She wasn’t going to let him get to her. He was an idiot. Instead she started to think about the call he’d tried to make to Harry.
Everything she’d seen suggested that electronics had gone haywire all over the world. There’d been plenty of speculation about terrorism, but there was no way one EMP was responsible. You’d have been talking dozens and dozens of detonations, spread out around the globe, happening simultaneously. The coordination that would have demanded was damn near impossible, and it couldn’t have taken out the trunk lines. The science didn’t work like that.
She shook her head. And what was Jake Carter’s role in all this? Did Harry have the answer? Was that why he’d risked her ire?
She forced herself to concentrate on the intellectual problem the failure of the trunk lines implied: What was capable of taking out global communication? Of sabotaging electronic devices across the world near simultaneously? And, of course, the natural follow-up question: Why was it happening now?
She needed to think about it all logically, and that meant starting with the core concepts. What did she know? The power had gone out, not the power grid, but power everywhere, in everything. No. Not everything, in everything new and unshielded. Older electronics weren’t all disabled, and shielded equipment like her computer was fine. Which of course explained the leap of logic that led to thinking about EMPs, disregarding the scale of detonation that would have demanded. The effect of a pulse was terminal; the detonation burned out the electronics in question. But she’d seen people around the campus using their cell phones—meaning this was temporary, not terminal.
It isn’t just the campus
,
or even the city,
she reminded herself. It was worldwide. Which meant surely it had to be natural, didn’t it? Some kind of global phenomenon?
Something stirred at the back of Finn’s mind; something she’d heard at a lecture a few years back. She sat with her head in her hands, trying to dredge through the memory. It had been a symposium on historical events and how they shaped language and other aspects of our culture. One of the speakers had been talking about significant natural events, things like the biblical flood and the formation of the Grand Canyon. She couldn’t remember his name, or the title of his talk, she wasn’t even sure of the name of the symposium, which didn’t help, but she knew where and when it had been held, give or take a month or two.
It was a place to start. Turning to her computer, Finn typed in search terms. If she could identify the symposium she could dig up a full program, and then narrow it down from there until she’d identified the speaker. Assuming he wasn’t some whack job, she was willing to bet his talk, or the foundation of it at least, would be available in an academic journal somewhere. Everything was online somewhere. That was the modern world.
She scanned the results her search returned, following a few of the links to dig deeper. It gave her something to focus on—a distraction from the man who’d just walked back into her life and then turned around and ran right back out of it as if his ass was on fire.
Fuck you, Jake Carter . . . just . . . fuck you . . .
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JAKE REACHED THE CORNER.
There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the building in front of him. It was a typical New York redbrick with retail space on the first floor and apartments up above. There was some stone at its base, offsetting the red brickwork, and art deco detailing around the windows, all stylized blades and notches and waves. The building stood away from others on the block. The view from here was mainly office buildings with very few vantage points high enough to look out over everything onto the water.
Looks could be deceptive.
When the Atlantic Telegraph Company installed their operation, they’d wanted something that looked dignified and prestigious, with plenty of space. Over the following century, Manhattan real estate would come at a premium. The land around the building had been bought and sold for ever-increasing profits over the years, but the relay station had remained.
Part of his job with the MTA involved keeping track of underground tunnels and old access points. There were still a lot of fiber-optic transatlantic trunk lines that ran into the city. When they’d gone in, the companies—and the government—had recognized the need to monitor them, converting some of the old cow tunnels and other preexisting tunnels that weren’t part of the burgeoning subway network into maintenance tunnels so they could keep an eye on things. Since the old relay station had been in good shape at the time, they’d simply added to its functionality, coupling it into the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the city. It made financial sense: why build a whole new office to do the same thing when you already had one available?
The shadow of the stock exchange didn’t quite stretch this far, but it came close, creeping up the blacktop. If the trunk lines had been sabotaged, this was where it had happened.
Jake froze in the middle of dismounting the stolen messenger bike: the relay center’s front door swung open and a group of men emerged. They were less than two hundred feet away. They hadn’t noticed him, and he wasn’t sticking around until they did. He ducked back out of direct line of sight. He counted nine men, all dressed in black. He couldn’t make out any details beyond the fact that they appeared to be carrying briefcases. No, he realized, not briefcases, toolboxes.
They moved with the same kind of military precision as the group he’d seen entering the stock exchange.
Not just entering, they died in the stock exchange,
he amended, reminding himself of the stakes. There was no way he was ever going to forget those few cold-blooded seconds that had snuffed out their lives.
The team walked in the opposite direction, away from him. Jake spat out a curse. He’d been right, but being right was no consolation prize; they’d beaten him here and done whatever it was they had to do. He was always at least one step behind them. Or three or four steps if he was being honest with himself.
There was a pattern here, a grand scheme of things they were working toward, but all he could see were a couple of threads that he kept pulling at. They’d hit the stock exchange network and the relay station. There had to be a connection between the two. What did they stand to gain by disabling the trunk lines? How did that fit in with the financial exchanges? Time and money.
The men turned and headed into the parking lot alongside the building. Jake rolled quickly down the sidewalk after them, stopping just shy of the portico that ran all the way to the building’s edge. He had a view of the parking lot. It wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the chance of them seeing him. Any closer and the risk of being spotted rose exponentially.
The team clambered into the rear of a gray minivan parked on the outermost edge of the lot, next to a lamppost. The engine rumbled to life—obviously shielded just like the killer’s motorcycle had been. Two of the team held back, ushering the others inside. One of the two turned slightly, looking his way. Jake didn’t dare so much as flinch, knowing that any kind of movement would only draw the guy’s eye. There was a glint of metal on the guy’s shoulder, right near the collar. It was too far away to make out any kind of detail. The second guy shifted, following the direction of his partner’s stare.
Jake tensed. There was no mistaking the killer’s face, even from a distance. He had his connection.
Jake watched the man pull a pistol from a sheath behind his back tucked under his coat. He knew what was coming. The man beside him did the same. Both guns had the long silhouette of silencers on their barrels. They nodded to each other, finishing their visual sweep of the surrounding street, and turned as if to duck into the van with their team.
The noise barely carried.
Jake didn’t need to hear the suppressed shots, he heard the slump of bodies against the panels of the minivan, and the grunts of the dead as their lives were brutally silenced.
It took two seconds flat to finish shooting and close the doors on the corpses.
There was nothing Jake could have done to save any of them—and it wasn’t his place to. He wasn’t naïve enough to think the dead men were angels. They’d gone into the relay center with their eyes open, no doubt promised riches in return for their expertise. If they believed, maybe they’d get their reward in heaven.
Jake tasted the bile in the back of his throat. He hunkered down, unable to look away, but not dumb enough to risk drawing attention to himself. At least not yet.
Watching people being executed was becoming a bad habit. He was one guy, unarmed, against two killers. He’d bleed out in the street before he made it halfway across the no-man’s-land between the relay station and the minivan. Besides, there was no point in being a hero for a bunch of dead men.
That was the cold hard truth.
They were dead; Jake joining them wouldn’t help anyone. The only thing he could do now was watch. Whatever these guys were up to, it was worth killing their own people for. That made it something Jake
wanted
to know all about. He was contrary like that.
The first man turned, and for a second he and Jake locked gazes. He could tell by the way the killer’s eyes widened then narrowed that he recognized Jake.
The killer raised his gun.
Jake spun back behind the building’s edge as brick chips spat from the wall.
Three shots. Not that he was counting. He was too busy trying to stay alive.
He heard running feet—the two shooters covering the parking lot in seconds. He didn’t have a lot of choices, or time to make a plan. He couldn’t retreat, the block was too long and he’d be offering them his back. The only thing he could do was tackle them head-on and hope the stupidity of it saved his life. Speed and surprise were the only things he had going for him.
Jake powered out of the alcove, pedaling frantically, eyes straight ahead, desperate to get to the other side of the street and disappear between the buildings before the devil knew he was dead. He passed within a few feet of the men, but the gamble paid off: they hadn’t counted on him being stupid enough to turn on them.
They fired again. He didn’t feel anything so he didn’t slow down. It was as simple as that. If the bullet wasn’t punching him out of the saddle he wasn’t getting off the bike. He gritted his teeth and kept on pedaling hard, expecting a bullet to slam into his spine any second.
It didn’t.
He couldn’t hear them coming after him. Jake turned left, swerving around a half-parked UPS truck, then swiveled around to put himself between it and an abandoned station wagon, dismounting and ducking down to stay out of sight. He waited.
It only took a couple of seconds, but then he heard it: the one sound that up until this morning was so ubiquitous with city life it was simply background noise, part of the lifeblood of New York like the steam venting from the sidewalk drains, but now stood out as brutally as a gunshot—the roar of a car engine.
A small sports car turned into the street. It couldn’t go very fast because of the other vehicles littering the road like blood clots in the arteries of Manhattan.
They were hunting him.
Jake edged back a couple of steps as the car’s hood came into view opposite him, retreating behind the UPS truck. He kept the high-sided vehicle between him and the killers as he walked the bike around the back of the truck, which put him behind enemy lines.
The absence of gunfire meant they hadn’t seen him.
He was under no illusion as to how it would go down. No questions. He was a loose end, even if he didn’t know anything. He’d been seen at two of their engagements, which was enough to make it
seem
like he knew what the fuck was going on. Under the rules of engagement that was pretty much a death sentence.
The noise of the engine grew gradually fainter as their search took them farther along Water Street.
He was in the clear.
* * *
A flash of light saved his life.
The glint reflected off the UPS truck’s side mirror. It was all the warning he needed.
Jake threw himself off the bike, hitting the ground hard as the bullet that had been meant for his head shattered the mirror instead, detonating in a spray of metal and glass.
He scrambled forward and looked up to see the killer from the stock exchange astride his motorbike. They’d faked him out. His partner in the sports car was nothing more than a decoy to lure him out as it passed. And he’d fallen for it.
Jake abandoned all thoughts of the bike and dashed back around the corner of the truck, using it as a shield.
He tried the door, praying it was unlocked. There was nothing obvious inside he could use as a weapon or a shield. There was an umbrella, a metal lunch box—admittedly built like a brick—and a handheld scanner the UPS guys used to record signatures. It wasn’t much, but Jake grabbed all three.
The windshield shattered above him, raining glass down across his back. Jake pulled back out of the truck but there was nowhere to turn.
The killer was there, waiting for him, the cold dead eye of his gun aimed squarely at his face.
Instinctively, Jake hurled the scanner as hard as he could. It arced high, spinning in the air. It was a distraction, the sudden movement drawing the killer’s eyes for a split second. But the gun never wavered; so much for the fake-out.
Jake threw the lunch box. It caught the gunman square in the forehead just as his eyes darted back to Jake. He staggered backward a single step but didn’t drop the gun.
Jake stood there, a dead man, waiting for the hammer to fall.
The gunman fired twice, blood in his eyes . . . and somehow missed.
He heard the car turning, drawn by the gunfire.
Two against one, without a pot to piss in, he wasn’t exactly writing himself a glowing epitaph. Still, there were worse ways to die.
He faced his killer.
Ready.
“Do it,” he challenged the man. “Kill me. Because if you don’t I
will
kill you.” They were hollow words from a hollow man.