dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  The last possibility made Joe feel lost, cut adrift, and utterly alone.

  “Nothing,” he said as the SUV fell into the space directly behind them. It sped up, tailgating, and started flashing its lights. The message was clear: pull over.

  Joe stamped down on the accelerator even more and the turbo under the hood kicked in. They passed a traffic cam that flashed and Joe hoped that Abernathy was still in a position to kill the ticket when it turned up on his desk at YETI.

  Joe thumped the steering wheel in frustration. “We need to get off this road.”

  “You’ve got an exit in a couple of miles, but they’ll only follow us.”

  “We’ll see,” Joe said through gritted teeth. “What are they up to?”

  Their pursuers were moving out into the next lane, and Joe guessed they were going to try to pass them before the turn off. Joe hoped that the cars were pretty evenly matched and gave the accelerator a little bit more pressure.

  “This is where it gets a bit sketchy.” He turned the wheel and began edging out into the outer lane, attempting to block the other car’s hostile maneuver before they could draw level. The other SUV made it clear that it wasn’t going to yield for Joe, but he knew a bluff when he saw one and carried on moving out. The other SUV braked to avoid the inevitable collision and Joe floored the accelerator, pulling the car onto the dividing line and keeping on it, straddling both lanes.

  Their pursuers moved to undertake on the left, waiting for Joe to try to block them, but he figured it was only a feint and they were going to go outside as soon as he made a move, so he stayed where he was. Whichever way they came at him, he was ready to swerve and cut them off.

  But it was a temporary measure at best.

  He needed to gain an edge, get off this highway, and lose the other SUV as soon as possible. That meant taking the next exit. But without looking like he meant to take the next exit.

  The mile marker came up and, due to the speed they were hurtling along at, the half-mile sign wasn’t far behind it. The chevrons counted down and Joe snatched the steering wheel right and gave it the last jolt of speed the SUV had in her. He passed the two chevrons exit marker, then the one chevron, and the mouth of the exit ramp yawned wide. The other SUV was making to cut him off on the inside, just in case he was going to try for the exit. Joe shouted, and wrenched the wheel over to the left, almost rolling the car; he aimed for the space between the SUV and the guardrail, and just went for it.

  He clipped the lip of the rail, jostled across some grass, fought with the steering, and then made the ramp. The driver of the other SUV realized what Joe was doing a second too late.

  A second was all it took for them to overshoot, try to adapt, swing their vehicle across, and smash into the guardrail. Joe watched them disappear behind him in the rearview mirror, took his speed down to something approaching sane, and got Ani to plot him a route back to the city.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GOING TO GROUND

  Abernathy led his team down the tunnel and tried to figure out what had just happened. No matter how many times he played it through in his head, he came no nearer to an answer. Armed men had just stormed YETI HQ, and it was pretty clear that they weren’t there to fix the coffee machine. A strike team, dispatched to a secret law enforcement unit in the heart of London. It was unthinkable!

  The tunnel was long and mostly dark and the air was musty. What little light there was came from overhead fixtures that hadn’t been serviced in a long time, so many of the bulbs were dead, the rest choked with dust. Smartphone flashlight apps would have made the task of negotiating a path a whole lot easier, but all devices had all been discarded as soon as the panic had faded from Abernathy’s mind and he’d realized that it was a whole lot harder to escape pursuit when the phones in your pockets continued to broadcast your location. His was exempt from the mobile phone mass grave, only because it was impossible to track.

  But just because it was the most secure phone in the YETI building didn’t mean it worked underground.

  He tried to think of things that they had going in their favor.

  First up, the repeated evacuation drills had meant that the people who’d invaded YETI had found the place empty, and they would waste no small amount of time trying to figure out how that could be. They’d search every inch of the place, every room and closet, and they would find no one. Abernathy thought that it would be like those sailors who boarded that old ship, the Mary Celeste, and found the traces that people had left behind—breakfasts laid out, cups of tea still steaming—but no people. Then he remembered that those last details had been fictional embellishments from a story by Arthur Conan Doyle and decided that his analogy was severely flawed. The intruders wouldn’t find the hidden door through which they’d escaped, of that he was one hundred percent certain. And pushing the button that opened it would do nothing, not without a reset of the system that could only be accomplished with the chip implanted in Abernathy’s arm.

  There was no way that the invaders could follow them.

  But his team was in a state approaching hysteria. They were analysts—incredibly good at what they did, but essentially just desk jockeys—and they certainly weren’t trained for fieldwork. So, of course, they were completely unprepared for a sudden flight from the safety of their office into the unknown.

  Abernathy wanted to tell them everything was going to be all right, but even he wouldn’t buy those words, so how could he expect his staff to?

  That’s not good enough, he chastised himself. They’re looking to me for guidance, and I need to find the words and the time to offer it.

  So even though time was ticking and he really needed to be aboveground sorting this mess out, he decided to show the leadership and solidarity his team needed, and he took precious minutes to stop and try to calm everyone down, to take a quick mental inventory of them, and to generally reassure everyone that things were going to be okay.

  It worked.

  To a point.

  And then they continued on their way down the tunnels.

  Still, he turned it all over and over in his mind.

  Someone had sent an assault team into YETI, but who? And, perhaps more urgently, why?

  There was no reason that he could see. Unless the men with guns had intended to slow down an investigation—of which Abernathy and his team had a half dozen running at the moment. But why would anyone want to shut his department down? Apart from the weird turn that Joe’s inquiry had taken, everything else was standard fare, nothing different from any other cases they ran day in, day out.

  It had to be the X-Core case; nothing else made any sense.

  But how had the investigation led to this mass exodus?

  He was missing something.

  All right, he told himself, think about it. Ignore that it’s personal. Ignore that these cowboys came into my house with guns. Treat it like any other case.

  He didn’t know who had organized the invasion, but he could think about the other details that every investigation needed to uncover. Three things:

  Motive. Means. Opportunity.

  The cornerstones of a case against any criminal.

  First was motive. Simple. To shut down the investigation into X-Core. But there was a motive behind that motive—a darker purpose hiding behind that basic assertion. Why? Why would anyone want to shut down an investigation of national—no, global—significance?

  Because they had something to gain from it.

  But what?

  Onto the second thing: means.

  It was obvious to Abernathy that whoever sent an assault team into YETI HQ had all the means they needed at their disposal. Either that was an authorized team—which meant government forces lay behind the masks—or it was unauthorized, and that meant mercenaries, a private security firm, or terrorists.

  The idea that it was terrorists seemed too paranoid. But all of the options were possible. Probable? That was another matter entirely. That the prime minister had authorized a raid i
nto one of his own services seemed ridiculous. Unnecessary. If he’d wanted to shut YETI down, then he could have done it with a phone call.

  So that left soldiers for hire.

  But sent by whom?

  Opportunity, then.

  The timing of the attack.

  It tied in directly to the timing of Abernathy scrambling a team to Shrewsbury to secure what Joe maintained was an alien creature hidden inside Professor Klein. It was surely no coincidence that one had followed the other. But where did that leave him?

  That someone had a vested interest in shutting down all mention of the events at Pabody/Reich? That someone already knew what was going on there but, for some unknown reason, was keeping it quiet, with armed troops?

  They were nearing the first exit from the tunnel and Abernathy performed a quick calculation, weighing the fact that they were still close to YETI HQ against the need to get topside and start making some calls.

  He wasn’t going to get scared off of an investigation by a bunch of rent-a-killers.

  YETI was coming out of the tunnel, sure, but they were going underground until he sorted this mess out.

  And then heads would roll.

  Joe drove two miles until they reached a small village, then he started looking carefully left and right.

  “Gotta ditch these wheels,” he explained, and Ani looked out the windows, too, until she spotted a car parked in a blacked-out driveway.

  “That one will do,” she said. “Screened on two sides, no lights on, can’t see any motion sensors …”

  Joe pulled over and they got out of the SUV.

  They made their way toward the house cautiously, but there was no one around and the lights stayed dark.

  “Don’t suppose you know how to hot-wire a car, do you?” Ani asked.

  Joe shook his head. “Not in my training schedule. You?”

  Ani wrinkled her nose.

  She approached the front door and, seeing a generous mail slot on the front door that was close enough to the door’s lock, she put her hand through it, reached upward until she was sure that she was in approximately the right area, felt around until she bumped into a bunch of keys hanging there, maneuvered her hand around until she could grab them, pulled the front door key out of the lock, and extracted the whole bunch back through the slot.

  Whatever dumb luck was working for her tonight, it had delivered in spades. Hanging from a fob was a miniature teddy bear, a few house keys, and the key to the car.

  She tossed it over to Joe, who snatched it out of the air and nodded his approval.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “Want a lift?”

  He unlocked the car and slid into the driver’s seat, ratcheting it back so he fit. Ani got in beside him. He started it up and, to Ani’s surprise, he headed back the way they had come. “They won’t be looking for this car. And they’re not going to think we’re stupid enough to head back toward them.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “So do I.”

  The SUV passed them halfway back to the main road. The front bumper was mangled and pretty much hanging off, and there was a long scrape down the side, but Joe only allowed himself a smile when it disappeared out of his rearview mirror.

  The car they’d just commandeered was a strange little Korean number from one of those companies that keeps the costs down by paring back on the luxuries. The gearbox was a little unforgiving, but a few miles toward London he thought he was getting the hang of it. He checked the fuel tank and saw that there was more than enough to get to the city, checked that the SUV wasn’t creeping up behind them, and managed to relax a bit.

  He tried Abernathy again, but still no reply. It was worrying him more than he dared to admit to Ani.

  Still, she had enough to be dealing with at the moment, and voicing his fears was no way to make her feel any easier about things. In all the craziness, car chases, and car stealing, he’d almost managed to forget about Klein and X-Core, concentrating instead on the enigma of Abernathy’s radio silence. He thought about it, weighing the pros and cons, and made a decision.

  “I need my phone,” he said. “I know they’ll just track us with it, but without a line to Abernathy we’re useless here anyway.”

  Ani shrugged. “Not necessarily. I know you think that I’m playing Crossy Road or Deadman’s Cross here, but I’m actually working on something. Give me a few minutes, though.”

  Joe drove until Ani said, “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “We-e-e-e-ell, if I had some tools I’d just take your phone apart and disable the GPS. It’s just a chip, easy to remove. But we haven’t got any tools, so the problem stops being hardware and starts being software.”

  “And?”

  “Hold your horses, Agent Dyson. This is the part where I get to tell you about the clever solution I’ve come up with. It’s … it’s the part where I get to show off, you tell me how brilliant I am, and I nod and agree with your wise words. Okay, we’ll skip that. I’m going to boot up your phone into DFU mode, connect it to this tablet, and I’m going to flash your phone a firmware update that I just thrashed out. It isn’t going to be tidy, your phone might turn into a brick if it all goes wrong, but if it works it’ll teach your GPS a very important survival skill.”

  “Which is?”

  “How to lie, my friend. I’m going to teach your phone to report a bogus route to our naughty little MP friend and get him chasing us all the way to Canary Wharf.”

  “You can do that?”

  “We’re about to find out. You have a USB cord for this thing?”

  Joe looked embarrassed. ”I didn’t bring one with me.”

  “Then I am your dream come true.” Ani reached in her jacket and pulled out a handful of cables, found the right one, connected his phone to the tablet’s USB port, and said, “Here goes something.”

  She booted up the phone and Joe waited.

  And waited.

  Modern phones took so-o-o-o long to start up.

  They were pretty close to London now, and then Ani let out a whoop, fist-pumped the air, and handed him back his cell.

  “There you go, sir,” she said. “That should confuse the enemy for a while.”

  “You’re sure they can’t track us?” Joe asked, and Ani thumped him on the bicep.

  “Of course I’m sure. Now call Abernathy and find out why he’s freezing us out.”

  The assembled workforce of YETI’s technical and operational teams emerged from a hatch in a garden by a house on a deserted cul-de-sac that had surely seen better days. The few houses that remained were run-down and unloved. Which, Abernathy had to admit, made it a perfect place to lead his people out into the Promised Land.

  Aboveground.

  He helped people off the ladder and on to terra firma, lugged the Shuttleworth brothers’ cases up onto the overgrown lawn, took another head count, and then gave himself a moment or two to catch his breath.

  And, more importantly, to let his people catch theirs.

  Abernathy had to admit that the air tasted pretty sweet after the staleness of the tunnels.

  Still, the work was far from done. He had to get everyone to another location where they could set up a temporary headquarters using laptops and whatever the Shuttleworths had brought, and then they had to focus their attentions on the “why” behind the invasion of their HQ.

  First, though, he had some pretty important protocols to take care of. Phone calls to key people. It was going to be hard to explain the situation, but he needed his HQ back, and was prepared to send in the entire British Army to make it happen, if that was what it took.

  He was reaching for his phone when it started ringing.

  Abernathy felt relief flooding through him when he saw the caller ID and pressed ACCEPT with a finger that hardly shook at all.

  “Joe!” he said. “Are you and Ani safe?”

  “Of course we are. Things got a little … hectic … for a while back there, but we’re coming in.�
��

  “No, you’re not. Nowhere to come. An armed tactical squad hit YETI HQ about twenty minutes ago and we only just managed to get out.”

  “Emergency drills finally paid off?” Joe’s voice hardly wavered, and Abernathy realized that Joe was back on his game.

  “They certainly did,” he said ruefully.

  “Who hit you?”

  “We only just emerged into the night air after a lovely slog through the tunnels so, to be honest, we don’t know. I was about to make some calls.”

  “You might want to hold up on those for a minute. I think I know who was behind the attack. And it may change your contacts list.”

  “You’re telling me you have a name?”

  “Thanks to Ani,” Joe said, and Abernathy heard warmth and pride in Joe’s voice and knew that he’d made the right choice pairing them up. “You’re not going to like it or—most likely—believe it, but Ani and I have just escaped from gorillas sicced on us by Victor Palgrave, and the timing of our respective troubles seems too precise to be coincidental.”

  Abernathy took a few seconds to think before replying.

  This was a whole other level of trouble.

  Victor Palgrave? Sure, he was an ambitious politician—weren’t they all?—but was he really capable of organizing the assault on YETI? And if he was, then what was his motive?

  Put all those details aside for now, he told himself. Forget things that need evidence to prove. Think about this, and only this: you’ve met him a few times—do you think he’s capable of it?

  Abernathy thought about the kind of man Palgrave was—how he was charismatic but manipulative, charming but self-serving, outwardly modest and humble but inside confident and superior. He thought about the man’s practiced focus-group persona, and the depths that shallow patina of PR covered. He thought about the way the man smiled with a studied warmth that never seemed to reach his eyes. He remembered the rumors he heard of just how right wing Palgrave was politically, and how meeting him had done nothing to dispel those rumors.