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?”
“Yes, Mr. Alom.”
“Good. That wasn’t too difficult, was it?”
“No, Mr. Alom.”
“Now listen carefully, we have reason to believe there is a new player on the field, brought in by Miss Keane and operating in New York. As of yet we haven’t worked out who, precisely, he is, or what role she hopes he will play, beyond being a random integer inserted into the equation. It is possible they have been colluding for some time. That makes him unpredictable. I do not like unpredictable things. Hunhau is currently dealing with this inconvenience, but it behooves us to be aware that she may have reached out to others since arriving in London. Miss Keane is nothing if not industrious. You don’t get to live this long in her game without being good at what you do.”
“Understood.”
“Xbalanque is on her way in from Berlin to support your action.”
“Unnecessary, we have everything under control here.”
“I’m quite sure you do, Cabrakan, but it is better to be safe than sorry, as the old adage goes. I would much prefer overkill to no kill at all.”
There was an insulted silence on the other end of the line.
“Twenty-three hundred hours Zulu time, Ixtab and Kauil will make their move.”
“We will be ready, Mr. Alom.”
“I am relying upon you.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You just did.”
Again, prickly silence. The assassin gathered himself, knowing this was dangerous ground. “Do you believe any of this shit you’re peddling? I mean . . . all these names, this Mayan gods crap, it’s all for the cameras, isn’t it? You don’t really believe this stuff, do you? Like the Scientologists, right? You know it’s all a pile of bullshit?”
“Let me be quite clear about this: what I know and what I believe are not your concern.”
“I just mean . . . it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s the kind of thing that has conspiracy theorists pissing in their pants.”
“I take it you do not believe?”
“You take that right.”
“And still you fight for our cause?”
“The money’s right.”
“Ah, yes, the money. What about faith?”
“I have no faith. I don’t believe in anything I do not know to be provably true. You cannot sell me on your religion because without faith it falls apart, and faith means believing in something you can’t possibly know.”
“Quite the philosopher, for an assassin.”
“I spend a lot of time alone with my thoughts,” the killer said without any irony.
“And if I were to tell you that we have proof?”
“Of these old gods of yours? I wouldn’t believe you. I’d be crazy to.”
“Indeed. But surely you cannot deny that there are things in this world we do not understand.”
“And those gray places are where your gods lie?”
“Not my gods, no, my answers.”
“Answers?”
“There are no gods, my friend, not old, not new. There are no great old ones in the stars looking down. The sum of all, the only thing scattered among the dust, is knowledge. There is no magic. There is no
power
. There is no supernatural. It is all about knowledge. With knowledge you can shape the world. How you come about that knowledge is irrelevant. How you present it to the masses, what dog-and-pony show you decide to put on, doesn’t matter. All that matters is the knowledge itself and how you exploit it. So yes, where you see gods, I see answers. How do you think I knew to plan and then to act?”
“You knew it was going to happen?”
“I knew it was going to happen,” Mr. Alom affirmed. “And that, my friend, is magic.”
“How did you know? How could you know when the rest of the world didn’t?”
“Market research.”
“Bullshit.”
“Careful, young man. I do not appreciate being spoken to with such obvious disrespect.”
“You’re not being straight with me.”
“Oh, but I am. I have given you the answers you are looking for. That you do not understand them is not down to my shortcomings, but rather your own. It is all business at the end of the day.”
“What the fuck
are
you people?”
“The winners,” the voice said. “And that makes us the ones who write the history of the world.”