Hit List (8 page)

But none of that would stop a thief who had the combination. And thanks to the button camera Benjamin had planted on the coat of one of the library employees weeks ago, Ash knew six out of the
eight digits.

The vault, she decided. Seconds later, she was in front of the door, looking at the twin dials and the release button.

The flaw in dual-control analogue combination locks was that the person twisting the second dial could see the final position of the first, if they looked. This meant that they knew three
quarters of the combination, not half. And thanks to Benjamin’s camera, Ash knew it too.

She twisted the first dial clockwise to 1, and then anticlockwise to 61. Then she turned the second dial clockwise to 45, anticlockwise to 38, and hit the release button.

The door didn’t open. Wrong combination. If the power had been on, an alarm would have started shrieking right about now.

Ash twisted the dials to 2, then 61, and 45, then 38, and pushed the button. Still nothing. She tried 3, 61, 45, 38.

This was why she and Benjamin hadn’t attempted to break in before now – there had been a ninety-nine per cent chance she’d set off the alarm. But with the power down, all she
had to do was be patient.

8, 61, 45, 38. The vault door stayed closed. 9, 61, 45, 38.

She could hear the paramedics clomping around elsewhere in the library. Hopefully they’d searched around here already, or at least wouldn’t come this way until she was already inside
the vault.

Ash tried 17. Then 18. Almost a fifth of the way through.

She wondered where Benjamin was. She’d advised him to run away from the cops as soon as they took their eyes off him, but she knew
he
knew that if he did, they would realize
he’d been lying and call back the paramedics. Which would leave Ash in a tricky situation if she was still strapped to the underside of the gurney, waiting for an opportunity to escape.

She wasn’t, but Benjamin had no way of knowing that – so he was probably still with the police, buying her as much time as he could.

The code didn’t begin with 29. Nor 30, 31, or 32.

Get out of there, Benjamin, she thought. Don’t get caught for my sake.

She tried 40, 61, 45, 38 – and heard a faint click inside the lock. She hit the release button, and heard a louder click as the wheel on the vault door spun a couple of degrees.

“Yes!” she whispered. She grabbed the wheel and twisted. After three complete rotations, the door clanked and swung outwards on well-oiled hinges.

And then Ash heard one of the paramedics approaching.

She slipped into the vault, grabbed the handle on the inside, and started to pull the door shut behind her. But when it was almost there, she froze.

He was too close. He would hear it when it closed.

Ash held the door a centimetre ajar and waited.

The paramedic’s footsteps got louder. Ash held her breath as he walked into her field of vision, and stopped. He scanned the nearby bookshelves for signs of the phantom Mr. Fields.

Then he turned around and walked back.

Ash waited for ten long seconds, silently counting. Then she pulled the door the rest of the way shut. She clenched and unclenched her hands a few times, trying to stop them shaking.

The inside of the vault was as black as tar. The air was cold and dry – to better preserve the books, Ash guessed. She dug a penlight out of her pocket, clicked it on, and a circle of
light appeared on the wall.

At first glance, the vault’s contents were no different from the surroundings outside – just shelf after shelf of books. But as Ash drew closer, she could see that the books in here
were significantly older than those in the military history section. Time had stained the pale covers and bleached the dark ones, leaving the titles difficult to read. Some had gold threads woven
into patterns on the spines. Ash didn’t touch any of them, worried that they would crumble to dust beneath her fingers.

Most of the books appeared to be laws, with titles that had words like
amendment
and
declaration
in them. A few novels were mixed in, too – she saw a first edition of
Bleak House
, and a handwritten draft of
Frankenstein
. There was a huge Bible that looked old enough to be the original.

What Ash was looking for would, she hoped, stand out among these ancient tomes: a four-terabyte portable hard drive, which held a program written by a Terrorism Risk Assessment employee, Kathy
Connors, in her downtime. It would probably be about the size of two small laptops stacked one on top of the other, but Ash had no idea about the colour. She also wasn’t sure exactly what the
program did, but thanks to the size of the drive, she knew it must be something impressive. Four terabytes could contain about two thousand times the amount of code used to write Windows. And
whatever it was, she knew it had got the programmer killed – her home had been burned down by an angry mob who were convinced she had murdered a child in a neighbouring suburb. The subsequent
police investigation revealed that the child had never been anything more than a rumour.

How the drive had found its way from the blazing house to the city library vault, Ash had no idea. But thanks to the hit list, she knew it was here, and she knew the programmer’s family
would pay to get it back.

She was running out of places to look. She’d run her penlight over every shelf, and hadn’t seen anything that looked remotely like a hard drive. She crouched down and started
searching under the shelves.

Lights flickered on above her, and suddenly the inside of the vault was as bright as day. The cops must have got the power back up. Ten minutes earlier, Ash thought, and I would have set off the
alarm.

A whirring sound, behind her.

Ash jumped. But it was only an old PC booting up. She hadn’t seen it as she walked in – it was probably used to index the vault’s contents, and rigged to switch on any time the
door was unlocked.

Ash scanned the table the computer sat on, looking for signs of the hard drive. No luck. Just a phone, a fax machine, a modem and a printer. The set-up must have been decades old – these
days, a single device would perform all the functions of those four machines. The computer chassis looked like it belonged in a museum rather than a library.

Ash stared at it. Where’s the best place to hide a hard drive? she asked herself.

The answer was right in front of her. Inside a computer.

She kneeled beside the chassis and felt around the edges for a release catch. These old computers had lots of empty space inside them – even combined, the motherboard, processor, hard
disk, memory card, video card and disk drives didn’t take up much room, but the chassis needed to be spacious to keep the components from overheating. There might just be enough room inside
for a clever thief to conceal a four-terabyte hard drive. It would be the perfect hiding place, since the computer chassis wasn’t likely to be opened, and even if it was, the drive
wouldn’t look out of place to anyone other than a computer engineer. If she could just—

There! With a faint click, the wall of the chassis came loose, and Ash was staring into the innards of the computer.

Bingo. The hard drive looked much newer than the other components. Less dust, sleeker design. It was smaller than she had expected, but still conceivably large enough to hold 4TB of code. Ash
unplugged it from the motherboard, put it on the floor, and reattached the wall of the chassis. Then she pocketed the drive, stood up, and turned to leave...

Wait. She turned back, staring down at the fax machine. Something had caught her eye. A sheet of paper in the printout tray of the fax machine. Something was typed across it in 12-point Times
New Roman, the default font for practically every application on every computer in the world:

“Have they found him yet?” Benjamin demanded.

“They’re looking,” the detective said calmly. “I’ve just got a few more questions for you while we wait, okay?”

Questions were bad news. Benjamin had been in the back of this police van for almost twenty minutes already, and the more questions he was asked, the more lies he had to tell. The more lies he
had to tell, the more inconsistencies he had to worry about. Inconsistencies like –

“What exactly was your grandfather doing in the library at this time of night?”

“Reading, I’d imagine,” Benjamin said. “That’s what it’s for, right?”

He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. Nobody likes a smart-arse, and Benjamin could tell by the detective’s hardening gaze that he was no exception. He looked like a guy
who’d been a cop a long time. Loose shirt, no tie. A mouth that had forgotten what a smile felt like. Eyes as dark and merciless as gun barrels.

“But it closed hours ago,” he said. “Why was he
still
there?”

Benjamin looked at his feet. “Grandpa has Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “He’s pretty good, mostly, but sometimes he gets confused. You have to tell him things a
couple of times before he hears them. I guess he just missed the announcement that they were closing.”

The detective looked a bit sympathetic at that. Benjamin guessed that he, like most people, had an old relative whose mind wasn’t what it once was.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the detective said.

“Thanks,” Benjamin said.

His voice sounded familiar to Benjamin, but he couldn’t work out why. A couple of cops had come to his school on career day, but they’d both been women, so that wasn’t it.

I must have heard him interviewed on the radio, he thought, or something like that. It’s not like I know any cops. Ash and I always try to avoid them, especially since—

His blood ran cold. What had this detective said his name was, again?

“Do you think maybe I could help with the search, Detective Smith?” Benjamin asked.

“Detective Wright,” the cop corrected. “And don’t worry, it’s under control.”

Detective Damien Wright. No way. This was the same guy who’d caught Ash five months ago at Hammond Buckland’s headquarters. Benjamin had been listening as Wright interrogated her and
handcuffed her to a piece of furniture – and as Ash escaped while he was out of the room.

Wright hadn’t been able to track her down; she had given him a fake surname when he questioned her. But if he found out she was here, she and Benjamin were both in deep trouble.

But how can I warn her? he wondered. I can’t use the radio while he’s watching me. And if she’s in the vault already, the signal won’t get through the walls.

The detective must have seen the anxiety on Benjamin’s face. “All right,” he said, standing up. “I’ll go see if they’ve found any sign of your
grandad.”

“No!” Benjamin said. “I...uh...”

Think! he told himself. Come on!

“Don’t just leave me here,” he said. “On my own, I mean.”

Wright sighed. “You can’t come with me, kid. It’s a crime scene.” He stepped out of the van, leaving the door open. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

As soon as Wright was out of earshot, Benjamin grabbed his radio. “Ash, come in,” he whispered. “Ash!”

There was no answer.

Ash picked up the sheet and reread the words.

Help me, 37.4215, -122.0855, Alice B.

What had she stumbled across? A prank? A test? A postmodern poem? Or a real-life distress call from someone who needed rescuing?

And then she no longer had time to think about it. There was a thumping on the vault door, and a voice, shouting, “Mr. Fields? Are you in there?”

Ash gasped. She’d assumed the paramedics had left. She ran behind a shelf, stuffing the paper into her pocket.

“Why would he be in there?” one of them asked.

“Don’t know. But he’s nowhere else in the library, so we have to check.”

“I’ll call the cops – maybe they’ll be able to get the combination.”

Scanning the area for a hiding place, Ash cursed Benjamin for his acting skills. If he hadn’t been so convincing, the paramedics would have gone home by now, instead of standing outside an
unlocked door, wondering about the combination. This would be funny, she thought, if it weren’t so terrifying.

“Mr. Fields!”

“I don’t think he’s in there.”

“If he’s trapped, he might not be able to respond. He might not even be able to hear us through this goddamn—”

Clank.
The door swung ajar, just a little. One of the paramedics must have touched the release button. Ash scuttled back towards it, ducking behind the carbon-steel frame. Hopefully the
paramedics would be looking straight ahead at the shelves when they entered.

“What do you know – it’s not even locked!”

The door was pulled all the way open, and the two paramedics ran in, one of them yelling, “Mr. Fields, can you hear me?”

Ash tiptoed sideways towards the door, quickly, quietly, willing them not to turn around. Almost there...

The paramedics were walking down an aisle, heads turning left and right. “I don’t see him,” one was saying.

Ash was almost there. She didn’t take her eyes off the paramedics. Come on, she thought. Look harder. Search every aisle thoroughly.

She was three steps away. Two. One.

She was out! She turned to leave—

And crashed into a police officer. She yelped.

“Whoa,” the officer said. “What are—”

Their gazes locked. Ash’s eyes widened.

“You!” Detective Wright roared.

Ash heard the paramedics turn towards the noise. She reached back without looking, pushed the door closed, and spun one of the dials to lock it. Then she charged at Wright, who was reaching for the service revolver in his hip holster.

He was taller and heavier than her – she had no hope of knocking him down with this wild charge. So upon impact she wrapped her arms around him like he was an old friend, and squeezed as
tight as she could, momentarily trapping his gun arm against his side as she reached for the radio on his hip.

Wright snarled, grabbed her hair with his free hand, and pulled. Ash squealed as her scalp burned and her neck twisted backwards. Her grip weakened, and she heard a snap as the stud keeping
Wright’s revolver in the holster came loose.