Hit List Page 13

Curiouser and curiouser. Peachey smiled. On my way, he wrote.

  Detective Wright’s fists were white around the steering wheel. His nose was broken. A river of blood, hot and wet, was dribbling down his chin and soaking his collar.

  He didn’t wipe it off. In fact, he barely noticed it. An ion-storm of firing synapses was raging in his skull.

  Got to get to the airport, he thought. Got to beat Peachey.

  It wasn’t about anger and it wasn’t about earning his salary. As long as he’d been a cop, Wright had been addicted to the feeling he got every time he put away a killer or drug lord or arms dealer. There was a strong sense of rightness, that he’d made the world safer. Better. There was a place for bad guys: prison. And there was a place for good guys: everywhere else. His job was to make sure everybody was where they belonged.

  Every now and again a jury let someone go when they shouldn’t have, or a parole board released somebody too early, and that bothered him. But this was far worse. This time, a bad guy had just walked out the goddamn front gate of Hallett State. That felt more wrong than anything else he could imagine.

  And Peachey was a very bad guy. Wright’s first experience of him had been the sight of a severed hand lying in an alleyway. The first time he’d actually seen him in the flesh, he was blowing the brains out the back of Hammond Buckland’s head.

  No one was going to stop Wright from putting Peachey back in his cell. For good, this time.

  A car honked at him as he roared past – the driver apparently hadn’t noticed the police light he’d put on the roof. He ignored her, swerving left and screeching up the ramp onto the highway.

  He had no proof that Peachey was catching a plane anywhere. But after breaking into a police station and killing a SWAT cop, it made no sense to hang around. And when every officer in the state knew his face, he wouldn’t feel safe driving.

  The airport nearest the station had been locked down the minute Peachey’s escape had become public. Standard protocol. No flights out. But Wright was driving further. He figured Peachey wouldn’t use the nearest airport – he’d try to trick them.

  It was a lot of speculation. But, Wright thought, I was right about him shaving his head, wasn’t I?

  Nobody else thought Peachey would try to fly out. Too much security. You needed money, you needed ID, and you had to ditch your weapons. There were easier ways to get out of town.

  But Peachey hadn’t escaped on his own, Wright knew. No one breaks out of Hallett State – you leave when your time is up. Someone was helping him, and anyone with that kind of power could procure a fake passport and a ceramic weapon that wouldn’t show up in the metal detector.

  The traffic was too heavy. He wasn’t moving fast enough. He drove up onto the shoulder and floored the accelerator, siren howling.

  His phone was ringing. He snapped it open. “What?”

  “Detective Wright, this is Agent Gerritz. Where are you?”

  “On my way to the airport,” Wright said. “Have you caught him?”

  “No. We need you to come back to the station so we can—”

  Wright hung up. They wanted to interview him about what had happened at the police station. They would ask him the same questions over, and over, and over, while Peachey was getting on a plane and escaping for ever.

  He was getting closer. More and more taxis were falling behind as he sped past.

  The phone rang again. He ignored it.

  I’ll go back to the station, all right, he thought. Dragging Michael Peachey by his treacherous throat.

  The airport was a bright oasis in the gloom of the surrounding fields. A 737 swept overhead, impossibly big this close to the runway.

  Wright screeched to a halt in the taxi rank, grabbed his Colt out of the holster, and got out. A cab driver pounded on the horn. Wright ignored him.

  He ran through the sliding glass doors marked Departures, past the ads for luxury cars and investment companies, and then he was in the airport, already scanning the jet-lagged faces of every bald person he saw.

  Too tall.

  Too fat.

  Female.

  A voice above him said, “This is the final boarding call for passengers on flight QF107 to San José, California. All passengers for this flight please make your way to gate 17.” He ignored it.

  A teenage boy saw his gun, and said, “Whoa! Take it easy, man.” Other people were starting to look over, cry out, back away.

  He kept looking. Too many tattoos. Chin too wide—

  “Hey!”

  Wright turned. An airport cop was pointing her gun at him. “Drop your weapon!” she roared.

  Wright exhaled, a mist of blood bursting from his shattered nose. “I’m a cop,” he said.

  “Put the goddamn gun down,” the woman said.

  Wright lowered the gun slowly. “Take it easy.” He gestured with his free hand towards his jacket. “I’m reaching for my badge.”

  “Drop the gun first,” she replied.

  Wright was about to comply. Then he looked over the cop’s shoulder – and saw Peachey.

  He’d already gone through the security checkpoint. He was standing at the bottom of the escalator to the departure lounge, staring incredulously at Wright.

  “Peachey!” Wright yelled.

  Peachey smiled, took one step backwards, and began to rise out of sight.

  Wright whipped the gun back up, took aim at Peachey’s heart, and squeezed the trigger.

  Blam!

  It was like getting kicked in the chest. The gun tumbled from Wright’s fingers.

  The airport cop fired a second time. This shot missed the Kevlar armour, punching through Wright’s shoulder. He felt a ligament rip and heard a gurgling sound as blood sprayed up into his ear.

  “Damn it,” he wheezed. The world was starting to spin. “He’s getting...he’s going to...”

  The carpet rushed up to meet him. He tried to push the ground away. Failed. Not enough blood getting to his brain.

  He kept one eye open long enough to see the cop’s shoes approaching at a bizarre angle. “Control,” she was saying. “The situation has been resolved.”

  It’s not resolved! Wright thought. He’s escaping! He’s...I can’t...

  He blacked out.

  Behind the airport cop, Peachey was riding the escalator up, up and away.

  “Well,” Benjamin said. “This sucks.”

  “Yep,” Ash said.

  They were sitting on the floor in the blind spot under the camera, their backs against the deposit boxes. The only illumination was a blinking green light on the underside of the camera, which barely punctured the blackness. They’d taken down the mirrors, but Ash couldn’t see the rest of the vault. She couldn’t even see Benjamin’s face, or her own hands.

  Given the dark, they might well have been free to move around. But the camera could have a night-vision function, or a motion sensor that would turn on the lights. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  Ash’s stomach growled.

  “What the hell was that?” Benjamin demanded, alarmed.

  “I’m hungry,” Ash said.

  “Oh. Sorry.” She felt him press a muesli bar into her hand.

  “Thanks. How many more of these do we have?”

  “That’s the last one.”

  They hadn’t had many, but that was probably for the best. No toilet in a bank vault, Ash reflected.

  “You want to share it?” she asked.

  “It’s fine.”

  She tore into the wrapper, feeling guilty. Whatever this was, it was certainly her fault. Benjamin would be a straight-laced, law-abiding choirboy if it weren’t for her. He had followed her into crime the way a puppy follows whoever fills its bowl, and now, maybe, he was going to die because of it. And she was eating the last muesli bar.

  But he’d said he didn’t want any and she was hungry. It was his choice. She couldn’t force him to eat it any more than she could have stopped him trailing her down the dangerous road she’d chosen. />
  She looked at the glowing hands of her watch. Just after eleven. They’d been crouched in the darkness for seven hours, and they still had ten to go.

  Right now, she thought, Dad would be at work, finishing the salmon sandwich he always packs for lunch. What will he think when he gets home and I’m not there? How long can I pretend to be at a friend’s house? To make things worse, she had no idea what would happen when the vault door opened. Would Buckland come in, triumphant, having bought Benjamin or manipulated the other bidder? Or would the Ghost be there, a terrible grin on his lips, ready to make Benjamin disappear in a puff of smoke?

  “What about your mum?” she asked. “Has she won the lotto or something? Taking you would be a good way to get to her.”

  Benjamin sighed. “She would have told me, and I would have told you. I tell you everything.”

  “I know. Just asking.”

  They had been over every possible reason someone could want him, alive or dead. Money. Revenge. Love. (“If they wanted a date, they could have just asked me,” Benjamin had said.) But they had found nothing convincing. For all his talents, Benjamin was no more desirable as a prisoner than any other teenage boy.

  Ash finished the muesli bar and tucked the wrapper into her pocket. She stared into the inky shadows. “Care for a game of I Spy?”

  Benjamin chortled. The sound was refreshing. “You think of that joke just now?”

  “A while ago,” she admitted. “I wanted to save it for the halfway mark, when we’d need it most.”

  “We halfway already?”

  “No. I got impatient.”

  Benjamin laughed again. “Have I ever told you that there’s no one on earth I’d rather be trapped in a pitch-black, cold, scary safe-deposit box vault with than you?”

  “Don’t think it’s ever come up,” Ash said.

  “Well, it’s true.” He cleared his throat. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with D.”

  “Dark.”

  “Correct.”

  “I spy with my little eye,” Ash said, “something beginning with B.”

  “Blackness.”

  “Correct. You are a worthy foe.”

  They played a few more rounds, but after shadow, dimness and gloom, they ran out of synonyms. Ash tried “aphotic”, but Benjamin said the words in I Spy had to be nouns, not adjectives.

  After a few minutes of silence, she put her hand over his and squeezed. He squeezed back.

  “Did Buckland tell you we screwed up?” he asked.

  “What? When?”

  “At the library. That hard drive you took wasn’t the one on the hit list – it wasn’t big enough.”

  “It did look too small to hold four terabytes,” Ash said. “So what was on it?”

  “Indexing software, with about a million files.”

  “So...we stole the city library’s catalogue?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whoops. I wonder how we can return that without getting busted.”

  “Could be harder than it was stealing it.”

  Ash sighed. They weren’t even that good at their jobs. How had they become important enough to end up in this mess?

  “Let’s talk about the Ghost,” Benjamin said suddenly.

  Ash was startled. “Why?”

  “I want to work out how he stole Buckland’s emerald. I’ll feel safer here once I know for certain he can’t walk through walls.”

  That makes sense, Ash thought. “What if,” she began, “the emerald Buckland put in the vault was actually a duplicate made from coloured ice? It would have melted on its own, without the Ghost needing to go anywhere near it.”

  “Buckland said it was the real deal.”

  “He said it wasn’t a hologram. How do you tell cleanly cut ice from a gemstone?”

  “It would have left water on the floor when it melted.”

  “Dry ice, then. Buckland wouldn’t have noticed a little bit of CO2 in the air, right?”

  “Maybe not,” Benjamin said doubtfully. “But I think he would have noticed he was carrying around a block of ice instead of a priceless emerald.”

  Ash sighed. “Probably.”

  “Sorry.”

  There was a pause.

  “What about the steel bricks?” Ash said. “The ones Buckland made his vault out of. Did he say where he got them?”

  “Don’t think so. Why?”

  “But it only took sixty-six of them to build the whole thing, right? So they must have been really big. What if one was hollow?”

  “Wait.” Benjamin sounded excited. “Are you suggesting the Ghost intercepted the bricks on their way to Buckland, and sealed himself inside one?”

  “Yes,” Ash said. “Along with some cutting equipment and an oxygen tank. Once the vault’s been built, he cuts his way out, steals the emerald, and welds himself back in. From the outside, the vault looks exactly the same.”

  Benjamin said nothing. But the more Ash thought about it, the more she was sure that it couldn’t have happened any other way. “He closes bidding on the site using his phone,” she continued, “prompting Buckland to cut a hole in the wall so he can check on his emerald – and after he’s gone, that’s the Ghost’s escape route! It’s perfect!”

  “Impressive.”

  “Yeah. I can’t—” Ash paused.

  That hadn’t sounded like Benjamin’s voice.

  “Benjamin?” she said.

  Silence.

  She lifted his hand. It was limp in her fingers. Her heart kicked in her chest.

  “Benjamin?”

  There was a noise behind her. A swish and a clank – the sound of a deposit box being closed. One of the big ones.

  The Ghost has been in here with us the whole time, she thought. Just like with the bricks.

  Ash knew she should be doing something to defend herself, but she couldn’t bear not knowing what had happened to her best friend.

  She whipped out her phone, and pointed the glowing screen at Benjamin. His eyes had rolled backwards into his head, and his jaw was stretched open in a silent scream.

  My Enemy’s Enemy

  Ash choked on a hiccup of pure terror. “No!” She shook Benjamin’s shoulders – had he fainted? Was he dead?

  Please, she thought. I’ll give up thieving, I’ll go on a date with you, I’ll do anything, just please, Benjamin, don’t be dead. There was something sticking out of his neck. A knife. No, too small. It was a syringe, or a dart perhaps.

  Maybe he’s alive, Ash told herself, desperate. He’s no good to anyone if he’s not, right? The Ghost wouldn’t kill him. Maybe he’s just unconscious.

  Footsteps. Someone was drawing closer behind her, and she couldn’t afford to ignore them any longer. She turned, stood, listened. Tried to judge his position, so she could dodge him when he attacked.

  And then what? Dance around him for the next nine and a half hours, hoping Buckland would come to the rescue when the bank opened?

  “You’re making a mistake,” she said.

  The steps kept coming.

  “Seriously.” Her voice shook. “Don’t do this. Benjamin is worth more alive, and free, than whatever you’re being paid.”

  She listened. There was silence.

  He’s interested, she thought.

  “Great,” she said. “Now give me the antidote to whatever you’ve drugged him with. Then we can talk about this.”

  She glanced back at Benjamin, and saw that he was gone. He had been taken without the slightest sound.

  “No!” she cried. “Don’t leave! I’m serious! There’s a woman trapped in the Googleplex, and Benjamin’s the only one who can hack the security system to get to her, and—”

  Something clicked in her brain. Whoa, she thought. That’s it!

  “That’s why someone put a bounty on him!” she said. “Whoever imprisoned the girl hired you to take out Benjamin before he could rescue her. So whatever they’re paying you for this, Alice must be worth more! Way more!”

 
Her guts wrenched at the realization that she was sacrificing Alice to save Benjamin. But it was the only way. She’d find a way to save Alice from the Ghost later. She just needed time.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t take him. We can work this out.”

  Crack.

  The room filled with an other-worldly red glow. Ash saw the Ghost, tall and cold-eyed, Benjamin slung over his shoulder like a roll of carpet. Like he weighed nothing.

  Ash’s eyes widened. It couldn’t be true.

  “Liam? You’re the Ghost?”

  The boy from the dance dropped the glow stick to the floor. “Tell me about Alice,” he said.

  “Thank you. Enjoy your evening. Goodbye! Thanks. Enjoy your stay. Thank you. Goodbye!”

  Peachey nodded politely to the beaming flight attendant as he disembarked, the last in a very long line of passengers. He looked out over San José as he walked down the steps to the tarmac. The city lights sparkled like those of an old pinball machine.

  He straightened his legs, stretched his neck, blinked his dried-up eyes. It had been a long flight.

  His job had always required an unpleasant amount of travel. There were few countries he’d never been to. Anywhere there are people, he thought, there will be someone who wants someone else dead.

  For this reason, airports and hotels and hire-car stands no longer interested him – he could sleepwalk through them. As he strolled through the arrivals gate, threading through the clusters of sleepy passengers, only a small part of him was wondering whether to rent a car to get to the Googleplex, which would leave a paper trail, or take a taxi, which would create video evidence of his trip and possibly a body to dispose of, depending on the inquisitiveness of the driver, or ride a bus, which would require him to find a stop and a timetable and be near poor people, which was always an unpleasant reminder of his childhood in the Solomon Islands.

  A small part of his brain was calculating all this, but the rest was pondering a larger question – why was he being sent to the Googleplex in the first place?

  We need you to go to California and protect something that belongs to us.

  He was a hit man, not a security guard. His employer wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of breaking him out of prison just to have him look after something. So Peachey must also be required to kill somebody.