Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

He wasn’t sure how long he ran for, but when he staggered to a halt he’d worked up a thin coating of sweat over his face. He sat down hard on the kerb, even though he couldn’t see a thing. Planted down on his rear and gripped his knees and sucked in giant lungfuls of air.

Samuel sat down alongside him, barely out of breath.

Rico let out a sharp exhale, but an involuntary sound came out with it. It turned into a ragged sigh, which he certainly didn’t intend.

It made him seem weak.

Samuel said, ‘Have you done that before?’

‘Killed someone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah, I’ve killed a few people back home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘Juárez.’

‘You got a powerful daddy?’

‘Yeah. How’d you know?’

‘It adds up.’

‘What about you?’

‘My whole family was powerful. Like your daddy.’

‘“Was?”’

Samuel let out a noise somewhere close to a growl. ‘They ain’t shit no more.’

‘What happened?’

‘Everything was taken from them. They got into a war with a pair of thugs. And those two thugs stripped them of everything.’

31

From the makeshift office, Violetta led King and Slater across the main space, past the rows and rows of desks manned by the same intensely focused workers.

King kept his mouth shut. He’d survived in his field for so long by figuring out early on that he wasn’t the master of everything. In the earliest years of his career, he’d opted to go silent when he was out of his depth and absorb knowledge like a sponge. So he wasn’t saying a great deal. But he sure was thinking it.

It was impossible not to. All the meditation in the world couldn’t prevent his mind from racing. He’d never grappled with something so daunting. Dealing with the possibility of mass civilian casualties — like a bomb going off — was one thing, but at least that was instantaneous.

Bang.

Over.

This was a different beast. It would be a steady decline into madness. Maybe some of them would make it out of the boroughs before panic gripped them, but not everyone. Innocent lives would be lost at a staggering rate when the shit hit the fan.

And this address, if it was accurate, might spell the difference between the lights coming back on, or staying off for good.

That opened up another hundred questions, but he quashed them.

Now was not the time.

Violetta pulled to a halt in front of a V-shaped desk in the corner of the room, separated from the rest of the rows by at least a dozen feet of empty space. There was a guy in his forties sitting in a black office chair with an air of importance around him. His back was hunched as he faced his triple-monitor setup, but it didn’t seem like his natural posture. More conducive to a man who’d given up on appearing professional in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.

King stood quietly behind him, and Slater pulled up alongside.

Violetta stepped forward and tapped a finger gently on the table.

‘Alonzo,’ she said.

He jolted in his seat and rotated. He was Hispanic, with a neatly trimmed goatee and thick curly hair falling forward over his forehead. He had thick bushy eyebrows and a face that might normally appear kind and patient. Now, it was wracked with stress. He had heavy bags under his eyes from lack of sleep.

He looked King in the eyes, then Slater, and said, ‘You’re the muscle?’

‘Yeah,’ Slater said, folding his arms over his chest.

Alonzo eyed Violetta. ‘They’re as good as you say?’

‘They’re the best we have.’

‘They’ll need to be.’

He ran both hands through his hair in distress.

Violetta said, ‘Give them a rudimentary explanation of how you got the address, and what it means.’

‘Right,’ Alonzo said, processing the request with a couple of blinks. King instantly knew his type. Intensely straightforward, no excuses, no bullshit. Totally analytical. The best kind of intelligence operative. The man would tell it how it was. He wouldn’t cut corners. He wouldn’t add window dressing. And he wouldn’t downplay something, no matter how disastrous it might sound.

King said, ‘Just give it to us straight.’

Alonzo said, ‘There’s a very slim chance that the people responsible for this are operating out of an abandoned bank building in the Bowery. I only got the address three hours ago, but as far as I can tell it’s legit. They sure as hell didn’t want me to have it. It took some serious manipulation of the trail I had to work with.’

Slater said, ‘You mean what they left behind when they seized control of the system?’

‘Yes,’ Alonzo said. ‘Good. You’ve got the gist of it. No one can do something on this scale and be a ghost. But these hackers that we’re dealing with … they’re seriously fucking good. As in, some of the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been at the cutting edge of this technology for the better part of twenty years. Nothing they did was off-the-charts impressive, but they executed every step flawlessly, and now we’re shut out. There’s nothing we can do to get control back. They did their recon, they found the flaws, and they exploited them. The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter how good we are as government operatives. We’re now working with old-school systems in an ageing industry, and that doesn’t leave any room for us to be creative. These guys we’re fighting are brilliant. But if they were that smart, then they probably knew they couldn’t truly mask their location. Not with the sort of back doors we have available. So, what I’m saying is…’

‘They probably know that we know,’ King said.

‘Yes,’ Alonzo said. ‘And I don’t think it’s a fake address. I can’t see how they’d do that. Not the way I got it.’

‘Could it be something you can’t see?’ Slater suggested.

‘No,’ Alonzo said. ‘I’m the best, and I hire the best.’

Matter of fact.

Straight to the point.

No unnecessary detail that he and King wouldn’t understand anyway.

King nodded, satisfied. He liked the man already.

Alonzo said, ‘So here’s what I’m getting at. I can’t see any other solution to this clusterfuck of a