Hawk, p.13
Hawk, page 13
part #6 of Will Slater Series
The man dropped the phone instantly.
It smashed back against its cradle and toppled off the desk.
Silence permeated the room.
Slater kept the gun in position, but he took a step back through the open doorway and peered down the corridor. He saw King on the open landing, gun raised, defensive posture initiated.
Ready for a war.
Slater mouthed, ‘All good,’ but he didn’t vocalise it, because he had no idea who was in the adjacent room. King nodded and approached warily, his footsteps large and imposing on the cheap floorboards underfoot. He reached the doorway, and both he and Slater squeezed through into the room. Slater shut the door behind them, and they both sat down on the thin-framed chairs near the entrance. In unison, they rested the guns on their lower thighs, keeping a finger each on the side of the trigger guards.
Slater gestured for the three workers to sit.
They dumped themselves down in their swivel chairs with the colour draining from their faces. Slater figured they’d never been threatened before in their lives, and as he scrutinised them, he came away entirely convinced that these were the trio they’d been looking for all along.
He said, ‘Do all three of you speak English?’
They nodded in unison, their mouths all hard lines.
Slater said, ‘Because you’re all geniuses, aren’t you?’
Their faces were turning whiter and whiter. Slater could see the veins in their foreheads, the lumps in their throats. They were all in their late twenties with stooped postures and thin noodle-like arms.
They could have been from the same family.
Made in a lab somewhere, with similar properties.
The two guys had thin receding hair, and the woman’s hair was frizzy and looked unhealthy.
But it was simply a byproduct of the environment.
They were cooped up in this dank office space with an absence of natural light and unending job stress. These were the tech prodigies, offered gross starting salaries to do private work for a private company, paid under the table whilst avoiding any tax implications with the help of government officials paid off with bribes. A perfect system, except for the expectations. They were designated to run a foolproof operation that had no margin for error — if they slipped up, and the wrong parties found out about the airfield, it would be their heads on the chopping block.
If the encryption they set up was bypassed, all of it would be right there for the taking.
All the flight logs, all the quantities of the imports — everything.
And now their jobs were about to get a whole lot more complicated.
But only for an hour or so.
Slater said, ‘Okay. Ground rules established. We can all communicate with each other — that’s good. Now who else works in this building?’
The woman sat up and said, ‘There’s a few guys in the other module, but we’re the only people in this one.’
King said, ‘You telling the truth?’
She said, ‘Why the hell would I lie to you? Do you think I want to die?’
Slater exchanged a glance with King. They both tried not to smile.
She was smart.
Slater said, ‘So we won’t be disturbed for the foreseeable future?’
The man closest to the window gulped and mumbled something.
Slater said, ‘What?’
The guy pointed a shaking finger at the dirty window pane. ‘Did you kill those guys out there?’
King said, ‘No.’
The man breathed a sigh of relief.
King said, ‘But we will if we have to. And we’ll kill the three of you too.’
Slater got up and strode over to the window. All three of the hackers flinched, but he kept the gun behind his back and peered out through the pane.
Assessing the scene.
He didn’t like what he saw.
One of the warehouse workers was already upright — the guy King had hit twice to put down. He seemed to have a chin made of steel. Nothing could keep him down. He was wallowing in the shadows under the flight of stairs, surrounded by overgrown grass, but soon he would be on his feet and functioning mentally.
Slater said, ‘King.’
King perked up.
Slater pointed out the window. ‘Got a slight problem that needs dealing with.’
King nodded once. He’d intentionally drawn into himself. Reduced his communication to nods and single syllables. Playing the role of the enforcer. It made him seem more terrifying.
He rose off the small chair, listened intently for sounds of activity in the corridor outside, then threw the door open.
Slater heard his thudding footfalls on the other side of the wall.
He shook his gun at the tech team and said, ‘All of you get up.’
They sprung off their chairs, completely obedient.
Slater said, ‘Come over here.’
They joined him by the window.
In a shaky voice, one of the guys said, ‘What’s going on?’
‘I want you front and centre for the big show.’
‘The big show?’ the woman said.
Slater looked at her, then looked back out the window.
King threw the back door of the module open a moment later, and hustled out onto the deck. He flew across the landing and down the steps, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him moving like a gymnast, and he caught the barely conscious worker by the corner of his high-visibility vest. The guy spun round, reacting to the touch, but he was operating at far less than normal brain capacity, so it took him vital seconds to register who stood in front of him.
Then his face fell.
King hit him with a blocky forearm, thrusting it horizontally into his face, sending him straight back to the shadow realm. He collapsed back underneath the deck, and for good measure King kicked his legs out of sight. When the body was firmly tucked away in the overgrown grass, he looked up to the window and nodded a confirmation to Slater.
He won’t be getting back up for a while, his look said.
Both an operational necessity and a measured performance, in equal parts.
The tech team was suitably horrified. Slater told them to sit back down, and they wandered back to their chairs on shaky legs. When they planted themselves down, each of them appeared to be grappling with their own version of an existential crisis. Would they have taken this highly illegal, very risky job if they knew it would ultimately lead to this?
This hadn’t been in the job description.
They’d been told they would never fall into harm’s way, no doubt.
King re-entered the room, and gently closed the door behind him.
He stared at the three workers.
Slater said, ‘Are you going to help us?’
All three of them blurted, ‘Yes,’ at the exact same time.
29
Slater said, ‘Good. Just making sure.’
King said, ‘Here are the ground rules.’
Three sets of eyes darted in his direction in unison. Slater hadn’t done anything to demonstrate his abilities yet, so for now King was the most terrifying person in the room, and they reacted accordingly. They hung onto his every word like the mere idea of them not paying attention could get them killed.
King said, ‘We’re not going to kill you if you do exactly what we say. And we mean follow every word. Nod so you understand what I’m telling you.’
Three nods.
‘You’ve all been recruited straight out of university?’
Three nods.
‘Are you all Hungarian?’
The two guys nodded. The woman shook her head.
She said, ‘I am German.’
King said, ‘Okay.’
Then he looked at Slater.
Over to you.
Slater said, ‘Do you know your way around military-grade encryption?’
Three nods.
King said, ‘Why should we believe you?’
The woman said, ‘We have to know our way around it. This operation needs to be conducted without anyone on the outside realising. That takes a lot of work. More than we can realistically achieve. But the three of us work well together, so we get it done. We’ve been asking them to hire more people for a long time.’
‘What are your qualifications?’ Slater said.
‘We all have Masters’ in software engineering, and we all graduated magna cum laude from separate universities,’ one of the men said. ‘And we all displayed certain … traits that put us on the radar of this place.’
Slater raised an eyebrow.
The woman looked sheepishly at the ground and said, ‘Are you cops?’
King pointed a finger out the window. ‘Would cops do that?’
‘Depends which cops.’
‘We’re not cops,’ Slater said. ‘So you can tell us.’
‘We were all implicated in financial crimes before this organisation approached us.’
Now King raised an eyebrow. ‘Implicated?’
The woman shrugged. ‘University is expensive. And most security systems aren’t anything impressive. Not to people like us.’
King nodded, seemingly satisfied, and rose off the chair. All three of them flinched. He crossed the room, step by step, and approached the end of their desk. He took the slim black smartphone out of his pocket and placed it delicately on the table. He tapped the screen with a single finger.
‘I need you to get into this phone,’ he said. ‘However you can. And as fast as you can. You’re going to need to put all those skills you’ve been acquiring to the test, because if you don’t get it done we’re going to kill you. And we might not just shoot you either. We might beat you down like we did to those guys outside. Because you got yourself into this mess through your own mistakes, and now you’re going to face the consequences for it. If you don’t get into this phone you’re going to wish we were police. Have I made myself clear?’
Three nods.
Three pale faces.
Even Slater bristled at the spiel. He knew full well that neither of them were prepared to kill a trio of scared, talented kids fresh out of university, but King almost had the acting chops to convince Slater, too.
Slater tapped the barrel of his VP9SK against the desk and said, ‘He’s not kidding. And I’ll be the one to do it.’
One of the guys gulped.
‘Okay,’ King said. He put his .44 down on the table and clapped his hands together. ‘Get to work.’
Slater circled around behind the three swivel chairs, so he had a view of the monitors splayed out across the desk. He kept his gun in his right hand, and made sure all three of them could see it.
‘I’m not going to tell you to slow down your workflow for me,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘I get that you’ll need to do things fast. It wouldn’t feel natural to walk me through it. But I don’t need to keep an eye on what you’re doing. Because the simple fact is — if you even think about tripping some kind of panic button, I’m right here. The second someone charges through that door in response to your alert, I’ll shoot all three of you through the backs of your heads. It won’t even be a contest. Security might get the jump on us after that, but that won’t matter to you. We’ll have killed you long before it turns into a proper firefight. You won’t be around to wonder whether we got away or not. So don’t try it.’
They all nodded.
‘Okay,’ Slater said. ‘Permission granted to proceed.’
They huddled around the phone and plugged it into one of the CPUs. Instantly, the woman pulled up a specialised software program and said, ‘Yeah, it’s encrypted. We’ll need to do an offline attack.’
‘Like I said, you don’t need to walk me through it,’ Slater said. ‘Just get it done.’
They got to work, and Slater stepped back in awe at the speed with which they flashed through tabs. They pulled up information on what seemed to be a dozen different ways to breach an Android phone and absorbed enormous amounts of data in minutes, speed-reading their way through a collective bible of instructions.
Then they broke down what would and wouldn’t work, and started running different potential options in a rapid explosion of code.
They typed at inhuman speed, fingers flashing across the keyboards, but there was none of the Hollywood glitz and glamour.
They were just obscenely good at their jobs, and Slater knew if they’d decided to contact their superiors for help through one of the open tabs, he would have no way to tell.
King sat in the corner, seemingly counting the minutes ticking by, and Slater was so enraptured by the speed of the tech team that he didn’t notice his colleague stand up and slip out of the office.
He did, however, notice King return a few moments later with both the semi-conscious warehouse workers draped over each of his shoulders.
30
The tech team went pale, and Slater hissed, ‘What are you doing?’
King dumped them down in the corner of the room and waved his gun in their faces. ‘Stay fucking quiet if you want to live.’
The pair nodded uneasily, and sat with their arms around their knees and their heads bowed.
Again, Slater said, ‘What are you doing?’
The tech team visibly slowed down. Slate tapped his own gun against the backs of their chairs.
‘Don’t look at them,’ he instructed. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’
Then he turned back to King, and for a third time said, ‘What are you doing?’
King pointed at the workers. ‘They’re waking up. We needed to bring them in here. What else would we do with them?’
‘Knock them out again.’
‘You want me to turn them into vegetables? Because that’s how that happens. They can’t take another hit each. We need to watch over them.’
Slater almost sighed outwardly, but he kept it in.
Yeah, great, King, he thought. This really adds to our aura. Getting concerned over our victims taking one too many knocks to the head.
Instead, he said, ‘Okay. Go get the other guy.’
But King was already halfway across the room, and a moment later he threw the door open and disappeared back out into the corridor.
Then Slater heard multiple footsteps at once, and a sudden pause, as if two separate parties were sizing things up, and that preceded a surprised, ‘oomph,’ and a moment after that King returned hauling another office worker by his shirt collar. A man Slater had never seen before. The guy was bleeding from the mouth and nose, and King dumped him down next to the warehouse workers with a disgruntled expression plastered across his own face.
King looked up at Slater, and muttered, ‘New arrival. Stepped into the corridor as I was on the way out.’
Slater regarded the scene all around them, and shook his head in disbelief.
This was quickly getting out of control.
Soon they’d be babysitting half the employees at the airfield in a semi-conscious state.
Slater said, ‘Make sure that doesn’t happen again.’
King raised two bruised hands and said, ‘How the hell am I supposed to control that?’
‘We can’t track seven people at once.’
One of the tech guys said, ‘I’ll watch them.’
‘Yeah, right.’
The guy said, ‘Think about this for a second. All three of us wanted out of this job as soon as we realised exactly what it entailed, but they kept us doing what we’re doing by showing us how we’d go down just as hard if we burst the bubble. So we’re implicated in this whole thing, and you two clearly have nothing to do with this operation. This phone isn’t related. You just needed our services, right? So why shouldn’t we help you?’
Slater said, ‘That’s a noble speech. But I still don’t trust you. Keep doing what you’re doing.’
The three of them turned back to the desktops.
King vanished again, and came back half a minute later dragging the final office worker in tow. He practically threw the man across the room as he re-entered, frustrated by the mounting complications and the increasing likelihood of detection.
Slater felt the same.
They exchanged a weary glance as they surveyed the four airfield workers in varying states of disrepair, and the three tech workers hunched furiously over their monitors. It was a lot to juggle at once.
But they could do it.
The tech team seemed compliant, at least.
So they took up positions on each side of the room — King stood over the four workers and kept his .44 aimed at each of them, daring them to make any sudden movements. At the same time Slater maintained his position behind the desks, even though it was growing more and more useless with each passing moment. The three tech workers were deep inside their own bubble, speaking their own language, ignoring all outsiders. He very much doubted they were going to rat the intruders out. He’d believed the man who had spoken about their lack of allegiance, even though he hadn’t shown it at the time.
Finally, after nearly twenty minutes of silence — interrupted only by the clacking of keys and the clicking of a computer mouse — the woman spun around in her chair to face Slater.
He flinched involuntarily. He was aware of the four workers in the corner slowly coming to their senses. Their increasing lucidity was worrisome. King was staying vigilant, but he only needed to slip up for a second, and four bodies would pile on him. All the reflexes in the world wouldn’t be able to save him if he was stripped of his weapon and overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And if Slater had to intervene, it would leave the tech team unattended, giving them room to make a break for it. He wasn’t sure if he’d swayed all three of them over to his side yet.
So, getting more and more tense with each passing second, he said, ‘What?’
She said, ‘We’ve got a text message sent to the phone sixty-four days ago. Does that add up?’
King bristled. ‘That’s two days before it happened.’
She furrowed her brow, confused. Slater didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to know about that. He just said, ‘What does it say?’
