the technical theory behind its operation, the reality was that Alex suddenly found himself enveloped in clouds of thick white smoke that were suddenly ejected from vents in the ceiling. It carried no scent that he could detect, and seemed to be breathable, though he did notice a strange sense of disorientation and light-headedness after the first few seconds. With nowhere for it to disperse, the strange, dense mist rapidly filled the room, reducing visibility to only a few yards.

  ‘Go now!’ Anya yelled over the blare of the alarms.

  Alex fumbled to disconnect the laptop from the access port but, unable to make his fingers cooperate with his brain, simply yanked out the little USB memory stick plugged into the side of it. He had what he needed now anyway.

  ‘Come on!’ Anya practically hauled him to his feet and pulled him towards the main door, which had opened automatically when the fire-suppression system kicked in.

  They had made it about halfway down when a figure suddenly loomed out of the mist, the long barrel of an assault rifle out in front of him.

  Anya reacted with the speed and aggression born from years of experience. Ducking down low to present a smaller target, she rushed in against him, closing the distance before he could bring the weapon to bear, and jamming her own sidearm against his body armour. The M1911 thudded as a round discharged, quickly followed by a second.

  Even the best armour in the world couldn’t protect him from such lethal close-range fire, and he began to fall. A third round to the head was enough to put him down for good. Letting him drop to the floor, Anya quickly disengaged from him and hurried onward, with Alex leaping over the fallen man and trying not to look at the gruesome results of her work. He’d already seen enough things over the past few days that he knew would revisit him late at night for years to come.