Merry raised one eyebrow. “What?”
Vlad simply showed her the results of his archive breach. It was the digital ID of their client. He had a name after all: Yorgos Costas. He had been a spy in his own right. An Academy graduate. Seven years deceased. Deceased.
“Fuck.” Merry updated her screens – Jayne was approaching the top floor. She jumped onto the comm. “Jayne! Abort, abort! It’s a set-up! Our client’s a ghost!”
+++
Jayne kicked the door open onto the roof. The man in black handed the briefcase over to a young gangster, made obvious by his face tattoos. The gangster handed a large wad of cash to the man in black. The hand-off was complete, but now Jayne had to discover what the stand-off was all about.
“Yo, Jayne, this surprise party just went south. We need to you to abort now!” Merry continued yelling into Jayne’s ear, but Jayne tuned her out. She couldn’t go back now.
“Drop the case and the dough!” Jayne pulled a gun from inside her jacket. “And hands in the air! Both of you, now!”
The man In black took his time turning toward Jayne. His eyes, all that was visible behind his high collar, flashed over Jayne like she was nothing more than a detail on the skyline.
The gangster started shaking. Unlike the man in black, his eyes were full of nothing but bafflement and fear. It was as if all the secrets of the world revealed themselves to him at once. It was the face of a man who knew he was about to die.
The man in black drew a gun from his dark coat as if this had been the plan all along. But he didn’t shoot Jayne. He blasted the young gangster in the chest. The briefcase slipped from his dying grasp and clattered onto the roof. The young gangster stumbled backwards and fell off the roof. If the gunshot hadn’t killed him, the fall would.
In the split second that the man in black drew a gun, Jayne spotted a long lightning bolt tattooed down the length of his forearm. Jayne focused her sights on the man in black’s foot with the goal to stop him, not kill him. “Freeze!” She pulled the trigger, but the man was too fast. He sprinted to the edge of the roof and leapt across the gap onto the next building, leaving the briefcase behind.
In that moment, Jayne quickly ranked her priorities. Grab the briefcase, then pursue the man in black.
Jayne had to make a split-second decision: the man in black or the package? She decided the contraband was more important. Jayne crouched down by the briefcase and, shielding her face from the shrapnel of concrete that would kick up, shot off the lock.
The first thing she saw was a photo, hard copy on glossy paper, of her. She slammed the briefcase shut. That was bad. She felt the sinking feeling of knowing you just lost.
The discovery that she was more integral to this than she ever suspected magnified the importance of tracking down the man in black.
She shut the case and clutched it to her chest as she followed her target across the urban chasm of an alleyway. She leapt over the alley and landed on the roof of the next building, using her momentum to catch up with the man in black. She flung the briefcase like a mace into the back of his head.
The man tumbled onto his side. Jayne heard sirens approaching – there was no doubt the authorities had already been alerted to the shot body of a young man who plummeted to his death.
She planted her booted foot onto the lower stomach of the man in black. He was tall and thin, thinner than she expected. A black mask hid all of his face but his seemingly iridescent-green eyes. Jayne would have believed it if his eyes had a mind all their own. Jayne couldn’t help but notice the mercilessness burning behind the iris, though fierce, seemed unwilling.
Jayne dug her steel-toed combat boots into the man. She noticed the lightning bolt tattoo on the hand again. “Who are you?”
The man in black kept his masked mouth shut. Jayne pulled the gun from her holster and took a page from “Merry’s Guide to Intimidation”. She pressed the barrel over his crotch. “No answer, no balls!”
If the man did answer her question, Jayne couldn’t hear anything over the hellish choir of sirens and screaming club patrons pouring out into the street. The only answer Jayne could discern from the man in black was a swift kick with his right leg up and over her own. He locked his foot at Jayne’s thigh and slammed her onto her side. Her gun flew from her grasp and skittered across the roof, off into the street. Her finger prints were on a gun empty one bullet that fell off a roof next to a dead kid.
Uh oh, Jayne thought. Not exactly a good look.
The man in black somersaulted onto his feet by the roof’s edge. He blew Jayne a kiss from his hidden face and stepped backward off the ledge.
Jayne ran to the end, but when she looked down she saw nothing. The man in black was gone like a phantom.
Now it was time for her to do the same. She grabbed the briefcase. With all the might she had left, she dug heel into shingle and made one more Olympian jump onto another building. She absconded down the fire escape and slid down to the street as nonchalantly as possible. An entire squad of Techcropolis’ finest ran right by her. She made a mental note to tell Cameron that his boys in blue were getting rusty.
+++
Lucky Bed Motel, L26 Theron Techcropolis, Amaros
The fire escape Jayne found salvation in connected to an emergency grate into Level 29. She thought she’d be safe a level down and worked her way down the lower fire escape onto the streets. But the place was crawling with cops.
As two cops on magne-cycles zoomed past her, Merry radioed in. “Did you go down to twenty-nine?”
Jayne awkwardly shifted the briefcase as a trio of street cops crossed the street in her direction. “Yeah, can’t talk too much either.”
“I understand,” Merry replied. “You need to go down to twenty-seven or twenty-six. Thirtieth Precinct called on twenty-nine for back-up. Apparently, they can’t hunt you down and handle hundreds of drunk sorority girls and frat guys at the same time. Which is ironic, because I could definitely handle one-hundred frat guys at the same time. I’ve done it before, and I’ll-”
“Merry, as entertaining as your escapades are, we’ll have to table that story. There should be an ele-grav in the next couple blocks.”
Merry sighed over the phone. “Fine, Jayne, but remind me to tell you the part about the barbecue tongs. Anyway, they’ll be searching for a signal at this frequency now. So, let’s switch to radio silence. For at least the next couple hours. Do you think you’ll be okay?”
Jayne stepped into the ele-grav and scanned in some credits. The doors slid shut. “Of course, babe. This ain’t my first rodeo.”
Merry laughed. “Hugs and a kiss for my little miss. Scrambling this frequency… Now.” And the signal went dead.
The ele-grav zipped through a few dozen feet of crumbling infrastructure – pipes and cable, many of which were totally decayed and useless if not also health hazards.
The ele-grav passed through the division, and Level 26 welcomed Jayne with a dying neon fanfare burning through the light smog. The lower levels got a bad reputation, but many of them were already beginning to turn around. University students and artists, the seeds of gentrification, were venturing down into the lower numbers for the practically free rent. A vibrant and brash scene of experimental art and music was emerging in the lowest levels – a literal underground scene. Soon the homeless and the truly unfortunate would be driven out of those levels, too. But for now, Level 26 was still the home of those society didn’t care about. To Jayne, it felt like a temporary home.
+++
Jayne double-locked the door of the honeymoon suite she checked into under a fake name she had made up on the spot: Susie… Carpetson. Not her best alias. Usually, when picking a name, you don’t base it off whatever is around you, but Jayne was in a desperate situation.
A cockroach crawled out from under the pillows when she threw the briefcase onto the bed. Jayne could relate – hiding for reasons she didn’t understand.
Jayne flicked up the latch on the briefcase, crudel
y bent where the bullet tore through the locking mechanism. Sometimes a little firepower was preferable to spending hours deciphering a digital codex embedded into the lock.
She took a deep breath and noticed the pain she was in. She was emerging from an adrenaline trip. Her view of the room expanded, no longer hyper-focusing on the briefcase before her.
She saw the cockroach crawl down the length of the bedspread and down onto the floor. It skittered over the carpet and squeezed into a crack at the base of the wall. For every roach you see, Jayne remembered from a pest control billboard, there are thousands hidden.
She opened the case and her stomach dropped like a neutron star the size of a bowling ball. She had hoped what she saw on the roof had been a hallucination. But it was all very real.
The case was full of information, hard information, about her. Whoever wanted this information wasn’t fucking around. The backing up of digital files on paper meant someone wasn’t going to risk being digitally traced. She shuffled through – everything was there. Her dismissal from the Academy, witness profiles of every black-market acquisition, breakdowns of every mission she’d taken on, profiles of every freaking romantic encounter she had ever had. And, finally, Burrett. Everything – from escape to the murders to his, so she had thought, secret imprisonment.
And then the pounding at the door, the signature of a cop who’s been given permission to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Susie Carpetson! We have this entire building surrounded! Come out with your hands behind your head!”
Jayne shut the briefcase. “Fuck.” She ran to the window – sure enough, a squad of hover-cruisers, flashing their red and blue lights, had the entire motel surrounded.
The pounding on the door happened again. KNOCK KNOCK.
“Uh… Who is it?”
“POLICE!”
She decided to attempt a little damage control. As fast as she could, she rifled through the thick stack of documents and pulled, as best she could determine, the most damning of information about her. “Uh, police who?” she finally responded.
“Police open this door! I mean… Dammit, how did you do that?”
She grabbed the desk chair and, building momentum like a shot-putter, chucked it through the window with a glistening cascade of shattered glass.
Before she made her daring getaway, she shut the bathroom door. When they realized she didn’t jump out the window, they might try checking the bathroom.
The flustered officer’s rage could be heard through the walls. “For refusing to cooperate, you have given us substantial cause to enter this room.”
Jayne heard a faint “thunk” on the door. She knew that sound. They just stuck an incendiary unit on the knob. Those locks were designed to keep out angry wives being cheated on, not cops with military-grade equipment. She was toast.
Time to check out the attached living room and kitchenette, Jayne thought. As the incendiary device’s small, but powerful explosion popped the lock off the door like a projectile, Jayne yanked the briefcase off the bed by the handle and ducked and rolled into the connected room, shutting the connecting door behind her. She made a mental note to upgrade to the suite more often. As the cops stormed the bedroom, Jayne was already out in the hallway through the attached room’s main door.
Now she only had to find another place to hide. It was going to be a long night.
CHAPTER TWO
Inside A Laundry Cart, Lucky Bed Motel, L26, Theron Techcropolis, Amaros
Two hours had passed, and the dirty laundry was really taking its toll on Jayne’s sense of smell. The sound of cops, the dull chatter of investigators looking for clues, had ceased about an hour earlier, Jayne estimated. The churning whirr of a dozen hover cruisers surrounding the motel died down not too long after that.
Since then, silence. But Jayne wasn’t taking any risks, so in the laundry cart she would stay until she felt totally confident the cops had gone.
She honestly couldn’t believe it had worked. An entire squad and a team of investigators looking for a criminal didn’t think to check the laundry cart at the end of the hall?
Jayne ran over the events of the night in her head. She received an assignment to tail a “man in black.” Merry and Vlad learn their client hid their digital trace with the ID of a dead man. A dead man from the spy academy, no less.
She witnesses a successful handoff. Why did the man in black shoot the thug? Why not her? What did the thug know? Or maybe, Jayne realized, it was what he didn’t know. As much as Jayne hated to admit it, the moment she stepped onto that roof, the man in black had a wide-open opportunity to kill her. But he didn’t.
Were the police chasing her because they think she killed the young, face-tatted gangster? Or was it about the information? Although Jayne couldn’t figure out how the cops would know about that.
For as many times as she had successfully worked with cops, boy could they be a pain in the ass.
Jayne had learned plenty about police procedures to know what not to do, which would be sneaking out. There would be a small perimeter of cops who stayed behind. They’d have their eyes peeled for suspicious activity. It’s always best to leave right out the front door, chin up and head high. Wave to them, if you can. Flash them a great big smile and stroll out the door like a dad taking his family on vacation. That’s exactly what Jayne was going to do.
The smell and the silence were officially unbearable. Jayne moved aside the bundles of dirty sheets on top of her and poked her head out.
The cancerous, nose-burning stench of the filthy hallway was a welcome change after two hours of breathing in sheets stained with… she didn’t even want to think about it.
She climbed out of the laundry cart, yanking up the briefcase behind her.
“Hey! Stop!”
Jayne spun around, nearly tripping over a duvet wrapped around her ankle. Around the corner from the vending machine nook, a cop emerged with a Dubbo-Dipper Choco-Stick. “Freeze!” The cop fumbled, not wanting to drop his brand new Choco-Stick. As fast as he could, he removed his gun, and placed the candy bar in his holster. Then he aimed. “You’re under arrest!”
But Jayne was already executing Plan B: jumping out the window.
She high-tailed it down the length of the hallway, knowing a bullet would pierce her back at any moment. Feet away from the end of the hallway, she flung the briefcase forward, shattering the window. She took a flying leap of faith out into the open air of Level 26.
As if knowing this would be her plan all along, a Security Drone hovered right outside the third floor of the Lucky Bed Inn. As Jayne’s jump arced to its crest, she came face to face with the blank, staring eye of the drone’s camera. She could see the shutter inside the lens snap open, then shut.
It took only a split second, but there was no question about how much more complicated things were going to get. “Ah, fuck.”
The bushes did very little to break Jayne’s fall, and the decaying pool pump did even less. Her leg landed hard on a smog-corroded PVC pipe which snapped with her force. The jagged edges tore her pants and cut a gash six inches long down her thigh.
But Jayne didn’t notice the cut at first. She was too distracted by the loud POP her ankle made when she landed on it sideways.
The sound was triggering, the pain familiar. Jayne was fourteen again. She was climbing through an abandoned computer factory in the restricted post-industrial district of Windsor-Calcula, her hometown on the planet Zhang 11b. She had entered into the wasteland with Indigo West, Yuri Voronin, and Joe Lawless, her first crush. Mostly because of his name.
The gang’s exploring came to an abrupt end when they reached a massive hole, a dozen feet across, in the middle of the factory’s fifth floor.
Yuri took a six-pack they brought with them and threw it across the gaping chunk of missing floor. Only one of the beers cracked open and fizzed out until it was empty, the rest still drinkable.
Indigo punched Yuri on the arm. “What the fuck?”
Yuri smiled, cocky and a little drunk already. “Whoever makes the jump gets the beer. Who’s gonna do it?”
“No one, Yuri.” Joe zipped up his jacket and took Jayne’s hand, leading them back the way they came. “Let’s go guys.”
But Jayne slipped her hand from Joe’s well-intended grip. “Wait a minute. It’d be a shame to let that beer go to waste.”
To the horror of Indigo and Joe, and to the amazement of Yuri, Jayne broke into a sprint toward the edge where the carpet tore and hung loosely off the broken floor.
Jayne’s legs catapulted her skywards, but not forward. She missed the other side by a mile and fell like a brick. She crashed onto a conveyor belt two stories below.
Jayne remembered her friends hollering down that they’d run and get help. She remembered lying on the floor of a roach and raccossum infested factory for a little over twenty-four hours before she finally saw the heavy beams of power-lights shine down on her. Her friends had forgotten the location of the factory lost in an endless-seeming sea of identical memorials to obsolete trades.
She promised herself she’d never be helpless again.
Jayne nearly ground her teeth into fine dust as she locked her foot into the crook where a shaft of pipe met with the pool pump.
With her foot tightly locked in between the pipe and the pump, she brought her fist down hard against the side of her leg. In one swift chop she forced her ankle back into place. If the security drone hadn’t already given away her location, her blood curdling scream would.
Jayne wanted to shake the police off her tail as soon as possible and set this injury. A nap would be nice, too. And maybe a margarita and a spa day.
Jayne grabbed the briefcase and forced herself up. She nearly blacked out from the pain, but she shook herself out of it. Pain, she told herself, is a small price to pay. Her only other option was getting arrested and losing everything she had worked for.
Once Jayne hobbled around the motel’s algae-filled pool, she could see a warehouse through the chain-link fence that stretched between the towering mid-level buttresses holding up the city.
Exposed (Interplanetary Spy for Hire Book 2) Page 2