“What about if we phone in bomb threats or something? Try to get people out of there even if we can’t get there ourselves?”
“Maybe. But that’s just going to cause an extra layer of chaos. That sort of disruption helps the terrorists”—that was how he was thinking of them now. Organized, dangerous, domestic.
“If shutting the places down is their only aim, maybe, but it hasn’t been before, has it? It’s been about infiltrating the systems to upload some sort of Trojan horse . . .”
He wasn’t sure. She could be right: if they controlled the shutdown, maybe they could use it in their favor.
“I can check on Port Authority,” Finn offered. This was unexpected. She was the bookish type, not a field agent. “It’s not that far,” she added. Which wasn’t exactly true. Port Authority was down at 42nd and Eighth, several miles below Columbia.
He rubbed his free hand over his face. “These guys aren’t fooling around. They’ve killed their own men. They won’t think twice about putting one in your head if you get in the way.”
“I’m not stupid, Jake,” she said with no anger or sarcasm. “But think about it, the guys you went up against earlier, they’re going to have circulated your description now, aren’t they? Their gangs . . . units . . . are going to be watching for you. Nobody’s going to be looking for me. I’m just going to be another face in the crowd. That’s the ultimate camouflage.”
She was selling it hard, but Jake wasn’t buying.
He didn’t like it.
Scratch that. He hated it. He couldn’t ask her to put herself deliberately in harm’s way. But he wasn’t asking, was he? And her argument was good. The more intel they had on all this, the better.
“If I say no you’re just going to do it anyway, aren’t you?” he said.
“You know me so well.”
“Okay, fine,” he agreed finally. “But watch yourself. I’m serious. If it even looks like they’re on to you, get the fuck out of there. You’ve got my number now. Use it. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Not on your watch?” He could hear the smile in her voice. “Roger that, sir.” She wasn’t exactly good with the military parlance, but the effort made him smile too. “You be careful yourself, soldier. And we’ll touch base later. See if we’ve learned anything. Now let’s go kick some bad-guy butt.”
“I’m serious. Don’t take any risks.”
“Yes sir!”
Shaking his head, he hung up and pocketed his phone. There wasn’t anything else he could do here.
No, that wasn’t true. He leaned over the row of computer terminals and, one by one, deactivated the Trojan they’d installed, hopefully robbing them of their stranglehold on the phone lines.
He was about to delete the remote access program when he had a better idea.
He moved through the root directories into the security settings, and sure enough, there was a password protecting the program. Passwords were a problem. He glanced over his shoulder at the corpses. Nope, they definitely weren’t going to tell him.
But he didn’t need to know it.
Actually, it was better if he didn’t.
He selected the Enter New Password option, and unsurprisingly it offered him a window with three blanks spaces—the first one for the existing password, the second for the new password, and the third to confirm it.
Jake entered a random string of letters in the first space, just hammering the keys, and typed qwerty123 in the next two, then hit Return.
Password incorrect.
Of course it is, he thought, and smiled as he repeated the process. The same warning appeared. Then he did it again. Three for three.
Once more and this time the message was different.
Unauthorized access detected. System lockdown in effect. Please contact your system administrator to override and restore access.
That should make things a bit more interesting, he thought. Now, none of us can get in. Which wasn’t strictly true. They could send another team in, but that would require on-site access, and with a bit of luck the only guys with the expertise to hack the system were in the minivan outside very dead. That was the risk of cleaning up as you went—if you had to go back and retrace your footsteps without the experts you’d wasted the first time around, things got a whole lot more difficult the second time.
He repeated the lockdown on the other terminals. It took less than two minutes to make sure no one was getting back into them easily.
He stepped over the dead men and made his way back toward the light.
Chapter Twenty-six
WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO NOW? That was the million-dollar question.
Unfortunately, Sophie only had about a buck fifty in change, which was nowhere near enough to buy an answer. She sat in a crowded all-night café, which she’d chosen because she’d seen the reassuring glow of a We’re Open! sign in the window. Power was starting to return to some neighborhoods, as she knew it would. The promise of warm coffee, tea, and company had attracted quite a crowd. Outside, normality was reasserting itself. That was the personality of London summed up in a few short words. No matter how extraordinary the crisis, the ordinary was only ever a few hours away. These people had lived through extraordinary times more than once, be it IRA bombs or the 7/7 terror attacks, the Blitz. They had a history of stiff upper lips.
The silhouette of an angelic statue filled half of the plate-glass window. A prewar double-decker bus rumbled down the street. It looked like it had been rescued from a museum but that hadn’t stopped dozens of people from cramming into it. The bus was heading back into the city. It didn’t matter to the people onboard that they wouldn’t be able to do anything when they got there, it was important that they simply turned up, that they showed they weren’t beaten.
The huge digital sign wrapping around Piccadilly Circus was blank. Eros was surrounded by scaffolding.
There was familiar graffiti sprayed on the boards. The Hidden’s symbols served a purpose—they’d paid off a bunch of young artists, banking on their misguided sense of social justice, and were using these kids to create the feel of territorial warfare, adding to the element of confusion and uncertainty amid the populace while The Hidden took control, adjusting the place.
Which made her a thorn in their side.
She knew them.
She knew how they communicated, the frequencies they used, and how they’d shielded their technology in preparation for the polar shift; she knew how they thought, how they’d planned, and, ultimately, what their endgame was. Control. These were men who were more interested in the ability to influence the world markets than they were in ephemeral things like greed or power. Both of those were transitory. They knew what was coming. It wasn’t just about systemic racism, it was about class warfare. It was about how the poor were held back simply because it suited these men to do so. Places like Ferguson, Missouri were going to be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice in the way that the Kent State shootings back in 1970 should have been, in the way that the Jackson State shootings ten days later should have been—but back then there had been no national outcry because the nation wasn’t mobilized. It wasn’t connected. Not like now. Now a simple tweet could summon forces to fight side-by-side in a full-scale riot. And it wasn’t just black oppression, it was Latino subjugation, it was the haves against the have-nots with all the economic influence to make sure those ghettos never cleaned up and those kids never had a chance at a better life. They didn’t want an educated populace, they wanted a frightened one, and they had their mouthpieces in place to make sure people were frightened, with the rabid right-wing press spouting hate and lies with an Ebola-level of infection that rippled through communities.
Fifty million Americans were poor.
Fifty million voters.
And yet the 1 percent kept their choke hold on the economy and the power that came with it, distracting those fifty million poor voters with hot-button issues like immigration and abortion an
d gun control. Manipulating the masses with television, feeding its drug to the nation.
And that was how The Hidden removed something as basic as reasonable choice from democracy—they had no intention of toning down the lies their networks vomited up. They served a cruder purpose. They weren’t meant to be believed. People knew the TV lied, but what they didn’t know was how they could make good decisions if the only thing telling them what was happening in their world was corrupt. And as long as they stood in line for 6,000-percent loans they couldn’t afford to pay back without taking another 60,000-percent one, things would never change.
They didn’t need to strip the poor of the right to vote. Tell enough lies, pump enough hate into their homes, and they’d do exactly what you wanted anyway.
There was no American Dream.
There hadn’t been one since the greed of the nineties turned into the cannibalism of the subprime mortgage collapse and the banking collapse and every other fiscal nightmare these people had brought upon themselves in their hunger to feed off the poor. Now there was inflation, now there were credit bubbles and fiscal black holes and honest-to-God poverty of the kind that should only exist in the third world.
That was their doing. That was what they wanted. That’s what it came down to. Eat the poor. All fifty million of them. Keep them in the ghettos with no hope of doing anything other than looking at the shiny hubcaps of the cars rolling by.
They didn’t need Viagra, these parasites, they’d got a permanent hard-on and were fucking each and every poor bastard out there, bent double over a barrel of oil and dollar bills.
One man couldn’t fight them. Fifty million, the people they were really frightened of, they could. But without a voice, without a way of communicating their truths, they were just as screwed as they had always been.
The real enemies, made up of politicians, legislators, and businessmen with power worth hoarding, hid in the shadows, drawn together. A secret society of movers and shakers that had the power to change the world beyond all recognition fed the fires of hatred while people laughed as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tried to highlight the idiocy of more white people believing in ghosts than they did in racism. An African American president hadn’t meant the end of hate, it just meant the rich and powerful had to be more devious with how they manipulated people.
The helicopter and two kill teams had been enough to convince her they were looking to solve the particular problem she posed with brute force. A bullet to the head.
Which was about the going rate for fucking up their plans at the stock exchange. She’d just cost them a not-so-small fortune, but worse than that, she’d made it obvious she’d tampered with stuff, creating a false paper trail that led right back to them. She’d told the entire world they were there. That was the only way to really hurt them; they hated exposure. They lived in the darkness for a reason.
It was all about pushback now.
And who was there to fight back? Who would stand in their way, assuming they’d succeeded in destroying Fort Hamilton and isolating Manhattan. That would give them all the time in the world to adjust the city, reshaping it in their image while the government scrambled to respond.
She’d tried to tell Jake, but had he understood her message?
She would have killed to know what was happening in New York, but international communication was pretty much dead with the satellites screwed up. It would take a long time before things returned to normal. They knew that, it was what they were banking on. That was why they’d acted now. Ever since they’d uncovered the second Mayan calendar and realized the implications of its prediction of a polar shift, and what that meant for the technological world that civilization had built itself on as the magnetic fields went haywire, everything these men had done was about preparing for the shift and how to best exploit it in terms of controlling the wealth of the world.
So, even if Jake had understood what she’d tried to tell him, how long could he last in the line of fire? Because he would, wouldn’t he? He’d put himself right in the line of fire without even thinking about it, even if he didn’t have a clue who or what he was up against in The Hidden.
They were ghosts.
Bogeymen.
They moved in the darkness.
Until twenty-four hours ago they’d been the silent power brokers, the kingmakers, more urban myth than monster under the stairs, like the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, and every other secret society imagined to be out there by the tinfoil-hat brigade—but that had all changed overnight.
She had to assume she was in this alone.
Which meant giving up on doing the impossible, focusing on what one woman could actually do.
Not that she was exactly normal. In some ways, maybe, but she could kill a man at forty paces in a dozen different ways, and that number increased as the distance between them diminished. That was why they’d recruited her in the first place—her combat training plus off-the-chart intelligence scores, her Vassar background. The whole package.
She had no idea how she’d gotten here, making the transition from fiercely patriotic soldier to a corporate assassin. It would have been too easy to say it was all about the money. But something inside her was broken. They’d recognized that. They played on it when they brought her into the fold.
She’d been first approached by a woman much like herself, similar age, similar background, similar education and experience, who had sounded her out about the ills of society and her own belief system before leaving her with a business card with a number printed on it and urging her to call. That call had changed her life. Yes, the money had been good. Private security was always good. They had a job for someone with her particular skill set, demanding a degree of independence, they said, which made her laugh and translate to Does not play well with others. They didn’t argue with that. The job was in Kosovo, an in-and-out mission where the Army couldn’t go. Some rich diplomat’s kid had been kidnapped. They needed someone on the ground to run things and bring the kid home alive. There was nothing, they said, that they could do to help her, no resources they could offer to make her job easier. She brought the boy home. Next they sent her in to what had been Soviet Russia, again with no backup and no resources to call on, again seemingly chasing shadows. This time it was a computer outpost in the middle of a very grim landscape they needed taking down because, supposedly, the software engineers working there were on the brink of developing a dark net that would run beneath the Internet, a place where all sorts of illicit trade and trafficking could flourish. That wasn’t it, of course. They were hackers who’d found a way into the deepest darkest secrets of one of Switzerland’s most prestigious banks and there were some very rich men who wanted those secrets to remain buried deep. And on and on it went—Greece, Italy, back to the Hindu Kush, Israel, anywhere they needed her.
Somewhere along the line the jobs changed and it soon became obvious she was nothing more than a corporate assassin, killing for the Almighty Dollar. She told herself it was no different to being a mercenary and cashing a paycheck for fighting in Kabul. For a while she was even good at lying to herself.
But it couldn’t last.
There was a line.
There was always a line, a point where youthful ideals and grown-up bitterness met; the question was what happened then, because it was one thing to sign up to do their dirty work—it was exciting, it felt like she was doing some good—but quite another to actually take a step back and think about what you were being asked to do. And that was exactly what she’d done, realizing she’d hit the point of no return when they were asking her to kidnap kids in Eastern Europe and bring their blood home to feed on it.
She took a sip of coffee, still barely able to process what they’d asked her to do, and hating the fact that she’d done it.
They weren’t vampires. Not literally. They wanted the blood for transfusions. Desperate measures and unethical science had come together in a clinic in Bern where no questions were asked if your money was gre
en enough. The young blood was meant to rejuvenate the aging process in their brain tissue and muscles. These people wanted to live forever. What was the point of wealth and power when you were pushing up daisies? The whole process was ghoulish. She didn’t know how it worked, but there was no denying the results. She’d seen them with her own eyes. Dementia in one of their number had been first stemmed then reversed. Now he was giving orders again. A new man. He called himself Alom. That wasn’t his real name. He was known, and beloved by millions, a face from the silver screen they trusted and had lined up to see on Sunday-morning matinees. If only they knew what he was really like. It had been his idea to use the names of Mayan gods and goddesses in their communications, a curious affectation, obviously intended to be some sort of tribute to the calendar that had opened this brave new world to them.
They couldn’t understand her qualms—and argued she’d done much worse for them, which of course she had. But these were children. The results, no matter how miraculous, didn’t justify the means.
They couldn’t. Ever.
They were asking her to steal kids, not just their blood.
She wasn’t giving them back, either. Done, they were discarded.
And that was her line. That was the thing she couldn’t do. Not if she wanted to keep her soul intact.
What they hadn’t expected was that she’d turn on them rather than cross it.
They’d made her.
She knew their secrets.
She was an enemy they’d trained.
And now she was hunting them.
Chapter Twenty-seven
JAKE SHOULDERED HIS WAY DOWN THE STEPS leading into Penn Station.
With the power still out, he’d hoped the station would be empty, or at least near empty. He couldn’t have been more wrong—the place was a heaving mass of humanity, most of which smelled as though it hadn’t showered for a week.
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