Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  “I’ll skip the rather obvious joke about The Who being wherever Roger Daltrey is,” Mendelsohn said. “How do we get to the why?”

  “They’re all connected,” I said. “The why is usually the easiest to figure out, because villains like to monologue. They have a reason for what they do, after all; they don’t just descend into wanton criminality for shits and giggles. This Grendel, though, he’s been pretty quiet about why he’s pissed off enough to travel cross-country, steal, and kill an FBI agent.”

  Mendelsohn nodded. “So that’s unusual in your experience? That stoicism?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, kicking myself for not taunting Grendel a little more in that direction. “Villains aren’t generally all that bright, even when they’re crazy dangerous. They’re either after money, chasing an ideology, following a creed, or assuaging damage to their ego—MICE is what the intelligence community used to call it, though they used it for figuring out how to flip people into being agents for the CIA or ferret out spies on our soil.”

  “Fascinating,” Mendelsohn said. “That’s a very interesting item to carry in your analytical toolkit.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said. “Anyway, looking at this Grendel—if money was the motive, how he’s making it from these attacks isn’t obvious. It’d be easier for him to walk into a bank vault and run off with truckloads of cash.”

  “Would it?” Mendelsohn asked. “Given the new meta security protocols most banks have implemented?”

  “Yeah, probably.” I nodded. “Even the Federal Reserve banks aren’t prepared for something on the scale of Grendel. He could crash through even reinforced walls, I suspect. So money seems out as an immediate motive.” I ticked that one off, holding up four fingers and pushing down the pinky. “Similarly, creed? People with a religious-level motivation? Not usually all that quiet about it. They like to proselytize. So I doubt that’s in play. Same with ideology; he’d be likely to throw out a manifesto at some point, or at least make mention of whether he’s an eco-terrorist trying to save the planet or a pissed-off metahuman supremacist—if such a thing exists. Choice of target would also be informative here.”

  “He’s gone entirely after tech companies,” Mendelsohn said.

  “Yeah, and different ones, which is what’s throwing me off,” I said, after having counted off two more fingers. “If he was hitting the same one, or ones all owned by the same person, okay, we’re at ego, or more specifically—”

  “Revenge,” Mendelsohn said.

  “Exactly.” I slapped the menu delicately against the table. “I suspect that Grendel’s motive runs in that direction, but it’s really murky how given the breadth of his targets. The only thing they have in common is they’re all Silicon Valley tied. So why is he mad? Did he get banned from Socialite and Facebook and Twitter all at once or something?”

  “Deplatformed, they call that,” Mendelsohn said.

  “And if so, what does stealing algorithms, servers, robotics equipment and whatever he got from Inquest—what does that get him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know exactly, but I’m narrowing my theory,” he said.

  “Do share.”

  Mendelsohn waved me off. “I’d prefer to let you finish your chain of reasoning first. I find this all very fascinating.”

  “Well, here’s my theory, since you’re pushing me for it,” I said, and took a slow breath. “And please, feel free to punch any giant holes in it you can.”

  “Oh, I will.” He smiled.

  “Given that thus far,” I said, trying to put together the vague notion that I’d been wrangling with for the last few hours, “Grendel has attacked only companies owned by Cameron Wittman or Inquest...” I took a long breath. “I think he’s someone who used to work for those companies, or has ties to someone who worked for both Wittman Capital and Inquest.” I took a deep breath. “There. That’s it. Thin thread, right?”

  “A little,” Mendelsohn said, looking a bit pained. “But only because the overlap there would be considerable. Silicon Valley is a somewhat insular town, and the number of people who have worked for both our companies, or affiliates of both?” He looked up as though calculating. “It’s quite a large number. We might be able to put together a list from people who we know of on our side of the equation have come from Inquest, but we’d be limited without Inquest’s cooperation to find people who had left us and ended up there eventually. Other than perhaps truly high profile ones.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said, sitting back. “Still, if we got that list, it’d be a starting point. I could forward it to my office, have them start looking into it, maybe bird dog some of these people based on suspicious activity we could glean from their internet footprint.”

  Mendelsohn looked very serious for a moment. “If you want a direct tie, I might have one for you—Cameron Wittman was an early investor in Inquest.”

  “Really?” I frowned. “You weren’t kidding about the incestuousness of this town, were you.”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s very...” He turned his head, looking through a set of shrubs that partially obscured the restaurant from the hotel lobby. “I’m sorry. I’m suddenly very distracted by the hubbub.”

  The lobby was filling up fast, that same grubby-looking crowd filling out with a slightly more diverse audience; now I saw some middle-aged women in athleisurewear sprinkled among the hipsters and even a few better-dressed folks. “What is going on out there?”

  Mendelsohn peered over the raised planter that afforded us a view into the lobby but didn’t give the lobby much of a view of us. He frowned, staring out. “It certainly looks like something’s happening.”

  I looked at the makeup of the crowd again and saw a familiar look—a dude in plaid flannel with a long beard and fauxhawk glanced around, and I recognized not just his appearance but him, specifically. “Hey, that’s Lumberjackoff!” I shot to my feet.

  “Who?” Mendelsohn asked, but my stomach had already plummeted, and I knew breakfast was right out at this point.

  The crowd noise picked up as the elevator dinged across the lobby, then a hard bass beat dropped that rattled my teeth once more. Before I even heard the lyrics start I knew, even without opening my eyes, what had happened, because of course it had—

  Friday had arrived.

  39.

  Friday

  The music was turned up to eleven on the portable speaker system he’d bought at an all-night big box store nearby. He wore it strapped around his shoulders, because other than heavy steel frames, they were the only thing that could bear the weight. He needed to turn himself into a stage, because it was all about him, an artistic metaphor for his incredible artisticness.

  This was his moment, the elevator thrumming around him. He had his phone at the ready, synced to the stereo mounted on his body, and as it approached the bottom floor he held his finger over the button until he heard the ding and the elevator doors slid open to his fans—

  BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—

  The bass line was so epic, it was ten times as epic as any stupid epic novel ever written. It was so epic it would put Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time’s drunken bastard child to shame with its utter epicness. He felt the bass notes thrum through his body, tuned up to perfection by a last-minute pass on the track that had kept him up all night after his trip to get the speakers.

  He’d had this idea right after Sienna had left. He could tell she was disappointed that his attempts to leverage his fame had failed. Maybe she thought those failures made her look bad because they were related. Whatever the case, this was his moment to shine, for both of them, really, and to turn up the Funk Level of the FBI to LETHAL. Which is what it should have been all along.

  The music hit the front row of fans waiting as the elevator door opened like a hot blast of awesome—uh, kittens. Like a hot blast of kittens. Shot out of a special kitten cannon. With claws out. The crowd wavered under the onslaught of amazingness—or possibly the decibel levels he was cranki
ng, hard to say—

  Then they exploded into hysteria. Maybe some tears, again, because of the loudness. Friday didn’t do things like a little bitch, so the stereo setup he was wearing was top flight.

  This was his moment, and he was not going to waste it.

  “I’m droppin’ deuces, deuces

  Tied up like shoelaces-es

  My partner’s badass as hell

  Her name is Sienna Neal—uh, on

  She will Slay Queen your face off

  and rip your soul all night long.”

  The throbbing beat sang to Friday’s heart. The crowd was totally into it, their response like a thousand O faces looking back at him.

  Yes.

  Finally.

  This was going to be the greatest day ever.

  40.

  Sienna

  “It’s like he doesn’t listen at all,” I moaned, leaving behind all thoughts of water, coffee or breakfast as I sagged against my seat. I sagged a little farther after he threw my name into the lyrics, wondering if I was experiencing a stress headache or a brain hemorrhage. It was so hard to tell.

  “I don’t think that technically qualifies as music,” Mendelsohn said, fingers in his ears. The beat was so loud that I could feel it in my teeth. “And those lyrics...”

  “Yeah, he’s not got a strong future in poetry,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut, debating what to do about this. This one was definitely going to cross Shaw’s desk. Hell, a rapping FBI agent/contractor? It’d make all the major news shows, because what else did they really have to report? Trade negotiations with Revelen? The Louisiana Department of Education’s corruption scandal?

  Nah. Slap a jackass spinning a terrible verse with my name on it and you’d have the lead story for every nightly news program in the nation. Content farms like Flashforce were probably already gleefully ripping someone in the lobby’s cell phone video and splashing it all over their front page in a vain effort to draw eyeballs.

  “You’re thinking about how this is going to get back to your bosses, aren’t you?” Mendelsohn asked.

  I shook my head, fingers now firmly planted in my ears. It didn’t help. “No, I don’t give a damn what they think.” That raised his eyebrows. “I just hate being in the public eye, and this is going to plant me squarely there for the billionth time.”

  “Well, you are the world’s first superhero,” Mendelsohn said with a slight smile. The empty coffee cup was rattling on the table in front of me from the bass. “That generates some interest. Especially since you’ve done a grand total of one interview, ever, and it was, to be graceful, a—”

  “Trainwreck,” I said. “Except it was a train of innocent animals, like puppies and kittens, but also diesel, and once the train wrecked, all of them were splashed with the fuel, the oily sheen coating their pretty fur. Then, as the world watched, saying, ‘Ohhh, my gosh, this is so sad,’ something sparks—”

  “Yeah, it was like that,” Mendelsohn agreed, cutting off my lovely analogy mid-riff. Which was probably a plus, because it was going nowhere good from there. “But some of that was down to the format.”

  I frowned at him. Well, frowned more. “Huh?”

  “News programs, interview programs, they’re all structured based on commercials,” Mendelsohn said. His eye twitched, and I suspected the overpowering bass line was getting to him, too. “For instance, on cable news shows, you have about five, six minutes between segments. So given the dramatic conventions around narrative structure as it appeals to us humans, interviews tend to push to get something fantastic to happen in that period. An argument, a sensitive topic blooming to fiery anger—you know.” And he just left that there.

  “Oh, yes, I know,” I said, thinking back to my interview with Gail Roth. “Guess I’d never thought about the format of my destruction.”

  “The structure creates a perverse incentive to drama,” Mendelsohn went on. “Because rather than having an inherently interesting conversation, they’re forcing the issue by building to a commercial break. And they don’t want to lose the audience during it, so—”

  I blinked a few times. “Sonofa. You’re right. She’d push me right before they broke to commercial. Then they’d preview how I’d answer so they could keep people watching.”

  Mendelsohn smiled, a funny spectacle given his fingers, like mine, were plugging his ear canals. “If you ever feel the urge to clear the air by trying again, may I recommend one of the new internet-based interview shows, like a podcast? No standard commercial breaks means they’re not pushing you toward a dramatic moment or editing your responses to rip some nuance out of them.”

  “I did notice a little of that,” I said, “though I supplied plenty of ammunition without them needing to edit much.” Feeling the curious pressure of Mendelsohn’s gaze, I hastened to add, “What can I say? I was young and foolish and I’d just saved the world. I thought people would understand the level of violence that entailed, but apparently not.”

  “Perspective is tough,” Mendelsohn said, glancing sidelong at Friday, who was now gyrating his pelvis like a stripper in front of an audience that seemed strangely into it. I felt like that was a reflection on society somehow, but didn’t want to spend much time considering it.

  “I should probably put an end to this before it gets out of hand,” I said, getting to my feet.

  Mendelsohn caught my arm, but gently. “Regarding our conversation just now—what do you think will play better in the news?” He gave me a canny smile. “Your, uh...uncle? Making a spectacle of himself all alone? Or you thundering out there and putting a stop to it?”

  I sighed. My shoulders sagged.

  When you’re right, you’re right.

  And this man was right.

  I sat back down as Friday launched into the same verse for the fifth? Sixth time since he’d come out? And waited for our server to come around with my coffee. The bass line thrummed like I was in the middle of a club, and even though I sat down quietly, it set my teeth on edge and made me want to grind them.

  41.

  “He’s never going to wrap that up, is he?” I asked Mendelsohn as we escaped out the back of the hotel an hour later. I’d come to a reluctant conclusion on this question all on my own, but now that the deafening bass beat was starting to fade, I felt compelled to ask him, see what he thought of it all. Especially since shortly after I’d decided not to crash Friday’s party, he’d somehow turned his stereo system up to new levels of obnoxious and made further conversation impossible.

  Frankly, I was surprised the hotel hadn’t called the cops on his noise polluting ass, but maybe coasting on my celebrity status was reaping him some unearned benefits.

  “He seems very keen to bask in the glow of your star,” Mendelsohn said, pushing a coil of black hair off his forehead, as though it had wilted under the assault of Friday’s deafening “music.”

  “My star could use a little less basking from him,” I said as we started to circle the perimeter of the hotel. “It’s already surrounded by the Dyson Sphere that is the FBI.”

  Mendelsohn chuckled. “Speaking as a closet astrophysics hobbyist, that was an excellent reference. Do you really think that was the FBI’s intention in offering you a job, though?”

  “I wouldn’t care to speculate on their motives,” I said, suddenly quite a bit more brisk and guarded than I’d been thus far in my conversations with Mendelsohn. I couldn’t tell whether he noticed or not, but he took my answer in stride as we circled the building toward the limo that was situated in the far parking lot, taking up about five spaces where it waited. “Where are we headed this morning?” I asked as he hurried ahead to open the door for me. “Wittman Capital?”

  “Ah, maybe we should work from a cafe this morning,” Mendelsohn said, and instantly I knew he wasn’t much of a liar. His cheeks were flushed, and he was looking at the minibar in the corner of the limo compartment.

  I raised an eyebrow. “What am I going to do in a cafe? I need some answers on how the
various components that Grendel’s been stealing fit together. Isn’t that more the kind of thing I could get clued in on from your people?”

  “I can give you my speculations anywhere, really,” Mendelsohn said, practicing A+, textbook avoidance behaviors once more. He caught my eyes, then sighed, because he was easily smart enough to know I’d figured him out. “Sorry.”

  “What is it?” I asked. “Did somebody put a stink bomb in the office last night or something?”

  “Not exactly,” Mendelsohn said, low and dragging, “but...effectively, I suppose, yes.” He sighed again. “Mr. Wittman is...displeased...with the way things have gone thus far. In a very general way.”

  My cheeks seized up as I frowned, I did it so hard. “Excuse me? He’s displeased with—he’s displeased? I’ve already died once on this case, but he’s displeased? Well, my goodness. What’s the bee in Cam’s bonnet about?”

  “It would be unfair for me to speculate,” Mendelsohn said in a very guilty way which told me, a) he knew what was up Wittman’s ass and b) he was too classy to not let that one come straight from the horse’s mouth.

  “Fine,” I said. “When can I meet with him to clear the air, then?”

  “Not today,” Mendelsohn said, extra firm, like a brick mattress. “He’s overloaded with meetings.” He brightened a couple degrees. “But regarding those theories about what Grendel is up to, I do have one very strange, most improbable—”

  My phone chirped, then Mendelsohn’s followed a second later. I had mine up first, by dint of my meta speed, scanning the alert that had come across from the dumbass news network whose updates I had, Lemming-like, subscribed to for some reason (wanting to be informed). Most of their updates were horseshit, but every once in a while, like now, the proverbial blind squirrel had managed to at least find its own nuts:

  BREAKING NEWS—POLICE CONFIRM METAHUMAN THREAT GRENDEL IS ATTACKING MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, CAMPUS OF SOCIALITE.