Money Run (16 page)

“Benjamin?” she said.

“Still here, Ash,” he said. “I take it you're in a bit of trouble.”

“I'm under arrest, handcuffed to a bed, infected with anthrax, and I might have only minutes before that detective comes back.”

“Could be worse, then.”

“You bet,” Ash said. “I'm not injured, not currently under guard, and they don't know my real name. And I still have my iPod.” She smiled as she kicked off her left shoe. “I still have you.”

Benjamin didn't reply.

“Are the roadblocks still up?” she asked quickly.

“Uh, yeah,” Benjamin said. “A news helicopter has flown in for live footage, and it's parked on top of the apartment building, so I can see everything. I guess this means it'll take a while for Wright to get you out of there.”

“I was hoping you'd say that,” Ash said, picking up the shoe. Handcuffs are much more difficult to pick in real life than in the movies. The ones with a metal block instead of a chain are almost impossible, because they hold your wrists together, keeping your fingers away from the key slot. Fortunately, most handcuff keys in the world are exactly the same. Any one of these universal keys will open almost any pair of handcuffs. And Ash had one sealed in the left sole of every pair of shoes she owned. Now she just had to get it open.

“Is the TRA van still outside?” she asked.

“Yes. The antibiotics you need are penicillin, doxycycline, and…wait. Oh my god!”

“What?” Ash demanded, alarmed. “What's going on?”

“You're not going to die!” Benjamin blurted out.

“What?” Ash's heart beat faster. “How come? What have you found?”

“The anthrax was fake!” Benjamin said. “I wasn't quite certain of the picture, so I did a full chemical analysis of the sample data you sent me. It just finished compiling. It's not really anthrax, it's baby powder or something!”

“Are you sure?” Ash demanded. “You're not making this up, or guessing, or hoping? You know for certain?”

“I know for certain, babe. You're going to be fine!”

“But I've had the flu symptoms you warned me about,” she said. “Coughing fits. A runny nose. A headache. If I haven't had anthrax, what's wrong with me?”

“Best guess?” Benjamin said. “I'd say you've got the flu.”

Ash exhaled, emptying her lungs completely, like she was finally expelling the last of that breath Benjamin had asked her to hold when she first opened the box. She laughed quietly until tears were flooding down her cheeks. She punched the bed with her free hand and stamped her feet and smiled until her face hurt. Then, once she'd wiped her face and regulated her breathing and her heart rate was down to normal, she picked up the shoe and resumed her attempts to open the sole.

“You know what this means?”

“We should have a candlelit dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate,” Benjamin said instantly.

“Nope,” Ash said. The compartment in the sole opened, and the handcuff key popped out. “It means it's time to get back to work. We have $200 million to steal.”

Peachey opened his eyes.

His burned eyelids stung as they scrunched up above his eyeballs. The world was a gluey blur – he was still drenched in oil. He tried to move, and his limbs barely responded, squidging inch by inch across the tiles.

But he was thinking, feeling. His heart still beat in his chest. His fried lungs still sucked in air.

He was alive. Against all odds, he was alive.

He groaned, a long, rattling sound. The last thing he remembered was Alex de Totth firing a gun into his heart at point-blank range as he was drowning in a vat of boiling oil. What the hell had happened? Was he dead? Because, frankly, he'd hoped the afterlife would be less slippery.

He lifted his right arm off the ground, and it hurt like hell – like there were weights strapped to the joints. He endured the pain and wiped the oil out of his eyes with his hand. Then he raised his head to look at his body.

He actually looked okay. His suit was beyond ruined, of course, but his skin was pink and raw rather than crystallized into charcoal as he'd expected. He tried to find the bullet wound in his chest. Had de Totth, for the first time in her career, missed the heart of her victim?

Peachey frowned. There was something sticking out of his chest. He tugged it out and stared at it.

It was a tranquillizer dart.

De Totth and her team weren't using live ammunition. They hadn't planned to kill him at all. Then what the hell were they doing?

Peachey clambered to his feet. He was still in the kitchen, and there was a hose looped against the kitchen wall. He staggered over to it, picked up the nozzle, pointed it at his head, and twisted the tap.

Water blasted across his face, cleaving through the oil like a windscreen wiper through rain. He lowered his head so the spray could cleanse his hair. The water was deliciously cold as it trickled down his collar. He opened his mouth to catch some, swilled it around his oil-stained teeth, and spat it out.

He rinsed his torso, his arms and his hands, and his legs and his feet. Pretty soon he was completely soaked, and felt almost human again. He tossed the hose to the floor and switched it off.

It disturbed him how little he understood the situation. Why did de Totth want to keep him alive? He was her nearest rival. He wanted to kill her. So why stick him with a tranquillizer dart and leave him in the kitchen? Is this a game to her? he wondered.

Maybe she wanted the bounty on Buckland. She'd knocked Peachey out to get him out of the picture, then contacted Walker and gone billionaire-hunting.

But that didn't make sense. She could have left him in the deep fryer if that were the case.

Peachey couldn't find his Beretta. Not in his pockets, not in the oil vat, not on the floor under any of the benches. De Totth must have taken it. That was two guns lost in one day.

Maybe disarming him had been her objective. But why keep him alive?

Maybe it was Buckland who'd taken his gun away. Peachey couldn't remember whether he'd still had it in his hand when Buckland threw him into the vat.

Peachey screwed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. He wound his fingers through his hair and tugged until it hurt. Focus, he told himself.

He decided to stick with the plan. He had no other options. Go to Buckland's office, kill Buckland, leave the building. He'd do it with his bare hands if he had to. But now it wasn't just a matter of money. It had nothing to do with reputation. It wasn't about what the government would do to him if he failed his mission.

It was going to feel good, though. Buckland had made Peachey angry. Peachey wouldn't walk away even if he could.

Peachey ran back through the maze of service corridors towards the stairwell. He had one thing in his favour. By now, Buckland
must
believe Peachey was dead. He'd hit him on the head, dropped him into a deep fryer, locked the lid and switched it on. There weren't a lot of ways to survive that, and if de Totth hadn't come along, Peachey would be a lump of charcoal by now. So Buckland wouldn't be expecting another attack from him.

What's more, he'd be distracted by de Totth and her team. Whatever it was they were here to take, it was a fair bet that Buckland didn't want them to take it. So he'd be focusing on them while Peachey crept up on him from behind.

That's why de Totth saved me, he realized suddenly. She's hoping that I'll be the distraction, trying to kill Buckland while she robs him blind.

He shoved open the stairwell door. Fine. She can do her thing, I'll do mine.

“You're kidding,” Benjamin said, more amused than appalled. Maybe he was still on an “Ash isn't dying” high. “After all this, you're going back in there?”

“You think after all this I'd just give up?” Ash replied. “No way.” Her handcuffs clicked open, and she tiptoed to the front door. She pushed her ear against it. No one was coming, but there was someone out there, shifting their weight from foot to foot. Wright had posted a guard. Smart – but he should've put them inside the room.

“You know, not having anthrax doesn't make you invincible,” Benjamin said. “You're still vulnerable to bullets, car crashes and kryptonite.”

“I'm planning on avoiding those particular things.” Ash went over to the window and looked out. The HBS building stood proudly above her, silhouetted by a washed-out rising moon. Car headlights sparkled in the distant streets.

“Based on your previous adventures inside HBS, they're not going to be easy to avoid. Well, except the kryptonite. And I wouldn't be surprised if the government agents brought some just for you.”

“Wrong,” Ash said. “The hit man thinks I'm dead, so he and his government backup are only concerned with Buckland. There's only one more place on our list to search: the basement. I'll get in, find the money, walk out with it, and wait for the police to take down the roadblocks.”

“You promise to go straight to the basement, and straight out again?” Benjamin sounded serious now. “I cannot describe how much it would suck if only hours after you were spared from death by anthrax you got killed in the crossfire between Buckland and the government.”

Ash bit her lip as she pulled the duvet off the bed. Benjamin had just given her a moral dilemma to consider. Could she really steal the money and otherwise mind her own business while the government killed Hammond Buckland upstairs?

She hadn't made him rich. She hadn't made the government greedy. But still, wasn't she obligated to do something? Didn't having advance warning of the plan make her partly responsible if he died?

There wasn't a lot she could do. She was a thief, not a bodyguard – and she would be outnumbered. But still, Buckland didn't deserve to die. And the guy who'd shot at her from the roof didn't deserve to win.

Buckland was almost a stranger. She owed him nothing. She would be risking her life if she tried to save him.

But still.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Straight in, straight out. I'll keep out of danger.”

“Thanks, Ash.”

“I'm hoping Wright will send some cops into the building anyway,” Ash said. “TRA can't keep people out for ever – not without exposing what's going on.” She pressed the blanket up against the window, near the wall. She dragged a chair towards her, then raised her leg and held the blanket in place against the glass. Then she lifted the chair with one arm, and bashed it against the window.

The glass was thick; it didn't break first time. But the sound was deadened enough by the blanket that Ash didn't think there was a risk of being heard by the guard outside. She swung the chair again.

Shards of glass clinked against one another under the blanket. Ash lowered her leg, now uncomfortably aware that she was at least twenty storeys above ground, and started pushing on the broken window through the duvet, widening the hole.

“How are you going to get back into HBS?” Benjamin asked.

“You'll see,” Ash said. But so far, she had no idea.

She snatched the blanket away, like a magician revealing a bird from under a handkerchief. The window yawned toothily at her, and the wind ruffled her hair. She started breaking off chunks of broken glass on the left-hand side, the side closest to the wall. She kept going until she reached the frame of the window, so she could run her hands up and down the frame without getting cut. Then she went back to the bed and started twisting the sheets into a rope.

She felt absurdly teenage as she tied one end of the rope around the bedpost she had been cuffed to and the other around her belt. Just an average fifteen-year-old girl, making abseiling equipment out of bedclothes, climbing out the window because she'll be busted if she opens her door.

She shook off the image. Cops, not parents. Twenty storeys, not two. Two hundred million dollars instead of a secret boyfriend.

And she was hardly an average girl.

She stood on the edge of the floor and leaned out into the void, clutching the wall to her left. The people pressing at the roadblocks below were so far down they looked like specks of seasoning on a crisp.

The rope held. If she fell, she wouldn't die. In theory.

The rope was nowhere near long enough to get her close enough to the ground so that she could drop down safely. Instead, she was hoping she'd be able to climb into the apartment next door.

She reached out to her left, stretching her arm to its limit. The wall between her apartment and the one the Veyron had landed in was only half a metre thick, so she could reach the opposite edge. She took a long, shaky breath. Then she jumped.

Her stomach scraped against the concrete and she wrapped her arms around the wall like a cat clinging to a tree trunk. The rope billowed out behind her. She hoped that no one happened to be looking up, and that if they were, the light was sufficiently poor and her face shielded enough that no cameras would be able to make it out. This would be a lousy way to get famous.

She craned her neck to peer into the ruined apartment. The crime-scene photographers were gone. About time.

She stretched her leg out and touched the floor of the crash-site apartment with her toes. It wasn't as close as she would have liked. She reached out further, and was able to put her whole foot flat against the floor. But she couldn't just step in – she was going to have to jump.

Ash braced her leg against the wall, and counted to three in her head. Then she counted again, because she still couldn't muster up the courage the first time. Then she jumped.

Her foot scuffled against the carpet of the crash-site apartment, and for a terrifying moment she thought she was going to slip. But then her sole caught against the fibres of the floor and she managed to shove the rest of her body forwards. She almost landed on all fours before the rope jerked tight, and her hands were suspended just above the floor. She wriggled backwards a little bit to get some more slack, then reached back and untied the rope. Free, she slumped face first against the carpet, ignoring the scratches of broken glass particles against her chin.

“Benjamin,” she panted, “did you see me on the news?”

“What? No. Why? What did you do?”

“Good,” she said.

She tore off a piece of the curtain and used it to wipe her prints from the inside of the Bugatti Veyron. The keys were the most crucial part, obviously, but she did the steering wheel, door handles and dashboard as well. There was a single hair on the headrest, and while she knew for a fact that no one had her DNA on file, she removed it anyway. She checked the seat for fibres from her jeans, and gave everything a quick, final wipe. Then she threw the piece of curtain out the window. It danced away along the breeze.

Now her problem would be getting out of the apartment. Depending on where the guard outside the other apartment was standing, he might be able to see the door to this one. If that was the case, she'd need a diversion before leaving.

Ash walked into the kitchen. The walls must be sturdy; the car crash in the bedroom hadn't knocked a single item off the shelves in here. She opened up the liquor cabinet and took out a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream. She popped the lid and sniffed it. Yuck. People actually drank this?

She walked back to the window frame and picked up the sheet-rope she'd used to rappel in. She poured Bailey's along it, then threw the bottle around the corner so it landed in the adjacent apartment with a crash.

“Any ideas about who would put fake anthrax in HBS?” she asked Benjamin as she walked back to the kitchen.

“Forget who would. Who
could
? You had a pretty tough time getting into that room, and you weren't carrying a coffin-sized box.”

“The room obviously isn't guarded around the clock. The only reason we didn't look for the money later at night is that we don't have the resources to break in.”

“So the culprit is someone who does,” Benjamin said. “Terrorist groups would use real anthrax, so it's probably not them.”

“Rival corporation?” Ash suggested.

“What rival corporation?” Benjamin countered. “And besides, how would they benefit from an anthrax scare? It'd barely make a dent in HBS's share price. The risks would far outweigh the benefits.”

Ash took a gas lighter out of a drawer, and clicked it a couple of times to check that it worked. “So, back to my original idea. The government put it there because they thought their hit man needed backup. The fake anthrax gets found, the TRA gets called in.”

“Brilliant,” Benjamin said. “You're a genius.”

Ash sighed as she washed her hands at the sink. She knew that tone.

“Except,” Benjamin continued, “that the box must have been there since at least last night, because that's the only time a break-in could happen. And the government wouldn't have known the hitter needed backup until this morning.”

“Square one,” Ash said.

“Square one,” Benjamin confirmed. “Still, does it matter? I mean, is it relevant?”