Deadlock (3 page)

‘She’s remarkable,’ Colonel Francisco said, as he walked along the balcony towards Nero. ‘To be honest with you, Max, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. Those are my best men and she’s making them look like amateurs.’

‘Yes, it would appear that my instinct about her potential was correct,’ Nero replied. ‘Now all we have to do is work out how to ensure we can safely tap it. That girl has been subjected to some of the most brutal training imaginable, it is a wonder that her mind is still intact.’ The truth was that it had taken weeks just to persuade her to engage him in conversation. At first she had maintained a defiant silence, but Nero had not been discouraged. Over the past few years, he had trained many children who had been subjected to the worst kinds of brutality and he knew that there was still time to save the girl. At first, he had talked to her about her life before the Furans, growing up on the streets of Moscow and then slowly he coaxed from her details of the torments that she had suffered at the Glasshouse. Slowly he had begun to catch glimpses of the fiercely independent and resourceful young woman that the Furans had tried so hard to suppress. They thought they had broken her, but in truth she had just hidden that part of herself away, deep inside, somewhere they could not reach it.

‘She’ll be a huge asset if we can trust her,’ Francisco said, watching as another of his men went flying.

‘Agreed,’ Nero replied, ‘so perhaps it is time we found out if we can.’ He turned and walked to the stairs at the end of the balcony. He made his way down on to the training floor and the guards around the edge of the room visibly tensed.

‘Gentlemen, you are dismissed,’ Nero said as he approached the panting men surrounding Raven. There was no disguising the looks of relief on some of their faces as they walked or limped away.

‘You did well,’ Nero said as he approached Raven. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Out of practice,’ Raven replied. ‘Your men are weak.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Nero replied. ‘It’s just that you are unusually strong. Thank you for honouring my request and not seriously injuring any of them.’

‘The dozen guns pointing at me made it difficult to disagree,’ Raven replied.

‘Indeed,’ Nero said, glancing at the men around the perimeter of the room. ‘Perhaps we should remove them from the equation.’ He turned to Francisco who was still watching from the balcony above. ‘You and your men may leave, Colonel.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’ Francisco replied with a frown.

‘I’m quite certain, thank you, Colonel,’ Nero replied.

‘Understood,’ Francisco replied, still frowning. ‘Clear the room.’

Raven and Nero watched in silence as the guards filed out, leaving them alone in the large hall.

‘You’re a fool,’ Raven said. ‘I don’t need a weapon, you know. I could kill you where you stand with my bare hands.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ Nero replied, looking her in the eye. ‘The question is why don’t you?’

Raven stared back at him for several seconds, as if weighing her options. Nero knew that if he had miscalculated he would almost certainly have made a fatal mistake. He was a capable fighter, but he knew he was no match for the young girl standing in front of him.

‘The truth is I don’t know,’ Raven replied. ‘Just a couple of months ago I would have terminated you in an instant, no matter the consequences. And yet, today . . . for reasons I don’t quite understand, I do not want to.’

‘And why do you think that is?’ Nero asked.

‘Perhaps it is because I do not yet understand you, Nero. I tried to kill you and yet you have shown me nothing but charity. It goes against everything I have been taught.’

‘From what you have told me in the past few weeks, you have been taught that choice is an illusion. Correct?’

‘Yes,’ Raven replied with a nod. ‘Madame Furan believes that we are all just slaves to one degree or another. I could carry out someone else’s orders, but then I would merely be swapping one master for another. We all must serve and denying that is pointless.’

‘People who seek to control others have been repeating that mantra for centuries,’ Nero said with a frown. ‘It is no more true today than it was then.’

‘You serve within your organisation,’ Raven replied, studying him carefully. ‘You have your masters. How is that any different?’

‘The difference is that I serve G.L.O.V.E. by choice,’ Nero replied. ‘The reason I’m part of that organisation is that I fundamentally believe in freedom. The freedom to act as we choose, to make our own decisions, our own laws. The life of a villain is a life where one must make one’s own rules, but still there must be a sense of responsibility. Without that there is nothing but anarchy, chaos and death. That is what I have always tried to teach the students of this school.’

‘And yet I remain a prisoner,’ Raven said.

‘You have been kept under guard in order to ensure that you do not endanger the lives of my students and teaching staff, but you are not a prisoner,’ Nero replied, shaking his head. ‘If you wish, you may leave now. That is your choice and you will have to live with the consequences. I would very much like you to stay and help me find the Furans so that I can stop them once and for all. The truth is there are some people within G.L.O.V.E. who would have me extract their location from you by force, but that is not my preferred option. I would far rather that you
chose
to help me. If you do choose to leave I will probably be punished for letting you go, but that, in turn, is my decision to make. So what will it be, Raven?’

She stared at him for a moment and he thought he could almost see the battle being fought behind her eyes. She looked down at the floor and then back up at him with just the faintest hint of a smile.

‘My name . . . is Natalya.’

chapter two

now

Otto stared down at the lights of the city spread out below him and ran his fingers through his snow-white hair. Taking a deep breath he stepped up to the rail that ran around the perimeter of the roof and leant out over the edge.

‘Hard to believe that it was only ten minutes ago that this actually seemed like a good idea,’ Otto said, staring at the tiny cars passing by on the street hundreds of metres below him.

I would like it noted that I have never classified what you are about to do as a ‘good idea’
, a calm voice with a slight synthetic edge said inside Otto’s head.

‘Yeah, well, you’re along for the ride too,’ Otto said. It had been several months since H.I.V.E.mind, the artificial intelligence that was normally responsible for the day-to-day running of the Higher Institute of Villainous Education had been reinstalled in the tiny organic supercomputer embedded in Otto’s skull and by now he had become oddly used to his constant computerised companion. Otto pulled a metre of wire from the small reel mounted in the middle of his back and secured the end to the steel railing. He pulled the black cowl of the suit of segmented body armour up and over his face. The suit’s head-up display flared into life and presented an array of digital readouts at the periphery of his field of vision, each of the suit’s systems reporting their own state of readiness. The ISIS, the Integrated Systems Infiltration Suit was the most sophisticated combat armour in the world and the exclusive property of G.L.O.V.E. It contained technology that every special-ops team on the planet would give anything to get their hands on, but, unlike Otto, they didn’t have the right friends in low places.

‘OK,’ Otto said, ‘let’s get this show on the road.’

He tapped a series of commands into the control panel mounted on his forearm and then climbed carefully over the rail, keeping a firm hold as he concentrated on the horizon, trying to ignore the altitude reading on his HUD. Instead he watched the digital clock on the other side of the display that was slowly counting down towards zero. With five seconds to go Otto engaged the ISIS thermoptic camouflage system and the tiny holographic projectors that covered the suit’s skin fired up and Otto was instantly rendered all but invisible to the naked eye, only the faintest shimmer in the air betraying his location. The counter reached zero and Otto took a single deep breath before diving head first off the parapet. For a few heart-stopping seconds he plunged down the side of the building in free fall, just centimetres from the mirrored glass before the brake in the reel on his back engaged and he felt his descent slow dramatically until he was finally hanging stationary. He pushed himself away from the glass and flipped himself over so he was hanging upright before engaging his HUD’s thermal imaging system. The mirrored glass faded away to be replaced by a multicoloured image of the room inside, where several long banks of boxy objects were glowing with heat. Beyond these objects was another room, within which Otto could see the clear outlines of two people sitting at a desk.

‘I’ve got two guards in the adjoining room,’ Otto whispered into his throat mic.

‘Roger that,’ a woman’s voice with a soft Russian accent replied in his earpiece. ‘Tripping alarm in three, two, one . . . go.’

Otto watched as the two figures inside the building leapt to their feet and ran for the door. As soon as they left the room Otto hit a button on the suit’s control panel and a small sphere mounted on his chest lit up with a bright green light as the suit’s Argon cutting laser came online. Otto watched as the sphere swivelled in its mount, steering the beam in a perfect circle. An instant before the circular cut was complete Otto closed his eyes and reached out with his mind for the building’s security systems. It was second nature for him now to tap into the system remotely using the organic computer systems in his head and deactivate the motion sensors in the room just before the thick circle of glass fell on to the carpeted floor inside with a soft thud. Otto pushed away from the glass before swinging back and through the narrow hole in the window. He landed in a crouch, carefully scanning the darkened room as he rose to his feet. Satisfied that his entrance had gone unnoticed, for now at least, he turned back to the window and unclipped himself from the descent cable. He reached into one of the pouches on his belt and pulled four small discs from within before placing one in each corner of the floor-to-ceiling window that he had just cut through.

‘I’m in,’ Otto said. ‘Two minutes to exfil.’

‘Understood,’ the woman’s voice replied. ‘I appear to have the security team’s undivided attention. Let me know when you’re on your way out.’

Otto walked quickly across the room, moving between the banks of computer servers and letting the buzz of the data they were processing wash over him. The information he had come for was not there, but he had not really expected it to be. These machines were wired to the outside world and therefore vulnerable. If what he had come for had been stored on one of those machines then none of this would have been necessary. He moved towards the rear of the room, heading for a steel vault door set into the wall. As he approached he disengaged his suit’s camouflage system and the security systems controlling the massive door sensed him approaching as he became visible once more. He tried to mentally connect with the security system, but all he could feel was a confusing jumbled buzz of seemingly random data.

‘Looks like the same quantum encryption as we found in Dubai,’ Otto said. ‘It’s definitely Disciple tech. I get the impression that they really don’t want us poking around inside their network.’

It would appear so
, H.I.V.E.mind replied.
Brute force decryption estimate is three thousand and forty years, nine months, two weeks . . .

‘OK, I get the point,’ Otto said. ‘Looks like we’re doing this the hard way. Let’s hope that they’ve not noticed that our guest has gone missing yet.’

‘Prepare for identification scan,’ a synthesised voice said as he approached. Otto reached into another pouch on his belt and pulled out a small silver ring-shaped object. He pressed a switch on one side of the ring and several beams of bright white light shot out of it before converging in the air above Otto’s hand as a three-dimensional shape began to appear. At first it was just an amorphous hovering blob, but then it began to grow sharper, taking on the shape of a man’s head. A few seconds later there was an uncannily lifelike image of a frowning man with a bushy black beard hanging in mid-air. Otto held the disembodied head up to the scanner mounted in the vault door. It had taken Otto weeks to build a holographic projection system which would have a high enough resolution to fool the scanner and now was the moment he would find out if all of his efforts had actually been worthwhile. The beam of the scanner swept over the hovering face and Otto waited for several long seconds, holding his breath.

‘Identity confirmed, Victor Raskoff, access granted,’ the synthesised voice said and the locking systems within the door disengaged with a whirring clunk and the huge door began to slowly swing open.

‘See, I told you it would work,’ Otto said with a grin. ‘Now let’s see if we can find what we came for.’

As he stepped into the vault bright white lights in the ceiling lit up. The walls were lined with shelves on which were stacks of money in every conceivable international denomination and neatly stacked piles of gold bullion. Otto had not gone through all of this to steal anything as mundane as money; what he was there for was far more valuable. He walked to the rear of the room and approached a small steel case on one of the shelves, opened it and smiled. Inside was a rectangular piece of jet black glass.