Christian shook his head. “What’s going on is a natural process and once we’re past the initial stages things should settle down.”
“The lights will come back on?”
“Pretty much. Obviously a lot of stuff’s been damaged, but . . .” He shrugged as if to say that was better than nothing. His coworkers were already returning to their discussion about how to get their equipment functioning.
“Do me a favor. If you find anything out, let me know, okay?”
“I will. Definitely,” he promised.
His smile was sweet. Pity she wasn’t into good guys.
She left him to it, head full of questions, and moved back down the stairs and across the campus toward Schermerhorn.
Back on her floor, Finn was already thinking about the iconography of one particular symbol which she’d just seen painted on a wall as she’d crossed the campus. She was about to go back for a second look when someone called her name. She turned to see Debbie Caulfield waving her over to the break room. Debbie was short and round and could have been called dumpy, but she usually made up for it with a dazzling smile. She didn’t look happy. She looked frightened.
“What’s up?” Finn asked, detouring to join her in the break room. “You okay? You don’t look it.”
The shorter woman nodded. “Yeah.” She blinked a couple of times. For a moment Finn thought she was going to cry.
“What is it, Deb?”
“I . . . before . . . I was attacked.”
“What happened?”
The woman was shaking. “I saw someone coming out of your office. I thought he was a friend of yours, but when I said hi he slammed me into the wall and bolted.”
“Oh Jesus . . . you’re okay, right?”
“Shaken up, but mainly it’s just wounded pride.”
Finn nodded, taking her hand. “He’s no friend of mine, believe me.” She recounted her own run-in with the stranger. “It looked like someone had messed with my computer. I guess you just confirmed it. We should call the cops.”
“Campus security? Fat lot of good those idiots are.” Debbie managed a wan smile.
“No, the real cops.”
“And tell them what? That someone shoved me into a wall? I can just imagine how that’ll play with them given what’s going on out there.”
She had a point. The cops wouldn’t prioritize a break-in on campus where nothing appeared to be missing. They’d say it was a job for the clowns at campus security to clean up. She didn’t trust those bozos to organize an orgy in a brothel.
Bozos in brothels brought her thoughts around in a creepy sort of way to sex, which in turn brought her back to Jake. He still hadn’t called back. She hoped he would, soon. She had a lot to tell him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HE WAS IN WAY OVER HIS HEAD.
He needed someone to help him see beyond the accumulation of portents and weird shit that pointed toward some sort of fire-and-brimstone Armageddon, because that wasn’t what was really going on.
The first person that came to mind was the last person he actually
wanted
to speak to.
She picked up on the second ring. “Finn Walsh, Art and Archaeology.”
“Hey.” He paused a second, not really sure how intimate you were supposed to sound with a woman who’d no doubt made voodoo dolls to stick pins in your cock. “It’s Jake.”
“Thank god! Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Yeah, I’m good. It’s been a really weird day.
Really
weird. I was going to call, but . . .” He let it hang.
“Tell me about it.”
He took her literally and did exactly that, got it all off his chest, the whole story, from hearing about Fort Hamilton to the guys who’d blown up the Times Square station, the graffiti he kept seeing, the men dead men at the stock exchange, and the fight in the relay station. Including the bodies that were maybe an hour from going into rigor, eyes wide open but glazed over and the blood staining the cement beneath them. All of it. He even told her about Sophie’s call that started the whole thing off, and how that had led him to Harry, and eventually back into her life.
“I don’t even know how to respond to that,” she said after he’d finished. There was no humor in her voice. Shock.
He knew how she felt. He’d lived through it and he still didn’t know how the hell he was supposed to be reacting to these things. He was just focused on going forward.
“Weird doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she went on. “They must have known this was going to happen. They couldn’t react this fast otherwise. And the gas masks. They must have known somehow.” And then she told him the little she’d figured out about the polar shifts and how that would have disrupted the earth’s magnetic fields, how birds needed those to fly and how that disruption could account for a lot of the end-of-the-world portents they’d been seeing. He listened, taking it all in, without interrupting her.
Jake let that information settle in. “This is a purely natural process? Are the poles going to shift back again anytime soon?”
“Not for several thousand years,” she said.
“Right. Okay. So. They knew,” he said. “I don’t know how they knew, but they did. They knew the poles were going to shift, and they knew what it would do to the electronics when they did, and they were in place to act fast. That takes serious resources.” He was thinking fast, trying to process it all.
“You really think these guys are trying to take control of the city? I mean, if they’re already that powerful why would they need to move against an entire system that’s already set up for them to profit?” Which was a good question. “That’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it? Security, finances, communications? It’s like they’re going to war.” She broke off, but before he could say anything she added, “The roads are already screwed up, but it’s got to be transportation next, doesn’t it?”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. She was sharp. She might not be a soldier, or have that kind of background, but she understood strategy and was more than capable of connecting the dots.
He nodded. “They already blew the Times Square station—that’s enough to bring the subway to a halt for twenty-four hours, easily, and just the threat of more bombs, saran gas, anything like that, one more explosion and it’ll be down completely. But that’s internal, it’s all on the island. If we’re thinking like military minds, they’d want to cut off external access to Manhattan until they’ve finished whatever it is they’re doing.”
“Airports and trains? LaGuardia,” she said immediately. “And JFK. And, oh fuck me . . . Penn. Grand Central. Port Authority. Oh god, can you imagine how many people are there now?”
He could. He’d been thinking about nothing else since the notion had first occurred to him back at the relay station. “And Newark, it’s too close to leave untouched. They can’t risk it, it’s like leaving the back door open. But yeah, we’re on the same page. It’s what I’d do if I were heading up a military op.” He shook his head. “Thing is, these guys are good. They’re efficient. Their strike teams are working to a timetable, no room for error, so they’re already in place in at least one of those sites. There’s no way I can stop all of them.”
“You could call the cops,” she suggested, but the problem was the cops were too busy with immediate threats to worry about some perceived one, and he had no real evidence to support his claims apart from a stack of corpses. And those would only lead to the wrong kinds of questions first. The kind he really didn’t have a good answer for. Who was going to believe stories about shadowy figures going around trying to subvert the city’s essential systems? It was straight out of
Conspiracy Theories for Dummies
.
“They’re not going to listen,” he said.
“You were in the Army, right? What about your old CO? There must be someone you could call who’d remember you. Give them your name rank and number so they know you’re legit, then tell them what you’ve stumbled onto?”
“Might work,” he admitted, but in truth he couldn’t see himself getting beyond a switchboard somewhere and then being consigned to the crank calls department of Couldn’t Give a Fuck HQ. It wasn’t as if he was some Purple Heart hero. “I’m gonna head to Penn Station,” he told her. Of all the targets this one was closest. “I’ve got to do something.”
“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.