Money Run (10 page)

But her stomach was churning. This didn't feel right.

She stepped back from the box. She wiped the hand that had touched the dust on her jeans.

“Ash, get away from the box,” Benjamin said. His voice was shaky. “Stand as far away from it as you can.”

“Why?” Ash said, backing away. “What is it?”

“Don't talk. Don't even breathe.”

“What—”

“Shut up, Ash!” Benjamin snapped. “I'm just checking something.”

There was a pause that seemed to last an eternity. Ash didn't take her eyes off the box. She half expected a muscular claw to push up through the dust and reach out for her—

“Oh god,” Benjamin said. “Umm…”

“What is it?”

“Put your jacket over your mouth,” Benjamin said. “Breathe through it. How much did you touch?”

“Benjamin, what the hell is going on?”

“It's not just dust, Ash. I think it's anthrax.”

Peachey wrapped his free hand around his wrist, just above the cuff. This was going to hurt.

“
Aargh!
” He pulled, and the cuff ground across his flesh, mashing the skin against the bones inside his hand. It got stuck just above his thumb. The girl had done them up tight.

He wiped the sweat off his free hand against his trousers, rubbed the sleeve across his brow to keep the moisture out of his eyes, and pulled again.

Shick.
The cuff slid off his hand, and Peachey gritted his teeth as the feeling flooded back into his fingers. There were advantages to having wide wrists and narrow hands after all. He curled his hands into fists, like he was crushing the pain into a harmless paste. He rested the back of his head against the side of the desk for a moment.

He didn't have much time to waste. The girl would be getting away. Angry as he was at her, that wasn't the main source of his desire to kill her – she had seen too much. She knew his face, she knew what he was up to. Peachey doubted that she was calling the cops; she was clearly up to something herself, and would want someone else to do her dirty work. But she would tell her employers. And Peachey didn't even know who she worked for.

He clambered to his feet and stretched. He still couldn't see his Glock anywhere, and finding the girl quickly was probably more important than having a gun. Now that she no longer had the element of surprise, he would be able to kill her with his bare hands.

He twisted the door handle, and the door swung open. She hadn't locked it behind her – first mistake. He closed it behind him, and tapped out the same combination as before on Keighley's keyboard. The door locked. Now no one would come in and see the ruined office before he wanted them to. Control. It was all about control.

Peachey worked through his objectives as he ran towards the lifts. Maybe in the movie of his life, they would flash up on the screen, silver and sparkling. Like his mind was a computer. He smiled. Smart and analytical, like a computer. I like that, he thought.

Objective one: kill the girl. Two: return to the office and hide. Three: kill Buckland. Four: escape. Same plan as before this unpleasant interruption. Just with one extra step.

He pushed the lift button, and a door slid open almost immediately. No one inside the lift. He stepped inside, and stared up at the screen. No way to know what floor she was on. He'd have to do this the hard way.

Peachey was an efficient and methodical man. He pushed the button for floor 24. If she wasn't there, he would move down to floor 23. Then floor 22. And so on, until she was dead and he could return to Buckland's office to wait for his main target to arrive.

The girl was a temporary setback. Emphasis on temporary, he thought. The doors slid shut, and he waited as the numbers counted down. He glanced at his pocket watch. It was nearly quarter past six.

“Oh my god,” Benjamin said again.

“Stay calm.” Ash's voice was muffled by her jacket. She'd ripped off the sleeve she'd dipped in the dust with her contaminated hand, and was breathing through the rest of the jacket. She was holding the arm she'd dipped in the box away from her and tilting her head to the side. Why am I telling him to stay calm? she thought, teeth clenched. I'm the one who's been exposed!

She tried to steady her breathing. “How do you know it's anthrax?” she asked.

“I examined the data from the scanner, and the picture didn't look like the Wikipedia image of dust mites. So I checked the anthrax images on a hunch, and it looks the same. Well, similar. I don't know. Oh god.”

Ash didn't know much about anthrax. But she knew that it was a disease, and that it came in powder form. She knew that it was a popular biological weapon because it was fast-acting and fatal. She knew that once you inhaled it, you were a goner.

This was worse than getting arrested. Convicted. Jailed. This was
death
. By planning the Hammond Buckland Operation, Ash had engineered her own destruction.

“I thought anthrax came in envelope-sized amounts,” Ash said. “I thought that was how weaponized anthrax was usually used. That's why it was such a threat – because so little could do so much.”

“That's what I thought, too,” Benjamin said. “How much is in the box?”

“It's full, Benjamin.
Full
. As in, to the brim.”

“That's…impossible. Are you sure?”

Ash wanted to scream. “Yes, I'm sure! The coffin-sized box is full! I'm looking right at it!”

That part wasn't true. She was staring at the floor, like even making eye contact with the box could kill her. Like it wasn't already too late.

“Maybe…maybe that's how much anthrax $200 million buys.”

Ash coughed into her jacket, startled. “You think Buckland bought it? Why would he put anthrax beneath the air vent in the room right underneath his office? That's the stupidest, most elaborate suicide method I've ever heard of.”

“But he's not in his office,” Benjamin pointed out, still panicky. “You saw him downstairs. And you said the box had a clock. Like it was supposed to open on a timer. Or maybe he was planning to sell it to someone else, like he's using terrorist groups to launder money—”

“We're wasting time,” Ash said. “Is there anything I can do now that I'm exposed?”

Benjamin was silent.

“Talk to me, Benjamin,” Ash said. “I can handle it.”

“You need to wash as soon as possible,” he said. “If you haven't already inhaled any, then that will stop the ones on your skin from getting into your system. But if you
have
inhaled some, it won't help. There are medications, but only for mild exposure to mild strains. It's usually fatal…”

The last word was choked off. There was a long silence.

“Stay with me, Benjamin,” Ash said. “I need you!”

“I'm so sorry!” he wailed. “This was my idea, it's my fault you're in there, I was greedy and stupid and now you're—”

“Hey!” Ash coughed again. She hoped the stuff on her tongue was just lint. “One: it's not your fault. Two: I'm not going to die. You diagnosed me from Wikipedia, for goodness' sake. I'll wash. I'll get whatever this stuff is off my skin. But I need to get out of this room. Is the vacuum cleaner still outside?”

Benjamin sniffled. “No, they just took it away. The antechamber is clear. But—”

“But nothing,” Ash said grimly. She picked up her mirror, pulled out her Maglite, and turned the door handle.

Hammond Buckland stared at the screen. Interesting, he thought with a smile. Developments I hadn't foreseen are popping up all over the place.

He hadn't expected Michael Peachey to be smart enough to head back to the office rather than following the clues that had been planted for him. He hadn't expected Ashley Arthur to disappear from his radar, and then reappear out of the white room looking like the devil was chasing her. He hadn't expected Peachey and Ashley to ever meet, and when they both walked into his office, he hadn't expected them to both walk out again.

For the first time, he wished there were surveillance cameras in his office. He would have liked to know what had transpired in there.

Peachey was supposed to find the box. Not Ashley. Buckland sighed. No matter how carefully you examine and strategize and think things through, there's almost always something you didn't see coming. Wherever there are people, there are surprises.

It was a shame. But the plan should still work. It just required a little…sculpting. A new facet, here and there.

And it was good that the police had already shown up. Peachey had unwittingly done Buckland a favour by jumping out the window. Buckland wanted people to sit up and take notice of what was happening at HBS. He wanted spectacle. But there was still more to come.

He picked up the telephone and dialled.

“Yes?”

“I'm about to initiate phase two,” he said. “Are you in position?”

“Ready to go,” the woman replied.

Buckland hung up and dialled again.

“Terrorism Risk Assessment, this is Agent Jin.”

“I want to report an incident,” Buckland said.

Peachey dragged the lift doors aside as they started to open and stepped out onto floor 24. This floor should be easy to search – no offices or closets, just a whole lot of cubicles and a water cooler. One kitchen, two bathrooms.

Finding the girl was what he wanted most. She was an anomaly, she was unpredictable. She needed to die. Buckland could wait – Peachey still planned to hide in his office and kill him when he returned. But if he happened to run into Buckland among the cubicles, then there was no harm in that.

Except for Buckland, obviously.

Even as he hummed an improvised soundtrack to his movements in his head, Peachey was becoming concerned about this part of his memoirs. When they were made into a film, he didn't want it to become too long – any movie longer than about one hundred minutes bored him. But this situation was too complex to be explained in twenty minutes of action and narration. And he didn't want the Buckland hit to be the main focus of the movie, either. He'd done far more interesting things in his life than this.

Peachey had been born in the Solomon Islands. He had never known his parents, but now assumed they had been European – his features were vaguely Dutch. His mother had abandoned him, and he was raised in a shelter with several dozen other children of varying age and ethnicity. He had been thrown out at age ten for brawling with the other kids.

The first killing had been accidental. He'd been out on the street for two weeks. He was in a dusty back-alley, fighting with one of the other orphans who'd been ejected from the shelter, a big fourteen-year-old with close-set eyes and scars latticed across his knuckles. They had duelled with milk crates, empty beer bottles, bricks – anything they could pick up and throw, or club each other over the head with. By chance, Peachey had discovered that if you stick a bicycle spoke into the flesh behind someone's ear, it only takes a little pressure to penetrate the skull and kill them. Suddenly the fight was over, and Peachey had a career.

He would stab wealthy tourists from behind in crowded marketplaces, from a distance of about a metre, and then lunge forward and catch them as they fell. He would grab their wallet as he lowered them to the ground, stuff it into his trousers, then yell “I'll get help!” and run while bystanders were still in shock.

In this way, he eventually saved up enough money for a plane ticket to France. His plan was to continue with much the same work. But Paris had twenty million tourists per year, more than the entire population of Australia, and he figured the pickings would be better than in the Solomons.

It was there that he took his first contract. A woman saw him kill a foreign businessman with a flick-knife in an alley, and instead of calling the police, she offered him 10,000 francs to kill her husband – half now, half later. Peachey was old enough to know that 10,000 francs was a lot of money for an hour's work. He took the contract.

Peachey curled and uncurled his gloved fists. The corridors on floor 24 were almost empty. A couple of maintenance guys were carrying one of those robotic vacuum cleaners down the hallway, already taking it apart. Peachey stepped aside for them.

No sign of the girl here. He headed for the bathrooms.

It was time to start thinking about his contingency plan. Peachey sighed. He was pretty sure that the government would try to have him killed after he'd finished with Buckland. The situation with Walker was one Peachey often found himself in. Instead of paying him after the job was done, his employer would try to murder him. That way they were covered; there was no risk of him getting arrested and cutting a deal with the cops. Spilling it all for reduced sentence or immunity. And once he was dead, there would be no more pressure on law-enforcement agencies to find the truth. Case closed.

Peachey already knew that Walker had a source somewhere inside HBS – she had acquired the CCTV footage somehow, and she'd got Peachey into Buckland's appointment book. Presumably she could have instructed her source to kill Buckland, except that might leave a trail leading to her. Much better to hire Peachey, wait until his job was done, then put a bullet in his skull and walk away.

The low-risk course, Peachey thought as he pushed open the men's room door, would be to disappear after killing Buckland. Skip town, and lie low for a while. But there were problems with that. First, he wouldn't get the rest of the money. Second, he wouldn't be able to work while keeping a low profile. Third, there was the slight chance that whoever Walker sent after him would actually find him. And then Peachey would have to do more killing. For free.

Peachey peered under the cubicle doors, and walked out again. Trusting Walker to pay him wasn't really an option. Worst-case scenario, she would have him killed as soon as he showed his face. Best case, she would pay him to try and convince him he was safe. Then she would have him killed as soon as he turned his back.

What he needed was a dead man's brake. A mutually assured destruction type deal. He'd already started down that path by revealing that he knew Walker's name. Time to go a little further. He needed a situation where his death would expose her, but paying him would solve the problem.

Peachey examined his stolen phone. It should have a feature which would record all conversations onto the handset. He found it under SETTINGS and switched it on. Too easy.

There was a guard standing by the door to an office on his left. The girl wouldn't have been able to sneak past, so it probably wasn't worth checking. But the guard had a gun; a Beretta 92FS on his hip.

Peachey had decided earlier that the risk of killing a security guard for his weapon was too high. But that was when he'd only had one target, instead of two. The stakes had changed. He needed a gun.