Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (95 page)

The grate creaked, something gave way, and with one final pull, it opened. James slammed against the side of the tunnel, bashing his hip and cutting his skin.
 

Enna crawled through and opened the door, flooding the tunnel with light. She squeezed into the opening before turning and pulling James through the narrow grate. When he finally got through, he found himself standing in an old wood-panelled hallway. It looked like some antique home he’d seen once in some pre-war photos.

He moved further into the hall to allow the two Upsiders to come out of the tunnel. As Liza-Marie and Ghanus exited the tunnel, James stretched to ease his joints. His head spun, and he fell against the wall. “Jesus,” he said. “I never thought we’d ever get out of there.”

Enna smiled at him sympathetically. “You’re bleeding,” she said, leaning down and lifting the shirt over his hips. His shirt was sodden with blood and stuck to his raw skin. He winced and shut his eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Enna stopped moving his shirt. “Come through. Gabe and Petal should have medical supplies here. I’ll go let the others know we’re here. I got a message from them earlier.”

“Them?” James said. “Sasha and Malik?”

Enna hesitated before the two Upsiders crawling out of the tunnel took her attention.

Ghanus and Liza-Marie stood behind James, impassive behind their half-masks. They hadn’t even broken a sweat.
 

“Come on, James. Let’s get you sorted.” Her face seemed more pained than it ought to for his wounds; they were only superficial. Before Enna could lead James to the rest of the safe house, Ghanus dropped to his haunches and looked back into the tunnel.
 

“Look,” he said, pointing back down into the darkness.

A light shone from far back down the tunnel. “We’ve been tailed,” Liza-Marie said. “We’ll take care of it. You get James seen to.” She patted Ghanus on the back. “You want to take this one?”

The Upsider grunted and kneeled into a firing position while taking the rifle from his back. He aimed the weapon down the tunnel and brought the scope to his eye. “Waiting for clear visual.”
 

Ghanus waited for a few minutes, remaining still like a rock. James could hear the footsteps now and was about to order Ghanus to fire when Ghanus pulled the trigger. The exiting bullet made a near silent sound as the cartridge suppressor absorbed the gas. There wasn’t even a scream or a noise. The bouncing light stopped. Ghanus checked the scope. “Target down.”

“We need to retrieve the ronin-chip if they’re wearing one,” James said. “Elliot will know one of his nodes is down and will take... measures. We won’t have long.”

“I’m on it.” Ghanus passed his rifle to Liza-Marie and, like a dog, shot down the tunnel before Elliot’s system could know the ronin was dead. James bent down to watch. Ghanus was on the body within seconds, cutting away the arm.

***

While Ghanus was retrieving the chip, James followed Enna through the safe house, up a set of wooden stairs and out into another hallway with a number of doors leading off. He could hear voices now; a low rumbling of many people making plans. He opened the first door to his left and looked in, hoping to find Sasha. A group of five security people huddled around a pot of tea broke off their conversation and stared up at him. “Erm, hi,” James said. “Sasha here?”

They said nothing. The door opposite the hall opened, and a female security officer approached him, touching him gently on the shoulder. “I’m Elaine. I was tasked by Enna to lead this team and recover Sasha and Malik. I think you should come through.”

Her artificial blue eyes analysed him, giving nothing away.

“What is it?” he said, feeling the slow crawl of dread wither his confidence. She didn’t answer, just took him by the elbow and led him into another room. Malik sat in an armchair. At first James didn’t understand why he looked wrong, but then he saw the metal cuff. “Malik, what happened to your leg?”

“Long story, James. We’ve got bad news, I’m afraid.”

Enna joined him in the room, carrying a medical box.
 

“I think you should sit.” Malik pointed to the sofa opposite him. James walked around it and sat down, leaning forward so as not to get blood on the leather surface. Elaine sat down next to him while Enna remained standing, leaning against the arm of the sofa. She placed the medical box on the coffee table and prepared a shot of ’Stem.
 

“What happened?” Enna said to Malik. “Are you okay?”
 

“The ronin happened. Sasha and I, we...” He shook his head.

“Go on,” James urged, realising what was about to come, realising why Sasha wasn’t present.

Through tears, Malik told James everything from the moment they followed the sniper to the warehouse district to Sasha’s death. And that Elliot’s central consciousness was likely being held within a data-centre at Cemprom.

***

James blinked the tears from his eyes and straightened his back. The others were silent with grief. Shocked at the sudden reality of the situation. James was, too, whether from the shock or the desire to strike back, but he refused the ’Stem injection, not wanting to suffer its lethargic effects.
 

With a grim determination he addressed the group. “We have to forget about our grief right now. It’s tragic beyond words, and I’m sure once this is over—if we survive—I will fall apart. But we have to focus on the task at hand. Finish what Sasha started.
 

“If you want to honour her properly, pay her your respects, you will do it by taking down Elliot and ending Fuentes’ reign. It’s down to us, no one else. I, for one, haven’t lost as many as I have to simply collapse in a mire of sadness.

“Enna, I want you and Jess to use Omega to crack into Cemprom’s systems. We need the schematics of the city’s layout in order to find the data-centre.”

“We can do that,” Enna said. “But at least let me tend to your wounds.”

“A bandage and I’ll be good to go.”

“We’ll come with you,” Liza-Marie said to James, indicating herself and Ghanus as they entered the room. Ghanus held a severed wrist and hand with the chip still on.
 

James took it and checked that the chip was in good order. “Good man,” he said. “This will be perfect.”

“What are you going to do with that?” Malik gestured to the severed wrist.

James’ lips curled, and his eyes narrowed. “We’re going to use it to go fishing. We’ll hook it up to Omega and piggyback the connection since the citywide network isn’t an option anymore.”

“But won’t that tip off Elliot, and thus the others, about our whereabouts?” Enna said.

“That’s the point. We’ll set up an ambush, take out as many of the bastards as possible.”

“I... can...” Enna stumbled as she thought about the plan.

James grabbed Enna by the shoulder. “Best form of defence is attack, and I’m sick of hiding and crawling around in tunnels. While we bring the fight here, it’ll cause a diversion while some of us head to Cemprom—using the schematics—and take down Elliot for good.”

Enna’s face took on a pained expression. “You think we can do it without Alpha’s help?”

“Without hearing from Petal and Gabe, we have no option but to try.”

He turned to Elaine. “Do you understand the plan? What needs to happen here?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, saluting him.

“Right, then, everyone get to it. We don’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. Think of the loved ones we’ve lost recently. Use that grief to motivate and focus on the task at hand. We have a common enemy, and they must be stopped; otherwise our entire struggle and loss has been for nothing. Do you understand me?”

A chorus of, “Aye,” went up, and they set about their plans.
 

James took the chip and climbed with Enna up a set of creaking, wooden stairs and entered a room devoid of any furniture. The windows were shuttered and the walls undecorated. Jess sat on the bare floorboards next to Omega, her face a picture of concentration.

“How’s he doing?” James asked, feeling a bit odd referring to Omega as a he, but knowing there was a real, albeit incomplete, mind in there.

“He’s sad about Sakura,” she said.
 

“Well, it’s time for Omega to learn to stand on his own. We’ve got a job for him.”

James filled her in on the plan, and she helped connect Omega and the ronin-chip, successfully bridging the connection. Enna handed him a slate, and together they traversed Elliot’s network, spoofed as the man Ghanus had killed, tracing the source of information back through various routers and nodes. Each jump brought them closer to Cemprom, until after five minutes of navigating through the computer system, James saw it.

“It’s huge,” Enna said, leaning over his shoulder and looking at the size of the data-centre. “There’s petabytes of information in there.”

“And the worrying thing is,” James added, “his complete consciousness is probably not in there. Given what Malik said about when Sasha connected with him earlier and Petal’s previous experience, I would say that only part of him is contained there. His mind would have spread out, probably using some of the satellites and other nodes and data-centres that we don’t know about.”

“So this is all futile, then?” Enna said.

“No, not at all. It’s like an octopus. If you take out the bit in the middle, you kill off the individual tentacles. Think of his mind in that context. If you look at the data streams, they all feed back to that central location. Even if his full mind isn’t in there as one complete unit, by destroying it, we’ll take out the main processing unit, the brain of the entity, if you will.”

“How do we get there?”
 

“I’m working on that,” James said. “I’m running a program that’s tracing the route and transposing it onto the public transport map. Cemprom have schematics of the various tunnels and access ports. With luck we should be able to plot a route underground, meaning we should get there unseen. Once that’s complete, we—”

The sound of gunfire from outside of the safe house cut off his words. Elaine shouted up the stairs. “They’ve found us!”

Chapter 30

Petal sprinted across the wet sand. Xian’s boats were two hundred metres away. She could just see four figures under the glow of a lamp hanging from one of the boat’s masts. The small group huddled around the base of the hull where it met the jetty.
 

A few seconds later the figures dashed back down the jetty and weaved in and out of the various layers of debris littering the dead tents. Petal wondered what they were doing but then soon realised, just before her foot snagged in a net half-buried under the sand. She hit the beach hard, knocking the breath from her lungs. She dropped the shovel in front of her and banged her head against the metal spade cutting her across the forehead.
 

“Motherfucker!” she hissed through gritted teeth.
 

When she raised her head, she noticed smoke billowing into the night sky from the jetty, and a fizzing noise accompanied it. “Oh fuck, no, no. Xian!”
 

She screamed briefly before an explosion erupted, sending a massive billowing flame into the sky. The sound of rending and sheering metal mixed with the roar of the fire. The two boats fell all around in thousands of pieces like flaming meteorites.
 

Fragments of white-hot metal panelling showered her position. She reached down and freed her foot from the net and spun out of the way as a three-metre-wide piece of boat hull whistled down from out of the sky to bury its sharp edge into the sand less than a metre from her head.
 

Smaller pieces rained down. She jumped to her feet and ran in zigzags, trying to avoid the deadly precipitation. She arrived at the flaming remnants of the boats. They were black, charred hulks. Fires burned on whatever fuel or oil Xian might have had inside.
 

Under a piece of floating wood, she saw the half-melted and damaged case she’d carried Alpha in. Xian’s workbench was on fire. Many pieces were stuck into the wet sand. The whole thing was like a dark sore on the earth.
 

She searched through the burnt-out hulls and the piles of debris lying on the beach, but she couldn’t find Xian or Alpha, the parts no doubt scattered, burned, and ruined. For a brief moment she collapsed to her knees and placed her head in her hands. This was too much. First Gerry, then Gabe, now this. When would it end? And why Xian? He was nuts, but he hadn’t hurt anyone. And then she remembered: those ronin bastards.
 

Looking up from her position, her legs sodden with sea water, her face smeared with sand and ashes, she looked over to the fallen tents and saw the figures heading back to the scene of their crime. The one in front wore a familiar coat: Gabe’s leather duster jacket. He smiled and laughed with the others as they approached the wreckage. They were standing at the edge of the jetty where it met the bank. They hadn’t yet seen her down there in amongst the flames and destruction.
 

Using that to her advantage and trying not to let the rage overwhelm her, she crawled on her stomach, slowly inching her way closer, using the pieces of the boat and its contents for cover.