I let out a shaky breath. Four numbers, and an asterisk to finish the combination. That still left twenty-four possible combinations—perfectly doable, given mechanical locks rarely had a cutoff for failed attempts, but still more than I could manage with Malik and her guys combing the darkness behind me—even supposing I could keep track of the combinations in my head.
But I had broken enough combination codes to know two things. First, if asked to set a four-digit combination, a sizable chunk of people chose years. And second, because most people picked dates that were personal to them, that likelihood was doubled when the digits included 1 and 9. The chances were very high that the combination began with 19—which meant that it would be either 1945 or 1954. I had no idea which one was more likely, but it didn’t matter. Without pausing to think, I typed in 1954* and twisted the knob so hard the metal gave a quiet shriek. This time, it turned.
The door swung open and I slipped inside, closed it silently, and sank down with my back to the cold metal, my heart thumping hard enough to make me feel sick.
Inside the shack was very quiet, the sound of the sea and the wind muffled by the thick concrete. It smelled of ice cream cones and sour dairy, overlaid with the slight fustiness of defrosted freezers. I was straining my ears for the sound of voices, but it was hard to make out anything above the rushing of my own blood in my ears and the pounding of my pulse.
And then I heard it. Closer than it had ever been before. Very, very close.
“Jack!” It was Malik. She sounded angry now, more than angry, furious. “Jacintha Cross, this is a police order. We have dogs on the way, and believe me, you do not want to be hunted down by the dogs.”
I pressed my face into the pack. There was sand in the stitches where I had dropped it in the dunes. I fought the urge to cough.
And then I heard another voice, a male one. Not Miles but someone else, someone who made my pulse speed up to a sickening pace.
“She outfoxed you?”
It was Jeff.
“That little fucking bitch.” It was a low growl of frustration from Malik. “I saw her, I’m telling you.”
“If you say so.” Jeff sounded more amused than annoyed. Then Malik’s voice came again, sharper.
“Hang on a sec, what’s this place?” There was the scrunch of boots on gravel as they came closer to the shack and stepped onto the concrete apron in front of the counter. I squeezed my eyes shut, as though that could make me somehow less visible. I wished, wished, wished more than anything that I had Gabe’s voice in my ear, telling me I could do this. Because right now, I felt like I was about to lose it.
“Reckon she could be in here?”
There was a short silence, and then, shockingly loud, a sudden rattling bang as someone—maybe Malik—tried the shutter over the serving hatch, considerably less gently than I had.
“It’s padlocked,” I heard from Jeff. “Any signs of forced entry?”
“I don’t think so.” There was more rattling as someone, probably Malik, examined the edges of the shutter, but I knew they were solid. “Let’s try round the back.”
More scrunching. I felt bile rise in my throat and swallowed it down, hard. I had a sudden, sharp memory of hiding under the sofa at Arden Alliance while the security guards hunted outside, but I had never felt this scared on a job.
“Combination lock,” I heard, more muffled this time; the door was evidently thicker than the shutter. Then a series of clicks as someone did the same as I’d done, jabbing random buttons. I pressed my face even harder into the rucksack, trying to still even my breathing. Please, please don’t notice the worn keys…
“Fuck,” I heard, in Malik’s voice, her tone disgusted. “Well, I can’t see how she could have got in here.”
“I think she’ll have doubled back, gone up to the road to try to hitch a lift. She’s good with people. Persuasive. It’s more her style,” Jeff said a little condescendingly. There was an I know what I’m talking about edge to his tone. Malik gave an exasperated sigh.
“I’m telling you, she didn’t double back. I saw something.”
“Coulda been a rabbit,” Jeff said with a shrug in his voice. Malik made a sound like she was trying not to tell him where to shove the rabbit.
“Well, either way, there’s not much we can do until the mist lifts,” she said tightly. “Let’s fan out, check the road, and then when it gets a bit clearer we can try again.”
Behind the metal door, I let out a shuddering breath.
I waited until the sound of their boots fell silent. Then I pulled myself to my feet, opened the door, and peered out the tiniest crack. I wouldn’t have put it past Malik to have been waiting, silently, to see if I popped up, like Jeff’s rabbit from a hole.
But she was gone. And so was Jeff. There was no one there, just the swirling mist.
I turned up the collar of the coat against the stinging sand, gently closed the door of the shack behind me, and then walked on, into the dark.
It was maybe two, three hours later that I stumbled wearily into the outskirts of Hastings. The sun was only just coming up, and I hadn’t dared to hope for an open cafe, but to my amazement, there was one down by the port—not a fancy place, just a diner serving bacon sandwiches and tea to the fishermen and dockworkers. At the counter was a group of workmen who’d stopped off for a complicated order of hot drinks and breakfast baps.
As I stood behind the foreman in the queue, I felt my legs shaking with what might have been anything from hunger, to tiredness, to just plain shock.
What I was doing definitely wasn’t sensible—I didn’t know what Malik’s next steps might be, but I’d been seen in a town only a few miles up the coast, and I was wanted for murder. It was surely only a matter of time before my picture was in the paper. The big question was whether the police knew about my hair. Had they found footage of me at the train station? Or were they still operating under the assumption that they were looking for a girl with red hair in an anorak?
Either way, I probably didn’t have much time left. But that didn’t matter. For the first time in two days, I had an idea of what to do next. It had been forming as I ran through the dunes, thinking over my realization of the night before, pondering how I could infiltrate Sunsmile without getting caught. Normally for a job like this, a big job, breaking into a company full of sensitive details, Gabe and I would have done weeks of phishing, cracking, and OSINT—gathering both covert and open-source information from all the places we could until we had a clear picture of who to target and how to get in.
I didn’t have weeks. I might not even have days. I didn’t have access to Gabe’s library of hacking tools, password rippers, and Trojan horse programs. And if I got caught, I would have no get-out-of-jail-free card, no head of security to bail me out. But I did have a plan.
A prickle of excitement ran through me—and then I realized that I had reached the head of the line, and the server was standing with her arms crossed, waiting for my order. I bought a cup of tea and a toasted teacake and asked for the Wi-Fi password. Then I found an empty table and fired up my computer.
The first thing I did was what I almost always did when choosing a target. I went to Instagram and searched for any posts geotagged to Sunsmile Insurance Ltd. The head office was in Milton Keynes, and luckily the employees were an Instagram-savvy bunch who loved taking pictures. More importantly, Sunsmile was a big company. Small places, where the security guards knew every single member of every team, were something of a nightmare. But Sunsmile looked to have several hundred employees—and that was just the ones on social media.
I scrolled down the posts, page after page of them, taking down possible names, clicking through to profiles. I was looking for two things: women of about my age, ideally not too physically dissimilar from me, and holiday snaps. There was one more thing I was keeping an eye out for—a picture featuring a security pass—but that seemed like too much to hope for, so I wasn’t holding my breath on that one. Firms had got much better about not letting employees post their passes, in part because of people like me telling them about the risks.
Somewhat to my astonishment, however, it was that which came up first: a man holding up his brand-new employee pass and grinning broadly. “First day nerves LOL!” read the caption.
I clicked through and enlarged the image. Oh, Brian from Finance. You lovely, lovely idiot.
He’d had the sense at least to obscure part of his real name, but that didn’t matter for my purposes. I screenshotted the pass and saved it to my downloads, then went back to looking for likely targets.