Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  “Me and water, can you imagine?”

  “Bikini all packed then?”

  Finn barked out a short laugh. She went over the fridge and pulled out a cold Coke Zero, then grabbed a banana and an apple from the ever-full fruit basket. It was almost a nutritious meal. It certainly covered at least one of the basic food groups. “It’s not as adventurous as it sounds,” she told Elise. “I’m analyzing a bunch of symbols marking ruins they found just off the coast of Cuba. It’s all video chat stuff.”

  Elise saluted her with a stiff black coffee. “Nice. A dig you don’t even have to leave your office for. Like I said, cushy.” She took a sip, then smirked. Finn knew that look. It was the same one a predator wore as it homed in on hapless prey. “And speaking of your office, who, pray tell, was that absolutely fucking gorgeous man you were entertaining? I almost felt my womb contract and I was fifty feet away. That’s one dangerous man.”

  “He’s all yours,” Finn replied, looking anywhere but at Elise, which of course just encouraged her to tease some more. Jake was still a sore spot. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t called back. She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought he might. But that was her all over: gullible. “He’s a friend of a friend. No one special. We met at the holiday party last year.”

  She watched Elise’s eyes widen as she got the reference. “Oh, fuck me, he’s that one? Well Jesus Christ, woman, if that’s the guy who got your panties unbunched, all I can say is good fucking taste, girlie. I’d be all over that thing like a dose of chlamydia.”

  “Elise!” Finn laughed.

  “Tell me you disagree. I mean, you went there, not me, I’m just giving you the Elise Bennington seal of approval. So what did he want? Round two? You can’t tell me he just stopped by to chat, I’m not buying that. I want the gossip. Make it juicy. I need to live vicariously through your slutiness,” Elise rambled on. “And you know me, I’m a dog with a boner—and yes, I went there. So make it good.”

  “He wasn’t here for me,” Finn told her.

  “Well that’s a disappointment.”

  “You know what? Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Best way to get over a bad one-night stand is to get under a good one-night stand,” Elise said, grinning. “Fuck him. Or, you know, don’t. Alas, I must love you and leave you, which is rather apropos, given the whole tall, dark, and handsome thing. I’ll catch you later, okay? You, me, a big old tub of Ben & Jerry’s and we’ll set the world straight.”

  “It’s a date,” Finn agreed. “Now get out of here before Tom turns up.”

  “Laters, babe,” Elise said, and was gone. That woman was a phenomenon. Finn stopped short of calling her a natural disaster, though she often left a trail of devastation in her wake.

  As Finn peeled the skin from her banana, a shadow crossed her vision. She glanced up expecting to see Tom there. It wasn’t Tom.

  A man walked down the hall toward her. He’d just turned the corner that led back to her office, one of only three down there.

  It wasn’t exam or term paper time, so there was no reason for any undergrads to visit her. She didn’t recognize him. Tall, slim, moved like an athlete, easy and graceful. Not exactly good-looking, certainly not in the world according to Elise Bennington, but distinctive. He had arresting features. That was the only word she could think of to describe him. Strong and sharp bones, dusky skin, and dark hair that looked almost brassy in strip lights, like burnished metal. Central American, maybe Salvadoran. He was too old to be a student, at least an undergrad, and wasn’t wearing the obligatory man-bag/backpack they all wore these days. He wasn’t dressed like a student either. His clothes were tailored. Actually, he looked like he belonged in an ad for a casino or some fancy ski resort. He certainly didn’t look at home in the dank halls of academia.

  “Can I help you?” Finn asked as he approached, thinking that maybe he had something to do with the research project. He looked the part, projecting an aura of wealth.

  He looked up with a dark, intense gaze, then brushed right by her, picking up speed as he hit the stairwell.

  “Hey! You! Wait a minute!” Finn started to follow him, but he was already through the door.

  Aren’t I just Miss Fucking Popular today. First Jake and now this one. I see a good-looking guy, he sees me, and he bolts.

  Shaking her head and laughing at her own grim humor, she headed back to her office. The door was ajar.

  She’d locked it. She knew she had, it was habitual. She didn’t want to set foot inside, expecting to find that it had been trashed like in some cheesy movie, papers everywhere, desk overturned, her chair lying on its side, her computer a smoking heap.

  But paranoia aside, everything looked fine so she left the door open behind her. Finn put the Coke Zero on her desk and sank back into her chair ready to finish her feast.

  It took her a moment to realize the angle of the monitor was off. It had been moved. It was only a few degrees, but it meant too much light reflected on the screen. She readjusted the monitor.

  Her first thought, and not a very comforting one, was that the guy had been in here rooting around for something. What could he want with her or her computer? There was nothing exactly espionage-worthy about the new gig, but who knew what got into the heads of otherwise sensible people? Money made people do strange things.

  Maybe he was some kind of treasure hunter who’d got wind of the dive and wanted to take a look at the photographs?

  One stranger in the hall and a door that hadn’t latched properly and she was envisioning all sorts of grand conspiracies playing out like something from Tomb Raider, only she was no Lara Croft, and as far as excitement went this would make a pretty tame level in the game.

  Chapter nineteen

  WHEN SHE AWOKE, the thought of checking in to one of the roadside hotels for a shower had crossed her mind, but they were all full of commuters who hadn’t been able to make it home for the night. Even if there had been a spare room, there were too many people who might remember her. She didn’t like being remembered.

  Instead, she stole a candy bar from the parking lot’s nonfunctional vending machine and got back on the road.

  And now here she stood in the heart of Paternoster Square, looking up at the eight-story building that housed the London Stock Exchange. Though it was a clear and unseasonably warm night, with soft moonlight blanketing the square, it was completely quiet. This place wasn’t a shortcut to anywhere. There was no reason for people to pass through on their way to somewhere else, especially at night. There was no crowd of protective camouflage for her to hide within.

  There were guards, of course, and an array of security measures that slammed down into place the moment a threat materialized.

  She figured she’d just have to ride her luck.

  Sophie had learned a long time ago that the best way to gain entrance anywhere you didn’t belong was to act like you did. People were inherently trusting. They expected you to be who you appeared to be.

  If you tried to skulk along, head down, clinging to shadows, you were basically telegraphing a subliminal message to everyone who did see you: I don’t belong here, remember me. Her primary concern right now though was that the wrong people had beaten her here. She didn’t have a choice. She needed to get inside.

  Sophie strode across the plaza, past the column with its gold flame–filled copper urn.

  The stock exchange’s first floor was two stories tall and jutted out from the rest of the building. There was a colonnaded overhang dwarfing its arched windows and doors.

  Sophie moved through the shadows without anyone shouting at or shooting her. So far so good. That didn’t mean they weren’t watching.

  The wide glass doors were locked, but she’d come prepared. She pulled a lockpick gun from her go bag and inserted the muzzle into the bottom set of locks, then mirrored the move with the top locks. The gun made short work of the standard key locks by pushing different picks forward until they hit the right combination to trip the t
umblers. It wasn’t rocket science. The locks were an antiquated deterrent; the real security was the sophisticated alarm system, which on any other day would have taken a team of master thieves to beat. Today, the same sophisticated alarm system had been rendered impotent by the blackout, leaving the place vulnerable. It was all part of Alom’s master plan, and better than mass murder, which was a very real alternative.

  She pushed through the door. The sheer scale of the lobby was daunting, all glass and steel. A single open foyer led all the way up to skylights that made the glass-globe sculpture that hung in the open space above her shimmer in the moonlight. Normally the sculpture, called The Source, shifted and moved each day, the glass spheres changing position to create new and interesting shapes, including words. Now the component parts hung motionless.

  Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, London had moved from an open-outcry system—which required a public trading floor—to a purely electronic method of trading several decades ago.

  There wasn’t a single centralized space for traders now. Which was very useful, as it meant that any office inside the complex would suffice for what she intended; they were all tied into the same central computer system.

  Sophie moved quickly, but again without rushing. She did her best to take in all of her surroundings without lingering. It was another layer of appearing like she belonged there. She didn’t want some security guard thinking she was an intruder, even if she had just forced her way in. She headed for the stairwell, climbing to the third floor; low enough to get out in a hurry, high enough to have a decent vantage of the plaza below while at the same time minimizing the risk of someone stumbling upon her. It was all basic probability, really.

  She picked an office at random. The door locks were electronic, jammed shut during the outage. They didn’t pose much of an obstacle. Her entry was so simple it was almost embarrassing considering the kind of secrets she hoped the room would offer up; two microscrews anchored the doorplate, then it was just a case of tripping the lock mechanism with her fingernail.

  She pushed the door open, then stepped inside. It was a blandly corporate space, a company logo she didn’t recognize emblazoned on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk, comfortable couches that worked hard to look like classic Eames designs to the side so guests could wait in relative comfort for their escort to take them through the single paneled door that was all that stood between them and corporate nirvana on the other side.

  That door was shut too, a conventional lock this time. It didn’t make any difference to Sophie’s lockpick gun, which took less than three seconds to fake the tumblers. Moments later she was striding down the carpeted hall between several other closed doors, toward the one at the far end. She wanted to work in an office that would provide her light from the night sky and also give her a view of the street.

  Corner offices in places like this were always more spacious and comfortable. The room she entered was no exception, big and airy with an entire wall of windows looking out over the square. A massive mahogany desk dominated one side of the room, classically powerful with carved wood rather than the usual sleek modernism she expected from Gen-Xers raised on Gordon Gekko. The leather blotter in the center suggested a love of penmanship and a better, vanished age that offset the unobtrusive flat-screen monitor beside it. A big leather wingbacked desk chair completed that image.

  The other side of the room was equally old-school old-money English stereotype, with a big leather Chesterfield couch and matching wingbacked armchairs grouped around a handsome leather-inlaid table, also carved from mahogany. It was obviously the wood of money, old and new. A row of dark, polished bookcases lined the wall behind it, filled with thick, gilt-lettered leather volumes. It gave the impression of age and wisdom, like the quarters of an old barrister or a school headmaster, the message being you can trust the man who is king of this particular castle.

  It was all an illusion, of course. You could trust him about as far as you could throw him—and that was preferably out the window given the state of the financial markets.

  But it was quiet, comfortable, had a computer terminal, and overlooked the entrance, which was all she wanted from the space.

  Sophie pulled out the chair and squatted down beside it, studying the computer tower tucked away there. No added bells and whistles to the casing. She pulled a small, flat battery pack from her bag, then nudged the tower forward and to one side so she could see its back panel well enough to get at the power cord. She switched it out for the short cable from the battery pack then hit the power button on the front of the tower.

  Even though she’d known it would work, it was a relief to see the power light blink on, and hear the deep chime of the system booting up.

  She settled into the desk chair and watched the screen come to life, the same company logo popping up in a small window that demanded a name and password. She didn’t have either.

  What she had was better. She leaned forward and slid a thumb drive into one of the open USB slots on the tower’s front.The drive lit up as it accessed the stored program, running through the permutations until the dots began to appear like magic within the password window.

  The Enter key darkened as if pressed and the entire window vanished. The logo was replaced by a tropical sunset and a row of file folders. Sophie ignored them—she wasn’t interested in this company. The only thing she cared about was its access to the broader building system.

  She right-clicked up to the Servers header, accessed the drop-down menu, and selected LSE. The new window showed a series of drives and databases, each with its own acronym. It could have been written in Mandarin for all she knew; fortunately, she didn’t need to be able to interpret all of the various files and subfolders.

  The thumb drive was still in place. Sophie opened it and selected one of the other files there—the one she’d copied onto it before fleeing Paris. A simple black terminal window appeared, and programming code began to scroll across it as the blunt white letters raced to fill the blank black space too rapidly to read.

  The program, a spider designed to crawl through the tangled web of the mainframes’ file structure to the core files she needed, was fast. It took about sixty seconds to return its results.

  Sixty seconds felt like an eternity. And even then, if it worked, it wasn’t guaranteed to stop them. The best she could hope was that it would slow them down.

  A flicker of motion caught her eye. She half-turned toward the big plate-glass window, then froze before instinctively pulling back, but it was too late by then.

  A dark figure rushed across the plaza.

  Whoever it was, they weren’t alone. Their body language betrayed that. They moved with speed, head down, checking left and right, then behind, without looking straight ahead. They were maintaining their position, a rear scout, making sure no one was on their six.

  Five seconds later—still not enough time to burn up the endless minute she needed for the program to finish its task—she felt rather than heard the concussion of an explosive grenade reverberate up through the building from below. They’d blown out one of the front doors. No subtlety. They didn’t care if she knew they were coming for her. They were that arrogant or that good.

  She turned back to the screen. The terminal window was no longer scrolling through new lines of code.

  “Come on, come on,” she urged, hitting Enter. She watched as the cursor on the bottom blinked, then steadied.

  Program Executed.

  She closed the window and the program, then yanked her thumb drive out of the tower. She killed the power, disconnecting the battery pack to shut the system down. It was only a matter of seconds, but each one was precious.

  She stuffed the battery back into her go bag and dashed out of the office and down the hall. She needed to get the hell out of there. The next few minutes were crucial.

  Sophie stopped at the frosted glass of the company’s front door. She had two choices, and she knew whichever one she picked was going to
be the wrong one: make a break for the exit and hope to get past the security team making their way up to her floor; or hide out here and hope they passed her by, giving her the chance to duck out behind them.

  Without knowing how the team functioned, she could only think what she’d do in their place—sweep the building bottom to top, locking down each floor as she went, eyes on every stairwell, no way into or out of the building uncovered. Everything depended on how many men they had at their disposal.

  There was a chance they weren’t here for her, rather that they were here to do exactly what she had, find an empty office and break into the dormant system. Just because it was London didn’t make it immune—these people had plans, and those plans included adjusting the city and ushering it into the new world right alongside New York and the other traditional power bases of the global economy. So, yes, there was a chance, but it was so slim she couldn’t count on it unless she wanted to risk winding up in a body bag.

  Sophie eased the frosted glass door open and peeked into the central foyer. She was careful to stay back, making sure her shadow wouldn’t stretch as far as the lobby floor below. Without the light sources to betray her, she was good. The foyer was completely glassed in. Even so, she could hear people moving about down there.

  “Right, we know she’s in here,” the voice carried up from below. “Divide into Alpha, Bravo, Charlie teams. Take each stairwell, work your way up bottom to top, sweep each floor. Anyone gets in the way, end them. Jenson, find a spot and get plugged in. If we’re lucky she hasn’t had a chance to completely screw things up yet. The rest of you, stay sharp. This isn’t a recovery mission, gentlemen. She doesn’t get out of here alive.”

  Chapter twenty

  “OUR MEN HAVE ISOLATED THE TRAITOR,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “Is she dead yet?”

  “No, but it is only a matter of time.”

  “I don’t want to hear about how clever you are, and I most certainly don’t need a blow-by-blow description of the hunt. The only thing I want is photographic evidence that the bitch is dead. Understood?”