“Yeah. That’s pretty profound for you, Clarence,” Fergus said.
“Fuck you,” Zacker said. “And anyway, that was how Deliah tried to explain it to me on my terms. And it makes sense, though I think she still thinks I’m way more complicated than I actually am. Not my problem if—”
Zacker trailed off and went to peer out the scope. “Action, Ferguson,” he said.
Fergus was already on his feet and over to the monitors. “Where’s our fire-cult guy?”
“He suddenly up and scurried off moments ago, looking like something was biting his ass,” Zacker said. “The van over there is new.” He pointed.
“It’s black, not white.”
“Right. Apparently, vans come in more than one color in the Supervillain Supply catalog,” Zacker said. “Two guys just got out in full camo gear. One went into the building, carrying a heavy bag; the other went off down the street. Bad Yuri took a walk about five minutes ago to see if it would draw anyone out, and it looks like it worked. Perp number one—I’m ranking ‘em by priority for you—is on his tail.”
“Shit. Okay,” Fergus said. “I’m going to go after Yuri. Keep me informed what happens across the street.” He popped an earpiece in, shrugged into a nondescript pair of street-cleaner coveralls, grabbed his bag, and took off down the stairs three at a time.
“To your left, down past the banana store,” Zacker yelled after him.
Fergus ran to the corner outside the fruit store and stopped under the hanging banana-shaped sign, peering down the street. He could see a guy in camo about a block ahead, walking purposefully but not quickly, one hand staying by his side where his jacket was slightly bulked out. “Gun,” Fergus said.
“No shit, ya think?” Zacker replied over the earpiece. “Yuri’s about four blocks farther up, knows you’re coming, gonna help you close the trap. You know how to do this?”
“I know how to do this,” Fergus said, and began walking down the street toward them both.
It was midafternoon, too early for the evening crowd to be out in the streets yet, and the day shoppers were starting to thin out. There were enough people to provide reasonable cover if no one was specifically looking back to see if they were being followed, but also plenty of people to get in the way—or, worse, get hurt—if things went suddenly very badly.
The van guy ahead of him had slowed his walk; past him Fergus could see his own doppelganger stopped at a sidewalk farm stand, a pair of lemons in hand, talking to the proprietor. She was smiling and laughing, and held up a lime.
The man in camo drifted to a stop, intent on the interaction about a block ahead of him, seemingly unaware of the other people on the sidewalk passing back and forth around him.
Fergus kept his walk steady, not breaking from the casual, everyday pattern of sound around him, as he pulled a small pair of invisi-gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. He caught up to the guy when they were still half a block away from the farm stand. As Fergus walked to pass him, he held out one hand and deftly slid the man’s wallet out of his back pocket and into his own.
“Hey!” Yuri shouted from the farm stand, pointing right toward the two of them. “Man, I think that guy just pinched your wallet!”
Fergus dashed down the narrow alley conveniently right beside him, as the guy in camo turned and came pounding after him. The man had his gun half-out when he caught up to Fergus and grabbed him by the shirt, swinging him around just in time for Fergus to slap his hand across the man’s neck and dump enough electricity into him to drop him without a sound.
Yuri pelted into the alleyway and saw that Fergus already had him down. “Unconscious,” Fergus said, as Yuri walked up to stand over them, blocking the view from the entrance to the alley. Fergus took the chits out of the man’s wallet one by one, scanned them, put them carefully back inside exactly as they had been, and put it back in the man’s pocket.
“Police are coming,” Yuri said. “You have about forty seconds to get away.”
“Going now,” Fergus said. “That gun ought to get the police’s interest when they get here.”
“I am sure a concerned citizen would not hesitate to point it out,” Yuri said. “Now run so I can yell after you.”
Fergus ran, and a few moments later, Yuri started shouting after him. “You! Come back! Thief! Vile miscreant!”
By then, Fergus was out the far end of the alley and melting back into the crowd, all commotion now far behind him. “Status?” he asked.
“I can’t see from here, but from the police radio, they’ve just started talking to your friend and the van guy, who I gather you knocked out?” Zacker answered.
“I did,” Fergus said, catching his breath. “What’s going on in the apartment?”
“Perp number two is in the hall outside the door, starting to get antsy that he hasn’t heard from his partner yet. If he’s smart, he’ll walk now, reassess, and come back later. And . . . not smart. They never are. He’s picking the lock.”
“Okay, I’m heading over there,” Fergus said.
“Yuri says no on that, and I agree,” Zacker said.
“But—” Fergus started to say.
“No. Don’t go in and fuck everything up,” Zacker said. “If you don’t trust me on this, why the hell am I even here?”
“Fine. I’m going to go check out the van,” Fergus said.
“Only if it’s empty. If not, get your ass back here and sit this the fuck out,” Zacker said. “Yuri is just finishing up giving his statement to the police and should be back here in another ten, if you need a babysitter.”
“Asshole,” Fergus said.
“Schmuck,” Zacker replied.
Fergus looped around the block back to their apartment building and stood just in the shadows around the corner from where the van was parked, listening and feeling. The van was bursting with electrical signals. He didn’t hear movement, but the street was hardly quiet around them, and he certainly couldn’t see anyone through the opaque front windscreen. It was foolish to assume there weren’t sensors all over the van, but like the locks, they would be entirely dependent upon electricity.
Fergus got his handpad out and walked down the sidewalk like he was scrolling through his social feeds, just like two-thirds of everyone else out walking, and he timed it so that there was a group coming down the walk at the same time, and he stepped close to the curb to let them past and ran his still-gloved hand along the body of the van, shorting it out.
He kept walking, but no one got out to yell at him, so after a few steps, he stopped, turned as if he’d forgotten something, and climbed into the unlocked, silent van.
Lucky for him, it was unoccupied. The back of the van was crammed with so much gear and electronics, Fergus wasn’t sure how they even fit two guys in there to start with. An enormous parabolic dish sat in the center of the floor, suspended in a mishmash of soldered electronics.
“How the hell did you get in that fast?” Zacker said over his earpiece.
“I’m just that good,” Fergus said. “What’s happening upstairs?”
“Perp just got in. Looks like he’s doing a preliminary sweep to make sure no one else is in there,” Zacker said.
Fergus went into the front of the van and knelt down under the dash controls, fumbling for the memory slot. He found it, pulled the card out, and slotted that into his handpad long enough to upload the entire data cache to Whiro, then slipped it back into place. Then he went into the back and stared for a while at the equipment. Finally, he gave in and put in a video call to Ignatio.
“Vergus!” Ignatio declared, so close to the screen that only three of eir eyes were visible. “Where—”
“Hang on; I’m short on time,” Fergus said. He held up his handpad so Ignatio could see, and slowly panned the van interior. “Any idea what all this is?”
“Can we connect to these syst
ems?” Ignatio asked.
“Yeah, soon as the van reboots,” Fergus said. “Should be soon, but . . . Oh, there it is.” The instruments blinked back into life, and the rising crescendo of signals was almost like a punch in the gut. He pulled his confuddler out of his shoulder bag and, after studying the systems for a few minutes, moved a half-empty coffee mug gently to one side and wired it in.
His confuddler balked. “There’s some high-level security here,” Fergus said. “I’m not sure I can even get a passive scan of the network, not without leaving a trace. Some of this is obviously surveillance gear, but this other stuff? Any ideas?”
“It is a guess, but maybe they hope to scan for fragments,” Ignatio said. “Send out a signal burst, listen for a reply, like you do? But the fragments have not been making noise to hear.”
“The one from Japan is a little louder,” Fergus said. He’d left it behind in Zacker’s apartment, and as much as that made him incredibly nervous, even from here he could tell it was right where it should be. “It wasn’t until I got near it, and then it sort of perked up on our trip out.”
Ignatio made a face. “That is bad.”
“How much range do you think this scanner has?”
“Terrible, terrible. Perhaps if they parked on top of one?” Ignatio said. “You are much more portable. A compliment, ha! But still, I think you should wreck it, yes?”
In Fergus’s ear, he could hear Zacker swearing. “They’re letting perp one go, minus the gun. Perp two is ransacking the apartment,” he said. “Can you get your ass back here now?”
“Will do,” he said. “Gotta go, Ignatio.”
“Isla is very—”
“I’ll be up there soon, and then she can yell at me in person as much as she wants, but I gotta go,” he said, and cut the connection.
He unplugged his confuddler and tucked it back in his bag, then put his hand against the main console and fried the entire system. The van itself shut down again. He picked up the coffee mug and spilled the remaining contents into the console, and left it tipped there, an obvious, accidental culprit for the outage, popped another blister of cleaning bots, and then he slipped back out onto the street and away.
Zacker shoved past him the moment he entered the apartment, and growled, “Stay put and don’t fuck it all up,” on his way by.
From the apartment, Fergus watched as Zacker intercepted Yuri on the sidewalk, and could hear him asking for directions. Perp one, who had been heading up behind Yuri, stopped in his tracks and loitered on the corner, pretending to check his shoes, then his watch, then his handpad in some of the worst acting-casual Fergus had seen. On the monitors, perp two finally found the fragment piece atop the windowsill, dropped it into his pocket, and made a beeline out of the apartment.
“Two is coming out,” he told Zacker and Yuri over the audio link.
Yuri led Zacker toward the corner, causing perp one to back off even farther and hide behind a public charging booth. Yuri was pointing down the street, making left and right gestures with his hands, and Zacker nodded along.
Behind them, perp two slipped out of the building and hared off in the other direction. Perp one turned and walked away as well. “That’s it; they’re out and gone,” Fergus said.
Zacker thanked Yuri, who headed back into his apartment, and Zacker headed off in the direction Yuri had pointed. He arrived back in the apartment twenty minutes later with ice cream. “Blueberry lemon,” he said by way of explanation. “I only got one for myself. Figured you were probably one of those fucking vanilla people.”
Fergus ignored him and watched until the two men got back in their van. It sat there for several minutes, then pulled sharply away from the curb and sped off down the street. In its angry wake he spotted a figure in plain linen step out from behind a tree and watch it go.
“And that,” Fergus said, mostly to himself but with great satisfaction, “is how a honeypot works.”
Chapter 11
Yuri had already ditched the beard and shaved his head, while Fergus was back to his natural color and chafing at the stubble now colonizing his chin, when they arrived at Kelly Station in Earth orbit. Fergus waited with him for the lunar shuttle to arrive, both of them too tired to talk much, but when the shuttle boarded, Yuri gave him a tight bear hug before silently boarding his shuttle for home.
Fergus wandered back out into the concourse full of new arrivals who had not yet dispersed or been collected by family, and called Francesco to let him know both Yuri and payment were on their way. “Thank you, my friend,” Francesco said. “You told me there was trouble coming, and that it could reach us even here on Luna. If it gets past you, you’ll get us warning?”
“If you can hear the entire Earth screaming from here, then it got past me,” Fergus said. “I expect if it does, it’s because I’m already dead.”
“In this moment, I regret once again that you are not a theatrical man, as that bodes poorly for any hopes you are exaggerating,” Francesco said. “Do take care.”
“And you,” Fergus answered.
He milled around the slowly emptying concourse, avoiding the inevitable for an hour or so, then gave up and caught the docking transport back to Whiro.
“Your van people are Digital Midendian, Inc.,” Whiro told him the moment he’d crossed through the airlock on board. “They are a private company specializing in data security and management, one of the top in the field. Their headquarters are in the Texas Republic, but they have offices all over Earth. They do a lot of contract work for government agencies.”
“Let me guess . . .” Fergus said.
“No need. You will be correct. They have a contract with the Alliances Terrestrial Sciences Unit, whose inception date corresponds with the start of the data scrub,” Whiro said.
“So, they take the contract, start removing the data, then suddenly get interested in whatever it is the Alliance is covering up. As long as they don’t tip that hand, they have the perfect inside source—themselves.”
“Yes,” Whiro said. “It is, I believe, good that you did not try to penetrate their systems in the van, as it would likely have failed and provided confirmation of our existence and a measure of our threat as a competitor. You used cleaners in the honeypot apartment?”
“Yeah, and the one with Zacker just in case. But they’re going to be looking closer at everything from now on,” Fergus said. He’d rolled around his memories of the van incursion for a while before drifting off the night before, and had to agree he’d gone as far as he should. “If I do need to crack them at some point—which is probably inevitable—I’m going to need a lot more information and resources to do it. But what would a data security company want with the fragments, though?”
“They are alien in origin, and the core fragments exhibit properties outside humanity’s current understanding of physics,” Whiro said. “The founder of Digital Midendian, a human named Evan Derecho, has spun off several tech enterprises in his career, moving on when they reached sufficient stability and reputation to become, at a guess, no longer an interesting challenge. I note that Digital Midendian has a research-and-development division that has grown tenfold in size in the last five years, without any obvious product line.”
“And where is this R&D division headquartered? Also Texas?”
“No. Perhaps conveniently for us, it is in the northeastern territories of the Sovereign City of New York,” Whiro said. “If you would like, I can put in a call to Mr. Zacker?”
“Not until we know a lot more. And anyway, he might not even be home yet, and he’ll be happier about helping us more once he’s had time to get bored again,” Fergus said. The ship was quiet, lights dim until he got close enough to the sensors to trigger them to brighten, and while it was a relief not to be accosted the moment he got on board, it only made his sense of dread for the upcoming confrontation deeper. “Where are Isla and Ignatio?�
� he asked.
“Sleeping,” Whiro said. “It is, by ship’s clock, just past 3 a.m. What time is your internal clock referencing?”
Fergus walked into the small kitchenette, rubbing his face, and dumped himself down on the grippy couch; upholstered with special smart fabric, it did a decent job of keeping you in place if the gravity suddenly went away, but the extra friction made it slightly more effort to slouch on, so it only added to his grumpiness. “I don’t even know. Bodies don’t work that way,” he said.
“When did you last sleep?”
“I don’t know that, either. I dozed a bit after Zacker headed back to the SCNY before I had to turn the apartment keys back over.”
“That is insufficient for optimum performance,” Whiro said.
Fergus laughed and forced himself to get up from the couch. “Let me get some coffee, then we can look into this Digital Midendian outfit more.”
“No,” Whiro said. In front of Fergus’s outstretched fingers, the coffeemaker powered down.
“You have to be joking,” Fergus complained.
“I will return the coffeemaker to service after you have slept for at least eight hours. And I specify slept: lying in your bunk, attempting research, does not count. Also, I have now turned off all your access to ship and dock feeds.”
“Whiro, please. I have a lot to do.”
“You will do it better after sleep. If you wish me to wake Ignatio and ask em about restoring your feeds, I can do so. Or I can wake Ms. Ferguson and let her know you have returned. I believe she has matters for discussion.”
Fergus had made the mistake, once, of waking up Ignatio during eir infrequent but intense sleep periods, and he’d rather stab himself in the eyeball with a fork. And as for Isla . . .
The Scavenger Door Page 20