Zero kill, p.19
Zero Kill, page 19
‘Synchronized,’ Camille said softly into her scalp mic.
Then she let Elsa, Carragher and Antovic into reception. The camera on the opposite side of the street also showed footage from forty-eight hours ago in its live feed, and they stayed close to the wall to ensure they couldn’t be seen from the apartments above when they walked around the front of the building.
In the rear office, they opened their bags and kitted up. Put on Kevlar vests and tactical belts, equipped HK416 carbines and ammunition, tanto blades, flash grenades. Carragher checked the final bag, which contained a brick of C4 to blow the contents of the vault in Apartment 7b.
‘Saint?’ asked Carragher. ‘What’s our status?’
On the roof of the seven-storey building opposite, lying flat on the hot tarmac, Saint used Steiner tactical binoculars to watch the streets surrounding the building. Whipping his focus to the blocks east and west, he listened to the bustling noise of the city: distant sirens, the throb of traffic, music drifting across Recoleta. ‘All clear.’
‘Klimt?’ Carragher asked the driver, who sat in a van a couple of streets away.
‘Ready,’ came the terse response.
Seven minutes later, and exactly on time, a car pulled up outside and two men got out: part of the security changeover for Apartment 7b. The two middle-aged men in rumpled suits, one dark-haired, the other with sandy highlights, arrived at exactly the same time every evening. They buzzed to be let into reception.
‘Hola!’ said Camille with a cheery smile when they came inside. If they saw the receptionist was someone different, they didn’t have an opportunity to do anything. The door had barely closed behind them before Antovic shot the dark-haired one in the back of the head, using a Ruger Mk IV with a suppressor.
Before the dead man even toppled into Antovic’s arms, Elsa and Carragher appeared from the shadows to train their weapons on Sandy Highlights. Camille and Antovic dragged the dead man into the rear office. Elsa pushed his colleague up the stairs. Carragher followed, carrying the bag of explosives.
‘If you don’t say exactly, exactly, what’s expected of you at the door, I’ll kill you, do you understand?’
‘Sí,’ the man replied through gritted teeth.
Elsa and Carragher reached Apartment 7b on the second floor. Carragher placed the bag against the wall, and they both readied their carbines.
There was no surveillance apparatus outside the apartment door, the security team inside was using the building’s own network of cameras, which meant they would have seen Dark and Sandy walking up the stairs together, laughing and chatting, just as they had forty-eight hours ago.
Sandy was about to press the doorbell when Carragher saw that they were several seconds too early – their movements had to synchronize exactly with the timestamp on the footage from two days ago. He pressed the barrel of the carbine into the back of Sandy’s neck, told him quietly, ‘Espere.’
The man’s finger trembled at the bell. Carragher checked his watch, waiting for the exact moment. In four seconds. In three. In two, one…
His watch vibrated faintly against his wrist.
‘Now,’ Carragher said, and the man pressed the doorbell: the ring was loud and shrill.
‘What’s the weather like this evening?’ said a voice from the other side.
The man’s mouth snapped open, but if he intended to scream a warning to the men inside, the gun barrel pressed against his lower spine made him think again.
‘Intemperate, to say the least.’ The man gave the second part of the code phrase. ‘But at least it isn’t snowing.’
Carragher glanced at Elsa, the ghost of a smile on his face.
Adrenaline rushed around her bloodstream; her heart thumped in her chest, blood surged into muscles; hormones released around her body, increasing focus and concentration; her nervous system spiked, her breathing accelerated.
She lifted the HK416 at the door.
The first lock on the door snapped loudly in the quiet hallway.
Elsa made an adjustment to the grip on her weapon.
A second lock clicked.
She made a minor adjustment to her balance, ready to move.
And then, the final scrape of a chain swinging against painted wood…
The door began to open.
And then everything happened at rapid speed—
Sandy began to shout a warning, but Carragher kicked the man hard, shooting him in the back as he lurched forward. He was already dead when his body slammed into the door, forcing it open. Standing compactly, legs and arms bent to accommodate the recoil of the rifle, Carragher fired twice into the corridor ahead. Two men fell instantly. Another man appeared from a door on the right, and Elsa shot him.
And then they went inside. Covering each side, moving down the corridor quickly, Carragher slightly ahead. Weapons raised, anticipating every door to the left and right, as they had trained to do.
One guy came out of a room directly in front of Elsa and she fired at his chest; he spun, hit the wall and dropped. Carragher kicked open a door on the right, moving inside, staying low. It was empty.
Two men burst from behind a door, letting off short, panicked bursts of gunfire, but aiming too high. Elsa fired, two short bursts; felt the weapon heating up in her hands. Their bodies flew against the wall, blood smearing down the plaster as they slumped to the floor.
Carragher dropped to one knee and aimed when another guy appeared at the far end of the corridor, firing wildly. The man was killed instantly.
Elsa and Carragher entered every room, weapons sweeping in a fluid motion, aiming into every corner. As they approached the door to an en suite, the wood splintered angrily as someone sprayed it with automatic gunfire from the other side; they heard his frenzied shouts of panic. The shots stopped when the man fumbled with a new magazine. Carragher put his foot to the door – it gave way easily – and shot him in the head. The guy fell into an empty bath, bringing a plastic shower curtain down with him.
Stepping over the bodies in the corridor, Carragher said into his mic, ‘We’re in.’
Elsa stayed alert as he fetched the bag containing the C4 from the landing and brought it inside.
The living room was as massive as the one they had trained in. Like the rest of the apartment, it was furnished ornately, with expensive cabinets, recliners and tables. But there was an additional door in the far wall. When Carragher opened it, another door was revealed, one made of smooth steel.
‘Are we going to blow it open?’ Elsa asked. That would take time, and make a lot of noise.
He shook his head, then keyed in a code on a pad in the centre of the door. It was twelve characters long, and he didn’t hesitate. Elsa heard bolts shunt open. She didn’t know how Carragher had the code, but there was so much about the mission she didn’t understand.
When the door opened, a small, brightly lit space the size of a wardrobe was revealed. She heard the hum of a cooling system. Inside the vault was a metal table, and placed on that was a rectangular box, the size and shape of a hard drive, with a band of blue light pulsing around the upper edge of it.
‘That’s it?’ she asked. ‘That’s why we’re here?’
Ignoring her, Carragher unzipped the bag and took out the brick of C4. Then he took out a remote detonator, tape, and wire.
‘You’re sure you’ve got enough there?’ she asked, incredulous. She was no expert but it looked like far more explosive than they needed.
‘Got to be sure,’ he said tensely.
‘Uh, we’ve got a problem,’ Saint said in her ear. ‘There are five vehicles, SUVs, moving towards us fast.’
‘From which direction?’ asked Carragher, without looking up from what he was doing.
‘Let me see… every fucking direction.’
‘Did everyone hear that?’
In a corner of the room was a table with a monitor on it showing the security feeds for the interior and exterior of the building – the footage from two days ago.
‘How do they know?’ asked Camille urgently.
They could have tripped security sensors, or there could be hidden cameras Carragher didn’t know about, in the apartment, in reception, somewhere outside. One of the security men may have hit a panic alarm.
‘They’re going to be here in two minutes,’ Saint said urgently in Elsa’s ear.
‘How many in the vehicles?’ asked Carragher, placing the wireless detonator carefully in the C4.
‘I don’t know, the windows are tinted. But there are four carloads. We need to leave, guys, like, right now.’
‘Stay in position,’ Carragher told him irritably. ‘Reception, what’s your status?’
‘Calm here,’ said Camille, but there was a tension in her voice.
‘I don’t think you understand, Steve,’ interrupted Saint. ‘We’re going to have company in less than—’
And then Saint’s voice cut out.
‘Roof, we’ve lost you,’ Elsa said quickly. ‘Saint? Camille?’
She couldn’t hear Camille or Antovic in reception; Klimt’s connection was also dead. Elsa’s instincts were screaming. Carragher was in the doorway of the vault, attaching the explosives to the hard drive.
‘We have to go,’ she told him.
‘A few more seconds…’
‘We don’t have—’
His attention snapped angrily to her. ‘We finish what we came to do!’
Then she heard the screech of tyres. Going onto the balcony, she saw three SUVs pull up in front of the building; men with assault rifles jumped out. She counted a dozen, at least – probably more. Another carload would be heading to the back of the building.
‘Camille, Antovic,’ Elsa said urgently into her mic, not knowing if anyone could hear her. ‘Get out now!’
But she knew it was too late. If they hadn’t escaped the building already, they’d be trapped.
Then gunfire started downstairs. Bursts of it drifting up to the second floor from the street as the men rushed towards the entrance. She heard Camille and Antovic return fire from inside. From the window, she saw one of the men fall in the street, and the others take cover behind the vehicles.
‘We’ve got to go,’ she shouted at Carragher. ‘Right now!’
Carragher didn’t turn from what he was doing. ‘Just one more sec—’
‘Now, Steve!’ she told him.
Chips of stone flew off the balcony. Elsa ran inside and threw herself against the wall between the doors as glass and wood shattered on either side of her. She didn’t know how they were going to get out, didn’t have time to even consider how everything had gone wrong so quickly. Carragher hadn’t done his homework properly, or the mission had been fatally compromised.
Carragher kept low as he came over with the detonator in his hand. More shots thwacked against the ceiling from below, sending plaster flying off the cornices. The remaining glass in the balcony windows smashed to the floor, as the gunmen shot up from the street.
They heard the crack of a rifle from high above, Saint returning fire from the roof of the building opposite. The bursts of automatic gunfire on a quiet street in the centre of the city would soon bring the police.
Elsa edged along the wall beside the shattered balcony door to look outside. Two men were face down in the street. More vehicles arrived and men poured out.
‘We can jump from the balcony to another, try to get round the far side of the building, or head up the stairs to the roof.’
‘Camille!’ Carragher rushed towards the central corridor.
But heading downstairs was senseless. Camille and Antovic would be pinned down, maybe even dead already, or heading to the floors above. They had to climb higher, find another way to rendezvous with the van – and they had to do it now.
‘Klimt,’ she said into her throat mic. ‘Are you there? We need you!’
There was a crackle in her earpiece and she heard Saint’s faint voice, the thump of his footsteps, automatic gunfire buzzing like static – but it kept cutting out.
‘—on – surrou – only chan—’
‘Saint?’ she shouted, watching Carragher moving steadily along the central corridor towards the closed front door of Apartment 7b, his carbine raised.
‘Whatever you’re thi—’ Elsa heard Saint grunt, and a clang as he jumped across something metal. ‘Get it do—’
‘Saint, where’s Klimt?’
‘No id—’ The connection stabilized for a moment and Elsa heard him crash through a door into a stairwell, his voice rebounding off the concrete walls, his steps echoing harshly – then cutting out – echoing. ‘Heading to the van – stay safe.’
The connection dropped again.
‘Bit late for that,’ muttered Elsa angrily as she saw Carragher stop in the middle of the corridor. Something was happening outside the apartment.
He turned, raced back into the room and threw himself behind the wall, just as the front door blew off its hinges in a cloud of whirling smoke, and men poured inside.
31
As soon as he had delivered to Camille the data retrieved and decrypted from the photographs taken in the vault, Flex relaxed the only way he knew how, by playing GTA5 online. Screaming into his headset as he took part in heists, robberies, road racing, and made himself a pest on the streets of Los Santos. After a stressful evening, he was wired and on edge, and the only way to wind down was by taking out his anger on hapless NPCs and wolfing down junk food.
Gone five in the morning, and finally needing to sleep, he threw his controller down, telling the other players, ‘Bye, losers.’
His home was a tiny flat in Soho, and as convenient as it was to live centrally, the area was full of drunken pillocks who fell out of the late-night bars and clubs at all hours. Flex was finally dropping off in a bedroom the size of a shoebox when he heard shouts from below.
‘Flopsy, you up there?’ someone was calling. ‘Flopsy, mate, I need to talk to you.’
Growling in irritation, Flex covered his head with a pillow, but the voice was insistent.
‘Computer guy!’ called the man, and that got his attention. In his T-shirt and underpants, his sagging belly undulating, Flex pulled up the window sash.
A homeless man stood in the street below, among the skeletal frames of the market stalls. There were a lot of people like that in Soho, beggars who followed the cash-rich tourists during the day and spent the night bundled in doorways. Sometimes Flex had to step over them to get to his own door, but they weren’t usually such a nuisance.
‘What are you doing?’ he called down. ‘People are trying to sleep!’
‘Are you Flopsy?’ the homeless guy called up, but then someone out of sight below corrected him. ‘Wait… Not Flopsy? Are you Flex?’
He had a bad feeling about this. ‘Who’s asking?’
The man counted the windows to Flex’s floor and told whoever was out of sight, ‘He’s on the third.’ Then he waved. ‘We’ll be right up.’
‘No, wait!’
Flex panicked. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He’d been assured by his employers he’d never be implicated in any wrongdoing, but that if he ever felt threatened he should call a certain number. He raced to find his phone in his small lounge-kitchen.
But he’d had a pizza delivered, and a lot of sides, which he’d scoffed as he played on the PS5, and all the open boxes were spread across the table; his mobile was somewhere under it all. He searched frantically for it, throwing the half-empty boxes into the air – food flew everywhere – but footsteps were approaching quickly up the communal stairs, and along the landing.
The guy downstairs didn’t look like police, he looked like a thug sent to kill him. Flex thought of the numerous security breaches he’d been involved in, and his stomach churned. He should never have agreed to hack that camera-phone in Pyongyang! He imagined himself getting waterboarded.
He put on the latch just as someone banged on the door.
‘We know you’re in there, Simon slash Flex, let us in,’ said a woman’s voice.
Flex rushed back into the room, opened the window and looked down. Three flights up, he’d never survive the jump, and he was just wearing underpants.
Then the front door flew open – the flimsy chain was as good as useless – and Elsa Zero strode inside.
‘Did we wake you?’ she asked. The guy from the street came in behind her, closing the door, and his mad eyes immediately fixed on the sole remaining slice of stiffened pizza in the box.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ he asked.
Terrified, Flex shook his head, and the man folded the slice in two and stuffed it into his mouth, then turned his attention to the last of the garlic bread.
‘I need to see what you got from the photos I took tonight.’ Elsa added more gently, ‘Flex, I need to see it.’
‘Can I use your shower?’ The vagrant who had come in with her started taking off layers of clothes. A body-warmer, a puffer jacket, a hoodie. When they slapped to the floor, Flex realized they were soaking wet. She was wet through, too.
‘We don’t have time for that, Saint,’ Elsa told him.
The man called Saint shrugged and headed towards the fridge.
‘There was nothing on it,’ said Flex.
‘There must have been something, otherwise RedQueen wouldn’t be trying to kill me all of a sudden.’
Flex gawped. ‘I don’t know anything about that! I just do computer stuff.’
‘I know you do.’ She picked up his laptop from a chair and gave it to him, then manoeuvred him by his shoulders to the table. ‘So show me.’
‘All that information will be on a secure RedQueen server,’ he said. ‘And protected.’
‘Who uploaded it?’ she asked.
‘I did.’
‘Then it shouldn’t be much trouble to get to it again.’
