Anarchy Boyz

by D L Young

“What about them?”

  “They saved your ass, if you remember. You owe them, salaryman.”

  “Stop calling me salaryman,” Maddox said. “And your turfies saved your ass, not mine.”

  It was true and it wasn’t. The biker gang had come to Tommy’s rescue while the kid was running interference for Maddox during a datajacking run. But it was also true that if they hadn’t shown up when they did, Maddox might not have been able to pull off his part of the job.

  He took a long draw on his cigarette. The tip glowed to life as he inhaled, tobacco sizzling. “Listen, kid,” he said, blowing, “there’s nothing I can do to help them.”

  “Like you would if you could,” the kid muttered.

  Maddox ignored the comment. “I don’t even know what this is all about. I’m trying to find out.”

  The kid sat there for a moment. “So the cops think you’re a terrorist now, huh?”

  Maddox blew out a tired breath. “I don’t know what they think.”

  “Are you a terrorist?” the kid asked pointedly.

  “Not this week,” Maddox answered glibly, then turned the question around. “But what about your turfies? Did they go and get themselves radicalized? They get off on bombing business offices now? Sticking it to the corporate man?”

  The kid looked offended. “That’s not how they roll. They don’t care about City Hall and bullshit politics.”

  Maddox said, “This is the part where I remind you they call themselves the Anarchy Boyz.”

  “So what?” the kid said.

  “The name implies a certain political leaning, yeah?” Maddox blew smoke.

  The kid rolled his eyes. “It’s just a badass name, that’s it. Bombing a building? They don’t pull stuff like that.”

  Maddox took a long drag. He tended to believe the kid. Despite their name, the Anarchy Boyz had never struck him as having any kind of activist agenda or social axe to grind. They were delinquents, thieves, scam artists, certainly, but they weren’t terrorists.

  He blew out a disappointed cloud of smoke. The kid was a bust. He didn’t know anything helpful, wasn’t holding any pieces to the puzzle. Maddox was as much in the dark now as he’d been before they’d made the trek up to the Bronx.

  “Let me call my friends down on vice squad again,” Jack suggested, seeming to sense Maddox’s frustration.

  Maddox frowned. He’d been mulling over that very action for the last few minutes. “I don’t think so.”

  Jack straightened up. “Why not?”

  He tapped his cigarette over an ashtray next to his gear satchel. “You start asking around too much, and they’ll wonder why you’re so curious.”

  Jack waved a dismissive hand. “Give me a little credit, Blackburn. You think I don’t know how to talk around something? All I have to say is I’m looking for some extra security for my next fight. Hell, there ain’t a cop down there who doesn’t have some kind of side hustle, legal or otherwise. Then I make a bit of small talk. How’s the family? How are things going on the job? You’d be surprised how much a cop will give up about what’s going on down at the precinct.” He made a talking puppet with his hand. “Chatty as hell, most cops I know.”

  “Look,” Maddox said, “like I said before, I don’t think they IDed you up in the Bronx. You need to walk away now. This is a lot of heat.” Jack might have been the king of the underground fighting circuit, but he wasn’t a career criminal. And this strange mess Maddox found himself in was the kind of deep water he knew the fighter couldn’t comprehend, much less navigate. Natural Jack Kadrey could charm his way out of a lot of situations, but this wasn’t one of them.

  Jack stared at Maddox for a long moment, then turned to the kid. “My friend Blackburn here ever tell you about Rooney?”

  Tommy blinked and shook his head.

  “Old Rooney took our man Blackburn here off the street, taught him his trade. And back when I was getting started in the fight game, Rooney hooked me up with some promoters, helped me get the ball rolling.”

  “Jack,” Maddox blurted out, “The old man doesn’t have anything to do with—”

  “You think this Rooney could help us now?” the kid asked Jack.

  “He passed on a while back, young brother,” Jack said. “But if he were still here, he’d give us a hand. You could count on that.”

  Jack paused for a moment, then went on. “Yeah, they don’t make them like Rooney anymore.” The fighter’s voice took on a solemn tone, and a wistful expression came over his face. “It’s dog-eat-dog here in the City. Everybody’s got an angle. Maybe it’s always been like that, not just here but everywhere else too. Maybe that’s just people, you know?” He glanced over at Maddox. “But when Rooney was around, it reminded you things didn’t have to be that way. Not all the time, anyway.”

  Maddox didn’t say anything. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The fighter smiled. “Duly noted, my brother.” He then held up a finger. “One call. That’s all I’m going to make. And I promise I’ll be careful. And who knows?” Jack shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. Like I said, cops are chatty, and maybe Gideon’s investigation—”

  Whatever the end of the sentence was, Maddox didn’t hear it. “Gideon,” he blurted, interrupting the fighter. “You said Gideon.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Naz Gideon. He’s running the bombing investigation.”

  “You didn’t say that before,” Maddox pointed out.

  “Sure I did,” the fighter said.

  “No, you didn’t,” Maddox said. “I would have remembered.”

  Jack straightened up. “So you know him or something?”

  Maddox barely heard the question. The name set off a hundred whirling thoughts in his mind.

  He gazed earnestly into the fighter’s face. “Forget the call for now. I need to check something first.” He removed the deck and trode set from his satchel.

  Tommy looked at the equipment, confused. “You’re going to plug in?” the kid asked. “Thought you said it was too risky.”

  Maddox crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Yeah, it is.”

  8 - A Detective's Remorse

  The smell of the small room turned Detective Deke’s stomach. It was the kind of stink that hung in the air, thick and pervasive, and attached itself to you like humidity in the tropics. A stink that made you deliberately close your mouth to keep out any of its vile airborne molecules. Deke swallowed hard to keep from gagging as a fresh wave hit him. The shit-and-piss stench he could handle. It was the regular rounds of vomiting that got to him. The three odors combined was something from hell, and it nearly made him empty his stomach the same way the four suspects had been emptying theirs for the last hour. The smell of torture and human suffering. Christ, it was nasty.

  A couple meters in front of him, a pair of off-duty beat cops in puke-splattered plastic smocks took turns prodding four biker punks with shocksticks. The teenage punks, suspects in the T-Chen Engineering bombing, sat in metal folding chairs, their lanky frames strapped to the chair back and legs, their arms behind them and bound at the wrists. Each punk was a reeking, soaking mess, pants soaked from waist to knees with the foul mixture of their own fluids. Around the third or fourth shock, they’d each lost control of their bowels and bladders.

  The taller of the two cops poked the working end of his shockstick into the side of the leftmost youth. The punk’s body went rigid, his face contorting grotesquely from the voltage, a guttural, animal sound erupting from his mouth. Deke winced and looked away.

  Next to the detective stood Lieutenant Gideon, his commanding officer, who watched the session impatiently, apparently unbothered by the stench. There was a tightness in Gideon’s square jaw and a manic quality behind his dark eyes, telltales Deke had learned to spot over the two years they’d worked together. His superior was losing his patience—not that he had much to lose in the first place—and Deke sensed the man was close to boiling o
ver.

  In his early thirties, Gideon was younger than Deke by some ten years, but what his boss on the police force lacked in age, he more than made up for in ambition. And in Deke’s twenty years as a cop, he’d found that ambition and an irritable impatience often went hand in hand.

  Deke self-consciously touched his specs again, which were hanging on his shirt collar, making sure they were turned off. Like Lieutenant Gideon and the two cops dealing out the torture, Deke was nakedfaced. There would be no visual record of what would be officially logged as a voluntary interrogation. And no sound of the session would travel beyond the room, thanks to the thick layer of soundproof foam covering every inch of the ceiling and walls.

  The punks didn’t know anything useful. That much was obvious to Deke. They barely seemed to know this datajacker Maddox, much less where he was. The punks had reached their breaking point half an hour ago, though the tough one—the girl, of course—had held out a respectable fifteen minutes longer. After twenty years on the force, you got a sense for these things, and Deke had become something of an expert in spotting the exact moment someone’s spirit was broken.

  It hadn’t been a good day for his boss. The one hot lead they’d had, the kid Tommy Park, who’d called each of the punks’ specs from a market up in the Bronx, had turned out to be a bust. The kid had managed to slip away from the rhino squad Gideon dispatched to pick him up. The lieutenant had been furious over the squad’s failure, and Deke knew his boss would make sure every one of them paid for the screw-up. A month on foot patrol in a hiverise without body armor. Or maybe a few weeks of ground traffic duty at the Five Points. Talk about your hell on earth. The soles of his feet ached just thinking about it.

  Still, given the opportunity, Deke would have traded places with any of them in a heartbeat. They weren’t nearly in as much hot water as he was. Or maybe the better analogy was a vat of acid, because that was what it felt like he’d been thrown into. Like the floor had suddenly opened under his feet and he’d fallen down into something that would destroy him.

  This whole thing had gone too far. He’d been foolish to agree to it in the first place. Why had he let himself get talked into it? Why hadn’t he pushed back more?

  Still, the situation hadn’t yet spiraled completely out of control. And while they couldn’t change the regrettable damage that had already been done, they could still get out of this mess if they were careful. They could still dodge the bullet coming their way.

  The only problem was convincing Gideon. The lieutenant, it seemed, believed he was bulletproof.

  Deke cleared his throat and spoke in a low, confidential tone. “Maybe we should wrap it up,” he suggested, worried about more complications if they stretched out the interrogation much longer. The beauty of the shockstick was that, when wielded by experienced hands, it left no marks on the skin or detectable nerve damage, making it the perfect torture device. Its biggest downside was the cumulative risk that came with overuse. The more shocks the punks received, the more likely something bad might happen. Deke had seen suspects stroke out or go into cardiac arrest after only half a dozen shocks, and these punks had already received twice that many. It was one thing to doctor a log entry, tagging the session as a routine interrogation where (whoops!) the feed on your specs also coincidentally failed. It was something else entirely to have to cover up an accidental death. The last thing Deke and the lieutenant needed right now was a second fatal mishap.

  Gideon didn’t seem to share this concern. He shot Deke an annoyed glance and didn’t answer.

  The detective swallowed. “If they knew anything useful,” he said, “they would have given it up by now.”

  Gideon snorted. “That your expert opinion? Or you just pussying out as usual?”

  “I’m not pussying—”

  “Bullshit,” Gideon interrupted. “For the past half hour, you’ve been standing there, looking like some virgin chick staring a foot-long cock.”

  “I don’t like the direction this is going,” Deke said.

  “Then maybe you should leave the room.”

  “I’m talking about all of it,” Deke said, keeping his voice low. “Not just these punks.”

  The lieutenant’s expression darkened. His stare was like a heat laser boring into Deke’s skull.

  “I’m just saying we should slow down and rethink all of this,” Deke said. He glanced warily over at the beat cops, lowering his voice further. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

  Scowling, Gideon regarded his subordinate skeptically, his glare unwavering as one of the biker punks screamed in agony.

  After a moment’s contemplation, the lieutenant said, “Let’s have a chat in my office.”

  Gideon opened the door. “Back in a minute,” he told the beat cops. The pair looked at him with uncertain expressions.

  “What are you staring at?” Gideon snapped. “I didn’t say stop, did I? Hit them again.”

  ***

  Lieutenant Naz Gideon’s office was a four-walled tribute to its occupant. Plaques with his name bestowing various honors and recognitions. Service medals behind glass frames. A picture of him shaking hands with the mayor. This was the office of someone on the fast track, the decor announced to all who entered. Of one of the department’s brightest shining stars. Deke never failed to marvel at the excessive shamelessness, at the naked ambition it not so tactfully communicated. But that was Gideon, wasn’t it? The runaway locomotive. The raging bull. Step in his way at your own risk.

  Gideon sat behind his desk, hands folded, seemingly relaxed. “Have a seat,” he said. The anger from minutes earlier appeared to be gone, Deke noted. Maybe that was a good sign.

  Deke remained standing, too restless from worry to sit. He paced back and forth in front of the desk. Would the man listen to reason? Would he see just how crazy this whole thing had become?

  “This has all gone too far,” said the detective.

  The lieutenant smiled patiently. “You worry too much, Mr. Sanchez.”

  “That’s not funny,” Deke blurted. “I never would have agreed to go undercover with that datajacker if I’d known…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Gideon sighed. “Deke, sit down. Please.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Deke lowered himself onto the chair.

  “Can I get you something?” the lieutenant offered as he pulled a small bottle and two glasses from a drawer. “Whiskey?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Gideon poured one for himself, picked up the glass, swirled the amber liquid around. “You need to calm down. This will all be over soon enough.” He drank. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about?” Deke tapped himself on the chest. “I’m the one who was plugged in with Maddox. What if I get made?”

  “You won’t. The bogus profile you were using was untraceable, and the forged background was watertight. Maddox didn’t suspect you were anyone but who you said you were, did he? And it’s all gone now anyway. I made sure of that.” He slid his palms together like he was washing his hands. “Mr. Sanchez never existed. I purged it all myself.”

  Deke took a long breath, though it failed to calm him. True, he had to admit, the cover ID and its manufactured history had worked as planned. A datajacker of Maddox’s purported talents wouldn’t have been easy to fool, but Gideon had managed to do just that. The lieutenant had even predicted how the jacker would sabotage the fictitious Mr. Sanchez’s cloaking app. Still, not everything had gone as planned.

  “People died,” Deke said bluntly.

  Gideon’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. He placed it on the desk, stared at Deke for a long moment. “Regrettable,” he said.

  Regrettable, yes, Deke agreed cynically. This whole wicked business was regrettable. Gideon’s obsession with this datajacker was regrettable. The plan to frame him was regrettable. Deke’s stupid, stupid decision to go along with it—hoping to curry favor with the department’s brightest star and re
vive his flailing career—was regrettable.

  And most regrettable of all was the bomb’s mistimed detonation, which had taken the lives of fourteen T-Chen Engineering employees. The device, smuggled in by a hijacked janitor bot and hidden in a cleaning supplies closet, was supposed to go off at two in the morning, when the building was empty except for a few security bots roaming the hallways. They weren’t sure what had happened, why it had blown up during business hours. Someone might have found it and accidentally set it off. Or maybe the timer had failed. For Deke, the question of how it had occurred no longer mattered. As soon as the news of the bombing hit the news feeds and the body count had begun, he’d felt as if the walls were closing in on him. He was an accomplice to murder. Mass murder. And Gideon expected him not only to go about his business as if nothing had happened, which was insane enough, but the lieutenant also refused to abandon his plan to nail this Maddox person to the wall. In Deke’s view, it was a course of action that wasn’t merely flirting with disaster, it was brazenly inviting it to ruin your life.

  “Naz, we have to stop this before it goes any further,” Deke pleaded.

  “It’s too late for that now.” Gideon took another drink. “We’re too far down the road to turn back.”

  Deke wasn’t so sure about that, retracing the chain of events that were supposed to happen if everything had gone to plan.

  Since the datajacker was too slippery, too clever to be caught by conventional police methods, the idea had always been to collar the biker kids first—Maddox’s last known associates—and then coerce them into a confession over the T-Chen bombing. Their guilt in the crime was plausible, given not only their criminal histories and lack of credible alibis but also the fact that one of their number, a kid named Tommy Park, ran a junk stand in Fabbertown that sold tech of all sorts, including the kind that one might use to build an explosive device. Tommy Park and the Anarchy Boyz had turned out to be the ideal patsies.

  Not so coincidentally, on the same day of the bombing, there would be a major security breach inside T-Chen’s datasphere. As the investigation moved forward, Gideon would make sure the digital and physical crimes were inextricably linked and that Maddox was identified as the mastermind behind both the bomb attack and the DS breach. Only a radicalized extremist would commit such an attack, a cold-blooded terrorist intent on fomenting chaos and misery.