Restraint was needed here.
In spades.
King could do that. He’d always been the purer of the pair, somehow managing to avoid the temptations of drink and drugs to suppress his blood-drenched memories. Here, he could speak to whoever they faced with tact, with level-headedness, with the persuasion that was needed.
Slater wasn’t so pure. Slater wasn’t so noble.
And he was fine with that.
King stepped inside the vault, and Slater followed. It was a long, wide, tall space with every square inch of the walls taken up by the framework of safe deposit boxes. The boxes had been gouged out long ago, creating a U-shaped skeleton to house a dizzying array of computer towers. There were dozens of them at the minimum, all see-through containers sporting state-of-the-art CPUs within. Fans inside the towers kept all the gear cooled, and for good reason. Slater estimated he was looking at millions of dollars worth of technology. He hadn’t seen gear like this since…
Well, since a few hours ago.
It rivalled Violetta’s team’s setup — in fact, it trumped it. He wouldn’t have a clue where to start deciphering the labyrinth puzzle, and he knew that even if Violetta had people who did know, they wouldn’t achieve a thing.
He was proven correct with the first words the occupants uttered.
A gangly kid with thinning hair dyed jet black said to King, ‘Put that gun down, man. It won’t do you any good here.’
King said, ‘Won’t it?’
‘If you take this place by force, you’ll stay locked out. We planned for that. You ain’t got a hope in hell of cracking the ciphers.’
There were only four of them, the oldest no more than twenty-five. They were practically hunchbacked from spending so much time at their desks.
Three boys, one girl.
The boys rail-thin, the girl soft and flabby. They all shared characteristics — hollow cheekbones, gaunt complexions, glassy eyes. None of them were armed. None of them had even bothered to resist. They sat in swivel chairs with muted, placid demeanours, almost like they barely registered the two enormous soldiers who’d just stepped foot in their lair.
The eyes haunted Slater. There were only a couple of bulbs overhead to illuminate the space, and it seemed to accentuate the deadness of their gazes. There was no hope in them, possibly worse than Samuel, worse than Gavin.
They were disenfranchised, with nothing left to care about, nothing left to strive for.
The living dead.
Slater shivered.
He’d fought terrorists, mercenaries, rogue operatives.
Nothing had put him out of his depth like this.
King looked at the guy who’d spoken — the one with the dyed hair. He said, ‘I know.’
He put his MP7 on the floor.
Slater followed suit.
The girl said, ‘What happens now?’
‘Who do you think we are?’ King said.
The guy with the dyed hair said, ‘Negotiators, probably.’
‘No,’ King said. ‘If I was a negotiator I’d have a mental checklist ready to go. I’d have bullet points to hit. I’d try to warm you up with some calm talking points, and then I’d slowly transition to what I really wanted. But I’m not going to do any of that, because I’ve got no plan.’
The boy’s gaze lingered on King’s physique. ‘You going to try and beat us into submission? That’s what you people do, isn’t it?’
‘Sometimes,’ King said. ‘But I’m not going to do that here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it wouldn’t work. You’ve probably planned for that, too. If we started hurting you, you’d have a series of commands to execute that would make it look like you’d pulled the code out of the control stations. But, really, it’d just be a smokescreen, to make us ease off the pressure. You probably have a dozen different backup plans. Right?’
Slater was impressed that King understood.
The kid slowly nodded. He said, ‘You’re not going to get us to reverse this. No chance.’
‘What do you know about the people who recruited you?’
The girl gave a sadistic smile. ‘Whatever you say, mister, it’s not going to work. You’re staying locked out.’
The boy said, ‘In the back of your head, you’ve got a failsafe, right? You think, if you can’t convince us to reverse this, you can bring us in and maybe torture can make us sing.’
King didn’t answer.
The boy said, ‘We have a failsafe, too. You put one finger on us, and—’
He parted his lips, and bared his teeth, and Slater saw a clear pill with a dark green core.
His heart stopped in his chest.
King said, ‘Is that cyanide?’
The other three kids bared their teeth, too, exposing three more pills.
The boy said, ‘We’re the only ones who know the ciphers. They’re in our heads. Not a single other person in this whole operation has them, which I guess doesn’t matter, seeing that you probably killed them all to get here. But if we’re out of the picture… well, everyone stays locked out for good. You’ll have to build a whole new power grid over the old one. How long do you think that’ll take? How many people you think’ll die?’
Slater thought, Holy shit.
77
Outwardly, King gave no reaction.
Inwardly, he panicked harder than he ever had before.
Four bites was all that separated New York from thousands and thousands of deaths.
He said, ‘I get it.’
The boy said, ‘Good.’
‘I still want an answer to my question.’
‘What question?’
‘What do you know about the people who recruited you?’
‘Some crime family, I guess.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Who cares? They were just the bankroll. What’s done is done. They gave us what we needed to pull this off. Lined it all up for us and let us knock it out of the park. And it was glorious. I mean, it was nice they hated this country just as much as we do, but in the end that doesn’t really matter.’
‘The Whelans don’t hate America.’
‘Yes, they do. They hate the Western propaganda machine that suppresses the masses and dulls the minds of—’
‘Trust me, they don’t. They hate us.’
Silence.
The boy said, ‘You and your friend there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘We’re the reason all
