Sunfail (10 page)

Thirty-one miles under the incredible press of water.

She looked at the speedometer, running the numbers in her head. At current speed she’d reach the other side in a little less than half an hour. The question was what would be waiting for her when she got there.

There wasn’t much one French border guard could do to stop her. The tunnel didn’t have blast doors they could seal to prevent her from getting off sovereign French soil, but if their radios were shielded, they could get word to their British counterparts in Folkestone. She was going to be coming out of the tunnel hot.

But she had a thirty-one-mile drive to think about what she’d do at the other end, more than enough time to run through her options and come up with a plan. It wouldn’t be a good plan, but it was better than no plan.

The tunnel was straight, the center of the track reasonably level, but the sleepers every few feet promised a jarring ride, so she hopped the rails and followed the flat gravel track running alongside the rails until she reached a branch in the tunnel which took her through to a second, much smaller tube.

She could almost reach out with her hands and touch both sides at once as she roared down the flat surface of the maintenance tunnel. It was an alien landscape, harsh, new, clean, with acoustics that meant the engine’s roar swelled to deafening levels, folding in on itself as the echoes reverberated through the cramped confines.

Sophie was armed: she had her pistol and her knife. She could do a lot of damage with either of them if she had to. One-on-one she’d hold her own in any fight. Two-on-one the odds were still stacked in her favor. Three-on-one things would set a little hairier, but she had nothing to lose. That meant she wasn’t afraid of getting hurt. That, in turn, meant she was much more dangerous than any men who might be waiting for her at the other end of the tunnel, because they had wives and children and things they didn’t want to lose weighing them down. Yet she didn’t want to kill anyone else unless she really had to.

Unfortunately, she might not have a say in it.

Sophie put her head down and drove, thundering through the tunnel so fast the emergency strip lights blurred into pulsing lines on either side of her head.

Twenty minutes later, the brand-new Egli-Vincent burst out of the Channel Tunnel entrance like a runaway train, engine racing, wheels a blur as it hit the open air like a flame.

Six guards were waiting for her.

Not enough, no matter how good they thought they were.

She was better.

The bike’s sudden appearance caught them off-guard, even though they’d braced themselves, taunted by its roar for minutes before it finally appeared.

She deliberately steered for the biggest and ugliest of the men in front of her, standing point with a submachine gun leveled at her. The gambit was a simple—and desperate—one: she had to assume he wanted to stay alive.

He had less than twenty feet to decide. Not enough time for rational thought to take over. He was operating purely on instinct as he squeezed off a burst of gunfire. The bullets tore up the road in front of her because, as she’d hoped, he had no intention of killing a defenseless woman.

She didn’t so much as veer an inch from her path. She needed him to know she had no such qualms as she surged forward.

He bought the gambit and hurled himself out of the motorcycle’s path, leaving a gaping hole right at the front of their line.

She raced through the center of the line, taking the Egli-Vincent’s speed into the red zone. There was nothing between her and London.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“WE HAVE A PROBLEM, MR. ALOM.”

“Then fix it. That is what we pay you for.”

“It’s not as easy as that.”

“It is. You might like to think it is more difficult, but in reality things are only as difficult as you make them. This is business. Nothing more, nothing less. And in business you strategize, you prepare, and you capitalize, and then, if you are lucky, you make a killing. We aren’t trying to win friends here. There is nothing to be gained in being cautious. We must be bulls. If there is a problem, you deal with it. That is what you do. There is no room for doubt. The plan is solid; we have at our disposal information none of the competing factors are party to. Today is all about follow-through. Today, with the grace of the old gods, we become kings of the world.”

“There’s a problem,” the assassin began again.

“Then find a solution, or die trying.”

“Yes, Mr. Alom.”

“Better. I take it you encountered resistance at Wall Street?”

“Very little. None of our friends made themselves known, though we picked up an audience.”

“And judging by your ‘problem,’ I assume you failed to deal with it at the time?”

“The priority was getting out of there.”

“No, the priority was doing the job you were paid to do, Mr. Cabrakan. You disappoint me. There can be no witnesses. Do you understand?”

“I do.” The words were delivered like a marriage vow.

“Good. Do not disappoint me twice in one day or we shall have to consider liquidating our assets.” There was no misunderstanding the threat. “I take it the operation itself was a success?”

For a moment there were only the sounds of the city on the line, and even those were muted by the absence of traffic with just the one engine revving quietly beneath him, then the assassin took a deep breath and finished his report: “The adjustment was successful.”

He explained that the programmers infiltrated the system and inlaid a real-time delay, allowing their systems precious milliseconds to react upon the trades before they actually happened on the stock exchange servers. It was barely perceptible, not visible to the human eye, but given the hundredths and millionths of a second it took these machines to react, it was almost a lifetime in terms of cold hard calculating time—as good as being clairvoyant, allowing them to make all the right trades, grab stocks a moment before their share prices hiked, and dump them before the bottom fell out of the market. Fractions of a second were all it took for the machine to make a killing, and once the worm was embedded, no simple reboot was going to cleanse the system, no matter how clever the SYSOPs believed their system was. Pulling the plug wouldn’t change a thing.

They were in.

It was only the start. He wasn’t party to the myriad strands of the plan. He was only a pawn in this game, with Alom and his kind the kings and queens. He knew that. He knew that he was disposable. He’d be a fool to think otherwise. But if he played his part and didn’t let Alom down, he could walk away from this richer than any god. The prospect was almost worth dying for.

“Send word, we need more foot soldiers. Let the youth rise up and feel useful.” It was a simple enough plan to keep the Watchers busy so that they wouldn’t know where the true threat lay. With the city already on edge, masked kids with spray cans were every bit as frightening as an armed jihadist. Anarchy on the streets had always been the best alternative when it came to distracting law enforcement. And it was so much better to use disenfranchised youth than it was to risk any of their own men. “There is still so much to do before we emerge from the shadows, Mr. Cabrakan. You know what you must do. Very simply put, give them hell.”

Or, in the case of the gate-crasher who’d stumbled into the party back on Wall Street, open the gates and push him through with a bullet in the face, the assassin thought grimly.

He had no intention of failing Mr. Alom.

He knew better than that.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“HOLY FUCK . . . I MEAN . . . JUST . . . LOOK AT IT . . .
look
at it.” Finn Walsh couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. It was astounding. Breathtaking. She was quite literally lost for words. She shook her head. She knew she was grinning like a kid, but she didn’t care. It
was
incredible. It was everything she’d dreamed it would be and so much more.

An underwater image dominated the screen. It had been taken with some sort of night-vision lens, making it bright and clear, but heavily tinted to a pale blue-green. It was like looking down on an alien civilization in some distant world.

There was a row of buildings, or more accurately foundations, clearly squared and far too precise to be artificial. Beside that row was a second row. This one was far more than just rectangular bases and broken foundations, with three complete structures. Each of the three submerged buildings’ four walls sloped inward to form a rough pyramidal point. The first and last of the three structures had smooth sides, but the middle one was broken into squared rings, each one narrower than the one below it. Stair steps. She was looking at a stepped pyramid through the green filter of the sea. The two ruins flanking it were regular smooth-sided pyramids.

These three buildings made this underwater ruin an incredible discovery. A life-changing one.

It was the very first image of the ruin the divers had found. They’d included it and all of their early seismographic readings on the server so she could get up to speed on the project. A husband-and-wife team who’d first stumbled upon the area, and then returned to survey the ruins on behalf of the Cuban government, had taken the shots. The area in question, in the Pinar del Río province, was right on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle and was rife with shipwrecks, so the motivation behind the first dives, she assumed, had almost certainly been salvage related.

Instead, they’d stumbled on something so much more important than lost treasure.

The pair, Pauline Zalitzki and Paul Weinzweig, had shown the images around, drawing a great deal of interest very quickly, including from
National Geographic.
But the economic truth was these ruins were over two thousand feet beneath the surface, both difficult and costly to examine. The fact that standard oceanography suggested the area would have taken almost fifty thousand years to sink to that depth, significantly predating any recorded civilization, didn’t help, though it really should have been the thing that had the moneymen the most excited. They were dealing with so many anomalies. The first Egyptian pyramids had been built roughly five thousand years ago. The numbers just didn’t add up, financially or historically. There was no way the couple’s discovery could be ten times the age of the pyramids of Giza. It wasn’t possible. Unless the area had somehow sunk suddenly, due to fractures around it, perhaps? A break in the plates?

But that didn’t stop Finn from being stunned that it had taken so long—over a decade from the first sighting of the ruin—to fund a proper exploration.

Government approval? Jurisdiction on the find was probably a nightmare with it falling between Cuba’s and the United States’ governance. The two countries had had plenty of issues. And, of course, the initial discovery had been right before 9/11. Everything had stopped after that, with the obsession over Homeland Insecurity taking precedence. Who cared about looking at old underwater ruins, especially near Cuba, when there were civil rights to infringe upon in the name of national security?

Their loss was her gain.

Technology had marched on significantly during the last decade, so the timing was good in that regard too. They were capable of closer scrutiny, with significantly more clarity, at much less cost. And back in 2001 there was no way she’d have been involved without being on-site—innovations in global communication and file-sharing had changed the world in ways it was still hard to comprehend. To quote Walt Disney, it really was a small world after all.

It was also one in which the university employed ancient backup generators, otherwise it would have been as dead in here as it was out there. Sometimes it was good to linger in the technological dark ages, she thought wryly. The hard-science division eggheads were always playing around with miniature cyclotrons and god only knows what else, everything they touched capable of generating massive power surges capable of bringing down the network—so all of the computers on campus were shielded, and isolated from the city’s electrical grid. The grid had been out for six hours now. It was probably their fault. Her network connection kept dropping, but other than that mild annoyance, her system seemed okay even if it had taken about five times longer than necessary to download the initial batch of files to her local hard drive to access whenever she needed.

But there was no getting around the fact that things were weird outside Columbia’s walls. An ounce of imagination was a very bad thing.

At first it had been a cacophony of honking and blaring horns following the unmistakable screech of tires and squeal of brakes and the sharp, tearing sound of metal upon metal. Quickly it had transformed into the chaos of crunching impacts and so much else, but those had been overtaken by the proper sounds of chaos. Voices first. People screaming, initially in fear, then at each other. Eerie silence had slowly taken over, and that was worse than all of the noise put together.

Finn hadn’t dared leave the university’s protection to see what was left out there. In her mind the world beyond the campus limits had taken on a complete
Escape From New York
vibe. The problem was, she was no Snake Plissken. She didn’t want to venture out in case it turned out there was nothing but a wasteland beyond the campus gates. She couldn’t help it. Once her mind had gone down that track all she could imagine was a barren
Mad Max
esque ruin that had once been one of the busiest cities in the world.

Give it enough time and there’ll be primitive tribes out there, people hunkering down behind makeshift forts and attacking each other with whatever weapons they can bring to hand
, she thought. All that was needed for wide-scale panic to kick in was someone realizing the lights weren’t coming back on—then they’d lead a revolution straight to the nearest grocery store, slaughtering anyone who tried to take the food from their hungry mouths.

It was basic psychology.

It had been drummed into the American psyche ever since the Y2K hype. The whole notion that the computers would just suddenly stop and everything they knew and trusted and built their lives around would come to a juddering halt was ingrained now. The first hint of trouble, of a tornado or even a storm warning, and the lines at the groceries stores were a mile long with people lining up for toilet rolls and stockpiling batteries and canned foods, anything with a long life, anything that wouldn’t go off and stink the place up. Then they’d go back and turn their homes into bunkers and batten down the hatches. That was the reality of America today, and it wasn’t just the rednecks.