Jimmy Coates (12 page)

“Now
that's
cooperating,” Saffron beamed. “But it does make it harder for me to do this.”

“What?” Before the word had fully escaped the technicians' mouths, Saffron's hands jerked out. With two deft flicks she chopped both men in the side of the head simultaneously. She caught them as they slumped forward and settled them in their chairs, unconscious.

“Get up there, Jimmy,” Saffron ordered. “If we're lucky we've got about two minutes before anybody—” She turned to see an empty ladder and an open hatch. Jimmy was already gone.

Jimmy clambered up on to a rickety metal platform a couple of metres square. It overlooked a dimly lit, cavernous hall six metres below that must have stretched out under the whole building. A line of voting kiosks wound its way round the hall like the Great Wall of China. They were clamped on to some kind of conveyor belt that at times disappeared into huge grey blocks of machinery.
All of this just so that people can vote
, Jimmy thought.

As the production line continued, the kiosks were more and more stripped down, like bodies with the flesh removed, revealing the skeletons underneath. In fact, there were only a few left intact.
Did any of them still have the data he needed?
Jimmy wondered.

He dashed across the platform, swung himself over the safety rail and climbed down the wall to the production floor. He ran to the start of the conveyor belt, where the last few kiosks were still complete, and he could be sure they hadn't lost their hard drives yet. He searched one for an identification or serial number. He felt like he was inspecting a soldier at the head of his regiment. The serial number was on the bottom corner of the machine and as soon as he found it, Jimmy pulled out his phone. Saffron answered straightaway.

“I wasn't sure we'd have phone reception down here,” she said.

“Nor me,” Jimmy replied. “But I'm glad we do.” He was thinking of setting off another explosion in the grounds outside to try to buy them a little more time. “I need you to find the data for voting kiosk number MA-C*080-5.”

“No problem.”

Jimmy still had the screwdriver on him from when he'd built the explosive devices. He knelt down at the back of the machine and cradled his phone in the crook of his neck while he unscrewed the cover on the kiosk to expose the wiring. Meanwhile, he could hear the faint tapping of keys – Saffron was playing her part at the other end of the phone. But while Saffron could simply download the data on to a flash drive, Jimmy had no way of powering up the kiosk to try hacking the software. He'd come prepared to dismantle the guts of the machine and find its hard drive. That's where the raw data would be stored – the actual votes that people had made in the election. And that's what he would need the UN Inspector to compare to the data Saffron found. “How you doing?” Jimmy asked, teasing out the wires of the kiosk with his screwdriver.

“I'm nearly there,” Saffron replied. “Just a few codes to get through…”

Jimmy felt a smile creep on to his face, despite the tension in his chest. His hands were steady and it felt like the screwdriver was simply an extension of his finger. He reached deep into the kiosk and pulled out the components one by one, aware that somewhere in his head he knew what each part was and that his instincts were using that knowledge to navigate towards the hard drive. He could almost hear a whisper, listing the components as he removed them:
motherboard, sound card, fan…

Then suddenly that whisper was torn apart by a sound at the other end of the phone. It was a muffled thud. Jimmy's muscles froze. “Saffron?” he whispered, gripping the phone tightly in his fist. Then came more noises – a crash, then shouts. Was that Saffron's voice?

Jimmy jumped to his feet and dashed towards the platform. Had they found Saffron so quickly? Just then, two huge security guards climbed up out of the hatch and stood on the platform, peering out into the murky hall, their guns held out in front of them. Jimmy spun to run back the other way, but he was too late.

“There!” one of the guards shouted. It was drowned out by the crack of his gun. Jimmy dived for the cover of the kiosks. The bullets pinged off the metal in rapid succession. Jimmy instinctively curled himself up as small as possible behind one of the kiosks and covered his head with his hands, but his programming was burning in his veins. He could already hear the guards descending from the viewing platform to hunt him down. Then the echo of the shots faded, drowned out by a huge creak and a succession of clunks. The conveyor belt Jimmy was crouching on started moving.

Jimmy peered round the side of the kiosk and immediately regretted it. The blast of a guard's gun lit up the hall. Jimmy leapt backwards just in time. The bullet struck the kiosk close enough to his face for a spark to hit his cheek. Jimmy glanced down the production line, where, one by one, the kiosks filed into the gaping mouth of the first piece of machinery that would decommission them. A curtain of rubber strips meant Jimmy couldn't see what happened inside, but he could feel an intense heat and it was getting stronger as the conveyor belt took him closer to the machinery.

The kiosk he'd been dismantling was a few metres further down the line, in the direction of the decommissioning mechanism.
The hard drive
, Jimmy thought. Meanwhile, beneath the cacophony of the production line he could hear the guards descending on him from the other direction.

Another flash lit up the darkness and gunfire peppered the kiosks. The guards were shooting at any change in the shadows. Jimmy felt a throbbing urgency in his chest. He couldn't stay sheltered behind this kiosk for much longer, and the hard drives he needed so badly were seconds away from entering the decommissioning unit. He knew he had no choice.

Jimmy took a deep breath, set his muscles, then exploded into a sprint down the conveyor belt. Gunfire flashed around him, but Jimmy paused for a fraction of a second behind each kiosk, rolling and ducking to create a totally irregular path. There was no way the guards could hit their target. But perhaps they wouldn't need to. The last kiosks were entering the machine now. On either side, bright-orange hazard signs burned into Jimmy's consciousness as intensely as the flashes from the gunfire.

“Saffron!” he shouted into his phone, still clutched in his fist. “Saffron, what's happening?! Are you there?!” For a split second, Jimmy thought he heard a response, but the voice, if it was a voice, cracked up. And that's when Jimmy finally ran out of space. He felt the rubber strips pushing on his shoulders. They came with a surge in the noise and the heat. Jimmy frantically tried to work out some way of stopping the conveyor belt, or jumping off it without getting shot. But it was too late. Suddenly he was inside the machine, and everything happened at once.

A burst of high-pressure steam blasted towards Jimmy's head. He rocked backwards so quickly he didn't even know what he was reacting to until the steam roared past the end of his nose. It felt like the sweat on his face was so hot it was bubbling. At the same time two metal arms punched towards the kiosks from either side at the level of Jimmy's knees. He jumped up, ducking his head at the same time so he didn't knock himself out on the low ceiling.

The arms clamped on to the base of the kiosk in front of him, ripped off the casing, spun it round and slammed it down flat on the conveyor belt. Then, with despair, Jimmy saw the hard drive extracted by another metal arm and flung up into a slot overhead.
Where does that slot go?
Jimmy cried in his head. There was no time to find out. The conveyor belt moved on, with metal arms swinging out from every direction to continue the dismantling.

Jimmy swivelled and twisted to dodge the mechanical blows and spray bursts of some kind of coolant. All he could feel was heat and the swirling movement of his own limbs, swishing and leaping so quickly that his head spun. His coat wafted around him like the wings of a bat. At first it protected him from the heat, but soon he wanted to rip it off and abandon it. He knew he couldn't. He could feel the weight in the pockets of objects that could save his life.

Eventually the attack paused and Jimmy found himself lying flat on his front, on top of two sheets of metal from the casing of one of the kiosks. The clanking and crunching of the mechanical arms was left behind. Jimmy looked up, searching for the hard drives. Was there any chance they hadn't all already been wiped or destroyed? That moment, a few metres ahead, a huge iron press slammed down like the fist of a giant squashing a beetle. It was crushing the kiosk casing into totally flat sheets of blue metal, and Jimmy was next.

He threw himself forward and pulled his legs up into his chest just as he hit the conveyor belt. The iron press thumped into the rubber behind him. The conveyor belt took him past the first stage of machinery, but there was another tunnel coming up and another rubber curtain. He snatched one of the flat sheets of blue metal just before it was sucked through the rubber curtain. Then he jumped down off the conveyor belt and ran.

It was a couple of seconds before the guards realised what was happening. They hadn't expected Jimmy to emerge from the decommissioning tunnel in one piece. When they finally spotted him, all they saw was the flash of metal. Jimmy blazed through the darkness, holding the metal sheet ahead of him with one hand while with the other he hauled himself up the outside of the decommissioning machine he'd just been through. Despite the bullets, the heat and the strain on his muscles, he was totally focused on leaving Chisley Hall with the hard drive from one of the kiosks.

At the top of the machine were dozens of chutes where the inner components of the kiosks were sorted and zipped away to the next stage in the process. The hard drives were small black boxes being spat out of the machine so fast they may as well have been giant bullets. So that's what Jimmy used them for.

He heaved his whole body up and swung round, landing a double-footed kick against the chutes on top of the machine. The force of one blow was enough to dislodge the chutes. The mechanism screeched and clanked, but the kiosk components kept firing, a shower of metal blocks, circuit boards and electrical tubing.

The guards were bombarded by the parts being spat out across the hall. They ran for cover, while Jimmy jumped down, shielding himself with his metal sheet. Before the guards could start shooting again, Jimmy reached into his coat. He gripped a cardboard tube strapped by elastic bands to a mobile phone: one explosive device that Jimmy had kept with him instead of sending on the rubbish truck for Saffron to distribute around the grounds.

Immediately Jimmy lobbed the device over his head like a grenade. The arc of his arm was perfectly steady despite the speed he was running. The explosive device soared through the falling debris, over the heads of more guards who'd appeared on the viewing platform. It dropped perfectly – right down the hatch that led back to the control room.

Jimmy's fist was already clenched round his mobile phone, his thumb pressing the call button so hard the handset was about to crack.
Where's the explosion?
Jimmy thought, frantically. The delay seemed to last forever. Had his phone lost reception? He had to keep moving, sprinting between the machinery from shadow to shadow, dodging the bullets or shielding himself with his metal sheet, all the time running towards the platform where the guards loomed over him, towards the guns, but also towards his only possible escape.

Finally the floor rocked. A massive white flash blasted round the hall. Then came the noise – a thunderous crack that echoed off the machinery and resounded in Jimmy's skull. A shaft of black smoke rushed up from the hatch, pouring into the hall. Jimmy powered through it, skipping over the guards, who'd been blown off their feet or fallen from the platform. On his way he snatched a stray hard drive from the floor and stuffed it into his pocket.

In seconds, he was through the hatch. He was choking on the black smoke as he locked the hatch behind him, but he was buzzing with new focus.
Get what you came for
, he told himself. Getting in and out of Chisley Hall was useless unless he could somehow salvage all the data he needed. Unfortunately, the blast hadn't just allowed Jimmy to evade the security force. It had also ripped apart the network of computers in the control room.

Jimmy peered through the smoke, covering his mouth and spluttering with every other breath. The monitors were smashed. The keyboards were nothing but melted plastic. How could he have been so stupid? He'd assumed that Saffron hadn't been in the room, but he hadn't thought about the damage to the computers. Desperately trying to keep himself calm, he wafted the smoke away from the work station to get a better look at the equipment. Had any of it survived?

A noise pricked his senses. Boots pounding up the hall. There was no time to analyse the computer system. Jimmy reached to the very back of the desk and snatched the one metal box that looked more intact than any of the others. He ripped it out of the tangle of half-melted leads, tucked it under his arm, then barged out into the corridor to meet the guards.