Hit List Read online

  “It’s a damn good trick,” Benjamin murmured.

  “It was,” Buckland said. “And while I don’t believe the Ghost can walk through walls, I do know he’s very, very dangerous. Stay away from him. If you even hear his name, get as far away as you can, as quickly as you can.”

  Ash nodded. She wondered how close she had been to disappearing at the mine, and felt a little sick.

  But that’s the job, she told herself uneasily. Going into dangerous places, doing dangerous things, meeting dangerous people. Putting yourself in harm’s way, for the greater good, to make up for the bad things you’ve done. Right?

  “Enough about him,” Buckland said. “We’ve got a while before we land in California, and we should spend it talking about the Googleplex.”

  “How good’s the security?” Ash asked.

  “Extremely. Around-the-clock guards, cameras everywhere, every door locked electronically and only accessible using face-recognition software we won’t be able to fool, or with a bypass code we won’t have.”

  Benjamin said, “Do you know what kind of encryption algorithms the bypass uses?”

  “Eight-bit, with a four-digit key,” Buckland said. “But it doesn’t matter, since the access panels are rigged to sound the alarm. Try to plug anything into the lock, and we’ll be busted. Take too long punching in the numbers, and the system resets, which rules out using a calculator to work out a suitable combination by trial and error. So unless you can factor numbers bigger than one hundred million in your head, you won’t be able—”

  “I can,” Benjamin said.

  “—to crack the... What?”

  “I can factor numbers bigger than one hundred million in my head,” Benjamin said.

  “No you can’t,” Ash said, frowning.

  “Sure I can. I won a state mathematics competition for it last year. Give me one.”

  Buckland pulled a PDA out of his pocket and fiddled with it for a bit. “One hundred and fifty-seven million, two thousand five hundred and sixty-eight,” he said.

  “Two thousand, four hundred and eight,” Benjamin replied. Then, as an afterthought, “And six thousand, five hundred and twenty-one.”

  Buckland fiddled some more, dividing his nine-digit number by one of Benjamin’s four-digit numbers. “Say that again,” he said.

  Benjamin repeated the numbers. Buckland looked amazed.

  “Benjamin,” Ash said, “you have a superpower. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “Well, I don’t like to brag.”

  “You love to brag,” she said.

  Benjamin looked uncomfortable for a moment. “I’ve always been good with computers,” he said, “I suck at sport and I read a lot. Having a freaky gift for maths would have made me a walking cliché of nerdiness, so I just never told anyone.”

  “Including me.”

  “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

  “Well,” Buckland said, “that solves some of our problems, but not all of them. All that stuff I mentioned is just Google® security. Whoever has imprisoned Alice in the building almost certainly has some kind of warning system of their own, and there’s no way to find out what it is. So you’ll be improvising a lot along the way.”

  My speciality, Ash thought. “No problem. What gear will we have?”

  Buckland nodded to one of the boxes on the seats behind her. She unbuckled her seat belt and went over to it.

  “I wasn’t sure what we’d need,” Buckland said. “So I brought everything.”

  Ash opened the box. A power drill, glow sticks, a lock-release gun, an EMP generator, and something that looked like a grenade launcher from the future.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  Benjamin peered into the box. “Hey,” he said. “That’s mine!”

  “I know,” Buckland said. “I took it from your lab. Thought we might need it.”

  “Yeah, but...” Benjamin sighed. “Never mind.”

  “What?” Ash pressed.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” he said. “For your birthday.”

  Ash stared at the thing, delighted. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Thank you so much! I...what is it?”

  “It started out as a grappling-hook launcher,” Benjamin said. “Shoots the hook with one hundred and twenty kilos per square centimetre of pressure, so you can also use it to bust the hinges off doors – just make sure you unfold the stock like this and press it hard against your shoulder, otherwise the recoil could break your bones. Hold this button to rewind the cable, which is fifty metres long and can safely lift one hundred and seventy kilos.

  “But I added this bit on the top – a tranquillizer gun with a twelve-dart magazine. It uses the same trigger as the grappling hook. Hit this switch to activate it.

  “I also attached a bayonet, which you can extend or withdraw by pushing this button down here. If you pull the trigger while the blade is extended, it works as an electric saw.” He scratched his head, clearly pleased with himself. “And here you’ve got a scope with night vision or thermal, a torch and a laser pointer. Best of all, because it’s so narrow, it folds up and fits in a laptop bag.”

  “This is amazing,” Ash said. “Where’s the laser pointer?”

  “Just behind this tinted shield. I got the diode out of a Blu-ray burner, and it’s very powerful, so leave the shield on if you’re just using it for targeting. Take it off if you want to set fire to something from a distance.”

  “Wow!” Ash wondered how long Benjamin had been working on this. “It’s by far the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. You know you could make a fortune selling this to the military, right?”

  “I know,” he said. “But yours are the only hands I’d trust it in. So I soldered a fingerprint scanner to the butt – once I install the reader software, only you will be able to fire it.”

  “What’s it called?”

  Benjamin frowned. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Grappling-hook-tranquillizer-dart-saw-blade-gun doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?”

  Ash thought about the acronym – GHTDSBG. That was no good.

  “It does an awful lot of things,” Ash said. “We could call it ‘the Benjamin’.”

  Benjamin flushed. “Thanks, but that would get too confusing.”

  Ash smiled. “How about ‘the Benji’?”

  He went even redder. “Whatever you want,” he said.

  Ash lifted the Benji up. It was surprisingly light – it would be heavier, she supposed, when it was loaded with the grappling hook and the darts, not to mention the batteries.

  “Google® won’t know what hit them,” she said.

  Invasion

  “Escaped?” Detective Wright roared. “How?”

  “We don’t know yet, exactly,” Belle said, her voice fuzzy through the speaker phone. “But it looks like he stole a gun from a guard, shot her and a colleague, took the keys and let himself out.”

  Her voice had taken on a flat, calm quality. Belle Evans had been Wright’s partner for nine years, so he recognized the tone. It wasn’t that she didn’t care – she was compartmentalizing, becoming several people at once. One Belle was talking to him, and a hundred other Belles were looking at the problem from every angle, trying to work out where Peachey might have gone and how to get him back.

  “How could they be so careless?” he demanded. “Michael Peachey is the most dangerous prisoner they have in that place. Had. He’s a hit man – and a famous one at that.”

  “Former hit man. He probably lost his job when he got locked up.”

  “And for all we know he’s got it back again now that he’s out. Goddamn it.” Wright grabbed his badge and his gun from out of the desk. He picked up the phone and switched off the speaker as he ran towards the lift. Maybe Peachey is back at work, he thought. Perhaps that’s why he’s out. If he had another job planned, he might have been waiting for the right time to escape – or perhaps it was me, somehow my presence helped him get
out...

  “There’s a bright side,” Belle said. “His fame should make him easier to catch.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it’ll just force him to become even more violent. We might have a dozen dead paparazzi on our hands by the end of the day.”

  “Hey, another bright side.”

  Wright’s jaw already ached from clenching. “This is serious.”

  “I know.” A few more Belles returned to the conversation. Tactful Belle and Sensitive Belle. “Sorry.”

  Wright pushed the button for the ground floor. The doors closed swiftly. “Get his picture out to every TV station and newspaper,” he said. “Make it impossible for him to hide.”

  “That’ll cause panic. There’ll be citizen’s arrests and beatings all over the state. He’s too ordinary-looking – there must be hundreds of men in their thirties out there who look like him.”

  “Thousands. But if Peachey kills someone – which he will – and we didn’t warn anyone that he was on the loose...”

  “I know,” Belle said. “I’m just saying we’ll have to make sure every newspaper and TV or radio station that airs a warning includes a ‘do not approach’ quote from the force. That’ll minimize the damage.”

  The doors opened. Wright stormed out into the empty foyer. “Good,” he said. “Get a sketch artist to mock up a picture of him without his hair, and send that to the media as well.”

  “You think he’s going to shave his head?”

  “It’s the first thing I’d do. And dig up our old sketch of Ashley and redistribute it. She’s connected to this, somehow.”

  “Got it.”

  Wright hung up, and Peachey’s voice echoed through his head, quiet, glacial. You’re third. First Buckland, then Ashley, and then you.

  Could I use this? Wright wondered. Could I follow him to Buckland’s body, and then to Ashley, and have them both locked up by the end of the day?

  “Excuse me,” said a man in the doorway. “Detective?”

  Wright didn’t break step. “Whatever it is, talk to the sergeant,” he said, pointing to a sign that said All visitors please see reception.

  And then he looked.

  The man was Peachey. He was smiling, and his head was shaved.

  Wright reached for his gun, but Peachey was quicker. He lashed out, snapping Wright’s nose like a dry branch.

  I was right, Wright thought wildly, before blacking out.

  Peachey would have liked to shoot Wright where he lay, but even with the silencer, his pistol would be loud enough to alert the sergeant around the corner, who would sound the alarm. And anyway, he was a man of his word – Wright would be killed after Buckland and Ashley Arthur, not before. So instead he dragged Wright over to a bench and propped him up in a sitting position, head slumped drunkenly.

  The detective’s nose had started bleeding. Peachey picked up a drinking-straw wrapper, crumpled it into a ball, and pushed it up the dripping nostril, half hoping Wright would inhale it and choke to death. There was a phone on the floor. Wright must have dropped it. Peachey put it in Wright’s hand and placed his hand in his lap so it looked like he was sending a text message. No one would know he was unconscious unless they tried to talk to him.

  Good enough. Peachey pulled Wright’s wallet out of his breast pocket, checked that the badge was in it, and walked briskly around the corner to the reception desk.

  “Can I help you?” the sergeant asked.

  “Detective Mitch Pratley, North Central PD,” Peachey said, holding up the badge and a Manila folder. “Here to drop off a witness statement for Damien Wright. He around?”

  The sergeant wrote down the badge number, and then said, “Think you just missed him. I can—”

  “No problem. I’ll leave it on his desk.”

  Peachey pushed the button for the lift. The doors opened immediately, and he walked in, pushed the first floor button, and waited. Soon the lift was purring upwards.

  He felt a curious thrill, infiltrating a police station. It was a first for him – he spent so much of his time avoiding cops that it was quite exhilarating being in the lion’s den.

  The doors opened. Peachey walked into the work area of the police station, surprised by how much it looked like an ordinary office – noticeboards, cubicles, blizzards of paper strewn across desks.

  Only half a dozen cops were out on the floor, two typing furiously, three yelling into phones, and one striding along the corridor holding a USB stick in an evidence bag. Most of the force appeared to be out. Probably looking for me, Peachey thought with a smile.

  There were four offices to his right. Two had closed doors, which Peachey guessed would be locked. One of the others was occupied by a hawk-nosed police chief who was typing a text message. The last office was open and seemed to be empty.

  Peachey walked in, closed the door. Locked it.

  The chair squawked as he sat down in front of the computer and switched it on. Immediately it asked for a password.

  Peachey typed in password. An error message appeared: Incorrect username and/or password.

  Peachey opened the drawers in the desk and started digging through the piles of paperwork. He found a photocopied application for a licence to carry a concealed weapon. It had the officer’s birth date on it.

  Peachey typed the date in. Incorrect username and/or password.

  When the login screen reappeared, there was an additional message: Final attempt before lockdown. This meant that if Peachey got the password wrong this time, the computer would go into standby mode, and would refuse to switch on for an hour.

  Peachey looked at the photos on the desk. There was one of a police academy graduation ceremony, and there was one of a man and a woman holding hands in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Probably the officer and her husband or boyfriend.

  There was an answering machine on the desk. Peachey hit play.

  “No new messages and six old messages,” the machine recited. “Message one.”

  “Hi, it’s David,” said a voice. “Just wondering if you’ll be home in time for us to go to dinner at my mum’s. Call me back. Love you.”

  Peachey typed David. The computer screen said, Welcome.

  Peachey grinned. More than sixty per cent of passwords were the names of loved ones, birthdays, or the word “password”, and there wasn’t a hacker in the world who wasn’t pleased about it.

  He clicked an icon marked POACSD – the Police-Only Access Census Statistics Database. A menu popped up with search fields for name, age, gender, vehicle registration, address and blood type. Peachey typed in Ashley’s name, the suburb her school was in, and her gender. He didn’t bother typing an age range. He hit enter.

  Only one match – age sixteen, address 146 East Park Way. There was a landline phone number, which Peachey wrote down on his hand. There was no mobile number or blood type, which was disappointing. No photo either, but he no longer needed one of those.

  It seemed that Ashley had no criminal record, so all this information must have come from the census. Clever girl, Peachey thought. Never caught. But I’m cleverer.

  He cocked his head to the side. A sound from the door – like someone turning the knob very slowly, very carefully, and finding it locked.

  Peachey drew his pistol, checked the magazine, and slapped it back in. An unalerted cop would have knocked on the door or, if the office was theirs, used a key. Silently checking if a door was locked was SWAT behaviour. Somebody must have realized the station had been infiltrated.

  The door might be kicked in and the room filled with tear gas in moments. Time to go, he thought. He picked up the computer monitor. Cords ripped out of the back with a series of dry pops. He carried it over to the window, and threw it.

  The monitor shattered. The window didn’t.

  Peachey frowned. He’d been doing so well.

  He tore down the blinds to see that the window had cracked, a spider’s web of fissures scratched out across the glass. Peachey put his foot against it and pushed �
�� the pane broke in two and tumbled out into the daylight. There were two SWAT officers standing in the street. One fired a shotgun in Peachey’s direction while the other ran for cover behind the van.

  The shot was too high. Peachey heard another window disintegrate above his head, the next floor up. He fired three rounds through the storm of falling glass, aiming for the running officer’s back. The gun kicked in his hand, every shot like a thunderclap.

  He’d missed – the guy was out of sight behind the van. Peachey turned on the guy with the shotgun and unleashed another eight rounds. Some missed, and some hit the Kevlar, but one punched through the SWAT officer’s neck. He staggered backwards, firing again, too wide this time. Peachey had already stopped watching. The cop’s lungs would be filling with blood. He was finished.

  The door exploded behind him, and someone yelled, “Freeze!”

  Peachey didn’t. He vaulted over the window sill, plummeted, and hit the street with a hard thud. Then he was running, past the dying cop, past the van, and out into the unwary world.

  “So how much money does Google® have?” a kid up the back asked loudly.

  The tour guide maintained his easy-going smile. It was the kind of direct, impertinent question that kids often asked, not because they were interested, but just to make him uncomfortable. They didn’t realize that he had heard all these questions hundreds of times before, and he’d had plenty of time to fine-tune his answers.

  “The company’s equity has been estimated at just over $36 billion,” he said. “Enough to keep providing all our free services for many years to come.”

  At no point during his response had he stopped thinking about the pizza he intended to make for dinner. I need a new job, he thought. Something more challenging.

  The sun shone down from a clear Californian sky on the Googleplex campus, painting the lawns an impossibly bright green, making the windows of the buildings gleam like gems. The teenage students seemed oblivious to the cheery surroundings – most of them, the guide thought, probably can’t even see through their fringes.