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

like that?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Why hasn’t it been done before?’

‘If I had to guess,’ she said, ‘it’s that no one thought to try.’

Quiet.

The quiet of realisation.

Slater looked over at King. ‘Things need to change.’

‘That’s not our department,’ King said. ‘We’re enforcers. End of story.’

‘I know,’ Slater said. ‘But Violetta needs to hear this. The whole damn government needs to hear this.’

‘They will.’

King turned to the girl.

She said, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

‘If you fix this,’ he said, ‘I’ll do everything in my power to help you.’

‘Aren’t you just an enforcer?’ she reminded him.

‘Not exactly.’

Slater said, ‘He’s dating his boss. He has leverage.’

King half-smiled, and surprisingly so did the girl. Right then and there he understood Slater’s usefulness. King knew he had restraint, and tact, and the ability to talk to anyone. But Slater had the no-nonsense approach to almost every situation, and he used it to cut through to the core of the issue. Sometimes, he went too far. Sometimes, it worked brilliantly.

Just like that, he’d dissipated the tension between the three of them.

King said, ‘How long will it take you?’

She scooted closer to the desk, still in shock, still horrified by what had unfolded, but with something new in her eyes. They were no longer as dead and soulless as when King had stepped into the room.

He thought, maybe, they might stand a chance.

She said, ‘An hour, maybe.’

‘That’s it?’

She lifted her gaze to him. ‘It won’t take much to hand back control. The real work came in building the thing. Controlling the worm is simple. Not easy, but simple.’

‘If you have the ciphers, you have the key?’

A nod.

He said, ‘So you really didn’t keep them anywhere physical?’

She shook her head. ‘That was our trick. We memorised them and then erased them. If we all died, the system would be impenetrable.’

He was about to say, Why did you do this? but he stopped himself short.

Now was not the time to be provocative.

He went quiet, waiting patiently, and the girl hunched closer to her triple-monitor setup and brought up a series of windows. She sunk into the flow state, her eyes wide and unblinking, and her hands started to fly over the keyboard.

King turned to Slater and muttered, ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

He stepped out into the antechamber.

It wasn’t done yet.

But it might as well have been.

He crossed to the broken window Slater had launched Gavin Whelan out of and rested against the sill. He took a deep breath, ran a hand through his hair, and winced as his ribs lit up with the familiar dull throbbing. His nose had doubled in size since the fight with Walker. He couldn’t breathe through it. The septum was mangled.

But in the end pain was nothing.

Victory was everything.

He pulled out his smartphone, touched a familiar contact name, and lifted the device to his ear.

Violetta said, ‘For the love of God, give me good news.’

‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Everything will be back to normal within the hour.’

He thought he heard her ordinarily stoic exterior shatter.

She audibly sighed.

She said, ‘I don’t know how you did it. I don’t know what to say.’

‘There’s nothing to say,’ he said. ‘I’m just glad it’s over.’

‘I’ll pass the word down the pipeline. The engineers will be ready to get the grid functioning as soon as control is returned.’

‘You know what this means, right?’ he said.

‘What what means?’

‘It was four kids,’ he said. ‘Four kids, Violetta. That’s who did this. Gavin Whelan found them on the deep web and filled them with hate. They wrote the code. They unleashed the worm. They did it all. Because they could.’

‘We’re going to need an overhaul of the system,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I know.’

‘Literally an overhaul. This can’t happen again.’

‘That’s not for you to worry about,’ she said. ‘We have entire departments for that. The flaws have been highlighted. Improvements will be made. That’s all you need to know.’

‘Good,’ King said. ‘As long as you understand.’

‘I understand.’

‘Then I’m off the clock?’

‘You’re done.’

The words released something in him. A permanent tension fell away, and the tendrils of civility crept back in. He came out of “kill mode,” and the bank building transformed into an empty dark obelisk instead of a live hostile environment.

She said, ‘You did phenomenal. As always.’

‘I think my ribs are cracked. My nose is definitely broken. Slater’s concussed. He’s operating on autopilot.’

‘You’ll get the best treatment. As always.’

He sighed. ‘One more thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Keep the ground troops back. This is going to take an hour or so. I don’t want her to get spooked.’

‘“Her?”’

‘One of the coders. Two of them killed themselves with cyanide pills, and I had to throw the third into a wall. But she’s complying.’

‘Christ,’ Violetta whispered. ‘The ones that are dead… were they needed?’

‘She knows enough to stop it. We’re in the clear.’

‘Cyanide. How old were they?’

‘Couldn’t be far over twenty.’

‘It’s a mad world.’

He stared out the window at the orange glow of the rising sun and said, ‘Has been for a long time.’

80

True to her word, Violetta kept the foot soldiers back.

They surrounded the building, a mixture of ordinary NYPD cops and SWAT forces, keeping curious pedestrians at bay, cordoning off the scene, cleaning up the bodies of the fallen. Slater watched them go about their work diligently from the vantage point of the broken window frame.

He was tired. He was in pain. He was hungover. His head swam and spun and throbbed, either from the concussion or the sleeplessness or the overall wear and tear of such vicious combat. The night had been no easier than his last several operations, and, as usual, the stress had threatened to tear his sanity to pieces.

How many times can you come this close?

How many times can you scrape by?

How long until your luck runs out?

Questions that had plagued him since his career had begun.

But he was still here.

Still kicking.

Witnessing another sunrise.

The days ticked ever onward.

King was in the vault with the girl, who’d given them the name Letty. He wasn’t sure whether it was real or not, but