I don’t get why Jack is simply standing there, why he doesn’t leave; then it hits me that he can’t. Something has gone wrong with the swipe card.
No. None of this is down to malfunction.
I open up a new shell and connect to the GEM system, logging in via the secret backdoor I created when I hacked the source code. It responds by telling me the account does not exist. It’s been deleted and I’ve been locked out.
I pick up the mobile and call Aaron, no fake cheeriness in my voice this time.
‘Aaron. You have to get upstairs to Synergis, right now. There’s somebody trapped inside the sub-zero room.’
‘Hang on, slow down. You say there’s . . . Oh Jesus.’
I’m guessing the new feed from the sub-zero room has shown up on one of his monitors.
‘You need to open the door. There’s somebody trapped in there.’
His voice is shaky in response.
‘There’s somebody dead in there. That’s . . . Shit, I think that’s Leo Cruz.’
‘Yeah, and he won’t be the only one if you don’t do something. It’s an industrial chilling facility. You need to get up there and let him out.’
‘Let him out? That bloke’s just killed somebody. I’m not opening the door to him on my own.’
‘It’s not what it looks like, believe me.’
‘Hang about, how do you know what it looks like?’
Uh-oh. His tone is accusing now. I’ve blown it.
‘You said you were talking to Leo Cruz a few minutes ago, about the lights,’ he goes on. ‘How are you seeing this? You said you were at home. You sound different. Who are you?’
I make one last desperate appeal.
‘Never mind that. This is an emergency.’
‘Damn right it is.’
COLD LOGIC
Someone has hit the alarms. The ringing is muffled, but Parlabane can definitely hear it from beyond the walls of his frozen cell. It is a faint sound of hope.
There is a CCTV camera high on one wall. Maybe Sam has seen him and raised the alert, or perhaps it was Aaron the security guard. If that was the case though, why wouldn’t he simply come and open the door using the override outside? Why hit the all-out emergency button?
The bloodied mess on the floor answers his question. That’s when he grasps that the best-case scenario right now is that he should survive only to be taken into custody and charged with Cruz’s murder. That’s what this has been about all along: setting somebody up to take the fall.
Setting Sam up to take the fall.
It was supposed to be she who was coming here tonight, as far as Zodiac knew. He had demanded that she keep him up to date with her progress and her strategy, right down to the specifics of when she was planning to hit Synergis. When the scene was discovered in the morning, it was supposed to appear to the police that Cruz had tried to fight her off, apparently after he had interrupted her mid-robbery.
The post-mortems would show that he died of stab wounds, while she died of hypothermia, either after being rendered unconscious or from finding herself locked inside the sub-zero room. Crucially, the temperature would disguise when Cruz had actually died. By the time morning came around, there would be no sure way of knowing the time of death for either of the corpsicles.
With the alarm having been raised, he is estimating – hoping – the police will make their discovery a lot sooner than Zodiac planned, but he’ll get his scapegoat nonetheless. They’re going to find Parlabane in here covered in blood, not all of which, he is sure, will turn out to be his own. Somewhere else in this building, a knife will be discovered too, with his fingerprints on the handle, grasped while he was unconscious.
He has to get out of here before the cops arrive. He looks back and forth, scanning the walls, as though there was a second door he might have missed. There is only one door, however, to which his key no longer works.
Might as well be locked in the vault, he muses bleakly, a thought that causes him to reflect on the crucial ways that this is not true.
The sub-zero room is only a trap if he sees it as one. It wasn’t designed to keep people in: it was designed to keep heat out. So it’s not like the steel-walled vault at all.
His first instinct, as always, is to look towards the ceiling for a climbing route out of here. He reckons he could unscrew one of the panels and access the crawlspace between the sunken ceiling and the true ceiling above. Unfortunately the pain in his right arm is telling him he can’t take the high road this time.
He looks down instead, paying closer attention to the floor material. He had been hoping for sectional tiles but beneath his feet is a rubberised surface, extending wall-to-wall. He crouches down and sifts through an upended tray of equipment, tossed there as evidence of the fatal struggle. There is a pair of shear cutters lying half buried under an avalanche of precision screwdrivers and a tangle of alligator clips.
As he lifts them he notices a darkened smear upon a length of metal, a corona of frosting distinguishing it from the other tools. It is a knife, deliberately discarded, blood freezing on the blade and his fingerprints doubtless on the plastic hilt. He wipes it down but in the frozen air can’t be sure how effective this is. He considers taking it with him and cleaning it properly but he knows the cops are on their way and he can’t risk being caught with it.
He uses a clamp stand as a hammer, driving the point of a screwdriver into the floor until he has made a rip large enough to introduce the tip of the shear cutters. Then he begins nibbling along in a line, tugging the matting upwards as he goes. It is stiff but just about pliable, and after a few minutes he has created a flap, beneath which he can see the original flooring. Throughout the rest of the R&D lab he has seen cables disappear into ducts beneath the carpet tiles, so he is confident there will be a crawlspace beneath, though how adept he will be at crawling in his injured condition remains to be seen.
He has to cut a bit further and tug back a larger flap until he reveals a seam between floor panels, either side of which are pairs of screws holding the sections in place. It takes a while doing it left-handed, but eventually he removes one end of a section and is able to lever it up like a hinge. There is a tiny passage underneath, extending beyond the walls of the sub-zero room. He is only a couple of yards from freedom, but every inch of it is going to be agony.
He crawls in head first, encumbered by having to cradle his right arm against his chest. His ribs are afforded no such protection, so the pain is constant as he squeezes himself along, hauling with his good arm and pushing with his feet.
As he struggles his way through the channel his mind is pulled back to the deduction that it was meant to be Sam who was framed and left for dead here tonight. For some reason this feels like another blow. He can’t say why, but somehow this seems more wounding than that it should be him. After all, he’s put himself in a lot of stupid positions, walked willingly into dangerous places. Who has she hurt to deserve this? She’s only a kid: yet someone was planning to frame and murder a nineteen-year-old girl to cover up their own crimes.
Rage acts as an analgesic, either through distracting him from the here and now or filling him with a more overwhelming emotion.
He wants to hurt whoever is responsible for this, and he wonders why he didn’t feel this way only a few minutes ago. He ended up being the one on the receiving end, and for this he is confused to feel grateful.
Sam.
He thinks of the sacrifices she is making in order to look after her sister, the danger she is putting herself in to stay out of jail. He thinks of the break-in she suffered tonight, pictures not one but two vulnerable young girls at the mercy of an enemy as ruthless as it is faceless. The depth of his anger surprises him.
She is a person he had come to detest, someone who had ripped his world apart when he thought his life was back on track. Now he feels personally outraged at the idea of a threat to her. Now he would go to any length to protect her.
CONTAINMENT
It
is dark beneath the floor, the light from the sub-zero room barely penetrating the gloom. He can see only shapes but he knows he is beyond the wall because the alarms are instantly louder. He twists his body through ninety degrees, wincing against a fresh wave of hurt, then pushes upwards against the panel directly above his face.
It doesn’t move. He spends a brief moment wondering about the viability of remaining here throughout the police search, before remembering the rather obvious point of entry he has left in the sub-zero room. He pushes again, reaching a few inches to the left of his last attempt. It still doesn’t lift, which makes him think of the screws he had to remove at the other end, driven downwards into a joist.
He comes close to panic, but thinks of all those cables he saw. The sub-zero room wasn’t designed to allow under-floor access, but the rest of the lab would have to. His hands search for another join and he gives it a shove. He feels the panel move, though it is restrained by something on top of it. He gives it another couple of thumps and dislodges it laterally, enough for his fingers to feel the underside of a carpet tile.
It takes a further effort of contortion to get the shear cutters from his pocket into his left hand, after which he is able to rip a hole in the carpet. Then, with his left arm forced into the gap, he is able to wrench and worry his trunk through the resulting slit.
He gets to his feet and stands steady for a few seconds, getting his breath back and recovering from the dizziness of being suddenly upright once more. His inner ear is normally a better friend than this. He must have taken a very nasty whack to the head.
The alarm isn’t helping. It’s one of those deafening sounds intended to drive people from the building in case of emergency, though his principal worry right now concerns who might be coming into the building, and how soon.
He’s not quite ready to break into a full run or even a jog, so he walks swiftly towards the lab’s main entrance, where he waves his swipecard at the sensor, which gives it a damn good ignoring.
The card must have been deactivated. It is now going to open nothing, leaving him trapped in the R&D labs. He has squeezed himself painfully through a steel-framed intestine and shat himself out of the other end, but the only thing that has improved about his situation is that he’s a bit warmer and no longer sharing accommodation with a corpse.
He has to get back in touch with Sam. She has high-level access to the GEM system, so she should be able to reactivate the swipe card.
He reaches instinctively for his mobile, only to remember that it’s gone.
Arse.
It takes an embarrassingly long few seconds for it to occur to him that there are about a dozen telephones within feet of where he is standing, only for his embarrassment to be disastrously compounded by the realisation that he doesn’t know any of her numbers. They’re all on his handset.
He suppresses a scream of rage then remembers they weren’t using mobile networks to communicate.
Parlabane hurries back to the PC he logged into earlier and opens a browser to download a copy of the VOIP software they were using. The program takes a few seconds to install, and as he watches the progress bar he notices he has left bloody fingerprints all over the keyboard and mouse.
He glances towards the electronic workbenches, where he recalls seeing a box of disposable latex gloves earlier. He rushes across while the software continues to install, grabbing a fistful of paper towels while he is over there. He is unable to clean the keyboard or mouse completely, but has hopefully smeared the plastic enough to obliterate the prints.
This sparks a recollection of his final thought before being hit with the electroshock: that he still needs to retrieve that memory stick from the server array.
Bollocks.
There is nothing he can do about that now, as his card will no longer open the door to the server farm.
The installation completes and a few seconds later he is keying in his login details. That is when he notices that the PC has neither a webcam nor an attached microphone.
He breathes, keys in an instant message.
He waits for a response, which doesn’t come.
Still he waits.
MULTITASKING
I am scanning the CCTV cameras in an attempt to see where Jack might emerge, as well as keeping one window on the lobby to check if the cops have arrived yet. I watched him cut a hole in the floor and somehow squeeze himself into it, but it’s been ages since he disappeared and I’m starting to worry that he’s stuck under there. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a camera that is labelled as being outside the sub-zero room, so I don’t know which view he’s likely to show up on.
I hear a sniff. For an instant I think it’s Jack back online or some other audio feed I’m picking up. Then it’s followed by a whimper.
‘Sam, can I have a glass of water?’
Lilly is in the doorway again. She looks dead on her feet, red-eyed from crying and from fatigue. I recognise the exhaustion that comes when she should have been asleep hours ago but was too upset, and then actually too tired to slip over.
Asking for a glass of water as a pretext for reappearing well after lights out: she hasn’t pulled this shit in years. That tells me how desperate she is. I can’t turn her away.
I find an unbroken glass, fill it with water and walk her back to her bedroom. As I tuck her in again, I hear a chime in my earpiece: some kind of alert from the computer, though I don’t recognise specifically what.
‘Sam, tell me the story about Poogie.’
I used to do this some nights when she was younger. We shared a bedroom because she didn’t like being alone in the dark. It was this silly story I made up about her favourite doll, Poogie, and her adventures when she got lost in the land through the bedroom mirror.
I turn out the light, leaving the door ajar and begin talking. It’s been years, but I remember the basics, and she seems calmer as soon as I hit my stride.
I hear the chime again, and this time I realise it’s the instant-message alert from the VOIP program, which it plays if you have the window minimised or something else open on top.
Jack is back online, but I’ve not finished the story.
By the half-light from the hall she looks wiped. I wonder if I should keep going until she’s asleep, so that she doesn’t reappear again, but I know I don’t have time.
‘I’ll have to finish this later,’ I say. ‘I’m just going to the toilet.’
I pull the door over so that there is still a sliver of light spilling through, then I run to the kitchen where I begin to type frantically.
ESCAPE KEY
Finally the screen shows Parlabane a response.
She pings back her mobile number instantly. He writes it down on a Post-it note and sticks it in his pocket, then he dials.
‘Is this number registered?’ he asks, aware that the call records will be logged.
‘No, it’s a burner. Are you okay, Jack? I saw you all bloody on CCTV, and there was a body. Looked like Cruz. What happened?’
‘I was attacked. He took my bag.’
‘He got the prototype?’ she asks, appalled.
There is no time to get into this.
‘I need you to fix my swipe card. It’s not working. I’m trapped in R&D. The alarms are ringing and I’m fairly certain the cops are on their way.’
There is a pause that he really doesn’t like.
‘I’m really sorry. I’ve been kicked from the system. Someone else has hacked this place tonight.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he spits, only stopping himself from kicking a chair in frustration due to the thought of his feet being among the few parts of his body not already damaged.
He hangs up and looks across the labs, walking briefly
back and forth to widen his perspective. Other than the vault and the sub-zero room, there are three more doors, two of them controlled by the GEM system. The exception is the door to Secure Disposal, which allows him a moment of hope until he remembers that it is operated by a numeric keypad. Unlike the vault PIN, he sincerely doubts a fresh code for that gets emailed out to everyone on a daily basis: not simply for getting rid of rubbish.
He recalls their dumpster dive inside the enclosure at the foot of the staircase this door must lead to, where they found just enough information to proceed with this insanity. If only that had been properly secured, rather than helpfully opened for them by an easily duped security guard. He pictures the hard drive they found, which causes him to also picture the lab worker he watched open this door for her colleague, carrying a tray of damaged components.
He’d filmed it. He had been standing only feet away: maybe close enough to see which numbers she pressed; definitely close enough to hear the key chimes. The information he needs should still be here, hidden where he stashed it when he saw the guard searching those visiting investors with a detection paddle.
He is about to head for the gents when a message pings on to the monitor in front of him.
Parlabane runs for the toilets, hope and purpose helping him block out the pain. There is no deliberation over which stall: he remembers it as though he was in there that morning.
He uses the precision screwdriver he took from the sub-zero room, which makes short work of unsecuring the access panel behind the cistern.
It is less stiff this time, coming away smoothly. He reaches down behind the kickplate, the fingers on his left hand scrambling like the biggest spider back there until they locate the solid state drive. He hauls it out, one of the cameras still attached, the other lost behind the plumbing.
Want You Gone Page 27