Blood rushes through Kat’s ears like wind as Liz zooms back in on the man in question. He’s hunched and looks racked with cold and hunger. He’s trying to clasp himself warm, but is stopped by shackles confining his movement. He’s the right height and age, tall and ungainly, his face blotched with blood sores, lips peeling, one eye infected and half closed. But he isn’t defeated. Nor does he show fear.
Luxton taps on the glass, beckons them out.
“C-come on,” says Liz.
“A second,” says Kat. Why did the file reappear automatically? She calls up the copy in her own Internet file.
Only an expert, with an eye trained to detect, would be able to tell immediately that something is wrong with her secure site. Kat swallows hard, shoots a look through the door glass. Luxton’s gaze shifts from inside the edit suite to something happening along the corridor.
The only excuse Kat can come up with is that she should never again mix computer work with being bombed.
She had been sure that the White Ice firewall would stop it. Or was that a rationalization because this was the only shot she had at saving her father’s life?
Now, instead of seeing a copy of Suzy’s History Book, she’s looking at a pair of hands in cuffs.
:hacktrap,1465 :
CAPTURED BY
National Intrusion Computer Network Protection Center, Shanghai
FORTY-EIGHT
Wednesday, 4:07 p.m., BST
Luxton opens the door. “Now!” he shouts. He’s grabbing Liz’s arm. Kat’s not moving. She’s punching keys to cordon off Suzy’s dossier in its remote file and in the hard drive so that no one else can get to it and no one can detect her keystrokes on Media Axis’s computer network.
Luxton’s hand is on her arm. She shakes him free. “Go, go,” she yells.
“Out, Kat.” His voice is a whisper.
She’s almost there, putting up a hall of mirrors between keystrokes.
She seals it with an ampersand and a pound sign, returning the file, with its evidence of killings and corruption, to its embedded sanctuary.
An alarm starts up in the corridor.
Luxton carries Liz over his shoulder. People jostle, running. Sirens blare right through the building. Crowds gather on the sidewalk, hands over eyes against the sun, looking for smoke.
On the curve of the corridor, past a screen where a host is explaining a graph of the global economy, Luxton pushes open a door. They go into a dimly lit stairwell. Luxton climbs up from the basement toward the ground floor.
“With luck, there’ll be a vehicle waiting—” he begins to say, when a light from above hits him in the face.
He drops to a squat, gripping the banister to keep balance with Liz’s weight. Kat judges there are two flashlight beams, two or three floors up.
“What floor do you need?” she says to Luxton.
“One floor up,” he says.
“I’ll stay and stop them. You take Liz out.”
Luxton has a dead expression around his eyes, the look of someone who’s stopped trying to find emotions. He knows what she’s suggesting is the only way.
“I’ll wait as long as I can,” he says. “Door at the top, cross the road. It’s a long white stretch . . .”
Footsteps are coming down, not fast, flashlights swerving all over. Liz hangs over her brother’s shoulder; her face caves in on itself, as if by being carried, she has put Kat in more danger.
Kat looks at neither of them. She pushes past Luxton, takes two steps at a time upward, runs across the landing to the next flight, hand shielding her eyes whenever the flashlight catches her, keeps going. Just a few more steps, and she hears a voice, “Stop. Stop right there.”
Kat turns her shoulder, shouts, “What the hell—”
She falls with a hand on the wall, lets her foot slip back a stair, and comes down on the edge of the concrete, cutting into her upper thigh, which ignites a nerve already made raw by the bomb. She cries out, hadn’t meant to, but it works.
There are two of them, in dark blue uniforms, light blue short-sleeved shirts, the logo of a private security firm on the breast pockets. They’re middle-aged, hesitant, not there to get her, just clearing the building.
One steadies a flashlight beam in her face, the other crouches down. “You okay?”
Kat holds her leg, teeth pressing into her tongue while the pain subsides. “How do you get out of this place?” she manages.
“We’ll get you out, love,” he says. “But they think it’s a false alarm, don’t they, Rick?”
His hand is on her elbow. “Can you balance on that leg?”
“I’ll try,” says Kat. It’s like being with the dentist when the anesthetic hasn’t kicked in. Her lips are tight, eyes closed. She feels a tug on the cord holding her ID card to her waistband.
“You’ll be all right, Rachel,” he says kindly and looks up toward Rick. “Rachel Williams,” he reads off the card. “ID number 873289/f/MC/8005.”
Rick pulls out a keyboard and punches in the number.
“Are you American?” asks Rick.
“Canadian,” says Kat.
The guard reading her ID card is the more out of shape of the two; Rick has a steadier, meaner face, like violence is his hobby, and his day job’s holding him back.
Kat strikes the out-of-shape guard just below the nose. Through the stairwell railing, the bladed beams of Rick’s flashlight catch a sheen of blood on his face. She hits the man again, in the same place, then kicks hard into Rick’s knee.
Rick’s tough. He staggers, but takes her measure as if he has all the time in the world. He has a wiry face with sharp surfaces. He shifts to get his position right and brings the flashlight up, no longer a lamp, but a weapon.
Kat puts up her arm to block it, causing him to hesitate. She slams her foot into his chest, catches him just below the rib cage, and follows it with her fist. This time he falls.
Down one flight, she finds the door and pushes it open, gets across a corridor, and through another door is the street, where she sees a stretch limousine with darkened windows.
The sidewalk is crowded with evacuated staff, everyone standing in someone else’s way.
She gets clear of the crowd, runs into the middle of the street, and sees a police barrier. Another one is set up behind her.
The limousine’s brake lights come on. The back door opens, fingers around the inside handle, and another hand beckoning. Kat jumps in.
Luxton’s driving. He accelerates, jumps red lights, and heads toward an overpass. Two policemen stand in the middle of the road, hands held high, ordering the car to stop.
They’re going fast up the overpass, lampposts and street railings flashing past. The hood of the limousine rises up like a speedboat, pushing Kat back into her seat.
Through the top corner of the side window, Kat sees a large, two-engine military helicopter flying unusually low.
The checkpoint rushes toward them. A policeman fires at the limousine. The windshield cracks but doesn’t break. Another policeman is looking up at the helicopter, confusion on his face; neither their limousine nor the helicopter is meant to be there.
“That ours?” she says.
“Not ours,” says Luxton, his arms tightening to take the pressure on the wheel.
The sheer weight of the limo, which must be armor plated, tosses police cars as if they’re plastic cartons. Kat’s thrown against Liz, then back against the door. Automatic fire frosts a side window but doesn’t smash it. Luxton takes them up the overpass, makes a right-angle hand-brake turn at the top, heads down a side road, and stops.
“Switching cars,” he says, throwing open his door. He’s on the sidewalk, pulling Liz out.
“You. Out,” he yells at Kat. “This side.” She slides across and out.
A police van pulls up on the overpass. The back doors open. A rocket flashes from the skids of the helicopter, and the blue metal of the vehicle tears apart like a ripped sheet. Flames, fed by oxygen, curl under
neath and catch on the clothing of the men sitting inside. Two men make it out, blazing, and fall to the concrete, rolling. Then the fuel tank catches, and the van disappears in a fireball.
Luxton opens the door of an old red sedan and lifts Liz into the passenger seat. Kat gets in the back.
Smoke blows toward them, shielding them from the checkpoint. She hears automatic weapons fire, and a new explosion buffets her eardrums, with a fresh surge of heat that clears the smoke. A rocket from the helicopter has destroyed their limousine.
“What the hell,” she shouts to Luxton. “Is the military trying to kill us?”
Luxton, at the wheel, pulls out, his eyes half on the mirror, half ahead of him.
The helicopter’s directly above them, descending so low now that Kat feels she could reach out and touch it.
The car jerks, and they’re thrown forward. Luxton’s eyes flicker uncertainly. His foot is hard on the gas, but nothing’s happening except the whine of the motor. The car’s roof creaks. The helicopter has taken the rear wheels off the ground with magnetic claws, which lift it a fraction, then clamp down and around the chassis to carry the full weight.
Hands off the wheel, Luxton turns in his seat. “Sorry,” he says.
With preternatural calm, Luxton lets down his window and tilts his side mirror toward the sky. Claws stretch from the helicopter’s underbelly like the legs of a beetle, clutching the sedan around its midsection.
Kat’s stomach muscles tighten, and her body chills. She is filled with hatred so pure that it flushes all fear from her system. It makes what she feels about Sayer an irritation; her shooting of the men an unemotional necessity. It’s as if every piece of anger she’s experienced before is a preparation for how she now intends to use it. She will kill these people, and she will enjoy it. Nothing will stop her.
She breathes in the acrid smells of burning vehicles.
South of the overpass, the helicopter has lifted them high enough to cross above a high wire fence into a parking lot. Between rows of cars, many of them old and battered, the helicopter descends slowly until Kat feels the car’s chassis touch the ground again.
The clamps are released, and the helicopter goes up fast again, its nose dipped.
A voice from a loudspeaker commands, “All of you come out of the car with your hands up.”
“No choice,” says Luxton.
Kat opens her door. She has one foot on the ground when she senses rather than sees a faraway flash of yellow. She looks straight above to see the helicopter jerk in midair, like a horse rearing at a jump.
It swivels, and a jet of oil spurts, hitting the ground around her. The chopper’s tail arches as if it’s going to snap, making the aircraft spin out of control, with a grating sound of metal destroying metal, sending out columns of sparks.
“Move!” yells Kat. They both have Liz, carrying her, Kat’s hands under her legs, Luxton’s under her arms.
The helicopter, flames shooting from the fuselage, twists toward the ground. A rotor blade hits the car’s roof, bouncing the helicopter onto its side, and an inferno engulfs both vehicles.
A shot shatters a van’s side-view mirror close by. “Over there,” Luxton says, pointing to where he thinks the gunfire is coming from.
Kat can’t tell. Nor who shot down the helicopter. Nor who’s attacking them now.
“G-go! Both of you,” shouts Liz.
But where? With a deafening noise, auto safety glass rains down around them. Police swarm into the compound. Blue lights flash outside. There’s no way out.
A crack of thunder explodes in Kat’s head. All is silent. She feels heat on her skin. Her legs can’t hold her anymore. The vans, the fireballs, the burning helicopter swirl in front of her. Her vision narrows to a tunnel, and all she can see is the horror on Luxton’s face as two policemen, hands under his shoulders, drag him off.
FORTY-NINE
Thursday, 4:20 a.m., BST
The tang that catches her throat isn’t smoke, but salty sea air. Kat coughs. She’s standing by the porthole of a police launch, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, watching the belly of a half moon dip up and down with the rocking of the boat. She sees faraway ships’ lights, but nothing that looks like land.
Inside, a pair of gray television screens on the wall of the small galley cabin are turned off. An empty bowl of soup, which she’s just finished, is on the table with a soup urn, a pot of coffee, a basket of bread, a bowl of white sugar, a pile of cutlery, and salt and pepper shakers. The table’s plastic top is chipped, and on one corner is a cigarette burn.
In the middle of the table, lying in a polyethylene bag, is her grandmother’s ring, given to her mother, then loved and worn by Suzy and torn off her finger when she was shot.
There’s only one of its kind, a big circle of silver with a square of tin on top, four tiny diamonds, one in each corner, and a figure-eight infinity symbol between them.
After Luxton and Liz were taken away, Kat was carried in a police van to a police station, where she was locked in a cell. The police guarded her with undisguised loathing, as if she were the cause of the death of their colleagues.
The conversations that she overheard were of shock, how a British military helicopter could attack a police checkpoint, about the police officers who had been killed, about politicians screwing things up, about Project Peace being a sham, about things going too far.
Just before midnight, the cell door was unlocked. Kat was taken to a helicopter that flew her to somewhere on the east coast, where she boarded the launch. They put her in a cabin and locked the door. From the porthole, she watched the launch put out to sea. Then the door was unlocked, and Kat was taken to the galley.
Max Grachev, in full police uniform, was waiting for her with soup and coffee. He told her that the helicopter attack had been carried out by a rogue military unit that supported Project Peace. The police had been ordered simply to arrest Kat and Liz. The helicopter crew intended to kidnap them.
Luxton and Liz were unhurt, but under arrest. Kat remained in danger, which is why they were heading for Europe, where she would be safer.
Now Grachev stands, arms folded, leaning against the wall. He has a bandage on the right-hand side of his neck. He walks with a slight limp. He’s just placed Suzy’s ring on the table.
Slowly, Kat opens the seal of the bag, puts her hand inside, feels the cold metal of the ring, and brings it out. She lifts the lid under which Suzy used to keep a tiny picture of them all: Mom, Dad, Suzy, Kat, Grandma, bunched together under the cherry tree on one summer’s open day at the Lancaster orphanage.
The picture’s not there. Instead, she recognizes a tiny powered circuit for a direct satellite transmission system. It might have been a small piece of decorative jewelry, but Suzy used it as a transmitter.
“Yulya wanted me to give it to you,” says Grachev.
Kat picks up the ring and curls her fingers around its spiky edges. “Tell me,” she says, her voice barely audible. “Friday night. All of it.”
Grachev clasps his hands in front of him. “I knew Suzy was trying to find out about her father. John,” he corrects himself. “I didn’t know how dangerous gathering that information would be for her. Still, as soon as I got to London, I watched her. I didn’t introduce myself. I doubt she knew I existed.
“I saw from our travel records that she was due to go to the concert on Friday evening. You are right. She didn’t care about music. And it was a long way to go when she had no known connections in that area. There must have been another reason. I booked a seat as well. I didn’t need authorization to go, so I went.
“Suzy arrived, preordered a gin and tonic for the intermission, took her seat, and sat through the first part, the Tchaikovsky, all the time acting perfectly normally. Then came the intermission. It was spitting rain, but still warm. Suzy picked up her drink from a ledge near the terrace door.
“I hadn’t expected her to go outside. I thought, rather, that she was to meet someone at t
he concert. But she pushed open the terrace door enough to test the weather. She was looking out at something, very thoughtful.
“Quite suddenly, she left her glass on the terrace wall, walked down the steps, and started out across the lawn. She tried to make it look as if she were taking a stroll, but I could tell she was heading somewhere. I let her get as far as the sculpture just before the beginning of the footpaths into the marshes before following. But I misjudged the weather. It was darker than I thought, and Suzy vanished. I couldn’t see her at all. There are two paths. You’ve been there, you know. One is a foot track that heads straight out into the marshes. The other is the grass track between the trees, which turns down past the pig farms. I headed down that one. The wrong one.
“I heard a shot, and I heard Suzy shout. I heard another shot. Then there was silence, and I began running toward her. By the time I got there, Suzy was dead, and the ring was gone.”
He’s not looking at Kat. He’s avoiding her. “I am not proud of what I did next, but it was necessary. I ran back to the concert and sat through the second part, Beethoven’s Ninth. Her empty seat was in view all the time. I knew she was dead. I knew I had failed to protect her. I have never felt less of a man in my whole life.”
Kat steps across to the porthole, drawing in smells of marine fuel. She looks at her grandmother’s ring in the glow of a back deck light.
Assuming its signal would have enough power to reach a low- orbiting U.S. military satellite, Kat now knows why Suzy would have gone to Suffolk, where the big skies and open coastline would give her a chance of a clean transmission. Suzy would have worked out that the time of the intermission matched the satellite’s trajectory and that the concert would give her a cover. With rain clouds, she would have questioned whether she’d get a clear enough path. So she stood on the terrace, perhaps with a sense of destiny, but also calculating her chances of success. Then she must have decided to risk it.
Kat goes back to the table. Grachev hasn’t moved. Neither of them speaks. Kat ladles soup into the bowl. It’s vegetable and hot, and its burn goes right down her throat. Her body sucks it in. She breaks off a piece of bread, swirls it around, and eats as if there might be no more.
The History Book Page 20