Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  The man stayed where he was, seemingly not sure if he should comfort her or just put her out of her misery. In the end, it wasn’t his choice to make.

  “What the hell’s going on out here?” The voice preceded the groan of the command center’s door opening. A man appeared and he didn’t look pleased. He had a darker complexion than the fake hobo, with long shaggy hair that hung in thick greasy clumps around his dirt-smudged face. He wore tattered clothing that was held together by the grime crusted into it, but had that same alertness about him as his partner. That, and a very similar-looking gun.

  “Nothing, man, nothing, it’s all good,” the first guy said, crossing the hall in a hurry to stand by the partially open door so she couldn’t see in. “Just some crazy broad. It’s all good.”

  The second guy grunted, pissed, but pushed the door the rest of the way open and exited the command center. He didn’t look toward her once. It must have been the weirdest fancy dress party of all time in there, she thought, as two more men emerged after him, both dressed down to look like they lived on the streets. It was a good way to go unnoticed up here. People didn’t see the homeless in New York, they just ebbed and flowed like so much flotsam in the river of the American Dream. The third man turned a curious eye on Finn before dismissing her as irrelevant and turning his attention to the second hobo.

  “Let’s go,” he said after the door slid shut behind the last man.

  All four of them walked back down the hall. They barely even acknowledge she existed, which was just fine by her. Even able to study them now, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to recognize them in a lineup without all of the crap they were covered in. It was an effective disguise.

  Finn waited until she was sure they were gone before she stopped sobbing. She blew her nose again on the borrowed handkerchief and sat up, brushing a few errant strands of hair out of her face.

  She looked around—no sign of the men. She couldn’t hear the dull echo of approaching footsteps either.

  She was alone in the hall. It had worked.

  The question now was whether she could reverse whatever it was they’d done. She thought about calling Jake, but she wasn’t in trouble. He was a line of last resort.

  She pushed herself to her feet and tried the door again. This time no one stopped her.

  Inside, the Operations Control Center for all of Port Authority was unimpressive, except for the fact that it appeared to have power. There were a handful of desks set around the room’s outer wall, each with a couple of monitors and a battered desk chair in front of it. She wasn’t sure if the room was shielded, if the men had brought in a generator, or if power was starting to return on its own accord, but across the far wall was an entire array of fully functioning flat-screen displays. The flickering from them cast the room in an eerie glow. The nine screens alternated views of various locations within the Port Authority complex. She saw one fixed on the hallway just outside where she’d run afoul of the hobo. Finn kept half an eye on it as she walked over to one of the desks and hit the space bar on the keyboard to wake the computer.

  She didn’t want to think about what would happen to her if those guys came back. She focused on the monitor instead. It showed what looked like an Excel spreadsheet, all number-and-letter combinations and blinking lines. It was a timetable, she realized after a few seconds of confusion. That made sense. The control center kept track of when each bus was scheduled to arrive and depart, and determined which bay they should use so that there wasn’t a backup or a collision on the tight ramps.

  Right now everything was on hold, hence the blinking lines instead of times. What she didn’t know was how that could help the four men she’d seen leave. What good did it do them to interfere with a schedule that would be updated manually the minute things returned to normal?

  There was absolutely nothing beneficial about hacking into a manual system that would change every single day of the week. Unless they’d put in a way to override the updates.

  She clicked around, looking for options, and found one under Preferences. When she followed the chain of commands she was offered a Remote Access option. The box had been checked, an IP address entered. So that was it. They had reset the system so they could log in remotely and change the schedule any time they liked. It wasn’t exactly the crime of the century.

  How had it gone from looking at glyphs carved into an ancient wall to trying to bring down a complex public transport computer system in less than twenty-four hours?

  She shook her head. No point attempting to make sense of it.

  When she tried clicking off the remote access, a pop-up demanded her authorization. She hit Return. It told her: You do not have authorization to alter these settings. Which was rich, all things considered. Since she didn’t know the passwords to get in, she needed an alternative.

  Finn sank into a chair, planted her elbows on the desk, and stared at the screen. Her gaze flicked back to the rack of nine screens on the wall, making sure the men weren’t coming back. Not that she expected them to—they’d gotten what they wanted.

  She needed to think. There had to be something she could do, even if it was as simple as turn it off and turn it on again, the regular sysop joke in college. Whenever anything went wrong that was always the first response: have you tried restarting it?

  She didn’t think it would work here. But if she couldn’t figure something out, when the buses started running again they’d have full control.

  Finn started banging randomly on the keys. She hit multiple keys in combination, trying different configurations and mashing down like a toddler trying to control the computer by sheer brute force. Several new windows popped up as a result of her efforts, and strings of nonsense appeared in various cells here and there, but still she kept at it, hitting the keys harder and faster and earning warnings about authorization that she willfully ignored until the beeps of protest became a one-note concerto.

  Finally she must have hit just the right combination—or, in this case, the wrong one—and the screen went dark. Then it turned a bright, blank blue.

  The Blue Screen of Death.

  She’d crashed the system.

  Finn rooted around under the desk for the master power switch and shut the computers off. All of them. She counted to ten then added ten more for good luck before she flipped the switch back on. Then she waited.

  She didn’t dare to so much as breathe. Everything rested on this. After thirty agonizing seconds, the power lights on the various computers began to blink. The monitors woke back up next. And then, on one monitor after another, she read the same message: System damage detected. Restore to last safe restore point? Y/N.

  Safe restore sounded absolutely idyllic, though of course there was nothing to say the hobos hadn’t set the restore point after they’d screwed around inside the system. But she’d cross that metaphorical bridge when she came to it. Finn stabbed at the Y key and the computer acknowledged her choice: Restoring default settings. Please wait.

  She watched as the screens showed the percentage that had been rebuilt. 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%, 99% . . . 100%. Default settings restored. Restarting system.

  There was a whine as the computers shut down, a sharp click and then a whir as they started back up again. And this time, once they’d warmed up, they showed the MTA logo as a startup page, with spaces for users to enter their logins and passwords.

  She didn’t have the passwords, so she had no idea if she’d done it, but hopefully standard settings didn’t include the remote access patch they’d put in. They could always come back and repeat the process, but Jake had been fairly sure they were running on a detailed—tight—time line. Anything that messed with that bought precious minutes or hours for normality to reassert itself outside.

  She could do one more thing to make it even more difficult for them to get back in. She rooted through the desks, looking for what she needed: a long wire paperclip. After she’d closed the door behind her, she inserted it into the lock and gave
the slim piece of metal a vicious twist so that it snapped in half—half still between her fingers, the rest embedded in the lock. They wouldn’t be able to pick the lock, and breaking the door down would attract attention. Attention seemed like the last thing these guys wanted. Of course, the MTA wouldn’t be able to get back in either until a locksmith had undone the damage she’d caused.

  Finn smiled to herself as she tossed the broken paperclip aside and walked away.

  She’d done it. She’d had to improvise, and she’d broken her promise to Jake not to get too close, but she’d done it. She’d not only found them, she’d thwarted their plan. She was a regular Nancy fucking Drew, she thought to herself, grinning as she exited Port Authority.

  Now it was down to Jake.

  She wanted to check in with him, see how things were going at Penn and if he needed her to go somewhere else. She was fired up. She really wanted to tell him how she’d fooled the fake hobo and screwed with their hack, but without knowing what was happening where he was, she had no way of knowing if a call would betray him.

  She’d just have to wait for him to check in with her.

  He’s a soldier, she thought. He can handle himself.

  As she walked back out into the cold of the winter, she saw the first few flakes of snow drifting down. It was the absolutely last thing the city needed. Snow.

  Up ahead she saw a group of men in uniform. Soldiers. The cavalry had arrived.

  Chapter THIRTY-THREE

  “ZACCIMI IS DEAD,” THE ASSASSIN SAID.

  “She lost the rights to that name when she turned against us,” Mr. Alom countered. “Sophie Keane is dead. Well done. Cabrakan has covered our tracks in London; though the explosion may draw more attention than we would have liked, it will effectively purge our presence from the financial district. Today is a good day.”

  “Not really. She killed me.”

  He paused a beat, as though trying to process her last few words. “I don’t understand.”

  “Poison. I have minutes, maybe fifteen if I’m lucky, before it stops my heart. It’s already hard to focus and think.”

  “Antidote?”

  “Too late. The race is run.”

  “You have served us well, Xbalanque. May the lords of death find use for your unique talents.”

  She remained silent.

  “Was there something else?”

  The assassin said nothing.

  “I do not like silence. What is it?”

  “Before she died, she exposed us.”

  “How?”

  “She named you, she unloaded everything she knew in public.”

  “Who did she talk to? I need to know everything. Be very clear in your account, soldier.”

  “She grandstanded in a café. Fifty, sixty people inside.”

  “And where are you now?”

  “Outside.”

  “Has anyone left?”

  “Not that I have seen.”

  “Good. Contain the situation.”

  “I might not have the time left,” she said simply. It had nothing to do with the fact that fifty more deaths would weigh heavily on her soul as she made the journey to the afterlife, or anything like that. It was purely practical. Killing fifty people took time. She didn’t have the ammunition, for one, and she couldn’t very well ask them all to sip poison-laced lattes. Unlike Cabrakan she had no access to explosives either—and given the black mess of the sky behind her, he’d probably used all of his.

  “Then find another way. Make your last fifteen minutes with us about limiting the damage. It is too late to silence Sophie Keane, but it is not too late to make sure nothing she said leaves that café. You are industrious when it comes to death. I have faith in you.”

  Mr. Alom hung up.

  He hadn’t given her a choice.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t make one anyway.

  Zaccimi’s words came back to her: Do you think you can absolve yourself of any guilt by saying you’re following orders? . . . You make a conscious decision every time you pull the trigger.

  The dead woman was right: she did make a choice. And right now she had another one to make. Yes, it was blind obedience. She understood this. But that didn’t make saying no any more likely. She stood there with her hand on the door, looking at the young mother putting her baby back into the buggy.

  You make a conscious decision . . .

  She opened the door.

  Chapter Thirty-FOUR

  THE ADDRESS ON THE CARD HAD LED HIM to an old brownstone. He arrived as night fell, before the storm broke.

  There was nothing really remarkable about the building itself—it was one of the wider ones, with large bay windows flanking the front door, five stories tall plus a subbasement below the entrance stairs. It was made entirely of dark brown stone rather than brick, meaning it was a proper brownstone—apart from the fact that it was patrolled by obviously armed, obviously well-trained, obviously on-high-alert guards.

  Who are you people? Really. Not just some made-up name . . . Who are you?

  He watched the guards pace around the front gates. The suit at Penn had called them The Hidden. He’d also called them a dragon. A dragon, Jake saw, that was equipped with automatic rifles and God only knows what other ordinance.

  Jake sat on a stoop a couple of hundred yards away, rolling a cigarette so he looked like any other guy taking a load off, and ran through the most immediate problem he faced—how to get in there.

  His phone started vibrating in his pocket. He assumed it was Finn letting him know how things had gone down at Port Authority. But it wasn’t her, it was an alert from his voice mail.

  He dialed in, assuming it was telemarketers or some other sign that the world wasn’t in fact ending and that the vermin who preyed on people were already out in force trying to sell them shit they didn’t need.

  He listened to the message.

  It was Sophie: “I’m not going to say I’m sorry again, Jake. You know I am. I’m banking on the hope that you’ll do the right thing. Remember the girl I was, not the woman they are telling everyone I became. I’m neither. Both, I guess. But I can’t get out of this now. I have to see it through to the end. I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Things I should never have done. And I’ve gotten you mixed up in all this. I’ve sent you out to fight Goliath and forgotten to give you any stones for your sling. You need stones. I’m going to send you something. Use it well. And try not to hate me, Jake. I’m not a bad person. I just messed up. We’ve all done that, haven’t we?” The message was time coded over an hour ago.

  As he hung up, his phone hummed again, an incoming text message. There was an attachment. When he opened it, he saw a crazed black-and-white square like a Mondrian block painting filling the tiny screen. It was a QR code, a square barcode with information embedded inside. It was by far the most intricate one he’d ever seen. Every QR code had smaller squares in the top two corners and in the bottom left, but normally those took up almost a fifth of the total space. On this code, the squares were so small they were barely visible to the naked eye, drowning in random pixelated lines. If a normal QR code could hold a URL, this one could probably store an entire book. Or at least an e-mail, he realized.

  Which meant there could be another message within Sophie’s message. Secrets within secrets, Jake thought, answers hidden in plain sight. These secrets were going to have to wait a few minutes. He couldn’t get at them right now anyway, since he first had to storm a barricaded building single-handed. He put his phone away.

  He wasn’t getting in through the front door unless he came back with some serious ordinance of his own. Even if the house had a back garden or patio, which a lot of the older brownstones did, it would be secured. Short of parachuting in, he didn’t have a lot of options. He looked up at the darkening sky.

  That wasn’t true; there was one: below.

  No one expected an attack from below. He knew this city—and especially its tunnel systems—like the back of his
hand. He was basically a mole man. He spent most of his days down there, using long-forgotten access tunnels, cattle tunnels that weren’t on any map, and of course the original drainage sewers that predated modern Manhattan.

  His sense of spatial awareness, overlaying the map of the city below on the city streets above, was sharp, and pushing himself up from the stoop and starting down the block back toward Broadway, he realized that there was a chance, a slim one, but a chance. This was more than he’d had a few minutes ago.

  When his phone vibrated again, he snatched it up thinking it was Sophie. It wasn’t. It was Ryan.

  The conversation was brief, Jake trying to say no, Ryan refusing to listen. It ended with Jake promising to meet up with him before he went underground, Ryan convincing him that assuming he did manage to infiltrate this secret society’s ultrasecret lair, the answers he was looking for weren’t going to be in a folder conveniently labeled The Truth. He was going to need Ryan.

  Jake didn’t have a counterargument.

  * * *

  Half an hour later they trudged along the 1 line.

  They’d entered the tunnels at the 96th Street station, grateful to duck out of the swirling storm as it finally took hold. There was a raised walkway along the side for MTA workers, which saved them from splashing through sewage and detritus that accumulated down there, and meant they weren’t walking directly on the wooden sleepers of the tracks either.

  That didn’t change the fact that it was dark, dank, and reeked of filth and putrescence. Mercifully, there were no trains.

  The Maglite Jake had acquired back at the relay station offered a little light. Ryan had come equipped, bringing a second, more powerful flashlight. Yet together they barely scratched the dark surface of the world below.

  They kept moving. They didn’t talk, even though Ryan clearly had a thousand questions.

  The subway tunnel walls were covered in graffiti—not all words and tags either. In New York, every available surface inevitably became an artist’s canvas, especially where they weren’t supposed to go. There were whole abandoned tunnel systems down here that were covered in so much paint they looked like the inside of a clown car, all riotous color and motion. The tags and images were sparser but still present, including a stick figure of a man running, a strange flower with a grinning evil smiley face at its center. There were eerily accurate renditions of the mayor of New York sucking an oversized cock right beside a caricature of Hillary fingering herself to a caption of I still believe in a place called Hope. That was as political a polemic as the underworld could offer. Equal-opportunity homemade porn. Ryan read a line out loud, “God is nowhere. God is now here. Trippy.” His voice carried far too loudly in the darkness but Jake didn’t shush him. That would have been worse.