The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  She just didn’t want the guy behind the spotlight to see her reaching for the forty-five.

  Ten meters behind her was a pair of double doors. She could make that in no time, if there was enough confusion.

  She took a few deep breaths, and began to feel the pulse of adrenaline in the back of her head.

  Then she whipped around and started shooting.

  Chapter 20

  Her first shot confirmed the fact that there was a sniper because the skinhead behind the spotlight started to return fire. She was backing as fast as she could, and something fast and high-caliber tore up the floor between her and the manhole.

  The skinheads on the stage dove for cover—smart move.

  Her second shot took out the spotlight. The auditorium rang with an explosive shatter that was audible even over the gunfire. The space under the balcony wrapped itself in shadow and Angel suddenly had a good view of the sniper on the catwalk, next to the spot.

  She kept backing up. She hadn’t been hit yet. Even though she had some darkness for cover, she didn’t tempt fate by slowing her movement. Unfortunately, that meant that the three shots she took at the catwalk went wild. She kept the sniper pinned, but she didn’t hit a damned thing.

  The good news: neither did he.

  Angel backed into the exit. She pressed her shoulders into the crash bar and hoped the goofs who were peeling off stage right were it as far as Knights’ security was concerned. The door started opening, and the sniper tracked his weapon toward the light. Sparks leaped off the chairs near her, and plaster bloomed off the balcony’s edge between her and the gunman.

  She fired the last two shots at the sniper, holding him down, and decided to give these people something to think about.

  As she pushed through the door, she tossed the grenade at the hole.

  She ran as fast as she could, dropping the empty gun. Out the door the way was clear to the end of the hall. It ended in a window overlooking a blank brick wall. Angel hoped she was on the first floor.

  She was in the air when she heard the first explosion, a bass ramble that shook the air like a thick piano wire. Her shoulder hit the window as she started hearing the secondaries ripping underneath her. She heard the doors behind her blow open. A pressure wave of scalding air blew her through the window. Smoke belched out the window after her.

  She hit the brick wall and fell backward into a trash bin.

  For a few seconds, she couldn’t move. She had a vivid mental picture of one of the Knights finding her here, spread-eagled in a pile of garbage . . .

  No one showed. She watched the rectangle of clouds above her slowly become obscured by smoke. By the time she felt she could move again, she heard sirens in the distance.

  She climbed out of the trash bin and limped away from the sound.

  She ended up walking north, altogether stupid considering the way things were going in this town. She didn’t care. She walked down the too-empty streets of Nob Hill, listening to sirens in the distance.

  The world had become one big mother-humping mess.

  Not only that . . .

  Angel stopped walking a little north of Union Square. “Where is everybody?”

  The streets were dead. She was the only pedestrian, and the only traffic she’d seen was the occasional flashing light in the distance. She stood and listened, and the city was deathly quiet. The echoing sirens, foghorns in the distance—that was it.

  Angel’s first thought was that it was five in the morning and the city was still waking up. But that would be the first time she’d ever seen the sun rise over the Pacific.

  She looked up at the purpling sky and the thought occurred to her.

  An effing dusk-to-dawn curfew.

  Just like New York and LA and a half-dozen other cities. That was not a good sign. Worse, she was standing a good mile or two from anyplace familiar.

  Like she had a place to go. And, after the fiasco she’d just been through, the last thing she wanted was for the cops to come to her rescue and protect her.

  She looked around, trying to think of a place she could run to ground before the sun set. It was San Francisco, which meant you were always in walking distance of a four-star hotel. Since the Knights had left her wallet, she could afford it. However, she didn’t want to leave a computer record. But it’d have to do if she couldn’t think of anything better.

  Hmm, computers, now there was a thought.

  Angel turned around and faced the neon lights of Chinatown that started glowing down the hill a few blocks away from her.

  • • •

  Tetsami—Mr. K—had her brought down to his office. This time, instead of the bottomless sky-blue screen, the holo was in the midst of a pulsing three-dimensional abstraction.

  “Welcome,” said the long-fingered frank. Behind him, the screen undulated with a sea of multicolored equilateral triangles. “I was disturbed to hear the fate of your ‘protection.’”

  “How—”

  Mr. K chuckled to himself. “The only real question is the moreau assumption that the police were in complicity with your abduction.”

  Angel shook her head. Bullshit—but she could see where the idea had come from. Between the Knights and the moreys she could see why the city started a curfew. “I don’t believe this.”

  Mr. K shrugged. “To answer your question— In respect of our partnership, my organization has placed your name on our priority list for routine information gathering. There are a number of blank spots, but we have many sources.”

  It was unnerving to think she was being watched by this guy. “You knew the Knights had me?”

  “Suspected. The information we are trying to decipher seems to have a market with quite a few buyers. Not the least of which is the Fed.”

  Angel looked up at Mr. K, not really surprised. “The government?”

  “The NSA in particular.”

  “You found out what—”

  “No.” Mr. K shook his head. “That, in fact, is the point.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  He smiled. “There has been no such thing as an unbreakable code for forty years.”

  Angel opened her mouth, closed it.

  “You’ve handed me something based on a totally alien algorithm. With the current software—” Mr. K shrugged. “Either that, or it’s a few gigs of gibberish.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Without access to the encryption technique, somewhere in the VanDyne mainframe—”

  “Can’t you hack their computer?”

  Mr. K sighed. “I wish I could, but—”

  “I thought that was what you did for a living?” Angel was getting frustrated. She’d gone through too much bullshit with those ramcards for it to turn up nothing.

  “Angel, I’m not a magician or a psychic. I cannot access an isolated system.”

  Angel stood up. “Damn it, a nutso survivalist cop could.”

  She faced a silent Mr. K. Beyond him, plane waves of interlocking triangles rolled by on the holo. He looked thoughtful for a moment, although it was hard to tell beyond his sunglasses. “An unanticipated wrinkle. You refer to Detective Kobe Anaka, I presume.”

  She was past the point of asking him how he knew these things, and if anyone’s reputation deserved to precede him, it was Anaka. “Damn straight,” Angel said.

  “Would you give me the details?”

  Angel did so, and by the time she got to Anaka’s screen showing bright lights over Washington, Mr. K had a broad smile.

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “An outside line,” he said more to himself than to her. “A recent addition. Tied directly to the net, not here, but on the East Coast. The Fed could afford it . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mr. K looked up. “Up to very recently, Van
Dyne was running an isolated mainframe. Apparently the Fed opened a line to Washington when they took over. Anaka had the advantage of being on the site where he could tap the line physically. To do a software hack, we have to start in DC and work back—”

  “Now you’re saying that you can do this?”

  Mr. K stood up. “Angel, there are rooms upstairs that are free for you to use. I have to prepare a software team for the penetration. We’ll call you down when we go in.” He started tapping controls that barely shone through the onyx surface of his desk.

  As a guard led her out of the office, she could hear him mutter, “The system that developed this is going to be interesting.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t a room Mr. K let her use, it was an effing suite. The place was bigger than her place and Byron’s condo combined. The bar was better stocked than places where she’d served drinks for a living. Two bedrooms, each with its own bath. A comm-entertainment center that took up one entire wall, with its own holo screen . . .

  And all of this focused on a north-facing balcony that gave one hell of a view, even in a city where views were a dime a dozen. All of Chinatown was sprawled below her in a chrome-neon warren. The Pyramid hovered right next to the Coit tower on Telegraph Hill, and beyond that, the bay . . .

  And the dome on Alcatraz, wearing a cluster of aircraft warning lights like a ruby crown on a half-buried skull.

  All of it was so empty. It gave her a shudder just to look down on her adopted city. By herself in this huge apartment, looking down on the deserted twilit streets, she could feel her loneliness strike her with the force of a physical blow.

  She found the control to opaque the windows. The empty city faded from view. Fine, she thought to herself, she’d avoided being picked up by the cops. She’d managed to escape the skinheads. She had a decent ally in Mr. K.

  Who knew what Anaka was doing.

  She briefly thought of calling him. He didn’t need her disappearance feeding his paranoid tendencies. But she didn’t. After all this crap, she didn’t want to talk to him. Anaka was very good at making her nervous, and she was nervous enough.

  Fine, Angel thought, now what?

  She sighed and peeled off what was left of her clothes, taking out clumps of fur here and there. Battered and bruised, but no real damage. Which meant she was very, very lucky.

  She kept thinking that her luck was due to run out.

  Maybe she should take Nohar’s advice and split to Seattle. Give up. Let the players sort it out among themselves.

  She walked to one of the showers and decided it wasn’t going to be that easy. She didn’t like the idea of giving up. Everyone was fucking with her, and she still didn’t have a handle on the reason.

  What was so damn important to all these freaks?

  It took her a while to figure out the shower was voice activated, and it threw her a bit when it asked for the water temperature—Talk about high class.

  But, then, this was the level she was operating at now. Whatever mind games Byron had been playing before he bit the big zero, because of him she was a millionaire. She was playing in games way out of her league, and everyone who’d been fucking with her was only the hired help. Everyone, from the Knights to the feline hit squad—

  She wasn’t going to split until this got resolved somehow. If she left all this hanging, there was no telling what could blindside her. There was a group of people out there who could afford to lay a few million on the line for the data Byron carried. The Fed itself was involved with this somehow, and the players weren’t going to give up just because she did.

  What were her other options?

  Go back to the cops? “Yeah, right . . .” More wonderful protection they’d give her, and the way tension was building in this town, she didn’t want to be anywhere near a cop when the cork blew. Fair or not, the police were going to catch shit first and hardest from both sides.

  So, if she was ever going to live a sane and normal life again, she was going to have to ditch the data.

  She turned off the water and let it sluice off her fur. Damn Byron for unloading this shit off on her. By now, everyone in the game knew she had it. What the hell had Byron been doing?

  Trying to auction it off, that’s what, she thought.

  She figured, now, that there had to be at least three groups involved in Byron’s little game.

  There were the folks from Denver, the people Byron was supposed to deliver it to. The people who went with the pine-smelling disinfectant, the people she supposed would have been at the hand-off during the football game. There was the feline hit squad, the people who offed Byron and made a mess wherever they went.

  Then there were the Knights, who—if her memory served right—were backed by someone called the Old Man, and who might have a connection in the Fed.

  Every single one of them was probably pissed at the way Byron ran things.

  But if the Knights were a potential buyer, it now made sense that Byron was in that seedy hotel on Eddy Street. It also made sense that a pissed-off feline hit squad wasted him there. Angel figured that the morey hit squad would be a little ticked if they found out that Byron was thinking of selling this data—whatever it was—to the Knights.

  It also explained The Rabbit Hole. Earl and company weren’t out to trash a bar. They were out there for Byron. Perhaps to intimidate him, or deal, or something. Angel was sure the Knights would be just as pissed to find Byron dealing with moreys as vice versa. Maybe Byron was even meeting the feline hit squad in the bar that night. Angel had a dim memory of a table of canines and felines.

  Byron tried to play too many sides. For all she knew, there might be a dozen more groups out there—

  Mr. K had better turn up something useful because she needed to know why everyone was after those cards.

  Chapter 21

  As he’d promised, Mr. K sent for her in the morning. They were ready to take on the VanDyne mainframe. After an abbreviated breakfast and a halfhearted attempt to clean the jeans and blouse that the Knights had helped to roach, Angel descended into the underground chamber. There were fewer people manning the terminals surrounding the grand black Toshiba, but there was an air of purpose to their activity.

  When Angel entered Mr. K’s office, the holo display showed a massive grid of microscopic multicolored triangles that seemed to recede into the distance, toward some infinite horizon. His black desk was alive with lights, underlighting his face.

  “Welcome.” He motioned her to sit.

  “Thirty seconds to satellite uplink,” came a voice from a speaker hidden somewhere in the office. Angel felt like she was about to witness some sort of space launch.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  Mr. K smiled. “Hit and run on very short notice. We found the outlets to the dedicated comm lines in the DC net.” He nodded at the holo screen, and Angel could see it as a representation of the communications net, like an infinitely more detailed version of Anaka’s little van display. “We’re going to tap into the Fed’s comm net, follow the dedicated line back to VanDyne and leech all the data we can before they lock on our slaved satellite.”

  “Twenty seconds to satellite uplink.”

  Mr. K flipped open a box set flush with the surface of the desk and withdrew a hemispherical apparatus trailing wires. It fit snugly on his bald skull, and Angel now realized why he was a frank, and why his skull was such an odd size.

  He was hardwired into the system.

  Angel shuddered. “Is this going to help crack that data I gave you?”

  Mr. K shrugged as he adjusted a few controls on the side of his helmet. “If possible, we’ll drain their system dry. The encryption algorithms are all in there somewhere. Probably part of the ops system.”

  “Ten seconds to satellite uplink.”

  “Combat hacking of hostile govern
ment systems—”

  “Five seconds.”

  “—is what I was designed for.”

  “We have the uplink.”

  Angel hadn’t noticed the glowing dot that seemed to hover over the grid on the holo. Now, she saw it suddenly erupt a bright light, shooting down toward the grid. The holo’s point of view rode down on that point of light.

  Angel’s stomach lurched as the light trail injected itself into the grid and began to follow paths made of multicolored triangles. From this “ground-level” perspective, the plane wasn’t near flat. It was made of hills and valleys, multicolored trails snaking over mountains, through the ground, shooting up into the virtual sky. And her point of view shot through this scene like a mad hypersonic rollercoaster.

  The scene blasted through one of the hills and stopped for a brief split second. It spun wildly in an infinite chamber made of multicolored shifting cubes. A thousand of these cubes seemed to rotate ninety degrees at once and the holo’s point of view shot out of the chamber and rejoined the hypersonic coaster—

  “We have penetrated Langley.”

  Angel had to turn away from the holo scene. It was making her seasick.

  “Cloaking signal sourcing, the backdoor is secure.”

  She looked up and kept her gaze locked on Mr. K, avoiding the scene on the holo behind him. Mr. K’s only visible expression was part of his wide smile. Everything else was hidden by the helmet, visor, and a forest of wires that ran back to the desk. Long, delicate fingers were flying over the controls on his desk. Angel looked at the desk and saw that the controls themselves were changing every time he touched a new square of light.

  “Penetrating target security.”

  Did she see a change in his smile?

  “Too easy . . .” Mr. K’s voice trailed off.

  “Target penetrated.”

  Up to now the smell in the office from Mr. K was one of excitement and exertion. Now, suddenly, she smelled fear—

  Angel looked up at the holo. What she saw there hurt her eyes. It resembled none of the previous graphics. It didn’t have a sane geometry. It looked solid, but it rotated in a manner that three dimensions couldn’t accommodate. The colors pulsed in a rhythm that made her want to shut her eyes.