“Charlie, go to their apartment,” Bravo said. “Take care of her and make sure none of these whiz kids left any traces leading back to us. We’ll clean up here.”
The tall one with dark hair nodded, his back still turned to her. “On it.” He disappeared from her sight. The click of the front door shutting followed.
“She was always smarter than me,” Jasper said. “Told me you guys were a disaster waiting to happen, but I never would’ve guessed you were terrorists.”
What had the Outliers been working on? What were these men so desperate to cover up that they’d kill a bunch of hackers rather than pay for silence?
“This is your last warning.” Bravo pressed the muzzle of the silenced gun to Jasper’s temple. “Be quiet, and finish the code for the scheduled broadcast of the video.”
“You’re going to kill people,” Jasper said, “with some Z-1984 shit—”
A pop split the air of the compact space like a thunderclap. Blood sprayed from the opposite side of Jasper’s head.
Kit slapped a palm over her mouth to kill the scream that nearly burst from her dry throat.
“No!” one of the guys gasped.
Jasper collapsed on his keyboard, his eyes cold and lifeless. Blood trickled down the side of his ghost-white face.
Bravo snagged Jasper’s collar and tossed his limp body out of the chair.
Her stomach convulsed. She wanted to vomit but locked her lips, straining to stay quiet.
“Delta, get him up,” Bravo said, gesturing to Tim.
A bearded man yanked hard on the back of Tim’s Trekkie For Life T-shirt, forcing one of Kit’s best friends up onto his feet. Tim’s eyes were wide with terror.
Delta shoved Tim toward Jasper’s workstation.
In twenty feet and ten seconds, she and the hallway would be in their direct eyeline.
Dread uncoiled in Kit’s chest. She scrambled backward and groped behind her for the door handle to the mainframe room.
Her fingers found the cool steel lever. She depressed the handle, ducking into the freezing room that was kept cold to protect the hardware, and let the door hang open.
She wasn’t a hide-and-cower kind of gal. Yet here she was, pressed against the wall, wishing it would envelop her. The horror of what was unfolding washed over her.
Tim, Jeff, Marty, Lincoln…were all going to die. Her best friends. Her family.
Her insides roiled. She had to get out of there without being seen.
“Finish the program,” Bravo said, his tone icy, detached.
“But the keyboard…” Tim said. “It’s covered in blood and…”
“Brain matter, bits of skull,” Bravo said. “Unless you want yours added to it, I suggest you finish what Jasper started.”
The click-clack of fingers flying across a keyboard cut through the low hum of the surrounding machinery.
She shivered down to the bone. The loft was a three-minute drive. Charlie would search the apartment and tell Bravo she wasn’t there. Bravo would look for her everywhere.
Oh God. God.
What was she going to do? How could she save the others? How could she save herself?
She stared at the wall of backup hard drives linked to the workstations in the Lair. Her gaze drifted over the rows of blinking lights, up the thin handles of the drives, locking on the name of the system at the top: Sentry.
Jasper’s words rang in her head. Take the Sentry. Make it right.
He was misguided and power hungry, but he was clever enough to feed her a message: grab the backup hard drives and find a way to make these bastards pay.
She scanned the serial numbers of the hard drives. Each one corresponded to dates and individual workstations. The archive was vast, cataloging everything they’d worked on over the past six years. If those killers were going to cover their tracks, they’d destroy the backups as well. The Outliers’ life’s work would be eradicated.
Taking precious minutes to pull all the hard drives was suicide. Besides, there was no way for her to carry them all. But she didn’t know who had worked on what for Bravo’s deranged crew or which workstation harbored the data mother lode.
Whatever horror-gram video they wanted scheduled for broadcast was on Jasper’s computer.
Kit found the hard drive linked to Jasper’s station. It was a real-time mirror backup. If Tim wasn’t done loading the encrypted video, it wouldn’t save, and pulling it would send a pop-up alert. She needed to take Jasper’s hard drive last.
Whatever those terrorists wanted, the work had been divided between five hackers and multiple workstations. Think. Come on. Think.
Lincoln was brilliant, kind, a gentle spirit. A natural who found answers for the most complicated problems. Anything significant would have been given to him to execute.
She found Lincoln’s row.
Flipping the switch, she powered his current drive down and pulled it from the mainframe. Her gaze bounced to the doorway. It was a toss-up between Marty, Tim, and Jeff.
I’m glad she doesn’t know what Tim and Lincoln did, Jasper had said.
Another clue. She chose Tim’s drive and stuffed both in her bag.
The pop of gunfire pierced the drone from the air conditioner, echoing in the pit of her stomach. The gun had a silencer, but the sound was sharp, louder than expected.
She ached to do something, anything to protect the last people in the world she loved. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do. Not against three men with guns.
Take the drives and get out. She hustled to Jasper’s backups and found the hard drive she needed and shoved it in her satchel.
Another gunshot snapped in the air. They were executing everyone. The familiar ache of loss cut so deep that her soul bled. But there was no time to grieve. She had to move.
Kit peeked around the threshold and glimpsed Tim and Marty. Both dead.
Instead of having qualms about guns, she wished she had an Uzi in her bag.
Bravo and the other man moved out of her sight.
She slipped into the hall, glancing over her shoulder, and hurried toward the exit. Blood pounded in her ears as she zipped past the break room. The door was almost within reach.
Looking back again, she was nearly breathless with dread. Her stomach was a block of ice, but she kept going.
At the door, she pressed the bar handle down gradually, her hands, arms, entire body quaking with the effort. Desperation made her ache to burst across the threshold, but she had to be careful not to make any noise. With a soft click, she cracked the door open and glanced back.