Christopher Brookmyre (6 page)

'Also known as the mess, I'd wager,' he remarked drily. The strip lights overhead flickered briefly as she took a seat at one of the machines.

'Smooth,' Bett noted approvingly. He meant the near-seamless switch to auxiliary power just effected somewhere below them by Som and Armand. If the main power went down, there was an average three-second delay before the back-up systems kicked in, which would be enough to put even this sorry mob on alert that something was amiss. Their trick was to bring the auxiliary power online first and make the transfer before killing the main grid.

'Very,' Lex agreed. It hadn't even rebooted any of the PCs, which made a change. The corollary of Murphy's Law dictated that she
wasn't
midway through an elaborate script the one time a power switch
didn't
crash the computers. Lex restarted the blank one, then glided in her chair along the edge of the long desk, nudging mice to bring the rest of the screens back to life.

'I want the duty roster for tonight, Alexis,' Bett announced, looking at his watch. 'And we're going to need it in approximately two minutes plus injury time.'

'Yes, sir,' she answered with genuine enthusiasm, though not for Bett's request. The machines all had users logged on so that if anyone checked the records it would look like they'd been working - and one of them had highlevel security clearance. The roster was located in seconds. There was no need to share this with Bett quite yet, however, so she had a brief window of plausible hacking time while she ostensibly 'retrieved' his request. Instead, she went straight to the access setting and killed the maglocks on all the security doors, then jacked in her USB stick and ran a probe through the network in search of her target.

'Sir, it's Nuno,' whispered a voice in one ear. 'We have recce'd the mess. Six guards and three, I think, lab techs. One plasma screen, one Champions League match in progress, two cases Amstel beer. Nice to see them getting into the spirit with a named sponsor. Are we good to go?'

'This is Armand. We are good to go, awaiting command.'

'The order is on your command, Nuno,' Bett advised. 'But let's give them until the final whistle. Unfair not to let them find out how it ends.'

'You're all heart, sir. Too kind sometimes.'

'I know. Hang on, how many did you say? Nine?'

'I can't be sure. Using the mirror, I couldn't see all angles. But nine at least.'

Lex knew what he was thinking. It was Rebekah's first mission. She held her breath. Opportunity might be about to knock if Bett opted to go help out.

'Could do with another gun to be on the safe side,' he said. Oh please, oh please. 'Alexis, you got that roster yet?'

Shit.

She was past the point of no return regards sneaking around behind his back, but she wasn't ready to lie to his face yet. Especially not when it was lying about a small thing that was most suspicious if you got rumbled.

'Printing it now, sir.'

He looked it over, nodding, as it wafted from the printer.

'Get upstairs to the mess. And don't stop to smell the roses. Go.'

Damn it.

She grabbed the memory stick from the USB port as she got up, daring a glance at Bett to see whether he had noted this. He wasn't watching, still toggling through security cameras. What was he looking for?

Injury time, he'd said. He was referring to the end of the soccer game the guards were watching, but it was both literal and metaphorical in this instance. 'Injury time' was the term they used when they were tight up against the clock but didn't know exactly how long they had left. No one knew precisely when the referee would blow the final whistle. Lex charged up a staircase with greater concern for haste than stealth, then found herself barrelling down more corridors, Nuno giving her a running commentary of directions as she went.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
, she thought, wryly. Hacker-speak for lost and confused, recalling a phrase from early, text-only adventure games.

Nuno warned her she was getting close, so she traversed the last corridor silently, the sound of the soccer game and accompanying anxious shouts at the TV spilling from the nearby mess. Nuno and Rebekah were crouched on the near side, weapons ready.

Lex approached the doorway and gestured with her mirror to indicate that she was taking a look for herself. She could go sight unseen into a tiny hut with two guys in it, but nine targets in a large room meant she needed a firsthand take on the layout. The plasma screen was against the right-hand wall at ninety degrees to the corridor, the targets sitting around in two rows: one on aluminium chairs, the other behind, and more elevated on tables. Unused chairs had jackets thrown over them, holstered guns resting on other table tops next to the beer crates. It was midweek party night. On the far wall, at the end nearer the TV, was a long panel of sliding shutters. The assembly sounded increasingly anxious, calling encouragement in near-despairing tones. Time was running out, in more ways than they knew. Lex withdrew and took her place alongside her companions. Nuno got to his feet.

'On my command,' he whispered, standing up.

Lex gestured to hold.

'Did you see those shutters?' she asked.

'We tried,' Nuno replied. 'No access.'

'Not any more,' she assured him.

'Okay, cool. Let's go.'

Thirty seconds later they were in position inside the kitchen, standing behind the canteen's serving hatch.

'Stand by, Armand,' Nuno ordered, pulling down his night goggles. Lex and Rebekah followed suit.

'Standing by,' came the response.

Three whistles sounded from the other side of the sliding shutters, accompanied by cries of deep disappointment. Time to put them out of their misery.

'Go.'

There was no panic when the lights went out, which was helpful. There were groans and ironic cheers in response, suggesting it was a far from unprecedented occurrence, and a remark bemoaning that the power hadn't gone out earlier and 'spared us watching that bunch of clowns tonight'. Amid this hubbub, no one much noticed the sound of the shutters being opened. They all stayed still, probably in accordance with a safety protocol, and waited expectantly for the back-up system to restore the light. Down here, the darkness was total. It was pretty spooky to be standing so close (3.278 metres, according to the range-finder) to people, to be looking at them, levelling guns at them, yet to remain utterly invisible to them. Once you got over the ghostly feeling of disconnection, the sense of power was enormous. Nuno nodded, and in less than three seconds, every man in the room was down. Rebekah, as it turned out, found her marks flawlessly. Theoretically it was no great shakes to hit blind, unmoving targets from close range, but when it came to the moment and those targets were live flesh, anyone might choke the first time. No one could predict it for sure, not even Bett, which was why he'd sent Lex as back-up.

Lighting was restored on Nuno's order. They angled up their night-sights and climbed over the counter into the mess.

'I want a body count,' Bett ordered redundantly in their earpieces. The total verified Nuno's estimate: six guards, three other staff. He relayed the news to Bett with a concealed satisfaction his boss would have been proud of.

'There should be ten,' his boss informed them all, cutting it short. 'According to the duty roster, we're one lab-rat light. I'm checking the cameras, but no dice so far.'

'Shall I cut the power again?' Armand asked.

'No, that'll only make him scurry. We're looking for a labgeek who's neither interested in football nor beer. He'll most likely be happily back over his Bunsen burner now that the power's been restored. Nuno, Rebekah, Alexis, take a floor each and find him. Armand, Som, back to the script.'

Nuno sighed, but Lex didn't share his disappointment. This was the chance she was hoping for: free rein to wander, nobody on her shoulder.

'I'll take the bottom level,' she volunteered, before Nuno could send her elsewhere. The brief search time she'd had upstairs before Bett dispatched her on gun duty had been sufficient to locate which lab she needed, though not enough to crack the security, otherwise she could have downloaded the files over the network.

'Okay,' he agreed. 'Rebekah, you take this level, I'll go . . . '

Nuno was interrupted by the sound of an alarm, its electronic pulsing reverberating around every corridor in the complex.

'Sounds like our lab-geek's more spooked than Bett thought,' Rebekah observed.

'Yeah,' agreed Nuno. He pinched his collar-mike. 'Maybe we should rethink the lights,' he suggested.

'That's a negative,' Bett replied. 'Armand and Som have work.'

Back to the script, Lex thought. She headed out into the corridor and down the nearest stairwell, the noise bouncing around the place in an incessant blare. Not highly conducive towards concentration, but she'd zone it out, same as she'd background the possibility of the spooked stray getting hold of a piece and taking panicky pot-shots about the place. It was now or never.

'Alexis, I need you back here ASAP,' Bett ordered.

Shit.

'I want this alarm shut down and I need the authorisation codes to stop the cops coming down here.'

Learning from the main man, and though there was no one around to see, Lex concealed both her initial angst and her subsequent delight behind a neutral expression.

'It'd be quicker if I just grabbed a machine where I am, sir,' she relayed, continuing past the floor Bett was speaking from and making for the deepest level. Now, she not only had a window to work, but a reason to be at a PC if the CCTV cameras happened to spot her doing it.

'You can get the codes from another machine just as easily?' he asked.

'That's why you pay me the medium-sized-but-entirely-reasonable bucks, sir.'

Lex sprinted towards the specified lab and sat down next to the nearest PC, waking it from its screen-saver snooze with a nudge of the mouse. She doubted she could get the auth codes anything like as easily from here as from a terminal that was already logged on at high clearance, but the fact was she didn't need to. She'd systematically - you could even say reflexively - logged all the auth codes and passwords immediately when she found them, in the same directory as the duty roster.

Lex plugged in her memory stick and called up the files. She could buy herself more plausible keyboard time if she held off relaying them to Bett, but the alarm sound was proving more brain-meltingly unbearable than she'd anticipated. Presumably in a facility such as this, the intended effect in an emergency was to make the staff stop at nothing to evacuate. She told Bett the codes. The alarms ceased a few seconds later, and she wouldn't need to worry about his next order for a little while either as he'd be on the phone to the local fuzz telling them to stand down their response. The ringing in her ears faded into the deep, still silence that once again enveloped the complex. There was nothing to hear but air vents and PC fans. Lex took a breath, blinked her eyes clear and got to work. It took less than a minute to locate what she was after. The files were encrypted, but she didn't need to worry about that just now. She just had to get them on to the memory stick. She initiated the copy process and sighed deeply as she watched the blue line slowly grow, crudely measuring the transfer's progress as file names whizzed in alphabetical order, too fast to read, across the bottom of the window. The huge DivX files were last, naturally.

'
I need as many of the research and development files as you can get, but the
videos are crucial. If you don't come back with those, don't come back at all.
'

Those were his words, the non-negotiable terms of the deal. She cursed the slowness of the USB port as it drip-fed the data, but she knew she should have copied the DivX files first, on their own, before anything else. However, as she was in injury time, she had opted to select everything and just blob the whole lot at once. Her anxiety was irrational, she knew. No one was coming down here, certainly not in the couple of minutes it would take to complete the transfer, but it was the stakes that made it excruciating.

'Come on, come on,
jeez
,' she muttered to herself. Her ante: going behind Bett's back.

On the table: walking free of him forever.

'
Bett's not the only man in the world with contacts. You do this for me and
we'll see whether the Canadian government still cares so much about isolated
acts of teenage exuberance.
'

The transfer finally completed, the event unnecessarily announced by a dialogue panel with typical Microsoft self-satisfaction. Lex dismissed it then knelt down and reached behind the box for her USB stick. She heard the metallic click of a gun being cocked somewhere behind her, and froze, feeling her insides turn to concrete.

'Don't fuckin' move,' said a male voice, angry determination not quite masking tremulous fear. The accent sounded close to her grandfather's, though the choice of vocabulary was not. He sounded close, only a few feet away, and yet she hadn't heard him approach because she had all interrupts locked out, so intent had she been on her business. Her first thought then, upon hearing the voice, was relief at whose it wasn't.

'Get up. Back away from the desk. Keep your hands up.'

She complied, looking along the desk to where she'd left her weapon - not far out of reach but far enough.

'Turn around. Slowly.'

She turned, keeping her hands visible but close to her head. She let one drop slowly to her collar, grimacing as though nursing a strain to disguise that her fingers were pressing the mike.

'Who are you people? Hands up where I can see them, I said.'

Lex removed her hand from her neck and faced him. It was the lab-geek, no question: a little older than her, sandy fair hair, complexion hacker-sallow from being cooped up in here and not spending much time in the Big Room. He held his weapon in both hands, a stubby device with a bulky black-plastic stock and the widest muzzle she'd seen outside of Elmer Fudd's arsenal.