He hoped all his other men were cozied in their three different assigned motels in Brooklyn, none more than a mile away from here.
He didn’t like Vanessa’s silence. He knew she was pissed, sulking, but he also felt it was something more. This silence of hers—after a bombing, she was usually on top of the world, but not tonight. Well, things had changed. She’d get used to it. She’d come around. Then he realized that Ian, Andy, all of the men were quiet after Bayway and all the deaths. No, he realized they’d all been on edge before tonight, and he understood now it was because of Darius. He knew all Ian’s men were afraid of Darius, and they were right to be. Matthew knew there was a killing lust in Darius that ran deep, and was as automatic as a snake striking out.
No, it would be all right. They would stick to the plan, the grand plan he and Darius had devised.
But still, Matthew worried about Ian, his best friend, the one man he’d trusted for so long. He thought of those long-ago days when the two of them had traveled through Europe, guns and bombs in their backpacks, targeting those electrical grids and oil refineries that relied heavily on Middle Eastern oil. But now he’d come to see that destroying them in his perfectly executed little bombings had been petty, nearly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and they hadn’t accomplished very much at all.
But Darius had showed him the way, the new way, and he wanted it so bad he could taste it, the final revenge for his family. Close, so close now. No looking back, only forward, ever forward. He and Darius would stop the madness once and for all, and because of them the world would change. It made him tremble to think about what he was going to do. And he felt, deep down, where it counted most, fear and pride and a sense of infallibility. What he would do was righteous.
He called Vanessa to help him. Silently, they unloaded the car, pulled a dirty tarp over it, and placed a large rock on the hood so it blended in with the other cars on the dingy repair lot, and then went up the oily, stinking stairs to the apartment. It was the middle of the night, no one to see them.
There were blackout curtains on the windows, a good thing, because inside, the apartment pulsed with gleaming monitors and equipment that took up every available flat surface, their screens glowing blue in the night. Andy Tate, firebug and computer expert, too young to be as crazy as he was, always wired, no coffee necessary, was leaning back in a broken leather chair, his legs crossed on top of the kitchen table, alternately playing with a Zippo lighter and eating an apple.
He saw them, raised a fist, and shouted, “I am the master of the universe!”
Matthew felt his heart pound as he hurried over to him. “Does that mean you’re in?”
“Tango down, bitches. Oh, yeah, dude, I pulled down their drawers and slipped it right in. My baby has already infected all the terminals and servers, corrupted all their precious files. I have control of the master boot records. Everything’s offline and I should have all the data downloaded in another hour, two tops. They won’t know what hit them. They’ll be scrambling for days trying to track us, and we’ll be long gone, with everything we need in place.”
“Good. Good. Well done, Andy.” He turned to Vanessa. “Go shower and start packing. We leave as soon as Andy has the information downloaded.”
She gave him an emotionless look and went down the narrow hallway, fear scoring deep at Andy’s announcement. This, at least, she’d known about, but now it was reality. Andy had gotten into all the major oil companies’ computer systems. Truth be told, she hadn’t imagined he’d be able to do it. Well, she’d been dead wrong. She had to send in an alert right away that it was no longer a plan, it was done. It would happen.