by Lisa Smedman
The fourth person, however, was more careful—or more professional—than the other three. Judging by the height and weight, this one was probably female, but that was about all the data they had on her. She wore a dark blue balaclava that seemed to have been padded to distort the features underneath; the composite faces that the securicam's Ident program had created were as smooth and featureless as animated cartoons. The only details the program had been able to define with any certainty included her ear shape, which was rounded, like a human's, and the fact that her eyelids had been painted with bright red makeup.
Judging by the woman's cautious movements, Alma had at first flagged her as the team's leader, but it had soon become clear from Wharf Rat's shouts and gestures that the shadowrunner was leading this group. Alma had later decided that the woman must be the team's technical-support member—a little smarter than the rest, and not willing to rely on a thin nylon mask for disguise.
Gray Squirrel was just starting to notice that something was wrong when the dwarf shouted and pointed the submachine gun at him. Gray Squirrel's eyes widened. For a moment it looked as though he was going to try to plug in the jack and drive away. Then he let the control cable fall into his lap.
Just as she had done when she first saw the vidclip, Alma let out a sigh. This time, however, it wasn't one of relief, but regret. Gray Squirrel's caution should have helped him survive.
Gray Squirrel made a show of surrendering to the intruders, but Alma could guess what had been running through his mind. Although the intruders had somehow breached the parking lot's security system, he must have known that help would be on the way soon. Alma watched him cock his head as he stepped out of his car, obviously listening for the hissing jets of a takedown drone.
Elsewhere on the monitor screen, one of the vidclips appeared to be in fast motion—cars slid past in a blur and the image wove and dodged as the drone on which the camera was mounted whipped through the parking garage. Two seconds later, the drone appeared on the vidclip that showed Gray Squirrel and his extractors, and the researcher's face broke into a nervous, anticipatory grin.
He wasn't the only one who'd been expecting the drone, however. Dreadlocks raised the launcher to his shoulder and fired, and what looked like a crumpled ball of silver cloth shot into the air. The fine metal mesh fluttered open just before striking the drone and wrapped itself completely around the drone as if magnetized. A second later the mesh crackled with tiny sparks as its electric discharge unit activated.
The vidclip that had been taken by the drone's camera was now nothing more than a blur, but the other securicam showed what was happening. Hot spots glowed on the mesh where it covered the drone's jets. Two seconds later, the drone fired its takedown weapon: hollow, feather-tipped needle darts loaded with gamma scopolamine. The darts didn't go far, however—the feathered tips were caught and held by the mesh.
The drone, looking like a pincushion and bereft of its guidance camera, crashed into one of the garage's concrete support pillars and slammed into the floor. The vidclip shot by its securicam rolled through a few dizzy gyrations and came to rest pointed up at a bright white circle that must have been one of the halogen lights in the parking garage's ceiling.
On the split screen near the center of the monitor, Gray Squirrel was shoved into the back of his car. The dwarf climbed into the driver's seat and jacked in, and the others piled inside. Wharf Rat took the front seat, and Dreadlocks sat in the back with Gray Squirrel.
The female member of the team leaned over the downed drone, taking a last look at it, and then turned and ran for the vehicle. She clambered into the back, and the door slammed.
The car squealed backward out of its parking space, changed gears, and roared up the ramp. It flashed across several of the split screens on the monitor as it squealed around corners, at times narrowly missing the few parked cars that were still in the garage so late at night. The dwarf seemed to know exactly where he was going—he took the most direct route to the garage's Rupert Street exit.
The first time Alma had seen the vidclips of the extraction, she'd expected the car to be trapped at the exit. PCI's security teams had obviously been alerted to an extraction in progress—they'd already sent a drone to deal with it. By this point, the entire garage was on lockdown. The vidclips showed steel containment doors and ballistic-composite shutters blocking every exit, and secguards moving in on foot.
The barrier across the Rupert Street exit was in place—when the dwarf saw it, he brought the car to a screeching stop, front bumper almost touching the heavy steel containment door. There was a brief pause, and then one of the rear doors opened. The woman stepped out and headed for the maglock beside the door. She leaned over it, as if keypadding in a combination.
The lock shouldn't have activated. The garage was on lockdown, which meant that the ultrasonic "key" in Gray Squirrel's vehicle would no longer trigger it. The maglock had its own power source and was not accessible via the Matrix. The only way to open it was to punch in an eight-digit manual override code—a code that was changed daily and issued only to those secguards who were on duty that day.
The woman straightened, and the containment door rumbled up into the ceiling.
Alma and Hu had both come to the same shocked conclusion the first time they'd viewed this vidclip. A serious breach of security had occurred: one of their own staff must have been involved in the extraction. An extensive grilling of the secguards on both the day and night shifts, however, had turned up no evidence to support this theory. Every one of the guards had willingly submitted to an injection of gamma scopolamine—one of the takedown drug's side effects was that it induced the same willingness to talk as a "truth serum." Not one of the guards admitted to having compromised security by divulging the code.
On the monitor, the woman got back into Gray Squirrel's car. As the vehicle pulled away into the night, the containment wall closed. The last image captured on the vidclip was a shot of a PCI secguard, running up to the maglock as the door slammed shut and frantically entering the code that would open it again.
The clock on that vidclip read 11:11:28 p.m.—it had taken the four intruders just six minutes and twenty-six seconds to carry out the extraction. The shadowrunners might look scruffy, but they operated as smoothly as any team Alma had ever put together. She hated to admit it, but she was impressed.
The tabletop monitor reverted to a blank blue screen. Alma considered what she'd just seen for a moment before looking up but came up as blank as the screen. "I didn't see anything new."
Hu shot a level stare at her across the table. "Look again."
This time, a single vidclip was playing full-frame on the monitor: the one shot by the drone's camera, after the drone had been taken out of commission. The fine-weave mesh that had wrapped around the drone obliterated all detail, and the halogen light shining directly into the lens had overloaded the camera's aperture settings. For a brief moment, however, a fuzzy black silhouette loomed in the field of view: the securi-cam had captured the woman as she leaned over the drone to look at it. Then the silhouette disappeared from sight.
Alma knew this portion of the vidclip frame by frame. She'd had it enhanced, magnified and run through a visual decryption and feature-recognition program several times, hoping to add detail to the female intruder's face. Nothing had worked—the face had remained a blur. As the vidclip ended, Alma looked up at Hu, puzzled.
Hu restarted the vidclip at the point where the silhouette leaned over the drone.
"I had another look at this clip last night, and I noticed something interesting," he said. "Just as the woman pulls back out of the camera's field of view, the image becomes blurrier. At first, I assumed that the mesh cloth had shifted, but then I took a closer look."
Hu touched an icon on his monitor, and the magnification increased. The clock superimposed on the vidclip slowed, stretching a single second into a minute. Alma suddenly saw something new: the blur started in the middle of the camera's point
of view and spread slowly outward like flowing water. The blurring was uneven, as if the obstruction on the lens was frothy. Alma suddenly realized what it must be.
"She spit on the drone," she whispered.
Hu nodded gravely. Beside him, Mr. Lali tensed in his seat.
"We managed to collect a sample of the dried saliva from the lens," Hu said.
Alma nodded. She could guess what was coming next: PCI security would have done DNA typing on the saliva and would have a "fingerprint" of the fourth intruder. If they found a likely suspect, a DNA match would prove that person's guilt or innocence. Normally, the development would have excited Alma—it meant they were that much closer to solving the riddle of who had conducted the extraction. But with Hu and Mr. Lali acting so strangely, Alma found herself dreading what was to come.
Hu was watching her intently, unspeaking, his cyberarms resting in too casual a manner on the polished tabletop. Mr. Lali's eyes were puckered with lines of sorrow and regret, like those of a father who was reluctantly facing the prospect of disciplining his child. Mr. Lali whispered a single word: "Why?"
Alma blinked.
Hu was more direct. "The DNA from the saliva was an exact match with the cell samples in your personnel file. We didn't just do the usual random sampling—we typed all twenty-three chromosome pairs. Every single one was a match. You were the fourth person on that team, Alma. You extracted Gray Squirrel, then conveniently found him again yesterday—dead."
Alma shook her head, her mind whirling. "But . . . but that makes no sense," she said. "Why would I want to extract Gray Squirrel?"
"Gray Squirrel was a valuable commodity," Mr. Lali said softly. "The REM inducer has both military and civilian applications. Whichever corporation releases it will be launched into triple-A status."
"We know who paid for the extraction," Hu tired at her. "We've traced the buyer back to Tan Tien Incorporated."
He was staring at her, as if waiting for a reaction. The only one she could provide was surprise. She'd been charting probabilities for days, trying to come up with the name of the corporation that had ordered Gray Squirrel's extraction, and had only managed to narrow the list of possibles down to eight. How had Hu come up with the answer?
Nervously, Alma called up the corporate files in her headware memory and scanned them for Tan Tien Inc. The company was headquartered in Beijing and was one of the more prominent corporations in the Pacific Prosperity Group. Headed up by the reclusive Sau-kok Chu, it specialized in pure research. The cyberware and bioware it developed never left the drafting computers, except as copyrighted data. The corporation made its money licensing its research to other companies that actually built the hardware.
It would be easy enough for Tan Tien to claim the REM inducer as its own, especially since PCI had yet to release any information on the hot new project it was being so secretive about. But in order for Tan Tien to profit from the extraction, Gray Squirrel would have to agree to tell it about the project—in detail.
"You've seen Gray Squirrel's psych profiles," Alma protested. "He'd never willingly work for anyone else or provide data from any of our research projects. He's inno—"
Suddenly, Alma remembered the reading the I Ching had given her that morning: Innocence, with one changing yin line that would later transform the hexagram into the one called Treading. She'd thought the I Ching had been referring to Gray Squirrel, but he wasn't the innocent person the coins had spoken of.
Alma was.
As Alma looked at Hu's cold stare and poised-for-trouble posture, however, she could see it would be difficult to convince her boss of her innocence. Mind racing, she tried to puzzle out what had happened.
"I was framed," she concluded. "Someone wanted to make it look as though I was involved in Gray Squirrel's extraction. Somehow they got a sample of my DNA sequence, replicated it, and engineered that saliva." Even as she spoke, however, she realized how ridiculous her conclusions sounded. Who would go to such lengths—and why?
"What about the manual-override combination for the maglock?" Hu asked in a soft, dangerous voice. "Where did they get that?"
"I don't know," Alma agonized. "Perhaps one of our secguards managed to lie under gamma scopolamine. Have any of them shown signs of—"
"No," Hu said grimly. "You are the only suspect—your own DNA places you at the scene. I'm surprised you managed to conceal the grace of your move-by-wire system. Until last night, I was completely fooled." Beside him, Mr. Lali nodded.
Alma protested: "But I was—"
"Home in bed," Hu said. "Just as you presumably were last night, even though you didn't answer my urgent-flagged calls until this morning. You were alone on the night of Gray Squirrel's extraction, I presume?"
Alma nodded mutely. Hu would know from her personnel file that she lived alone and did not have a lover. There was no one to back up her alibi.
Mr. Lali stared at Alma for a long moment before pronouncing her sentence. "You've always been a loyal employee, Ms. Wei. You've provided PCI with twelve years of commendable service, but in the light of this deliberate act of sabotage, I have no other choice but termination. You will have no further access to PCI's buildings or facilities, and the personnel and security files in your headware memory will be wiped. Hu will accompany you to your home and ensure that any PCI data you have there is erased. If you cause him any trouble, he is authorized to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure your cooperation. Do you understand?"
Alma winced. She felt like a child, unable to find the words to defend herself against a parent who had unjustly accused her. "I understand. I'll cooperate." She noticed that her left hand was trembling again. She couldn't tell if it was anxiety or the initial stages of TLE. Asking for reparative surgery, however, was out of the question now. She'd have to find some way to prove her innocence first.
"We must bear in mind one other important matter," Mr. Lali continued. "Your REM inducer." He glanced at Hu.
Hu placed both palms flat on the table and leaned across it as he rose to his feet. The pose was one that the Justice Institute taught, designed to be intimidating. His words, however, were what frightened Alma.
"If you were thinking about trying to sell the tech, don't," he said. "PCI included an additional feature in the beta-test REM inducers: a miniature cranial bomb—one just large enough to fuse the inducer's circuitry. It's activated by a 'dead man' switch—the moment all brain activity ceases, it goes off. It's also designed to trigger if anyone other than a PCI technician attempts to surgically remove the inducer. We had to be certain the inducer wouldn't fall into the wrong hands if a test subject was killed, or extracted—or tried to sell the tech to another company."
Alma nodded, unable to speak. The REM inducer was the last thing she'd been thinking about—how could Hu accuse her of wanting to betray PCI by selling it? Pacific Cybernetics Industries was her home, its staff were her family—and now she was losing them.
"The bomb wasn't intended to injure surrounding tissue," Hu continued. "But given the inducer's placement within the brain, there's a high likelihood of serious trauma. If it goes off, the resulting damage would mean you'd never be able to sleep again. You would eventually die from the physical debilitation caused by sleep deprivation. I wouldn't wish that kind of madness on anyone."
Alma was only half listening. She wasn't angry at Hu for not telling her about the cranial bomb earlier—she understood the need for that level of security on a research project as secretive as this one. If it had been Alma who had been extracted, instead of Gray Squirrel, the bomb would have ensured the project's security. Alma would willingly have paid the price. What angered her was that Hu didn't seem to realize that.
She lifted her eyes to meet those of Mr. Lali. Her voice nearly faltered when she saw the disappointment and contempt written on his face. Until today, she'd seen nothing but a father's loving pride in those eyes. He'd often praised her as one of the best counterextraction experts in the city. She was a loyal member of t
he PCI family—but now she was being disowned. It stung.
Mr. Lali waved a hand, dismissing her. She rose to her feet, the move-by-wire system automatically compensating for the shakiness she felt. Hu walked around the table, took Alma's elbow lightly in one cybered hand, and steered her toward the door.
Out in the hallway, she stood meekly while Hu activated the elevator's maglock. The earlier delay she'd faced in accessing the boardroom's maglock confirmed her guess: her palm prints had already been erased from the PCI building-access database.
As they waited for the elevator that would take her down to the lab where her headware memory would be erased, Hu leaned toward Alma. His words were pitched low enough that she had to activate her cyberear's amplification system to hear them, and his lips barely moved. He obviously didn't want the building's securicams to pick up what he was saying.
"Spitting on the drone was stupid, Alma," he whispered, "and you're a smart lady—too smart to have done that. When I reported that to Lali, he wanted to terminate you immediately—and I use that word literally, since he was talking about activating the cranial bomb—but I persuaded him to give you a chance to figure out what's really going on here. He agreed to four days—you have until noon on February 28. I just hope you have the intelligence and resourcefulness to find out who our unauthorized intruder really was in so little time. If you manage to discover anything, give me a call."
Alma glanced sideways at Hu, and saw that his face was carefully neutral, his eyes firmly on the elevator doors. She was shocked that Mr. Lali had considered activating the cranial bomb before hearing her protests of innocence, feeble though they were. She was relieved that Hu still believed in her—or, at least, wanted to believe in her. He'd just given her permission to continue her duties—unofficially, and without any of the corporate resources or team support that she was used to.