Sunfail (24 page)

She should have anticipated it—it was a radical move, but one thing she knew about these people: they weren’t afraid of making a mess. If they couldn’t buy it they’d break it.

She’d forced their hand by manipulating the computer systems to deny them access. By doing that she’d given them no choice, they’d resorted to extreme measures. If they couldn’t have the place, no one could. Simple as that. And a terror strike wasn’t something that could be easily traced back to them; if it could then a lot of other “trouble” across the world would already have been laid at their doorstep.

No, to the world at large it would be another senseless act of violence.

There was familiarity in terror these days. That helped them to hide, using their money and influence to spread the fear. That was where their real power lay.

They stood behind well-known political figures, lobbying their opinions with cash, shaping them with threats. They bankrolled certain extreme interests, making sure the funding was there to keep chaos on the bubble, but never enough to undermine their financial interests. No one wanted the money markets to crash until just the right moment; it had been carefully manipulated, timed to perfection.

Sophie stared down at her cooling coffee, wrapping her hands around the mug.

Victory turned to defeat so easily. She’d blocked them and their response had been massive and brutal.

She was frightened for the first time. Genuinely, bone-deep scared. Not for herself. Her fate was already sealed and had been since she’d said no to them. No, she was frightened for all the others who were going to be hurt because of her. She was even frightened for Jake.

It was easy to think of these people as collateral damage. But they were more than that to their daughters, sons; they were brothers, lovers, husbands, wives. They had faces, they’d had lives. Until those lives had come into orbit with hers. And then, at that point, that unknowable place, they’d ceased to matter and become collateral damage.

But she had to fight.

The Hidden couldn’t be left to win unopposed. Not when she knew what they wanted out of this.

Sophie needed to take care of something while she still could. She pulled out her phone and dialed the number from memory.

It was in the hands of the gods now. She’d get a signal or she wouldn’t. If she was going to die, then she was going to die trying to end this.

CHAPTER THIRTY

FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE ABSOFUCKINLUTELY RIDICULOUS, Jake thought.

He stood deep in the bowels of Penn Station, staring down at the five bodies. Five dead men. He’d only killed one of them—and even that was a stretch given he hadn’t actually pulled the trigger—but all of them dead
because
of him. Because he was here. Because he had gotten involved.

There wasn’t any remorse or guilt on his part, purely frustration. Dead men tell no tales, as the old line went. He was rapidly running out of people to ask, and was ticking off the list of places to look just as quickly.

He thought of Finn. He’d been too far underground to receive calls, and the radio silence was unnerving.

You couldn’t run a good op without contact. But she wasn’t a solider.

Was she still there? Was she in trouble?

He knew he should go check on her. Port Authority wasn’t all that far. Eight blocks up. Less than ten minutes’ walk. Jake headed for the door back out onto the concourse.

A minute later he was easing his way through the glass door and onto the customer side of things. Life was going on with the same alarming lack of purpose. Nobody was pointing at him, and nobody was screaming. No one even noticed him emerge from the control room. Which meant the sound of the gunshots hadn’t traveled. Good. There was nothing to be gained by mass hysteria. Right now what he needed was a good dose of normality.

Not that there was anything normal about New York right now.

Jake paused long enough to scan the room, reorienting himself, and then turned to make his way toward the northernmost exit.

He froze, staring up at a huge bank of monitors mounted on the wall in the Amtrak lounge. Through the glass wall separating them he could see one of the screens clearly enough to read the ticker across the bottom. The screen was dominated by an image of smoking rubble that had once been a building. The yellow bar of the scrolling caption read:
London Stock Exchange in Terror Attack . . .

Jake watched it roll through three times before he was absolutely sure what it said. Strikes on the world’s two primary financial centers in the same day?

He ran out into the central waiting area, doubling around into the Amtrak lounge. The guard didn’t even glance up at him. She was too busy watching her little TV set, which showed the same footage, but hers had sound.

“. .
. on the scene today
,” a reporter was saying, “
as the city of London was the site of a devastating explosion. Investigators have determined that this was a deliberate attack of terror. The speculation is that the lack of power and failure of usual security measures made the financial hub too tempting a target to pass up. We are reminded of Osama bin Laden’s final entreaty to his followers to rise up against the nodes of economy, that there is no greater way to hurt the United Kingdom than to neutralize its economic heart. Police are currently searching for this woman”—
a face appeared on the screen. She had changed, but still had the same strong, almost sharp cheekbones, the pointed chin, the small, sharp nose that turned up at the end into as close to a chisel bit as bone would allow. The hair was shorter than he remembered, but still just as wild. He used to love tangling his fingers in it and pulling her against him
—“in connection with the explosion. If you see her, please contact the authorities at once. Do not approach her as she is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
”

Sophie did indeed look dangerous, Jake thought, staring at her face numbly. But then, she always had. She looked older, tired. But yes, still dangerous.

What the fuck’s going on, Sophie? What the fuck are you involved in?

Two big questions.

There were smaller ones too, like how there was power here. Did that mean the world was coming back online?

Jake peered at his ex-girlfriend’s face for the first time in more than a decade, unable to shake her cryptic phone message.
I’m not who you think I am
. That was one thing, the other was the fact that she’d warned him. Warned him and apologized. She never apologized for anything. But that wasn’t what he was thinking about now. Now his mind was focused on the last warning she’d given him.
You’re going to hear stuff about me. Bad stuff.
She was involved, there was no doubt about that, but was she a victim or was she one of them?

The Sophie he knew wasn’t a victim, ever. But it had been a long time since he’d last seen her. There was a lot of living done between the pair of them. They weren’t the kids they had been. He couldn’t even remember the naïve idealist he’d been in more than abstract terms, combat zones had beaten that kid out of him. But he remembered her nature. She hadn’t been a terrorist; she’d been fiercely patriotic. He just couldn’t imagine her turning against her country.

I’m not who you think I am.

Then who are you? What do you do for them? Apart from blow up the London Stock Exchange
, he thought bitterly.

Control. That’s what everything else had been about so far. Control. And if these people couldn’t control it, the next best thing was to destroy it, right?

Was that what had happened?

They’d tried to take London and failed so they’d left nothing behind.

New York, London, and Tokyo—that was the third one. Only three world stock exchanges, and one had been hacked and another blown up within the space of a day. The same day that the lights went out across the world.

Did that mean Tokyo was next? Was that what was happening?

Was the newsreader right and bin Laden’s prophecy was finally coming to pass? He tried to remember exactly what Sophie had said in her message, but all he could remember was an overall sense of:
It’s bad, very bad, and about to get a whole lot worse.
Which wasn’t far from the mark.

She’d obviously known about all this, there was no getting around that, and whether she’d blown up the London Stock Exchange or been framed for it, he needed to talk to her.

I’m not who you think I am.

Right
, he thought,
like you won’t be fighting them, trying to make things as difficult as possible. I don’t know you at all.

She was the key. She knew what was happening. More importantly, she knew why. He wanted answers. She had them.

What is it about the end of the world and women I’ve slept with?

“Mr. Carter?”

Jake stopped.

“Excuse me, Mr. Carter?”

He saw a group of men off to the side of the waiting lounge. They stood in the shadows cast by the curving wall. They were watching him. One of them nodded as he looked their way. He knew the man. He’d seen him before today, a couple of times, without realizing he’d seen him. He’d been on the train at Times Square, but he’d been wearing a cop uniform then.

Jake walked over to them. “You’ve got me at a disadvantage.” He stopped ten feet away: close enough to be heard without shouting, far enough to be well out of knife range. He didn’t recognize the other two men, and yet, he sort of did in a way that he couldn’t place, like he’d seen them before, in the background, but never really registered their presence.

All three wore business suits, dark slacks and dark button-downs and dark ties with long black trench coats over them. Men in black. Everything about the way they so desperately tried to blend in with the city screamed feds. All three looked slick, professional, but not exceptional, not memorable.

Then he remembered where he’d seen the second man: walking toward Wall Street. He’d led Jake straight into the New York Stock Exchange where this entire nightmare he was currently living began.

“That was you, wasn’t it? Down at the stock exchange this morning?” He knew he was right, even though the man neither confirmed nor denied the allegation.

Instead, the guy came back with a question of his own: “Are you planning to stop The Hidden?”

He had no idea what that meant.

“And in English?”

The questioner’s hair was touched with silver. He had a small, neat goatee that was streaked as well. There was a lapel pin on his coat, too small for Jake to make out the details, but it was silver and triangular, not gold, so it didn’t match the one in his pocket. So what was this? Some really exclusive turf war where people with more money than sense were fighting for control of his city?

You can hardly call it a war if only one of the factions is running around killing people.

“Don’t be coy, Mr. Carter.”

“I’m not being coy. I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“You aren’t a very convincing liar. All I want to know is, are you trying to stop them or are you helping them? Think carefully about your answer. It’s the most important question anyone has asked you in your life. Believe me.”

The threat was implicit.

He took the gold pin from his pocket and held it in his clenched fist. “I’ve never heard of any Hidden people, apart from the mole men.” His gaze drifted off toward the tracks. Probably not the best time to make a joke. “But assuming you mean these guys,” he opened his hand to reveal the pin, “then yeah, I’m gonna stop them. Me and my army of one.”

His questioner nodded, as did his companions behind him. “Good.” He smiled. It wasn’t any kind of smile Jake was comfortable being on the receiving end of. “That was the correct answer. Unfortunately, you are wasting time running around chasing shadows. The fight isn’t out here, no matter how it might appear. If you want to influence the outcome of this fight you need to get dirty, and that means slaying the dragon in its den.” There was a trash can up against the wall behind the men, just a standard city-issue bin. The man glanced over his shoulder and nodded. The third member of the trio reached into his jacket and pulled something out that Jake couldn’t quite see. It was small and bright; he placed it atop the can.

“How much have you managed to piece together for yourself?” the watcher from the stock exchange slaying asked him.

Jake figured he had nothing to lose. “Some. It’s all about money, it’s not terrorism, whatever people are being led to think. It’s about money and power.”

“Leverage,” the man agreed. “Control. With the right quantities of both you can convince people to do whatever you want, including slowly poisoning themselves. If I were to tell you that every day people willingly ingest a poison that was refused FDA approval thirty years ago, because it was proven to cause memory loss, seizures, vision loss, and cancer, to exacerbate and mimic the symptoms of conditions such as Alzheimer’s and depression while the poisoning affects the dopamine system of the brain causing addiction, what would you say?” It was a rhetorical question, the guy didn’t give him a chance to answer. “You’d tell me to get the hell out of here, I’m sure. We are talking about a deadly neurotoxic drug masquerading as an additive that interacts poorly with all antidepressants, L-DOPA, Coumadin, hormones, insulin, cardiac medications, and the like, and yet it’s in circulation because of the kind of influence we are up against. The day of President Reagan’s inauguration, his very first act in power was to ensure that this poison found a way through the safeguards of the FDA, appointing a new director to replace the original one who had stood in its way, and when the five-man committee looked like they were
still
going to refuse to rubber stamp the poison as fit for human consumption, he added a sixth man to put the vote into deadlock, allowing his hand-picked director to cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of poisoning the world for profit. The man who did that was then rewarded with a fat contract with the public relations firm who represented Monsanto, who are currently poisoning our food supply with genetic modifiers. But that’s not the takeaway here, the takeaway is how far up the chain their influence goes, Mr. Carter. They were able to apply pressure on POTUS and get him to directly interfere with the process, overlooking the scuttled grand jury investigation of the company with a vested interest in the getting the poison into food, to overcome the recommendations of the Bressler Report, to ignore the PBOI’s recommendations and pretend this toxin did not chronically sicken and kill thousands of lab animals.”