Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  “That should buy us a little time,” he said. But just how little was little?

  He started trying doors, one at a time, carefully working his way down the hall. A few were locked, nothing he could do about that. A few had voices coming from inside so he didn’t bother even trying them. The place was a labyrinth.

  They found the stairs and went up. They opened out into a grand foyer, with wooden balustrades and paneled walls that reeked of old money. There were leather couches and smoking paraphernalia beside an open hearth, tall glasses on the table beside the butts of smoked Cuban cigars. But there were no people.

  Jake heard a noise off to the left, which he assumed must be the kitchens.

  The stairs continued up. On the next landing they found the library. Well appointed, floor to ceiling with leather-bound books, no doubt priceless, like the works of art decorating the walls. In the hallway Jake saw what he was sure was Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. On the wall in the library was an unmistakable van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, and in the smoking room Bellini’s Madonna and Child. They were priceless works of art, and each had one thing in common—they were considered lost in World War II to the Nazis, presumed destroyed. Yet here they were, in this brownstone in Manhattan.

  Everything has a price.

  He couldn’t even begin to imagine what else was hidden in this place.

  They kept on looking, not sure what it was they were hoping to find, mindful always of how long they’d been inside and of every creak and groan the old building taunted them with, expecting a shout at any second to let them know their time was up.

  It was as though they’d stepped back in time to some colonial plantation house. Jake felt deeply uncomfortable, sure they were the first black men to set foot inside the brownstone who weren’t servants.

  Then on the fifth floor he tried a door that opened onto a small, tidy little study off a reading room. There was a slick high-tech computer dominating the green leather inlay of the desk’s surface.

  “Now this is more like it,” Ryan said, setting his gun down beside the terminal as Jake shut the door behind him. The computer was in standby mode, not full shutdown. He tried waking the machine up, but the words Enter Access Code popped up in the middle of the screen.

  “How about a little space while I work my magic?” Ryan said, grinning. He was enjoying himself now, very much in his element.

  Jake moved over to the window and looked down into the street. Life seemed so ordinary out there. Snow settled. Snow swirled. People hurried by, heads down, hurrying to get out of the storm. It was hard to imagine there was a fight for control of the city going on right now on every corner, in every waking network and computer system, every banking system, air traffic control, anything and everything he could think of. It all just looked so normal, like any other winter night. Even the streetlights were coming back on.

  Behind him, Ryan rubbed at his face with one hand, staring at the display as if he could simply bludgeon it into submission with the sheer intensity of his will. He’d come prepared; this was his world. They didn’t need to have a folder labeled Secret Global Domination Plan. They could wrap themselves in a million levels of code and cyphers and protections. But this was Ryan’s domain. No matter how smart they were, he was smarter. He slipped something into one of the ports on the machine, cracked his knuckles as if about to start a piano symphony, and started typing.

  “Fuck,” Ryan said after a few seconds. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “What is it?”

  “Fuckers,” Ryan grunted, his hands moving fast across the keyboard. Then he slammed his fist on the table beside him and kicked the chair away from the terminal, making a lot more noise than Jake was happy with. “The fucking code’s optical.”

  “What? You mean like eyeball scanners?”

  Ryan grunted again, looking at Jake like he had just fallen out of the moron tree and hit every branch on the way down.

  Optical. He’d said it himself, a scanner. Not eyeballs though. Jake dug his phone back out of his pocket and scrolled through the recent messages to the last one, from Sophie, with the elaborate QR code embedded in it. She’d said it was a stone for fighting Goliath. “Like this?” he said, handing it over to Ryan.

  Ryan took it from him and angled the phone up at the computer’s webcam.

  Come on, Sophie, don’t let me down, Jake willed, staring at the screen while the pair of them waited for something to happen.

  There was a faint but audible click as the computer seemed to accept Sophie’s QR code and the regular desktop opened up for them.

  “And we’re in,” Ryan said. There was nothing fancy about the desktop, no secret Hidden logo on the screen like he’d have expected if Tom Cruise was playing his part on the big screen. Nothing like that at all.

  But Jake wasn’t watching the screen anymore. There was a photograph on the bookcase, three men fishing, shaking hands over a big catch. He recognized two of the three. One was the incumbent whiter-than-white president, who’d just been sworn into office; the other was Harry Kane.

  He didn’t know what to do with that. It had to be a coincidence, surely. That’s what two things were. It needed three things to be a pattern. But . . .

  “You need to see this,” Ryan said, pointing at something on the screen.

  The first time Jake read it, it made no sense. The second time scared the shit out of him.

  He read it three times. It had to be some sort of mistake. Wishful thinking by some seriously fucked-up mad men . . . some sort of Nietzschean superman crap.

  The documents were all there, the gruesome details of their plan, an itinerary that started with blowing up Fort Hamilton, then progressing through terror after terror to the moment Jake first spotted two of their foot soldiers inside Times Square. In addition to the stock exchange, the trunk lines, Port Authority, and Penn Station, they’d targeted air traffic control and the MTA itself, meaning his worst fears had been right—they were out to conquer New York. But there was so much more to it than that, or seemed to be. It wasn’t some bullet-point itinerary, it was photos, schematics, and other pieces of the sick puzzle.

  “This is some heavy shit,” Ryan said.

  “Can you search for something for me?”

  “Sure. Hit me.”

  “Harry Kane.”

  It took a couple of seconds to return a string of results revealing that Harry’s name was all over this system.

  Jake stared at the screen thinking: Why? But even before he could ask that aloud, he was asking a new question, a new name. “Sophie Keane?”

  Wordlessly Ryan ran another search and turned up another set of hits. Unfortunately, the files were all locked, and the QR code wasn’t offering up any more secrets. “They’re running some sort of cypher, 128-bit encryption. It’s tight.” He pointed at something on the screen. It took Jake a second to realize it was a single file that had been returned in both searches. It was a JPEG, a photograph of Harry and Sophie, only it said Cabrakan and Zaccimi. Code names.

  “Can you get into any of this stuff?”

  “Given time I can get into anything. You keep a lookout, make sure we’re not about to receive any visitors, I’ll do my thing here. What are we looking for?”

  “Proof. Something we can take to the cops. The military. Something we can use to bring these guys down.”

  “Ah, nothing easy then.”

  Jake crossed the room to the door. He wasn’t sure what the connection was between Sophie and Harry. He’d sat up late at night more than once, rolling ice around a tumbler of whiskey, lamenting the one that got away, with Harry nodding along sympathetically, never once mentioning that he’d met Sophie, and yet here they were, sharing a photograph on the billionaire murdering playboy’s computer servers.

  One of the only things he knew for sure about these two people, he realized, was that Harry Kane was old money. His parents were filthy rich, the wealth inherited from his parents, and their parents before the
m, going back generations. But just because he comes from money . . . Jake didn’t like the way his thoughts were going. Harry was a friend. He’d been a friend for a long time. He’d known the guy for the better part of fifteen years. Now, seeing his name on a file was enough for him to get the tar and feathers out?

  “Okay, got something,” Ryan said. “Kane’s personnel file, well, what passes for one in a crazy-ass cult. Says he was recruited by Zaccimi. That’s Sophie Keane. Lists his activities, places they’ve sent him, completed missions, that kind of thing.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Better you see it for yourself.”

  It felt like his entire world was being turned on its head. He’d come here expecting to find, what? Membership rosters? Instead he was looking at a list of assassinations. And that’s what they were, he was absolutely sure of it. Kills carried out by one of the men he’d always considered to be a close friend. The man he’d first turned to when he was searching for answers here. It was all in there, how he’d been approached by Zaccimi—Sophie—and how he’d been recruited. It was like he was some kind of sleeper agent for the CI-fucking-A waiting to be woken up and sent on a killing spree. “I can’t read this,” he said, but didn’t take his eyes from the screen. There were other names and events he recognized. Things that had been reported as tragedies. Accidents. And looking at this, he knew they were anything but. “Is it the same for Sophie?” he asked, already knowing it was. I’m not who you think I am.

  Ryan said nothing. He simply opened a series of surveillance photographs from Paris, time-stamped this morning. There was no mistaking what was going on. She’d been marked for execution. Harry Kane had been dispatched to kill her.

  Jake pushed through the photos, looking for verification that she was dead, but there was nothing. There was a photo of him in there too, taken as he crossed Zuccotti Park. Toward the back of the shots he came across photos of strange drawings, all of them a lot like the markings he’d seen the two men spray across the wall in Times Square.

  “Can you copy these?”

  “Sure,” Ryan said, dumping them onto the stick he’d plugged into the machine. “They important?”

  “Everything’s important right now until we know it’s not.”

  “Roger that.”

  Ryan was still copying across the last couple of images when the relative silence in the room was violently broken by a loud, grating sound that filled every inch of the old brownstone. The alarm was brutal.

  Their time was up.

  Chapter Thirty-SEVEN

  JAKE WAS ON HIS FEET AND AROUND THE DESK in a fraction of a second, Ryan two steps behind him, gun in hand.

  If they didn’t get out of there, it wouldn’t matter that Ryan had found a way into their system.

  Jake opened the door, but shut it again a split second later without managing so much as peeking around the doorjamb. Shadows moved across the hardwood floor. He wasn’t stupid enough to think these guys wouldn’t recognize him. They’d be all over him like a rash if they saw him. He was a marked man. He had been dragged into the middle of this by Sophie—as proven by that single photograph at Zuccotti Park.

  Right now it was kill or be killed. He wasn’t naïve enough to think there was a way out of this that didn’t involve blood.

  He had to think like them. He was in their place; this was familiar ground, they knew every inch of it. They knew all of the hiding places and escape routes. There was nowhere he could run they didn’t know about, including the door out of the basement into the abandoned tunnels. In their place, he’d do a grid search, making his way down the hallways one room at a time. He tried to think.

  He spotted a small flange on the doorknob and turned it carefully, locking the door. It wasn’t much and it wouldn’t stop them for long—they didn’t need to be subtle, they could just kick the door down.

  Then Jake realized he had inadvertently locked the two of them into a small inner room with no windows or other doors. He’d effectively trapped them.

  “What’s our goal here?” Ryan asked. “Beyond just getting out.”

  “Just getting out,” Jake replied. “Nothing beyond that.”

  “Not good enough,” Ryan said. “We get out of here, nothing’s changed. We’ve got a few photos, but these guys have got their own assassins, man. All we’ve done is paint targets on our backs.”

  “Strategic withdrawal.”

  “Now you sound like a fucking soldier boy. We need to hurt them. Hurt them bad. But the key, the main thing we need, really need, is insurance so they don’t come after us.” Ryan tapped his temple with the barrel of his gun. “That’s thinking.”

  “Right now I’m just thinking about keeping you alive.”

  There was a heavy lamp on the desk beside the computer, an old-fashioned brass light. Jake thought about using it as a makeshift weapon, yanking its cord free of the wall and wrapping it around his fist. It would have some heft to it. But Ryan was right—even if he hadn’t used these words—he was thinking like a victim. He’d taken the ceramic knife from the guy in the relay station—he could do a lot more damage with that. If he cut them, they would bleed. He’d have to get up close, which wouldn’t be easy given they were packing some serious heat. Still, he’d take a few of them with him before they cut him down. Maybe that’d buy Ryan the time he needed to get out.

  “I’m gonna get you out of here, and when you do, I want you to find a woman.”

  “I’ve got a woman, unless you’ve forgotten,” Ryan wisecracked.

  “Shut up and listen. Her name is Finn Walsh. She works up at Columbia. A lecturer. She knows what’s going on. Find her. Give her the USB. She needs to see those photos. Understood?”

  “Show her yourself.”

  “Just promise me.”

  “Fine.”

  They needed another way out, but this wasn’t some locked-room mystery. There was no secret panel in the wall that would pop open when Jake pulled the right book from the shelf.

  He peered around the room again, which wasn’t much to look at. He could just about stretch from wall to wall, touching both sides at once. Maybe with a sledgehammer he could pound his way through the wall. But there were two problems with that: one, no sledgehammer; the other, the noise. Jake slammed his hand against the wall in sheer frustration.

  “What you doing? They’ll hear you!”

  The dull thud echoed through the compact study and into the room beyond—then stopped. Jake repeated the strike, listening to the echo. Then he heard it: the sounds of outside—they were muted but unmistakable. He needed to somehow get into the room next door, even if they were five stories up.

  He stood with his back against the wall, staring at the door, expecting the handle to turn at any second. The incessant wailing of the alarm had spiraled to the kind of howl that would drive the dog packs in the neighborhood wild.

  They couldn’t just stand there waiting for the inevitable. He needed to do something, to be proactive, not reactive. So far he’d been reacting to adversity, trying to fix problems as they arose. Now he needed to be the problem. He needed to take the fight to them, like Ryan had suggested.

  “Give me the gun.”

  Ryan shook his head, but handed it over. A Beretta M9.

  Jake knew the gun well. Fifteen 9mm rounds in the clip. It had been a long time since he’d handled a weapon like this. Right now he hoped it was like riding a bike, something you didn’t forget. It wasn’t a standard M9, he realized, it was a General Officers Model, unique to the Army and Air Force. He didn’t want to know where Ryan had gotten his hands on it. He checked the firing pin block to make sure it wasn’t engaged, racked the slide, and moved to the door, ready to go out shooting.

  “Follow me. And don’t get yourself killed.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Jake opened the door and stepped out. There were two men in the corridor with their backs to him
. They must not have heard him banging on the wall above the screech of the alarm.

  Jake didn’t hesitate. There was no room for moralizing. He pulled the trigger, feeling the fierce recoil of the double-action, and put a bullet in the back of one man’s spine. The second managed to turn in time to take a bullet in the face. The impact blew out the back of his head.

  There was no hope of hiding now. Jake stepped over the corpses, going for the door as another black-clad foot soldier came charging up the wide arc of the staircase. His next shot took this guy in the kneecap, bringing him down like a felled tree, but it didn’t stop the soldier from trying to put a slug though Jake’s brain. Mercifully, the bullet whistled by his ear and bit into the plaster and ripped through masonboard wall. Standing over the man, Jake used another bullet to put him down.

  “Cold, dude,” Ryan barely breathed.

  “Shut up,” Jake said. He could hear more of them coming. He looked back at Ryan and gestured with two fingers toward the door.

  Ryan nodded and ran for door while Jake kept him covered.

  Jake stopped dead in his tracks after following Ryan through the door. He’d been expecting another quaint pseudo-Victorian gentleman’s lounge. This was anything but—they had stumbled upon a modern-day technological nerve center with two men trying unsuccessfully to duck behind the terminals. Jake immediately shot them both, then closed the door behind him.

  The room was deceptively large, with an array of screens against one wall that would have been fit for a Pentagon briefing room. They displayed a global map, targets and trajectories marked off and all sorts of other information he couldn’t understand with icons beside names like Xbalanque, Hunhau, Ixtab, Kauil, Cum Hau, and others. Jake saw names two he recognized, Cabrakan and Zaccimi.

  Zaccimi was the only name marked in red. Out of play. He didn’t know what the map meant beyond the obvious. There were two banks of monitors, a dozen on each. He thought for one terrible second that he had been mistaken and that there were no windows here because it was so dark in the room, but then he saw that they were blacked out.