‘That everyone?’ said the woman.

  Lucy and Marc stumbled in, taking up places on either side of the car. Beneath their coveralls, they wore regular clothes that made them look like any other office worker.

  ‘Okay . . .’

  The woman spoke into the radio and the elevator doors slid shut. There were no controls inside the car, Lucy noted, which meant it was operated from somewhere else. The car ascended and the smoke thinned.

  The woman with the radio wiped her eyes, blinking as she took in the other passengers. Her vision cleared and settled on Lucy.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Lucy had hoped they might actually make it to the upper lobby before anyone noticed anything amiss, but it wasn’t going to go that way. She whipped out a spray bottle from her jacket pocket and shot a blast of droplets right into the other woman’s face. The contents of the pretty pink bottle were not Chanel, but halothane anaesthetic.

  The woman dropped the radio and sank like a stone. Marc was already on the closest security guard, pulling the guy into a sleeper hold before he could go for his sidearm.

  In the tight confines of the elevator, they had nowhere to hide, so Lucy went on the offensive, kicking the man on the floor in the head, and dosing the second guard with another puff from the spray bottle.

  ‘Whassgoinon . . .?’

  The collapsed man raised his hands to cover his face as the guards hit the floor around him.

  ‘Camera,’ said Lucy.

  ‘You ready for this?’

  Marc produced one of the same lasers that Kara had used and fired it into a glassy bowl mounted on the ceiling. Anyone watching would see only smoke, and then nothing as the digital camera’s flash-blinded CCD chip cycled through a reset.

  ‘You’re asking me now?’ Lucy scowled and removed the last of their smoke grenades from her jacket as the lift slowed. ‘Hold your breath,’ she added, pulling the pin and letting the canister drop.

  A fresh surge of grey haze gushed up into the confined space as the elevator gave off a cheery ping. The doors opened and they spilled out into the upper lobby in a cloud of smoke, dragging confusion along with them.

  Lucy spotted the exits leading deeper into the building and skirted her way towards them. Meanwhile, clutching a pass card liberated from one of the unconscious guards, Marc deliberately stumbled straight into the closest member of the armed security team waiting for them in the lobby.

  ‘What’s going on down there?’ said one of the security detail.

  Marc feigned wheezing, as if he couldn’t talk. His performance wouldn’t win any Oscars, but it was enough to draw the attention of the guards and give Lucy the time to get some distance.

  ‘Stop . . . Stop her!’ Marc finally gasped, pointing in Lucy’s direction as she fled. ‘Intruder . . .!’ He faked another attack of racking coughs and staggered back.

  It did the trick. As Lucy broke into a sprint, she heard one of the guards calling out to lock down the entire building.

  Now I gotta play rabbit long enough for us to pull this off, she told herself.

  *

  After a while, Walter Novick put his jacket back on, despite the warmth inside the operations centre. He had to hide the fact that he was sweating through his shirt. It was a vain attempt to project some kind of presence, to show he was in control, but he couldn’t tell if it was working.

  Months ago, when the Frenchman and his colleagues laid out their proposal to him in a dingy bar in Hell’s Kitchen, it had sounded straightforward. Like something out of a movie, a clever script that would play out in fast bursts of action, and end with a rousing conclusion.

  At first he’d thought it a test of his loyalty. Something the NSA mandarins had cooked up to make sure that Novick deserved his security clearance, dangling what he desired in front of him to see if he would betray his position for greed. But that didn’t last long; in Novick’s experience, that three-dimensional chess bullshit was more the CIA’s style. The Langley farm boys missed the Cold War and they loved playing their byzantine games. The NSA was straight down the line. Less imaginative. That was part of the reason why he was stuck where he was.

  Walter Novick had been part of Titanpointe’s full take surveillance mission for five years and passed over for promotion at the end of every one. The Frenchman and his friends were shrewd judges of character. They knew what he really wanted – not money, not power, but recognition. Novick wanted to be appreciated for his service. He wanted to be valued.

  More than that, he wanted the job that idiot Sean Harlow had been given instead of him.

  The men had told him a story about how America had become slow and self-indulgent as its status on the world stage was eroded. They talked about a much-needed wake-up call to stir the country back to greatness.

  Like 9/11, they said, but smaller, with less casualties, and controlled by us. It will shake people out of their complacency.

  An event like that would need men of intelligence and skill in the right places, to guide the outcome. Men like Walter Novick.

  On some level, he understood they were appealing to his vanity, but Novick didn’t care. They told him they would remove Harlow from his position and facilitate Novick’s promotion instead, and past that point he wasn’t really listening anymore. He agreed to it, of course.

  How much of what the Frenchman had said was a lie? He couldn’t be certain. But now the plan was fragmenting, and Novick was losing his nerve.

  It was supposed to last an hour, maybe two. They were six hours in, with no end in sight. Harlow would take the fall when the interrupt device was eventually discovered inside the building, and Novick would be the hero of the day for keeping a cool head during the crisis.

  But he was terrified. Isolated and alone at the back of the ops centre, he watched system after system go offline and listened to the technicians grow frantic as they botched each attempt to reboot the grid. As long the interrupt remained in place, they would continue to fail.

  Novick looked at his shoes. The interrupt sat directly below him in one of the subsections on the floor beneath, connected to a secondary signal bus, a malignant spider in the middle of the network’s complex web.

  He had been careful to direct the tech teams to different locations as they searched fruitlessly for the source of the problem. In many ways the Long Lines building was a self-contained micro-city, and to search every possible piece of it would take days.

  But eventually Novick would run out of blind alleys to send them down. He would have to decide when he would miraculously ‘find’ the interrupt and save the day.

  He fingered the burner phone in his pocket. Each time he’d managed to slip away to the men’s room and turn it on, the Frenchman had not answered his calls. Novick’s mind churned with the possibilities that silence suggested. Had his co-conspirators been arrested? Or cut their losses and left him twisting in the wind?

  Now someone had deliberately driven a garbage truck into the Thomas Street entrance, and that someone was inside the perimeter.

  He sat down and his stomach rolled over. Novick eyed the waste-paper basket beneath his desk, fighting the urge to vomit into it.

  ‘Walter.’ He looked up to find Margaret Mooney hovering nearby, clutching a laptop to her chest. ‘Diagnostics on 47, 46 and 40 are complete. Nothing there.’

  ‘Okay, carry on,’ he said dismissively. ‘You know you don’t have to tell me when they’re done, just tell me when they’re all done.’

  She made no move to leave.

  ‘I don’t consider this a smart use of my time—’

  ‘I didn’t ask your opinion, Margaret!’ Novick snapped. ‘I told you to clear the rest of the diagnostics!’

  He didn’t want the petite woman bothering him, with her cute Irish-American accent and her blunt manners. The feeling appeared to be mutual, especially after that ill-judged pass he had made at her during last year’s Christmas party. He always felt she was quietly judging him, as if she had the right to do that. It was no secret that Mooney had liked Harlow a lot – most people did. Novick had never been able to understand how the dead man had managed that.

  ‘When Sean was here, we—’

  ‘He’s not!’ Novick broke in, bringing her up short.

  Mooney blinked, taken aback at his tone. She’d sobbed at Harlow’s memorial service, he recalled.

  ‘Sir?’ One of the security officers, a round-faced man named Roper, interposed himself between them before any more could be said. ‘Report from the ground floor. The lobby is secure, looks like the devices inside the truck were smoke generators. No explosives, so that’s something.’

  Novick nodded along with that, clutching at the tiny fragment of relief.

  ‘Where’s the intruder now?’

  Roper frowned. ‘In sector 6 or 7. We’ve sealed off the stairwells. We’ll get her.’

  ‘Are there any others?’

  Roper made a tutting noise. ‘Unclear. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe?’ Novick glared at him.

  ‘I have people in the infirmary,’ Roper shot back, matching his mordant tone. ‘I’ll debrief them when I can.’

  ‘Then go ahead!’

  Novick sat back in the chair, making his dismissal clear to the other man. Roper’s lip curled, but he went on his way. Novick blew out an exasperated breath, only to realise that Mooney was still standing close by, clutching her computer.

  ‘Walter, I think I should—’

  It was too much for Novick to take, and he bolted to his feet.

  ‘Can you just do your fucking job, Margaret? Is that too much to ask?’

  She recoiled. ‘You want me to leave the ops centre again, while there’s a lockdown in place? There’s a terrorist out there!’

  ‘You were not supposed to hear that,’ he told her. ‘It’s not your concern. We’re safe here, so get it done!’

  Novick rapped his finger on the side of her laptop, and then pushed past her, making for the men’s room once again.

  When he was certain he was alone, he locked himself in a stall and reactivated the burner phone with trembling fingers.

  The text on its tiny screen read, NO MESSAGES.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The workstation from which Margaret Mooney had to monitor the diagnostics was one of dozens of identical rooms throughout the Long Lines Building, a part of the complex-within-the-complex that belonged to the National Security Agency. While most of the tower was still technically the domain of the telecoms provider that owned it, in reality the NSA oversaw most of the day-to-day operations within the sandstone-coloured skyscraper.

  The room possessed the same bland landscape of white walls and sky-blue support pillars as the others, the only differentiation coming in the colour-coded panels on the doors to show the security levels of the various floors.

  New assignees from Fort Meade or one of the agency’s other stations often became lost in their first weeks working at Titanpointe, and Mooney sometimes joked that the layout of the place was an intelligence test. If you couldn’t find your way around, you didn’t have the smarts required for a career in the NSA. But some days, even Margaret felt like the building moved rooms around on its own just to spite her.

  She stared at her screen, watching the program loop back over and over, as it marked each operational subsection as free of tampering. Green indicators popped up one by one, and Mooney grew increasingly frustrated with each new report indicating ALL CLEAR.

  It was absolutely not. Something was seriously wrong. By now, the entire communications grid for the east coast should have been back up to operating status. Nothing short of a massive nuclear attack could produce such a result, but yet here it was. The problem wasn’t just that the grid had been knocked offline, and it wasn’t the huge power outage making it worse. There was a third factor that no one could nail down. And that pig Novick had his head so far up his own ass that he would never listen to the suggestions of a second-string tech like her, even if she hadn’t been a woman.

  The other ladies on the team had told her exactly what to expect from him. Novick was the kind of man who referred to women as ‘females’, like they were some other species, and who hung out on sleazy pickup websites when he wasn’t busy taking credit for the rest of the team’s work. How such a person could be elevated to running the operations centre was beyond her, but after the horrible circumstances surrounding Sean Harlow’s death, the agency had been hard-pressed to find anyone else suitable to replace the affable man at short notice. Like it or not, Novick knew the systems inside and out, which made him the logical choice – on paper. The fact that most of his co-workers could barely tolerate the guy had not made its way up the chain.

  When this is over, Mooney thought, I should talk to someone in HR about a transfer.

  The workstation door opened and a man she didn’t recognise entered. He gave a start as he spotted her.

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Didn’t realise this unit was in use.’ In his late thirties, he had a scuff of facial hair and dirty blond hair, and the indisputable air of an alpha geek about him. His accent reminded her of a guy from Toronto she had dated. ‘Can I . . .?’ He indicated a vacant computer opposite her.

  ‘Sure.’ Mooney narrowed her eyes as he took a seat and tapped a security pass on the reader pad next to the screen. ‘Did Novick send you to check on me?’

  ‘Novick?’ he repeated. ‘No. He never . . . uh . . . said anything.’ There was a pause. ‘He giving you a hard time?’

  ‘He’s a prick.’ The words escaped before she could stop them.

  ‘Most bosses are.’ He hesitated. ‘Any luck with the . . . uh . . .’ He gestured around at the air. ‘Everything?’

  ‘I’m sure the second we find something, Novick will tell everybody.’

  ‘Right.’ That gave the man pause. ‘Because he’s handling the checks personally?’

  ‘Well, that’s his job now.’

  Mooney frowned. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something about this person was off. She knew most of the new intake from the previous month, and the bearded man’s face didn’t fit with them.

  Mooney thought about what Roper had said, back in the ops centre. The security officer had noted that the intruder in the building was a woman. But then Novick had asked, Are there any others? And Roper didn’t have an answer.

  ‘I hear that a lot of people don’t like Novick,’ said the man, clicking his mouse and tapping at the keyboard in front of him. ‘That true?’

  Her skin prickled. He was fishing for an answer.

  They had trained them for this kind of thing. Social engineering, the instructors called it. A soft kind of interrogation, where opposition agents tried to draw out information from an unsuspecting staff member in everyday conversation. Before you knew it, you would be telling them about where you grew up, the name of your first pet, and anything else that might come in useful for cracking your passwords.

  Mooney decided to play her suspicions.

  ‘Have we met before? You look real familiar.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He glanced away, focusing on the computer screen she couldn’t see. ‘I’m new. I work upstairs.’

  ‘Oh, they bring you in to help out with the lockdown?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you on Sean Harlow’s team?’ she said. ‘The big guy, you can’t miss him.’

  She’d laid out her trap. Anyone who had been working at Titanpointe for more than a couple of days would have heard the tragic story about the shooting of Harlow and his sons in a home invasion gone wrong. Management had put an ‘In Memoriam’ poster on the main noticeboard, and it was all people talked about in the cafeteria.

  ‘I haven’t met him yet,’ said the man.

  Mooney knew then she was on to something. She rolled her chair to the right. Behind the guy, she could see a mirror image of the computer screen he was working at, reflected in the plastic casing of one of the servers.

  The display showed the login screen, still waiting patiently for a password to be entered. Which meant blondie here was faking it, tapping away and pretending to work.

  A chill rushed through Mooney and she straightened the sweater over her shoulders. The phone with the emergency call button was on the far side of the room by the water cooler, a good five metres away.

  She feigned a cough. ‘I swear, the air con in this place is so dry. My mouth is like Death Valley.’ Mooney stood and walked towards the cooler. ‘You want something to drink?’ She paced out her steps, trying not to hurry.

  As the cooler glugged cold water into a paper cup, she let her hand drop towards the phone.

  ‘Please don’t do that.’ The Toronto-ish accent vanished and all of a sudden the guy sounded English.

  Mooney looked up and froze. He aimed a pistol at her, a bulky cylindrical thing like the ones zookeepers used on runaway animals. She raised her hands.

  ‘What gave me away?’

  ‘Sean died two weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh.’ The English guy stood up and motioned her away from the phone, then grabbed her ID card from the reader at her station. He glanced at her photo. ‘Margaret, is it? Look, I know you may not believe me, but we’re both chasing the same target.’

  She scowled at him. ‘I’m not telling you anything.’

  ‘Well, you’ve already told me most of what I want to know.’ He flicked a look at her screen. ‘Like, who is in charge of getting the grid back up again. This Novick bloke, yeah? And it should be sorted by now. Except it isn’t. Like someone is deliberately making sure the system stays offline for as long as possible.’

  ‘You’re the one who drove a truck into the lobby,’ said Mooney. ‘You’re the only troublemaker I see right now.’

  He sighed. ‘All right. Cards on the table. I’m a covert operative working against the terrorist group that attacked New York today,’ he insisted, ‘and for the record, my partner and me didn’t hurt anyone. We’re looking for something.’

  The British guy described a device he called an ‘interrupt’, capable of keeping Titanpointe’s fail safes from activating.