Viper Nine Read online

  Finishing his cigarette, Egorov blew out the last breath of smoke, only to see the lights in the water vanish. He turned and craned his neck upward to the walls of the Kremlin behind him. They were indistinct from the buildings behind, the entire complex nothing more than a looming shadow in the dark.

  There must have been a power cut to the building, he thought. Yet casting an eye across the river, he found an entire area of the city shutting down, lost to darkness. The only light remaining, the glowing stub of the Minister for Health’s cigarette.

  As he dropped it to the stone floor and ground it under heel, that was gone too.

  French Airspace. Nine p.m.

  The Gulfstream jet cruised at 41,000 feet, the horizon a pale blue line as the sky turned dark overhead. As usual, post-mission, Driver felt tired, but too wired to sleep. She felt tense, the air pressurised but not all the pressure courtesy of the plane. The cold glances from Wells and the silence from the rest of her team said it all. She’d screwed up, royally. And had to rely on the others to bail her out.

  Driver felt ashamed of herself, and yet justified at the same time. As the jet neared Parisian airspace, she awaited the inquest, relieved to be back in jeans and a grey sweatshirt.

  Pope was the first to break the silence, out of the whale costume and filling out a black muscle T-shirt. ‘Is no one gonna mention the elephant in the room?’ he asked, sitting in the seat across the aisle.

  ‘What elephant would that be?’ Driver replied, opting to tackle it head on.

  ‘The bloody nuts,’ Pope said, holding up a thumb-sized bag of pretzels. ‘Or the lack of ’em.’

  ‘You think that’s the elephant?’ Lim said from the seat behind.

  ‘Yeah,’ continued Pope. ‘We get all this new slush funding – new base, new gadgets, new guns. And then they go and scrimp on the in-flight snacks.’ He struggled to prize open the bag with his over-sized fingers. ‘Can’t even get in the bloody things.’

  Rios sat facing Pope with a leg draped over the seat next to her. She leaned forward and snatched the bag from his hand. Prizing the pretzels open, she viewed the pack with suspicion. ‘Sasquatch is right. What the fuck is cheese and chive?’

  As Rios tossed him the pretzels, Pope sniffed the bag. ‘It’s like my granddad went to the dunny on a bag of twigs.’ He paused and turned towards Lim. ‘What elephant were you talking about?’

  ‘The one where our team leader gets stage fright.’

  It was Wells, speaking from the rear of the cabin.

  On the outbound flight to London, the former MI6 man had taken the seat across from her. They’d laughed and joked. He’d seemed relaxed as usual, wearing his trademark smile. But the return journey was different. Day and night, and not just outside the plane.

  Driver turned and peered down the aisle. Wells sat low in his seat on an aisle seat, a navy hoodie and matching baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.

  ‘I didn’t get stage fright,’ she replied.

  ‘Looked like it to me,’ he continued, not bothering to meet her eye.

  Driver leaned out into the aisle. ‘Blowing the guy away in front of his kids? Come on.’

  ‘It’s not the only chance you had,’ Wells said.

  Driver huffed to herself. ‘Maybe I’m the only one who wonders why we’re executing a guy on the whim of a few politicians.’

  ‘During the mission, we have to follow through,’ Baptiste said, standing and stretching at the front of the plane in caramel chinos and a white, short-sleeve shirt. ‘But otherwise, I’m with Driver. Who and what are we fighting for anyway?’

  ‘Don’t pretend it’s anything new,’ Lim muttered. ‘This is why it’s better to work alone. We almost missed our window.’

  Driver glared at her Chinese teammate between the seats. ‘Is that all that matters? Hitting our window?’

  Pope threw a pretzel in his mouth. ‘It pays the same, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Kravchenko must have known he was playing with fire,’ Rios added, running a hand through her long, dark hair. ‘So long as no one’s hunting me…’

  ‘Nice change of tune,’ Driver replied.

  ‘Look,’ the Latina continued, sitting up in her seat. ‘the minute we stop being useful, we’ll be the ones with bullets in the heads. You can’t trust those UN motherfuckers.’

  Thanks to the support of Baptiste, Driver felt relieved she wasn’t the only one with reservations.

  Still, she was troubled by the rest of the team. How could they be so callous? Sure, she half-expected it from Pope, a born mercenary, Rios a convicted killer and Lim a former freelance assassin. But not from Wells. He was supposed to be different. Had she figured him wrong?

  ‘I thought we were here to make the world better,’ Driver continued, ‘not worse.’

  ‘Sometimes that means getting a little dark,’ Rios said. ‘Or have you forgotten your days in the CIA?’

  ‘It’s those days I don’t want to repeat,’ Driver continued, seeing her unquestioning loyalty to the agency in a harsh new light.

  Wells laughed to himself from the back of the plane. ‘If only we could all be so selective with our morals.’

  Feeling the pinch of a nerve, Driver turned in her seat. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  As the British operative shrugged and pulled his cap over his eyes, Rios waved for the team’s attention. ‘Hey, check this out. Did someone pull the plug or what?’

  Driver launched out of her seat across the aisle. She peered through a window on the opposite side. At this height, the populated area below was no more than a mass of orange pins of light. Block by block it shut down, as if part of a chain reaction.

  ‘That’s the whole of Paris,’ Baptiste said, peering over Driver’s shoulder.

  Texas, USA. Two a.m.

  The sound of the alarms was deafening, a panel of lights flashing wild and pressure gauges in the red, threatening to snap. Minutes earlier, Coleen Mathis had sat behind a computer screen, playing Solitaire and taking the first bite of her ham and mustard mayo on rye. With all systems stable and one eye on the clock, she could never have foreseen the mad scramble of the last few minutes as the entire system went haywire.

  Mathis was as dumbfounded as the rest. The well-flow data had looked A-okay. She’d checked it only ten minutes prior. Now out of blue the whole plant was at risk? It didn’t stack up. And whatever she and her fellow engineers tried didn’t work. The entire plant was in danger of going up. The latest readings on the bank of monitors in front of them showed everything was fine. Yet the control panel and the frantic calls they were getting from engineers out in the field were telling Mathis and her team the blowout preventers were down.

  ‘The whole damn shit-show’s gonna go up,’ gasped Bob Hennessy, her hangdog boss in his deep southern drawl.

  He wasn’t wrong. Mathis heard a deep rumble. It rose through the foundations of the building and shook the office hard, spilling her coffee over her keyboard.

  On the screens in front of her, she watched as one well shut down after another. Mathis grabbed her dark-blue work jacket off the back of her chair and raced with the others out of the door. They ran along the corridor of the Red Star Energy offices, feet thumping over cheap brown carpet. Mathis snatched her white hardhat off a peg and, with the push of an exit button, the group piled out of the door onto a steel gantry looking over vast swathe of pancake-flat oilfields.

  ‘Hold onto your assholes,’ Hennessy said as he stared wide-eyed into the darkness.

  Mathis’ jacket rippled open in the warm early morning wind, just like the loose strands of hair breaking free of their clip. The rumble sounded like an earthquake coming from the ground up. The gantry was half a mile from the nearest well, yet it shook under her work boots, loose rivets rattling their way out of the handrail.

  Then the first of the wells blew – dazzling orange jet, soaring into the sky, crowned by a billowing cloud of tar-like smoke blending with the dark sky.

  Like falling domin
oes, the remaining wells erupted and caught fire, Mathis hit by a wave of heat from the one nearest her station.

  Within minutes, the entire oilfield was ablaze, the air barely breathable and stinging the eyes.

  ‘Holy fucking hell,’ Hennessy murmured.

  Paris, France. Nine p.m.

  ‘This is your fault,’ yelled Maxine, peering around the taxi driver’s seat, trying to get a better view of the traffic.

  ‘How is this my fault?’ her husband, Marc, replied, waving his arms from the backseat of the cab.

  Maxine tugged on the necklace. The one that went perfectly with the pink dress she’d bought especially for the journey. ‘You’re the one who forgot to book the taxi in advance.’

  ‘We had to wait ten minutes,’ Marc said, neck veins tensing under the collar of his black Armani shirt. ‘This has got nothing to do with me.’

  The elderly male taxi driver pointed at the nose-to-tail traffic ahead. ‘He’s right, it’s never this busy.’

  Maxine leaned forward between the front seats of the Renault saloon. She pushed her wavy brown hair out of her face. ‘Unusual or not, we’d have been there by now if my husband didn’t have a sieve for a brain.’

  Marc wound down his window and stuck his head out for a better look. ‘Maybe we can get out here and run.’

  Maxine turned and shot him a look of disbelief. ‘What? Run along the road like a pair of meth-fuelled derelicts?’

  ‘Oh sorry, you can’t run,’ he continued, motioning to her pastel pink Louboutin heels. ‘Because you insist on travelling in those ridiculous things.’

  ‘What would you have me wear, a tracksuit and trainers?’ Maxine huffed, shivering at the thought of it.

  ‘Well, the traffic’s moving now,’ the taxi driver said. ‘We’re only minutes away.’

  Maxine checked her Gucci watch. ‘We’re going to miss it.’

  ‘We’re not going to miss it,’ Marc replied as the taxi rolled at a maddeningly slow place towards the terminal. ‘I have a good feeling.’

  ‘You and your good feelings,’ Maxine grumbled. ‘I had a good feeling when I married you, and look how that turned out.’

  Marc shook his head and cursed under his breath.

  Okay, Maxine could admit he wasn’t responsible for the power cut affecting most of the city, but he insisted on leaving everything until the last minute. No matter how long they had to prepare for anything – a dinner party, a wedding, a flight to Italy to celebrate their two-year anniversary – they were always in a rush. Late, flustered and running for the door. It was inelegant and she was sick of it.

  Yet perhaps there was hope, after all.

  The taxi driver pulled into gap in an outside lane. He followed the faster flow of traffic and squeezed in front of a shuttle bus, just in time to make it through the barrier for pickup and drop-off.

  ‘At last, a man who’s resourceful,’ Maxine said.

  ‘Anything to get rid of you two,’ the driver mumbled, pulling up fast in a parking bay.

  Maxine wasn’t about to take him to task, instead scrambling out of the backseat as Marc and the driver dumped their cases onto kerb.

  Fumbling in her purse. Maxine pulled out a handful of notes. She jammed them in the taxi-driver’s fist, far more than the fare, and grabbed her designer case. Marc ran ahead, swerving around angry travellers storming out of departures as if they’d been turned away.

  Maxine ran to catch up. Lucky for her, she wore heels for everything except the gym, and could run in anything.

  For a brief moment, her spirits lifted at the thought that they might just make it. She’d been looking forward to the trip for months, and she so desperately wanted their anniversary to be special.

  Yet something was wrong. It was chaos in departures. All the desks closing. Were they too late? No, it was bigger than that. A member of airport staff bustled past her in a navy blazer, a radio in hand. He talked of problems with the airport control tower. GPS going haywire. No planes able to land or take off.

  Maxine caught up to Marc, breathing heavy as they stared up at the departure screens above, jostled by angry passengers hurrying left and right.

  In rapid succession on the giant screen, every single departure turned from delayed to cancelled, their flight to Venice included.

  Maxine’s shoulders sank with her heart.

  Marc turned to her with a sarcastic sneer. ‘I suppose you’re going to blame this one on me too.’

  London, England. Seven p.m.

  It was baking hot on the busy platform at Blackfriars tube station. The summer evening heat oppressive in the artificially lit confines of the underground network, especially for Orla Simms, a young woman six months into pregnancy.

  The only breeze available was the hot rush of diesel-tinged air as the train sped out of a dark tunnel and rattled to a stop.

  Orla couldn’t jostle and push with the rest of the scrum any more. She had to hang back, protecting her bump until her fellow commuters had stepped onto the train before she boarded.

  It wasn’t quite rush hour, but neither was it long since the weekend exodus from the city, with standing room only.

  People said you were never more than a few feet away from a rat in London. Well, on the tube, that went for armpits too.

  As Orla rode backwards gripping a handrail inside the door, a lanky man with long ginger dreads leaned in close, a hand pressed to the roof of the carriage. His foul-smelling pit was only centimetres away, the wild bush of hairs like octopus legs threatening to reach out and crawl up her nostrils.

  Mercifully, the man got off at the next stop, along with several more of her fellow passengers. A seat freed up on the end of a row and Orla eased herself into it, no longer able to drop in, cross a carefree leg and open a book to the next chapter without giving a second thought to the heat.

  Everything was more difficult and deliberate now, including shopping for outfits that fitted her bohemian style.

  Note to self, Orla thought as she took her phone and scrolled through the day’s news: if you have a second child, make sure you get pregnant in late summer and avoid the worst of the heat on the tube.

  With the train zipping away from the platform, Orla tucked a dark-brown tussle of hair behind her ear and scrolled through the news. She was met by a series of breaking stories: power grids out in New York, Moscow, Paris and other major cities around the world. Then there were the burning oilfields in China, Canada, Siberia and the US.

  The Oxford native tapped on the live news feed, only to find stories coming in of chaos at Charles de Gaulle, JFK, LAX and Heathrow to name a few. What on earth was going on?

  Orla’s first and admittedly selfish thought was that she hoped the problems at Heathrow didn’t cause delays on the line. And heaven forbid the power should go down in London. It was her worst nightmare. Being stuck on a train, underground, in between stops. It sent a shiver down her spine, causing the baby to kick in protest.

  She willed the tube train on to a safe and swift passage out of the confines of the city towards her commuter belt home to the south. And the wish appeared to be working, the chatter of people discussing the news and the gentle rock and rumble of the train her only distraction from her phone.

  Then the first sign of trouble. The lights in the carriage blinking off and on. Orla looked up – the lights held. She felt relieved, put a hand to her bump and checked her social media accounts for more commentary on the events.

  But the lights blinked some more. This time, out a few seconds. And was it her, or was the train slowing down? Not braking, but rolling towards a slow, prolonged halt. Disquiet broke out along the carriage. Orla peered out of the window behind her, only to be met with her own reflection.

  Maybe the driver had to wait for a signal. Yes, that made sense.

  ‘Excuse me ladies and gentlemen,’ a confused voice crackled over the speaker system. ‘This is your driver. We seem to be experiencing some power issues. But not to worry, I’m sure we’ll be up and
running in no—’

  The speaker system cut the driver off mid-flow. This was worse than Orla’s worst nightmare. She was stranded on a tube train with no power, halfway down a long, pitch-dark tunnel. Orla checked her phone and noticed the news stories were no longer refreshing. She was all out of bars. The phone of the woman wedged next to her revealed the same.

  That was when the lights went out.

  Tokyo. Five a.m.

  With an itchy trigger finger and a quickening of the pulse, Hideo Nakamura checked his six. The coast was clear. Few people in the immediate area and none of them within range of his position.

  The lighting was artificial. The smell of black coffee strong in the recycled air. He focused again on-screen, moved his mouse over his target and bam, a double-tap on the image of the naked woman cupping her own breasts, beckoning him, daring him to see more.

  At first nothing happened. Nothing but a black buffer wheel. It spun over the top of a spreadsheet of logged technical issues from customers up early enough to care whether their PC software was working or not.

  There weren’t many calls at this hour. Hence the mostly-empty office. Nakamura worked the graveyard shift. The cons – the ridiculous hours, the lack of a social life. The pros – more pay, fewer complaints and plenty of privacy.

  But nothing was happening. Not until a message that read: initialising.

  ‘Initialising what?’ Nakamura muttered under his breath.

  He wished he’d never asked. The wheel stopped spinning and the naked girl appeared, full frontal. Then another girl. And another. Not just images – videos, invading his screen. The sound of a hundred orgasms filling his headset. He threw them off and rattled a finger on the mouse in an attempt to shut the videos and images down.

  It was no good – no response. Nakamura hit escape. That didn’t work either, so he tried to shut the computer down. No, this couldn’t be happening.