Clan Corporate (32 page)

“So. From the top. How would you characterize Client Zero’s state of mind last time you spoke to him?”

I’m not on the spot, Mike realized with an enormous sense of guilt-tinged relief-because it meant someone else was going to catch it in the neck. “He seemed perfectly fine, to be honest. A bit stir-crazy, but that’s not unexpected. He wasn’t depressed or suicidal or excessively edgy, if that’s what you’re looking for. Why? What happened?”

Colonel Smith shook his head and shoved his voice recorder closer to Mike’s side of the table. “Summarize first. Then we’ll go round the circle. Treat this as a legal deposition. Afterward I’ll fill you in.”

“Okay.” Mike recounted his last meeting with Matthias. “He was asking about his Witness Protection Program status, but-” Mike stopped dead. “You said he took a lift down from the twenty-third-floor window. He was on the twenty-fourth floor. With no direct elevator between them. How’d he get downstairs?” Through two security checkpoints and four locked doors and then downstairs in an elevator car with a webcam and a security guard?

“Later,” Smith said firmly.

“Uh, I’d like to register a note of caution here. Did anyone see Client Zero move between floors twenty-four and twenty-three? And was there any evidence that he left the building by one of the ground-level doors?”

There was a pregnant pause.

“I’d have to say that we don’t know that,” said Smith. His eyes tracked, almost imperceptibly, toward the door outside which the blue-suiter with the gun would be standing guard.

“Oh.” Oh shit, thought Mike.

“I’m betting he got riled up and broke out,” said Smith, his voice even. “How he managed that is a troubling question, as is why he chose to do it right at this moment. But he’s a smart cookie, is Client Zero. Just in case he had outside help, we’re going to full Case Red lockdown. Nobody goes below the tenth floor without an armed escort until we’ve clarified the situation.”

“He can’t have evaded our monitoring completely, even if he managed to bypass the guards.”

Smith’s pager beeped for attention. He glanced at it, then stood up: “I’m going to deposit this, then take a call. Back in ten minutes.” He disappeared through the door, taking the voice recorder and leaving Mike and Pete alone in the windowless room with the glass furniture and the vault fittings.

“He got stir-crazy,” said Mike.

Pete looked at him.

“What am I not hearing?” asked Mike.

Pete coughed. “After your last meeting I dropped in on him. He was pissed-you said you’d been called away-”

“By Eric, he can confirm it-”

“Well sure, but Matt didn’t see it that way, he thought you were bullshitting.

He was worried. So to get him calmed down I tried to draw him out a bit about why he came over to us. I mean, you’ve been doing all those grammar sessions and he was getting bored, you know?”

“Okay.” Mike leaned back to listen.

Pete got into the flow of things. “He had this crazy paranoid-sounding rant about how he was a second-class citizen as far as the bad guys are concerned, on account of how he can’t do the magic disappearing trick-well, I’ll buy that. And then something about a long-lost cousin turning up and destabilizing some plans of his. Seems she grew up on our side of the fence, worked in Cambridge as some kind of tech journalist. They rediscovered her by accident and she made the wheels fall off Matt’s little red wagon by snooping around and stirring up shit. So Matt tried to persuade this Helga woman to get off his case and she-she’s called Miriam something here, something Jewish-sounding-”

Can’t be, thought Mike. She can’t be the same woman. The idea was too preposterous for words.

Pete stopped. “What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. So what happened? What went wrong with Matt’s plans?”

“She wouldn’t blackmail-he said she wouldn’t play ball, but that’s my reading-and there’s some stuff about her discovering a whole other world where the Clan guys have got a bunch of relatives who don’t like them and who were paying Matt to look after their interests-he’s always been a bit of a moonlighter-and the upshot is, he had to cut and run. He’s still pissed at her. He came to us because he figured we’d protect him from his former associates.”

“Uh-huh.” Mike nodded. Miriam-what was her other name? “What’s this got to do with the time of day?”

“Well.” Pete looked embarrassed. “I asked him how he thought it had worked, and that was when he got agitated. Said you’d told him something about him being in military custody now? So I tried to get him calmed down, told him it wasn’t what it sounded like. But he wasn’t having it. And at about five in the morning he went missing. Do I have to draw you a diagram?”

“No,” said Mike. He sighed. “I knew this military thing was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, well. Which of us is going to tell Smith?”

They found the colonel at the security checkpoint by elevator bank B, talking to one of the guards. He didn’t look terribly happy. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I’ve got a hypothesis I’d like to test, sir. I think Matt may still be in the building. Did we catch him leaving?”

“That’s what I was just ascertaining,” said Smith. He glanced around irritably. “Get me …” He snapped his fingers, searching for a name-“Sergeant Scoville, mister.”

“Sir.” The guard pulled out his walkie-talkie and began talking to someone.

“So.” Smith pointed a bony finger at Mike. “Explain.”

“Client Zero is no dummy. He knows he’s upstairs. He decided he wants to take a walk. We can be fairly sure he can move between floors but he’s not on camera, so either he’s been holding out on us-and I don’t believe he’s got what it takes to hack our sensors-or he’s gone to ground. My bet is either under the false floor or over the suspended ceiling, probably on the twenty-third but possibly on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth floors. He probably ran into the security zone on the twenty-second and bounced. Now he’ll be waiting for an opportunity to go elevator surfing or a chance to slip outside while we’re distracted.”

“Okay. Now tell me why he’s doing this. Where’s he likely to go?”

Mike glanced at Pete. “I think he’s breaking out because he thought he was looking at a comfortable relax-a-thon in the Witness Protection Program, and a new identity afterward, with us to protect him from his former associates.

Unfortunately, once Dr. James switched him to military custody we lost track of the WP program and his new identity, and he finally twigged that he was one step away from being given the whole unlawful-combatant treatment. As for where he’s going-I bet he’s got his own spare identity stashed away, from before he decided to come in. It won’t be as good as what we could have given him if we’d kept him in witness protection, but it beats being a ghost detainee.”

“Right.” The guard offered Smith his handset. “Jack? Our current best guess is that the target’s still in the building, above the security zone on ten. My top priority is, I want you to secure the entry zone and the lobby. Nobody leaves the building even if a Boeing flies into the top floor: our target may try to provoke an evacuation so he can escape in the crowd. I want a security detail to start on floor ten and work their way upstairs, one level at a time, until they get to the roof. They will need torches, floor-tile lifters, and ladders because they’re going to check the crawlways and overheads, and they need to be armed because our target is dangerous. How soon can you get that started? How many bodies have we got up here anyway?” He listened for a few seconds. “Damn, I’d hoped for more. Okay, assemble them. Smith out.” He glanced back at the two DEA agents. “Right. Any other suggestions?”

Mike took a deep breath. “Is he still valuable to us, if we can get him back?”

“Possibly.” Smith stared at him. “Your call, son.”

Time stood still. “I need to work on my grammar,” Mike said slowly. “But of course, after CLEANSWEEP we’ll have more subjects to work with.”

Smith held out his hand for the walkie-talkie, watching Mike’s face as he spoke: “Sergeant? Change of plan. Hold the floor sweep, I don’t think we’ve got enough people to risk it, if the target manages to arm himself …

Instead I want you to stand by to execute code BLUEBEARD. That’s BLUEBEARD.

I’m going to make an announcement in a couple of minutes. If the fugitive doesn’t give himself up, we’ll execute BLUEBEARD, then ventilate and search the place afterward.”

Pete looked shocked. Mike elbowed the younger agent in the ribs to get his attention. “Go get us all respirators,” he said. Smith nodded at him. “You really going to do it, sir?”

Smith nodded again. “We need to test the security system, anyway.”

“Ri-ight.” The desk guard was watching nervously, as if the colonel had sprouted a second head. Mike grimaced. “I love the smell of nerve gas in the morning.” Pete reappeared and handed over a sealed polythene pack containing a respirator mask and a preloaded antidote syringe.

“It’s not nerve gas, it’s fentanyl,” Smith corrected him. “Where’s the PA mike on this level?” he asked the desk guard.

“Fentanyl is a controlled substance,” said Pete, a conditioned reflex kicking in.

Mike looked round edgily. BLUEBEARD was a last-ditch antiterrorist defense; on command, compressed gas cylinders plugged into the air-conditioning on each floor would pump a narcotic mist throughout the building. Sure, there was an antidote, and the ventilator masks ought to stop it dead, but the only time it had ever been used for this purpose-in Russia, when a bunch of Chechen terrorists had taken a theater crowd hostage-more than a fifth of the bystanders had been killed. Gas and confined spaces did not mix well.

“Relax, boys.” Smith looked bored, if anything. “If you’re thinking about that Russian thing, forget it-they didn’t have respirator masks there. You’re perfectly safe.” He pulled the gooseneck PA mike toward his mouth and hit the red button. “Is this thing-yes, it’s live.” His voice rumbled through the corridors and floor, amplified through hidden speakers. “Matt, I know you’re in here. You’ve got five minutes to surrender. If you want to live, come out from wherever you’re hiding, and go to the nearest elevator bank. Hit the button for the tenth floor, then lie down on the floor of the elevator car with your hands on your head. This is your only warning.”

He killed the PA and turned to the walkie-talkie: “Okay, you heard me, Sergeant. Fifteen minutes from my mark, I want you to execute BLUEBEARD on all floors above ten. You’ve got ten minutes from right now to do a cross-check on all personnel and make sure they’re ready. Antidote kits out, boys. Over.”

Smith unsealed his respirator kit. “What are you waiting for?”

“The broken window on the twenty-third,” Mike said slowly. “Has it been repaired? And has anyone secured the window-cleaning system?” He opened the packaging around his respirator as he spoke, peeling the polythene wrapper away and yanking the red seal tab to activate the filter cartridge.

“The-” Pete’s eyes narrowed.

“We’ve agreed Matt’s not stupid. He probably guessed we’d have something like BLUEBEARD. Maybe he broke the window because he wanted fresh air to breathe?”

Mike pointed toward the nearest outside wall. “That got me thinking. Someone’s got to clean the windows, haven’t they? That means a motorized basket, right?

Maybe he figured he could ride it down past the security zone while we’re busy trying not to choke ourselves?”

“Point.” Smith began to reach for the walkie-talkie again.

“How about Pete and I check out floor twenty-three?” Mike asked, pulling the mask over his head. “We’ve got respirators, we’re armed, we can take a walkie-talkie. More to the point, maybe we can talk him down. Is that okay by you?”

Smith thought for a moment. Finally he nodded. “Okay, you have my approval.

Stick together, don’t take any risks, and remember-I’m not going to cancel BLUEBEARD if he gets the drop on you. Especially not if he takes one of you hostage. Understood?”

“Yes.” Mike glanced at Pete, who nodded.

Smith gestured at the charging station by the security desk: “Take one of these, they’re fully charged.” He picked up his own walkie-talkie. “Sergeant, I want you to check out the janitorial facilities, find out how they clean the windows above the tenth floor. If there’s an outside winch, I want it secured.”

Mike headed for the central service core, opening his holster. “Come on,” he told Pete, his voice muffled by the mask.

“What’s the plan?”

“I want to check out the floor tiles where he smashed the window. Where is it?”

“Twenty-third floor. You turn left at the checkpoint, then take the first transverse corridor past the service core. You want to follow me?”

“He’s not armed, is he?”

“I don’t think so.” Pete sounded uncertain.

“Well, then.” Mike held his gun at his side and gestured at the door onto the fire stairs with his free hand. “Let’s go.”

They took the steps fast. Mike rapidly discovered that breathing through a gas mask was hard work. He paused, gasping for air, on the twenty-second-floor landing, leaning against a brace of drab green pipes running up and down. Pete seemed to be doing fine: There’s no justice, he thought. “Shit. I can’t run in this thing.” I’m too old for this SWAT-team game. I’m not thirty-six yet, and I can’t run up flights of stairs in a gas mask anymore. What’s wrong with me?

He pulled his mask off and shoved it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“You sure it’s safe to do that?” asked Pete. Mike noticed that he wasn’t wearing his mask, either.

“I’ll hear when Smith trips the gas tanks,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. “Anyway, make sure you’ve got yours, right? Okay, here’s how we’ll do it when we come out of the stairwell. I’ll go first, covering the floor. You follow me, covering the ceiling and my back. We head for the window, and if he’s not there, we head for the security station and the PA mike for this floor and I try talking to him. What’s wrong with this picture?”

Pete shook his head. “Nothing obvious to me.”

“Okay, let’s go.” Mike shoved himself back onto the stairs and took the last two flights, paused to catch his breath just inside the door, then pushed through.