In the bundle of tools I’d thrown down ahead of my climb was a slim jimmy a bit like a small crowbar. Carefully, holding my breath, I inserted it between the doors. They were well made and I had to force the tip into the narrow crack, bending and scratching the powder-coated aluminum in a way that gave me a mean satisfaction. This was not something I would ever have done on a job. Leave no trace was my motto, accidents aside, and barring the odd broken ceiling tile, it was something I usually managed. But Cole’s fixtures and fittings were the least of my worries—I would have kicked in the fucking glass if it hadn’t been reinforced.
As I pulled on the jimmy, sweating with the effort, the doors groaned, as if in sympathy with my throbbing side. The gap between them was growing larger, millimeter by millimeter, and now I could see the metal bar of the lock shining in the moonlight. When the gap was about a centimeter wide, I reached in with the tip of the crowbar and pulled the latch sharply upwards. There was a click—and the doors slid back.
I let out a shuddering breath—and stepped into the darkness of Cole’s flat.
Inside, it was absolutely quiet apart from the sound of a man snoring. Carefully, I reached into my jeans pocket and switched on Gabe’s phone, then dimmed the screen and slipped it back into my hip pocket, with the top inch poking out.
I had been in Cole’s flat several times before, and I knew the layout, roughly, but in the darkness everything was strange, and I groped my way towards the snoring, edging round ottomans and coffee tables and almost stumbling over a book that had been left splayed on the floor. My whole side throbbed, hot to the touch, and I was light-headed, almost dizzy—but not in a completely bad way. My heart was hammering, but it didn’t feel like the sick, shallow flutters I’d experienced in the service station. It felt almost like… excitement.
I was right outside Cole’s bedroom door now, and I pressed it open gently, praying that he would be alone, that Noemie would still be abroad. He was. He was naked, sprawled facedown across the sheets, and he looked like he had been drinking. There was an empty wine bottle on the nightstand, and a glass tipped sideways on the floor beside the bed.
I walked across to the nightstand where his phone was charging, faceup, glowing gently in the dim light, and switched on the bedside lamp.
“Wake up, Cole.”
“Jus’ sec,” he slurred, and turned over, hiding his face from the light.
“Wake up, Cole,” I said more insistently. “You’re going to want to see this.”
I don’t know what was different about my voice that time, but something got through to him, and his eyes shot open. For a second he simply stared at me, completely nonplussed, and then he jerked onto his back and scrambled backwards up the bed, clutching the sheets to his crotch.
“What the fuck?” he gasped. “How did you get in here?”
“Check your phone, Cole.” I nodded at the phone lying on the polished wood.
“I’m not checking anything, what the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”
He was staring at me, but I saw that he had inched across the bed, and that one hand was reaching for something in the drawer of the far nightstand. Before I could react, his fingers found what he was searching for, and he sat up sharply. I was staring down the barrel of a small pistol. There was a click as he removed the safety.
“Get the fuck out,” he said, with a kind of snarl of satisfaction. There was a you messed with the wrong person edge to his voice. “I don’t know what you’ve come here for, Jack, but get the fuck out.”
“Check your phone.”
“How hard is this to understand? Get out or I will shoot you.” He said the last words very slowly, like I might be too stupid to understand them. I couldn’t tell if he meant it. The pistol was still pointing at me, trembling very slightly, but he was close enough to kill me no matter how shaky his aim.
Either way, it didn’t really matter.
“Shoot me. I don’t give a fuck, Cole. Don’t you understand? You’ve taken everything from me and I genuinely don’t give a shit if I live or die. Shoot me and explain that to the police.”
“I don’t have to explain anything,” he snapped back. “Someone burgled my apartment in the middle of the night. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to take—”
“One,” I broke in, ticking the objections off on my fingers, “I highly doubt that gun is registered; it doesn’t look very legal to me. Two, check your phone. It puts a pretty big hole in your story.”
“I’m not checking my fucking phone,” Cole ground out, but in spite of himself, his gaze flicked to the phone sitting on his bedside table, and I saw his eyes widen involuntarily at the sight of the notifications blinking on his lock screen. Twitter mention. Twitter mention. Discord call. Instagram tag. Twitter mention. They had already maxed out the counter and were showing as 99+ which, as anyone on social media knows, could mean only one of two things: either something very good had just happened… or something very bad.
Cole didn’t need to open the screen to know which it was. He had already begun shaking his head, his face ashen.
“No. No, no, no, no, fuck… Jack, what have you done.”
“Check your phone,” I said, quietly now, for the fourth time. And this time Cole put down the gun and picked up the phone.
His gasp sounded like a man who had been smacked around the face, and when he looked up at me, his skin had gone the color of skimmed milk—ghostly blue-white in the light from the screen.
“What the fuck have you done, you stupid bitch?” His voice cracked. “Don’t you know we’ll both be killed?”
“Don’t you know—” I put both hands on the bed, leaning in as though to confide a secret—though the truth was, my legs were shaking and I needed the support. “I. Don’t. Care?”
“What do you want from me?” He pushed past me, frantic now, searching around for his clothes, not caring that he was naked and I was standing right there watching as he dug in the drawer for his jeans and pulled them on. “What do you want? Do you want me to die?”
“I don’t care what you do. Everything I want is in the past. You can’t undo what you did. You can’t bring Gabe back. I just want you to admit to my face what happened. I want you to tell me you’re sorry.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said, but the words sounded forced out, each one spat like something that tasted rank. He picked up the gun from where he’d left it on the pillow and stuck it into the waistband of his jeans. “Okay? I’m sorry Gabe died.” He yanked a T-shirt down over his head, so hard the material ripped at the neck. “I’m sorry he went poking around in files no one asked him to check, finding exploits no one wanted him to know about. I’m sorry he didn’t listen to me when I said I’d deal with it. I’m sorry he was a fucking puritanical shit who’d never have done the sensible thing and taken a payoff to shut the fuck up. I had no choice—whatever I did, whether I patched the app or not, if he lived, he was going to tell Cerberus, and then we’d both be dead. I couldn’t save us both, so yes, I picked me. And I know what kind of a friend that makes me. But I didn’t kill him, okay? I didn’t, Jack. So stop trying to make this my fault.”
“So, tell me,” I said, making my voice as persuasive as I knew how. “Tell me, Cole. If you didn’t kill him, who did? Who are you working for?”
“I don’t know!” He was crying now as he searched through his drawers, pulling out a laptop and a bundle of cash. “They came to me—I’d only just started at Cerberus, I was working on some crappy app that never even launched, and they said they were government agents, they had this whole spiel about doing my bit for my country and getting paid for my service. It was small stuff at first. Not much more than what we tell advertisers. But then later…”
“Later they came to you about Watchdog, and Puppydog, and you were in too deep,” I said, feigning a sympathy I didn’t feel. I just needed him to keep talking. “Were they really government, Cole?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. His voice throbbed with a desperation that wasn’t faked. “Maybe some government—not ours, though. I realized that fairly fast. These people are very well funded, very organized, and they’re killers, Jack. We’re both utterly fucked.”
He was stuffing things into a holdall—clothes, money, three passports in an elastic band. He was barely paying me a second glance. I could have leaned over and pulled the gun out of his waistband and held it to his head, but I didn’t need to.
“Give yourself up, Cole,” I said softly. “Come on. This is over and you know it. You won’t even make it to the port.”
“Stay. Away,” he ground out, and brandished the gun at me one-handed, the other reaching for his bag. Tears were running down his face, but I didn’t think they were for Gabe. He was crying for himself. “Stay away.”
“Where are you going?” I followed him to the door. “Cambodia? Belarus? It’s not just the police you have to worry about, you know that, right? These people may be government, but I doubt they care about extradition treaties—they’ll hunt you down wherever you run to.”
“Shut up.” He was out in the hallway now, jabbing at the lift, and when it didn’t come, he opened the door to the stairs. “Stay back or I will shoot you, Jack.”