Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  The corridors crossed and crossed again, offering what felt like hundreds of choices. He moved slowly, trailing his fingers against the wall. It would be easy to get lost in here with no recognizable landmarks. Every shadow and dark shape looked exactly the same, save for the structure damage caused by the explosives.

  He reached a stairwell whose door was closing as he approached. Jake slipped his hand into the crack and caught it, listening for the soft footfalls ascending. He counted them before he pushed the door slowly open, wincing as it sighed on the hydraulic arm.

  Time was the one commodity not being traded here.

  Jake started climbing as quickly and quietly as he could. The sounds of the other man’s careful footsteps stopped. A door opened then closed, the rasp of it settling back into the frame echoing in the silence. Then the clatter of running feet filled the stairwell. The guy had thrown caution to the wind and was moving fast. That meant Jake needed to move faster. He could only hope the din would swallow the sound of his own ascent.

  He charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time, hand on the rail for balance in the darkness, breathing hard before he was around the fourth landing.

  More gunshots came as the last defenders of this financial Camelot fell.

  He saw a chink of light up above him, on the next landing. A door opening.

  It wasn’t natural light. A flashlight?

  Jake slowed down. He didn’t want his own steps emerging as the other man’s faded. A bead of sweat broke and ran from his temple, trailing slowly down his cheek before it was absorbed into his neck. Nostrils flared, he fought to regulate his breathing. Everything was suddenly quiet. He didn’t like that.

  Who the fuck brought a flashlight to a gunfight?

  He rose up a single step, listening for the telltale signs of trouble. He clenched and unclenched his fist at his side. He banged it against his thigh, using the impact to mark time: another eleven count. Jake always added one for luck. That’s just the way he was.

  On the count of eleven he moved, reaching for the door. He found the handle. What it opened onto was breathtaking.

  Jake had never set foot inside the New York Stock Exchange before, never mind the trading floor; even so, he knew he was looking into the very heart of the building. It was an iconic sight, like the Empire State Building or the rectangle of Central Park seen from above. You didn’t need to have been inside to have seen it; the trading floor was on the news every day.

  The room was enormous.

  The ceilings were easily sixty feet high, with an array of overhead beams supporting lights and wires and cameras as if it were a concert stage, which, given the kinds of performance art that played out here, wasn’t a completely inappropriate analogy.

  One wall was almost entirely green glass. Despite the fact that they were nearly opaque, the windows let in enough light for him to see the trading floor. There were nine dead men sprawled out in the center of it. Several large clusters of computers, workstations, and screens, built in a circle facing inward, dominated it. The walls were lined with more workstations with stools and chairs spaced haphazardly along them. Several massive screens hung from the ceiling at various points around the room, all dark now.

  An enormous American flag dominated one wall. NYSE banners hung on either side of the flag.

  It was an amazing place.

  Jake could only imagine what it looked like normally, full of life, hundreds of people running, shouting buy and sell orders, waving frantically to relay information. There were no day traders barking orders. There was no stock ticker counting down the fiscal apocalypse. Suit jackets had been tossed carelessly over the backs of chairs, papers still piled on desks. He saw several Coke and Mountain Dew cans and takeout containers beside silent computers.

  The corpses weren’t the only people on the trading floor. He saw the man he’d been following, and beyond him, the team he’d come here to intercept. The soft buzz of voices came from the room’s far side, directly beneath one of the big scrolling boards. They moved with grim efficiency. There were more computers there, hulking units that kept the back end of the system up and running so the traders could do their work up front.

  The crew, some sort of paramilitary unit, gathered around the banks of machines as a computer screen lit up. What the hell? There was no juice in the place and it seemed pretty obvious an EMP or something equally toxic to electronics had wiped out every system in the city, but these guys just happened to have found the one working network in New York?

  He watched the team move down the row, doing something to each machine in turn. Before they moved on to the next, the terminal powered up, lighting the room with its cool digital glow. The backup generators must have been fucked up beyond repair by whatever it was that had brought the systems down citywide.

  This was big.

  Important.

  Whatever had happened today, just like the graffiti artists on the subway, these guys were prepared.

  Where are the warriors? he thought, remembering the line they’d shouted.

  But who—or what—were they at war with? He didn’t have any answers.

  The man he’d followed to the trading floor slipped into a booth, using the shadows from its curving partition for cover.

  Smart, Jake thought, but the only similar place he could see for himself was across the floor. He couldn’t risk crossing that kind of killing ground. He stayed where he was and watched from the shadows, gambling that no one was going to follow him in through the door.

  It didn’t take long to see there was one guy on the team who was the alpha dog; he barked out rapid-fire instructions and no one argued with him. His guys sat at their row of reactivated computers. Six terminals, six men.

  Almost as one they began typing.

  Okay, he thought, this is some sort of high-tech heist. It made sense, kind of, but even if the terminals were working, they had to be offline, surely? With the systems down the trades wouldn’t register. And when the system came back online it’d reboot from backups, wiping out anything they’d done.

  But the men kept typing.

  Jake almost missed the sound of the stairwell door opening behind him. He barely had time to duck down as a new figure strode calmly toward the trading floor.

  He was older. He moved with confidence that bordered on arrogance, like he owned the place. The gray in his cropped hair caught the screens’ backlight. Average height, stocky, and dressed in the same nondescript black jeans–dark jacket combo of the guy Jake had followed. He walked straight up to the team leader.

  A nod passed between them.

  The newcomer walked along the bank of machines, talking quietly. Jake could just make out the sound of their replies, but not the actual words.

  The man nodded several times, and moved in closer to study one of the screens.

  Jake could see his face: blunt, with harsh features like he’d been chipped from rock, all the rough edges left untouched. Native American, maybe, possibly Latino. It was difficult to tell in the ambient glow of the computer screen.

  The man nodded again and stepped back, pulling a pistol from under his coat, and abruptly shot them in the back of the head one after another. The silencer, visible along the barrel, kept the noise to a soft whisper of displaced air.

  None of the men at the terminals had the time to save themselves. They barely had the time to make a sound as they slumped and fell out of their chairs.

  Jake had seen violence before. He’d experienced death. But not like this. Not this rapid-fire, cold-blooded murder. What the fuck had he got himself wrapped up in? Hit teams? Deadly assassins?

  The killer checked each body in turn, holding a finger at the thick vein in their necks to be sure there was no pulse. Satisfied, he rose and tucked the pistol back away in its holster at the base of his spine. He crossed the trading floor, walking slowly up the ramp toward the doors where Jake was hiding.

  Jake didn’t move. He didn’t dare to so much as breathe.
>
  There was no sign of the man he’d followed in here. Either he was hiding or he’d already taken off when the shooting went down. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t Jake’s focus.

  The mission directive had changed. He’d gathered his recon, and at the heart of it found a killer. He might have come in here thinking this wasn’t his fight, but it certainly was now.

  He was a simple man. People didn’t get away with cold-blooded murder in Jake Carter’s world. It was that black-and-white.

  Where are the warriors? he thought. Right here. I am a fucking warrior.

  Chapter Nine

  IT WAS BRAVADO.

  This wasn’t Kabul. He wasn’t packing. All thoughts of taking the killer down vanished as survival instinct kicked in. That was good. Nine times out of ten, pulling dumb shit like that was suicide. A different time. A different place. Yes. But not here. Not now. When the killer had real skill, which this guy had in spades, it nixed even that slim 10 percent element of chance—luck—that might have gone in his favor.

  Jake had seen firsthand just how well the guy knew his way around a gun: six men picked off in half as many seconds, head shots all around. Lethal.

  Size and strength didn’t matter against that kind of precision. One misstep and he’d be left having a religious experience he wasn’t ready for. All he could do was let the man walk out. It wasn’t cowardice. It was basic combat stuff. Priority one: stay alive.

  Jake waited a few tense seconds, not daring to breathe. The stairwell door eased shut on its hydraulic arm. He didn’t move.

  He gave the killer time to descend before he slipped through the door after him. Instead of following right behind the man, Jake ran down across the trading floor, avoiding the dead, to the banks of computer screens. He had no idea what he could learn from the terminals, but he had one shot here. Right now he knew nothing. Anything he could learn would be a start.

  Jake guessed he didn’t have much time before the NYSE security apparatus noticed its team was missing, so he didn’t linger as he stepped over the split skull of a dead man to get to his terminal. The screen filled with scrawling numbers and code that moved too quickly for him to fix on any of the command lines being executed by the machine. He wasn’t a programmer. He couldn’t scan the streams of code, and unfortunately there was no handy Press Enter to Destroy Western Civilization icon on the screen to make sense of it all.

  Whatever they’d come here to do was done. Nothing he could do to stop that, apart from maybe yank out a cable. His technical know-how only stretched that far. Done, he turned his attention to the corpse.

  It was a mess. The entry wound was clean, though the exit wound was anything but. It had opened a hole in the man’s forehead the size of Jake’s fist. Some sort of hollow-point ammo designed to cause maximum damage on the way out.

  Jake rolled the dead man over. His arm fell uselessly at his side, smearing the blood across the outer edge of the trading floor. The smell of death was already beginning to gather around the room; it began with blood and shit as the bowels emptied. No one ever talked about that. It wasn’t like in the movies. When the guy went down, hole in his head, the hole in his ass opened, the last and most brutal humiliation of murder leaving the victim to rot in his own shit.

  Jake hunkered down beside the dead man and went through his pockets. There were no wallet or other clues to his identity. No distinguishing features or marks. He was, quite literally, a dead end.

  Jake looked up, scanning the vast room for movement. The quiet was getting to him. He tried another corpse, which had likewise been stripped. It was the same for the others.

  If someone came in now there’d be no way he could talk his way out of this. He was alone in a room with a lot of dead men and most likely the only working computers in the city. Forget being black, this doesn’t look good on any planet, Jake thought, giving up on them.

  He killed the other terminals before he headed back to the stairs, knowing it was a risk, and not sure it would make the slightest bit of difference. He needed to get out of there. The cops would show up soon; he didn’t want to be around when they did.

  He nudged the door open a crack, then pushed it slowly wider, slipped through, and eased it closed behind him. He’d given the killer a full minute and more of a head start.

  Jake couldn’t hear any sounds of the man’s descent, and assumed he’d already made it to the bottom. Don’t be waiting. Part thought, part prayer.

  He followed him down, fast, making up the ground. By the time he reached the bottom and emerged from the stairwell into the short, dark corridor, Jake was less than thirty seconds behind him, and gaining.

  Which was good and bad.

  Good, because he’d come this far. Bad, because there was no turning back now. Not with the body count very much in the house. He was in for the long haul. This had become his fight. Whatever—and whoever—the fuck he was fighting.

  He wasn’t the kind of guy who could just turn and walk away.

  Sometimes he wished he was. It would have saved him a lot of grief over the years. But the dead needed a voice, whatever their crimes. No one deserved to die like that. And for a minute, an hour, a day, or however long it took for some semblance of normality to return to the city and its stock exchange, only three men knew they were dead—their killer and the two men who had watched them die.

  He couldn’t walk away from that.

  * * *

  Up ahead, the beam of the flashlight disappeared.

  For a second he thought the killer had turned it off, but then he saw the diffuse blur of light again and realized he’d turned down not one but two cross-corners in the labyrinthine structure.

  Jake followed the beam, moving quicker. Three turns and he was no more than fifteen seconds behind the killer, close enough to hear the dull echo of his footsteps in the dark corridor. He tried to time his footsteps to match those of the killer.

  The place was cold. His skin prickled. There should have been all sorts of sensors and silent alarms protecting the place. Nothing was happening. He could hear his breathing as his nostrils flared. There was no such thing as silence, not true silence, not in the dark. He clenched his fist, then realized what he was doing and tried to relax, but that just caused every other muscle in his body to tense up.

  The light stopped moving.

  The killer had reached a door.

  Jake froze, caught in no-man’s-land. He didn’t know the building, didn’t know where he was, but as light streamed in, he realized the killer had found another exit. The plain metal fire door opened out the back of the building, onto New Street.

  Backlit, the man looked like a giant, his silhouette filling the doorway. He stood on the threshold, seemingly to take it all in, the city at his feet.

  Jake heard singing. It took him a second to realize that’s what it was. Singing. One voice, stark, distinctive. The killer was no Mick Jagger, but hearing the haunting refrain of “Gimme Shelter” in the aftermath of what he’d just witnessed was chilling. The man was enjoying himself.

  He walked down the block, back toward Wall Street, singing to himself every step of the way.

  Jake followed him out of the darkness into the cold day, keeping close to the walls of the stock exchange. The killer’s voice echoed down the empty side street. Between the uncertainty, the darkness, and the cold, Jake imagined that most of the population was already seeking shelter indoors. Anyone who had somewhere to go would get there fast. The coming night would be brutal without power. How many old and vulnerable people would it claim?

  The old building didn’t offer much in terms of cover. If the guy turned around he was fucked. There was no way Jake was a good enough actor to pull off innocence or ignorance, not after what he’d just seen.

  At the corner another set of cement pylons kept stray traffic at bay. Not that it was a problem today.

  Leaning against one of them was an old Honda motorcycle with a heavy chain looped around it. The bike was all gleaming chrome and
black enamel, like new, but it lacked the sleek lines of modern bikes. There was something about its solidity and the power of its clean lines that was unashamedly masculine, and meant to appeal to boys across the world.

  Jake was still half a block back as the killer knelt beside the bike and unhooked the chain.

  Jake was trapped in that moment, staring at the killer as he straddled the bike and stamped down hard on the kick starter, revving the engine as he settled onto the black leather seat.

  The killer stared right at him.

  He’d been made.

  The man’s lip curled slowly into a mocking smile. He raised two fingers to touch his temple, either giving Jake an ironic salute or miming blowing his brains out, and pulled away from the pylon, burning rubber and roaring back up Wall Street toward Broadway, where refugees of the blackout bundled up against the elements and continued their long walks home.

  Once he hit the expanse of Broadway, the killer would open up the throttle and disappear into New York City and that would be it. There’d be no justice for the dead back there, and nothing to stop the man from finishing whatever it was he’d started.

  Jake was stubborn. It wasn’t his most endearing trait, but it kept him going long after others would have admitted defeat. He ran after the killer—it was all he could do.

  He dodged around an old woman burdened under bulging shopping bags overfilled with the bare necessities of life. Unable to stop himself, he slammed into a kid crossing the mouth of the street, and sent the boy sprawling.

  He didn’t have time to feel guilty. He ran on three more staggering steps, hands almost dragging across the blacktop, before he righted himself and cast about, searching for the killer.

  He could hear the bike, the rider mocking him by revving the engine as he let every one of those horses loose.

  What he saw was another one of those damned bike messengers peddling toward him like the devil was on his tail. Jake stood his ground, meeting the rider head on. There was a moment when their eyes met and the rider realized what Jake intended, but by then it was too late, he was falling. The back wheel skidded out beneath the messenger as he clawed at the air, desperately trying to catch ahold of something to stop him from going down.