Morse pauses to bite his lip so hard it bleeds. “You can send the snake in as many times as you need to collect the information you want from whatever system you’re breaking into; theoretically, a good snake can make a million passes a day and collect at least a few terabytes of information, more than enough to serve the average hacker’s purposes, depending on what he or she wants. This snake, though—it wasn’t meant for the average hacker. It was meant for…someone with real goals in mind.”
Chai leans closer to him. “What do you mean?”
He swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “According to the instructions we got from this Finn guy, the snake in question was supposed to be geared toward infiltrating a particular set of encryption systems.”
Chai moves her left hand from Garcia to Morse’s quaking wrist. “What systems?”
Morse’s entire body starts to shudder like he’s shaking apart from the inside out, an internal earthquake with its epicenter in his heart. Guilt.
He licks his inflamed lips, throws his gaze at the table as if he’s not worthy to look anywhere but down, and replies, “Federal law enforcement. The snake is supposed to break into federal law enforcement systems. Including the IBI. Including EDPA.”
* * *
May bursts into the interrogation hall through the retracting elevator doors with a flash of panic on her tongue that translates into, “They escaped!”
And in the seconds of stunned silence that follow the announcement, a dozen plus agents gawking at her sweaty, red-faced, shaking form, every Ocom on a belt or in a pocket or held in hands begins to buzz or squawk or ring or sing some poor-taste top hit song. And all of them carry the same message to their owners:
ALERT: THREE FUGITIVES HAVE ESCAPED FROM CUSTODY WITHIN CITY LIMITS. ANDERSON, PAT; CASTILE, SALLY; LANG, CHELSEA.
FUGITIVES MAY BE ARMED WITH BLACK MARKET VERA GRENADES OR OTHER ILLEGALLY ACQUIRED WEAPONS. APPROACH WITH CAUTION.
Beneath the official EDPA APB are pictures of the trio, mugshot like, that must have been taken not long before they were shipped off to house arrest. The entire left side of Castile’s face is black and blue.
Dynara scans the message more than once, and for the first time in the weeks since I met her, her cheeks flush pink in what may actually be embarrassment (an emotion she would never admit she has the capacity to feel). “VERA grenades? As in, the grenades my company only sells to four military divisions and are not in any way, shape, or form available on the consumer market?”
Which means someone with intimate knowledge of Chamberlain Corp.’s vault-like warehouse security systems, likely a trusted employee, has been smuggling out the company’s most advanced weaponry. If people like Lang, Anderson, and Castile can get their hands on VERA grenades…Gods, terrorists could be hoarding them now, building stocks for all-out war.
May staggers to a stop in the middle of the hall, doubled over like she ran here from the District of Dakota. Through her gasping breaths, she replies, “They must have gotten the tech from Delacourt or this Finn person.”
An expression that reads, I will murder you with a rusty spork, you lying bitch, sparks across Dynara’s face, so quick I almost miss it. And I get the sense that Celeste Herrera will be receiving another, less cordial visit from the god of war in the near future.
(A snake can lie all it likes, but it always needs to keep in mind that its slippery, scaly neck can easily be strangled by the right pair of manicured hands.)
“Either way,” May continues, “when my teams arrived to drag their murderous asses in, they tripped grenades at every entrance, waited until the stun fields dissipated, and high-tailed it out of their homes. Quick. Efficient. Organized. We lost track of them on the street cams in seconds. They had security-blind escape routes.” She beats her fists against her knees. “They planned it. From the beginning. Before they were even arrested. Must’ve been a contingency, held for when their jig was up.” A huff. “Bastards. We never saw it coming.”
Briggs pushes away from the wall. “These people are a hell of a lot more organized than you would expect of common revenge killers. This fiasco may have started with that warehouse shootout, a crime of the young, passionate, and scared, but it’s evolved into something more than kids throwing a bitch fit now.” Behind the Commander’s bulky form, hiding in a corner, Ric Weiss nods like he agrees, and though Briggs can’t see the motion, facing me and the rest of the crowd, he doesn’t continue until Weiss stops moving. As if he can sense his Lieutenant’s every gesture.
“I’d bet you anything,” Briggs growls out, “that this evolution was spawned by Finn, whoever he is. He must’ve…” His fingernails dig into his bare arms, and he sighs. “I don’t know exactly. We’re still missing too much information, but he has to be—”
“Money.”
All heads turn toward the redhead in the wheelchair, who’s staring at a ceiling light like it’s a visible epiphany.
Briggs’ eyebrows wriggle up his wide forehead. “Come again, Adamend?”
“Money,” I repeat. “It’s all about the money. Lang wants the money. Castile wants the money. Anderson wants the money. But Stiegel’s murder at the warehouse jeopardized their plans to win it.
“With GM Poly falling apart under DuPont’s increasingly crazy, violent actions, and Delacourt conning them out of the full payment they should have received for stealing the paintings, they were quickly becoming too underfunded and too disorganized to continue working on the decrypt snake with any sort of efficiency. So Anderson and Castile knew they were going to lose out on the cash prize.
“Lang, on the other hand, would have been on the outs with the GM Poly team after the warehouse incident—her best friend shooting her boyfriend. She would have drawn closer to Baltimore, sympathized with them. But Baltimore, now one member down, and even poorer than Poly, would have blamed her for their loss, on the grounds that she set the failed deal up, even though they were planning to backstab Poly from the beginning. She would have been a convenient scapegoat.”
I run out of air and have to take a quick breath. “But Lang was, is, determined to get that money, and when Baltimore foisted responsibility for Stiegel’s death on her, she countered by offering to help them get revenge and get back on track with the competition. So they sent her to Delacourt, who directed her to Finn.
“Meanwhile, Anderson and Castile also ran back to Delacourt, and the mob broker sent them to the mastermind of the operation, too. So, at one point, a couple weeks back, you had Lang, Anderson, and Castile in talks with Finn at the same time. About how they could still walk away from this disaster with their pockets full of gold.”
Dynara mutters, “And Finn gave them Somnexolene.”
Lance, crouched against the wall across from Weiss, adds, “And a dozen echo maker instruction manuals, courtesy of Lana Carter.”
May tacks on, “And the strategic insight Lang needed to pull off her revenge plot against Poly.”
I sag in my chair and finish with, “And he paid them for it. Giving Lang the money that Baltimore needed to get ahead in the competition, so they could win the big prize, and giving Anderson and Castile enough to look the other way when Lang’s fist came down on DuPont.”
Briggs scrunches his nose. “But why? Why give something that valuable to a trio of greedy fools barely in control of their emotions? What a risk, stealing something as important as the echo chemical and then handing it off to people like that. A man like Finn, with so much power and knowledge, steeped in so much secrecy—he wouldn’t trash trophies like that on a whim. So why?”
I pick at the loose threads on my worn, wrinkled, stuffed-in-locker jeans. “Maybe it was an experiment? Maybe he divvied up the Somnexolene into multiple, small doses and gave some to Lang and Anderson and Castile as a way to test its effects, to see if it worked, to ensure Carter had smuggled him the real deal. All those EDPA textbooks would be useless without real Somnexolene to pair them with. He could have a buyer out there for the whole pac
kage, but he can’t risk selling the chemical-textbook combo for millions, or billions, if he isn’t a hundred percent sure the whole package works as intended.”
Briggs frowns. “That’s all conjecture on your part, Adamend.”
“But it’s conjecture that makes sense, sir.” My hands slide off the armrests and into my lap.
“True. But there are other possibilities. We can’t operate on your assumptions in this dire a situation—despite their likely accuracy, given your uncanny skills—because they could lead us to choose strategies that end…like the museum raid.” His lips form a shape that might be a grim grin but could as easily be a sneer directed at my fiery head.
“We don’t need to operate on any assumptions at this point.” Dynara shoves her Ocom into her coat pocket and whisks by the crowd, down the hall, toward the elevator. A general on the march. “We operate on what we know: three murder suspects are on the run, and we need to recapture them before they pass a district border and complicate jurisdiction. We’ll deal with Finn and his machinations and the decrypt snake problem once we’ve closed the Stiegel and DuPont murders. We can free up all our resources then.” She taps the elevator control pad and peers over her shoulder. “May, I assume you put the research staff on the AutoNet and the city security grid?”
May, now breathing normally, gives a curt nod. “Yes, ma’am. Frederick is leading. They’re fanning out eight blocks a second, using standard facial recognition protocols. If they spot Anderson, Castile, or Lang in a vehicle, they’ll initiate a remote shutdown—with the Transportation Commission’s approval, of course—and lock the suspect in the vehicle until our forces arrive to make the arrest. If the suspects are on foot, we’ll hunt them down with a copter and ground forces. All teams are on Code Red standby, armed and suited, ready for action.”
Dynara’s fingers point toward Murrough, who’s been lingering at the far end of the hall, empty gaze aimed at the wall. He jumps to attention like her silent fingers make the loudest sound conceivable to the human mind. “Stay here with Chai,” she orders, nodding to the interrogation room, where Chai still sits, talking to Morse and Garcia, unaware. “And continue the search for the missing Baltimore kids. If I need your muscle, or your advice, I’ll call you up to the foxhole, okay?”
Murrough’s lips twitch at the thought of being left out of the action, but he understands the necessity of splitting from Dynara’s side to manage the lower-priority aspects of the case. Someone has to, and she trusts him to, so he concedes with a short wave, resettles his ruminating stance against the wall, and says, “Good luck.”
A minute later, too many people are crammed into the elevator, my wheelchair somehow situated in the middle of the chaos. We zip up the floors, nobody speaking, everybody thinking of the possible ways this case will play out based on the disaster it has already been. Behind me, his shirt brushing the back of my head, Jin hums his latest favorite song, some kitschy hop-top piece with high-pitched lyrics. Then the elevator dings and halts at our floor, and the crowd begins to file out. Jin and I linger behind, watch the quick-moving backs of Briggs and Weiss and Lance and Dynara as they storm their way through the hall toward the foxhole.
Once the last of the stragglers clear the elevator doors, Jin rolls me out, and I try not to rap my fingers on my armrests in a way that suggests I’m as irritated at his casual pace as I am. When I’m allowed out of this goddamned chair, I will never complain about laps in the EDPA gym again. And I swear—
“Hey, Adem,” Jin says out of the blue, his voice an odd sort of flat and flavorless. Not Jin like at all.
“Yeah?” I peek over my shoulder to take a gander at his face and find him with an expression that matches his tone: dull eyed and thin lipped, like someone drained his colorful personality and refilled him with shades of gray. “What is it?”
“I was thinking about what you said—that this Finn guy gave Lang and friends powers as an experiment or something. For, you know, a particular reason, an important goal, a certain end.” Jin’s teeth poke out and descend on his bottom lip, pinching the sensitive skin. “I don’t want to come off as an ass or anything, with you in that chair and all, but…”
Man, this is weird. Jin’s never butt in on my conclusions with his own before, not in any serious situation like a murder case. Most of the time, when he throws in his own (zany) opinions on people and places and things most suited to be evaluated by me, my skills… he’s joking. But this robot he’s transformed into since our discussion in the interrogation hall not five minutes back is definitely not in a joking mood.
Where is this coming from, all of a sudden?
(Almost like he knows more than he should, whispers a voice in the back of my mind.)
(I ignore it.)
“What is it, Jin? You can say. I’m not going to be mad if you contradict me.”
He halts my chair next to a vending machine and slips his fingers off the handles, then stares at his faint reflection in the glass, intersected by chips and candy bars. “I don’t think Finn gave Lang the Somnexolene for any legitimate end. I think he’s far too high on whatever chain he’s welded to for Lang’s plight to be anything more than a mosquito buzzing in his ear. I think he was annoyed by her whining, by her bothering him when he had more important things to do than pay attention to a girl involved by a second degree in a conflict between kids he outsourced a minor project to. I think he got fed up with the whole decrypt snake competition and decided, since it was already a mess, why not just…?”
A bead of blood wells up on Jin’s lip. His tongue swipes it away.
“Why not just what, Jin?”
Somehow, Jin drops his voice another octave, one lower and deader and more solemn than I have ever had the misfortune to hear him use before, and replies, “Why not just have a little fun?”
* * *
Sally Castile dies in a bent tin can some would call a car in the seconds before it hits the guardrail.
The security cams catch up to her on Interstate 95, where her stolen sedan is zooming along at two hundred fifteen miles per hour—manual drive—far faster than human reaction times can handle. Faster than any rational person would dare to go with their fault-prone hands at the wheel of a metal cage that will crumple like foil if it hits anything pushing more than forty-five.
It’s a suicide run, Castile’s last stand.
All the agents, IBI and EDPA alike, in the foxhole, gazes glued to the massive screen on the right-hand side of the wall, know it. Wait, arms crossed, lips tight, for the inevitable conclusion. Including the Transportation Commission rep, an older man named Wally, who holds his Ocom in trembling fingers and tries to stifle the devastated whine growing in his throat. Castile used her computer know-how to disable all the safety features written into the auto-drive’s central console in the car. Wally can’t shut it down remotely now. He can only watch like the rest of us. Watch Castile drive to her death.
Moments after Castile speeds around the on ramp and onto the highway, every car in a fifty-mile radius is aware of the impending danger. Their auto-drive AIs receive a warning ping from the AutoNet as Castile’s stolen car approaches. Because each vehicle on the network constantly transmits every byte of relevant traffic data to a central hub, which disseminates that data to every other car. They know what’s coming, the cars, so they are ready to respond when it arrives. When she arrives.
The red sedan cuts straight through six lanes of morning commuter traffic unimpeded. High-end cars owned by bankers, black government SUVs, driverless tractor-trailers, and a few family vans—they all lurch out of the fugitive’s path long before she nears them. Many pull off the highway altogether, spiriting their occupants to safety via alternative routes to their destinations. Those too close to Castile’s car when she rockets by pull over to the shoulder, stop, two lines thick, and refuse to resume their trips to various offices and government buildings and the occasional daycare center until crazy Castile is out of threat range.
The enormous sc
reen in the foxhole, under Lance’s control, switches from camera to camera connected to the highway light poles, always staying at least three hundred feet ahead of Castile. Though their resolutions are fairly low, standard street cams, I can still make out the shadows of curious passengers peering out of windows, wondering why they’ve stopped. Cupped hands on glass, shading eyes, to block out the glaring morning sun, half past the horizon. More than one Ocom pressed flat to the pane to record a video of whatever is about to pass by—they don’t know specifically, none of them; their AI’s are programmed to be vague about law enforcement interference in the AutoNet.
What they know is that something “exciting” is seconds from their sight, and so, like us, they watch. They see—
An IBI patrol copter rears up from its hidden perch on the steel beams beneath the suspended interstate, soars over the top of the roadside light poles upside-down, flips one-eighty, belly facing asphalt, and blasts forward until its shadow falls on Castile’s fleeing car. One of the pilots flips on the blinking red-blue lights, and above the growl of the propulsion engines on its wings, a voice shouts through the loudspeaker: “Sally Castile, stop your vehicle immediately! Cut the engine, exit the cabin, and surrender to IBI custody. If you do not comply, lethal force will be used.”
Castile doesn’t stop. She speeds up. Two twenty. Two thirty. Two forty. Those parked in the cars on the side of the road see nothing but a ghost of red blur by them. Castile, at her wheel, has milliseconds to respond to any obstacle in her path. And she can’t hack it.
Her hands are too slow and clumsy to make proper turns, can’t compensate for the pull of forward momentum, can’t calculate the angle of the wheel needed to correct a slide, can’t pump the brakes when they’re needed and leave them be when they are not. This is why manual drive is illegal these days—AI’s have foresight and flawless control. Sally Castile can’t even see what’s right in front of her face when she breaches two hundred fifty miles per hour.
Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2) Page 21