After a moment Lisa said, “Ma’am, I need to confer with my superiors.”
She switched off the intercom and looked at me, stymied.
“Shit!” LoTek said.
“What?”
“They must have hacked Emirates Telecom too, they masked their phone records, I only just found them. A mobile phone in that factory made a call to Russia not five minutes – shit. They’re making another one now.”
“Stop them!” I demanded.
“I’m trying, the database is screwy, someone’s added some kind of trigger… “
I heard the sound of keys clacking.
“Got it,” he said. “They’re cut off now. But they had a minute. We have to figure they had time to tell their bosses what’s up.”
“They know it’s us,” Lisa said. “Or at least they suspect. We don’t have much time. We have to find a way in.”
We stared at the solid steel doors for a moment.
“You know what we could really use right now?” I asked rhetorically. “Some high explosives and a detonator.”
Chapter 82
Semtex didn’t just look like Play-Doh, it had almost exactly the same consistency. I stuck a wad the size of my fist into the crevice where the double doors met, hoped it wasn’t too much, inserted the detonator, and carefully attached the two wires we had scrounged. I hesitated for a breath before connecting the second. If Lisa had accidentally crossed them at the other end… but she hadn’t.
I followed the wires down the hall and into the office, closed the door behind me, ducked under the desk, and ensured that nothing that might turn into shrapnel was in our line of sight. There wasn’t much space down there and we had to press closely together. Lisa’s lean body was taut and bony against mine. I remembered holding her beside that river in Colombia. She held a bare wire end in each hand. I noticed she had found napkins somewhere and wadded them into earplugs. I stuck my fingers in my ears, opened my mouth wide, and nodded.
The explosion seemed to happen even before the wires made contact.
The whole world felt ripped asunder, as if not just air and matter but the very fabric of the space-time continuum had been torn. Glass and plastic shattered and melted. The desk toppled over – away from us, fortunately. But we were sufficiently shielded, and far enough out of direct harm’s way, that we emerged relatively unscathed from the rubbled office.
The hallway outside had been transformed into a charred and ravaged wind tunnel. Clean rooms were kept at positive air pressure, to keep out contaminants, and the explosion had shattered both sets of doors. Walking up that hallway felt like walking through a hurricane while carrying an anvil.
As we approached the pressure began to equalize and the wind to abate. True to its name, the clean room was devoid of dirt or imperfections. Racks of workstations surrounded the glittering high-tech altar where discs of doped silicon two metres across were transformed into billions of carefully linked transistors by the magic of photolithography, a transubstantiation that had given the world integrated circuits, computers, the Internet – and Sophie’s Axon neural nets.
When we reached the ragged lip of metal that had once been a door I looked around cautiously, half-expecting to be shot at, ready to leap back. I had hoped the explosion might knock out everyone inside, and feared that it might kill them all. Neither had happened. Instead the clean room was empty. On its opposite side, another airlock led to an elevator.
“They’re on the roof.” LoTek’s voice crackled and wobbled; we were at the very limit of the GSM signal. “I’ve got video from their security cameras. Six of them. Sophie, Jesse, Jesse’s psycho ex-girlfriend, and three guys I don’t know.”
“Dmitri,” I guessed, “and two Russian Special Forces types.”
“They’re waiting near the helipad. Draw your own conclusion. It won’t be long before their help is on the way, and-slash-or the Dubai cops figure out they’ve been had. I’m rerouting a whole lot of calls but I can’t keep them from talking forever.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Also,” LoTek added helpfully, “they’ve got guns, and you don’t.”
“Thanks so much,” Lisa said. “Got any bright ideas?”
“You could go up there and hope they surrender on sight.”
“Uh-huh. Any others?”
“If I did I would have told you already. There is a theory that no problem exists which cannot be solved by a sufficient quantity of high explosive, but hostage rescue makes that kind of tricky.”
“Dubai’s police,” I said. “All the money in this place, they must have helicopters too.”
“Sure. But I’ve been doing my best to keep them on the ground. Once Sophie’s in their custody it’ll be tough to get her back. International fugitive and all that.”
“Better the cops than the Russians.”
“True. Shit,” LoTek said.
“What?” I demanded.
“I’m picking up a helicopter heading for the free-trade zone already. Not police. It’ll take probably fifteen minutes to scramble them. This one will be there in ten, maximum. Must be the Russians coming for their prize.”
There was nothing to say to that. I suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if there wasn’t enough air in my biohazard helmet. It took me two attempts to peel it off.
There was nothing we could do. The Russian helicopter would carry them away, unless we could somehow go up and stop them, and we couldn’t. They had guns and wouldn’t hesitate to use them. The only weapon we had was high explosive, useless under the circumstances.
I flung the helmet across the room in frustration. Its slipstream caught a piece of paper, which flew off a desk and floated gingerly down to the ground. Clean-room paper was made of a special material that didn’t flake. A childish corner of my wind wondered, irrelevantly, if you could still fold it into paper airplanes.
Paper airplanes.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey what?” Lisa asked.
“Hey, you moron,” I said, meaning myself, “this is a
Chapter 83
LoTek patched the video footage from the factory roof to our phones. The helipad was set amid a forest of air- conditioning ducts that looked like huge metallic examples of alien botany. Sophie and Jesse stood handcuffed near the giant X, escorted by two stone-faced thugs holding sleek handguns. Beside them Dmitri and Anya waited tensely.
I remembered Jesse picking cuffs in ten seconds flat to impress girls at parties back in our university days. I wondered if in all the recent mayhem he had had any opportunity to pick up a pick.
The clean-room elevator that had carried them up rose into a turret atop one corner of the concrete roof, right next to the helipad. Our freight elevator ascended to to a similar but larger extrusion about a hundred metres away. I hoped that was too far away for them to shoot with any accuracy.
Once we were inside and ready I pushed the CLOSE button. An engine hummed and the freight elevator’s double doors came together vertically, like the closing of a giant maw, leaving us surrounded by rusting steel lit by a single dim LED bulb. When I pushed UP the world jerked, and I nearly fell. I had to hold down the button to
