by David Caris
Kovac wanted to shut his mind off, but it kept looping back to Christopher Diaz. From there, his memories seemed to come as they pleased. He expected them to be sequenced, and in a way they were; it just wasn’t particularly helpful. He saw the cops at the boat shed, the council worker with her pixie cut and piercing blue eyes, and the name Alex Bain. He saw the neat corner of Griffin’s apartment with the camera, Malone’s fat nose, the Euros in the crawlspace, and Malone jumping from on high like King Kong.
It all nagged at him, and he realized it was the fact pretty much everything he and Megan had done so far stemmed from Griffin. The only exception Kovac could see was Christopher and maybe the council worker. But there was now a link back to Griffin there, too. The attempted drive-by had taken place near Wilson Software Solutions.
They dropped down off the freeway and back into some kind of industrial area. They passed incandescent petrol stations, lit up green. Kovac noticed they never seemed to stay on any one road long. There would always be a new set of traffic lights, a new turn to make, though the driver showed no loss of composure and no sign of being lost.
Kovac rubbed at his neck, more comfortable than he would normally have been in a seat like this. He had not risked smuggling his Glock or knife into Austria, instead hiding both in London before traveling. And as for his phone, he had never gone back for it after dropping it on the pavement.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Megan asked.
He glanced across at her. ‘How we ended up here.’
‘You’re regretting coming here, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘I’m grateful, Kovac.’
He said nothing to this, his mind circling round to Bishop. Why had Bishop gone dark after chasing Kovac through a soccer stadium? Bishop would know they were both here together. He had access to Megan’s phone, yet he hadn’t intervened.
What did that mean exactly?
And Bishop had presumably been able to access the phone Kovac abandoned back in London…
An unsettling thought.
Megan said: ‘On the way here, I was thinking about something my father told me. San Fernando.’
Kovac saw flashes of torn flesh and blood, along with the distinct sound of a particular man howling. It never ceased to amaze him what the name of a city could conjure in his mind.
He nodded. He remembered the job well enough. He had hunted down Megan’s sister’s killers, one by one. It had been his earliest job, occurring even before he became Kovac. It had been a mess. First, because he was still trying to live a normal life, taking calls from home while on the job. And second, because it had required torture.
Kovac hated torturing people. That was one part of the work he would never miss. Wherever he could, he left it to Bishop. It was an unspoken understanding between the two of them, a burden Bishop took on almost as a way of shielding Kovac. Torture flew in the face of everything they had believed as SEALs.
Megan continued: ‘I was thinking about it because of how hard you were on yourself back in London, when we were talking about the women in your line of work.’
‘Let’s stay focused on what we’re here to do, Megan.’ He nodded towards the driver, reminding her to watch the chatter, too.
She ignored his warning. ‘There’s the business side of things, sure, but I know there’s some good in the work you do. I’ve seen enough of your file to know that. And I know you were guided by my father’s conscience, if not your own, and I trust him.’
Kovac shot her an incredulous look in the gloom.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t say a word.’ He went back to staring out the window. They were out of the industrial area at last, passing several stately white buildings. The driver was tracking a large 42-seater bus painted in metallic blue.
What?’ Megan asked again.
‘After the data center, I’m going to tackle this alone.’
He heard her swear softly. ‘I knew it. That’s why you suddenly changed your mind? That’s why you came here? You used me as a way to get out of the U.K.?’
‘It’s harder to hide on an island.’
The trees were all lush and green under the streetlights, and Kovac spotted a tram up in the distance. It was a pretty city, no doubt about it. Spacious and oddly calm, despite its sizeable population.
Nothing like San Fernando…
Against his better judgment, he turned back to Megan and said: ‘Do you ever miss the training holidays? With Bishop at the farm growing up, I mean.’
She narrowed her eyes, as if in two minds about answering. In the end she said, ‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Yeah you do.’
She was silent for a beat. Then she sighed. ‘I hated it – at first.’
‘But then…?’
‘Honestly? You’re asking this now?’
‘I’m asking this now.’ Kovac nodded.
‘Then…’ She took a deep breath. ‘Then I saw you there, even though Bishop kept us separate to begin with. And I guess it didn’t seem so bad.’
‘Why did you hate it at first?’
‘I thought Bishop was a macho asshole. He had us running and doing bodyweight exercises, all that “reps, reps, reps” crap. Then came the basic awareness skills, stuff like that. That’s when I started to get interested. And by the time we got into self-defense and shooting with live ammunition, something about it started to click.’
‘That’s when I started helping with your training.’
‘Was it?’ Megan gave him an odd smile. ‘Well, then, I’ll admit, from that point on I was pretty keen to get on a plane down to the farm each break.’
Her phone buzzed. She checked it.
‘What is it?’ Kovac asked.
‘Nothing important,’ she said. ‘The car company. I forgot all about my car. It’s still where you left it.’
‘Can’t you send a few minions to scoop it up?’
‘Spoken like someone who’s never needed to manage minions before. It’ll be easier to sort it out myself when I get back.’ She paused, thinking for a moment. Then she said: ‘For the record, my father was very particular about shielding us from the trappings of wealth. I was exposed to a lot of it because I was with him, sure, and he had the money to choose the best of everything and he normally did. I don’t mean all that. What I mean is, I didn’t get things just because I wanted them.’ Her voice was so soft as she said this, he could hardly hear it over the tires. ‘If I wanted something, he always provided a pathway for acquiring it. I remember that. The larger the thing, the harder the pathway. That always drove my brother insane, but for me it was a good fit.’
She took out her phone again and glanced at a map on the screen. ‘We’re getting close.’
‘Emotionally?’
She laughed despite herself. ‘To the data center, asshole.’
Kovac tried not to smirk. ‘You have anything more on Griffin yet?’
‘No.’
‘Malone?’
‘No. They both vanished from the hospital, like I said. O’Keefe too. I’ve got my minions looking, but nothing so far.’ Megan leaned forward to the driver. ‘We’re close to the address, right?’
He nodded.
She sat back, still addressing the driver: ‘There will be some security where we’re going. Pull up so I can show ID.’
He nodded again.
Kovac was thinking about his own upbringing, which had involved plenty of driving late at night like this. He thought back to his mother, to her illness. He thought about his father, who had done the driving to and from the hospital. His father had been able to speak, but he had normally chosen not to. They had often done the entire hour-long journey to the hospital and back without exchanging a single word.
Kovac’s father had been Croatian, shorter than Kovac but a barrel of a man. Kovac doubted his father had ever loved his mother. Or if he had, it was before Kovac came along. Kovac had never been entirely sure why they married.
‘You’ve got that far-off look again,’ Megan said.
‘I was thinking about Griffin and Malone,’ he lied, as he ducked his head and peered on up the road. He saw what looked like a giant shed. ‘That it?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ He felt Megan’s eyes lingering on him, as if she wanted to ask more. She eventually glanced at the data center though, then focused on the driver again. ‘Slow down and turn in there, see? Where that little security booth is, beside the boom gate. Yep. Good. Perfect. This is us.’
Chapter 36
They stopped at the gate and a young female guard stepped out of the guardhouse, checking Megan’s identification and peering into the back. She gave Megan a quick nod, then gave the cab driver instructions in German.
The driver rolled slowly forward as soon as the boom gate was open. He followed a long open tract of blacktop towards what looked to be three identical aircraft hangers, then drove down one side of the closest hangar. As they passed beneath the enormous air vents jutting from the side of the structure, Megan leaned forward and peered up. The vents passed silently overhead, one after another. Each had enormous metal louvers the size and thickness of a treadmill base, and Megan suddenly remembered an email about this place, with an employee bragging that Austria alone would have half a million gross square feet of computing power once the data center was fully operational. She didn’t know if that meant processing power or storage space or what, but it sounded impressive.
She had forgotten what an enormous undertaking this facility was. It was Curzon’s attempt to break into the IaaS cloud computing marketplace – a gamble which last she heard, was yet to pay off. Even five years after completion, the facility was losing money.
Even so, this was the future of business, she thought. Giant sheds filled with computers, and hardly a human to be seen anywhere.
The driver stopped and Megan got out. Kovac followed. There was more security inside the hangar. Megan passed through a metal detector and was waved down with a scanner by another woman in a Curzon uniform. They did the same with Kovac, and Megan realized he wasn’t carrying a weapon.
‘Lead on,’ Kovac said, giving her a smile.
Megan was still angry with him, though she was working hard to hide it and keep him onside. Kovac had used her, coming here. Did he have any idea the lies it had taken to keep him free following the stadium bombing? The lies it had taken to get him into Austria? Did he care?
She didn’t know how to lead on, so she waited on a guide, who was still confirming their IDs and checking something via a handheld radio.
When done with the radio, this guide pointed into the data center proper. ‘This way, please.’
It looked like a set from a sci-fi movie. The lighting was dim and there was a low hum, along with millions of tiny flashing lights. The guard seemed to think it was her responsibility to provide a tour. She talked as she led them forward, occasionally glancing back towards Megan to make sure she was listening and keeping up. ‘The place is arranged around spines,’ she said in heavily accented German, leading Megan and Kovac down a corridor that had rooms coming off it. Each room reminded Megan of the bank vaults her father had taken her into in Switzerland. The computers, flat, rectangular and grey, filled all wall space and were so small they looked like safety deposit boxes. The roof overhead was just wire mesh, and Megan could see through it to the structural components of the hangar, along with countless pipes and wires. The place was truly vast, easily able to hold a dozen passenger planes.
The woman said more, but the accent didn’t make things easy and Megan couldn’t extract much meaning. The hum worked against communication, too. It was low and persistent, but omnipresent. There was no way to triangulate its source because it was coming from everywhere while echoing off everything, all at once.
As they walked, the machines changed. The square boxes grew larger and there were literally thousands upon thousands of wires now, moving from one box to the next in the same pattern, all of it repeating endlessly. Every fifty feet or so, the security guard had to stop and put her finger into a small sensor in a door handle, pulling the door open with a sharp click. Each time, she held it open for Megan and Kovac, still talking about the data center and the role it played in Curzon’s many business interests.
Eventually, Megan saw a woman striding towards them in a long stretch of corridor. This section of corridor was divided by mesh fencing. One side for humans, the other for giant computers the size and shape of fridges. As the woman got closer, Megan realized it was Juliette.
Megan waved hello: ‘What are you doing here?’ Juliette cupped a hand to her ear to signal she still couldn’t hear over the humming. It was almost awkward. They had acknowledged each other long before they were within earshot, and it took a lot of walking and smiling and waving and nodding before they all finally came to a stop at a large steel girder.
‘We need to talk,’ Juliette said, giving Kovac a perfunctory smile by way of greeting but pulling Megan aside. ‘I’ve got bad news.’
‘Don’t tell me it’s corrupted. I thought you said a power outage saved it from –’
‘That’s what I was told at first, but I should have thought that through. There was a power outage but it had no impact on this facility. It has redundancies.’
Juliette led her back along the corridor and into a small room.
When she shut the door, the humming immediately halved in volume.
Megan looked around. She figured the room was for staff. It wasn’t a break room per se. It seemed to contain uniforms and equipment. She thought about bringing Kovac in, but figured he would enter if he wanted to. She could catch him up as they walked back.
‘Do we still have a copy of it?’ she asked.
‘The domain controller? Yes. One. The information I initially got about the power failure – the information I passed on to you – it was garbled, but it wasn’t completely inaccurate. There have been quite a few power failures here the past few months apparently, and staff were concerned about a number of different machines that weren’t coping well with the transition from mains to generator and back again. A decision was made to upgrade the machine containing our domain controller. A fluke, really. The three guys who worked on that – this is as best I’ve been able to piece it all together, keep in mind – they were nervous. They backed everything up onto a solid-state drive, so they wouldn’t have to ask another Curzon facility for a copy of the domain controller.’ Juliette took a deep breath. She had been speaking fast, as if blurting whatever popped into her head.
‘We still have it because they didn’t want to look like idiots?’ Megan asked.
‘Basically.’
‘Okay, good. So long as we have it.’
Juliette said: ‘The new machine was successfully installed, and the solid-state drive went into a desk drawer. Lucky for us it did. When I started asking about it, that’s the backup they were referring to that was “saved by a power failure”. Which, as you can see, wasn’t wrong, it just didn’t happen the way I – anyway, I told them to get it to me as soon as possible. This is when I was still in London, working out of your apartment. But at the same time, I was nervous about plugging the drive in and trying to transfer it digitally.’
‘Okay.’ Megan sat down at a small table, sensing the story wasn’t yet complete and might run on a bit. Her legs were tired and she raised one and tensed all the muscles and rolled the ankle. She did the same with the other, still stiff from the flight. She had slept at a strange angle.
Juliette was saying: ‘I’ve searched the entire company, high and low. As for where it is now… I organized one of the three guys who created the backup to deliver it to me in person in London, but then I changed my mind. Your apartment’s a nightmare. Don’t go back there, by the way. It’s just about impossible to get in and out now. The media’s outside, three deep, and they go into a sort of feeding frenzy anytime someone enters or exits. I got fed up with it and decided it was time to relocate. I figured I could
work from here. I arranged for my kids to go to my parents’ place, then I organized Curzon to fly me to Vienna.’
‘And here you are,’ Megan said, trying to keep any trace of impatience out of her voice. ‘And the drive with the domain controller?’
‘Right. Exactly. I figured I would collect it myself, and it could travel back with me after I had backed it up a dozen times here. That seemed like the safest option.’
‘Good thinking,’ Megan said, detecting a hint of regret in Juliette’s voice.
‘It’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Well, not gone gone. It’s just not here anymore.’
‘Do we know where it is instead?’
‘It’s at the airport – here in Vienna. So it is in Vienna, just not…’ Juliette sighed, exhaling a long, weary breath and flopping down opposite Megan. ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired. I haven’t slept in… I don’t know how long. Days. And I’m starting to make mistakes.’
‘Then you need to sleep – soon.’
‘I know, I know… Believe me I know. But I can’t get ahead of this thing, and I’m worried if I sleep it’ll snowball to a point of no return. Maybe it has already. You’ve heard it’s spreading beyond the company?’ She rubbed at the bridge of her nose and picked up her previous thread: ‘They didn’t get the message about me coming here. There’s been a lot of stuff that’s been lost in translation – or maybe just flat out lost. One of the guys followed my first set of instructions. He set out with the drive, planning to fly commercial to London with it, and his flight was delayed because of high winds or something.’
‘So he’s at the airport now with the drive?’ Megan asked. ‘I just came from the airport.’
‘I know. I’ve wasted your time, sorry. And I know you don’t have time to waste, none of us do.’
‘Have you spoken with him?’
‘The technician at the airport? No. They’re getting me his cell number but I’ve sent a message and arranged a vehicle to bring him back here tonight.’