Molly hasn't taken her eyes off Murray throughout the whole conversation. Her world is narrowed down to a tunnel; she's barely been aware of anyone else, just her opponent. As the jet starts to move, she begins to notice her surroundings again. Sawyer, Raghuveer and Brody are belting themselves into seats on the other side of the cabin, giving their boss as much space as possible, professionally incurious about the conversation. They're not important any more. She can take them off the board.
The same goes for Graves, though she couldn't have got this far without him. He's been absolutely reliable: dogged, clever and perceptive in just the right ways. She doubts she could have counted on many people noticing the cat hair on Will's sweater, let alone making that mental leap to connect it to 'Damocles'. That took a degree of creativity that a thug like Sawyer isn't capable of. When she had put him under pressure – the faked 999 call, Piotr as the emergency operator on the callback – he'd analysed the options coolly and taken the only safe path she had left open to him. Straight to Murray's private jet, with her in tow.
The pilot's voice comes over the speaker, interrupting the music, telling them to please fasten their safety belts. Molly does hers up and leans back in her seat. Almost done, she thinks. She lets herself enjoy the luxury for a second, sinks back into the butter-soft leather, then spots Graves out of the corner of her eye, looking at her. Don't look too relaxed. We need to be in the air before this is over.
Liftoff is so smooth she barely notices it. Acceleration pushes her back, but there's only the mildest of lurches in the pit of her stomach as they climb. Out of the window to her right she can see the outskirts of London, buildings and motorways showing in the darkness as a grid of white and amber lights; cars, distinct at first, fading in to streams of red and white as the jet gains altitude. To Molly, it looks like a network, data flowing in and out; everything that had been real and concrete, on the ground, becoming abstract patterns. Then they're through the clouds and it's just them and the stars.
There's a rap on the table and she looks back to see Murray glaring at her. "So who are you, anyway?" he asks.
She fixes him with a look. "I'm Molly. Molly Root. I know who you are – you're Jonathan Murray."
He smirks. "Very good. You're what, fourteen? Fifteen?"
"What's it to you? Danny was a kid, and it didn't stop you killing him," says Molly.
"I didn't kill anyone," says Murray. "Whatever Lionel here does, he does on his own initiative. All I ask for are results, and he gets them."
Molly laughs in his face. "All he got was lucky. I had a man on the inside of his team for days, feeding me information. It's how I know who you are." She's aware of Graves half-turning in his seat, his attention fully on her now. "I've been in his computers, read your emails. You've been scared, haven't you, Jon? I liked it when you were scared."
"Where's my data?" he says.
"Oh, it's safe," says Molly. "It's mirrored across twenty servers, running as a torrent on a few trackers, burned to disc and locked in safety deposit boxes. You could probably hunt them all down if you knew where." She sighs. "It doesn't matter, really."
Murray leans forward, his elbows on the table. "Why not?"
"It's all encrypted," Molly says. "Your own security. AES two fifty-six. I don't have the encryption key, so I can't get in to it. Brute force cracking would take longer than the lifetime of the universe. It's all just junk without the password."
Murray looks at Graves over the tops of his spectacles. "Is that true?"
Graves nods. "If they didn't manage to grab the key, she's right. I think if they had it, they'd have released it already. They've had enough time since the initial raid."
There's a pause as Murray thinks about this, and then the frown smooths out to be replaced by a wide grin; he shows Molly one row of perfectly white and even teeth. It's a predator's smile. "So I guess I was worrying unnecessarily," he says.
Graves says, "It looks that way, sir. Though Ms Root is going to need to help us track down all the copies, in any case. I won't rest easy until we take care of everything that's in the wild."
Murray leans back. "There will be plenty of time for that, I'm sure. Right now I'm just happy this deal can go ahead without any more issues."
"Deal?" says Molly. "You killed my friend over a business deal? This whole thing has just been about money?"
"What else is there?" says Murray, still smiling. "It's about a lot of money. Millions, actually. It's worth Lionel getting his hands a little dirty."
"So what's all the money for?" Molly asks.
"Waste," says Murray. "A couple of thousand tons of hazardous chemicals we got stuck with. You know about coker gasoline? Low-quality stuff you get when you crack sour crude oil. It's not good for much – not worth much – until you sweeten it. That means taking the sulphur out. You know what caustic soda is, Molly?"
"Some kind of acid," Molly says.
"Close," says Murray. "It's alkaline, at the other end of the scale. Pretty nasty stuff. So you pump it in with the gasoline, and it washes out all the stuff you don't want. You end up with naphtha, which you can sell, and a lot of waste, which you need to pay someone to take off your hands and reprocess."
"Let me guess," says Molly. "You didn't want to pay."
"Exactly. It would have wiped out our profit on the deal. So we pumped it into a couple of tankers and sent them off to a couple of nations where the locals aren't too choosy about what they dump out in the bush. We pay them a couple of percent on the deal, they get rid of the stuff quietly, and everyone's happy." Murray shows her the teeth again. "Win-win."
"Except for the people who die when it leaks into the river, or out of the dump site?" Molly says.
Murray picks an imaginary shred of lint off his cuff. "The way I figure, once it's out of our hands, it's not our responsibility any more. What they do with it isn't up to me."
Nothing's up to you, Molly thinks. You just sit here in your jet like some kind of god, making the calls, telling your representatives on Earth what needs to get done, and when people get killed you spread your hands and say you didn't know what was happening down there on the ground.
"And that's what's in the emails – that's what you've been trying to keep from getting out?" Molly says.
Murray nods at her. She hates him.
"Excuse me," Molly says. "I need to use the bathroom."
Sawyer stands up, as if to go with her, and Graves waves her away. "She's not going anywhere, Lucas," he says.
When she comes back, she doesn't go back to the seat. She can't stand to be near Murray any more. Instead she leans against the bulkhead at the front of the cabin, hands in pockets.
She says, "Do you play Go, Jon?" He doesn't like it when I call him that, she thinks. There's a muscle in his jaw that twitches when he's suppressing anger. She bets he grinds his teeth in his sleep.
"No," he snaps.
"It's a good game. Better than Chess, I think. At least, Go is still a game where you have to be human to play it at the top level. You can't rely on a computer – on calculations, you know. The sort of thing you're good at."
"What are you talking about? Lionel, you want to give her a shot or something?" Murray's voice is a whine.
Will had done his job well, Molly thinks. The phone had been just where she'd told him to leave it, buried half way in the stack of paper towels in the bathroom's dispenser; now it's in her pocket. Her thumb is poised to send the first command.
"You know what the most basic concept in Go is, Jon?" Molly asks. "Life and death. Let me give you a quick demonstration." There's something in Graves's eyes as he turns to look at her, some sort of blossoming knowledge; then Molly thumbs the control.
Without any warning, thirty-five thousand feet above the English Channel, the jet engines cut out.
The next instalment of Root will be available on Thursday. If you can't wait till then, take the Acenet challenge to see if you have what it takes to join this secret world. Then join the discussion on our Facebook page and test your wits against the top Acenet members
