Ciphers

by Matt Rogers

‘Okay.’

  ‘And, Jim,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t care less how you feel about it. You’ll do what I tell you because the president’s issued an executive order instructing you to do so. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. Then he added, ‘But you’re lucky I agree with you.’

  ‘Just trying to do the right thing.’

  That seemed to lower his guard. He said, ‘I’ll round up as many men as I can.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘How bad is this?’

  She hesitated. Figured she could trust him. If there was anything she’d learned to appreciate in this business, it was people who didn’t bullshit. Those who cut right to the chase. She said, ‘It could get really bad.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘The power companies have no control over the substations. They’ve been locked out. What you see now is just the beginning of how badly New York is going to succumb to panic. Right now that building is the key to saving tens of thousands of lives.’

  ‘It’s hackers or something?’

  ‘Yes,’ Violetta said. ‘They’re rogue. They’re not affiliated with any terrorist organisation — none of them have stepped forward to claim responsibility for this. They’re acting independently.’

  ‘And you’re sure they’re in the building?’

  Violetta stared across the room at Alonzo, hunched over his desk, face illuminated by the harsh white glow of the three screens in front of him.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied.

  ‘How sure?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Then I’ll make sure I bring every cop in the city down on it.’

  ‘Thank you, Jim.’

  The line went dead.

  She hadn’t told Detective First Grade Jim Riordan that there was no guarantee the bank building was even populated. She hadn’t mentioned how little sense it would make if the rogue organisation’s remote HQ was located right in the heart of the grid they’d decimated. How inconvenient that would be for them. How nonsensical. Nothing added up…

  …but they had no other leads.

  That was the crux of it. If the building was empty, they were in the dark.

  So, despite her personal attachment to one of the men she’d put in the line of fire, she hoped like hell both Will Slater and Jason King were in the process of getting shot at. If they weren’t, she truly had no idea what might happen.

  A situation like this was unheard of in the modern era.

  The only sound that permeated the space was the incessant clicking of computer mice and tapping of fingers on keys.

  Trying, valiantly, to make progress.

  She knew if they didn’t, society wouldn’t be the same.

  43

  Slater lay on his back for a few laboured breaths, then eased up into a crouch.

  He listened hard.

  There was the inevitable outcry of civilians caught too close to the gunfight. Men and women and children unaccustomed to the in-your-face violence of combat. Gunshots sounded a whole lot different in real life than in the movies. Especially those of a .50 cal rifle — probably a Barrett M82. To the untrained ear, the reports would have sounded like bomb detonations. They sure did to Slater, and he’d heard them a thousand times before. He couldn’t imagine the terror of inexperience in this realm.

  Apart from the faint screams, he heard nothing. No approaching footsteps, no one reloading weapons, no crunch of glass underfoot. The lobby stayed silent, and as his hearing returned he picked up a faint plip-plip-plip from outside.

  He scrunched up his features and listened harder.

  Then it clicked.

  Rain.

  The skies had opened up.

  Cold tension ran through him, constricting his insides. It would have been hard enough breaching the bank building with a clear forecast. Already he could hear the downpour intensifying, transitioning from a faint shower to a genuine storm within minutes. He usually thought he was above getting affected by his surroundings, but something about the mixture of darkness and foul weather churned his guts.

  At least he was inside, where he could regroup and then—

  What? he thought.

  What the fuck can you feasibly do?

  He slid his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and dialled King.

  It rang for long seconds, on and on in the quiet of the lobby.

  No answer.

  He killed the call and put the phone back, then pressed two fingers into his eyes. The echoes of a splitting headache had come to life, deep in his skull. Obviously a side effect of trying to flush out the hangover so fast. Its remnants had finally caught up to him. He recognised that he couldn’t take the time to feel sorry for himself, and forced the pain aside.

  Then he heard glass crunching underfoot.

  A whole lot of it, actually, under multiple feet.

  He stiffened.

  Didn’t move a muscle.

  The footsteps spread out, three sets heading in three directions. Slater heard one coming up the middle, another moving diagonally to the left, and the final set diagonally to the right. Surrounding the reception desk from multiple angles.

  Shit, Slater thought.

  They’re trained.

  And they know where I am.

  Waiting wouldn’t achieve anything. The longer he drew it out, the better setup they’d achieve when the gunfight finally kicked off. So he zoned in, narrowing his vision, discarding any point of focus that wasn’t completely necessary. It shrank his entire being to a single objective.

  Survive.

  He moved. Crept forward in the crouch, reaching the left-hand edge of the desk. The Glock stayed fixed to his palm, and he slipped a finger inside the trigger guard. Then he inched out into the open, so slowly it was barely perceptible. He kept the marble wall behind him close, making sure he blended into it. It worked. He was able to get a respectable line of sight on half the lobby.

  He saw a hulking figure heading in from the left, its features indiscernible due to the absence of light.

  There was only one way to play it.

  Slater took a silent breath, raised the Glock, and fired an initial shot at the silhouette.

  The muzzle flare lit up the lobby as the bullet struck home, but the figure didn’t go down. In the brief flash of illumination Slater soaked in the hostile’s features. He was big, and he was clad in serious body armour. Slater spotted a giant vest over his torso and copious amounts of reinforced padding on his arms and legs. His face was obscured by a helmet with a reflective visor, making him appear more like an automaton than a man. There was some sort of assault rifle in his hands — Slater couldn’t get a proper look at it, but he figured it might be a carbine.

  All in all, the guy was clad in tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear.

  A bulletproof tank on legs.

  Slater’s first shot had accomplished nothing.

  So he switched gears and emptied half his magazine in the direction of the throat region. He’d managed a blurry glimpse at the guy’s neck and spotted a gap between his vest and helmet. He sent seven more rounds at the guy, his finger pumping faster on the trigger than he could keep track of, and then he threw himself back behind the reception desk.

  With an almighty crash, the body of the man thundered to the lobby floor.

  Slater wasn’t done.

  There were two more.

  He had genetic gifts and an unparalleled work ethic on his side, sure. But there were simple laws of nature you couldn’t control. Gunshots in a confined space impair the human ear, ten times out of ten, without fail. No question. The same old whine returned, and everything became muffled, and no matter how many times it had happened to him it never became easier to discern sounds.

  So he knew the other two armour-clad men were now charging at him, but he didn’t know how fast they were coming in, or what angle they were approaching from.

  There simply wasn’t enough time to reload a fresh magazine.

 
Many men might have hesitated.

  Overwhelmed by how it had all unfolded.

  Hesitation wasn’t in Slater’s vocabulary.

  He stood up and locked his focus on the closest man and emptied the rest of his clip at the guy’s face and throat. Eight full rounds. He was fully aware that if he tried to spare ammunition for the third man he was likely to fail to kill the first guy. Better to ensure he turned it into a one-on-one situation.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the last man raising his rifle and starting to squeeze off a shot, but by the time he returned fire Slater was already back behind the desk.

  The wonders of inhuman reflexes.

  Carbine rounds thudded into the decorative wall behind him, taking entire chunks of marble out of its surface, but none struck Slater.

  And the automatic gunfire couldn’t mask the sound of the second man smashing into the lobby floor.

  Stone dead.

  His throat torn apart.

  Slater breathed out.

  He reached back for a fresh magazine, but he knew it was futile. He understood the timing of life-or-death encounters so well that it was practically second nature, and he knew he’d get halfway through the process of reloading before the final man rounded the reception desk. There was comfort and complacency in knowing it was three-on-one, but now Slater had evened the odds. The last guy would panic. They always did. He’d elect to commit to a full-steam-ahead charge.

  And he did.

  Slater started slotting the fresh magazine home in the Glock 22’s underside, but the footsteps got too close for comfort.

  Screw it.

  He dropped the gun, timed it perfectly, and burst forward.

  He caught the guy around the mid-section, and they flew to the floor in a rabid cloud of testosterone.

  44

  The body armour covering nearly every inch of the guy’s frame was both an advantage and a disadvantage.

  It made him cumbersome, slow to manoeuvre his limbs.

  It also made him damn near impenetrable to Slater’s strikes.

  Slater had never been a quitter. He came down on top of the guy and quickly slid to full mount position, throwing one leg over the man’s mid-section and pinning him to the ground. Then he reached down and snatched hold of the carbine — an M4A1, just as he suspected — and used brute force to wrench it free from his grip. Maybe, if this had been a blockbuster film, they might have wrestled with the weapon for nigh on thirty seconds, complete with shifts in momentum and the barrel drifting inches from each other’s faces in a daring game of chicken. But this was reality, and when someone with Slater’s explosiveness gets hold of a weapon it sure as hell isn’t staying in one place for long. He probably broke a couple of the man’s fingers, still resting in the trigger guard when Slater simply tore the weapon free, and because there wasn’t enough room to reverse the carbine around without losing his position, he simply hurled it away like it weighed nothing.

  Then the guy truly panicked.

  Behind his helmet Slater heard him hyperventilating, his breath likely clouding the reflective visor on the inside. Slater took full advantage of the panic. He reached down and seized the underside of the helmet and yanked it upwards. It didn’t come off the guy’s head, but it tilted his chin up, exposing more of his neck to the open air. Slater then cocked his other arm at a right-angle and took aim with his elbow and dropped it down with all two hundred pounds of his bodyweight behind it.

  Crunch.

  Not great for the muscles and tendons in the man’s neck, not to mention his throat and windpipe.

  Slater heard a spluttering cough behind the helmet.

  This was the part where he was supposed to show mercy. He had the upper hand, so clearly he should stand up and help the man to his feet and offer to buy him a beer.

  Again, this was real life.

  This man had come here to put a bullet in Slater’s head and spit on his corpse.

  So Slater dropped the same elbow four more times, where it smashed home over and over again in the same spot, as brutal and uncompromising as a steel piston. He gave thanks that it was dark. He felt the guy’s throat caving in. He didn’t need to see it.

  He climbed off the body, panting, and went to fetch the Glock he’d discarded. No one had followed the three armoured mercenaries into the building. The lobby fell quiet, and the sidewalk outside stayed empty. He knew they’d come from the bank building, which meant there were probably many more reinforcements simply waiting for an opportunity to use their considerable arsenal.

  He found the Glock, and the fresh fifteen-round magazine lying alongside it, and bent down to pick them up. He stretched his fingers out, and leant forward, and—

  Pain seized him, so strong and sudden it made him audibly gasp.

  He straightened up and clutched at his shoulder like he’d been shot. At first he thought it was the open wound above his collar bone, but the bleeding had stopped minutes ago. He moved his shoulder an inch, rolling it backward just a touch. The socket screamed in agony.

  Dislocated, he realised.

  Shit.

  The extent of his troubles didn’t strike home immediately. It was only when he reached up with his left hand to try and poke and prod and shift it back into place that it hit him. Cold sweat beaded on his face, and the headache ballooned into a full-blown migraine, and even the slightest brush of his fingertips against the shoulder sent pain bolting through the limb. He couldn’t raise his right arm an inch.

  And he couldn’t shoot well enough with his left.

  Sure, he was respectable at it. An untrained observer might have considered him ambidextrous. But against trained hostiles, he’d fail.

  Unnerved, thrown off, he bent down and fetched the Glock with his left hand.

  His fingers shook as they clenched it.

  Moving slow and tentatively, he chambered the fresh magazine. It took him nearly twenty seconds, and the pain made his vision waver. He kept his right arm pointed straight at the floor, pinned to his side. It was about all he could manage.

  The full-strength elbows into the last mercenary had done the trick.

  Slater realised that if he’d held back on the last couple of elbows he wouldn’t have dislocated his shoulder. And, to make his decision more frustrating, the last man would have still been alive to answer questions in an interrogation. With enough restraint, Slater might have discovered exactly who was behind this, and why.

  Now, he had three dead bodies on his hands and a useless right arm.

  He figured that was about as bad as it could get.

  Wrong.

  Movement, on the sidewalk, right outside. He locked his gaze onto the source, and blanched.

  No way.

  It was three of the sicarios from Palantir. Which spelled potential disaster, if they were here and King wasn’t. Sure, they were down two men, but they were otherwise untouched. Either they’d seen Slater fleeing with Rico and taken off in pursuit, or they’d overwhelmed King in the alcove and shot him to pieces, then moved on.

  Slater’s heart skipped a beat.

  But he had his own life to preserve, first and foremost.

  The sicarios were racing for the revolving door, guns in hand. They must have seen Slater entering the building. He furrowed his brow. That didn’t add up — that meant they had surely witnessed the three hulking mercenaries following in stride, and he didn’t think they’d hurry into a war zone so willingly.

  Unless…

  There wasn’t much, if any, light outside. If they’d seen Slater run into the building, then they might already have been in pursuit as he was chasing Rico. So they might have seen the kid’s head explode, and figured he was the one behind it.

  In which case, they were dead men walking anyway, as Rico’s father would slaughter them when they got back to Mexico for failing to fulfil their sole responsibility of protecting his son.

  The cartels didn’t mess around with that sort of thing.

  They’d
be made an example of. Dead no matter what. But maybe if they turned over the body of Rico’s killer, they’d be spared a long and torturous demise. That way, the elder Guzmán would make it quick.

  And there was nothing more unpredictable than dead men walking.

  Slater saw them reach the entrance. They piled into the revolving door, guns up, ready to fire.

  Slater had no choice.

  The same survival mechanism kicked in, taking into account his mangled shoulder and pounding head and the lack of confidence in using his left hand to shoot with.

  So he turned and sprinted for the stairwell.

  Retreat.

  45

  He almost didn’t make it in time.

  His shoulder screamed for relief with every step. Each footfall on the hard floor of the lobby sent agony spearing through him, making his vision waver and throwing his equilibrium off. He could barely keep his feet underneath him. His brain yelled, Stop moving! Stop fucking moving! But he couldn’t listen. He heard the sicarios piling into the lobby, far behind him. They shouted and hollered in Spanish as they spotted him across the space. No more than an outline in the dark, but that was enough.

  A couple of them fired shots. The rounds went wide thanks to copious amounts of adrenaline shaking their hands, but Slater ducked and weaved all the same.

  ‘¡Pinche gringo!’ one of them shouted.

  Slater raced into the stairwell and collapsed on the bottom stair, just out of sight. He tried to suppress a gasp, but couldn’t. It came out in a short rattling moan, discharging all the pain he was in. It was indescribable. Like needles behind his eyeballs, impeding his every move. He used every ounce of mental toughness he had to suppress it, and then steeled his grip on the Glock and fired five rounds out the stairwell entrance. They shot through the lobby, almost certainly hitting nothing but air, but his only objective was to use them as a deterrent.

  He heard rampant cursing, and the sicarios diving for cover.

  He turned and leapt into motion, taking the stairs four at a time, making use of flexibility instilled from years and years of Muay Thai. The same agony greeted him with each step upward, but he’d discovered if he simply accepted it, it wouldn’t make him pass out. That had been his chief concern, but now he realised it was just bearable. Sure, the stairwell had constricted to a black leviathan pulsating and throbbing as it snaked upward into the unknown, but at least he could cover ground without losing consciousness.