by Nick Petrie
For the meet itself, she’d selected an asphalt parking lot by the boat launch, not far from the funky South Shore Yacht Club. To the north and east was the small yacht club building and the big lake. To the west was a steep grassy hill. To the south was the park and another rising hill, with houses well back behind its crest. The Yacht Club would be empty at midafternoon on a windy weekday in October. So if she pulled the trigger, she wasn’t likely to hurt anyone by accident.
Just on purpose.
She still hadn’t decided what she would do when the moment came. How far she would go.
When she closed her eyes, she could see her parents’ faces as clearly as if they were standing right in front of her. It helped tamp down the fear. But the guilt and pain were still as strong as the day it had happened.
Whatever she was going to do, when it was over, she could ride straight up the grassy hill and into Bay View’s maze of streets, or she could head south through the park system’s trails, emerging at any of a hundred different places in the city or three suburbs.
The equity paperwork had cleared her attorney’s due diligence in record time, and been remote-signed by all parties. In theory, she was in bed with the devil. She owned twenty percent of his company. She was counting on his assumption of her greed to make him think she wouldn’t throw it all away.
When she was ready, she called Operator Twelve and gave Holloway a half hour to get there.
* * *
—
She knew it was him when a slick black Mercedes SUV rolled down the access drive past the fish-cleaning station at the far end of the lot. She stood with the wood-fenced dumpster enclosure to her left, her bike leaning up against it. Behind her was a Bobcat loader and a gravel pile, part of some maintenance project for the boat launch just beyond.
She had a big messenger’s pack on her back, purpose-bought for the occasion, big enough to hold two million in hundreds and her rifle, too. She was confident that Holloway would have crisp packets of bank-banded bills, not a black garbage bag full of dirty twenties. Holloway liked to keep his hands clean.
The pack’s top pocket held her phone, connected to her wireless earbuds, with Kiko on the other end of the line. His little red pickup was parked just ahead of the launch kiosk to her right, engine running, Kiko’s elbow out the window with a cigarette in his hand like any other guy taking a break to watch the lake. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.
She’d tried to talk him out of coming to the meet, but Kiko wasn’t having any of it. He told her he’d risked his life for the city for fifteen years, he could damn well risk his life for her if he wanted. His wheelchair sat folded in the passenger seat where he could get at it easily, and his wrist rocket was in his lap with a bag of old ball bearings close at hand. She’d left her computer bag and her newest fuel cell behind the truck’s bench seat. She’d need it later if she was really going to run, but there was no way in hell Holloway was getting it.
As the Mercedes approached, she stepped away from the dumpster enclosure with her left hand out like a traffic cop. Her rifle was slung across her chest, with a thirty-round magazine locked in and the stock unfolded for accuracy. She knew how good she was with the gun, and had the range targets to prove it. She’d even threaded the barrel for her shop-made sound suppressor, so the crack of gunfire wouldn’t immediately draw the police.
She could see Holloway’s face clearly and knew he could see her, because he drove right toward her. But he didn’t seem to understand her stop sign, so she raised the rifle to her shoulder to emphasize the point. When he kept driving, she put a round through the windshield.
That got his attention, along with the splinters of flying glass inside the car. He flinched and hit the brakes and put a hand up to ward off future shards. Spark could have told him that glass wasn’t the kind of projectile he should be worried about.
He was twenty yards away.
So close.
* * *
—
Get out of the car,” she called.
He opened his door and stepped out with the engine still running. All the SUV’s windows were rolled down. He wore khaki pants and a blue blazer and a shit-eating grin.
“Where’s my money?”
“You don’t need that gun, Maria.” He began to walk toward her, hands out at his side. “We’re business partners, right? You don’t want anything bad to happen to me. Otherwise my business falls apart and you don’t get paid.”
So goddamn confident, laying on the bullshit.
The last time she’d had a gun on him, he’d been terrified. Why wasn’t he terrified now?
She aimed at the SUV’s side-view mirror and put a bullet into it. It shattered with a satisfying crunch. Holloway stopped in his tracks, shoulders hunched as if that could protect him. His grin had gone a little lopsided, but it was still glued to his face.
Behind him, a white van pulled into the otherwise empty parking lot a hundred yards away. There was a colorful company logo painted on the side.
“Where’s my damn money, Vince?”
“In the car,” he said. “I need you to turn off your ransomware first.”
A bulky guy in an untucked white dress shirt got out of the van and walked toward the yacht club building, staring at them curiously. He wore mirrored sunglasses on a cloudy day. She hoped he was too far away to see the gun. Although she’d made her escape plan with the police in mind, too.
“You’re not in charge, Vince. I’ll turn off the ransomware when I’m free and clear. Right now the clock is still ticking on the delete-bot.”
She shifted her aim to his chest. She felt her finger on the trigger. She hated him with everything she had. She’d thought she hated him enough to kill him, but now she wasn’t sure. She remembered what Kiko had said last night. That killing him wouldn’t end the pain or bring her parents back.
Of course, she was still going to dump the contents of his servers online where anyone could access it. The fail-safe was a way to protect herself, but once she got the cash, she would do it anyway. All his technology, the locations of his hidden assets, even the daily diary of his misanthropic narcissism and insecurity. It would be sweeter than killing him.
Clueless, Holloway straightened his grin. “The thing is, Maria, we’re the same, you and I. We make things. Not video games or dating apps or stock trading algorithms, all of it basically designed to move money from one set of pockets to another. No, you and I make real things that will change the real world. Like your fuel cell.”
“As far as I can tell, Vince, all you do is talk. Do I need to shoot your car some more? Or maybe I’ll just shoot you. Please, give me an excuse.” She put some pressure on the trigger. “Get. Me. My. Money.”
“It’s in the car,” he said again. “But I’d like to show you something first. Something you and your battery helped me to make, that your fuel cell would make better. I’m sure you’ve seen the 3-D renderings in my system. Don’t you want to see it in person?”
“That hyena thing?” She shuddered. “No, I really don’t. I want my money and we’re done.”
“It’ll just take a minute,” he said. “It’s pretty damn cool.” He raised his voice just slightly. “Harry, come here.”
A shining creature jumped out of the SUV’s back window and landed effortlessly on two outstretched front legs.
Then it gathered its back legs behind it and trotted up to stand beside Holloway. Not machine-still, like a parked car, but constantly shifting, a soft whine of servomotors adjusting its balance on four black feet.
55
Without conscious thought, Spark took a quick step back and shifted her aim to the creature.
From the CAD drawings, she’d expected something clunky and awkward, but this thing was sleek, almost elegant, and disturbingly fluid in its movement. Like an oversized greyhound, but more muscular.
It didn’t have muscles, of course. She knew that. It had gears and motors and pistons and springs. But that was how it looked. How it felt, viscerally. Like an animal, hunting.
Except animals had heads, and this thing didn’t. Instead it had a single arm, doubled back on itself, along what would have been the spine, if it were an animal. But it wasn’t. It was a machine. She had to remind herself of that. Although the claw at the end of the arm, positioned at the front of the thing, looked a little like a head. Or like a mouth, at least.
The body was more than a meter long, she knew that from the drawings, and it came up almost to Holloway’s hip. Two sets of instruments were clustered at the front, below the claw. The sensor suite, protected behind twin arcs of super-hard synthetic sapphire glass.
“Harry, that’s Maria Velasquez. Got her?” A soft melodic chime sounded, upbeat and cheerful. Holloway’s grin widened. “That means yes, Maria. And now Harry knows your face.” Holloway’s hand dropped to rest on the creature’s back. “His visual recognition software is top-notch.”
She took two steps to the side and the thing shifted to track her, its sensors like bug eyes under the blue-tinted domes. The hair rose on the back of her neck.
“He’s also part of a custom self-generating network,” Holloway said, “so he can talk with the other hyenas. Eventually he’ll have his own satellite system.”
“What’s controlling it?”
“I am,” Holloway said. “With my voice. The same algorithm as my answerbot, Operator Twelve. But more specialized, of course. When Harry’s fully deployed, he’ll have a supervisor back at mission control, one person for every eight to sixteen hyenas. Give them a job and they’ll do it. But they’re weirdly good at figuring stuff out for themselves.” He chuckled. “That’s the ‘autonomous’ in the name. HYbrid Electric Networked Autonomous System. HYENAS.”
Along one side of the thing, just below the claw, she saw a slim, straight tube with a rectangle at the rear. She flashed back to the CAD drawings, understood what she was looking at, and realized with regret that she should have shot Holloway when he stepped out of the car.
She was shifting her aim back to his chest when he said, “Harry, get the gun.”
Before Spark could process what he’d said, the hyena leaped forward, impossibly graceful. The long arm flashed toward her like a rattlesnake’s strike. Before she knew what had happened, the big claw had clamped on to the rifle barrel and was pulling it down and away.
She had two hands on the gun but she could barely hold it against the weight and strength of the thing. She set her heels and twisted but the claw just rotated with her. She stepped to the right and gave a quick hard yank, hoping to overbalance the creature, but it danced sideways in effortless compensation. She was playing tug-of-war with an immaculate, tireless beast. She’d designed the battery that powered it. She would run out of energy long before it did. She wouldn’t get her gun back, not like this.
“Kiko, help,” she called. “Shoot the fucking thing.”
“On it.” She heard his voice in her earbud, then a thump and clang as a half-inch ball bearing blew through the cedar dumpster enclosure and into the side of the heavy steel container. Another steel ball skittered into the grass and up the hill.
“You’re too close,” he said. “I don’t want to hit you by accident. Get some distance from it.”
She wasn’t about to give up her weapon, so she rotated left and yanked again. The creature pivoted with her, exposing its long silvery side to Kiko’s wrist rocket. But she was still too close. And the thing must somehow have learned from the last time she’d made the move, because the arm swung the barrel through a whip-fast semicircular arc that pulled her off balance. She found herself bent forward on her toes with her ass hanging out, her arms half-crossed, and the rifle sling tight around the back of her neck.
She knew she had to either get some slack or fall over, and she was afraid of what the creature might do if she hit the ground. So she angled her body to let her arms uncross a little, then dipped her neck and slipped the sling as she scooted her feet forward, getting her hips under her so she could use the full power of her legs and butt.
The creature was stretched away from her, still pulling, when she heard a hard metallic tak and its back legs stumbled sideways.
Above the rear hip, she saw a dent in the skin, but no hole. She improved her grip on the weapon, but before she could do anything else, the creature had rebalanced. The black feet found traction, the claw whip-cracked her gun in the other direction again, and it was all she could do to stay upright. The insect eyes had no expression.
“See how tenacious it is,” Holloway said. “It doesn’t get scared or tired, and it follows orders without question. Not like a person at all. Much better, in fact.”
She was focused on the creature, not Holloway’s face, but she could picture his expression anyway. Dreamy excitement, like Oppenheimer before the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, when people were laying bets on whether the atomic reaction would set the planet’s atmosphere on fire.
“Dammit,” Kiko said in her ear. “What’s that thing got for skin?” She heard a soft grunt of effort as he pulled back the sling, then a second ball bearing hit the creature’s angled flank. But it was just a glancing blow and the ball ricocheted away into the sky. “It’s a really small target.”
“Forget the machine,” she said. “Shoot Holloway.” Then realized what she’d asked her friend to do. Kill a man. “No, don’t do it,” she said. “Get out of here and call the cops.”
“Shut up and fight that thing.” He grunted again and a ball thumped into the side of the Mercedes.
“Hey, wait,” Holloway said. “That’s my car.” Another thump and the Mercedes sank, its tire flat. Holloway ran to hide behind it. Another thump and the SUV’s engine began to make a grinding sound.
The creature whip-cracked its arm again, but now in the same direction. It wasn’t limited by an elbow that only bent one way, or by a wrist that only rotated a hundred and eighty degrees. Spark’s arms were crossed and she was just barely hanging on. Then it cranked in the same direction again and she had to let the gun go or get her arms broken. The creature danced back with the rifle held high by the barrel.
Kiko had been right, she thought. Back in his garage, when he saw the plans for the creature, he’d told her to back off and send everything to the newspapers, to the FBI, to somebody. She should have listened. She shouldn’t have come.
She saw a flash of white to her right. She looked toward the high strip of decorative plantings that ran between the yacht club and the boat launch, concealing the parking lot from the promenade. The bulky guy in the untucked dress shirt stepped out of the bushes on Kiko’s blind side and walked purposefully toward the little red pickup. He had an odd smile on his face, and something slim and bright in his hand.
“Kiko, behind you. Kiko, get out of there. Go go go go.”
From his safe spot, Holloway said, “Harry, destroy the gun.”
The creature swung the rifle down and smashed it against the pavement, again and again and again.
56
PETER
Lewis pushed the Yukon hard down Lincoln Memorial Drive past Veterans Park, weaving through the lazy lakefront traffic like it was so many orange cones on a demonstration course. They were lucky it wasn’t rush hour yet.
Peter held Carson’s phone in his hand, watching the red bull’s-eye labeled maria on the map. It was steady by the boat launch at South Shore Park. Carson wasn’t happy to be left behind. Peter was afraid he’d have to break the bike mechanic’s leg to keep him from climbing in the truck with them. Another goddamn amateur was the last thing they needed.
“You believe what Spark said about putting a dead man’s switch on her server?” Lewis hit the horn and put two wheels up on the median to power around a Prius poking down the fast lane.
&n
bsp; Peter grabbed the oh-shit handle and held on tight. His go-bag bounced around the footwell. “Building a fail-safe would be a smart thing to do. And if she’s not willing or able to reset at eight tonight, we’re screwed. Not to mention everyone else.”
“So don’t shoot her, is what you’re saying. What if she try to shoot us? We just gonna say please don’t?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Peter said. “I hope we don’t have to kill her.”
Lewis had the pedal to the floor, the needle at seventy and climbing. They flew past the art museum and up the ramp to the Hoan Bridge, across Jones Island toward the South Side. He gave Peter a sideways glance. “Don’t get soft on me, Jarhead. I don’t care what she says, she brought an assault rifle into that crowded market, kids and all. She pulled the trigger. Yeah, nobody really got hurt, but that was dumb luck. Maybe she’s past saving, a lost cause.”
The needle hit ninety. Peter looked at his friend. “You think anyone said that about you, back in the day?” When Lewis had run a lethal crew, taking down drug houses for the money they held. “Were they right?”
Lewis made a face. “Shi-i-t.” Somehow he dragged three syllables out of a four-letter word.
“I know, brother.” Peter clapped a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Karma’s a bitch. Now please tell me a well-armed citizen like yourself has a few more serious weapons close at hand.”
* * *
—
Lewis took the Port of Milwaukee exit, drove past the Coast Guard station, then roared south toward Nock Street and the red bull’s-eye blinking on the map. It hadn’t moved since they’d left the bike shop.
They stopped on the hill facing the lake, hidden from the boat launch parking lot by the curve of grass but within sight of a dozen houses. Lewis popped the rear hatch and Peter moved the tool bag so Lewis could open the top of the shallow compartment he’d had a cabinetmaker build into the floor of the cargo space. It was less than five inches deep, and the cover was perfectly scribed to the sidewalls and carpeted with the same material as the truck floor, so the whole thing was almost invisible unless you knew to look for it.