Hit List (12 page)

“I read about that,” Benjamin admitted. “But that’s just a quirk. It doesn’t make them spies.”

“There are a lot of other quirks like it,” Buckland said. “Because the company has become so ubiquitous, it knows way more than most people realize. If you have a Gmail
account, it knows your name and who you know. If you’ve used its maps, it knows where you live, where you study, where you work. If you have Google® Desktop, it knows everything
that’s on your computer. Most website owners use Google® Analytics, which tells them how many people are visiting their website, and for how long, and where they’re from – so
Google® knows all that too. Thanks to Google® News, it knows what you’re interested in. Did I mention that they own YouTube?”

“But none of that is useful information,” Benjamin insisted.

“Individually, no. If Google® knows that Benjamin Whitely has googled plastic surgery, that’s insignificant. But if fifty-two per cent of people in the state have googled plastic
surgery, then that information
is
significant. And it can be checked for correlations – how many of those people have also googled protein supplements? How many of those are under
twenty? And so on.”

“Have you been monitoring my search history?”

Buckland frowned. “What do you mean?”

Benjamin reddened. “Nothing.”

“We’re missing the point,” Ash said. “There is no way that Google® is kidnapping people.”

“I didn’t say they were.” Buckland drummed his fingers on the plane’s steering yoke. “I said Alice was being held at the Googleplex, their headquarters. My guess
is, they don’t even realize it.”

“
My
guess is, it’s a prank.” Ash said. “Or a publicity stunt by Bing™.”

“I’d agree with you,” Buckland said, “except for the way it was done. As far as we can tell, only one message was sent. It was faxed – which is very traceable, by
the way – to a locked vault in the city library. Publicity stunts have to be public. The same goes for pranks, since the prankster likes to see it happening. This is something
else.”

“But that’s just as stupid a place to send a real SOS as a fake one,” Ash said.

“Indeed. Which means she probably had no choice where the message ended up. Which means it’s probably real.”

“How the hell would you imprison someone at the Googleplex without Google® knowing about it?” Benjamin demanded. “Like you said, they know everything.”

“We can figure that out later,” Buckland said. “What we should be focusing on right now is how we can get her out.” After a pause, he lifted the mike back to his mouth
and said, “Copy that, control.”

The pitch of the engine noise changed as Buckland’s hands fluttered over the switches.

“So who is she?” Ash asked. “Any ideas?”

“How should I know?” Buckland replied. “There are millions of Alices around the world, and hundreds of thousands of Alice Bs. Plus, the fact that she didn’t write her
full name means that it’s likely to be an alias.”

“Or she was interrupted,” Benjamin said.

Ash drummed her fingers on her thigh. “Are there any Alice Bs who work for Google®, or used to?”

“Yes,” Buckland said. “I looked into that. There are four that I could find, but I have no way of working out which it is – or if it is any of them. None of them has been
reported missing.”

I suppose we can ask her who she is after we rescue her, Ash thought.

Buckland turned away, his attention on the controls. The plane started to accelerate across the tarmac. The momentum pressed Ash backwards into her seat.

Benjamin turned to face her. “Are we really doing this?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Going to California, breaking into the Googleplex, rescuing a stranger?”

“Yeah.”

He grinned. “Cool.”

Ash’s stomach lurched as the wheels lifted off the ground. The walls roared and vibrated, and Ash wondered if this was what the inside of a microwave sounded like. Out the window, the
landscape gradually shrank until it was the size of a train set. Tiny cars trundled back and forth across ribbon-like highways, and a boat drew a white scar across the harbour.

The boat reminded Ash of the one she’d seen at the mine – and the fear she’d heard in the soldier’s voices.

“Mr. Buckland,” Ash said.

“Yes?”

“Have you heard of ‘the ghost’?”

There was a long silence. Ash couldn’t see his face.

He said, “Who gave you that name?”

It
is
a name, Ash thought. I knew it. “I overheard some other thieves talking about it,” she said. “In the mine.”

“Was he there?” Buckland sounded shocked.

With growing unease, Ash told him, “They said he was coming. And I think I saw his boat.”

“Jesus,” Buckland said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Who is he?”

“No offence, but he’s probably the most skilled thief in the world. In fact...” He paused.

They waited.

“You’re freaking us out back here,” Benjamin said.

“Do you believe in supernatural powers?” Buckland asked. “Psychics, seances, anything like that?”

Ash didn’t hesitate. “Nope.”

“No way,” Benjamin agreed.

“Good,” Buckland said. “The Ghost is a thief who likes people to
believe
he has paranormal abilities, both clients and victims alike. Everything he steals, he makes it
look like magic, so no one knows how it was taken even after it’s gone. One of his nastier habits is shooting people with a flash-bang, impaling them with a harpoon, and dragging them out of
sight while the people nearby are still blinded, so the person appears to vanish. Sometimes he tosses a set of clothes onto the spot to confuse the witnesses further. It’s supposed to make
people scared of him, and it works.

“He has a website where clients post details about the items they want, and then try to outbid one another on them. He closes bidding on each item once he’s stolen it, and then
delivers it to whoever offered the most money. The last time I checked, the
Mona Lisa
was up to four hundred and fifty-four million euros.”

“Like a criminal eBay?” Benjamin said.

“Yes – with only one seller.”

“How does he know they’ll be able to pay?” Ash asked. “Surely the internet is full of people who’ll make bogus bids.”

“Anyone who does that disappears,” Buckland said. “Word got around, so it doesn’t happen any more. A few people even got turned into zombies – you don’t want
to know how he does that.”

“Actually,” Benjamin said, “I kind of do.”

“He injects them with a tiny amount of tetrodotoxin, which paralyses them, stops the breathing, lowers the body temperature, and slows the pulse down until it’s undetectable, but
leaves them completely conscious. Then he dumps them in a public place to be found and declared dead. There’s no way of telling how many people he’s done this to – some are
cremated, alive; others regain their mobility days later, only to suffocate in their coffins or morgue drawers. But a few are able to escape, either by digging their way to the surface or screaming
until someone hears, but they’re too brain-damaged by the lack of oxygen to explain what happened to them, so all they can do is shuffle and moan—”

“Stop!” Benjamin said, slightly pale. “Okay, you’re right. I didn’t want to know that.”

“How do you know so much about him?” Ash asked.

Buckland said, “I once owned the world’s fourth-largest emerald, carved into the shape of the Buddha by Cambodian priests over a thousand years ago. When it appeared on the
Ghost’s site, I immediately took steps to protect it. I ordered a vault built out of sixty-six big steel bricks, stacked on top of one another and welded together. It cost me more than
$130,000. There was no door – I figured I’d have the vault dismantled after I’d dealt with the Ghost some other way.

“Less than two hours after the emerald was sealed inside, he closed bidding on the site, claiming to have stolen it. I didn’t believe it – how could he have got in? But when I
went back to the vault, my guards had disappeared. I had security cameras, of course, so I watched the footage. And I saw the guards vanish in the blink of an eye, the Ghost walk towards the wall,
walk
through
it, and walk back out, carrying the emerald.”

“That’s...impossible,” Benjamin said.

“Indeed. I assume the footage must have been faked. Someone could have broken into the security office, hacked into the computer and replaced the video file with a doctored one –
difficult, but possible. I was rattled, so I went to the vault. It was intact on every side, but I still wasn’t reassured. I used a cutting torch to cut one of the bricks loose. It took more
than four hours. And when I finally got it out, I could see that the emerald was gone.”

“How?” Ash was fascinated. “How did he do that?”

“If you ever figure that out,” Buckland said, “I’ll give you a million dollars to tell me.”

“No evidence of blasting or cutting equipment in the vault?” Benjamin asked.

“It took another hour for the metal to cool down enough so I could climb in through the hole without getting burned, but when I did, the inside of the vault looked exactly the same as
I’d left it. Except empty.”

Ash said, “You’re sure the emerald was in there when you sealed it?”

“I checked personally, before welding the final brick.”

“It was the genuine article, not a hologram or something?”

“It was the real deal,” Buckland said sadly.

“What about time loss?” Benjamin asked. “Are you sure it was only two hours between when you sealed the vault and when he put it on his website? You didn’t black out, or
anything?”

“No,” Buckland said. “I was awake the whole time, and my watch stayed in sync with every other clock I’ve seen since then. It was only two hours – and remember, the
vault took four hours to open later. The whole situation is impossible.”

“Could the Ghost have built an entire fake vault?” Ash asked. “Stolen yours, left his behind, and extracted the emerald later?”

Buckland’s eyes widened. “I hadn’t considered that,” he said. “But that would have taken dozens of people, heavy machinery, and probably a lot longer than two
hours. Those bricks were a metre thick – the whole thing would have weighed several tonnes. And the Ghost wouldn’t just have had to remove the vault and put a duplicate in its place. He
would have had to rebuild the room it was in – no door was anywhere near wide or high enough to fit the entire vault through. That’s very clever, but I can’t believe it’s
the answer.”

“It’s a damn good trick,” Benjamin murmured.

“It was,” Buckland said. “And while I don’t believe the Ghost can walk through walls, I do know he’s very, very dangerous. Stay away from him. If you even hear his
name, get as far away as you can, as quickly as you can.”

Ash nodded. She wondered how close she had been to disappearing at the mine, and felt a little sick.

But that’s the job, she told herself uneasily. Going into dangerous places, doing dangerous things, meeting dangerous people. Putting yourself in harm’s way, for the greater good, to
make up for the bad things you’ve done. Right?

“Enough about him,” Buckland said. “We’ve got a while before we land in California, and we should spend it talking about the Googleplex.”

“How good’s the security?” Ash asked.

“Extremely. Around-the-clock guards, cameras everywhere, every door locked electronically and only accessible using face-recognition software we won’t be able to fool, or with a
bypass code we won’t have.”

Benjamin said, “Do you know what kind of encryption algorithms the bypass uses?”

“Eight-bit, with a four-digit key,” Buckland said. “But it doesn’t matter, since the access panels are rigged to sound the alarm. Try to plug anything into the lock, and
we’ll be busted. Take too long punching in the numbers, and the system resets, which rules out using a calculator to work out a suitable combination by trial and error. So unless you can
factor numbers bigger than one hundred million in your head, you won’t be able—”

“I can,” Benjamin said.

“—to crack the... What?”

“I can factor numbers bigger than one hundred million in my head,” Benjamin said.

“No you can’t,” Ash said, frowning.

“Sure I can. I won a state mathematics competition for it last year. Give me one.”

Buckland pulled a PDA out of his pocket and fiddled with it for a bit. “One hundred and fifty-seven million, two thousand five hundred and sixty-eight,” he said.

“Two thousand, four hundred and eight,” Benjamin replied. Then, as an afterthought, “And six thousand, five hundred and twenty-one.”

Buckland fiddled some more, dividing his nine-digit number by one of Benjamin’s four-digit numbers. “Say that again,” he said.

Benjamin repeated the numbers. Buckland looked amazed.

“Benjamin,” Ash said, “you have a superpower. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Well, I don’t like to brag.”

“You
love
to brag,” she said.

Benjamin looked uncomfortable for a moment. “I’ve always been good with computers,” he said, “I suck at sport and I read a lot. Having a freaky gift for maths would have
made me a walking cliché of nerdiness, so I just never told anyone.”

“Including me.”

“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

“Well,” Buckland said, “that solves some of our problems, but not all of them. All that stuff I mentioned is just Google® security. Whoever has imprisoned Alice in the
building almost certainly has some kind of warning system of their own, and there’s no way to find out what it is. So you’ll be improvising a lot along the way.”

My speciality, Ash thought. “No problem. What gear will we have?”

Buckland nodded to one of the boxes on the seats behind her. She unbuckled her seat belt and went over to it.

“I wasn’t sure what we’d need,” Buckland said. “So I brought everything.”

Ash opened the box. A power drill, glow sticks, a lock-release gun, an EMP generator, and something that looked like a grenade launcher from the future.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Benjamin peered into the box. “Hey,” he said. “That’s mine!”