by David Jones
The three of them were back on the road inside fifteen minutes.
They crossed into Switzerland without incident. Jake had worried that he might be fingered as a criminal. For all he knew, Cymobius had sent his name, likeness, and even his DNA to Interpol with an order to arrest him on sight. But the Swiss border patrol simply waved them through the checkpoint after taking their thumbprints.
“It’s just a matter of juggling the data,” Anya said as they drove east from the border. “I can’t change Interpol’s databases, not without some major time on my hands anyway. So I didn’t.”
“Then how did we get through?” Jake asked.
“I directed the border guards’ database query to my computer,” Anya said, grinning and holding up her tablet. “Their computers are local and wireless, so when they called out for data they saw my fake database, which lists us as American tourists with clean backgrounds—no cause for concern.”
“Awesome,” Jake said.
“Let’s just hope we don’t run into any ISIL cells,” Oliver said, “because that little trick won’t work on them.”
Chapter 20
Watch
Geneva was not the war-ravaged town Anya and Oliver had described. The city bustled with activity: small cars trundling down narrow lanes, foot traffic crowding the sidewalks, and a veritable army of cyclists weaving in and out of the fray, heedless of the danger. That wasn’t to say the city showed no signs of recent upheavals. Several times, Jake found himself staring at bombed out buildings, their facades still blackened from long-dead fires, their windows devoid of glass. In some areas entire blocks were given over to heaps of rubble, much of it ancient stone with twists of rusty rebar poking out like petrified snakes.
Despite these rare pockets of destruction, Geneva bore the look of a city on the mend. New high rise buildings blossomed in the spaces left by their departed ancestors. Glass and steel shone in the ample evening sunlight, reflecting back the sky’s azure depths and ruddy clouds.
“Where are the ISIL gangs?” Jake asked.
“They stay hidden.” Oliver scanned the streets as she drove, eyes roving back and forth as if searching every car, every building, every face in the crowds for danger.
“And Dissolution?”
“They do the same.” Oliver glanced at Anya who sat in the back of the car. “Any luck tracing that Spearcast beacon?”
“Yes. Keep going straight.”
Oliver pursed her lips. “I haven’t seen any other cybrids or agents I know. Everything seems normal. I don’t like that.”
“We need to get closer to the Rhone,” Anya said. “We’re still at least a kilometer away.”
“It’s on the Rhone? In this part of the city?” Oliver’s jaw tightened as she spoke.
“Is that bad?” Jake asked.
“It’s a cesspit,” Oliver said. “Years ago, before the war, the area was posh. But not anymore.”
To Jake’s relief the local street signs were printed in French. He wracked his brain, but simply couldn’t recall if there was a Swiss language, or if they all spoke French and German, or maybe Italian. He was too embarrassed to ask.
They followed a street called Rue de la Corraterie, travelling north. Low-rise buildings crowded both sides of the road. Most were made of stone and bore a striking resemblance to the weathered, antique-looking edifices Jake had seen in Paris. Peppered amongst them, however, were scads of modern parking garages, apartment buildings, and office complexes. Phone and electrical wires crisscrossed every intersection, some drooping excessively low. Jake thought he could jump and catch one if he tried. As they traveled, the buildings became increasingly seedy, the people on the sidewalks fewer and poorly attired.
“Take the next right,” Anya said.
Oliver turned onto a street called Bel Air, which struck Jake as odd. Every city in America seemed to have a Bel Air street. Maybe the same was true of Europe?
“You okay?” Oliver asked.
Jake realized he had been shaking his head and grimacing. “Just realized I’ve been distracting myself, paying attention to everything except what we’re about to do. It’s like I can’t focus on it.”
A rare smile touched Oliver’s lips. “You’ve always been that way,” she said. “You used to set your mobile to ping every two minutes to remind you to stay on task.”
“Guess I didn’t know that about myself.” Jake experienced a strange sort of déjà vu having a woman he had only recently met tell him what he had been like in a life he couldn’t remember.
“Got it,” Anya said. She shot forward between the front seats, pointed with her free hand. “It’s that building, the one on the corner—the stone one.”
Jake twisted for a better look. The building in question was indeed made of stone. Ornate, and festooned with what looked like hand-chiseled artwork, the edifice appeared out of place in a modern city. Its entrance bore an awning two stories above the street abutted by Roman style columns nine feet high. More columns adorned its upper floors—seven of them—as they rose toward the heavens. A large sign affixed to the wall nearest the entrance pronounced it the Agricole Credit Agency.
“Looks like an old monastery,” Jake said.
“Probably was.” Oliver park the car two blocks away where the street ended at a bombed out lot.
Jake’s heart was beating hard. Were they really about to walk into a Dissolution trap? Hadn’t he escaped Seanan Reese only this morning? What was he thinking?
“It’s an obvious front,” Anya said. Her fingers danced across her tablet, doing what, Jake couldn’t guess.
“They’ll have surveillance,” Oliver said. “We’ll be made the instant we walk in, maybe even before. We have to assume they’ve got cameras everywhere, even the streets.”
“That they do.” Anya spun her computer around. The view was split into eleven rectangles, each showing a live stream. The top four covered views of the street and nearby environs as they might look from the building’s entrance. The rest displayed interior shots: people working in offices, the bank’s main entrance, and a series of what looked like small cells wherein people lay on cots or sat despondently on stools.
“Are those jail cells?” Jake asked.
“Yes, and look here,” Anya said. She tapped one of the displays. It expanded to fill the screen. In it sat a young woman dressed in frayed sweat pants, an overlarge t-shirt, and a pair of what looked like hospital slippers. Though she was staring at the floor, Jake recognized her immediately.
“Your sister.”
Anya gave Jake a grim nod and keyed the screen back to show all the feeds.
“Let me see that.” Oliver inspected the screen. She pointed at two of the images. “I see four cybrids in these two cells. Looks like they’re all asleep.”
“Sedated,” Anya said. “Without me to reprogram them, all Dissolution can do is keep them under. Otherwise, they’d have already escaped...or worse.”
“Where are the others?” Jake asked, scanning the screen. There were eight cells total, all empty except for the three containing Tia and the four cybrids.
Oliver shrugged. “Maybe Cymobius caught on, managed to block their Spearcasts before the got the chance to run here.”
“Yeah, that could be,” Anya said. “I’ve dealt with some of Dissolution’s other programmers. They aren’t imbeciles, but most aren’t up to Cymobius caliber. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got outfoxed.”
“So do we just walk in?” Jake asked.
“Can you show me where these cells are in the building?” Oliver pointed at the screen.
Anya tapped at it for a moment then passed it back to Oliver. Jake looked over her shoulder. It now showed a three-dimensional blueprint of the bank complete with specs for all interior floor plans.
Though the Agricole Credit building might be ancient on the outside, its guts were all modern infrastructure: steel reinforced crossbeams, air ducts made intentionally too small to accommodate a human of any size, blast proof s
ecurity doors that required a passkey to open separating sensitive areas.
Jake might not have known about such things, besides what he had seen on the net, but his cybrid certainly did. And according to it, the chances of breaking into such a place, especially with only two people, were next to zero.
He whistled. “Either of you got a tank handy?”
“Roof’s inaccessible. There’s no basement, no tunnels leading in through the sewers that I see,” Oliver said. “Scaling the outside to try a window is out, too much traffic day and night, and the cameras would catch us long before we got close.”
Briefly, Jake considered suggesting they call the authorities. Kidnapping people was a crime in every country, and anyone could tell that Tia had been abused. But calling the police would only alert Cymobius. Jake had seen how they could manipulate even local police forces back in New York. They wanted Anya dead, and they would no doubt love to get their hands on Jake and Oliver to reinitialize their KILL MACHINE protocols.
No. Involving the police would be a spectacularly bad idea.
“The cameras aren’t a problem,” Anya said. “I can shut off the feeds and divert them to my tablet.”
Oliver tilted her head. “What about security doors?”
“Everything in that place is run off their intranet. I’ve already established myself as a full admin. I’m in control. They just don’t know it yet.”
“So we’re going to walk in the front door?” Jake asked.
“Looks that way,” Oliver said.
“What about Seanan Reese, Moore, all those guys?” Jake had to admit to a certain tightness in his throat when he thought about the odds stacked against them. “What if they’re hiding in there somewhere? I mean they must be, right? They’ll recognize us even if no one else does.”
Oliver gave Jake a cool smile, one as filled with contempt as mirth. Without a word, she reached up, curled a heavy lock of her black hair around two fingers, clenched her jaw, and jerked it out of her scalp. It made a static-filled popping noise that sent icy tendrils of sympathetic pain up Jake’s spine.
“Pretty simple,” she said, reaching for another hank of her hair, “we don’t go as us.”
Chapter 21
Infiltrate
Anya held up a large mirror Oliver had bought at a knickknack shop around the corner. Jake stared into it, eyes wide, unaware for the moment that his mouth hung open.
“I don’t even look like me,” he said.
The face staring back at him from the mirror had Jake’s basic face shape, and his eyes were still the same shade of green, but the resemblance ended there. With Oliver’s coaching, and the unseen and largely unfelt aid of the nanites coursing through his blood, Jake had managed to age himself at least thirty years. He might have been his own father, had his father lived to gain gray hair and gray stubble along his chin and jawline. Deep wrinkles creased the corners of his eyes, his lips, even the soft skin at the tops of his cheeks. His nose had grown larger, becoming practically bulbous compared to its usual size. Even his neck appeared changed: saggy, as if the skin there was tired of hanging on.
“That’s the point.” Oliver turned the mirror to look at herself. Her transformation was even more astonishing than Jake’s. Obviously, she was far better skilled at this than him.
Her jet-black, shoulder-length hair was gone, replaced by a perfectly coifed, platinum blonde pixie cut. Her lips had grown redder even without the aid of makeup, and fuller too. By contrast, her cheeks appeared receded, the underlying flesh having melted away in less than an hour. High cheekbones redefined her look, as did her now-pointed nose. Without the aid of his cybrid, Jake would never have recognized her.
“We’ll need to grab a bite before we head inside,” Oliver said.
Jake nodded. He felt shaky, his body screaming for calories. The transformation had taken a toll on his metabolism.
“You get food,” Anya said. “I’ll set up here. Come get me when you’re ready to head inside.”
Oliver lifted an eyebrow. “You’re not going inside.”
“Are you kidding? You need me.”
“We need you out here running the computers. If you come with us you may get distracted, or hurt. That’s how we get caught.”
Anya looked thoughtful, lips pursed. “What about the cybrids. Aren’t you going to need help carrying them out?”
“I can carry two—so can Jake—and your sister looks like she can walk. The people in the front offices don’t look like thugs. They’re legitimate business types. I figure we can walk right past them without too much trouble.”
“Carrying bodies?”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane,” Anya said.
“We’ll find some way to cover them. Maybe push them out in a garbage trolley.”
“This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Anya said.
“You got a better one?” Oliver asked.
“No. But—”
“Then you stay here, work your magic for us, and we’ll come back alive.”
Jake gave Anya a quick grin as he and Oliver climbed out of the ambulance. Was it wrong for him to take some pleasure at seeing the girl who had wiped his memories looking totally flummoxed?
Probably. But he didn’t care.
Despite the obvious decline in this part of the city, it boasted several eateries within walking distance of the Rhone. Oliver chose a small diner that served fresh salads and hoagie-style sandwiches. She got hers to go and Jake followed suit. They ate in view of the Agricole Credit building, dangling their boots above the river. The water stank of fish and mildew. It was black and murky and unappetizing. But that did nothing to quell Jake’s ravenous appetite.
“Are you nervous?” Oliver asked after she had devoured most of her foot-long sandwich.
“A little,” Jake said.
“You’re a liar,” she said without malice. “You’re scared out of your skull.”
Jake nodded and took another bite of sandwich.
“We could really use Harris right now.”
Jake started to answer, but Oliver held up a hand.
“I know, you don’t want to lose yourself in him. I get that. I’m just saying I miss him. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” Jake said. It was lame, but what did you say to a woman who wanted you replaced by a stranger in your own head?
Oliver drew a deep breath, blew it out, and turned her gaze on the Agricole Credit building. “Not as sorry as I am.”
THE SUN HAD NEARLY set by the time Jake and Oliver started for the building. They walked side-by-side along the pavement, passersby paying them little attention. One man did offer them drugs in a Swiss French accent, but they ignored him.
“Jake, Oliver, do you hear me?”
Jake lurched in surprise at the voice speaking in his head. He spun, searching for its source before realizing it was Anya. It probably looked like he was already on drugs. “What? Where are you?”
“She’s still in the car.” Oliver spoke from one side of her mouth, shaking her head at his asinine reaction. “She’s using our implants. Anya, are you certain this channel is clear?”
“Yep. Checked it three times before I chose it. Also, I’ve set up my own encryption just between the three of us. Even if someone’s on this frequency, they won’t be able to break out what we’re saying.”
“How come neither of you told me I have a radio in my head?” Jake asked.
Oliver shrugged. “It never came up?”
“Is there an owner’s manual for this thing?” he asked, jabbing a finger at his skull.
“Let’s survive the next few minutes, then we can talk training.”
“I’ve got a graphics algorithm actively cutting you two out of the shot on the building’s cameras,” Anya said. “It’s working fine. Just don’t make any sudden moves until you have to, this thing’s sensitive.”
Oliver led the way into the Agricole building. Jake half expected the place to be closed, the do
or locked, since they were arriving after six. But the lights were still on, and the door was open.
A chime signaled their entrance. To their right, a large man in his mid thirties dressed in a security uniform gave them a nod. He wore no weapon, only a walkie-talkie on his belt. Beefy, positively running to fat in the middle, Jake fingered the guy for a power lifter, probably short on speed and stamina, but possibly a tough opponent in a one-on-one confrontation.
Opposite the door they had entered sat a pleasant-looking balding man of perhaps forty. He smiled at first Oliver and then Jake, his round glasses shining in the desk lamp next to him.
“Good evening,” he said in flawless French. “Welcome to Agricole Credit. Are you here to see an account representative?”
This was no Dissolution operative, or if he was, his ability to control his facial expressions was perfect. He gave every indication of being exactly what he seemed—an efficient secretary who took real pride in executing the duties required by his job.
“Tell him you have an appointment with Sigmund Lecessitor—he’s a small business investment broker who works on the second floor,” Anya said over their private channel.
This time, Jake managed not to jump at the voice in his ear, which was surprising, since he felt like his heart was doing a tango on his stomach. He was sweating, certain the guard and the secretary would see the sheen of perspiration coating his forehead and realize that something was off.
Oliver repeated Anya’s words.
“Very good, madam,” said the secretary. “The elevator is right over there. I’ll ring Sigmund, shall I, let him know you’re coming up?”
Oliver, who had already crossed the room to press the up button next to the elevator’s golden doors, gave the secretary a beatific smile that spoke of nothing but cool reserve—not a hint of nerves or worry. “Oh, I’d much rather surprise, Siggy,” she said. “You know how uptight he can be. Always staying late, never doing enough for himself.”