The Gomorrah Gambit Read online

“If…If we’re already dead, why would we tell you anything?”

  “Azi, come on. I’ve done this before. Everyone talks. It takes a while. But they always do.”

  Hatred: that’s what he has to draw upon. Enough hatred to make him brave, to keep her talking—to fill his blood with fire. “Fuck you, Munira. Or whoever you are. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. It’s over. We know everything, this place is surrounded. You’re done.”

  She laughs at this, as though delighted that he knows his lines so well.

  “So tough, Azi, it’s admirable. A lovely bluff! But I have a shortcut that always takes me to the truth. Adam…look at me. That’s right, I know all about you. Give me a smile.”

  Ad looks up, winces, then gives Munira the benefit of his middle finger. “No thanks. You’re not my type.”

  “Oh, but I was. Remember? And I’m so glad I finally get the chance to do this.”

  In one steady motion Munira angles her gun towards Ad and pulls the trigger. The bottom half of his left leg seems to burst. With a gurgling scream, Ad falls forwards. Blood drips between his clutching fingers, black under the fluorescent light. Munira adjusts her grip on the gun.

  “I told you, I’ve done this before. He’ll die, but not for a while. Plenty of time for the other leg. Then for the arms. Then it will be your turn, Azi.”

  Azi has seen more violence in the last week than he feared or dreamed of seeing in a lifetime. Yet this is different. Here, the pain belongs to someone else. And he can end it. As if addressing a lazy student, Munira continues.

  “Take a good look. I will hurt your friend until he begs for death. I will maim and mutilate him while you watch. It’s all the same to me. But I don’t think you’re up to this.”

  Azi looks at the cage walls, the polished floor, the dazzling lights. Ad is breathing fast and sobbing high in his chest, like a child.

  “Munira…Please don’t do this. Tell me what you want. There must be something. Just let me help him, he’s going to bleed to death.”

  She speaks fast, as if rattling off a list. “How did you find out the Institute was involved?”

  “IP addresses. From the Islamic Republic. I blackmailed your cousin…her cousin. Kabir. He sent files showing exit nodes for Gomorrah in this building.”

  She nods. “I see. And how, exactly, could you get in here?”

  “Ad planted a vulnerability when he worked at the Institute. In the main operating system, the clean zone. It was everywhere. So we activated it, to create a diversion.”

  “And you just decided to hammer your way through the floor?” She sounds impatient. “I’m not an idiot. You had someone on the inside. Who was it?”

  “Nobody, I swear it! We worked it out.”

  At his words, Munira points her gun towards Ad’s intact leg. “You’re lying. One last chance.”

  Azi’s vision has started to do strange things. Everything is out of focus apart from the small, dark gun.

  With a shuddering breath, Ad turns to him. “Fuck…her…mate. Don’t tell her…anything.”

  Ad has levered himself back into a sitting position and seems, somehow, to be bringing his pain under enough control to lean forwards. If he and Ad can both make a move at the same time, Azi thinks, if they can manufacture some kind of distraction, perhaps there is a slim chance. Perhaps there’s hope.

  The stink of blood is hot and bitter in the air. Raising his voice and trying to draw her attention, Azi looks Munira in the eye.

  “It was just us! Just us, nobody else. But I—”

  She sighs and pulls the trigger again. There’s a crash and a wet thud. Ad’s screams are those of an animal, without control. He falls onto his face, blood pooling thickly beneath him, his hands flailing towards the gore of his legs. Azi starts to move, but the gun has now turned in his direction. It gestures him into stillness, gliding in its owner’s grasp.

  “How is your memory now, Azi?”

  “Oh my God, oh Jesus, please…There was nobody inside. Odi, he helped us. He came over with me. We came together, from Athens. After Ad got in touch, because I sent him a message. The Americans refused to help. It was just me, Odi and Ad, I swear it. Please, don’t kill him. I’ll tell you everything, anything. Please! Please.”

  “Fine. What have you found out about Gomorrah?”

  “Nothing! Not yet. We’ve just started. Nothing. Nothing! Oh Jesus, please—”

  The wordless noise still coming from Ad fills Azi’s head. It’s the most appalling thing he has ever heard. The gun gestures, delicately.

  “I’m aiming at his left arm. Last chance to tell me anything you’ve left out. Anything.”

  “I swear it, I swear it, there’s nothing…we used a dolphin hack, smashed the giant jellyfish, came through the floor, picked the lock, I…please, let me help him.”

  Munira arrives at a decision, as if enough time has been allocated to this bothersome task.

  “Well, this is getting boring, Azi. The damage you’ve done is unbelievable. Yet, I want you to know, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you think you’ve found in here will die with you. I guess I should congratulate you. But this is goodbye.”

  She points the gun at Ad’s face. With furious concentration, Azi starts to speak, watching Munira, hunting for any flash of recognition or distraction as he throws words towards her.

  “I’m begging you! Look. I’m on my hands and knees. Let me tell you something you don’t know. About the Organization. And the Institute. And Erasmus. The director. There is something I know about him, something we found. Just let Ad live, please, just let me tell you. It’s on the laptop, look, please, let me show you…”

  The Organization, the Institute, Erasmus. It’s a kind of cold reading, beloved of con men and spiritualists. But it’s working. At this last name, her eyes widen involuntarily. Erasmus. There’s something there that matters. Something that she fears, or loves, or needs to know.

  Hauling himself into a kneeling position on the blood-slicked floor, Azi keeps begging and repeating Erasmus’s name, gesturing towards the laptop. Then, the instant her eyes shift, he lunges and kicks with all his strength at the metal door of the server cage.

  Munira turns, but it’s too late. She’s standing just outside and the gate’s momentum slams it shut, clicking the lock into place. Its mesh—he hopes—is too finely woven for any bullet. Without looking around, Azi turns to Ad and rips the T-shirt off his own back. It’s only as he’s desperately trying to fasten the blood-soaked strips of fabric around Ad’s ruined legs that he realizes Munira is chuckling.

  “Very clever. Proper spy stuff, Azi. Great job. Now you get to die in a new and exciting way.”

  Carefully, Munira holsters her gun, folds her arms and composes her voice into a monotone.

  “Computer, username Amira Dewan, verify. Override all protocols. Lockdown all exits. Begin coolant dump. Confirm.”

  A distant gushing sound floods the room at her words. Still tending to Ad, Azi glances at Munira one more time.

  “Goodbye, Azi. This entire space will soon be full of water. It doesn’t mix with electricity, or people. You’ll be dead, the servers will be dead. And I will be relaxing in a giant marble bath, drinking something expensive, not giving a moment’s thought to either this or you again. Ever. Sorry it didn’t work out.”

  She turns and walks away, her heels tracing ripples in the first few waves.

  Forty-seven

  It took her a long time to persuade Erasmus that hers was the way to go, to convince him that she could manage the timings, the expectations, the revelations. But she did it, and now, at last, her plan is unfolding.

  On the outskirts of Paris, four heavily armed jihadis in an unmarked van are arrested in a raid that sees no loss of life. The men all bear French passports and have been under constant observation since the Organization first became aware of their existence.

  In unrelated rural locations outside major German cities, four well-dressed groups of young men are arrested as they make
their final preparations for what appear to be weekend trips in smart new camper vans. One of the vans explodes when a nineteen-year-old slipping back inside manages to trigger the explosives with which its seat cushions are packed. Four policemen and both remaining suspects are killed instantly, while a fifth policeman will die later that day in hospital.

  In the southern outskirts of Berlin, six men gathered in a nondescript rented office are subdued by gas pumped through the ventilation system, before they can access the crate of automatic weapons that has been sitting in a delivery bay for the last week.

  Twenty-four further individuals are tracked down across rural France, Germany and Italy with minimal incidental damage. It is the largest, most impressively coordinated and successful anti-terrorist operation the continent has ever known. Two men manage to kill themselves before they can be captured—one with the detonator from a larger device, one with a kitchen knife—but everything else is expertly anticipated.

  Entire regions are on lockdown. Social media and news speculation is instant, intense and riddled with conspiracies. The French president, German chancellor and Italian prime minister announce a simultaneous press conference at the European Union headquarters in Brussels, where they will stand alongside fellow leaders and speak to the magnitude of the averted crisis. Behind the scenes, multiple security services rip up old rulebooks, abandon protocols and start wondering what the hell went wrong with every single system they own.

  Munira is glad that she dispensed with Azi and his friend in time to witness this in real time. She needs to leave the hotel soon, but it’s important both to savor and to learn from the execution of something so long planned. In its way, what is playing out is simple, ticking along with a clockwork inevitability. This is the nature of well-made plans. They become the only possible future, because you’ve stripped away every other path events might take.

  Simplify, simplify, simplify. This is her own motto, with which she shed the wasteful, complicated misery of her childhood like a snake’s skin. Who is more useless than a daughter born into wealth and tradition, a prize polished for someone else’s aspirations? Defiance is the absence of regret. And, speaking of Defiance, the grand finale in Görlitz is at last about to begin.

  Tomi’s rally will go ahead, its security guaranteed by the imminent arrival of four vans’ worth of elite troops from Interpol’s Counter-Terrorism Centre. Other police and troops are being quietly stood down. A picturesque rabble of protesters will only add to the confusion.

  Amid ferocious turbulence, nothing is simpler than men with the correct credentials arriving to take charge. The state lives and dies by its monopolies of violence, security, verification—and these are what she has pledged to dismantle and reshape.

  Across Europe, the last hour of the old world begins.

  Forty-eight

  For the first few minutes, Azi does nothing but struggle to staunch the flow of blood from Ad’s legs. Miraculously, reducing his own and then Ad’s T-shirts to rags seems to have some effect, once these rags have been knotted as tightly as slipping hands can manage above each knee. Azi clasps Ad, trying to soothe his friend’s shaking and gasping, whispering that everything will be fine.

  Only when he’s sure that the flow has become a trickle does Azi dare turn to the laptop to see if what he was attempting has worked. He and Ad created the dolphin hack on this computer. It remained ready, in theory, to blast soundlessly out from its speakers at the push of a button. If Azi managed to time his button-press for the minute the woman he knew as Munira spoke her instructions, the computer should have access to her admin account.

  In theory.

  Ad is watching him, Azi realizes, with something like a gleam in his eyes—with the realization of what Azi was trying to do. Despite everything, Ad manages to summon a shadow of his voice.

  “Mate…did it work?”

  “Hang on in there!” Azi replies. “I’m checking, I’m checking. Waiting for the system to talk to your routine. It’s going to work.”

  “If it doesn’t, you get out. Try.”

  “Bollocks to that, Ad. You’re coming with me. Both of us. We did it, we’re going to make it. We’re good.”

  “Don’t forget…” Ad seems to be drifting out of consciousness now, unable to finish his sentence.

  “Ad? Ad! Stay with me here. Look, it’s coming! Access, Amira Dewan…it’s lighting up!”

  They’re in. Azi can see it, onscreen: a log of actions under Amira Dewan’s master account. It’s definitely too late to stop the data center from filling up with water—nothing about the coolant dump she initiated looks reversible—and nor does he have any hope they can climb back out through the ceiling. There is, however, a function labeled exit nine that she appears to be using for her own escape.

  Azi watches it, onscreen. The exit flashes open for a few seconds, then closes. This must have been her departure. He waits, letting her get clear. Seconds pass like hours. Then he orders the exit to release. It flashes open once again—and, miraculously, stays that way.

  If Azi can find a route across the data center before the trickle of water thickens into a torrent, they should be able to make it. As long as he can drag Ad with him. As long as the woman he now needs to call Amira really has left and isn’t waiting to finish them off. As long as whatever waits outside isn’t as fatal as what’s inside.

  Grasping Ad by the waist, ignoring the screaming pain under what is left of his stitches, Azi releases the server cage door and prepares to move. Then he realizes that Ad is resisting him—gesturing back towards the laptop and the rope of cable still connecting it to the servers.

  “Don’t forget, Azi…The primary goal.”

  “What are you talking about, Ad? This isn’t a movie. You’re going to die if we don’t get out of here.”

  “To win the game. Gomorrah.”

  “Fuck that. Fuck all of that. You’re dying.”

  Ad pushes Azi feebly, gesturing towards the laptop.

  “Then I’m not fucking…dying…for nothing.”

  There’s no way Azi can attempt any rescue without Ad’s cooperation. Even half-dead, he’s the world’s most stubborn bastard.

  Swearing, Azi lunges towards the laptop, lifting it just clear of a wave flooding the floor of the server cage. How long do they have before core systems start to shut down and the exit closes? Trying to block out everything apart from the keyboard and screen, Azi dives into Amira Dewan’s account.

  As his glimpse of Jim Denison’s data suggested earlier, every single action taken by every single user of the Gomorrah darknet has been visible to her at all times. Even a glance at these records shows that she has constantly been creating messages and content, manipulating auctions, using Gomorrah to pull its users’ strings.

  Desperately, Azi starts copying files to the laptop, capturing the most recent logs first, the blocks of data coded by date and location. Ad is breathing faster and more shallowly on the floor behind him, the air catching in his throat.

  Onscreen, Azi recognizes something. The locations in the Middle East, the timings, familiar from the document dump that Sigma—as he knew her then—shared when she first got in contact. These are the names of the jihadis she betrayed when she handed over their details to Azi: tens of millions of dollars poured into false European identities, their recipients betrayed by the very darknet that supplied them. What was her plan?

  Then Azi sees it. Two dozen more names and locations, none of them familiar, complete with transactions and messages dating all the way to the present—the most recent originating just half an hour before she arrived here. A second, secret jihadi army. Azi sets the files to copy. There’s a noise behind him. Turning, his knees now trailing through half an inch of water, he watches Ad slump forwards. Ad’s skin is horribly pale against eddies of blood and dirt. There is no time left.

  Ripping the laptop away from the cable and wedging it under one elbow, Azi reaches under Ad’s shoulder with his free arm and tries to stand up. It�
��s impossible. Ad is cold and limp, his eyes unfocused. The pain in Azi’s body has spread and sharpened into a stabbing assault across his entire torso. Breathing through it, he leans down and slaps Ad across the face, once, twice, then rests his forehead against his friend’s and speaks with all the force he can muster.

  “Hold me, Ad. You need to hold on. Arms around my shoulders.”

  Ad groans.

  “Ad. This is it. End of the road. Win or lose. Don’t let them win. Hold on.”

  Somehow, Ad’s cold hands fasten around his neck. Azi rises, leaning Ad’s weight across his back, hunching out of the server cage through filthy water. There’s nothing to differentiate one direction from another except the liquid flowing across the floor. They’re underground, which means the way out is surely upwards.

  Turning against the water’s flow, Azi moves between the caged servers, his half-naked body slick with sweat and humidity. Ad is hanging on, but it’s not clear how long he will last.

  Then Azi sees it. A door on what might be an outside wall, a number illuminated above it. Eight. He looks left and right, slipping and skidding against a current that’s now almost at his knees. One more number, one more door. Azi doesn’t look at the blood, at the ruins of his friend’s lower legs, at the server lights blinking and turning dark. There is another glow above a door, perhaps thirty feet away. He walks, he staggers, half-kneels and then rises, crawling against the slope and the spillage of the floor. Number nine. Open. And then…

  …a concrete ramp, the dazzled intensity of daylight, a last staggering ascent, and a scene of unmitigated mayhem.

  Forty-nine

  The best thing about being met by a horde of armed, dangerous and extraordinarily efficient-looking Americans, plus their entourage of extraordinarily formidable-looking vehicles, is that Ad is instantly hefted into the back of a vaguely medical truck.

  The worst thing is that, with similar rapidity, Azi is gestured at gunpoint towards a van with a strong about-to-be-imprisoned-forever vibe. Has anything of significance not happened to him at gunpoint during the last twenty-four hours?