Jake stared at the screen thinking:
Why?
But even before he could ask that aloud, he was asking a new question, a new name. “Sophie Keane?”
Wordlessly Ryan ran another search and turned up another set of hits. Unfortunately, the files were all locked, and the QR code wasn’t offering up any more secrets. “They’re running some sort of cypher, 128-bit encryption. It’s tight.” He pointed at something on the screen. It took Jake a second to realize it was a single file that had been returned in both searches. It was a JPEG, a photograph of Harry and Sophie, only it said
Cabrakan
and
Zaccimi
. Code names.
“Can you get into any of this stuff?”
“Given time I can get into anything. You keep a lookout, make sure we’re not about to receive any visitors, I’ll do my thing here. What are we looking for?”
“Proof. Something we can take to the cops. The military. Something we can use to bring these guys down.”
“Ah, nothing easy then.”
Jake crossed the room to the door. He wasn’t sure what the connection was between Sophie and Harry. He’d sat up late at night more than once, rolling ice around a tumbler of whiskey, lamenting the one that got away, with Harry nodding along sympathetically, never once mentioning that he’d met Sophie, and yet here they were, sharing a photograph on the billionaire murdering playboy’s computer servers.
One of the only things he knew for sure about these two people, he realized, was that Harry Kane was old money. His parents were filthy rich, the wealth inherited from his parents, and their parents before them, going back generations.
But just because he comes from money . . .
Jake didn’t like the way his thoughts were going. Harry was a friend. He’d been a friend for a long time. He’d known the guy for the better part of fifteen years. Now, seeing his name on a file was enough for him to get the tar and feathers out?
“Okay, got something,” Ryan said. “Kane’s personnel file, well, what passes for one in a crazy-ass cult. Says he was recruited by Zaccimi. That’s Sophie Keane. Lists his activities, places they’ve sent him, completed missions, that kind of thing.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Probably not.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Better you see it for yourself.”
It felt like his entire world was being turned on its head. He’d come here expecting to find, what? Membership rosters? Instead he was looking at a list of assassinations. And that’s what they were, he was absolutely sure of it. Kills carried out by one of the men he’d always considered to be a close friend. The man he’d first turned to when he was searching for answers here. It was all in there, how he’d been approached by Zaccimi—Sophie—and how he’d been recruited. It was like he was some kind of sleeper agent for the CI-fucking-A waiting to be woken up and sent on a killing spree. “I can’t read this,” he said, but didn’t take his eyes from the screen. There were other names and events he recognized. Things that had been reported as tragedies. Accidents. And looking at this, he knew they were anything but. “Is it the same for Sophie?” he asked, already knowing it was.
I’m not who you think I am.
Ryan said nothing. He simply opened a series of surveillance photographs from Paris, time-stamped this morning. There was no mistaking what was going on. She’d been marked for execution. Harry Kane had been dispatched to kill her.
Jake pushed through the photos, looking for verification that she was dead, but there was nothing. There was a photo of him in there too, taken as he crossed Zuccotti Park. Toward the back of the shots he came across photos of strange drawings, all of them a lot like the markings he’d seen the two men spray across the wall in Times Square.
“Can you copy these?”
“Sure,” Ryan said, dumping them onto the stick he’d plugged into the machine. “They important?”
“Everything’s important right now until we know it’s not.”
“Roger that.”
Ryan was still copying across the last couple of images when the relative silence in the room was violently broken by a loud, grating sound that filled every inch of the old brownstone. The alarm was brutal.
Their time was up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
JAKE WAS ON HIS FEET AND AROUND THE DESK in a fraction of a second, Ryan two steps behind him, gun in hand.
If they didn’t get out of there, it wouldn’t matter that Ryan had found a way into their system.
Jake opened the door, but shut it again a split second later without managing so much as peeking around the doorjamb. Shadows moved across the hardwood floor. He wasn’t stupid enough to think these guys wouldn’t recognize him. They’d be all over him like a rash if they saw him. He was a marked man. He had been dragged into the middle of this by Sophie—as proven by that single photograph at Zuccotti Park.
Right now it was kill or be killed. He wasn’t naïve enough to think there was a way out of this that didn’t involve blood.
He had to think like them. He was in their place; this was familiar ground, they knew every inch of it. They knew all of the hiding places and escape routes. There was nowhere he could run they didn’t know about, including the door out of the basement into the abandoned tunnels. In their place, he’d do a grid search, making his way down the hallways one room at a time. He tried to think.
He spotted a small flange on the doorknob and turned it carefully, locking the door. It wasn’t much and it wouldn’t stop them for long—they didn’t need to be subtle, they could just kick the door down.
Then Jake realized he had inadvertently locked the two of them into a small inner room with no windows or other doors. He’d effectively trapped them.
“What’s our goal here?” Ryan asked. “Beyond just getting out.”
“Just getting out,” Jake replied. “Nothing beyond that.”
“Not good enough,” Ryan said. “We get out of here, nothing’s changed. We’ve got a few photos, but these guys have got their own assassins, man. All we’ve done is paint targets on our backs.”
“Strategic withdrawal.”
“Now you sound like a fucking soldier boy. We need to hurt them. Hurt them bad. But the key, the main thing we need, really need, is insurance so they don’t come after us.” Ryan tapped his temple with the barrel of his gun. “That’s thinking.”
“Right now I’m just thinking about keeping you alive.”
There was a heavy lamp on the desk beside the computer, an old-fashioned brass light. Jake thought about using it as a makeshift weapon, yanking its cord free of the wall and wrapping it around his fist. It would have some heft to it. But Ryan was right—even if he hadn’t used these words—he was thinking like a victim. He’d taken the ceramic knife from the guy in the relay station—he could do a lot more damage with that. If he cut them, they would bleed. He’d have to get up close, which wouldn’t be easy given they were packing some serious heat. Still, he’d take a few of them with him before they cut him down. Maybe that’d buy Ryan the time he needed to get out.
“I’m gonna get you out of here, and when you do, I want you to find a woman.”
“I’ve got a woman, unless you’ve forgotten,” Ryan wisecracked.
“Shut up and listen. Her name is Finn Walsh. She works up at Columbia. A lecturer. She knows what’s going on. Find her. Give her the USB. She needs to see those photos. Understood?”
“Show her yourself.”
“Just promise me.”
“Fine.”
They needed another way out, but this wasn’t some locked-room mystery. There was no secret panel in the wall that would pop open when Jake pulled the right book from the shelf.
He peered around the room again, which wasn’t much to look at. He could just about stretch from wall to wall, touching both sides at once. Maybe with a sledgehammer he could pound his way through the wall. But there were two problems with that: one, no sledgehammer; the other, the noise. Jake slammed his hand against the wall in sheer frustration.
“What you doing? They’ll hear you!”
The dull thud echoed through the compact study and into the room beyond—then stopped. Jake repeated the strike, listening to the echo. Then he heard it: the sounds of
outside
—they were muted but unmistakable. He needed to somehow get into the room next door, even if they were five stories up.
He stood with his back against the wall, staring at the door, expecting the handle to turn at any second. The incessant wailing of the alarm had spiraled to the kind of howl that would drive the dog packs in the neighborhood wild.
They couldn’t just stand there waiting for the inevitable. He needed to do something, to be proactive, not reactive. So far he’d been reacting to adversity, trying to fix problems as they arose. Now he needed to
be
the problem. He needed to take the fight to them, like Ryan had suggested.
“Give me the gun.”
Ryan shook his head, but handed it over. A Beretta M9.
Jake knew the gun well. Fifteen 9mm rounds in the clip. It had been a long time since he’d handled a weapon like this. Right now he hoped it was like riding a bike, something you didn’t forget. It wasn’t a standard M9, he realized, it was a General Officers Model, unique to the Army and Air Force. He didn’t want to know where Ryan had gotten his hands on it. He checked the firing pin block to make sure it wasn’t engaged, racked the slide, and moved to the door, ready to go out shooting.
“Follow me. And don’t get yourself killed.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Jake opened the door and stepped out. There were two men in the corridor with their backs to him. They must not have heard him banging on the wall above the screech of the alarm.
Jake didn’t hesitate. There was no room for moralizing. He pulled the trigger, feeling the fierce recoil of the double-action, and put a bullet in the back of one man’s spine. The second managed to turn in time to take a bullet in the face. The impact blew out the back of his head.
There was no hope of hiding now. Jake stepped over the corpses, going for the door as another black-clad foot soldier came charging up the wide arc of the staircase. His next shot took this guy in the kneecap, bringing him down like a felled tree, but it didn’t stop the soldier from trying to put a slug though Jake’s brain. Mercifully, the bullet whistled by his ear and bit into the plaster and ripped through masonboard wall. Standing over the man, Jake used another bullet to put him down.
“Cold, dude,” Ryan barely breathed.
“Shut up,” Jake said. He could hear more of them coming. He looked back at Ryan and gestured with two fingers toward the door.
Ryan nodded and ran for door while Jake kept him covered.
Jake stopped dead in his tracks after following Ryan through the door. He’d been expecting another quaint pseudo-Victorian gentleman’s lounge. This was anything but—they had stumbled upon a modern-day technological nerve center with two men trying unsuccessfully to duck behind the terminals. Jake immediately shot them both, then closed the door behind him.
The room was deceptively large, with an array of screens against one wall that would have been fit for a Pentagon briefing room. They displayed a global map, targets and trajectories marked off and all sorts of other information he couldn’t understand with icons beside names like
Xbalanque
,
Hunhau
,
Ixtab
,
Kauil
,
Cum Hau
, and others. Jake saw names two he recognized,
Cabrakan
and
Zaccimi.
Zaccimi
was the only name marked in red. Out of play. He didn’t know what the map meant beyond the obvious. There were two banks of monitors, a dozen on each. He thought for one terrible second that he had been mistaken and that there were no windows here because it was so dark in the room, but then he saw that they were blacked out.
Ryan was over by the wall now. Jake didn’t know what Ryan was doing at first, then he noticed several pipes running down the far wall. One was water, the other, definitely not. “Old building, old pipes,” his friend said, by way of explanation, and started chipping away at one of them.
Jake didn’t question it. Three long, quick strides and he was across the room. He grabbed the nearest chair and hurled it through one of the windows, sending thousands of shards raining down on West 91st Street below.
Jake had one thing on his mind—and that was learning how to fly, because he was going out of that window one way or another. The snow on the ground wasn’t much of a safety blanket.
Ryan broke through the seal on the pipe and was rewarded with a dull
thunk
and the rasping hiss of escaping gas. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter.
Jake looked at him and nodded. “Do it.”
Ryan thumbed the wheel, and set the flame burning as the first gunshot rang out. He took this as his signal to jump—three steps and he hurled himself through the shattered window, Jake one step behind him, and for one excruciatingly long second he thought he’d gotten it all wrong, that there was nothing there, then he hit the wrought-iron railings of a city-mandated fire escape and rolled.
Thank God for rules and regulations. Simple as that. Some officious little prick somewhere had just saved their lives. But only for maybe another fifteen or twenty seconds if he didn’t
move
.
It was a long way down. Jake fired the M9 through the window, buying them a couple seconds more, and started down, running three, four, five iron steps at a time, chasing behind Ryan until he hit the next landing, then again.
Shots rang out.
Jake aimed backward, firing wildly as he dropped another level lower. It was still a long way to the ground and he could hear someone clattering down the fire escape behind him. The snow made the iron steps treacherously slippery.
Ryan launched himself down the next set of steps, then jumped all the way to the platform below, hit the sheet of metal hard, his legs buckling beneath him, and rolled, scrambling back up to his feet even as the concussion of bullets pitted the wrought-iron platform beside his hand.
Jake followed and then kicked open the ladder, grabbing it and shimmying down as it locked into place, then dropped the last few feet to the alleyway that ran beside the building. He took aim and put a bullet into the chest of their pursuer. The shot spun the guy around, and left him sprawled across the lower levels of the fire escape.