by Wesley Cross
Could it be so simple?
Her mind wandered to the windy road to Sa Calobra village on the northwest coast of Majorca, the peaks of the Serra de Tramuntana touching the clouds in the far distance. Was Elizabeth kept all this time in the very place Cooper thought she’d never be able to go back to? Was it what the letters stood for—Sa Calobra, Liz?
She drew a sharp breath and lifted her hands off the keyboard, her fingers trembling. She had spent years begging and pleasing and manipulating, trying to pry the secret out of Engel’s hands. Thinking that Elizabeth was held in a place she couldn’t possibly find.
Instead, Engel had been hiding her in plain sight. Cooper, it seemed, wasn’t the only one capable of cutting against the grain.
She’d need to decode the message to be sure, and for that she was going to have a specialist. But she knew she was right. She also knew she couldn’t act on an impulse. Cooper looked through the coded file. Twenty-six pages of scrambled text. That was a lot of pages. Before she hopped on a plane and jetted across the ocean, she needed to know exactly what she was getting herself into.
She went back to the laptop and looked through the gray files. A lot of them were password protected, and she skipped them for now, fascinated by the depth of Engel’s empire. She opened the Guardian master file again, and poked around, reading reports, looking at spreadsheets, and scanning stored emails. One folder opened up into a series of gray cubes, also password protected, to her dismay. The name on one of them caught her eye. Project Daimyo.
She stuck her thumb into her mouth and bit on the nail, a habit from her childhood that never went away. She was safe for now, but while Engel and his minions thought she was dead, Cooper needed to move fast. The files on this laptop were her leverage that one day might save her life. It was her “get out of jail” card, but a big part of it was useless. The best part of it, anyway. Someone was going to have to help her open it up.
Cooper had been in her line of work for a long time, and to survive and thrive for that long in her field, one needed to develop a network of trusted professionals. Specialists on top of their game. Mistakes didn’t get you fired when you were a hitman for hire—they got you killed. Over the years, she had established relationships with all kinds of people who supported her trade: bankers, forgers, arms dealers, smugglers. But there was a weak spot in her network—cyber specialists.
She had used black hats before, of course, but it was all for low-level jobs. Ironically, her specialty—making a hit look like a coincidence, an accident, an act of God—prevented her from relying on technology too much. For this job, she thought, looking at the coded file, she couldn’t afford any mistakes. She needed to know precisely what the documents said. And not just the one that could finally lead her to Elizabeth. All of them.
To do this, she was going to hire the best hacker there was.
Cooper thought about it for a moment. She might not have used many hackers before, but in her line of work, she knew the underworld. And when it came to hacking, no one had more legends created about them than one person in particular. Cooper didn’t have much to go on yet, but she was good at finding people who didn’t want to be found. And she had a small clue.
A name.
The Witch.
36
“How’s the upgrade?” Hunt asked.
They stayed in the right lane of the highway, just under the speed limit. The husky voice on the radio over a country tune was singing something about a long way home and forgiving without forgetting. The sky in the east had already turned from black to pink and now was turning pale-blue. Jason had allowed Sorkin to pull ahead—at this hour there were still too few cars on the road and a convoy traveling together would attract unnecessary attention. He could see the Ram truck with a container hitched to it about a quarter mile and a few cars ahead of them. Without an entourage, it blended in perfectly. Brian and Chris could have passed for a father and son traveling the country, or two working men, hauling some equipment. The chances of them being pulled over were slim.
“I’m getting used to it,” Schlager said. “It’s still weird and the controls feel clunky, but I’m getting better at it.”
“It gets easier. When I first fitted my arm, I thought I’d never be able to get over how weird it was. It felt foreign, and even though it was exactly the size it was supposed to be, it felt three sizes too big. Every time I went through a doorway, I thought I was about to smash it into a frame. It took forever to calibrate, too. It’s a strange experience when your eyes tell you one thing about something and your sensors feed something different to your brain. Trippy.”
A radio station hissed, the country boy band disappearing, and then the sounds of a light rock song filled the cabin.
“At the very least, I’m capable of changing the music channel.” Schlager smiled. “I can camp out by Engel’s building and drive him crazy. Play for him the cheesiest radio station in the tri-state area twenty-four-seven. That will show him.”
“Impressive.” Hunt chuckled. “In all seriousness, though, I’m glad you gave it a shot. I only wish I could convince Mike to do the same. He’s risking his life for us almost daily. If anyone could benefit from proper defensive upgrades, it would be him. But I understand why he doesn’t want to.”
“If I were him, I would be hesitant, too—no offense,” Schlager said. “It’s one thing to agree to get a tiny chip under your skull that no one can see. It’s quite another to be visibly augmented.”
“That’s what I think we should work on once we have the opportunity. It would be the next logical step. For now, it’s proven to be an elusive goal, but I think we’ll get there sooner rather than later.”
“What?”
“To make our tech indistinguishable from what Mother Nature gave you. That will break down the hesitancy. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.” Schlager scratched his chin. “Maybe? I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, I would be reluctant to get any augs that would look like augs, but when I see them on you, or Martin, they don’t bother me at all. That’s part of the package. But I can see how artificial limbs that look like real ones would weird some people out. That can lead to prejudice against augmented people. And we had tried this. What was it—two, three years ago? It all came out like Barbie parts. That was terrible.”
“We did. We’ll have to keep on plugging away until it works. And there’s already prejudice, Max. I am in a privileged position, but I know when people stare and act weird around me. Hell, I was biased against the tech when Rachel worked on it. I thought unless someone needed a part, it was not unlike plastic surgery. A fad. And to be frank, if circumstances didn’t force me into getting an artificial arm, I don’t know if I’d ever come around on this. Most people are ossified in their beliefs. For certain things, it might take generations to challenge the status quo. Sometimes people need to see it in front of their faces long enough before they accept it.”
They rode in silence for some time, the sun steadily climbing in the east.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Hunt said. “Do you think JC is alive? I’m having a hard time processing this. So what that it sounds smart? Most commercial house controls sound almost as smart.”
“I do.” Schlager chewed on his lip and threw a glance at his friend. “It’s not about what she said that convinced me she was self-aware. It’s the ability to think in abstract terms. Think about it. Computers, even the most sophisticated ones, are at their basic level still making binary decisions. Ones and zeroes. That’s all there is. Of course, as you get more processing power, you can create enough forks on the logic tree that it would appear as if the machine is thinking. NPCs in modern games are good at this. But that appearance stays there only as long as you don’t stop for a moment and dig deeper. And when you do, you are left with a simple logic tree that you can trace with a finger. If this happens—you do this. If that happens—you do that. And so on.”
“And you don’t think JC is li
ke that?”
“No.” Schlager became animated. His gestures were more pronounced and there was a glint to his eye. Whatever he saw in the program that Helen Chen brought from across the ocean clearly made an impression on him. “JC can think like us. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. She contemplates life and death and beyond. She can operate in hypotheticals. If that’s not the sign of intelligence, then I don’t know what is.”
“And you think we need her for Rachel’s procedure?”
“Yes and no.” Schlager leaned back again, took off his sneakers, and pulled his feet onto the chair. “If you want that to happen soon, then yes. I’m sorry if this is blunt, but it’s the truth. She’d be capable of doing it in no time at all. The only issue is for us to make sure she doesn’t somehow escape.”
“If she’s truly alive,” Hunt said, “keeping her confined sounds kind of bad.”
“Perhaps.” Schlager shrugged. “But I’ve seen too many movies to risk it.”
“Touché. Do you think we can use her against Engel? To hack him?”
“Probably not.” Schlager shrugged again, almost apologetically. “I don’t see how we can let her hack things in the real world without risking her running away. Speaking of hacking. What did you think of Chuck’s intel?”
“Which part? About Otomo’s factories?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s a compelling story but Otomo’s bankrupt and as far as I know the assets have been nationalized. At least whatever was in Japan. But I guess it’s possible some of their factories abroad could have fallen into other people’s hands. I’m not too worried, though.”
“How so?” Schlager said. “If Victor Ye is building something new, we should be worried. Especially if he got his hands on a technology that wasn’t available to him before. We should send somebody to investigate. Maybe Chuck would go. He knows more about it than anyone else.”
“If I had to guess, they are building sentinels. I’ve read some reports that they had delivered some to the US already. Those don’t scare me. If anything else, hearing this makes me happy. Engel’s been trying to replicate Martin’s tech for years, but hasn’t been able to. To be fair, we haven’t been able to replicate it either—that’s why our sales to the DOD have been limited to alloys, protective current generators, and energy weapons. But cyborg tech is where the edge is. And not just from the technology perspective. It’s the combination of human mind and lethal machinery where you get the advantage. Drones are great, but they still need operators. We are closer to a true symbiosis than any other corp out there, Engel included.”
“If I didn’t know any better,” Schlager said, “considering that we are on the run, hiding in a retrofitted nuclear missile complex and have been designated to be enemies of the state, I’d say you sound optimistic.”
“It’s always darkest before dawn, my friend. Isn’t that what they say?” Hunt smiled. “Call me a fool, but I think once Sorkin disseminates the information about Engel’s foul play, the tables will turn. He won’t go down without a fight, I presume, but if enough people believe he cheated his way to victory, his support will wane and die. Once that happens, the rats will abandon his ship. Black Arrow, Victor Ye—do you think they support Engel out of ideology? Because they think he’s a nice guy who will lead them to a better future?”
“He’s a means to an end,” Max said.
“Exactly. They are riding what they think is a winning ticket. Once it becomes obvious it’s no longer the case, they’ll turn their backs. Then we’ll pick them off, one by one.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Have some faith, my friend.” Jason smiled and turned the music louder. “I know things look pretty gloomy right now. But I think we are about to turn the page.”
37
“Three miles till we hit the bridge,” Jason Hunt said over the open radio. The traffic had been building up as they got closer to the Delaware River and now it slowed down almost to a crawl. Connelly’s truck was now traveling in front of their group and Hunt right behind the trailer as they prepared to go different ways. “Brian, remember what we discussed. Once we cross the bridge, we are peeling off. Stay off the major roads and you should be fine. The only other point where you’ll be exposed is when you are crossing into Staten Island.”
“We’ll manage. Look at that guy. Just going across the lanes.”
“What’s going on?” Hunt straightened in his seat to look over the cars in front of him, but the trailer was blocking his view. They were approaching a small bridge over Christina River, the last crossing before the monstrous Delaware Memorial Bridge. He turned to Schlager. “Can you see anything on your side?”
“Nope.” Schlager rolled down the window and stuck his head out.
“Watch out,” Connelly yelled. “There’s—”
There was a screech of tires and a clash of metal, and Hunt watched in horror as the F-150 carrying Connelly and Chen shot out and went airborne on the side of the road as if launched from a catapult. Its driver’s side smashed, the truck flipped in the air and went over the barrier into the river below.
“No!” Schlager screamed.
Hunt pulled hard left, cutting in front of a beat-up sedan and eliciting an angry torrent of honks. The front of Sorkin’s truck stopped with a thud, hitting something, and then the front of the car whipped up, lifted by an invisible force, its wheels helplessly spinning in the air. It stood on the back wheels for a split second and then came crashing back down, the windows shattering on impact.
The traffic stopped. Hunt slammed on the brakes, the car shaking as Martin jumped out of the back.
“Stay in the car,” he shouted at Schlager—who ignored him, got out of the car, and ran toward the edge of the bridge. Hunt swung the door open and rushed out toward the Ram truck. Sorkin’s arm was hanging lifelessly out of the broken side window, blood dripping off his fingertips and puddling on the ground below.
“Jason,” he heard Schlager yell. “Watch it.”
“I told you to stay—” he started and froze, looking at the figure walking to him in a lurching swagger. The ugly face, the thick arms ending with disproportionately long, sinewy hands. A memory came rushing back, hitting him like a freight train. A general population holding block. A man pacing back and forth like a caged animal looking for a fight. The flurry of blows. The blinding pain of broken bones as the man’s foot crushed his elbow. And then the perverted smile as those creepy oversized hands held his broken arm out and slashed his flesh with a scalpel, going in so deep the steel scraped the bone.
Johnny the Butcher walked in the middle of the lane and stopped in front of him. A burnished armor covered him all the way up to his neck. A low, almost inaudible vibration came from somewhere inside of it. A shiny helmet with an open visor pulsated with a bluish glow.
“You look like a lost puppy,” the man said in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, as the visor slid closed. “I should have cut off both of your arms last time.”
From the corner of his eye, Hunt saw Martin rush past him to engage someone hidden behind the bulk of the trailer, the scales on the cyborg’s arm moving to reveal a snub-nosed barrel of a gun. The rattle of automatic fire snapped Hunt out of his trance.
He charged at Johnny, covering the distance between them in one powerful leap and then shooting him point-blank in the chest from a shoulder cannon as he landed. The man tumbled back from the impact, sparks flying off the front of his armor. He hit the trunk of the car behind him, an old Subaru with a woman in the backseat, her face distorted with a scream of horror. Hunt pressed the advantage, stomping on Johnny’s knee to bring him down and then his bionic arm shooting out at an impossible speed, aiming for the face.
An armored arm went up, turning a killer shot into a glancing blow, and then Johnny propped himself up on one arm, kicking Hunt in the chest with both feet.
Jason rolled back, the EMU controlling his move, the armored plates in his chest vi
brating, dissipating the blow but hard enough to make his teeth chatter.
A moment later, he was on his feet. He and Johnny circled each other like two prizefighters at the end of an even round: each waiting for the other to strike, each wary of making the first move. There was another torrent of automatic fire on the other side of the trailer, followed by a few powerful thuds and more shots still. A chill went down Jason’s spine—he hadn’t seen anyone yet who would last that long, confronted with the overwhelming power of the cyborg. Whoever was fighting Martin was giving him a run for his money. He needed to finish this dance with Johnny.
Fast.
He faked another charge, hoping to throw his opponent off his balance, but Johnny sidestepped, remaining perfectly in sync.
“Hey, asshole,” Schlager’s voice said. He had snuck around the row of cars while Hunt was trying to gain the advantage and climbed on the hood of the car behind Johnny, toting a pump-action shotgun in his hands. As Johnny turned to the sound of his voice, Schlager shot him in the face and then, as the man stumbled back, shot him again.
Hunt rushed forward, his bionic arm smashing the adversary like a mechanical hammer and pinning him to the ground. As Johnny struggled to get free from under his weight, Hunt pummeled his helmet again and again, his mind replaying the horror of the holding cell, the crazed Butcher’s smile as he carved his flesh. Hunt wanted to flatten that ugly face—to erase him from existence. Sparks flew off the helmet, its glow growing weaker.
“Jason!”
He heard Schlager yell, but before he could turn to see the new threat, something massive slammed into his side so hard it launched him into the air. The grille of a white Mercedes SUV arrested his flight, knocking the air out of his lungs, his reinforced ribcage straining against the impact. A few scarlet alerts popped up in his internal vision, highlighting compromised systems as the world outside dimmed in and out.