Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  And certainly no one would have anything on film, courtesy of the suit’s ability to defeat cameras.

  As a final precaution, the suit emitted an EMP that was gentle enough to trigger an altered state of awareness on the part of any onlookers, without frying their brains. It was enough for them to believe their eyes were playing tricks on them or they were having a senior moment. Maybe they were seeing something out of the corner of their eyes that wasn’t there, and was actually floating around inside their eyeballs; “floaters,” optometrists called them.

  Poor Elmo had been subject to sustained exposure within the EMP field of the suit, adjusted to keep him calm, and to help with hypnotizing him in order to get him to awaken from his hiding place in the museum when she needed him. He would recall sneaking into the museum through some elaborate but impossible method, if questioned by the police. That was assuming the first layer of hypnosis was penetrated, and they managed to drill down to the second or third layers. She had put the suggestions in his mind that would serve as the foundation for his elaborate story. When they realized there was no way to break into the museum in such a fashion, they would dismiss him as a poser, a whack job, and they’d let him go. She hated to admit it but, in some ways, his gross incompetence in any endeavor requiring motor skills, mechanical abilities, engineering or scientific acumen, made him the perfect partner. If, despite all her precautions, she managed to trip an alarm, she could leave him behind as the fall guy.

  As for his wild imagination, she had wondered about that. Time and again, he had managed to divine her methods, though she refused to confess as much, making up some alternative scenario he might buy into. But if they believed him, they would have enough leads to make her keeping him around a really bad idea. Then again, who could believe those insane musings about technologies that couldn’t possibly exist for another twenty or more years?

  She smiled, thinking of the stolid, conventional, conservative psychologies needed to function as police, their unwillingness to embrace wild ideas; that was their very downfall in a make-a-wish world—if you knew the right techies, and had enough money. She had the contacts, and she had the Faberge egg, but the latest in cash reserves come payoff time. Impossible to sell off directly. But there were plenty of black market collectors with basement vault museums who would be happy to convert the egg into any kind of currency she wanted, including gold bullion.

  Best of all, Elmo had to be awakened from level three of the hypnotic state, the deepest layer, to recall what she wanted him to retain about the dynamics of their relationship. Namely, that he worshipped her, would do anything for her, including overcome his own nature to be the perfect patsy for her criminal enterprises, and, oh, yes, invest her funds for her, multiplying them threefold or better, down economy or no, like only he could. Short of receiving the trigger words from her, he had no recollection of their relationship or any of their time spent together. It wasn’t foolproof; with sufficiently advanced methods, one could get down past the security levels programmed into his mind to get to the truth. But those methods, as a rule, were way outside conventional police interrogation acumen.

  Elmo’s one limitation was that he didn’t play the entire market; just stocks, and stocks weren’t as profitable as other—granted, riskier—undertakings. She needed to entice more flies into her spider web that had knowledge of derivatives and hedge funds and all the slipperier stuff only the smartest of the smart in the finance world began to understand. She would diversify her portfolio by giving them a percentage of her monies to toy with, see how well they did, before upping the investments. Luckily for her, attending art galleries to keep abreast of who was who, was part of the game. There, one was likely to find these high-handed investors, often looking to broaden their own holdings. Short of fundraisers, which she also prowled like a seasoned predator, art galleries offered the most promising candidates. She preferred the anonymity of the latter, even if they were less auspicious watering holes. It was easier to stay off-radar. The last thing she needed was to be known or coveted by the wealthy that made it a point to know everything about anyone worth knowing.

  She had always fancied that with sufficient wealth she might become a real player, retire from the world of sexy, hi-tech heists, and work on overturning governments, freeing the oppressed of the world. Or, barring that, take a middle road, graduate up to robbing the über-wealthy of all their loot and, by playing Robin Hood, return it to the people. Even with all the tricks she had up her sleeve, though, going after petty dictators introduced an unnecessary level of risk. It was one thing to escape from a locked-down building, quite another to escape from a locked-down country.

  She had time to work things out. While her noble inclinations were sincere, her addiction to heists was an even stronger force pulling at her.

  Besides—maybe Cliff and Piper were the just-in-time solution. Somehow she doubted it; a little too much pomp and circumstance.

  She couldn’t entirely explain why she was only fully relaxed during one of her elaborately planned and staged heists. The rest of the time she had a paralyzing low-grade anxiety, not too unlike Elmo’s, which, if less crippling, was certainly no less irritating. She supposed that was part of what attracted her to him, above and beyond the sea of financial nerds from which she had to choose. Maybe the fact that the heists alone forced out her A-game, elevating her from mediocrity, combined with her need for adrenaline. Maybe she needed the life-or-death backdrop owing to something in her past. Though she had had a fairly well-adjusted childhood; or, at least, as far as she could remember, as there was no allowing for incidents long forgotten and repressed. On the other hand, maybe that was the problem. Maybe her childhood was too well adjusted. And this was just how she counterbalanced the numbing stupor generated by over-safe environments.

  The frequent breeching was proving less cumbersome than she imagined. The suit extended protective goggles around her eyes without being signaled to do so. It filtered her mouth to keep water from getting into her lungs with a membranous catch it had thrown across her throat, porous enough to allow her to breathe, while minimizing swallowing water. She was nearly halfway across the lake, doing better time than most anything short of a high-powered speedboat.

  Someone had seen her.

  There was indeed a boat on the water. And there was more than one set of eyes on it. A single person with a fantastic tale was one thing; several with the same tale, was another. The fiberoptic eyes stitched into the suit giving her three-hundred-sixty-degree vision meant she could analyze the footage later to see if it was just one fool, or more than one. Hopefully the hi-tech footage captured the name of the boat; if not, she’d have to use more unconventional means to find it. For now, she was in no mood to play cover her ass for a low-grade security breach unlikely to amount to anything.

  She didn’t like the water, even if the suit maintained her body temperature just perfectly. And she was feeling fairly depleted, even if the aftereffects of the adrenaline coursing through her body were being partly counteracted by the nano.

  Ordinarily, she wouldn’t allow anything to spoil her mood. So the fact that it was taking a nosedive currently meant she was feeling the prolonged adrenaline overload now, the complete and utter exhaustion phase after one very sustained high. The adrenaline started pumping from the instant she started contemplating a new heist. That meant her system had been on overload for quite some time. Factor in figuring out the hundred and one ways she needed to neutralize Elmo’s incompetence, and the rigors of the heist itself, and she was pretty spent. The suit was doing most of the swimming for her; too much; she didn’t like it spoiling all her fun, either, and subtracting from her inborn athleticism and catlike reflexes.

  Emerging from the water on the other side of the lake, even if someone saw her, there was no one who was going to associate her with an art-museum heist happening several miles away. And it was a pitch-black, moonless night, per her meticulous planning. She was barely a shadow cast by the occasional
porch light. The suit would notify her, in any case, if she was under surveillance so she could take countermeasures.

  ***

  After timing her opening of the locker door to the rotating cameras’ blind spots, Iona stowed the egg in an anonymous locker at the airport. She had the suit digitize a copy of the key for later reproduction, and she crushed the key in her hand with the help of the suit, erasing all connections between the egg and her.

  Just home now, and to bed. She’d endure the anxiety of having the Faberge egg discovered before she could unload it. And one last fear: a possible short-circuit in the suit itself, the downside of all that prototypical tech, which she essentially was field testing, so its designers could learn the hard way what worked and what didn’t. She had tested the suits’ latest modifications beforehand, of course, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t breakdown after a few tries because someone thought they were rigorous enough as is.

  Considering all the reasons she couldn’t relax fully, she was forced to admit, a certain amount of adrenaline was something she needed to tolerate in order to sleep, even to relax. She wondered what that was doing for her aging process, having heard recently that over-secretion of cortisol and other stress hormones throughout the day, every livelong day, could age her as much as thirty-two years ahead of schedule. She looked damn good, but how long was that going to last? Could the nanotech advance fast enough to conquer her aging ahead of time? She would save that question and that mystery for later, during her next visit to Eastern Europe.

  FORTY-TWO

  Iona arrived at her flat in time to set off numerous alarms in her bodysuit. It didn’t take her long to figure out what was going on.

  They’d bugged her apartment.

  She could thank the boys, Cliff and Piper, for that. Thanks to them, she was now on police radar. She was furious. She had worked so hard all this time to stay incognito.

  The good news was, the police would just be looking for her to lead them to Cliff and Piper, so they’d be hanging back. They didn’t know of her other life, just the life she had with them. They were probably willing to write her off as a victim of Stockholm syndrome, which meant she still had some freedom to move about, if she could just ditch the dragnet.

  The question was, what to do about the surveillance? The suit was alerting her to exactly all the places they’d stuck spyware, painting their locations, shapes, and functions, and intel on how to disarm them, across the faux contacts in her eyes. She didn’t feel like closing her eyes to adjust the focus and depth of field on them to better read the information. So she had the suit project the 3D images about eighteen inches in front of her face, using a frequency of light the spyware couldn’t detect, and which she could read with the help of the nexgen contacts. As to wavelength selection, she left that to the suit, which understood the spyware surrounding her body in a web of womblike protection as well as her own security dragnet cast across the interiors of her flat.

  The boys had their secret life, and she had hers, and she supposed this was the price of keeping secrets from one another.

  She decided in the final analysis it would be best to do nothing about the snoopware, just play along as if she had no idea it was there, and modify her in-house behavior accordingly. When that got too awkward, the suit could zap whichever camera she was under in whichever room, and whichever audio device was listening to give her a brief moment of privacy. The interlude would be short enough for her voyeurs to think the transient glitch wasn’t worth sending someone in to investigate or replace the defective device. As it was, for right now, all she wanted to do was collapse in bed.

  That just left the matter of the suit.

  Wearing a body-fitting exoskeleton was just going to provoke more eyes on her. And she certainly couldn’t betray its true identity.

  She peeled it off and let it fall beside the bed, relying on the memory metal to carry out its latest orders in morphing its own characteristics. Anyone entering the room besides her, and it would disappear, like an invisible cloak, stretching itself out on the floor and mirroring the characteristics of the carpet in such a paper thin film, they’d never find it in a million years.

  Sasha waited for her to lose the suit, and don a pair of ill-fitting pajamas that wouldn’t entice peeping Toms to overreach themselves, before jumping on her and licking her face. Her kisses were always gauged to curtail her own slobbering, and never left Iona feeling like she needed waterproof makeup just to survive the onslaught. She was one immensely skilled and thoughtful, nearly human, dog. Just the way Iona liked her pets.

  Sasha barked at being referred to as a pet, although Iona hadn’t articulated the words out-loud. She had a lot of that going for her, a queer ability to see inside Iona’s mind. If owners were supposed to have a psychic connection with their pets, hers seemed particularly strong. The most recent proof: Sasha took her paw and crushed the bedside alarm clock. Bless that dog!

  ***

  Iona had to accept the fact that the boys were gone.

  There had been no contact, no explanation for their absence, nothing for three days straight. They weren’t caught, and stuffed in a holding cell somewhere. It just wasn’t their style. If they had been apprehended, they’d have escaped before the guard had time to turn his back. No, this was just going to be part of their on-again, off-again dynamic. So she may as well accept it.

  There was no point complaining; the truth was, for her, it was the ideal relationship. While they were off living their private lives together doing whatever it was they did, she could get on with her secret life. Only, she hadn’t exactly prepared for this. That meant doing another job for which she was ill-prepared. It meant rushing in without anticipating every contingency, and that meant the likelihood of failure would escalate accordingly. Ditto for Elmo’s psychological overhaul. Hypnotizing him to do what she wanted past all his anxiety defense mechanisms took finesse and planning of its own, and would likewise not benefit from a rushed job.

  The best solution was to tackle a more straight-forward heist in Cliff and Piper’s absence, especially since she didn’t really know how long they were going to be gone, while planning a more elaborate job for the next time they were out of town. When they were around, things were going to be running too hot and heavy for her to be moonlighting on side projects.

  Then there was the question of what to do now that her planning phase was to be carried out under the scrutiny of ongoing police surveillance.

  She landed on a solution that was as elegant as it was half-assed. She would develop a daily routine of going to the lake, sitting on a park bench, and drawing scenics of the skyscrapers across the water, and other cityscape vignettes within view. The subjects of her drawings, the precise parts of those cityscapes she chose to highlight, would be selected for their ability to cover the diagrams and schematics she needed to study ahead of time.

  All she really had to do was allow her flexible exoskeleton smartsuit to project the diagrams on her sketch pad for her—which only she could see—ripped off the city grid, as they would be, as the suit’s software stole into virtual locked vaults in cyberspace for the necessary drawings she needed. As to the maps she needed not yet scanned and parked in some digital archive… she’d save those jobs until the heat around her had died off, when they had long given up on her leading them to Piper and Cliff, assuming that day ever came.

  She cursed having her hands tied. She would have to find a way to make the heists harder to compensate for how much easier it was to work online than steal into paper archives in the real world. Then again, maybe it wasn’t any easier, just less physically taxing. She could just compensate by taking up yet another hobby, jogging around the lake.

  Leastways, staying occupied with business as usual would deflect her recurrent anxieties that surfaced whenever life got a little too dull around her. Anxieties that might just alert the police something untoward was going on now that she was under twenty-four-seven surveillance. They might well just misinter
pret the reasons for those anxieties and figure they had every reason to go on spying on her.

  ***

  Iona’s plan to draw cityscapes to conceal her nefarious exploits was proving workable.

  The bodysuit alerted her to the fact that the police had aimed several park security cameras at her. Their sweeping motions ensured at least one of them was on her at all times, which she supposed was subtler than training them on her and never panning away. In addition, a plain clothes cop patrolled the grass with a metal-detector from a distance, a rather imaginative cover, she thought, for a policeman.

  It was starting to rain.

  She cursed herself for not having a backup plan. She decided to improvise.

  She drove the car up on the grass in line with the park bench, and continued her drawing. What were the cops going to do? Chase her away? That would just raise the specter of her migrating to a spot where it would be harder to keep tabs on her. Her bodysuit alerted her to the cameras straining to focus past the glare and reflection off the car’s windows, and the software algorithms being run to further enhance the images, so they could tell what she was drawing. They were also monitoring her cell phone, and the car’s computer web to make sure it didn’t have security enhancements above and beyond what the cell phone had in case she was trying to use the car to make calls out that would be inaudible to them. Evidently, they weren’t complete dolts.

  She’d want to keep up the plain Jane routine as long as possible. If they pegged her as a hotshot criminal, she’d end up attracting the best of the best who only go after the best of the best. She enjoyed her quiet spells between heists: the planning and preparation stages and build up to the big moment; and the quiet aftermaths afterwards. Her life was never exactly adrenaline free, but the stress level varied by stages of a heist, which lent a nice rhythm to her life that would be lost the second some ace detective got a lock on her and clamped down with pit-bull jaws, never to let up. Nope, she preferred the allure of her double life, maybe triple life now factoring in the boys, even if it wasn’t exactly unproblematic.