The Whisper of Stars (21 page)

Eight years inside and Jen could feel the hatred leaching from him.

‘I can get information on Conrad,’ she said, her lips shaking into a smile. ‘I can tell you where he is.’

Lynch frowned, leant forward, resting his chin against his long fingers, and began stroking his lips inwards. ‘You’re full of surprises, aren’t you.’

Conrad Fowler had been Lynch’s right-hand man for years, but when caught and pressured, he cut a deal that put Lynch and the rest of his crew behind bars. For that kind of betrayal people expected retribution to be swift, but Fowler had somehow managed to evade Lynch and disappear. The money ploughed into finding him had become almost legendary in criminal circles.

Lynch seemed to drift away mentally for a moment, until finally he let out a long, deep breath.

‘And I thought I was going to get to play with you tonight.’

Jen didn’t want to think about what that might mean. Lynch gestured for his men to leave, and when they were alone, Jen asked him again.

‘Will you do it?’

Lynch shook his head, tutting, his outstretched finger flicking from side to side. ‘Now, now, Logan,’ he said, mocking her. ‘Not so fast.’

‘I need ID and transit to Samara. In return I give you Fowler.’ She added, ‘You’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘Get me to Samara,’ she said, ‘and you have my word. I will deliver Fowler to you on a plate.’

Jen knew what was important to people like Lynch. He might be a slippery, evil son of a bitch, but shit-suckers like him valued trust and honour above all else. He wanted Fowler more than he wanted her dead. That was the gamble, and it seemed to be paying off.

Lynch tipped his head back and screamed. ‘Fuck.’ He was laughing but was clearly annoyed. ‘You got me good, Logan. Rock and a hard place.’

‘No maybes,’ Jen said clearly.

‘Okay. Okay,’ he said, flapping his large hands around. ‘It’s more than you deserve, but I can get you to Moscow.’

‘No good. I’m taking all the risks.’ She realised with unease that he
wanted
her to persuade him. He wanted to play games. She could see him searching for a way to kill her
and
get the information on Fowler. She said, ‘And you get him. Finally.’

Lynch chewed his tongue, his black eyes glistening and cutting into her. Playtime was over.

‘I can get you on a cargo plane of farm workers,’ he said dryly. ‘It flies into Ufa.’

‘Ufa?’ Jen said doubtfully. ‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s the closest I can get you,’ he snapped. ‘Take it or leave it.’

‘What about Kryazh Air Force Base?’ It was small, near Samara, and the one she’d had in mind all along.

‘Sure. If you want to get caught, go there.’

Jen couldn’t visualise the distance between Ufa and Samara. Traveling across Russia would be difficult, especially in January. Icy conditions and her inability to travel via conventional routes increased the chance of failure exponentially. Jen swallowed, unsure of her next move.

‘How far from Samara?’ she asked, knowing his response wouldn’t be helpful.

‘Jesus, Logan!’ Lynch hissed loudly, spraying small globules of spit over her. ‘Beggars. Choosers. It’s the best I can do.’

Jen closed her eyes and nodded slowly.

‘And it won’t be cheap, either, a fake ID and retinals. Plus, I’ll need to pay people off on both sides. It will work, but it’s going to cost you.’ He paused, enjoying his moment, reveling in her desperation. ‘It’s going to cost you a lot.’

‘How much is a lot?’

‘Sixty,’ he said quickly.

‘Are you joking?’

He smiled, sat back slowly and folded his arms. ‘It would have been cheaper if I hadn’t done eight years, Logan.’

This was payback. It was the best she was going to get.

‘When?’

His wide, sickening grin was back. ‘Three days,’ he said, clearly pleased with himself. ‘Be ready.’

* * *

It was early. Nathan stared at his screen and cracked his fingers. ‘Hacking’ was an ugly word, something his students would use at the start of their course. He guided them towards more elegant terms, ones that suggested grace and some level of artistry. Hackers hacked, and often their motives were monetary or just plain malicious. What he had taught – in a life before this madness – he considered an art form.

Most of his students would go on to be security experts – white hats, as they were known – and they, of course, would fight the black hats. The terminology was oversimplified, something invented by people in suits who needed a simple analogy to describe a complicated world, but it was true. It was chess. A game. Good against bad. Sneakers against criminals.

He thought back to a challenge he had once given his students, something he called ‘Gap Assembly.’

On that occasion, the brief had been to ‘assemble’ detailed plans for the recently built Stadium of Light in Copenhagen. It had been constructed to celebrate the 2076 Olympic Games and was a terrorist target from bid through to completion. Each plan, document, blueprint, quote and signature had been logged, encrypted and securely stored.

The claim, at the time, had been that all data connected to the project was impossible to hack. A few years later, his team – albeit in complete and glorious secrecy – had proven them wrong.

He likened it to an artist he had seen once. The man had created an artwork on a huge canvas using the tiniest of dots. Stand close and you could see the technique, the individual presses of a pen, but take a step back and a landscape appeared, an illusion rich with depth and texture.

Assembly was similar; it involved the gathering of tiny packets of information. For every secure document, there was always a trail, something that wasn’t secure, a sketch, a proposal, a tweak to a piece of construction. Each piece of data formed a picture that made sense as a whole, the gaps often a case of simple guesswork. Nathan hoped the blueprint for the vault would reveal itself in the same way: an architectural drawing bought together using skill, technique and old-fashioned gut instinct.

The cursor on his screen winked, taunting him to start.

He got to work, deciding to hit a multitude of possible sources but spread it out over the next few days. Within hours he saw two files connecting and smiled.

The assembly was underway, dot by dot.

Chapter 39

Zitagi stood outside the office and calmed her breathing.

Summoned.

She had sped across town meticulously preparing her answers, her mind trawling the facts. Nothing happened without reason; each singular act was connected to another, even if sometimes it was hard to see. Logan had been to Owen Powell’s house. That meant she had made the connection between Baden and the Histeridae. She was better than Zido had expected, a worthy opponent. She checked her dress and shoes and knocked confidently three times.

‘Come,’ his voice bellowed from inside.

In a world of buzzers, passes and security systems, Victor Reyland was a man who liked to keep things simple, old-fashioned even.

She entered his office, a large corner suite with high ceilings and huge windows spanning the length of two walls. The hum of the air conditioning fought to maintain the low temperature he seemed to prefer. Reyland stood looking out over the city. He was a tall man and at seventy-two considered to be middle-aged, which was laughable. He was fitter than most fifty-year-olds. His rank no longer had a title within the agency, and like any good leader, if you stepped out of line he wouldn’t correct you. You would do that yourself.

‘Zido, it’s good to see you.’ His voice was warm but he didn’t turn to greet her. She joined him by the window, her mouth dry.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said, not moving an inch.

She looked out and studied the huge buildings towering almost a kilometre high. Airships and transporters blinked across the late afternoon sky. Beauty wasn’t something Zido could appreciate easily. It felt like weakness.

‘It is, Sir,’ she answered obediently. ‘Very.’

She could feel that something was wrong, a hairline crack of doubt within him, and knew how important it was to fix that before it grew into something that couldn’t be repaired.

He continued to stare out of the window. ‘When we bury a problem, we don’t expect it to come back and haunt us. And if it does, we control it.’

‘I will get it back,’ she said confidently.

He turned looked at her. ‘I don’t doubt that.’

Zitagi hid the surge of relief that washed over her. Reyland walked over to a small chrome table and invited her to sit. She obliged and Reyland stared at her, his eyes unblinking, paused in time. He waited for her to swallow and then poured a glass of water.

‘You are still confident of retrieving it?’ he said, handing her the glass.

She nodded. ‘Yes, Sir, I am. Absolutely.’

‘Good.’ He paused, eyes like liquid steel. ‘Tell me about Logan. What’s her next move?’

Zido needed to reassure him, and quickly. ‘She’s working alone but she’ll want to make connections. She will need to. The next time she surfaces we will be ready.’

He smiled a little. ‘Ah, yes. Your little experiment.’

‘We are close, Sir. A few more days and we will have a way of blocking the Histeridae –’

‘Callaghan, the chase, the guards and now McArthur. It’s a trail, Zido,’ he said. ‘You know how these things can unravel.’

‘I assure you, I will find her and this will all be over. Soon.’

He leant forward, smile gone, his expression like stone. ‘I’m getting heat from upstairs.
I
know you can handle this, but they want to team you with Phillips, turn things up a notch.’

Zitagi nodded and cleared her throat, unsure she had heard him correctly.

‘Phillips?’ she said calmly.

That fucking idiot. Over my dead body.

Something buzzed, Reyland’s secretary reminding him for the third time he was late for an appointment. They stood.

‘Don’t worry about Phillips,’ Reyland said, grabbing his jacket. ‘I will stall them. Just don’t mess it up and keep me informed.’

She nodded.

Finally, just before he left the room, he added, ‘The body count. Keep it low.’

Their meeting was over. Zitagi entered the executive elevator elegantly and with a calm demeanour, but by the time she reached the ground floor her anger was boiling.

Jim. Fucking. McArthur.

She blamed him for most of this mess. He had been weak, unable to make the tough decisions when it mattered. And now Phillips? That weaselly little shit had been snapping at her heels for years. The very fact they were even considering him made her seethe. The anger passed, as it always did, and by the evening her familiar cold clarity had returned. She knew what she needed to do. Reyland was putting his faith in her and she wasn’t about to let him down. When she pledged her life to the cause, she’d meant it,
unlike some.
Her remit was more important than anyone would ever know, and Jennifer Logan was not going to stand in the way of that.

Zitagi would be ready, and this time she wouldn’t waste energy trying to capture her. This time she would kill her and take back the Histeridae. Murder. It was easier sometimes. And then, when that was done, she would ensure that nobody, especially Phillips, got close to her affairs again.

Chapter 40

Jen had never been good at staying in one place too long. Hiding at Thomas’s had been particularly difficult, the atmosphere a disconcerting blend of functional and distrustful. She had tried to explain to Nathan why she hadn’t told him about Lynch, why she met him alone, but he remained angry. As she watched him stuffing clothes and equipment into a hard-shell case, she realised what she had done was wrong. Whether she liked it or not, they were a team and she needed to be more open with him, needed to trust him. He was standing now, arms folded, studying the map that was opened up on the table. She joined him.

‘When I’m done, we meet here, on this road,’ she said, tapping the pickup point. ‘Just North of Kurumoch.’

He nodded. ‘And then we hide and wait.’

There was a pause, as if he were about to say something else. Instead he rolled the map roughly and continued packing. They had been over the plan a few times but decided not to torture themselves anymore. It was full of holes and unknowns that no amount of planning was going to fill or make right.

They would travel separately. Jen would fly into Ufa Airport posing as a farm worker. Security at Ufa was an unknown, but workers were shipped out quickly and regularly to the various food production plants in the area. She would need to avoid detection, stay away from conventional routes and make her way north on foot, picking up a train on the trans-Siberian route to Samara. From Samara it was a ten-hour hike across the Zhiguli Mountains to drop straight down onto the target: the Shiryaevo Vault. The plan required improvisation at nearly every step. It was dangerous, but the only plan that offered a chance of remaining undetected – and also, importantly, the only plan that retained an element of surprise.

For Nathan it was simple: take a commercial flight into Kurumoch International and find a hotel in the nearby town of Tolyatti. He had assembled
basic floor layouts of the Vault, and once Jen was inside he would be able to guide her using close-range communication. She would enable him to hack from the inside.

‘You know we might not find anything, right?’ he said carefully.

‘We have the number of the server room and the code. We’ll find
something
.’

Later that evening, bags were packed and there was nothing else to do but wait. Nathan pushed the remaining food around his plate. They hadn’t talked much during dinner.

‘What was it like?’ she asked, ‘leaving your life behind?’

Nathan curled his lip and shrugged. ‘In the end I didn’t have much of a life to leave, I guess.’

Jen cast her mind back. Was it really possible that only a month ago her life had seemed so on track? So full of purpose? He looked up at her, his right eye bloodshot, and it seemed again as though he might say something but then thought better of it. He frowned, looking tired.