All it took was that little poke to her professional pride, and Freida proved herself a proper hack artist. “Hey, dammit,” she barked back, sounding like an irritable sister, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. Fine, I’ll see what I can do – but if I need backup, you better be on hand to give it to me.”
Bobbi looked at the connection window, as if she could reach through it, give Freida a pat on the head. “I’d never let you go down a dark alley like that on your own, girl,” she said, her voice warming up with her old cocky cowgirl bravado. “Don’t you worry. I got your Z.”
“No, it’s fine,” Freida said, and she grinned at Bobbi. She seemed a little relieved at the show of support, even a little cocky. “It’ll be much easier for me to work through it all myself. I know the system. I’ve got … ” She chose her words carefully now. “I’ve got a way in.”
Bobbi peered at her image floating in the window. “You’re sure?”
“Trust me,” Freida said, and she gave Bobbi a wink. “You’re not the only console goddess around. I’ll hit the system without a blip.”
“Well you do that, sweetheart,” Bobbi murmured as Freida hung up; she had already banished the window, and conjured a battery of new screens. She didn’t like the idea of leaving the whole thing to Freida, but she hadn’t done a serious hack since Tom had disappeared. Besides, if Freida had ways into a federal system without bringing the heat down on them, all the better to let her handle it.
Even if it did fuck with her pride.
A few hours later, Bobbi was going over the list of Genefex facilities again when the phone rang. Freida’s face appeared like a summoned holographic pixie. She was grinning again.
“All right,” she said, “I’m back.”
“Mission accomplished, I assume?”
Freida nodded. “Hell yes,” she cried; her eyes were still wide and manic from adrenaline, a condition Bobbi knew well. Must have been an exciting run. “Got in, got out, got what they had— although, gotta say, it wasn’t much.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing,” Bobbi said, and nodded. “What did you get?”
Freida looked off camera for a moment. “Sending it over to you now. Confirm that you got it, please.”
Bobbi called up a mailbox window – sure enough, a new message popped up sans sending line. She opened it up, saw encrypted documents keyed as they had agreed upon before. She opened them; captures of data appeared, small panels of white light in a neat row representing pages. Not many pages at all. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Looks like there’s not much at all here, though.”
“Yeah, just some information on Redeye, which is, as I said, not much. I got nothing on Cagliostro though— man’s like a ghost, whoever he is.”
“Or she.”
“Yeah, or she.”
Bobbi wrinkled her nose. The information in her hands now, she looked back to Freida’s miniature image. “How did you get in, anyway?”
Freida made a bit of a face. “Oh, well,” she said, “I had some, you know, passwords.”
“Passwords.” Bobbi arched a brow. “Active ones.”
“I had it from the Bureau,” Freida replied. “From when I was working for them.”
“You mean the ISB, or the FBI?”
Freida snorted. “The ISB. And anyway, don’t worry about it. I—”
A dark thought appeared in the deeps of Bobbi’s mind, surfacing like a corpse. “I thought they reset all passwords attached to a user once they leave service,” she said. Bobbi tried to suppress the suspicion that had come with that evil thought, but she wasn’t entirely successful.
“That’s true,” Freida said, and her joy turned to something much more evasive and unsure. “I just … I took care of it, all right?”
But Bobbi would not be mollified. “You might have put backdoors in the Bureau’s system,” she said, “but you certainly didn’t put them in the FBI’s.” Her tone shifted further, became hard, accusatory.
Freida snorted again, this time sounding more like an irritable horse. “Look,” she said, her voice furtive, tinged with shame. “I … I stole it.”
Bobbi didn’t expect this reaction from someone who had just committed federal information theft. Incredulity crept into her tone. “That’s what you were ashamed of?”
“No, I mean … ” On the other side of the line, Freida must have been turning colors to go with her frustration. “All right, I stole it from her, okay? Her access codes.”
“You mean your lady friend?”
“Former lady friend, but yes. All right?”
Ahhh. Now it made sense. “Think she’ll get in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” Freida admitted. “I don’t think so. We didn’t get caught, and she calls on the FBI to share forensic data all the time.”
“Let’s just hope that nobody clues in, then. For everybody’s sake.” Bobbi’s voice had become cool stone.
“Yeah.” Freida sounded distinctly uncomfortable now. “Well … I’m gonna go for now. Umm. Get back to me when you’re ready to talk about what you find in that file, okay?”
“Sure.” Bobbi hung up. She sat back hard against her chair, staring at the first two pages of their purloined file as it floated against the far wall. She was angry. Freida had done something really dumb, using the access data of someone to whom she was directly connected; it went straight against the rules of good practice where hack artists were concerned. Hell, anyone doing anything clandestine, ever. If anyone detected anything out of the ordinary, both the Bureau and the FBI would be tracking Freida down to ask questions – and this, in all likelihood, would lead them to Bobbi’s own door. God damn it, Bobbi rumbled to herself, rubbing hard at her brow. This shit is amateur hour. It was then that she decided that whatever happened in the future, she wouldn’t be going doubles with Freida again. Not unless she was sure that this was a one-time boneheaded error, and maybe not even then. It might have been a mistake to involve her in the first place, but there was nothing that could be done about that now. Bobbi would have to do her best to mitigate the risk of screw-ups on her own.
Bobbi spent a few hours reading Redeye’s file, but there wasn’t much there to begin with. No name, no real idea as to where she’d come from, and the mysterious young woman didn’t seem to exist before her appearance not long after Bobbi and Tom had met. Only in Seattle would a woman with a small army of crazy people, running around the Old City destroying random buildings, fail to get serious interest from the FBI.
Oh, they kept tabs on her – taking notes, that sort of thing – but without the archive that Bobbi had, they would have reached the same conclusion that she had initially made. Random insanity, just with explosives added. Given that the pattern of explosions were well away from the border with the Verge, it just didn’t serve as any kind of threat to public order, or at least any public order that the federal government was liable to bother with. Civil Protection had even less, she was sure – they were barbarians in the night, lighting strange fires and praying to nameless gods.
However, what the FBI was interested in was where they were getting their material. Given that the explosions seemed small and hadn’t caused major infrastructural damage, they had assumed up to now that Redeye and her followers were using small quantities of homemade explosives. With the explosion at the old Nissan plant, however, they had begun to change their tune. Could there have been commercial-grade explosives involved? Demolition charges? Military? Clearly it was expected that the bombing campaign would continue, but as far as this suggested, the Feds were not yet interested enough to go wading through the urban wilds to go figure it out.
But Bobbi had Pierre. She fired off a message to him, asking for him to see if he knew of any explosives going into the Old City; then she shut off the computer entirely. Sleep sounded like a good idea, sleep and then getting up the next morning and going to get some real breakfast – or lunch, given how late it was and how long Bobbi knew that she’d sleep. Assuming that they hadn’t
been discovered, and that the police didn’t bash down her door to take her in irons overnight. If she hadn’t been dragged in by tomorrow, she’d celebrate it a little. She’d been eating in too much, living like she was still some form of street creature. She had good money now, didn’t she? Maybe she’d go out and get some real beef. Maybe some lobster. Yeah, lobster sounded good.
Bobbi lay down with thoughts of flayed tails drenched with real cream butter, and of ancient horned claws stuffed with steaming meat, and she slept deeply.
Over the next few days, Bobbi hovered like a moth around anxiety’s pallid flame. The next day saw her spared waking up to guns in her face, so she managed to get up and get that breakfast she wanted; but all the lobster in the world, however delicious, however juicy, was ashes in her mouth as she considered the possibilities of the future. Even if they had managed to escape undetected, Freida had taken some pretty enormous risks, risks that she had not spoken to Bobbi about before jumping. Bobbi would never have done that, she was sure. She would have at least brought it up to Freida and they could have agreed upon it. She would have done that, not been a huge cocky cowgirl just because she knew the type of system they were infiltrating. Right?
The intrusion aside, the lack of data about the parties involved was further unnerving. She could understand Redeye – this crazy woman out of nowhere, blowing shit up that nobody cared about – but the bogeyman that was Cagliostro, who had tried to have Tom and her both captured, who had most likely hacked her system and snatched the evidence she had tried to send to the Bureau before it had even hit the road, and was apparently made of smoke, kept her wishing for a tinfoil hat.
Furthermore, there had been no word from Freida. That really set Bobbi’s nerves on edge; every day she sent messages out to the girl, but she wasn’t answering her phone or her mailbox. What the hell was going on there? Bobbi practically sat on the federal blotters, tracking investigation bulletins and notices of arrests in search of clues that their work been discovered. Nothing. More days passed with no news, but also no armed response teams poised to batter down her doors. Surely if they knew she was involved, they would have arrived by now – Feds weren’t known for fucking around where this sort of thing was involved. She lurked at the Temple for a solid week before Scalli’s constant probing finally got her to open up about the situation.
“Well, shit,” he had said, sounding rather impressed when she’d told him what had gone down. “I definitely understand why you’ve been laying low. But you can’t hide in here forever.”
“Not forever,” she had replied. “Just until I hear from Freida.”
“She’s probably hiding out on her own. You have a way of breeding paranoia in people, Bobbi girl. And in any case, if nothing’s showing up on the blotters, you’re probably all right to at least go out and wander.”
Bobbi wasn’t entirely convinced that they had in fact escaped detection, but she was convinced enough that she would go out and wander the city. Besides, the big bastard that was her only friend was wonderful enough to care about her well-being, and after blowing up at him the other week she wasn’t interested in disappointing him again.
It was easy enough to take the trains and let the world flow by. She, with her lavender hair in its sharp layered shag, her loose black unisuit and eyes swallowed by the veil of heavy Porsche sunglasses, blended in with the uptown crowd as she proceeded around the New City core. She watched them board, perfect faces, bodies engineered in surgical boutiques and driven by obsessive exercise and diet drugs, designer clothes draped over their frames like the skins of mythical lions. She could observe them behind the walls of her dark lenses; she was her own kind of bird blind, outwardly just like them but inwardly feeling like a different species of beast. Again she wondered if Tom had felt like this, and more importantly when she had started to feel this way herself. Had it been when she met him? Or had it always been there, hiding beneath the surface made of pop platitudes and youthful arrogance, waiting for the day to slip out?
Bobbi’s attention drifted to the few other people riding in the train car with her. She watched a trio of girls sitting on the far end of her train car, giggling about something. She had been them, once. A young man sat still closer, bragging to his friend. “…it’s got a org-mol processor,” he was saying, with all the poise and grandeur of a scholar beneath his crown of lacquered blonde hair spikes. “Brand new, straight out of the Tokyo factories. Get you across systems like you were made of light, you understand?” Bobbi had been him as well, but not nearly so douchey. At least she hoped not.
There was someone else, a young woman, possibly a few years younger than Bobbi. Her skin was corpse-pale, her complexion entirely poreless to the point of seeming as though she were made of porcelain or plastic. She wore a brand new Alexi Medenev coat, forest green with its shoulders that looked almost like armor pauldrons. Bobbi’s heart froze in her chest, and she felt the air rush from her lungs. She had seen that look before, of course. In magazines. In advertisements. In the camera feed from Orleans. Seeing the girl in profile, the strange perfection of it, every line and curve sculpted as if it were by a laser … Bobbi felt her body tense up, and her eyes widened behind her sunglasses as she stared at the other woman. Her eyes were closed, lined heavily in black with shimmering purple shadow ringing each like an exotic bruise.
Open, Bobbi said to herself, positively willing the girl to lift her lashes. Open! The need to see her eyes filled her, a manic lance of fear shooting through her as her mind recalled the images of the gazelle-woman at Orleans. She remembered that she had not brought her nerve crusher with her, and the fear pierced her through another time. What if she was another one of the murderous gazelle-women connected with the whole affair, one of Genefex’s silver-eyed killers? What if she recognized Bobbi? Would she be torn apart in public? Images flashed through her mind, images of her body converted into a bloody ruin under the woman’s perfect, white hands. The train car’s dingy plastic walls splashed with tapestries of blood. Bobbi’s eyes staring toward the heavens, blank and green like ancient bottle glass.
The train coasted to a stop at the next station. The kids got up, the giggling girls, the wanna-be datanaut and his buddies, and they began to file out of the car. Bobbi’s body ran on automatic. Her muscles fired on their own, fueled by the rampant fear that seemed to replace her blood. While her conscious mind continued to flash images of horror at her, her lizard brain did what it was designed to do; her body rose, taking numbed and hesitant steps, and it walked past this potential enemy without looking at her. Past the wall-screen advertisements, the smiling faces of beautiful people gazing down upon her like beatific saints, holding up their sacred vessels to spur her on. Moments stretched like the rubber from which her body seemed to be made, until at last she felt the hard concrete tile of the platform meet her boot heels. Only then did the images of death fade from her mind. Bobbi turned around to see the woman still sitting in her seat as the train doors closed, still set in her zen-like posture, the heavily made-up eyes still closed.
The train moved, and Bobbi’s heart stuttered in her chest as if grasped by a fist. As the train began to depart from the platform, the woman’s eyes opened slowly – and though she could not be certain, Bobbi thought that she indeed had caught a glimpse of silver, bright and polished, caught in the black frames drawn by the woman’s mascara. Bobbi stared after the train as it disappeared into the tunnel, by which time her heart began to beat again and she could blow out the long-held breath that seared her lungs.
Around her, the crowd of disgorged people began to move toward the exits. Bobbi let herself be caught up by them, let the tide carry her along until she emerged onto the street. She recognized that she was in Pioneer Square, on the fringe of the New City. The walls of office towers and mall blocks were to the west; here there were mostly bars and clubs and apartment buildings packed with corporate employees. Well, she could definitely use a drink. Nothing else, not even rational thinking – of course that woma
n wasn’t one of the Genefex horrors, of course she was just imagining things – could dull the trembling that shot through her body at this moment. She was scared, and she was ashamed of herself for it.
This goddamned city! There was no hiding from it, not even in her own little office. Bobbi picked her way down the sidewalk amongst a steady current of celebrants, shouldering past men and women in the colorful garb of the young and streetworthy. Here, at least, she fit in; the hair, her uni-suit, all of it good camouflage with which to blend in with these people. The street was her kind of street, the bars her kind of bars – or at least they had been at some point, when she did more than drink alone surrounded by holographic displays. She found a place she recognized, a trashy dance club called the New Standard, and walked straight up to the doorman who was tending to the line of would-be revelers trying to get in.
“Hey,” she announced, grinning at him from behind her enormous sunglasses.
“Hey yourself, little girl.” The doorman wasn’t like the usual case you saw – no enormous frame, no piles of stapled muscle. He was of average height and lean as a greyhound, of mixed afro-caucasian heritage, with short punch-permed hair dyed fiery red. That he was so thin and handling the door of a club meant he was probably wired up or some kind of former Special Forces type, nobody you wanted to mess with. Brown eyes swept over her, instantly weighing her worth. She figured he definitely must have been military at some point, looking at her that way. Professional. “You got a reason to be here?”
Bobbi reached into her jacket – slowly, noting the slight tensing of his face as she did so – and produced one of her cashcards, a thin wafer of indestructible epoxy emblazoned with a finger-wide band of black marble around its interface end. It spoke of a high-value credit account, with at least six figures attached. Bobbi did love having Stadil’s money; it made people look at her all over again when they saw some little punk girl flash that kind of cash.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 8