part0024

The Neo hacker den was in the Bronx. Not the nice part of the Bronx, the other part. And not in one of the high-rises in the not-nice part, but in a below-ground hovel positioned such that the best way to make a tactical approach was from below, via the old sewer system.

Graves breathed through his mouth to avoid the stench that threatened to make him gag. Although the atmosphere was technically breathable, the FBI prep team at the top of the manhole entrance six blocks away had offered him a gas mask. He’d refused out of some tough-guy machismo and now he was beginning to regret it.

He resisted the urge to touch the brick walls that glistened in the glow of his headlamp. No telling what kind of bacterial scourge lived down here. A sharp movement at floor level a few meters ahead caught his attention, made him startle.

They both wore knee-high rubber boots as protection against the puddles of fetid water that slopped at their ankles. They would probably protect him from a rat bite, too. A normal-sized rat, that is.

“I never knew these tunnels were down here,” Graves said, more to change the subject than because he cared. All this closeness was starting to get to him.

“Yeah, pretty cool, huh?” Craft reached out and stroked the wall with his gloved hand. “Some of these tunnels date from the early 1900s. You can still see the original brick. They’ve all been bypassed now by newer pipes and drainage systems, but some of these old tunnels are still around.”

Craft, who had struck Graves at their first meeting as a no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’am kind of guy, had a wistful tone to his old-school Brooklyn accent. In fact, Graves had attributed their quick success in finding the bomber at Anthony Taulke’s UN announcement to Craft’s bulldog attitude.

Craft paused for a breath. The smell was denser here and Graves wished again for a gas mask. The FBI agent nodded. “They’re in there. As soon as we send the street team after them from above, they’ll skedaddle down here. And then we’ve got ’em. No muss, no fuss.” He made a dusting motion with his hands.

Graves still wasn’t convinced. It just felt too easy. Why go to the trouble of hacking the UN security system and turning a security drone into a weapon—neither action a small feat of technical prowess—and then hang around New York? If it had been him, he’d be in Vancouver by now, maybe somewhere in Asia that wasn’t flooded or being threatened by a massive storm or an earthquake … maybe he was answering his own question. The United States was one of the better places to be, but it was a big country. He’d at least have gone to Kansas or Missouri.

Craft paused next to a ladder that disappeared up into darkness. “This is it,” he said. “The assault team is up there ready to snatch them up. Easy-peasy.” He made another dusting motion with his hands.

Graves wished this guy would stop telling him how simple this was going to be. He put his booted foot on the first rung and started to climb, leaving Craft steadying the ladder.

The ladder brought him to another tunnel. This one had rough concrete walls and smelled like there was fresh air being supplied from somewhere. The space was lit by intense floodlights set up in a ring, making Graves squint in the glare. Through narrowed eyes, he saw a gloved hand reach out and he grasped it, letting the man lift him the last few feet.

As his vision adjusted, he found himself standing in a circle of six black-suited agents with FBI stenciled in yellow across the front and back of their bulky body armor and their helmets. Craft clambered up beside him. “Turn those goddamned lights off,” he said in a harsh stage whisper.

“Do that, and send it to the general as well. He needs to let Mr. Taulke know we’re taking all possible precautions to take this asshole alive.”

Graves slid on his data glasses and waited for the pulsed prompt from Nichols. By Mr. Taulke, Craft meant Tony. As far as he knew, Anthony was still in a medically induced coma. He’d live, but when they finally woke him up he was going to wish he hadn’t.

Graves’s last-ditch effort to pull Anthony off the stage at the UN had probably saved his life. Basically, his body was one enormous bruise now, but he was alive and that was what mattered—at least that’s what Tony said.

Tony himself was a hero of sorts for getting Adriana Rabh off the stage before the window blew in and shredded them both. He’d taken a few shards of glass in the arm and had a pretty nasty cut on his brow, but he’d fared okay. Adriana Rabh emerged with nary a scratch. Teller on the other side of the stage had also bailed to safety, but his seatmate, the secretary-general, was among the dead.

The rest of the audience and news corps did not fare so well. One hundred sixty-nine dead and twice as many injured. Graves found it hard to believe there were even that many people in the room that night, but whatever the number, the carnage had been horrific. The drone had plowed into the audience and then smashed right through the back wall into the room where they’d had cocktails and then into the kitchens.

Graves, Cora, and the people in the front row who had had the foresight to shelter beneath the lip of the stage actually fared pretty well. Cora was shaken up but unhurt. Graves had taken some glass when he pulled Anthony down, but he was okay after a few stitches.

The woman who’d been sitting next to Graves had stood frozen when the drone crashed into the room. The only thing they found of her was a single high-heeled shoe.

It had been Tony’s idea to put Graves in charge of finding his father’s assassin—as if Graves didn’t have enough to worry about.

“Please, General,” Tony said, refusing to let go of Graves’s hand after they shook. “We—I—need your help. The council, we can’t trust anyone, least of all the UN. They tried to kill my father.” He finally let go of Graves’s hand and pressed his fingers to his forehead. He was sporting a colorful bruise on the side of his face and a thin red slice an inch or so above his brow.

“Look,” Tony said finally. “All I’m asking is that you act as my eyes and ears for this investigation. I need someone I can trust on the inside.”

“My father trusted you, that’s good enough for me. If—when—he wakes up, I want him to know that we did everything we could to bring this assassin to justice.”

That was the short version of how Graves came to be standing above a stinking, centuries-old sewer line under the Bronx waiting for his government-issue data glasses to sync with the FBI’s live feed on the Neo hacker den.

The image popped into his vision. Four young people, two men, two women, sat on beanbag chairs in a rough circle. One of the girls was vaping, a cloud of smoke obscuring her face. She had her fingers entwined with the guy next to her and he seemed anxious to get a hit of whatever she was puffing.

There was another girl with her back to them, her Neo tattoo clearly visible on the slender white nape of her neck. Graves thought she looked like she was sixteen. Barely.

Archibald “Spike” Lemmon. Graves studied the kid’s profile as he recalled what he knew about him. Twenty-seven years old, MIT grad, summa cum laude in computer science. Ran identity scams and ByteCoin ransoms to pay for school and fund his operation. Citizens Against Weather Superiority, or CAWS, was a Neo splinter group dedicated to stopping all forms of manipulation of nature. Anthony Taulke, a two-time offender in their eyes, was public enemy number one.

On paper, Spike had the skills needed to hack the UN, but something still bothered Graves. It was a big leap from stealing ByteCoin from rich people to turning a drone into a weapon of mass murder. Nothing in his record indicated he was violent. And then there was the fact that he was still here, as if waiting to get picked up by the FBI.

Graves nodded. Maybe once he got a chance to talk to this hacker he could make himself comfortable with the inconsistencies in the suspect. “Okay, let’s do it. Remember, I want them alive.”

“Roger that, sir,” Craft said. “When we hit them from the street level they will scurry to their bolt-hole, which will take them right here.” He pointed to a narrow hole in the ceiling. “We wait for all of them to get down here, then we hit the lights and take them all together. No muss, no fuss. Any questions?”

The armored FBI agents retreated to form a semicircle outside the lights, weapons up. Graves stepped back until his leg touched the steel ladder he had used to climb up from the sewer below. He was unarmed. The FBI was in charge of the arrest. He was here to observe and get a crack at talking to the infamous Spike.

The last light went out and Graves put his data glasses in his pocket. Craft’s Brooklyn accent said quietly: “Street team, this is mole team leader, you are a go. I repeat, you are go for the takedown.”

Graves held his breath, listening. Silence, then a distant thundering noise like running feet. There was the squeak of a hinge and the slapping sound of a rope hitting the floor of the tunnel. A clink and a hiss.

Another clink and the room erupted in the flash of a concussion grenade. Graves felt himself slammed backwards into the rough concrete wall, ears ringing, eyes watering from the force of the blow. He clawed himself to his hands and knees.

“Craft!” he shouted, but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears. He crawled forward, his fingers finding the hole in the floor and the reassuring solidity of the steel ladder.

And something else. A hand, attached to an arm, connected to a body not wearing armor. With his free hand, Graves switched on his headlamp to find he was gripping the arm of the suspect Spike Lemmon.

Spike smashed him in the face with his elbow and then slithered down the hole. The weight of the man pulled Graves downward. He hooked an elbow over the rung of the ladder and held on. Beneath him, Spike struggled like a wild animal. He gripped Graves’s wrist, hauled himself up, and bit Graves’s hand.

With a scream of pain, Graves let go, but he wasn’t finished yet. With Spike still in the glare of his headlamp, he launched his body headfirst down the hole. He hooked an arm over the kid’s thin neck, using him to break his fall and take him into the brick floor of the sewer.

Graves felt his face smash into slimy bricks and the rest of his body slammed down beside him. The fall knocked the wind out of him.

Ignoring the waves of pain, Graves got to his knees and pulled Spike upright, forcing his body back against the ladder. His headlamp flickered, damaged in the fall.

Spike’s face was covered in sewer slime and one eye was already starting to swell. His eyes focused on Graves’s face. “Please,” he whispered. “Help me. They’ll kill me.”

An explosion went off over his head and Graves felt the heat of a muzzle flash. He ducked automatically, then looked up.

Craft was framed in the open hole. In the flickering light of Graves’s headlamp, he had blood running out of his nose and he’d lost his helmet. His eyes were wild. “I saw a gun,” he shouted.

Graves looked back at the kid. He was still clutching Spike’s shirt front, but the kid’s body had gone slack under Graves’s fist. Still, he looked okay. Graves shook him gently and his head lolled to one side.