by Matt Rogers
‘That’s what she just asked me.’
‘Well…?’
King turned to Gavin. ‘I know what you did. I might not be the smartest with tech, but I understand people.’
Gavin stared.
King said, ‘What makes them tick.’
Gavin kept staring.
King said, ‘That cartel kid, Rico. The other kid, Samuel. You. It’s all the same, isn’t it?’
Gavin’s look was blank.
King said, ‘You’re disenfranchised. You thought you had it all. Then you realised money and power can go away like that,’ — he snapped his fingers — ‘and there was nothing left underneath. Here’s the thing you missed, kid.’
King pulled him in close.
‘You need to figure yourself out before you go out there and try to own the world. Otherwise you’re just an empty shell when you don’t get everything you want. And that’s when shit like this happens, when you decide to throw it all away and bring everyone down with you.’
King shoved him toward the stairwell.
‘For a smart kid,’ he said, ‘you really don’t have anything figured out.’
73
Slater remained in the background, and suddenly it all clicked.
‘Oh,’ he said.
King turned around.
Slater said, ‘I get it now.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You really think you can talk them out of it?’
‘I can try.’
They made their way up four flights of stairs, plunging back into the dark. Dawn had broken, and now the whole building was shrouded in the ethereal pale blue light that comes before the rising sun, but the windowless stairwell was devoid of the light. So it was back to shadow and paranoia and uncertainty. Slater swept every tight corner as King kept a tight grip on Gavin, making sure the kid didn’t run off.
But both of them knew he wouldn’t.
Just as King had predicted, Gavin Whelan had nothing left. They’d labelled him a kid, but in reality he was a thirty year old man with all the potential in the world, who’d chosen to use it to cause as much destruction as possible when the world hadn’t handed him everything. And that was the cardinal sin. In Slater’s eyes, that was the weakest act imaginable.
Caving in as soon as the going gets tough.
Giving up on all of it.
Trying to bring it down with you in your misery.
He couldn’t relate, and he never would. For over a decade he’d been unshakeable, precisely for this reason. It was a slippery slope. Compromise on your morals once, and you’ve set the precedent. You’ve opened the floodgates. Gavin had never had morality to begin with, or mental toughness, or grit. He thought he was tough, thought he could reach out and seize anything he wanted, but when he realised the world hadn’t been set up to please him, he’d crumbled.
Slater vowed never to break. Never to fall into that kind of despair.
He’d fight against it until the day he died.
He knew King was the same.
Maybe that’s why they were brothers.
Rage against the dying of the light.
74
They reached the sixth floor, and Gavin led them down corridors festering with rot and decay.
It seemed this section of the building hadn’t been touched in years, and age had eaten away at most of the decorative features. The aesthetic cedar log walls had termite-ridden holes in them, and the carpet was torn up in places, and the general stink of uncleanliness hung thick and heavy in the air. There were rooms branching off from the corridors with windows facing the Bowery, and a sliver of the dawn light crept in, but not much. Not enough to shed the gloomy atmosphere.
Slater stifled a shiver as they reached the end of the corridor and turned into an antechamber room that led to a giant steel vault. The antechamber was a narrow space with wood-panelled floors and a window to the right — one small piece of the left-hand façade of the bank building. He glanced outside and saw the intersection in the murky blue light, the sea of abandoned cars, the bodies still sprawled in the street, Alexis’ building across from them.
Then he turned back to the vault.
It was old, but he imagined it was just as impenetrable as when it had been built.
The old-fashioned cylindrical door was firmly sealed.
Beside it rested a newer keypad.
Gavin thumbed in an eight-digit sequence, and a mechanical hiss emanated from the door.
It didn’t swing open, but it was unlocked.
‘So,’ Gavin said, ‘what do you think?’
Slater and King froze.
They both read his tone.
There was something in his voice they hadn’t anticipated.
The burning desire for approval.
Slater stepped forward and took Gavin away from King, putting the MP7 barrel against his stomach to ensure he stayed put. Then he said, ‘Let me tell you something.’
Gavin stiffened.
Slater said, ‘I get it. I get why you did it. All your life you’ve been undermined by your family, but you were always capable. You’re smart, you’re efficient, you understand persuasion, you understand how to get what you want. But you were never able to use it. Maybe you didn’t have the social skills, maybe you just couldn’t put it together at the right time, but you were typecast as a spoiled brat and you never shed that reputation. So you were angry. Then you lost what little respect you had in the first place when your family fell apart. So, yes, I can see how that led to this. You thought, “Fuck it, I’ll bring the whole world down with me.” You saw a flaw in the system and you recruited people who were the same as you. Probably in their early twenties, probably incredibly smart, probably unemployed. Kids with the same ego complex as you. Who thought they were smarter than everyone else but never had anything to show for it. Kids who’ve sat at their computers for twelve hours a day for their entire childhood, who taught themselves everything about the digital world to compensate for their misery in the real world. Am I right?’
‘Yeah,’ Gavin mumbled, staring at the floor.
‘You used every trick in the book to convert them. I can see how you might have done it. They already hated this country for denying them opportunities. They thought they were brilliant, and they probably were, but not in every way. So, deep down, they despised society, and you tapped into that. You convinced them that it’s better off being ripped apart. You made them extremists, and they’re too young to know any different. They’ve spent all their lives inside with computers, and they don’t understand people. So you fed them your bullshit until they bought it hook, line, and sinker. They’re sitting in that vault now, probably imagining this whole thing is a giant game. They’ve got no hope for the future, just like you.’
Slater could tell he’d struck a nerve.
Gavin stood there, his psyche laid bare, his closest secrets revealed.
The kid thought he was a manipulative genius.
Really, he was just a piece of shit.
Slater said, ‘Maybe you feel bad now that someone else has realised what you’re up to. Maybe you’re hoping you could take it all back.’
Gavin shrugged, and then gave the faintest hint of a phantom nod.
Maybe hoping Slater and King couldn’t see his shame.
But they did.
‘Too bad,’ Slater said. ‘Dozens of people died tonight at the very least. Think about the home care patients who need their machines to survive. And that’s just scratching the surface. If the looting gets worse, it’ll turn violent. It’ll be man on man. And if we didn’t come, you would have relished it.’
Gavin said, ‘Wait. Let me come in with you. Maybe I can—’
‘You crushed your hopes earlier, Gavin,’ King said. ‘You told us yourself. They won’t listen to you.’
Gavin went mute.
He opened his mouth to say something.
Slater realised he didn’t care.
He pulled the trigger.
Put two shots into Gavin’s gut, and then backed him up to the window and threw him into it with enough force to crack the pane. Instead of cleanly breaking into a million pieces like the movies, the pane splintered and cracked, throwing huge jagged shards everywhere, and Gavin tumbled over the lip and fell six stories to the pavement below.
Slater peered down to confirm the results.
They were as to be expected.
75
Slater leant back inside and stared at the vault door.
Apprehension fell over them both.
King said, ‘Now for the hard part.’
‘You think they’ll be armed?’
‘I doubt it,’ King said. ‘If they are, it won’t be much trouble.’
‘But we don’t want to scare them.’
‘No,’ King said. ‘We don’t.’
‘How do we play this?’
King thought it over. ‘You know how to cut through to the core. But I don’t think that’s what we need right now.’
‘I agree.’
‘Let me do the talking.’
‘And if you can’t convince them?’
‘There’s always the finger breaking method.’
Slater shook his head. ‘You said it yourself. It won’t work on them. They’re like Samuel, only it’s not an act. Samuel was crazy, but he did care about his own life. These kids stopped giving a shit about their own wellbeing a long time ago.’
‘Then let’s hope I’m persuasive,’ King said.
‘You know what happens if it doesn’t work, right?’
‘Yeah.’
King shivered, and steeled himself. He wasn’t usually nervous in the heat of combat. There were too many variables, too much chaos, to truly be able to pay attention to everything. Now, in the quiet of the antechamber, he could feel his heart thumping, his head pounding, his blood running cold.
If he chose the wrong words, he would fail eight million people, maybe more.
If there was ever a time to be flawless, it was now.
He held his MP7 at waist height, the barrel angled forward, but emptied as much aggression from his posture as he could manage. The gun was a precaution in case one of the kids was sitting in there pointing a pistol at the door, but he didn’t think it would be necessary.
He took one step forward, gripped the thick steel handle of the vault door, and eased it open.
76
Slater loitered, opting to go in behind King.
For good reason.
He reminisced on their last two operations and how they’d both ended. Here, he’d broken Gavin Whelan, making the man realise the gravity of his own mistakes, and crushed his soul in the process. If Slater hadn’t killed him, Gavin might have killed himself, which is exactly what happened in Nepal. Aidan Parker, an ex-black operations coordinator and future presidential candidate, had gotten his own daughter killed in a ludicrous plot to acquire funding for his campaign. Slater had highlighted, piece by piece, the devastation he’d brought to his own family, and Parker couldn’t handle the scathing words. Slater had tossed a gun at his feet, and Parker had done what was necessary. Slater hadn’t pressured him into it. The man had simply broken.
Slater knew he had a way with words. He could cut deep. But he recognised his own flaws. He despised the scum of the earth. He was harsh when he spoke to them, and he didn’t have a great deal of restraint.
Restraint was needed here.
In spades.
King could do that. He’d always been the purer of the pair, somehow managing to avoid the temptations of drink and drugs to suppress his blood-drenched memories. Here, he could speak to whoever they faced with tact, with level-headedness, with the persuasion that was needed.
Slater wasn’t so pure. Slater wasn’t so noble.
And he was fine with that.
King stepped inside the vault, and Slater followed. It was a long, wide, tall space with every square inch of the walls taken up by the framework of safe deposit boxes. The boxes had been gouged out long ago, creating a U-shaped skeleton to house a dizzying array of computer towers. There were dozens of them at the minimum, all see-through containers sporting state-of-the-art CPUs within. Fans inside the towers kept all the gear cooled, and for good reason. Slater estimated he was looking at millions of dollars worth of technology. He hadn’t seen gear like this since…
Well, since a few hours ago.
It rivalled Violetta’s team’s setup — in fact, it trumped it. He wouldn’t have a clue where to start deciphering the labyrinth puzzle, and he knew that even if Violetta had people who did know, they wouldn’t achieve a thing.
He was proven correct with the first words the occupants uttered.
A gangly kid with thinning hair dyed jet black said to King, ‘Put that gun down, man. It won’t do you any good here.’
King said, ‘Won’t it?’
‘If you take this place by force, you’ll stay locked out. We planned for that. You ain’t got a hope in hell of cracking the ciphers.’
There were only four of them, the oldest no more than twenty-five. They were practically hunchbacked from spending so much time at their desks.
Three boys, one girl.
The boys rail-thin, the girl soft and flabby. They all shared characteristics — hollow cheekbones, gaunt complexions, glassy eyes. None of them were armed. None of them had even bothered to resist. They sat in swivel chairs with muted, placid demeanours, almost like they barely registered the two enormous soldiers who’d just stepped foot in their lair.
The eyes haunted Slater. There were only a couple of bulbs overhead to illuminate the space, and it seemed to accentuate the deadness of their gazes. There was no hope in them, possibly worse than Samuel, worse than Gavin.
They were disenfranchised, with nothing left to care about, nothing left to strive for.
The living dead.
Slater shivered.
He’d fought terrorists, mercenaries, rogue operatives.
Nothing had put him out of his depth like this.
King looked at the guy who’d spoken — the one with the dyed hair. He said, ‘I know.’
He put his MP7 on the floor.
Slater followed suit.
The girl said, ‘What happens now?’
‘Who do you think we are?’ King said.
The guy with the dyed hair said, ‘Negotiators, probably.’
‘No,’ King said. ‘If I was a negotiator I’d have a mental checklist ready to go. I’d have bullet points to hit. I’d try to warm you up with some calm talking points, and then I’d slowly transition to what I really wanted. But I’m not going to do any of that, because I’ve got no plan.’
The boy’s gaze lingered on King’s physique. ‘You going to try and beat us into submission? That’s what you people do, isn’t it?’
‘Sometimes,’ King said. ‘But I’m not going to do that here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it wouldn’t work. You’ve probably planned for that, too. If we started hurting you, you’d have a series of commands to execute that would make it look like you’d pulled the code out of the control stations. But, really, it’d just be a smokescreen, to make us ease off the pressure. You probably have a dozen different backup plans. Right?’
Slater was impressed that King understood.
The kid slowly nodded. He said, ‘You’re not going to get us to reverse this. No chance.’
‘What do you know about the people who recruited you?’
The girl gave a sadistic smile. ‘Whatever you say, mister, it’s not going to work. You’re staying locked out.’
The boy said, ‘In the back of your head, you’ve got a failsafe, right? You think, if you can’t convince us to reverse this, you can bring us in and maybe torture can make us sing.’
King didn’t answer.
The boy said, ‘We have a failsafe, too. You put one finger on us, and—’
He parted his lips, and bared his teeth, and Slater saw a clear pill with a
dark green core.
His heart stopped in his chest.
King said, ‘Is that cyanide?’
The other three kids bared their teeth, too, exposing three more pills.
The boy said, ‘We’re the only ones who know the ciphers. They’re in our heads. Not a single other person in this whole operation has them, which I guess doesn’t matter, seeing that you probably killed them all to get here. But if we’re out of the picture… well, everyone stays locked out for good. You’ll have to build a whole new power grid over the old one. How long do you think that’ll take? How many people you think’ll die?’
Slater thought, Holy shit.
77
Outwardly, King gave no reaction.
Inwardly, he panicked harder than he ever had before.
Four bites was all that separated New York from thousands and thousands of deaths.
He said, ‘I get it.’
The boy said, ‘Good.’
‘I still want an answer to my question.’
‘What question?’
‘What do you know about the people who recruited you?’
‘Some crime family, I guess.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Who cares? They were just the bankroll. What’s done is done. They gave us what we needed to pull this off. Lined it all up for us and let us knock it out of the park. And it was glorious. I mean, it was nice they hated this country just as much as we do, but in the end that doesn’t really matter.’
‘The Whelans don’t hate America.’
‘Yes, they do. They hate the Western propaganda machine that suppresses the masses and dulls the minds of—’
‘Trust me, they don’t. They hate us.’
Silence.
The boy said, ‘You and your friend there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘We’re the reason all this happened.’
‘No. We are.’
‘You might think that, but the Whelans put you to work. And we infuriated the Whelans.’
‘They said something, once,’ the boy said. ‘I thought it was a joke, but Gavin seemed pretty serious. He said they used to be kings.’