by O. J. Lowe
“In short, they’re a middleman. They do all this, though nobody’s ever been able to prove it. Coppinger picked a good partner. Normally you’d need all sorts of warrants and requisitions to enter the building as a Unisco agent,” Wade said. “That amount of wealth buys you a lot of insulation from the law.”
Sure did, she thought. There was a reason that the rich managed to get away with murder and the poor had the book thrown at them for minor misdemeanours. That was the society the five kingdoms had built, it was the sort of society that Claudia Coppinger banged on about wanting to tear down.
When the richest woman in the kingdoms spoke about making things more equal without giving insights into her process at doing so, hells when she ploughed her own credits into building an army rather than investing in social care, it was hard to take her seriously.
They both looked at each other, smiled. “It’s a good thing then that since this Coppinger crisis started,” Wade said, smugness personified in his voice. “Normal circumstances have gone out the window. We have evidence that Constauri has a connection to Claudia Coppinger, more than just circumstantial. Those payments from Claudia Coppinger to Harvey Rocastle to Lola Myers via Constauri…”
“You know what I think?” Pree said. “I think we should have a look around Constauri. Preferably after everyone’s gone home. See if we can get a look at Coppinger’s vault. She must have one there. It makes sense. Find something that can break all reasonable doubt and throw the book at both Constauri and Coppinger.”
Normally, anything they found on the scene without a warrant to investigate would be ignored in court as illegally obtained evidence from a place they had no business being anywhere near. The rules had been relaxed. The Senate wanted the swiftest possible resolution. Anything Coppinger-related was fair game.
Do whatever you need to do to resolve this, had been the message. The rules had been relaxed.
Of course, getting it might well prove to be a different matter, she thought with a smile.
Statistically, there was a reason why most attempts to break in, rob and get away with the contents of a bank vault ended in miserable failure. What made Wade so sure that this was going to be a success was that most attempts to break in there were doomed to fail because they had no right to be there. There’d be people trying to stop them from entering, from taking, from leaving. Every step was a hurdle to be overcome. You might surpass one, but to do them all was a challenge.
This would be different. They’d spoken to their superiors, they’d gotten approval, they’d even had some tech mailed to them to help them get in there. Anything and everything they’d need. The word from above was that they thought their lead was solid and they needed a win. There’d been some talk about some sort of violent fuck-up in Canterage, Wade had wanted to know more about it but been given the usual line of ‘need to know’ BS. He’d found himself wondering how much of it his friend was in the middle of. Violent situations did seem to find a way of inserting themselves straight into the middle of Nicks’ life.
No slight against Pree, he wished Nick was with him. He knew he could trust him. Pree, he felt like he could trust, yet there was something between them. An invisible wedge warning him that they weren’t equals. Not as partners. Not as humans. He was being ridiculous, he knew that. Pree was a fully minted Unisco agent, she had an impressive number of successful operations on her record. They didn’t nickname her the Spectre for nothing. Get in, do the job, get out before anyone knew she was there. Statistically, you couldn’t ask for a better person to have your back.
She didn’t normally work with partners, despite Unisco doctrine. So why had she asked for him to come on this mission with him?
“Constauri Holdings,” Pree said, leaning back in her seat, letting the scope drop into her lap with a dull thump. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?”
Wade said nothing, glanced at the timepiece on his wrist. They were entering within the next fifteen minutes, their window was going to present itself, and they needed to be ready. They both were armed, blasters strapped to their legs, dressed in black to mask themselves against the night. Security was not expected to be an issue. Anonymity was Constauri’s greatest weapon. He’d seen banks that looked like castles and cathedrals, laced themselves in grandeur and then complained when people tried to rob them, successfully or not. If you felt the need to flaunt it, you couldn’t complain when someone tried to take it from you. Always there would be those without to be jealous of those that had. Crime was a fast-growing business sometimes. There’d never be a limit on the number of applicants.
He said as much, Pree shrugged. “I’d still want something grander, but I know what you mean. Sometimes you want to balance image against security.”
Wade glanced at her. “I never figured you to be the grand gesture type.”
“Darling, they nicknamed me the fucking Spectre. You can’t get much more of a grand gesture than that.”
He laughed, let it die away as he glanced at the bag down at his feet. Everything they’d need for the mission. He was starting to jitter now, nothing unusual. Sometimes you got like this. Pre-mission nerves. They were good, he guessed. Reminded you to be sharp. You started to think you were invincible, you very quickly realised that you weren’t when the first blast hit you. Nerves made you move that bit faster, made you react a little quicker, allowed you to live longer. A bonus in his book.
“True,” he said. “As nicknames go, it’s a good one.”
“Never chose it,” she said. “Never unwelcomed it. Think it was meant to be mean, it never quite worked out that way. You throw enough people together at the academy and some of them’ll be assholes.” Pree’s face lit up in a smile. “That’s the mark of success. Taking that with which they’d like to beat you, what they perceive to be a weakness and making it a strength.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Glanced at his timepiece again, moved to tap a finger against it.
“It’s not going to move any faster the more you look at it, you know,” she said. “Relax. I can hear your heartbeat from here.”
She didn’t look worried, he noticed. She looked calmness personified, typical Prideaux Khan. Unfazed. Unworried. Maybe she was doing a better job of hiding it than he was. A lot better job.
“I’m not worried,” he said quietly. “Just trying to think of anything we missed. There’s the potential for a lot to go wrong.”
“Relax,” she said again. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. It’s going to be a cinch.” She cleared her throat, glanced out the window towards the building. Looked more like a warehouse than a bank, Wade thought. He couldn’t see the wealthy rocking up here to make their deposits. Had to be more than met the eye when you got inside. He remembered it was more about storage than moving funds. That made sense.
His summoner beeped, Pree’s did the same. He flipped it over, glanced at the screen. Two words but their impact bore deep.
Sixty seconds.
Nerves fading, he pushed the door open and scooped the bag up over his shoulder. Pree did the same, they slammed the doors shut behind them and started to run.
This sort of job required split-second timing. Somewhere high above them, a satellite had traced out their position in relation to the front doors of the building. They’d had their running time estimated from speeder to door, been given appropriate warning. Neither of them had dared park too close, just in case someone in there was suspicious of the vehicle. They’d agreed that they wanted to spend as little time exposed as possible.
A window had been fashioned, someone on Okocha’s department had been set to hack Constauri’s security system, illegal under normal circumstances. Again, desperate times led to rules being relaxed. Sixty seconds to get to the door. At the end of those sixty seconds, there’d be a five second window in which the locks would be temporarily disabled. Any longer, suspicion would be aroused. Anything less would look like a glitch in the system.
What wouldn’t be a glitch would be t
he subtle disability of all electronic surveillance within the building. There was a lot of it, they’d both been informed, as they’d expected there would be. Leaving property with a bank was buying into the belief that it’d be well protected, and their security would pass muster if needed. Videocams would be the very minimum, they weren’t a worry. Unisco techs had had years of practicing removing the activities of their agents from footage to preserve their identities. Most of them could do it in their sleep.
They made the run, a mad dash across two hundred feet of bare sidewalk in time to hear the lock click open. Pree grabbed the door, pulled it and they were inside. The lobby was dark, lights flashed on as they entered. Hands went for blasters, refrained from pulling them. Nobody. They were alone.
Better to be safe than sorry, Wade thought. Being jumpy might be embarrassing but you’d rather pull a weapon in surprise and not need it than the alternative.
Looking around, the realisation that it was a stark contrast to what they’d seen outside quickly dawned. This was more like it, he thought, checking out the black and white marbled floor, the huge desk towards the back of the room, a waiting area twice the size of his first apartment and probably better furnished. It had that look of wealth about it that the puritan in him found distasteful.
“Let’s do this then,” Pree said, adjusting the bag across her shoulders. Neither of them was happy about carrying them but it was a necessity. Sensor masking equipment wasn’t small, it couldn’t be hidden in a pocket, it was heavier than initially realised but the benefits were there for all to see. Complete biological concealment from all forms of surveillance. Last thing that they wanted to do was set an alarm off with their heat signature.
The summoner on the desk trilled and he trailed a hand out to snatch it up. “Yes?” He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, only partially succeeded. He didn’t like being disturbed at amidst his meditations. This time was his. A time to refocus, to dwell on his knowledge and to build on it. The best insights came during time alone with thoughts.
“Sir, there’s been an incident at the Holdings.”
His eye twitched, he closed it and felt the throb behind his eyelid. “Explain?”
“Only a brief one, but not like any we’ve seen before.”
He employed good people. He made sure of that. Retained his anonymity when he did it, just like his building, but they reported to him when they needed to.
“Unusual,” he said. If they’d not seen anything like it before, it could mean a great number of things. Some were troubling. Others were downright unsettling.
He reached out, grabbed his weapon and hooked it onto his belt. “Do you wish for us to alert local police, sir?”
“No,” he said. Glancing around, his eyes fell on his mask. The skull burning in the sun, his mark of office stared at him in silence. “That won’t be necessary. Thank you for informing me. I’ll deal with it from here.”
“Of course, sir. Good night.”
Things felt disturbing, a shifting of the signs he sought. His instincts told him danger was afoot. Checking it wouldn’t be a terrible idea. He never ignored his instincts and he’d never run from danger.
He wasn’t about to start now. He reached for the mask, slid it in his coat and made for the exit.
They didn’t talk as they made their way downstairs, a stairwell behind the main desk had been their point of egress. All good vaults were below ground, their intelligence had told them the same was true here. Part of the data packet that had been included in their brief showed them a floor plan, stolen off the Constauri mainframe. Not for the first time, Wade found himself truly indebted to the hackers working for Unisco. They did their job well, they’d be limited without them.
What they didn’t have was the occupiers of each vault, although they’d found them easily enough, a series of eight numbered doors with each of them twice as tall as Wade, three times the size of Pree. The data packet hadn’t mentioned who rented out which vault, that information beyond even their guys at short notice. Worse, they’d been told that the vault doors ran under a different system to the rest of the security, leaving it impossible to open them remotely.
Things could only get so easy, Wade thought, the two of them stood amidst the eight doors. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. He glanced back and forth, gauged each one. Maybe there was some sort of clue or crest. Nothing. Each sheet of steel was as blandly unidentifiable as the other, nothing to distinguish them from the other barring the numbers, hugely hewn copper shapes twisted into digits.
He looked at Pree. She shrugged. “I got nothing if you’re expecting me to have some answers,” she said. Each vault had a keypad and a fingerprint scanner next to them, those weren’t too much of an issue. They had the technology that could beat them, with time, a scanner that could scan the keypads, pick residue off each key and work out which ones were used the most. It could duplicate the fingerprints as well, once the correct one had been found to operate the fingerprint verifier.
Time. It was going to be their problem. They didn’t have an unlimited amount of it, certainly not enough to open every vault and check it manually. If they were still here when the staff started to arrive in the morning, there’d be trouble. At the very least, the mission would be jeopardised. Secrecy was their best ally here.
“Maybe it went in order of whomever got here first,” Wade said. “First investor got vault one, second one got vault two…” He tailed off. They still didn’t know who had signed up first. He closed his eyes, let his head hang. He let them slide open again, saw Pree smile at him.
“Keep them closed,” she said. “If it helps. Just… Wade, just listen. Close your eyes and let your mind wander. Think about it all, see if any of them call to you. Use your instincts, and we’ll try and work it out.”
He tried to avoid scoffing too loudly. “That’s terrible advice, Pree. I could do that and still get it wrong.”
“You could,” she said. “You know what isn’t going to help? Standing here wringing our hands. Might as well at least try it. I trust my instincts. You should trust yours too.”
Inwardly, she cursed him. Damnit Wade, why must you be so stubborn? Just go with what I say, we can do this. She’d already done it, she knew which one she was going for. One vault called to her, piqued her curiosity and she was going to push for it. Especially if Wade picked out the same one.
Baxter believed in him. She’d seen Wade’s eyes when Coppinger had attacked him on Carcaradis Island, she’d heard the tales about how Baxter had taught him to heal himself. He had the gift. It was part of the reason she’d wanted him here. She wanted to see how much and how capable he was. So far, the results had been mixed. He had so much potential but all he wanted to do was shut himself away from it.
He’d closed his eyes again, she was relieved to see that. “Concentrate,” she said, deliberately keeping her voice under her breath. She didn’t want to distract him. “Just reach out. Feel, don’t think.”
“You sound like you know a lot about this,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “You want to try it if you’re that damn good?”
She ignored that. Not least because she didn’t have anything that wouldn’t lead to questions she couldn’t answer. “Don’t listen to my words, listen to yourself,” she said. “Hear what your heart has to say.”
For the longest time, he didn’t say anything, was so still that the only sign of life was the gentle fall and rise of his chest. At least he had control of his breathing, pointing that out to him would have led to even more questions.
Pree had made her choice, had already moved to get the scanner out of the bag. If Wade said door number five, she’d know for sure. Something screamed out at her about that door, might not be the one they wanted, but she got the impression it was worth seeing inside. Maybe she was imagining things. Maybe it’d be easier if she was.
His eyes opened, he turned on the spot until he came to rest against the fifth vault. She couldn’t help not
icing how proud he looked with himself “That one,” he said.
Interesting.
Chapter Sixteen. The Trove.
“Ascension through the ranks of the Cavanda has always come from a position of strength, if you prove you are better than one currently incumbent, then you deserve their place. And of those you displace? Well, we have no need for weakness.”
Lord Amalfus to Kyra Sinclair and Gideon Cobb some time ago.
She’d handed him the scanner under the proviso that since it was his choice, he could open it up. He’d not argued, she’d conveniently not mentioned she also thought there was something about that door, just watched him as he ran the scanner across the keypad. The system might be on a different network to the rest of the security, it didn’t mean that they’d not been able to find out anything about it. The keypads operated under an eight-digit code, the scanner would find the most pressed eight buttons and feed them into a code cycler which Wade had already plugged in. It’d run through every feasible combination. Even at the speeds it processed, it’d still take too many minutes to check all eight vaults.
“Fingerprints occupying this vault are unknown,” Wade said. “Not in the Unisco database.”
That by itself wasn’t something that disproved the theory one way or another. Unisco didn’t have records of every single fingerprint in the kingdoms. Just those of the people who’d caused trouble and been caught. People who owned vaults like this were notorious for not getting caught. If it was Coppinger’s vault, records showed she’d never been caught, never been fingerprinted.
Several long minutes passed. She looked at her timepiece, wondered how many they’d have to break into before they found the right one. Wade stood crouched across from her, tossing the scanner back and forth from one hand to the other. He’d gotten the fingerprints long ago for the scanner, just needed to break the code. On the readout, it showed that six out of eight digits had been secured in their rightful position. She tapped her foot, fiddled with the butt of her weapon in its holster, chose to unstrap it just in case. She really hoped she wouldn’t need it.