Hit List (16 page)

“Perfect,” Buckland said. “Thank you very much.”

Ash heard Buckland’s footsteps retreat out the door. The woman stayed.

Has she noticed the mirror? Ash wondered. Can she tell we’re here?

The woman’s heels clicked away, and the door closed. The lights in the vault flickered off, pitching the space into darkness.

The house was ordinary. Boring, even. Cheap and small in a cheap and small neighbourhood. It was so unremarkable that Peachey could hardly believe his eyes.

Ashley Arthur can’t live here, he thought. No way. Whoever she is, she’s got resources – money, equipment, intel. She has major backing from major players. What would she be
doing in a place like this?

It had to be a fake address. He’d wasted his time coming here.

Either that, said a voice in his head, or you were beaten by a poor, everyday teenager.

Peachey clenched his teeth. He didn’t have anything else to go on. If Ashley wasn’t living here, he might have to abandon hope of finding her and go after Buckland some other
way.

I need to know for certain, he thought. He walked up to the door and pushed the bell.

He heard it ring inside.

He waited.

No one came.

There was a security screen door in front of the main one, so he couldn’t use a credit card or a knife to get inside. But a door is only as strong as its hinges. Peachey picked up a rock
from the garden with the intention of cracking them open—

—and saw a key on the ground.

Spare key under a rock? he thought. Seriously? This can’t be the place.

He went inside anyway.

The house was cramped and dark, the curtains closed. He stood still just inside the door, gun drawn, and listened.

No voices, no scuffling, no breathing. Ashley, or whoever lived here, wasn’t home.

He wandered through the house, looking at the old books and the small TV and the battered tables and shelves. The couch was scarred by cat claws, but the house had no litter tray or food bowl,
probably meaning that the furniture was second-hand.

He soon found a bedroom that looked like it belonged to a teenage girl. The bed was short and narrow, there was a stack of textbooks on the dresser. A lava lamp gurgled in the corner. Peachey
opened the wardrobe and found a row of jeans and tank tops folded on shelves.

But something about the space struck him as artificial. No posters covered the walls, advertising romantic comedies or pop singers or heart-throbs. No novels lined the bookshelves – it was
all non-fiction, mostly history and popular science. There were no speakers to attach to an mp3 player or radio.

Peachey was looking at the room of a very serious – perhaps even sad – girl.

Who cares? he thought. The point is, it’s empty. So do I wait for Ashley or whoever to come back, or is there something here I can use to find out where she is?

He didn’t like the idea of waiting. Sooner or later the phone he’d been given would ring, and he’d be asked to go somewhere and do something. His mysterious benefactors
probably wouldn’t respond well if he said, Sorry, I’m busy at a stakeout. I’ll kill your target once I’m done here, okay?

And it wouldn’t just be a matter of enduring some harsh words. They would want to punish him. They’d track him down using his phone, follow him here, and he’d have
to—

Wait. Back up. Track him down using his phone.

I can track Ashley using her phone, he realized. If I can find the number.

He went out into the kitchen, where the landline phone was sitting on its charger. There was no address book near it, so he scrolled through the list of recently dialled numbers. There were two
mobile numbers which appeared several times – probably the occupants of the house calling one another. Peachey grabbed a pen and wrote them on his hand.

He’d seen a computer in the other bedroom, which he guessed belonged to a single middle-aged man. The bed was longer, but still narrow. A flannel shirt and some corduroy trousers were
crumpled on the floor. There were some novels on the shelves this time, mostly ageing crime fiction. There were some books about computers and web design as well, some instructional, some
historical. When Peachey had entered the room before, he’d just been checking that it was empty. Now that he was looking more closely he noticed the picture frames on the bedside table, atop
the bookshelves, mounted on the walls.

Almost all of the pictures were of Ashley Arthur.

I’m in the right place, he thought.

Many of the pictures also featured an older man – probably the occupant of the room, possibly Ashley’s father. Glasses, greying hair, a vague
Where was I?
smile.

One of the frames was face down on the dresser. Peachey picked it up. It was a snapshot of a woman who looked similar enough to Ashley to be her mother or her aunt. She looked vaguely familiar
to Peachey, like maybe he’d seen her on TV or been served by her at a restaurant, but the exact memory eluded him, so he put it back down.

The computer looked old, but booted up quickly – the insides might be newer than the shell. No password. Peachey opened the web browser, went to Google®, and typed
how to track a
mobile phone
.

He knew there was a service called Google® Latitude that allowed users to see the locations of their friends (or their friends’ phones) but that required permission. Instead, he
scrolled down until he found something called SpouseCatchers.

He clicked the link and scanned the splash page.
Is your wife or husband acting strangely? Coming and going at odd hours? No need to hire a PI – track their phone.

Perfect, he thought.

He typed in the numbers from the credit card he’d been given. There was a disclaimer on the site that said SpouseCatchers would bear no responsibility for misuse of the service, and that
tracing someone’s phone without their consent was a violation of the Surveillance Devices Act which could result in two years’ imprisonment or a $26,000 fine.

Isn’t the lack of permission the whole point? Peachey wondered. He clicked
I accept
, and was in.

The first phone number he tried produced a Google® map with an arrow pointing at a spot not far from the house. It was the HQ of a web-design company. Peachey thought of the computing books
and figured that the number probably belonged to Ashley’s father, and that he was at work.

Peachey tried the second number. Another map came up. Mountain View, California. What the hell?

The arrow pointed to a bank – HBS International. Hammond Buckland’s bank, Peachey thought. What a surprise.

He wrote down the address and was halfway through booking a plane ticket when his phone buzzed. His benefactors must have noticed the activity on his credit card already.

It was a text message:
Michael. How are you enjoying your freedom?

Peachey raised an eyebrow. Not the tone he’d expected. He typed,
Wondering who to thank
. Then he hit
send
.

The reply came almost instantly. The messages were probably being typed on a computer rather than a phone.
Soon. After you do a little favour for me.

Me, not us. Was he talking to the boss? Peachey replied,
What favour?

Again, the reply was immediate.
I need you to go to California and protect something that belongs to me.

Peachey didn’t believe in coincidence.
Where exactly?

The Googleplex, in Mountain View. Interested?

Curiouser and curiouser. Peachey smiled.
On my way
, he wrote.

Detective Wright’s fists were white around the steering wheel. His nose was broken. A river of blood, hot and wet, was dribbling down his chin and soaking his
collar.

He didn’t wipe it off. In fact, he barely noticed it. An ion-storm of firing synapses was raging in his skull.

Got to get to the airport, he thought. Got to beat Peachey.

It wasn’t about anger and it wasn’t about earning his salary. As long as he’d been a cop, Wright had been addicted to the feeling he got every time he put away a killer or drug
lord or arms dealer. There was a strong sense of rightness, that he’d made the world safer. Better. There was a place for bad guys: prison. And there was a place for good guys: everywhere
else. His job was to make sure everybody was where they belonged.

Every now and again a jury let someone go when they shouldn’t have, or a parole board released somebody too early, and that bothered him. But this was far worse. This time, a bad guy had
just
walked out
the goddamn front gate of Hallett State. That felt more wrong than anything else he could imagine.

And Peachey was a very bad guy. Wright’s first experience of him had been the sight of a severed hand lying in an alleyway. The first time he’d actually seen him in the flesh, he was
blowing the brains out the back of Hammond Buckland’s head.

No one was going to stop Wright from putting Peachey back in his cell. For good, this time.

A car honked at him as he roared past – the driver apparently hadn’t noticed the police light he’d put on the roof. He ignored her, swerving left and screeching up the ramp
onto the highway.

He had no proof that Peachey was catching a plane anywhere. But after breaking into a police station and killing a SWAT cop, it made no sense to hang around. And when every officer in the state
knew his face, he wouldn’t feel safe driving.

The airport nearest the station had been locked down the minute Peachey’s escape had become public. Standard protocol. No flights out. But Wright was driving further. He figured Peachey
wouldn’t use the nearest airport – he’d try to trick them.

It was a lot of speculation. But, Wright thought, I was right about him shaving his head, wasn’t I?

Nobody else thought Peachey would try to fly out. Too much security. You needed money, you needed ID, and you had to ditch your weapons. There were easier ways to get out of town.

But Peachey hadn’t escaped on his own, Wright knew.
No one
breaks out of Hallett State – you leave when your time is up. Someone was helping him, and anyone with that kind of
power could procure a fake passport and a ceramic weapon that wouldn’t show up in the metal detector.

The traffic was too heavy. He wasn’t moving fast enough. He drove up onto the shoulder and floored the accelerator, siren howling.

His phone was ringing. He snapped it open. “What?”

“Detective Wright, this is Agent Gerritz. Where are you?”

“On my way to the airport,” Wright said. “Have you caught him?”

“No. We need you to come back to the station so we can—”

Wright hung up. They wanted to interview him about what had happened at the police station. They would ask him the same questions over, and over, and over, while Peachey was getting on a plane
and escaping for ever.

He was getting closer. More and more taxis were falling behind as he sped past.

The phone rang again. He ignored it.

I’ll go back to the station, all right, he thought. Dragging Michael Peachey by his treacherous throat.

The airport was a bright oasis in the gloom of the surrounding fields. A 737 swept overhead, impossibly big this close to the runway.

Wright screeched to a halt in the taxi rank, grabbed his Colt out of the holster, and got out. A cab driver pounded on the horn. Wright ignored him.

He ran through the sliding glass doors marked
Departures
, past the ads for luxury cars and investment companies, and then he was in the airport, already scanning the jet-lagged faces of
every bald person he saw.

Too tall.

Too fat.

Female.

A voice above him said, “This is the final boarding call for passengers on flight QF107 to San José, California. All passengers for this flight please make your way to gate
17.” He ignored it.

A teenage boy saw his gun, and said, “Whoa! Take it easy, man.” Other people were starting to look over, cry out, back away.

He kept looking. Too many tattoos. Chin too wide—

“Hey!”

Wright turned. An airport cop was pointing her gun at him. “Drop your weapon!” she roared.

Wright exhaled, a mist of blood bursting from his shattered nose. “I’m a cop,” he said.

“Put the goddamn gun down,” the woman said.

Wright lowered the gun slowly. “Take it easy.” He gestured with his free hand towards his jacket. “I’m reaching for my badge.”

“Drop the gun first,” she replied.

Wright was about to comply. Then he looked over the cop’s shoulder – and saw Peachey.

He’d already gone through the security checkpoint. He was standing at the bottom of the escalator to the departure lounge, staring incredulously at Wright.

“Peachey!” Wright yelled.

Peachey smiled, took one step backwards, and began to rise out of sight.

Wright whipped the gun back up, took aim at Peachey’s heart, and squeezed the trigger.

Blam!

It was like getting kicked in the chest. The gun tumbled from Wright’s fingers.

The airport cop fired a second time. This shot missed the Kevlar armour, punching through Wright’s shoulder. He felt a ligament rip and heard a gurgling sound as blood sprayed up into his
ear.

“Damn it,” he wheezed. The world was starting to spin. “He’s getting...he’s going to...”

The carpet rushed up to meet him. He tried to push the ground away. Failed. Not enough blood getting to his brain.

He kept one eye open long enough to see the cop’s shoes approaching at a bizarre angle. “Control,” she was saying. “The situation has been resolved.”

It’s not resolved! Wright thought. He’s escaping! He’s...I can’t...

He blacked out.

Behind the airport cop, Peachey was riding the escalator up, up and away.

“Well,” Benjamin said. “This sucks.”

“Yep,” Ash said.

They were sitting on the floor in the blind spot under the camera, their backs against the deposit boxes. The only illumination was a blinking green light on the underside of the camera, which
barely punctured the blackness. They’d taken down the mirrors, but Ash couldn’t see the rest of the vault. She couldn’t even see Benjamin’s face, or her own hands.