Hit List (17 page)

Given the dark, they might well have been free to move around. But the camera could have a night-vision function, or a motion sensor that would turn on the lights. It wasn’t worth the
risk.

Ash’s stomach growled.

“What the hell was that?” Benjamin demanded, alarmed.

“I’m hungry,” Ash said.

“Oh. Sorry.” She felt him press a muesli bar into her hand.

“Thanks. How many more of these do we have?”

“That’s the last one.”

They hadn’t had many, but that was probably for the best. No toilet in a bank vault, Ash reflected.

“You want to share it?” she asked.

“It’s fine.”

She tore into the wrapper, feeling guilty. Whatever this was, it was certainly her fault. Benjamin would be a straight-laced, law-abiding choirboy if it weren’t for her. He had followed
her into crime the way a puppy follows whoever fills its bowl, and now, maybe, he was going to die because of it.
And
she was eating the last muesli bar.

But he’d said he didn’t want any and she was hungry. It was his choice. She couldn’t force him to eat it any more than she could have stopped him trailing her down the
dangerous road she’d chosen.

She looked at the glowing hands of her watch. Just after eleven. They’d been crouched in the darkness for seven hours, and they still had ten to go.

Right now, she thought, Dad would be at work, finishing the salmon sandwich he always packs for lunch. What will he think when he gets home and I’m not there? How long can I pretend to be
at a friend’s house? To make things worse, she had no idea what would happen when the vault door opened. Would Buckland come in, triumphant, having bought Benjamin or manipulated the other
bidder? Or would the Ghost be there, a terrible grin on his lips, ready to make Benjamin disappear in a puff of smoke?

“What about your mum?” she asked. “Has she won the lotto or something? Taking you would be a good way to get to her.”

Benjamin sighed. “She would have told me, and I would have told you. I tell you everything.”

“I know. Just asking.”

They had been over every possible reason someone could want him, alive or dead. Money. Revenge. Love. (“If they wanted a date, they could have just asked me,” Benjamin had said.) But
they had found nothing convincing. For all his talents, Benjamin was no more desirable as a prisoner than any other teenage boy.

Ash finished the muesli bar and tucked the wrapper into her pocket. She stared into the inky shadows. “Care for a game of I Spy?”

Benjamin chortled. The sound was refreshing. “You think of that joke just now?”

“A while ago,” she admitted. “I wanted to save it for the halfway mark, when we’d need it most.”

“We halfway already?”

“No. I got impatient.”

Benjamin laughed again. “Have I ever told you that there’s no one on earth I’d rather be trapped in a pitch-black, cold, scary safe-deposit box vault with than you?”

“Don’t think it’s ever come up,” Ash said.

“Well, it’s true.” He cleared his throat. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with D.”

“Dark.”

“Correct.”

“I spy with my little eye,” Ash said, “something beginning with B.”

“Blackness.”

“Correct. You are a worthy foe.”

They played a few more rounds, but after shadow, dimness and gloom, they ran out of synonyms. Ash tried “aphotic”, but Benjamin said the words in I Spy had to be nouns, not
adjectives.

After a few minutes of silence, she put her hand over his and squeezed. He squeezed back.

“Did Buckland tell you we screwed up?” he asked.

“What? When?”

“At the library. That hard drive you took wasn’t the one on the hit list – it wasn’t big enough.”

“It did look too small to hold four terabytes,” Ash said. “So what was on it?”

“Indexing software, with about a million files.”

“So...we stole the city library’s catalogue?”

“Yeah.”

“Whoops. I wonder how we can return that without getting busted.”

“Could be harder than it was stealing it.”

Ash sighed. They weren’t even that good at their jobs. How had they become important enough to end up in this mess?

“Let’s talk about the Ghost,” Benjamin said suddenly.

Ash was startled. “Why?”

“I want to work out how he stole Buckland’s emerald. I’ll feel safer here once I know for certain he can’t walk through walls.”

That makes sense, Ash thought. “What if,” she began, “the emerald Buckland put in the vault was actually a duplicate made from coloured ice? It would have melted on its own,
without the Ghost needing to go anywhere near it.”

“Buckland said it was the real deal.”

“He said it wasn’t a hologram. How do you tell cleanly cut ice from a gemstone?”

“It would have left water on the floor when it melted.”

“Dry ice, then. Buckland wouldn’t have noticed a little bit of CO
₂
in the air, right?”

“Maybe not,” Benjamin said doubtfully. “But I think he would have noticed he was carrying around a block of ice instead of a priceless emerald.”

Ash sighed. “Probably.”

“Sorry.”

There was a pause.

“What about the steel bricks?” Ash said. “The ones Buckland made his vault out of. Did he say where he got them?”

“Don’t think so. Why?”

“But it only took sixty-six of them to build the whole thing, right? So they must have been really big. What if one was hollow?”

“Wait.” Benjamin sounded excited. “Are you suggesting the Ghost intercepted the bricks on their way to Buckland, and sealed himself
inside
one?”

“Yes,” Ash said. “Along with some cutting equipment and an oxygen tank. Once the vault’s been built, he cuts his way out, steals the emerald, and welds himself back in.
From the outside, the vault looks exactly the same.”

Benjamin said nothing. But the more Ash thought about it, the more she was sure that it couldn’t have happened any other way. “He closes bidding on the site using his phone,”
she continued, “prompting Buckland to cut a hole in the wall so he can check on his emerald – and after he’s gone,
that’s
the Ghost’s escape route! It’s
perfect!”

“Impressive.”

“Yeah. I can’t—” Ash paused.

That hadn’t sounded like Benjamin’s voice.

“Benjamin?” she said.

Silence.

She lifted his hand. It was limp in her fingers. Her heart kicked in her chest.

“
Benjamin?
”

There was a noise behind her. A swish and a clank – the sound of a deposit box being closed. One of the big ones.

The Ghost has been in here with us the whole time, she thought. Just like with the bricks.

Ash knew she should be doing something to defend herself, but she couldn’t bear not knowing what had happened to her best friend.

She whipped out her phone, and pointed the glowing screen at Benjamin. His eyes had rolled backwards into his head, and his jaw was stretched open in a silent scream.

Ash choked on a hiccup of pure terror. “No!” She shook Benjamin’s shoulders – had he fainted? Was he
dead
?

Please, she thought. I’ll give up thieving, I’ll go on a date with you, I’ll do anything, just please, Benjamin, don’t be dead. There was something sticking out of his
neck. A knife. No, too small. It was a syringe, or a dart perhaps.

Maybe he’s alive, Ash told herself, desperate. He’s no good to anyone if he’s not, right? The Ghost wouldn’t kill him. Maybe he’s just unconscious.

Footsteps. Someone was drawing closer behind her, and she couldn’t afford to ignore them any longer. She turned, stood, listened. Tried to judge his position, so she could dodge him when
he attacked.

And then what? Dance around him for the next nine and a half hours, hoping Buckland would come to the rescue when the bank opened?

“You’re making a mistake,” she said.

The steps kept coming.

“Seriously.” Her voice shook. “Don’t do this. Benjamin is worth more alive, and free, than whatever you’re being paid.”

She listened. There was silence.

He’s interested, she thought.

“Great,” she said. “Now give me the antidote to whatever you’ve drugged him with. Then we can talk about this.”

She glanced back at Benjamin, and saw that he was gone. He had been taken without the slightest sound.

“No!” she cried. “Don’t leave! I’m serious! There’s a woman trapped in the Googleplex, and Benjamin’s the only one who can hack the security system to
get to her, and—”

Something clicked in her brain. Whoa, she thought. That’s it!

“That’s why someone put a bounty on him!” she said. “Whoever imprisoned the girl hired you to take out Benjamin before he could rescue her. So whatever they’re
paying you for this, Alice must be worth more! Way more!”

Her guts wrenched at the realization that she was sacrificing Alice to save Benjamin. But it was the only way. She’d find a way to save Alice from the Ghost later. She just needed
time.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t take him. We can work this out.”

Crack
.

The room filled with an other-worldly red glow. Ash saw the Ghost, tall and cold-eyed, Benjamin slung over his shoulder like a roll of carpet. Like he weighed nothing.

Ash’s eyes widened. It couldn’t be true.

“Liam?
You’re
the Ghost?”

The boy from the dance dropped the glow stick to the floor. “Tell me about Alice,” he said.

“Thank you. Enjoy your evening. Goodbye! Thanks. Enjoy your stay. Thank you. Goodbye!”

Peachey nodded politely to the beaming flight attendant as he disembarked, the last in a very long line of passengers. He looked out over San José as he walked down the steps to the
tarmac. The city lights sparkled like those of an old pinball machine.

He straightened his legs, stretched his neck, blinked his dried-up eyes. It had been a long flight.

His job had always required an unpleasant amount of travel. There were few countries he’d never been to. Anywhere there are people, he thought, there will be someone who wants someone else
dead.

For this reason, airports and hotels and hire-car stands no longer interested him – he could sleepwalk through them. As he strolled through the arrivals gate, threading through the
clusters of sleepy passengers, only a small part of him was wondering whether to rent a car to get to the Googleplex, which would leave a paper trail, or take a taxi, which would create video
evidence of his trip and possibly a body to dispose of, depending on the inquisitiveness of the driver, or ride a bus, which would require him to find a stop and a timetable and be near poor
people, which was always an unpleasant reminder of his childhood in the Solomon Islands.

A small part of his brain was calculating all this, but the rest was pondering a larger question – why was he being sent to the Googleplex in the first place?

We need you to go to California and protect something that belongs to us.

He was a hit man, not a security guard. His employer wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of breaking him out of prison just to have him look after something. So Peachey must also be required
to kill somebody.

But who? Why?

The text messages had felt formal – no typos, no abbreviations, correct grammar. This led Peachey to believe that he’d been communicating with someone old, someone who hadn’t
grown up with the text-talk that saturated modern culture. Probably a woman, like most of his clients – women were less likely to kill than men, but in his experience, they were more likely
to outsource the job.

So, he thought. I’m looking for an old woman who owns something in California. Or I’m being manipulated, in which case it could be a young boy who has nothing but a mobile phone and
an unusual amount of influence in the prison system.

Peachey decided to rent a car, rationalizing that the paperwork would only lead to the false identity that had been created for him. He didn’t want the staff to see the wad of cash, so he
took it out, removed six fifty-dollar notes, and returned it to his pocket. He put the notes in his wallet as he approached the hire-car stand.

“Hi there,” said a man behind the counter. He peered at Peachey through thick glasses that made his eyes cartoonishly large.

“Hello,” Peachey said. “I’d like a car for tonight and tomorrow.”

The man took out a catalogue and Peachey selected the most generic-looking sedan he could find.

“Excellent choice,” the man said.

He took Peachey’s fake name, address and phone number and typed them all into his computer, and then said, “That’ll be two hundred and sixty-three dollars, please.”

Peachey took out his wallet and handed over the six fifties, pleased that his estimate had been so close. The man passed him his change and the keys.

Peachey asked, “Could I have a map as well?”

“There’s a GPS navigator in the car,” the man said proudly.

Which would record destinations. “I don’t like those fancy new gadgets,” Peachey said. “A paper map would be great.”

The man put a disposable map on the desk and held a pen over it. “Where you headed?” he asked.