Chapter 16 Tag #2
Ambrose was stuck. He couldn’t remove the threat from Nightingale, because that was the only thing stopping us from advancing on him. That meant he couldn’t stop McLaren, and he couldn’t release the mobile.
“I said to stop, now!” he screamed again.
Like before, she ignored him.
I saw his intent a second too late—the slight shift in his stance, the way his arm tensed.
Ambrose raised his weapon and fired. The shot cracked through the chamber.
McLaren jerked forward against the keyboard, her hands clutching at the desk for support.
I lunged, but Ambrose swung the barrel back to Nightingale’s head, still clutching the mobile in his other hand.
“Don’t move!” he shouted at us as McLaren slid from the chair, blood soaking her shirt. She reached toward Lex with trembling fingers, then shifted her gaze to Nightingale.
“Damascus…” Each word cost her. Blood frothed at her lips. “Codes…”
Her breath rattled in her chest.
“Finish it…”
Her hand dropped, and her gaze went blank, as if fixated on something none of us could see.
Lex made a sound as if she’d been gutted. She tried to move forward, but Con caught her arm even as she fought against him.
“Lex, stop.” Con held her back. “You can’t help her. She’s gone.”
She stopped struggling but couldn’t look away from McLaren’s body collapsed near the terminal.
The silence stretched. Then the laptop screen flashed again—Administrative Override 47% Complete.
“No!” Ambrose’s head snapped toward the terminal, and his weapon swung away from Nightingale as he lunged for the keyboard.
I charged across the room. Twenty feet disappeared in seconds. Ambrose jerked back with his focus split between the terminal and maintaining his grip on both weapons. For a fraction of a second, his thumb lifted from the mobile screen.
The laptop blared an alert: Countdown Initiated. Ninety Seconds to AIWS Deployment.
“No!” Ambrose’s eyes went wide as he realized what he’d done. The mobile tumbled from his hand, clattering across the floor as he twisted toward me.
The room erupted into motion. Dalgleish raised his weapon toward Con, but Ash was faster—a single shot hit him in the chest. The man’s sidearm spun away as he fell backward.
MacLeod moved to intercept me, but Renegade caught him, using his momentum to slam him against the wall with enough force to drive the air from his lungs.
MacKenzie raised his aim toward Con, but Lex was already moving.
Her shot found its mark—shoulder, not fatal but incapacitating.
When he dropped, his weapon skittered away.
Ambrose jerked the barrel toward Nightingale, but I was already there.
I hit his arm as he squeezed the trigger, and the shot went wild.
The bullet punched into the wall behind us, sending chips flying.
We grappled for control, spinning across the floor.
I locked both hands around his wrist, but he was stronger than he looked.
Years of bitterness and rage fueled muscles that shouldn’t have held against mine.
“You don’t understand!” he snarled, spittle flying. “You’ve had everything handed to you!”
Con reached Nightingale, and his knife flashed as he cut through the zip ties. She stumbled up from the chair, her legs unsteady after being bound for so long. Lex pulled her back toward the wall, away from the fight.
The weapon remained trapped between us. Ambrose twisted hard, trying to angle the barrel toward me. I drove my knee into his ribs and felt something give—a crack that meant broken bones. His grip loosened for half a second, and I ripped the weapon free, sending it across the flagstones toward Gus.
Now, we faced each other with no gun between us and no leverage for either side.
He swung wildly, but I blocked it and drove my fist into his solar plexus. Air rushed out of him in a whoosh, but he came back with a punch that caught my ribs. Pain flared, but I’d taken worse.
“You don’t understand!” he repeated in a ragged voice. “You never understood!”
I blocked his next swing and grabbed his arm, using his momentum to flip him. “You’re right. I don’t understand killing innocent people. I don’t understand betraying family. I don’t understand becoming a monster because you didn’t get what you wanted.”
Across the room, Ash moved to help Renegade secure MacLeod while Gus covered MacKenzie’s fallen form and kicked his weapon away.
I spun Ambrose around and slammed him face-first into the floor. His head cracked against the flagstone with a sound like a breaking egg, and his body went limp.
Con was there at once, securing him with zip ties he’d pulled from his vest.
Red numbers pulsed on the screen. The countdown was still running as sixty seconds blazed in text.
“What did you do?” Con’s knee pressed harder into Ambrose’s back.
Ambrose’s cackle erupted from beneath Con’s weight. The sound belonged to a man who’d lost everything and decided to take the world with him.
“I held it as long as I could, but you made me drop it.” Blood showed on his teeth from where his face had connected with the floor. “This is on your conscience, not mine.”
Fifty seconds remained.
“Every networked system on the planet crashes.” His voice rose, triumphant despite his defeat.
“Hospitals go dark. Planes fall from the sky. Cars with electronic ignition stop working. Traffic systems fail. Emergency services go blind. Life support machines die.” His grin sickened me.
“And we’re in Scotland when it goes live. We all die here. Everyone loses.”
“No!” Nightingale yelled, moving toward the laptop.
Con tried to stop her, but she shook him off.
“The codes.” Her voice cut through the panic. “I have the codes.”
I stared at her. “What codes?”
Forty-five seconds blazed red.
“From Idris.” Nightingale was already at the keyboard, with her hands hovering over the keys. “The encrypted files my brother left me. I memorized everything but didn’t understand what they were until now.”
The pieces fell into place—Idris’s death, the investigation he’d been running, the information he’d tried to protect. “The AIWS kill codes?”
“Yes.” Her fingers hit the keys.
“McLaren must have given them to him. Her last words meant something. Damascus codes. Finish it.”
I moved beside her. “It’s all we have.”
Forty seconds remained.
Ambrose’s face had gone white. “You can’t. Those codes don’t work. We tested them. We made sure—”
But his panic said otherwise.
Nightingale started typing, entering the first string—a long alphanumeric sequence that seemed to go on forever. The system immediately responded—Authentication Required.
She kept going with the second string, even longer than the first. Secondary Authentication Required appeared on the screen.
She entered the third code, the longest one yet—numbers, letters, symbols in a sequence that made no sense to me but clearly did to her. Forty characters. Forty-five. Forty-six.
My heart hammered against my ribs as thirty seconds remained, but Nightingale hesitated.
“Leila?”
“Forty-seven characters.” Her voice wavered. “I remember forty-six. What’s the last one?”
Behind us, Ambrose sneered despite Con’s knee on his back. “You can’t do it. You’ll fail. Everyone dies because you can’t remember one character.”
“Close your eyes.” I leaned closer, my hand on her shoulder. “You memorized it. Idris trusted you with it. The answer is in there.”
She did, and her face went still. Then her lips moved, running through the sequence again.
Time slowed as each second became an eternity. Twenty seconds remained.
Her eyes snapped open. “Seven. The last character is seven.”
When she entered it, the word Processing appeared.
More authentication challenges appeared—security protocols that McLaren must have built in, layers upon layers designed to prevent exactly what Nightingale was attempting.
But she kept going, entering code after code.
Her fingers didn’t hesitate again. They moved, driven by the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
The countdown reached fifteen seconds.
“That’s it.” Her voice shook. “Final sequence.”
The shortest code contained ten characters. If she was wrong, if she’d misremembered anything or gotten a single digit out of order, civilization would end in seconds.
She hit ENTER.
The air felt too thin to breathe as ten seconds appeared.
Processing remained on the display while everyone held their breath.
Ambrose sneered beneath Con’s weight. “Too late. You’re too late.”
My hand found Nightingale’s shoulder as five seconds appeared.
Four seconds.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
Then the screen changed.
Shutdown Sequence Initiated.
Neural Interface Disabled.
EMP Components Deactivated.
All AIWS Systems Terminated.
Countdown Canceled.
The laptop went dark. The hum of active electronics faded to silence. Components that had been ready to destroy civilization powered down into harmless metal and circuit boards.
Nightingale stepped away from the terminal, her whole body shaking now that the adrenaline was crashing. She’d done it. She’d saved the world with seconds to spare.
Movement behind us came sharp and sudden.
Ambrose twisted beneath Con’s restraint, his bound hands reaching for something we’d missed. His fingers found his ankle, and metal glinted in the dim light as he yanked a compact derringer from a concealed holster—he’d have two shots, enough to kill at close range if he got them both off.
“No one wins!” His voice cracked with rage and desperation. “If I can’t have what I deserve, no one—”
A shot rang out. Ash’s bullet struck Ambrose in the chest, and he jerked backward. The small firearm clattered from his fingers, unfired. Red darkened his expensive shirt, spreading quickly through the fabric. His eyes went wide with shock, then confusion, then nothing.
He slumped to the flagstones and went still.
Silence crashed down around us.
Ash’s hand trembled, and his face drained of color as he lowered his gun with his hand. He’d just killed his uncle.
Con’s hand gripped Ash’s shoulder. “You did what had to be done.”
Ash didn’t respond. He just stared at Ambrose’s body.
I caught Nightingale before her knees gave out and pulled her against my chest. She was alive. We were all alive. And AIWS was dead.
“It’s over,” I said into her hair. “You did it. Everything’s over.”
But looking around the room—at McLaren’s body, at Ambrose’s still form, the blood pooled around Dalgleish, at MacLeod weeping against the wall, at MacKenzie, who may or may not still be breathing—I knew it wasn’t over. Not really.
The aftermath was just beginning.