Sunfail (6 page)

Everything looked quiet, but if anyone knew looks could be deceptive, it was Sophie.

She returned her Vélib’ bike to the same corner rack she always used—she was a creature of habit, not necessarily wise for an assassin, she knew—then ducked around the corner. She stayed close to the little patisserie, her face turned toward its plate-glass windows. Anyone watching from across the street would have a hard time identifying her.

She made it to her building’s front door without being hit, slipped her key into the lock, and eased it open.

Looking back over her shoulder, Sophie stepped gratefully into the cool shadows inside. The inner door required a different key. That extra layer of French paranoia was one of the things that had attracted her to the old building. It would buy her a few extra seconds if someone came in after her.

She closed the door securely behind her.

Every second counted. Simple as that.

A rickety old wire-cage elevator in the center of the marble foyer serviced the building. She never used it.

There was a wide staircase that wrapped around the elevator shaft. She took the steps three at a time, running all the way up to the fourth floor.

Her apartment door was closed. Sunlight crept beneath its bottom edge.

Sophie waited outside the door, watching the line of light. It remained unbroken. If anyone was in there, they knew better than to pace impatiently in front of the door. Hopefully, though, she’d beaten them here. She wasn’t about to assume anything. Assumptions didn’t make an ass out of you, they got you killed.

She drew her knife from the sheath at her calf, reversing the hilt so it pointed down.

Given a choice she’d rather have a gun, but France didn’t allow civilians automatic firearms. A concealed carry just wasn’t worth the risk.

She held the blade flat against her forearm as she eased her key into the lock, then turned it. The lock was oiled. It was an old habit. She wanted it to turn silently.

The tumblers glided into place with a soft
click
. Again, she waited a second. Nothing changed behind the door: no footfalls, no shadows, no sounds.

She threw the heavy door open and surged through, rolling to come up several feet beyond the threshold, back to the wall, knife in hand ready to cut out the heart of any lurking threat.

Nothing.

Heart hammering, she scanned the lounge/bedroom and the adjoining kitchen for intruders, quickly marking off the areas before finally checking that the tiny bathroom was clear.

The only advantage of living in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment was that it was easy to search. It only took her a few seconds to be sure the place was empty.

Sophie kicked the door shut again. Locking it wouldn’t slow anyone down, it wasn’t a heavy-duty security door like some of her neighbors had. Leaving it open might, conversely, buy her an extra second or two if they assumed it was locked.

She headed into the bathroom. The toilet was an antique gravity-flush model with a porcelain tank overhead. She stood on the toilet seat and reached up, pushing back the tank’s lid. A strap had been taped to its underside. Yanking on the strap, she pulled a watertight bag out of the tank. She eased the lid back into place.

She stepped back onto the tiled floor, and checked the bag’s contents.

It was her escape kit: passport, cards, money, and most importantly, weapon. Keeping a “go bag” ready was a throwback to her military days. Back then, it would have included staples like power bars and water, a change of clothes, anything she might need for deployment. This was different. She’d been burned. When she left this apartment the woman who had been Sophie Keane would be dead.

Assuming she survived long enough, she’d be born again as Monica Guerra. That was the name on the passport and cards.

It was going to be hard to say goodbye to Sophie. She liked who she was. But it was better to be born again than simply die.

Slinging the bag over her shoulder, Sophie headed for the door.

She stopped on the threshold.

She didn’t know how close behind her they were, but she had to assume Cabrakan was near. She needed to change the most obvious things about her appearance to throw him off. No point in making it easy for the assassin. She kicked off her trainers, and shoved her feet into her hiking boots, lacing them tight. Better. Her leather jacket hung in the closet beside the bathroom. She shrugged into it.

Next she went for her computer. This was the part she didn’t have time for, but it needed to be done. She grabbed the thumb drive sticking out of the computer’s USB port and pocketed it, then picked up what looked like a car alarm remote sitting beside it and hit the
Lock
button.

There was a small pop from the computer, followed by a flash of smoke. She’d detonated a small charge inside the case, mangling the hard drive.

It was crude but effective. They wouldn’t learn anything from the machine. The acrid scent of burning wire and metal fused with the curls of smoke.

Turning to go, Sophie saw the only thing in the entire apartment she’d truly miss: a picture hanging on the lounge wall. It was a beautiful landscape, an Impressionist-style watercolor of Notre Dame at sunset, painted on a hand-woven paper scroll. She’d picked it up from a stall on the Brocante des Abbesses the day after she’d landed in Paris.

On a whim, she stepped over to it and lifted it from the hook, broke the glass frame, and pulled it out. Sophie rolled the scroll up and tied it with the attached ribbon before thrusting it into her go bag. It was a silly thing to cling onto, and those couple of seconds of sentimentality cost her.

As she turned back toward the door, she heard a faint scuff.

Cabrakan had caught up with her.

Sophie flattened herself against the wall so her shadow wouldn’t reach the door. She’d sheathed the knife when she’d gone for the go bag. Close quarters a knife was better than a gun, though she had no intention of sticking around to fight.

One of the things that had drawn her to this apartment was the way it invited the warm sunlight in through the glass double doors that dominated the lounge’s outer wall. The doors led out onto a small balcony, just big enough for a tiny round table and two folding chairs surrounded by a cluster of bright potted plants. In nice weather it was somewhere to relax, sip strong black coffee, and eat a pastry from the shop across the street while she watched the people down below. Today it was her way out.

She opened the doors, looking back over her shoulder as she stepped out. This was going to be fun.

Without thinking about what she was doing, Sophie gathered herself and leaped from the balcony. Misjudge it by a couple of inches and it was suicide.

She threw herself to the left and for one sickening second thought she was going to miss the top of the iron rails of her neighbor’s balcony and cannon back off them. She slammed into the rusty iron, kicking out and scrabbling for purchase fifty feet above the Parisian walkway.

For another long sickening second she thought her boots wouldn’t find anything to grip onto, then the steel toecap caught between two of the railings and gave her just enough traction to haul herself up. She folded over the railings and dropped down onto the worn tiles of the balcony.

Behind her, she heard the impact of her apartment door being thrown open, hard.

Her apartment was in the middle of the building. The balcony ran around the entire span of the apartment, giving it a beautiful double-aspect. It also meant that in five steps Sophie was out of sight—unless they had eyes below.

She grabbed the wrought-iron railing and swung herself over the edge, grasping the rails with her other hand as she lowered herself. The iron bars had vertical beams for hanging lanterns and clinging vines. Those beams were as good as a ladder down to the balcony below. The decorative curls of the wrought iron made easy hand- and footholds.

Sophie descended quickly, jumping the last few feet to the ground. Looking back up, she saw the assassin’s dark figure leaning over her balcony, scanning the streets. She couldn’t make out any signal between Cabrakan and someone down on the ground, meaning he was almost certainly alone. That was all that mattered. She ran for the Vélib’ rack, intending to grab another bike and lose herself in the crowds on the Boulevard de Magenta, but stopped short.

There was a motorbike parked outside her apartment building, a beautiful beast of red and chrome: a classic Swiss Egli-Vincent. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone inside. No one in her building owned one.

It was the assassin’s.

Never one to look a gift horse in the burning chrome, Sophie stepped up to the bike. It
was
an Egli-Vincent, but it was brand new, not just beautifully maintained. It looked
exactly
like the original model, complete with analog gauges. No circuitry.

Throwing her leg over the chassis, she straddled the machine. The ignition key was missing, but that wasn’t a problem. It took her half a second to pull the multitool from the outside pocket of her bag and jab the narrow screwdriver blade into the ignition. With a twist the makeshift key worked just fine.

A tug on the throttle, and the motorcycle’s engine roared to life beneath her. Sophie flipped up the kickstand, gave the bike some gas, and then she was gone, weaving through the logjam of unmoving traffic. She saw men in the cars, trying to make sense of why they weren’t moving.

She started humming,
It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
. . .

And it was. It really was.

CHAPTER SEVEN

JAKE COULDN’T FIND THE MEN IN THE CROWD.

Out in the open, night-vision goggles gone, the self-proclaimed warriors blended in. That was the trick: looking like anyone meant you looked like everyone. It was midmorning but the winter sun offered no warmth. The cold hit him hard and fast with its punishing kiss. His breath corkscrewed in front of his face.

He gave up and walked away from the dead square and the milling people before the shouting died down.

He tried calling in again, but his radio was dead. All he heard was cold empty static.

He listened to it for longer than was healthy, trying to make out anything in the white noise, a voice, a hint, a shred of hope. There was nothing.

A couple of cops tried to maintain some semblance of order, barking out commands, telling people to back off, to go home. It was the same message over and over. He heard it clearly as he approached. They didn’t know what was going on either. The best course of action was simply to stay safe, go home, batten down the hatches, and wait it out. Some even listened.

Jake walked, trying to take it all in.

The city was strange. He hardly recognized it. So much had changed in the few months since the dogs went feral and turned the island into Dogland. Something very fucking weird was going on. Yes, it was still his city, but for all it had been battered by storms and the tremors and everything else, it had changed more starkly in the last few hours than all of those weeks combined. He wasn’t a superstitious guy, not really, he had enough trouble dealing with real-world prejudices in a time when being black meant shit like
Stand your ground!
could get a brother killed and fear could see a six-year-old girl Tasered by trigger-happy cops. Sure, life wasn’t all
Driving Miss Daisy
,
Roots,
and
My name is Kunta Kinte.
Not while rappers like Jay-Z and Kanye hooked up with all that celebrity pussy and gave the average black kid in America something to aspire to: being a fucking Kardashian. Talk about the ninth circle of hell.

Somewhere behind him, he heard a busker singing the ghetto anthem “Hard Knock Life,” and couldn’t help but smile. You could turn the lights out and the world on its head, but some aspects of the city would never change. The guy was banging out the rhythms on an upturned bucket.

Everywhere there should have been a spark of power there was nothing. It didn’t take a genius to realize something had taken out the electronics, transforming New Yorkers into a shuffling horde cut off from the constant stream of life and social media that was their lifeblood.

The cell towers were down.

But it was more than just that.

The traffic lights were dead. Radios dead. The bank of TVs in the Best Buy’s windows, dead.

It was the same with the cars. They were all stopped along the streets, cars and buses and even motorcycles. He saw drivers pounding on the wheel like they were trying to give their vehicles CPR even as they flatlined. He saw men hunched over engines, trying to make sense of what wasn’t going on under the hood.

Most of the abandoned cars were newer makes and models, all of them with onboard computers and electronic ignitions. He’d seen an ancient Ford Torino, brown as dirt and twice as battered, that was boxed in by dead engines, its own still rumbling even if it couldn’t go anywhere.

He saw a couple of bike messengers weaving through the congestion, heads down, pedaling hard. They rode with the same death wish they’d always ridden with, but without the fear of fast-moving traffic and distracted drivers to slow them down.

Jake saw an old man who looked dead on the side of the road. He’d simply fallen where he stood. Jake’s first thought was that his pacemaker had failed along with all the other electronics in the city. A woman was on her knees beside him, pushing at his chest. She looked up at Jake with tears in her eyes.

There was nothing he could do, so he kept on walking. No one else stopped to help her.

There were more than eight million people in the city. Many thousands kept alive by pacemakers regulating their heartbeat. He didn’t want to imagine how many times this scene was being played out across Manhattan.

The shuffling, disconnected zombie horde made walking difficult, though Jake wasn’t in a hurry. He was walking without real purpose. He’d given up on the idea of heading out to Fort Hamilton. Without the subway running it would take hours to get out there and there was nothing he could do. He knew the protocols. Hamilton would be cordoned off while they waited for the military to send reinforcements—and that would be a serious operation. They couldn’t just drop-ship troops in if the blackout was down to an EMP—electromagnetic pulse—or something like that. Maybe by sailboat, or a diesel engine, something without any computer parts or circuits driving it. The military were smart; they would find a way. It would only be a matter of time.