Ciphers - Matt Rogers (popular ebook readers txt) 📗

reaching, palm open. Trying to get a hold of Samuel’s Glock.

Listening to the spiel, he must have figured the kid was deranged and opted to try and diffuse the tension by wrestling the gun away.

Bad move, Rico thought. He’s deranged, but he’s not detached.

The owner only made it halfway to the Glock before Samuel pulled the trigger and shot him in the chest.

It was hard to see where exactly the bullet impacted in the dark. The body fell face-first to the cold tiles and lay still. Rico didn’t look down. He was no stranger to the thrill of doing things that were off-limits, but this was…

He couldn’t put it into words.

It just felt wrong.

Samuel regarded the body, then motioned to the unopened bottle of whiskey. ‘All yours now. Drink.’

Rico didn’t need to be asked twice.

This isn’t happening. This isn’t real. Make it feel like an illusion.

He cracked the seal, twisted the top off, brought the open neck up to his lips and drank greedily. The liquid was warm, and it burned. It was beautiful. He knew that within minutes it would dull those pesky emotions — guilt and fear.

He lowered the bottle and noticed Samuel watching him silently. Like a hawk.

Rico shivered.

He felt the need to speak.

To say something.

Anything.

‘That was bullshit, right?’ he said. ‘About the lights. About you being involved. You were just baiting him.’

Samuel laughed.

The same harsh, discordant cackle.

The kid said, ‘Maybe you don’t know…’

Then he turned and skipped merrily out of the liquor store, twirling his gun like a child’s plaything as he went.

29

Violetta spent close to ten minutes laying it out.

Every piece of the snowball of panic that would accumulate as time ticked by.

It would start when bottled water became inaccessible and all the immediate supplies were looted from stores. Groceries and pharmacies would be desolate within a couple of days. No amount of emergency aid from other states would be able to replenish food and water supplies in time. Not for eight million people. When the water towers ran out, every tap in New York would be fundamentally useless. Maybe in the outer boroughs the residents might be able to maintain order for another day or two, but here in the heart of Manhattan it would be pure chaos. People would turn on each other when they realised they might very well starve or die of thirst if their circumstances didn’t change soon. The smartphones that had become the lifeblood of civilisation over the last decade would all be dead, and even those who could keep theirs charged with back-up power banks would find them useless without a cell signal. Half the city wouldn’t know what to do, and then survival instincts would kick in.

Whoever made the first move to attack and loot their neighbours would start a chain reaction that would spread like wildfire.

In the glum aftermath of her speech, King said, ‘What emergency services are being mobilised? What scale are we talking?’

She said, ‘That’s not my focus. There’s whole departments going haywire right now coordinating all of that. Every effort is being made to—’

‘You don’t have to talk to us like that,’ Slater said.

She looked at him. ‘Like what?’

‘Like you’re making a public service announcement.’

‘I’m just saying that—’

‘King is asking whether we were prepared to handle something like this.’

‘Obviously there’s—’

King said, ‘Violetta.’

She stopped dead.

He said, ‘Tell us the truth. It won’t change anything. It’s better if we know.’

She tapped the table with a single finger.

Over and over and over again.

Then she said, ‘Okay. We’re fucked. The main thing the government is focused on is bringing in back-up transformers in case this lasts longer than expected, which it very well could. But there’s a thousand logistical problems with that — transformers are enormous, and they can’t be transported easily, so it’s a nightmare. No one — not me or any of my peers — expected something on this scale to happen. If it doesn’t get fixed, the United States is wholly unprepared for the aftermath. Our best bet is flying in power trucks on DOD planes so we can start replacing the lines, but that’s a nightmare, too, as I’m sure you can imagine.’

Slater said, ‘So this needs to be rectified before the forty-eight hour window is up.’

‘Yes.’

‘Or all of New York goes back to the Stone Age.’

‘Yes.’

‘And if New York goes back to the Stone Age, it’ll be even harder to fix this with power trucks when it’s every man and woman for themselves. The streets will be a wasteland within a week.’

‘Yes.’

Slater didn’t follow up.

There was no need.

The stakes were there, loud and clear.

Instead he said, ‘I get it. You could go on all day about hypotheticals, and contingencies, and possibilities, but that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to fix it before any of that shit is even necessary. So let’s start doing that.’

‘That’s why I collected you personally,’ she said. ‘Realistically you might be the last chance of stopping this. There’s the digital way of shutting it down, which doesn’t seem feasible. And then there’s storming in there and demolishing it at the source. Doing things the old-fashioned way. And the pair of you might be the best on the planet at that.’

King managed a wry smile. ‘The old guard still has some advantages.’

‘But that’s pointless,’ Slater interjected. ‘If we need to physically be there, what are the chances that—?’

She held up a hand, cutting him off.

He stopped.

She said, ‘There’s things you don’t know. There’s things I haven’t told you.’

Slater’s eyes widened. ‘What do you have?’

‘An address.’

‘How’d you get it?’

‘Do you think my guys are twiddling their thumbs out there? There’s an inevitable trail of breadcrumbs in any cyberattack. Don’t ask me to go into detail. It’s as much of an impossible labyrinth to me as it is to you.’

‘Where’s the address?’

‘In the Bowery.’

Neither of them said a word.

King said, ‘Here.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would they do that?’ Slater said. ‘Who on earth would set up their base of operations in the very same place they’re instigating a blackout?’

‘There’s any number