Helix Nexus

by Chris Lofts

  ‘OK. We have the lift logs, access and egress lists, and the video feeds.’

  ‘Conclusions?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Ethan chewed another mouthful of pizza. ‘They’re all clean.’

  ‘Or they’ve been cleaned. Could they have been tampered with?’

  Ethan stopped chewing, raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry, Bruv.’

  ‘I’ll let you off. I’ll get Sofi to break them down.’

  Helix scratched his head. ‘What have Ormandy’s team got so far?’

  ‘There’s no chatter about it at the moment. They’ll get there eventually. And anyway you’re on suspension.’

  Helix clamped his hand on Ethan’s shoulder. ‘I’m not the only one.’

  ‘They might think they’ve locked me out,’ he replied, relighting his half-smoked joint. ‘But they don’t know about the other three sys admin accounts.’

  ‘So, there’s no useful video and no access logs,’ Helix said, pulling a stool from under a bench. ‘Can you pull up a schematic centred on the MoHD tower?’

  A three dimensional holograph materialised in the space between Ethan’s bench and the one where his brother was perched on the stool. Helix leaned in, his elbows on his knees. ‘Three identical towers: the MoHD, Justice and Bank of England.’ He pinched his bottom lip between his fingers. ‘Can you get the video feeds from Justice and the bank? The exterior ones.’

  Twin jets of smoke issued from Ethan’s nostrils. ‘Sofi?’

  ‘On it,’ the AI replied.

  ‘Christ.’ Helix laughed. ‘She even sounds like you.’

  ‘I think you’re warming to her,’ Ethan said, flicking ash from his joint.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘You’ve assigned her a gender pronoun.’

  ‘And you’ve given her a woman’s voice. Is it always listening?’

  ‘Most of the time. I’ve told her to be more discreet when you’re around. She thinks you don’t like her.’

  ‘It’s an impressive piece of programming, I’ll grant you that.’

  ‘Generous of you.’ Ethan nodded. ‘Ask her how it’s coming along.’

  Helix raised his eyebrows, but played along. ‘Sofi, how’s it coming along?’

  ‘You talkin’ to me?’ The voice of Robert De Niro replied. ‘You talkin’ to me?’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Helix laughed, slapping his hands on his thighs. ‘Can we turn down the sense of humour?’

  ‘Sorry,’ the default Mexican accent replied. ‘Only Ethan is allowed to tweak my parameters, but I do have the video feeds requested.’

  The holograph adjusted its point of view, showing the feed from the 55th floor of The Bank of England looking towards the MoHD. ‘This is from 30 seconds before the window of General Yawlander’s apartment was broken,’ the AI continued. ‘And 120 seconds after.’

  Helix slipped from the stool and folded his arms as the video played. The central portion of the panoramic window shattered and collapsed revealing the interior of the apartment. ‘Pause.’ He leaned closer ‘Enhance light levels.’

  Framed by the remains of the window, Yawlander could be seen with his Mameluke-hilted sword brandished above his head about to strike forward at his tall black-clad assailant.

  ‘Play forward two frames per second.’

  The General struck down in slow-motion connecting with the raised forearm of the attacker. The sword rebounded carrying him towards his opponent.

  ‘Smart-fabric,’ Ethan suggested.

  Helix nodded, his eyes fixed on the unfolding confrontation. ‘Pause.’

  The image froze. General Yawlander was on the precipice edge of the window held on the brink by the masked attacker grasping his tie just below his throat.

  Helix folded his hands in front of his face and turned away. He’d seen enough. Peeling his glove from his right hand, he flexed the fingers and joints of his prosthesis. ‘Fast forward to after the fall and pause.’ He waited.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Ethan exclaimed.

  Helix sighed and turned back. ‘Centre on the window, zoom in and enhance.’

  The face of the assassin was invisible behind a full face mask that carried a reflection of the building opposite. ‘It could be anyone.’

  ‘Full face tactical helmet with integrated comms and respirator. Whoever it is they came prepared,’ Ethan said.

  Helix pulled another beer from the fridge and screwed off the cap. Ethan declined. ‘But we still don’t know how they got there or how they got out.’

  ‘There are 60 seconds remaining of this recording,’ the AI announced.

  Helix sipped his beer. ‘Let it play.’

  The masked intruder turned away from the window. Two pairs of rapid flashes illuminated the room. Helix glanced at Ethan. ‘The security detail.’

  Ethan nodded. ‘Whoa! He dived out the window.’

  ‘Pause.’ Helix stood his beer on the bench. ‘That answers that one then. Is that a wing suit?’

  The video advanced showing the now skydiving intruder flying between the Justice Ministry and Bank of England in a north-westerly direction.

  Helix raised his eyebrows as the segment ended. ‘Go back 60 seconds. Freeze. Estimate height and weight of the individual.’

  Ethan read the data from the screen. ‘Six two and 210 pounds. Not quite as big and ugly as you.’

  ‘OK. Summary,’ Helix said, helping himself to a slice of Ethan’s pizza. ‘It was murder. Highly trained male assailant judging by build, weight and method of exfiltration. Standard issue tactical kit.’

  Ethan returned to his bench and brushed a space on his holo-screen. ‘Sofi. List and sort all serving officers by approximate height, weight and whether they’re qualified in airborne assault.’

  ‘Wait. Include location of all individuals meeting those criteria between the times of 18:22 and 18:42 today within a three-mile radius,’ Helix added.

  Data streamed across the screen. The initial list shortened as each filter was applied until there was only one name left. Ethan scraped the data from the screen and tossed it over his shoulder. It landed in the space between him and Helix. Ethan reached forward with his holo-mit, twisting and turning the 3D rendering. ‘Blackburn? What the fu…’

  ‘Play the timeline forward,’ Helix said.

  Ethan centred the rendering on the avatar of Raymond Blackburn. The timeline tracked his exit from the 55th floor window to a point close to Blackfriars Bridge. ‘He touched down in the memorial gardens before heading for the hyperloop at Blackfriars.’

  Helix pulled on his shoulder holsters and jacket. ‘What’s Blackburn’s current position?’

  ‘What are you doing? You’re suspended. Remember?’

  ‘As if that makes any difference.’ Helix said, rolling up his right trouser leg. He poked his fingers beneath the flap of prosthetic skin on the back of his calf and removed the tracker unit. ‘I want to get to him before Ormandy. Keep me in the loop. If anyone asks or thinks to look, I was here the whole time.’

  8

  Eleven minutes after leaving the Meridian, Helix waited in the shadow of a beech tree in the park opposite the ground floor apartment that Raymond Blackburn shared with his wife and their one-year-old daughter. The rain had abated. A cloak of dampness hung in the frigid air and dripped from the leafless trees. Blackburn’s AV was parked in front of the tall metal gates that divided the driveway from the rear yard and garden where his two Doberman Pinschers normally patrolled.

  Helix hadn’t been able to find a rational explanation for what Blackburn had done. He and Blackburn weren’t best mates. They’d gone through special forces selection and training together. They’d served on numerous operations, the most recent of which was the exposure of Justin Wheeler and his enigmatic and now dead benefactor Valerian Lytkin. They had a bond that existed between men who had fought together, but nothing more.

  Ethan’s voice came into Helix’s implant. ‘Ormandy must have joined the dots. There’s a patrol rolling in y
our direction.’

  Helix activated his comms. ‘How far out are they?’

  ‘I reckon you’ve got about fifteen minutes.’ Ethan’s lighter clicked and he took a deep draw on what was probably another joint. ‘This doesn’t make sense. If you were going to assassinate someone, the last place you would run to is back home to the wife and kid.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘I don’t like it. I’ve got a tingle down below and it’s not an itchy stump.’

  ‘You can get cream for that sort of thing.’ Helix drew his P226 from under his arm. ‘Keep me posted.’ He broke from the cover of the tree and jogged across the road.

  Light spilled from the window of Blackburn’s apartment in a pale yellow puddle on the pavement. Helix pressed his thumb to the door access panel, assuming Ethan had reactivated the universal access Ormandy had revoked earlier. A thin gap appeared down the left side of the door as the lock released. Helix crouched and pushed the door inwards, scanning the narrow entrance lobby. The faded aroma of an earlier meal leaked from inside. Musical nursery rhyme chimes played from a room on the right. Helix tilted his head at a distant conversation. The accent and articulation of the male interlocutor was too clipped to be Blackburn. A TV chat show or news bulletin perhaps. Helix stepped over the threshold, his feet cushioned by the thick carpet. Leading with a firm double-handed grip on his weapon, he peered around the frame of the first door into a child’s bedroom. The source of the music hung over a cot on the far side of the room. A shoal of grinning fish suspended on thin cords circled above Blackburn Junior. Helix ducked into the room, confirming the absence of any adult occupants.

  The volume of the conversation increased as he made his way towards the sitting room. He bobbed around the door frame of the second bedroom long enough to note a single foot, with an ankle chain and toe ring protruding from under the dishevelled duvet. A forearm hung next to a bedside table, a wedding band visible on the finger. Helix held his breath. Listened for the sound of sleep. Utilising the mirror on the door of the wardrobe, he confirmed the rest of the room was empty. An identical black Kevlar and carbon fibre jacket to his own hung on the back of a door leading to a deserted en-suite bathroom. The matching trousers lay draped over the back of a chair. Helix’s nose wrinkled as a familiar metallic liver-like tang fought with the aroma of fresh laundry. Olfactory associations detonated in his brain. His heart hammered in his ears. Blood.

  An archway framed the simply furnished sitting room. An overflowing box of soft toys sat against the wall. Above, a family portrait: Blackburn standing proudly behind his wife, the baby cradled in the crook of her arm, flanked by the two dogs panting in the hot lamps of the photographer’s studio. Fuck! The dogs. Helix swallowed. They must be outside, otherwise they would have nailed him the moment he came through the front door. He deployed a pair of nano-cams and waited. The video overlay in his eye confirmed the room was free from any canine presence.

  Pressing his P226 to his chest, he leaned to the right, peered into the room and immediately swayed back from the arch. Blackburn was at one end of the sofa facing the TV, identifiable by the angry battle scar on the back of his head. The same metallic iron smell from the bedroom pervaded the sitting room.

  Helix took a deep breath. ‘Blackburn?’

  No response.

  ‘Ray. It’s Helix.’

  The TV news reader continued her recap of Yawlander’s death earlier that evening.

  Another stolen glance into the room revealed no change. Edging forward he scanned left and right. The living space opened up revealing a dining table, high chair and kitchen beyond. He swept the corners, his P226 firm in his grip, then sucked a heavy breath through his teeth as he stepped around the end of the sofa. ‘Fucking hell.’ He ran his hand over his chin. ‘Not going to get a lot out of him, Ethan.’

  ‘So it would seem. You’ve got about eight minutes before the cavalry arrives.’

  ‘Two shots to the head, two to the chest. Small calibre. No exit wounds. Subsonic.’

  ‘What’s that just underneath his left shoulder?’

  ‘Either he or someone else has removed his location tracker.’ Helix teased the two sides of the wound apart. ‘It’s normally just under the skin below the left clavicle. Not like the new issue nano models.’

  ‘According to what I’m seeing it’s definitely not there. I’m getting a ping from the garden.’

  Helix crossed the kitchen to the patio doors. A switch to the right of the door frame filled the garden with light. ‘OK. That explains the lack of canine greeting.’

  ‘Fucking hell, that’s grim. I’m pretty sure that’s where you’ll find the tracker.’

  The nano-cams liquified and squeezed beneath the door frames. Reacquiring their spherical forms they rolled across the concrete yard towards the headless carcasses of the two sleek Dobermans laying six feet apart. ‘We’ll soon find out.’ He holstered his P226 as he strode back down the corridor to the adults’ bedroom. He focused on the red-smeared feeds from the nano-cams as they separated and burrowed into the dogs’ carcases.

  ‘Got the tracker,’ Ethan reported. ‘In the stomach of the dog on the left.’

  ‘Nice. All I can see is red mush.’

  Helix entered the room and tossed aside the duvet. He’d grown immune to dead bodies but they didn’t normally have their throats cut so deep that their heads had almost been severed. He dropped the duvet back in place, returned to the corridor and paused at the door to the nursery. The merry-go-round of smiling sea life continued its soporific melody. He glanced over the edge long enough to count two bullet entry wounds and the halo of blood surrounding the child’s head. He reached down for the duvet.

  ‘Nate. You need to get a shuffle on. Now.’

  ‘OK. I was just going to—’

  ‘She’s gone, fella. They’re all gone. You’re not meant to be there. Get out. Now.’

  It was just before midnight. In the seventeen minutes since Helix left the Blackburns’ apartment three police vehicles and two drones had arrived, along with a swarm of drone-based mediabots. A Mobile Forensics Unit was expected in the next fifteen. The mediabots were kept from encroaching on the airspace by a 300 hundred metre GPS exclusion zone that inhibited their flight systems. High voltage crowd fences were installed at each end of the street complete with a sentrybot should the risk of electrocution not be enough to discourage the idle curious. A pause in the rain had ushered forth a growing gaggle of gawpers requiring an additional perimeter around the apartment building. The homes above Blackburn’s had been cleared. The police drones maintained their programmed sweep of the area, pausing above anything that registered as a movement or heat signature.

  In the shadow of an oak, Helix tightened the hood of his jacket trapping the heat radiating from his head. He wasn’t any closer to getting answers and the longer he stayed the more risk there was of him being spotted. Two good men had died and he wanted answers. The rough bark of the oak pressed into his back as he avoided detection from a low flying drone. With the drone gone, his mind wandered back to the MoHD, Yawlander’s apartment and the conversation he’d had with Ormandy. Had he missed something? A chasm opened in his stomach. The one person whose opinion he valued was gone. Yawlander had a knack of asking the question you hadn’t thought of, or for spotting the tiniest detail on which a case pivoted.

  Forcing his mind back to the present, he zoomed in and made one more sweep of the crowd gathered at the eastern end of the street. Umbrellas were hoisted as the rain returned, thinning out the onlookers. What had happened to Yawlander, Blackburn and his family was clinical. It wouldn’t take Ethan long to find out why there wasn’t anything on the video feeds and logs at the MoHD. Helix swivelled to the west, scanning the crowd. A movement in the shadows of an alleyway beyond caught his attention. He froze. Switching to thermal imaging, he confirmed the presence of a large heat source. Night vision revealed a bald bulky man with a beard. The facial hair was impressive, almost hipster, bu
t its wearer didn’t look like the type to use beard oil or queue up for the latest trendy brain-boosting nootropic snack. The tactical clothing wasn’t from a unit that Helix was familiar with. ‘You seeing what I’m seeing, Ethan?’

  ‘Brick shithouse. Not someone you’d want to meet in the proverbial dark alley.’

  ‘No. What’s he doing?’

  ‘Why don’t you go and ask him?’

  ‘He’s not paying a lot of attention to what’s going on. Just standing there.’ Helix zoomed closer to the face. ‘Shit! He’s got a night vision monocular. He’s looking straight at me.’

  ‘You’re meant to be blending into the shrubbery. Standby. Get ready to move.’

  ‘What have you got in mind?’

  ‘You’ll see. Keep your eye on him.’

  A blinding flash of white light burst across Helix’s night vision as two police drones crashed into the high voltage perimeter fence, scattering the crowd and activating the sentrybot.

  Helix sprinted through the muddy park towards his AV. ‘A warning would have been nice or were you trying to blind me?’ he hissed.

  Ten minutes and three diversionary loops later, he entered the bottom of the street where he’d left his AV and slowed to walking pace. ‘Ethan? Are you there?’

  Pulling back the flap over the graphene panel in his jacket sleeve, he stopped and scrolled through the apps, selecting the backup comms channel. ‘Ethan. Come in, Bruv.’ The technology was advanced but not infallible. He scratched his ear, trying to recall the last time they’d had an unplanned outage. He was probably in the crapper, not that that stopped him from answering. Pushing his hood from his head, he scanned the street. Nothing moved. Locked-in life gave itself away in faint shards of light that escaped around the edges of shutters and blinds.

  A beep in his ear gave a brief beat of relief, but it wasn’t his brother. He ground his teeth. What did she want now? He prodded Julia Ormandy’s unsmiling image. ‘Home Secretary.’ He folded his arms. The lamp-lit drizzle persisted, beading on the collar of his jacket, rolling down his neck.