The Gomorrah Gambit Page 11

  Then he spots something among the scattered tech: several small silver boxes that, if he’s lucky, are the military cousins of a crowd-dispersal device he knows well. It’s called the Mosquito, and can produce intense, high-pitched bursts of sound. Throw enough ultrasonic interference into the mix and the results can be disabling.

  Azi fumbles several towards him, flips their rear switches to a range of different frequencies, then punches them into life before hurling them across the room and cramming his fingers into his ears.

  Even at a distance and through covered ears, the result is remarkable: a burning sensation deep in his brain, as if someone is slowly peeling off the plates of his skull. The gunfire stops. Fighting waves of nausea, Azi struggles into a crouch. The sonic burst will last around thirty seconds and, while he’s not sure he’ll be capable of running once it ends, he can at least die in the attempt.

  Just as he’s about to go, however, there’s a burst of gunfire in a different key and direction, followed by silence. He freezes. Thirty seconds elapse, then a face caked in blood appears around the edge of his table. Azi stares. The face stares back. Then it speaks.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

  It’s Odi, apparently both injured and incredibly pissed off. He slumps against the desk and gestures towards the far door. On the floor lie the two men who were, until recently, shooting at them. Azi lurches to his feet, and discovers that his legs don’t work very well while his eyes are looking at dead bodies. A sour taste of bile rises in his mouth and, after fighting it for a moment, he vomits. It’s almost a relief. Only once he’s finished this and pushed his hood down does he notice quite how profusely Odi is bleeding.

  “Odi! Shit, mate. I’ll get help. This way is safe now, is it?” He spits the last vomit out of his mouth and nods to the far door.

  Odi grunts through gritted teeth, attempting to staunch the bleeding with his hands. Moving as fast as he can, Azi dashes across the room and through the door. It opens into a corridor identical to the one he entered along, save for the detail that a massive hole has been blown through one of its walls from the overgrown grounds beyond.

  Emergency lighting floods the scene in red. Three dead men in civilian clothes are lying face down near him in the corridor, neat holes in the back of their heads. Two more are sprawled nearby. One of them is the man from the Tiergarten pavement. Munira isn’t there.

  The scene and its body count are so extreme that Azi finds he has temporarily run out of reactions. Did Odi kill all these people? Did they kill each other? What is going on?

  “Azi?” an incredulous voice calls out from behind him.

  It’s Anna, dressed in some serious-looking combat gear, holding a gun with businesslike ease. She walks towards him, a bowel-loosening parody of a smile on her face.

  “How and why are you here?” Her gun, Azi notices, is pointing between his eyes.

  “Don’t shoot! After your people took Munira, I got a message on my app to come here. I walked into this. Odi’s injured, through there. He needs help.”

  “It’s on the way. Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess.”

  Anna walks over to the bodies, checking them one by one, never lowering her weapon. “This was a raid,” she says, “which shouldn’t have been remotely possible. And I suspect that it has something to do with you.”

  “They came for Munira?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

  “They took her, which is different. They also took a lot of our gear. It’s complete chaos and the last thing I need right now is a guy who has been living and working in a shed for the past decade following me around. You’ll be dealt with later.” She starts to head to the door Azi came through, one hand still tracking him with the gun.

  Azi is close behind.

  “Wait…” He hesitates, gestures for her permission to take off his rucksack, then produces one of the smallest and strangest pieces of hardware he picked up. It’s little bigger than a standard thumb drive but, he’s pretty sure, a great deal more significant. For a start, it seems to have a GPS, microphone, camera and network capabilities, plus God knows what else lurking in its firmware. It’s also markedly different in manufacture from everything else on the site. “I found this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Exactly. It’s not one of yours, right? Yet it was in the trashed computer gear. Which I think means it was active before all this kicked off. Which I think means you have even more problems than you thought.”

  Anna’s eyes widen. She snatches it from him. “And you just happened to find this, did you?”

  “Crawling on my hands and knees through computer crap is a speciality of mine.”

  Her jaw clenched, she looks at him, at what she’s just taken off him, then reaches a decision.

  “None of what I’m about to say is happening. Do you understand? I am not telling you to make your own way out of this building and do whatever the fuck you need to do to get away from here and lie low. I am not telling you that we have been infiltrated, that some of my best people are dead, and this is the biggest fucking intelligence disaster since someone reckoned Saddam was stockpiling poison gas. I am not saying this, and you are not going to stay in touch via our mutual friend.” She pauses.

  “I will, however, shoot you in the face, just for the hell of it, if you’re still here in ten seconds. Are we clear, Azi Bello?”

  He’s already halfway out of the hole.

  Seventeen

  The best escape plans, Azi reckons, must look pretty similar to the best hacking assaults—because they both involve doing unexpected things quickly. Heavy with adrenaline, his feet pounding the tarmac, he puts block after block between himself and the warehouse, then hails a taxi and takes stock.

  Time is already running out, for him and for Munira. He has a change of clothes, his passport, a heap of highly traceable electronics, several hundred euros in cash and no idea what just happened. But he also has his freedom, and a mandate to put as much distance as possible between himself and the warehouse of horrors.

  First things first: appearances. Azi tells the driver to take him to a pharmacy and picks up razors, shaving cream, deodorant and bandages. Then he staggers back into the car.

  Next is a chicken shop, grim and dank enough to be almost like home, its neon sign heralding flavors no salad can match. Azi pays off his cab, demolishes a bucket of wings big enough to offset his post-gunfight tremors, then orders several off-brand energy drinks and tries not to start screaming or weeping at strangers.

  When the shaking in his hands has finally settled, Azi wedges himself behind a tiny table next to the toilet and tips out the most important electronic item in his stash: an Android burner phone which, with a little persuasion, picks up an open Wi-Fi network and comes online. It’s late at night on Central European Time, which means it’s early afternoon on the west coast, which means that—by his reckoning—there’s a decent chance that his friend Milhon will be responding to messages.

  Milhon is on Azi’s mind both because he’s pretty sure she’s California-based, and because she is the one person in the world he believes can and will help him get what he needs within the next couple of hours: money, money and more money.

  Specifically, as she spent several of their past exploits explaining in detail, Milhon is an expert in the realm of Pseudo-Random Numbers (PRNs to their friends): the strings of data that pass for unpredictable in the world of machines. Engineering a top-notch Pseudo-Random Number Generator is a complex art—and she was one of the best, right until she found out that the “research institute” employing her was being paid by the Russian mafia to reverse-engineer stolen slot machines.

  Being both an idealist and a hacker of considerable ability, she has been lying low ever since—except for sporadic infiltrations in AZ’s company. Right now, Azi is after the same thing as Milhon’s ex-employers: an app able to predict when any slot machine of the right type is about to pay out its jackpot. And, if Milhon is to be believed, this is exactly
what she came up with.

  All such an app needs for you to do is feed the system enough information for it to assess a slot machine’s PRNG state, then start playing it at precisely the right moment and—hey presto!—you’re guaranteed a win. Which is about the only edge currently adequate to Azi’s requirements. The only hard part is that you remain at the mercy of randomness: the payouts come when they come, or don’t, and there’s nothing you can change about that.

  Azi is certain she will have kept a copy, largely because nobody sensible discards software that smart. The question is whether there are any circumstances under which a sensible person might share it. Licking his lips one last time, he logs into one of his secure accounts and sends juice-stained fingertips flying over the burner phone.

  Milhon! AZ here. Emergency favor: real deal, can’t explain now. As big as it gets.

  Mercifully, he has to wait just five minutes for an answer.

  I’m listening.

  This is it. Willing himself to stay calm, Azi thinks back to when Sigma’s first plea arrived: a lifetime ago, when his world was still a shed and a screen. He refused to meet her, then dragged her into a trap. Praying that this hasn’t set some kind of karmic precedent, he keeps typing.

  Download of your casino app, latest version, for me to run on Android. Urgent.

  Can Milhon see the panic behind his words? Are any of the things he believes about the person on the other side of the screen true? It’s another five minutes before the answer comes.

  You’ll owe me. And then some. And then some more.

  I will. Life or death, no joke. Hoping to save a friend.

  Then she asks what he was afraid she would ask.

  Got something to give?

  Azi winces. He could lie or offer empty promises. Or—worse—he could inflict the truth on her. But some knowledge shouldn’t be shared. The app will give him a chance, if he moves fast enough. If he’s lucky.

  Cover blown, no tech. But if I make it, whatever you want.

  A last, agonizing pause.

  Deal. Only for you, AZ. Only for you. Be seeing you.

  Azi almost punches the air with joy, thudding both knees into the table’s cracked underside.

  AZ is back.

  With chicken in his stomach and Milhon’s app downloading onto his Android burner, Azi packs up and locks himself in the chicken shop bathroom for long enough to shave and fasten a fragment of plaster across each fingertip, masking his fingerprints. By the end of the process he almost looks respectable—at least by his own recent standards—and should be slightly harder to track.

  As fast as he can in the cramped space, he then strips to his underwear and runs two of the pocket-sized devices that he picked up in the warehouse carefully across his body. After five minutes, he has found one tiny tracker on each forearm that Odi presumably sneaked beneath his sleeves under the cover of his initial assault: ultra-adhesive slices of silicone so finely crafted that they’re almost indistinguishable from freckles. With luck, Munira will be sporting several of the same.

  Finally, Azi dresses in the cleanish clothes in his rucksack, counts his cash, hails a cab on the street outside and heads for the nearest casino.

  The Spielbank casino at Potsdamer Platz is a modern enough Berlin institution to care more about Azi’s cash and passport than his general appearance. At the entrance stands a statue of a bear with a fruit machine in its stomach, the creature’s paw raised in a mix of triumph and greeting. Inside, the sprawling space is clean and softly lit, the 2 a.m. crowd composed of young tourists and local regulars drifting across four floors of escalating appetite for risk—slots at the bottom; poker, blackjack and roulette up top. The regulars are easy to spot, their glazed eyes and slumped shoulders uniform as they chase the next dopamine hit.

  Azi walks among the slots, conscious that he needs to look like a harmless tourist to avoid being trailed by security staff. The giant neon figure of a blonde in cowboy hat and boots is sprawled along one wall, the roof is a brushed steel arch, and the air conditioning is excellent. To Azi’s relief, a young American near him is filming her winning combination and its payout on her phone—meaning there’s no etiquette against mobiles on this floor. He gets his Android burner out, loads Milhon’s app and starts to wander in search of the right kind of machine.

  There are over three hundred machines in total, most of them brand new. Azi almost despairs at finding a model with a predictable PRNG until he reaches a cluster underneath the giant blonde’s head. Beside her on the wall is an aggressively phallic neon cactus, and between this and her torso is a cluster of eight slots of a type Milhon has listed—WinBig. Four of them are in play, their gamblers’ faces glowing in the lurid neon. Trying to look as gormlessly touristic as possible, Azi sets about registering the state of each active machine.

  As he soon realizes, it could be a long haul. The problem is that big wins don’t come along very often—and it takes quite a few observations to calibrate the app for each machine. This means that the odds of him finding a sure winner before the casino closes at 5 a.m. are not as good as he had hoped. The process also requires him to spend a great deal of time looking harmless—and lose just enough money to look profitable—while fiddling with his phone. Come on, Azi mutters to himself. You’ve been preparing for something like this for most of your adult life.

  By 3 a.m. he is nervous. There are six further suitable machines on the other side of the slot floor, and Azi has managed to assess four of them in addition to the initial eight. None is anywhere near a big enough payout. Security guards pass by frequently and, given the contents of his rucksack, he doesn’t fancy a pat down.

  To allay further suspicion, he heads up one floor to the bar—mirrors, glass, rich reds and reflective metal; a hygienic version of fin-de-siècle decadence—and orders an espresso which he proceeds to load with brown sugar. By the time he has finished ripping open sachets he is essentially drinking a coffee-flavored heap of sugar, but he doesn’t care. The edges of his vision are beginning to wobble with fatigue.

  Then he sees it: another WinBig machine, nestled near the entrance to this floor. It’s being played by an angry-looking business type. Azi pours himself a glass of iced water from the jug on the bar and sidles over until he’s close enough to start entering combinations in his phone. One spin, two, three, four, five, six—Milhon’s app completes its calibration and Azi almost drops off his stool in shock. The highest jackpot is due in ten spins. Twenty thousand euros.

  He pauses, his mind racing. Will the business type play for ten more spins? Almost certainly: he seems to be in it for the duration and has already shot several hostile glances in Azi’s direction. What then? Azi gets to his feet and begins to make his way out of the bar. As he passes by the machine, he stumbles and not-very-accidentally launches his entire glass of iced water into the man’s considerable midriff.

  As Azi suspected it would be, the reaction is ferocious. The business type splutters, swears and unleashes a burst of insults into Azi’s face. With the appalled manner of the habitually inept, Azi grabs a napkin and begins to dab limply at the man’s cheeks and sodden crotch, only to find his wrists grasped in two hairy hands. Looking bewildered, Azi falls backwards onto the floor, shouting for help. The man pushes him down, shouts a few times and manages to get one vicious kick into Azi’s ribs before security arrives: two huge men, restraining the German and shepherding him out of the door.

  At once, Azi leaps to his feet and starts gesturing that there’s no problem at all, that these things always seem to happen to him, that he’s fine. He waits, twenty seconds, thirty, sipping the solid sugar dregs of his espresso. Then he eases himself into the padded chair at the slot machine, loads it up with all his remaining credit, and starts to play. With any luck, Milhon is as good as he has spent the last year believing.

  A few minutes later, digital bells and whistles indiscreetly announce that he has won the jackpot. Five minutes after that, he is cashing out at the nearest booth, accep
ting his winnings in the form of four hundred neatly bound fifty-euro notes.

  Ten minutes later, he is on the street contemplating the worst-case scenario he is about to embrace: making Gomorrah his exit strategy.

  Eighteen

  Given the carnage unleashed earlier, going anywhere near Gomorrah itself is what Azi would usually deem One of the Worst Ideas in History. On the other hand, precisely because of this fact, it’s about the only option he reckons nobody will anticipate. Trying to summon his last conversation with Munira, Azi runs through her words about obtaining the darknet client.

  There’s a username for messages, on Signal. Gomorrah. So simple! You send a secure message, you offer your evidence…

  As soon as Azi has logged into the necessary Signal account on the stolen burner phone, Jim Denison asks Gomorrah to add him as a contact.

  Azi holds his breath in the darkness, gingerly touching the swollen upper lip and aching jawbone given to him by the German. For ten minutes, he waits on a quiet backstreet, close to the main drag on which the casino stands. Street cleaners and delivery vans bustle through the first of the morning light. Everything is taking too long. Even if he can make use of the cash, even if his desperate hopes are answered, it may already be too late. Helplessly, he paces.

  Then, a miracle: his request is accepted. A few moments later, there’s a message.

  Please send required verification.

  Of course: evidence. If he’s very lucky, whatever instructions Munira gave Odi will have ticked the remaining boxes in Jim’s profile. Azi fires off links to Jim’s profiles, the Defiance forums, everything he can find. Then he waits.