by Jack Heath
It didn’t work.
A crash echoed out across the car park. It could have been a door slamming or a gun firing or the hard rubber sole of a loafer kicking against one of the pillars. The vast space stretched out the sound until it was completely alien.
Ash held her breath, listening for more sounds, but couldn’t hear anything over her own heartbeat. She hoped the thief wasn’t a car nut. If he was, he might be drawn to the Veyron like a moth to a floodlight. And if he pressed his face against the windscreen, tinted or not, he might see her lying flat across the seats.
“Ash?”
Ash jumped. Benjamin’s voice was surprisingly loud in her ear, and it stripped at her already frayed nerves.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m here.”
“What’s happening?”
“The other thief got loose. He got a gun from a security guard and chased me down to the basement. I’m hiding in Hammond Buckland’s car.”
“Holy crap! Are you hurt?”
“No,” Ash said. “Not yet. Tell me about anthrax.”
“You think now’s the best moment for that?”
“I could be dead before there’s a better one,” Ash whispered. “I’m running out of time, Benjamin. Tell me what you know.”
Benjamin sounded hesitant. “I’ve been researching it. But there’s not a lot of good news.”
“Tell me anyway. I need to know what I’m up against.”
“Okay,” Benjamin said. “Anthrax is a virus that gestates in rotten meat. It’s weaponized by a process I can’t find out much about. It isn’t transmitted from person to person, so you’re not contagious. It presents in normal flu symptoms at first, and then kills you fairly quickly. Mild exposure to weak strains can be successfully treated with antibiotics if you get them right away. But you’ve probably suffered a fatal dose.”
“What antibiotics do I need?”
“Lots. Large doses of several different kinds. But if you can get out of the building, you’ll be able to get them.”
“How?” Ash asked. “Where?”
“Well, I’ve been watching the news, and there’s a TRA van parked outside HBS. They’ve sealed off the block, and there are people in hazard suits walking around.”
“You didn’t call TRA, did you?”
“Of course not. Someone else must have found the anthrax upstairs.”
Ash shut her eyes. Someone else had been exposed.
“So you think that they might have the drugs I need?” she asked.
“It’s unlikely that they already know what the threat is. And the chances are minimal that the strain is so mild that such exposure as severe as yours is treatable. But I think it’s your best shot. Except…”
“Except what?”
Benjamin paused. Ash could picture his furrowed brow, his white knuckles. I might never see him again, she thought.
“Except that they’re not letting anyone out of the building,” he said finally. “They’ve sealed the surrounding area, and they’re telling everyone in HBS to lock themselves in the offices and switch off the air-conditioning to reduce air circulation. Once the quarantine is complete, they’re going to come in, find the threat, analyse it, and then start processing everyone for treatment.”
Ash took a deep breath. “So you’re saying that I’ll be dead, or beyond help, by the time they’re dispensing drugs.”
“Well…yes.”
“But…” Ash drummed her fingers against her leg. “But if I can get out of the building somehow, they might have the right drugs in the van, and I could steal them.”
“They’ve blocked off every exit,” Benjamin said. “The building itself is surrounded by news cameras. How are you going to get out?”
“You’ll see,” Ash said. She didn’t know herself, yet. But she would think of something. She had to think of something.
Ash didn’t notice the moisture welling up in her eyes until her breathing became constricted. Her nose was running and her chest was tight and then suddenly she was gripping the handbrake so fiercely that her knuckles were white and the tears were flooding down her face. She tried to hold it in, but succeeded only in muffling it, so her sobs were only silent shuddering breaths.
There was no way out of this. The odds were insurmountable. And there was no one else to blame. I made my own bed, she thought, and now I have to die in it.
Ping.
Ash’s eyes widened. Someone had come down in the lift.
And as far as she knew, the thief was still wandering around with the gun. She hadn’t heard the stairwell door open again.
Her first thought was that he might put it away, give up, leave. Or at least hide until the person drove away.
But she had seen the intent in the thief’s eyes. Not forgiving, not angry. Not willing to compromise. It was like his face had been set in stone, with a look that meant he knew she had to die, and that he wasn’t going to let anyone get in his way.
Ash sat up, slowly. She peered through the Veyron’s windscreen. The first thing she saw was Adam Keighley, Buckland’s receptionist, walking out through the doors of the huge cargo lift. The second thing was the thief, standing behind a pillar, pistol pressed against his chest, aiming at the ceiling. As Keighley walked, the thief stepped away from the pillar in the opposite direction, so it was still shielding him from view.
Ash could see what was about to happen. The thief would wait for Keighley to be facing away. Then he would step right out into the open, level the gun, and shoot him in the back.
Keighley walked, oblivious. The thief circled. In for the kill.
Ash gritted her teeth. She hadn’t come here to save lives. She hadn’t come to take them. She’d come to steal $200 million.
But if she didn’t have long to live, her last act wasn’t going to be cowering out of sight while the kindly receptionist, who’d only had the job a few weeks, was shot. I may not have done anything good in my life, she told herself. But I am not a monster. This is my chance.
She wriggled across into the driver’s seat and sat up. She pulled the seat belt over her chest, clipping the buckle in beside her hip.
She jammed the key into the ignition, and turned it.
The lights snapped on. The motor woke, like a sleeping lion.
Keighley froze. Behind him, the thief stared.
Ash slid the gearstick into first. It made a metallic click, like a gun being cocked. She slammed her foot down on the accelerator.
The Veyron blasted forwards. It was like being in a plane as it started up the runway. A second later, it was like being in a rocket as it blasted off. Ash’s head smacked back against the headrest, and the motor purred as the giant wheels spun.
In preparation for trying to steal the media tycoon’s Veyron, Ash had refined her driving skills in her dad’s car. She was okay – she knew which pedal was which, how to change gears, and how much to turn the steering wheel depending on the sharpness of the corner. But nothing had prepared her for going this fast.
Keighley was already diving right, so Ash swung the wheel left. The Veyron took the curve quickly and gracefully, like a pro tennis player’s backhand. The thief had guts, that was for sure. He wasn’t even trying to move out of the way. He was crouching in her path, pointing the gun at her skull.
Ash was sure he couldn’t hit her when she was moving this quickly, even if it was straight towards him. But she kept her head down, just the same.
Crack, crack! Two holes appeared in the windscreen, but it didn’t shatter. The glass must be tougher than the polymer usually used for car windows. Ash kept her foot to the floor.
The car growled as it sped towards the thief. At the last possible moment, he jumped.
The car didn’t lose any momentum, but Ash screamed as the thief slapped against the roof. Instead of the car hitting him, he’d landed on top of it. She looked in the rear-vision mirror as the thief landed face down on the ground like a sack of bricks, already in the distance.
Ash pressed her
foot on the brake. The Veyron stopped immediately, without squeak or screech. There was a huge shutter blocking the way out of the garage, the kind that only raises when you hold a card up to a scanner.
Ash didn’t have a card. She doubted the car could break through the barrier – in any case, she wasn’t willing to try. If the airbags inflated, she wouldn’t be able to drive it any more. She’d be back where she started; hiding in a basement with a killer.
She clicked the gearstick into reverse. The Veyron swung around in a narrow U-turn, and she put it back in first before blasting off again.
Keighley had vanished. The psycho killer was starting to pick himself up off the ground. She drove past him. She didn’t want to run him over again. She wasn’t a killer. Just a thief.
The cargo lift was up ahead. There was another ping as the doors prepared to slide shut. Someone must have called it.
Ash changed into second gear, and put her foot down. The Veyron zipped towards the lift, so fast that Ash felt weightless. The lift doors started to move. Ash gritted her teeth, sure that she was about to lose her wing mirrors.
The doors slid shut – but not before the Veyron had rolled between them. Ash pushed the brake, and the car stopped centimetres from the back wall of the lift.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror. The thief was picking up his gun, and turning to face her. The doors were sliding shut. The guy was taking aim. Ash flattened herself sideways across the seats, and the bullet punched through the rear window and buried itself in her headrest.
The lift doors closed, and Ash scrambled out of the car. If she didn’t hold down the CLOSE DOORS button, the thief could open them again by pushing the call button outside and she’d be exposed.
She pushed the button. Dragging in deep, shaky breaths, she pressed her ear to the door.
Silence outside.
The lift started moving.
There was something very surreal about riding in a lift with a car. She hoped it could take the strain. But this was a big lift, with a maximum capacity of – she checked the sign – 3 metric tonnes. She was probably safe.
She eyed the Veyron with regret. The bullet holes in the windows had probably halved its value. And there was no one who would repair it without realizing that it was stolen. So few had been manufactured that a teenager selling one was suspicious even without the damage.
But she wouldn’t live long enough to sell it, anyway. Not unless she could get out of this building and break into the TRA truck.
The lift stopped at floor 3. The doors opened, revealing a man in a hazard suit holding an assault rifle.
She stared at him. He stared at her.
The moment hung in the air, still. Ash figured he’d expected an HBS employee, who he would have directed to an office to limit exposure. If she’d been armed, he would have guessed she was a terrorist, responsible for placing the anthrax. But she was a slightly damp teenager standing next to a bullet-riddled Bugatti Veyron.
Before he worked out how to react, Ash pushed the button for the roof, and the doors closed between them.
Looking up at the screen, Ash saw that hers was the only lift moving. There were others hovering at floor 14, floor 9, the basement, floor 3…
…wait. Back up. There was a lift on the basement level. And it was just starting to rise.
The thief was following her.
No swear word Ash knew was harsh enough to describe her mood. She’d been soaked, shot at, and infected with a deadly virus. She was stuck in a lift headed for the roof, and aware that whatever floor she stopped at on the way, a murderer would follow her.
She’d never done a job that had gone as badly as this.
If she pushed buttons for a floor, the lift would stop at it. The thief might think she’d gotten out, and follow. But if she did that and he didn’t take the bait, his lift would catch up to hers. Then when she did get out, he would be closer on her heels.
She pushed the button for floor 17. She would try the bluff.
The engine of the Veyron idled quietly. She wondered if he would find her if she hid in the boot, or if he’d think she had left the lift. Then she wondered if she could open the boot from the inside afterwards. Then she realized she wasn’t sure if the Veyron even had a boot.
The lift stopped at floor 17. The doors parted obligingly. There was no one on the other side. She jabbed the roof button urgently a few more times.
The other lift kept rising. It passed floor 13.
The doors closed, and her lift kept rising. Come on, she thought, staring at the screen. Take the bait.
His lift passed floor 17 without stopping. He was now only two floors behind her.
Ash pounded her fist against the wall. Okay, she thought. I’ll get out at the roof. I’ll take the stairwell, run down a few floors, then find a place to hide. He won’t know what floor I’m on, and he can’t look for ever. Not with the hazard suit guys searching the building for anthrax.
She wondered why the guy on floor 3 had been so heavily armed, then decided now wasn’t the time to figure that out.
If she was hiding from the thief, she couldn’t be looking for a way out of the building. She couldn’t be breaking into the TRA van. She couldn’t be curing her fatal exposure to anthrax.
Maybe she should ask Benjamin which was a more painful death: bullets or anthrax. He could look it up on Wikipedia.
Floor 24. Two floors before the roof.
A storm of coughs charged up her throat, and she doubled over, hacking and spitting. The noise bounced off the walls of the lift. Her throat was scraped raw by the force. Her nose ran, and she wiped it on her sleeve.
Flu symptoms. The virus was taking hold.
Ash glanced in the mirror on the wall of the lift. She barely recognized herself. Sweaty, hollow-eyed from the fluorescent lighting – scared. But she’d heard people talk about a determined chin, and she now thought she understood. Her jaw was set. Her teeth were clenched. It was a look that said If I’m going down, I’m going down fighting.
Floor 25. The thief was on floor 23. Ash climbed back into the Veyron and shut the door. She shifted it to neutral and revved the accelerator, just to hear how loud a $2 million engine could scream. The lift walls vibrated as Ash gripped the steering wheel.
The lift eased to a halt and pinged. The doors parted, and the light of the setting sun poured in. The yellow cube sparkled hypnotically. Ash reversed the car out of the lift, curved it into another U-turn, and clicked the gearstick into first.
The car was facing the building on the other side of the street. It wasn’t as high as HBS.
“Benjamin, are you watching the news?” Ash asked.
“Yeah. They’re—”
“I don’t care what they’re doing. But it’s live, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Keep watching,” she said. She buckled her seat belt, and revved the engine again. “If I don’t make it…I’ve loved working with you. You know that, right?”
“Ash.” Benjamin’s voice was low. “What are you doing?”
“You’ll see,” she said. She checked her hands. Not shaking.
Ping. The other lift had reached the roof. Ash took a deep breath, and hit the accelerator.
The Veyron zoomed forwards. The wind blustered at it, but like the creature of extraordinary power it was, it shrugged it off.
Ash heard the crack of gunshots. Puffs of concrete dust surrounded the car suddenly, like heavy rain in the desert. A shot clinked off the yellow cube.
One hit the rear passenger-side tyre.
Ash heard a sudden thuddering from behind her, and the car swooped left. She twisted the steering wheel to correct the car’s trajectory, fighting for control. The gunshots were still coming. The edge was approaching fast.
The wheels spun and the car leaped forwards. Ash pulled her head down while trying to keep the nose of the Veyron pointed at the building opposite and the guy shot out another tyre and the car went into a spin at 250 kilometres per ho
ur and it was about to reach the edge and this was a bad idea and the wheels hit the lip of the roof and this was a bad idea she was going to die she was going to—
Contingencies
Wright stared up into the sky as the car flew across the street, twenty-five storeys above him. It actually flew, like a matchbox car someone had hurled across a room. It spun and tumbled and barrelled, silhouetted against the evening sky, and for a split second, he actually thought it would make it; that it would land right-side up on the roof of the building opposite.
The crowd down below were staring up with him. No one screaming, no one running. It was like their voices had dried up, like the flying car was a pocket watch swung in front of their eyes to hypnotize them. There was no time to feel anything more than astonishment. The camera operators behind the roadblock barely had time to swing their lenses up and capture the moment.
The car didn’t make it to the opposite roof. It crashed through one of the giant windows of the building two floors from the top and disappeared from view. It hit the glass so fast that the pane was shoved inward, and not a single shard fell down to the street.
After a few seconds of dazed silence, a wall of people ran towards the roadblocks. Most of them were running backwards, stumbling over each other and themselves, still watching the sky like there might be more to see. Like fireworks might explode on the roof, all part of the show.
Wright squinted. Actually, there was something up there. On top of the HBS building there was a silhouette of a man, staring across the street at the hole in the glass the car had made. Then he turned away and stepped out of sight.
Wright was getting increasingly frustrated. He hadn’t told the news crew this, but after calling in the homicide, he’d tried to go into HBS to examine the office with the broken window and question the remaining employees. And he hadn’t been allowed in. A big white van had appeared in front of HBS, and a gloved hand had pressed against his chest as he approached the door.
“Detective Wright,” he began, waving the badge, before looking at the woman who’d stopped him. She was dressed in a white hazard suit, complete with a hood, gas mask and visor.