Authors: Jason Dean
‘Does
every
thing you touch turn to shit, Bishop,’ said Luke Shelton, ‘or did you just decide to save up all that bad karma for the first
good woman to cross your path?’
Bishop let out a long sigh. They really didn’t have time for this.
They were facing each other in the small living room of Luke’s four-room
apartment in Brooklyn’s Loft Street. A widescreen
TV showed a movie with the sound turned off. Aleron sat slumped on a faded blue couch. Bishop turned to him, eyebrows raised.
The muscles in Luke’s jaw tensed. ‘Like you even care, asshole,’ he said. ‘I make one call . . .’
‘You won’t call anybody, Luke,’ Aleron said. ‘And I didn’t bring him here for
a dick-swinging contest. Jenna’s in trouble.
You gonna help or bitch?’
Bishop saw Luke visibly sag at his friend’s words and almost felt sorry for the guy. Almost.
Aleron hadn’t been too happy to see Bishop when he showed up at his house and explained the situation, but Bishop knew he
couldn’t save Jenna and do what was required alone. He needed
them both. He also had a strong feeling that Luke was the fifth
member of the hacking network Jenna had been talking about before. The one who’d escaped the FBI’s clutches, along with Jenna.
Which meant his computer skills were probably on a par with hers. Bishop hated to admit it, but he felt those skills might
soon be needed. They didn’t have to like each other. Jenna
was all that mattered.
Bishop sat on the couch next to Aleron and Luke pulled his La-Z-Boy round to face them. He still didn’t look happy, but Bishop
guessed that this was just his natural state anyway.
Aleron said to Bishop, ‘So what we got to do? You make this RoyseCorp building sound like Fort Knox. Why? What are they protecting?’
‘Information, mostly,’ Bishop said. ‘You got to realize they’re the
largest private security organization in the country, which basically translates as the largest in the world. My old racket,
close protection, is only a small part of what they do. Their main bread and butter comes from general combat and law enforcement
training at their massive compound in Virginia. And
if you get through the course, it’s pretty much guaranteed they’ll find
you high-paying work somewhere in the world along with the twenty thousand other contractors on their books. They’re at the
top of a very short list when friendly foreign governments need highly trained personnel to keep the peace during times of
civil unrest.
‘On top of that,
Royse has negotiated over twenty billion dollars in federal law enforcement contracts that I know of. And
that doesn’t include those black contracts that slip through the cracks.’
Luke shrugged. ‘So?’
‘So they’ve got lots of fingers in lots of pies, with lots of sensitive information picked up along the way. The CIA, for
one, would just love
to get a crack at the stuff stored on their servers, so you can imagine how other countries might feel.
All of which means they take their internal security very seriously.’
Aleron nodded. ‘And we’ve got to find a way through it to get Thorpe’s file.’
‘And we will,’ Bishop said. He just hoped it was true. He turned to Luke. ‘But first, I need to check
my emails. Where’s your
computer?’
‘That could be it,’ Bishop said, pointing at the screen. He and Luke were in a converted bedroom, with most of the wall space
around them taken up by seventies-era movie posters. He watched as Luke zoomed in on the only unmarked area they’d seen so
far on the penthouse level. All the other rooms on the floor plan were named for their
purpose and had the symbol of a partly
open door inserted into one of the four walls. This one’s central location meant it had no windows and there didn’t seem to
be an entrance or exit, either.
‘Huh,’ Luke said, inching his face closer to the screen. ‘Unless it’s his secret bowling alley. He’s already got everything
else up there. Library, bathroom,
gym, steam room, projection room, shooting range. Christ.’ He shook his head and continued
scrolling down, stopping at another unmarked box. ‘Hey, what’s this?’
‘Elevator bank running through the centre of the building,’ Bishop said. ‘Probably blocked off at the penthouse level years
ago.’
‘So how does he get to his office? Teleportation?’
‘Pilots his own chopper,’ Bishop said. ‘Enters through the roof so he doesn’t have to meet any other human beings along the
way. A Howard Hughes for the digital age.’
‘Huh, so they’re allowing night-time flights in Manhattan again?’
Bishop shrugged. ‘Probably safe to assume he bought somebody off and got special dispensation from the city.’
Luke grunted and closed that file and opened another marked
7
. He scrolled all the way down until he reached a dark blue bar that ran across the bottom. ‘Fill me in, Bishop. Every floor
plan except the first floor and the penthouse has got a coloured bar like this on it. Floors two to four are purple, five
through eight are blue . . .’
‘Colour-coded
departments,’ Bishop said. ‘The lower floors are Accounting, I think. They’ve got access to the other accounts
levels, but nothing beyond that. Close Protection was green and took up three
floors somewhere in the early twenties. Same deal, with no access to other floors. There were nine in total, I remember.’
‘Unless they added more while you were away,’ Luke said.
‘Who knows how old these plans are?’
‘Let’s assume they’re current,’ Aleron said, walking in with the rest of the printouts in his hands. He sat down in the room’s
only other chair. ‘Bastard’s done his research, I got to give him that. I’ve already lost count of how many problems we’re
up against here.’
Bishop turned and leaned against the wall.
‘If it were easy,’ he said, ‘Thorpe would have done it already. What kind of window
we looking at?’
Aleron looked up. ‘Seems all that money hasn’t changed Royse’s work ethic any; unless he’s got overseas business he keeps
fairly regular hours. Gets in at eight, leaves at nine in the evening, seven days a week. So unless you’re planning to go
in right
now, we got a three-hour window tomorrow between nine and midnight.’
Bishop tapped his head lightly against the wall, eyes raised to the ceiling. ‘Cutting it fine.’
‘Razor thin,’ Aleron said. ‘And it gets worse. Building’s got forty floors and, penthouse aside, each one’s got at least six
armed watchdogs on constant patrol. Count on at least twice that
many on the first floor. We got fingerprint scanners and
CCTV everywhere, including in the elevators, and they only go as far as the thirty-ninth floor. Then we got more cameras in
the stairwells, which do actually go up to the fortieth, but then you’re faced with an inch-thick steel fire door that doesn’t
open from that side. And, yeah, I know that’s illegal, but it
seems Royse makes his own rules and screw anybody who doesn’t
like them. And if you’re thinking of crawling around the air vents like they do in the movies, forget about it. At their widest,
you got twelve square inches to play with and nobody’s that skinny.’
‘All that’s for keeping intruders out of the main building,’ Bishop said, and saw Luke turn from
his screen to listen. ‘We
don’t want anything below the fortieth, so we use the roof access, same as Royse.’
‘Right,’ Aleron said. ‘Which then presents its own set of challenges. Luke, what can you show me?’
Luke swivelled round to search through the folder he’d downloaded. Bishop and Aleron came over to stand behind him. ‘All I
got,’ he said,
‘is a single aerial shot of the building.’ He clicked on an icon and
the screen was filled with a high resolution image of a skyscraper’s flat roof.
‘Thorpe must have been thinking the same thing and hired a chopper to make a flyover,’ Bishop said. He rested a palm on the
worktop and leaned in, taking note of every detail. From the position of the shadows, Bishop
guessed the photo had been taken
some time in the late morning. The top five floors were in view and showed reflective glass running around the building, except
for the south side of each odd-numbered floor, where windows were replaced by concrete. Most of the roof itself was taken
up with the various air conditioning systems and two plain utility buildings. He could also
see intricate scaffold pulleys
on the north and south sides.
But the most notable feature was the large green circle that had been painted on the east side of the roof, with a white H
inside it. Just above that was a sloping concrete structure, jutting out of the roof at a fifteen degree angle like a giant
wedge. Bishop figured it was the entrance
to the penthouse. The vertical end of the wedge was partly shrouded in shadow due
to the overhang that extended out a couple of feet at the top and sides, but Bishop could see it contained a door shape. Next
to it was a wall device that could have been a keypad or intercom.
Aleron nodded as he took in every part of the photo. ‘Yeah, it matches up with his
notes,’ he said, and pointed at the shadowed
part of the entrance. ‘See here? Numeric keypad by the side to get in. And although you can’t see it in this shot, there’s
another closed circuit camera just under the overhang, covering the helipad and a large part of the roof area beyond it.’
He moved his hand over the area in front of the entrance. ‘They’ve also got motion
sensors built into every inch of the roof
except for the actual helipad itself. Once Royse leaves that circle he’s got sixty seconds to reach the door and key in his
code before he trips the alarms.’
Bishop leaned back against the wall and rubbed his scalp. ‘Those scaffold pulleys there. How often do they get their windows
cleaned?’
Aleron smiled. ‘Thorpe checked that, too. Apparently, they got two guys on retainer. They’ve been through a thorough security
check and get paid a good salary to be available at a moment’s notice. The Local 2 Union doesn’t even get a look in. Everybody
knows them by sight and they don’t use replacements.’
‘All right.’ Bishop turned to Luke. ‘Aleron
told me you used to be a real hotshot hacker back in the day.’
Luke kept his eyes on the screen. ‘If that’s what he said.’
‘As good as Jenna?’
He was silent for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Nobody is.’
‘Okay. So how are you with numeric keypads?’
‘Huh. They’re duck soup if you’ve got time to play with them. I got a
program that’ll interface with the keypad’s programming
port, then run a number sequence until it hits the right combination. No way it can be done in sixty seconds, though. Ten
minutes, minimum.’
‘Fair enough,’ Bishop said. ‘The main problem is once we get in, how to break into a vault we know nothing about. I already
told Thorpe I’m no safecracker,
for all the good it did me.’ He turned to Aleron. ‘Tell me he’s not throwing us in blindfolded.
He must have found out something we can use.’
Aleron shrugged. ‘Only that RoyseCorp has an open-ended contract with Ulysses for all its safes. He’s also seen a large vault
in the basement for paperwork too sensitive to store in cyberspace. Also made by Ulysses.’
Luke said, ‘So, what, we’re just gonna gamble on Royse’s vault being the same make?’
‘I don’t think we’ve got much choice at this point,’ Bishop said.
‘Hey, look, I been thinking,’ Aleron said, biting his bottom lip. ‘A year ago I helped out a guy in your situation who wanted
the full makeover. But when it came time to pay up he was a couple
thou short. I let him go with a promise I knew he wouldn’t
keep, but a few days later his brother paid me a visit to thank me personally. A useful guy to know in the safe business.
Said if I needed a favour in the future he might be able to help out. You know, lend a hand. He gave me a cutout number I
could reach him with. His name’s Wilson.’
Bishop
raised an eyebrow. ‘I might have heard of him, if it’s the same Wilson.’
‘
I
haven’t,’ Luke said, frowning. ‘Who the hell you talking about?’
Aleron turned to him. ‘You remember that nationwide manhunt a few years back after thieves made off with fifteen mill from
the Pacific Continental in Seattle? It was the main story for about a week.’
Luke nodded. ‘This Wilson was one of them?’
‘The one who got them into the bank vault, if you believe the rumours. The cops couldn’t pin anything on him. He had people
who swore he was in another state when it happened, just like on every other job he’s pulled in the last twenty years. It
sure is good to have friends, ain’t it?’
‘So people tell me,’ Bishop said. ‘Okay. Set up a meet for me tomorrow if you can.’
‘Got it.’ Aleron paused. ‘How did Jenna sound when you spoke to her?’
‘Unharmed, I think, but totally out of it. Hard to tell on what, exactly. Some kind of opiate, maybe, to keep her passive.’
Bishop frowned. ‘You think you could you get your hands on some naloxone?’
‘Maybe. If I knew what it was.’
‘It’s a drug that reverses the effects of narcotic poisoning, assuming that’s what he’s given her. Sometimes it’s called Narcan.
Try to get a hypo of the stuff; it’ll look like the ones they use for insulin. In fact, get two. We’ll need to get Jenna moving
quickly when the time comes. It might make all the difference.’
‘Consider it done,’ Aleron said. ‘But there’s still a couple more issues. Like that camera above the entrance.’
‘Leave that with me,’ Luke said. ‘But I’ll need your help, Ali.’
‘You got it. Which just leaves the small problem of getting up onto the roof in the first place. Bishop?’
Bishop was staring at one of Luke’s movie posters,
his thoughts on what Jenna had said at the end. ‘Kyzatoo’, it had sounded
like. Then he thought of that line on the Willow Reeves letterhead. The part about it operating under the aegis of the Kebnekaise
Corporation.
Kebnekaise, too
. Was that what she’d been trying to say? Turning to Luke, he said, ‘See if you can find out about something called the Kebnekaise
Corporation
when you get a spare moment, okay?’ He spelled the name. ‘Probably nothing, but I want to make sure.’
‘All right,’ Luke said.
‘I was saying we still need to get to that roof, somehow,’ Aleron said. Bishop pushed off against the wall. ‘That’s my department,’
he said.