by P. R. Adams
“Wrapping up.” Avatar-Chan’s voice was dreamy, soft. A fountain pen poked up from the closest pants pocket. Real? Virtual?
“What do you mean you needed him in this place forever? Where are you putting him?”
“Genie in a bottle. All done,” Avatar-Chan said and waved a hand toward the display. The woman and two men who had been in Jacinto’s prison before smiled at us. Their eyelids had been restored, and there were eyes where there had been streaming data. “The snowcrash, being erased. Worms. Digging into their system. Archives. Little bombs hidden away. Takes time, but structure, the chimera—gone.”
“Gone?” Was that the bottle? “You got them? Jacinto and the others?”
“The others. Jacinto.” A shrug. “Don’t know. Harder to code for him. But, maybe.” That smile. Too casual, too confident, too dismissive.
Lying. “And the Cytek data? The trail on the Metacorporate Initiative?”
Avatar-Chan faded out, followed by the virtual world, and Chan leaned in close to me, my VR goggles in hand, and whispered, “Got it. All of it.”
And the look in those magenta eyes—glassy and distant—told me what I’d feared: Chan was deep in the drugs, under Huiyin’s influence.
Chapter 31
There were memories embedded in the stench of dead fish coming off the beach. Bad memories. Memories of fire and injury and pointless death. Those memories were intensified by the fire-scarred hulk of the data center looming before us, and by the ash floating on the warm, humid air. Someone had already fenced in a section of the parking lot to hold the first of the materials that would be used to restore the place. Otherwise, the lot was empty, reflecting every scuff of our steps off broken asphalt back at us in the still of midnight.
It was the perfect place for our rendezvous.
I unbuckled the backpack I had hauled down from the artificial hilltop where we had parked. It was the same place where we’d launched our intrusion effort days earlier. The backpack felt heavier than it should have, heavier than the contents actually were. How much weight could the Cytek computing device and several storage devices have between them? Maybe five pounds with padding.
I felt like I’d been carrying twice as much, if not the weight of the world.
I walked away from the others, to a spot near the encircling wall, and spat—gray as my outfit. But there was no getting rid of the ash that was in me again. Bitter. Gritty.
Danny tugged gloves on and nodded to the rooftop. “Taking position, like we agreed.”
He jogged away, quickly fading from even my thermographic sight in a darkness so complete that the most innocent heart would disappear.
Like the Agency.
It was just the chameleon gear he’d picked up with the auction money. Replacement, restocking—we all had reasons to spend that money and zero reason to keep it around.
Chan scratched at arms covered by a black hoodie, arms that no doubt shook with the same sick intensity as the darkly tattooed face hidden inside the hood.
The face of an addict fallen hard again.
My fault. All my fault. I pushed too hard, too soon. “Ichi, what do you think? Clear?”
Ichi considered the empty parking lot, the scorched building, as black as her outfit. “Clear.”
I nodded to Huiyin. “You?”
She twisted her neck—right, left. Moonlight reflected off her mirror lenses. She barely glanced toward the building. “No one’s here.
I powered on the radio I’d had turned off for the last hour and keyed the mic. “Miss Duvreau, this is Stefan Mendoza. Do you copy?”
Tick-tick-tick. Silence.
Then Duvreau’s voice. Impatient. “I copy, Mendoza. You have our coordinates?”
“I do. A familiar place. It’ll feel like home. The Baltimore facility you had the Agency strike for you. Need directions?”
“I know the way.” Irritated now.
“Remember—two vehicles. Anything more than that, and we scatter.”
“And I never get the data, yes. We’re en route. ETA, fifteen minutes.”
I turned the radio off again. Fifteen minutes. I had promised them it would be within an hour of a previously agreed upon meeting point. What was fifteen minutes when there were billions, maybe trillions of dollars at stake?
Huiyin pulled her machine pistol components from the pockets of her new jacket. She’d paid extra for the fitting, and it was worth it. She assembled the components, then worked fingers into a pocket sewn into the front near the collar, finally slipping out a magazine that she slapped into place. “You trust her?”
A too-familiar question. Do I trust her? “Duvreau?” I snorted. Loud. “It’s not like I slept with her.”
Huiyin arched a brow over her mirror shades: What does that mean?
We were really getting to know each other. “Nah. All that money at stake, powerful people looking at jail time, and you think I could trust her? They’re getting off easy at five million, but people like her, they prefer leaving corpses behind.”
“You think she’ll come with a large force?”
I pulled up my battered data device and showed the video feed from our original rendezvous point. “She landed with just two of those air limos and waited the whole time. No sign of reinforcements. No, my guess is she’s already got somebody here, watching us.” I waved at the rooftop, where Danny should be, invisible. “Danny, anything from up there?”
Danny whistled. “I, um, I can’t see anything just yet. Eyes are open.”
“ETA—” I checked my countdown timer. “Thirteen minutes, forty-two seconds.”
“Thanks. It feels like Hanoi all over again.”
Huiyin’s shoulders rose inside her black leather jacket. She rolled them, then rolled her head. The irritation was etched all over her face.
I whispered, “We talked about this.”
Danny groaned. “Sorry.”
I patted Huiyin on the back. “No worries.” I muted. “Danny gets excited. He can sometimes lose track of decorum and be a little insensitive. Did you have friends in that operation?”
Huiyin stared straight ahead. Cool and calm now. “Which operation?”
“Hanoi. Almost four years ago. Hoàng Oanh? She was a populist politician making big strides in the Vietnamese elections. She said a lot of things that scared the Chinese, so they kidnapped her. You never heard about it? I thought the MSS got caught between a rock and a hard place with the whole thing. The easy thing would’ve been to assassinate her, but the blowback…? They chose to try to scare her off.”
Huiyin shrugged. “Not everything has to be about killing.”
“Ideally, no. You didn’t answer—did you know anyone in that operation?”
“The MSS is a very large organization. I’m sure I’ve known people killed in one operation or another.”
“Sure. It’s just that would’ve been around the time you were starting out, right? A young kid, coming up through the ranks? Still under Dong’s supervision? If you were a high-potential candidate, maybe you were given a juicy operation to cut your teeth on?”
Clouds glowed in the reflection of her mirror shades. “I didn’t know anyone in the operation.” Icy.
“Makes sense. Like you said, it’s a big organization.” The timer showed ten minutes, thirty-four seconds. “Won’t be much longer. Fairly clear skies, decent lighting, a sliver of moon. Maybe this one finally works out our way.”
“You’ve thought through the angles, haven’t you?” Almost sarcastic.
“What? Did I miss something?”
Huiyin sighed. “It feels too easy. They buy the data from us for five million? That’s it? It’s data. It can be duplicated.”
“It’s a lot of data, and the implications stretch beyond just this one law. Politicians who were paid good money. Investors with a lot of exposure. Big. We’ve got the banking cartels—loans, guarantees, securities. It could bring a stop to their efforts to push everything into orbit. Five million’s a fair price. And if
we duplicate the data, we undo our credibility. That would be dangerous.”
“But you still don’t think they’ll pay.”
Ichi cocked an eyebrow. Challenging? Supporting Huiyin?
I didn’t have time for whatever was going on between them. “Nope. Bullets are cheaper.”
Huiyin stuffed the gun into her front, right jacket pocket. “Then why sell? Turn it over to your government.”
“I don’t work for them, either. They don’t care enough to make it matter, and I want my payday. I’m a mercenary, remember? Anyway, it’d take years to amount to anything, and they’ve already fixed the election, so it’d just get swept away. Like you said, it’s not always about killing. Sometimes it’s about the money.”
Huiyin muttered beneath her breath, then said, “I need some space.” She strode away.
Ichi looked ready to follow after the MSS agent until I shook my head. We were all on edge.
Especially Chan. I wrapped my arms around shoulders that felt like they would fold the moment things turned bad and steered the Gridhound around until we were looking at the blasted data center. “If things go bad in any way, you run for the building, okay? That front door’s gone, but there were ten, twelve doors inside. You can hide; you can block yourself in. Just stay low.”
Chan looked away. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Getting back on. Falling for her…words.”
“Huiyin? Don’t worry. She’s a pro. It’s how she operates, and she’s good at it.”
“Messed up…” Chan waved a hand, as if to say everything.
I squeezed those narrow shoulders. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Get clean again. Promise.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard. We’ll get you there together.”
Chan hugged me. Warm, urgent. Needful. “Thanks.”
“I thought we were keeping a good eye on you. She do anything else with you? Take advantage of you?”
“I…” A choking sound. A head shake. “No.”
But those magenta eyes had looked over my shoulder. At Huiyin. “You know you can always talk to me.”
“Yeah. Trust you.” Chan’s voice cracked.
And then I did something that made my stomach turn—I held up a pill. The sort the Agency used to give us in the field to calm our nerves and focus our attention. Not addictive, but you always found yourself needing just one more. “Need something to get you through this?”
Black-metallic fingernails took one side of the pill, and a surprisingly strong thumb worked its way up my fingers to clamp the other side.
Then Chan pressed the pill against trembling black lips and swallowed.
We’ll get you off this again. When we aren’t desperately in need of you. Goddammit.
Ichi glared at me the way she had when I’d killed Jose. She didn’t need to say a word. I kept breaking her trust in me, and at some point, that trust might not be able to come back.
Danny called over the radio, “Incoming! Two. Airborne. From the southwest. Nothing else. Um. How many can those hold?”
“Ten. Twelve.”
He whistled. “That’s a lot.”
It was. “Anything else?”
“Uh, not inside the drone range.”
“All right. Stay low. Everyone keep calm. Remember the plan.” I waved Ichi out about fifteen feet to my right and slightly forward, then walked Chan back from me about the same distance and a little off to the side. When I returned to my previous position, Huiyin was already about twenty feet off to my left.
We didn’t have to wait much longer: Running lights flared in the sky, followed a few moments later by the deep whine of fans. Floodlights from the bottom of the vehicle lit up the most obvious place for the vehicles to put down, then they descended one at a time. Gull-wing doors rose before the first tire touched the ground, and armored forms with helmets leapt clear. They dashed several feet away from the vehicles and each dropped to a knee before bringing up the carbines I’d seen before.
Ten. That was better than twelve.
Not private security guards. Not small-time operators. Assault personnel. Probably former military—like me.
As the second vehicle powered down, a form stepped out, any hint of femininity lost to what was probably an armored long coat. At least the designer of the coat had attempted to make it stylish—sandy colored in the floodlight. Lilly Duvreau’s dark hair was short, swept back from a face that would never be described as pretty. But it was a face that conveyed intensity and competence, and that was what mattered in her line of work.
She strolled forward, bracketed by two of her armored escorts, clearly giving zero fucks about anything. Closer up, the security team’s environmental gear was clear. They were prepared.
I bowed slowly toward her. “Miss Duvreau. Sorry for the coordinate mix-up.”
She showed no emotion when she said, “Fuck you, Mendoza.”
“Ouch. Are we still good to conclude this business?”
A pause, as if she really might be considering walking away. Or killing us without knowing the details. “You’ve killed a lot of my people. Why shouldn’t I tell my team to just turn you into gooey, unidentifiable puddles?”
“I think this data means more to you than a bunch of unskilled grunts.”
A longer pause, enough to tell me maybe she had a connection to her grunts, even if it was only a matter of pride. “Tell me how this works,” she finally said.
“You have a systems expert?”
Duvreau yelled over her shoulder, “Burkland!”
A woman exited the first limo—short, glasses with thick lenses, feathery pale hair. She seemed like she might be a little chunky beneath a loose-fitting yellow blouse and a long, gray skirt. Even though she appeared to be young, she looked as if life were being drained from her prematurely. Cubicle slave. She rushed forward, handbag banging against her hips, then seemed to remember what she was supposed to do and slowed. She came to a stop beside the guard on Duvreau’s left.
I pivoted to the systems expert. “Burkland? You’re the computer—”
Burkland said, “Sally,” She winced immediately. That hadn’t been part of the coaching.
“All right, Sally. Here’s the plan.” I held up my hands slowly. “I’m going over to my backpack. Duvreau?”
Duvreau called out, “Hold fire unless you see Mendoza do something stupid. Don’t do anything stupid, Mendoza. These people are given a fair bit of latitude in defining the parameters of their assignment.”
“Nothing stupid.” My hands stayed up while I sidled over to the backpack. I shouted, “Lifting the backpack now.” Then I lowered my left hand—slowly—and grabbed the backpack handle. And lifted.
I moved back to my position. “Sally, you have a computing device with you?”
Sally pulled a thick rectangular device from the handbag and flashed the screen toward me. “It’s a Wang-3350. Don’t let the bulk put you off—it’s powerful. And me and Harriet, we always joke that no one likes a small Wang, anyway.” She snorted nervously, then bowed her head slightly. “Sorry.”
“That’s good.” I waved her forward. “Duvreau, I want to pull a storage device out for Sally here to connect to. One. I will power it on and it will prompt Sally for a code, which I will give to her. If she types it in correctly, you’ll get a good look at some of the data. If she types it in incorrectly…well, it takes a while to generate a new code. Sally, take your time and get it right, okay?”
“Oh, I’m a good typist.” She giggled, but it sounded more anxious than anything else.
I locked eyes with Duvreau. “Are we all clear on this? We’re very close to wrapping this transaction, so everyone should just stay calm.”
Duvreau clenched her jaw. “Hurry up.”
I pressed a button on the device, and pale green lines flickered all around the frame. After a few seconds of the light show, a small display on the front presented twenty characters. “You seeing a connectio
n prompt, Sally?”
“I do!” That was genuine giddiness. Surrounded by imminent death, she was tickled over a computer working the way it was supposed to.
She had to be legit.
I read the code off, slow and loud.
She typed, then read it back.
“That’s good. Go ahead and connect, please.”
Sally bit her lip. “Okay. I’m seeing the device. Storage. Terabytes, partitioned, compressed. Wow. That’s some slick work. Really clean.”
Chan croaked, “Thanks.”
Sally squinted and seemed to spot Chan for the first time, then went back to work. “I want to—”
I cleared my throat. “Just open the file labeled preview, please. It’ll take about five seconds.”
It looked like Sally mouthed okay, and after a bit, she said, “Open. Miss Duvreau, it looks like a header for one of the DA-75 transactions. Wow. Wow. I had no idea this one was in the wild. They’ve got—” She looked up, caught the look on Duvreau’s face, and bowed over the display again. “I-it’s the real data. Ma’am.”
Duvreau gave a curt nod. Part defeated, part satisfied. “What next?”
I waved the storage device. “I’m putting this back in the backpack, then I’m zipping it up. I can hand it over to Sally or to one of your soldiers.”
“Sally.” Duvreau waved the other woman forward.
I put the storage device back into the backpack and zipped it shut. When I handed it over to Sally, I said, “This is all ruggedized, and the storage devices are shielded, but they’re worth millions to me. Please don’t drop them.”
She groaned beneath the weight but nodded, then whispered, “Wow! Must be very ruggedized! You guys thought of everything!”
“It’s what I do.”
She clutched the backpack to her chest and blushed. “This has been the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”
“I should hope so.” I almost wanted to carry the backpack for her.
Duvreau waited until Sally was back among the security team. “We have the devices with all the data.”
“You do,” I said. “Now we need the money.”