by John Shirley
“Sir, there’s something here, sir.”
“Something where, Starling?”
“On the monitor. Does it look like the sentry is down, sir?”
“Well zoom in on him you fool!”
“Sir, yes sir.”
Who is coming out with this sir yes sir stuff? Wolfe wondered. He’d recognized the voice talking to the guy. Verrick.
“Yes, sir, he’s definitely down—and cuffed to that fence.”
“Holy fuck! Okay, check all the exterior cameras, if you don’t see anything then rewind the digital feed! And recall the drone! Get it back here! And where’s the other Graywater?”
“Here, sir!”
“Get out there—no, wait till drone gets back, should be less than a minute, we’ll cover you with that...”
“Should I call the police, sir?” Starling asked.
“No! Are you nuts?”
“Sir...” Starling hesitated before saying, “...no sir.”
Wolfe chuckled—and, through the house’s automation server, directed the doors to lock. He found an option for emergency lock override...and unchecked it. Warning: House will stay locked for thirty minutes, said the message. Continue?
He clicked on yes.
“Sir! The door is locked!”
“Well unlock it!”
“It’s not responding, sir!”
“Sir—”
“What is it, Starling?”
“Sir, I rewound the security footage, sir! Someone’s hacked the system! You can see the man some of the time, but not clearly, sir, he’s used image blending on the—”
“Who the hell is he?” That was the Graywater’s voice. He sounded scared.
“Could be Quinn—he got word Pearce is still alive. He blames me because it was part of the deal for me to...it doesn’t matter.”
“I doubt anyone in the Club would have this much hacker sophistication. They could have hired a fixer, sir, but this is very...very Aiden Pearce.”
“Get that admiration out of your voice, Starling! Pearce is scum!”
“Sir, yes sir, but when you asked me to study him I did admire the way he...”
“Shut up! Get the drone back and find this guy!”
“Maybe we oughta get out through the windows!” the Graywater whined.
Wolfe smiled, and hit the controls that brought down metal shutters, blocking off the windows. Those were an anti-hurricane device. But they effectively sealed the residents of the house in.
The doors were high-security. They wouldn’t be easy to break. Shooting the lock wouldn’t work. They’d have to get a sledgehammer and work on it.
He could hear shouting, faintly, from inside the house.
Wolfe switched to the house heating system—and turned it up full. He then gave the house a series of other commands...
He heard a humming, then, and looked up in time to see the delta shaped drone appearing over the treetops, coming toward the house.
Delta Force, delta-shaped drone. Did Verrick intend that irony?
He didn’t have time to ponder—he was running, cutting right at the corner of the house. He heard a hissing, and bullets thwacked into the ground behind him. The drone was shooting at him. Verrick was probably controlling it, enjoying this little remote controlled hunting trip.
More bullets zinged past, one of them ricocheting from a metal shutter over a window. Next time that thing wouldn’t miss. Wolfe could almost feel the crosshairs on his back. And he pictured that dead deer in the meadow...
There—a driveway, in which sat a big white four-door Chevy Silverado truck; the driveway led to a carport.
Wolfe ducked into the car port. The concrete and steel roof would protect him for now. But how low could the drone fly and still fire with effect? If it came down low enough and got him in its sights, he’d have to try the Mack 10 on it, see if he could shoot it down. But it was probably armored against light weapon firepower.
He could hear it whirring overhead as they looked for him...
Wolfe shoved the .45 in his belt, and concentrated on the PearcePhone.
He knew how to hack into a drone—he’d worked up methods of blocking hacker transmissions from the Iranians. Could this drone be protected—by technology Wolfe himself had helped create? If so, that was another cold-blooded irony.
But as far as he knew, the methodology hadn’t yet been adopted. The Army took its time with testing.
“I guess I’ll find out,” he muttered, as he directed the phone to scan for the drone’s GPS receivers.
Pearce had a program for hacking a GPS receiver. And GPS is what drones used to orient themselves. The remote controls relied on GPS—you could tell the drone to go straight, but it used GPS to work out to do it relative to the controller.
“Spoofing” was the key—in this case, generating counterfeit GPS signals... He needed to get his phone’s signals aligned with the original signals used by the drone; then he had to increase signal strength, to override the GPS tracking loops. That would give him control of the receiver’s sense of location and time.
The drone was humming closer, as Wolfe pecked at the phone with his cold, half-numb fingers.
He glanced up—and saw its shadow on the driveway. The shadow was getting larger. Meaning the drone was getting lower. The controller had figured out where he was and was sending the drone lower to try for a kill shot. He could hear its rotors whirring, saw dust rising, swirling under their pressure...
“There he is sir!” came Starling’s voice through the phone’s hack into the house’s voice activation system. “All you have to do is get him in your sights!”
The phone chimed—and Wolfe saw the words GPS receiver located. Lock in?
He clicked on yes.
The drone was still lowering...and there it was, vibrating in the rotor wash, its camera swiveling to take Wolfe in; its gun muzzles training on him.
He looked at the GPS control grid—found, Veer Left. He tapped it—and the drone suddenly veered left. Firing a moment after it turned.
“Ha!” Wolfe said. His heart was pounding—he’d come within a split second of being shot down.
The drone fired a few more bullets but now its rounds were aimed to its left, away from Wolfe, and they spanged off the building’s shutters.
Wolfe found another directive: Circle area. Choose area diameter.
He chose fifty yards.
The drone suddenly headed out, circling the building...
“What the hell!” said the voice. “Starling, what’s going on?”
“Sir, I think he’s spoofed the drone, sir! He’s gotten control of its GPS—that’s the vulnerable point...We really should have used those GPS input protocols recommended by—”
“Starling, don’t say it!”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“It’s sure getting hot in here,” said the Graywater.
“Oh, hell and damn, he’s got control of the heat!”
“Who is this guy?” the Graywater muttered.
Wolfe put on the speakerphone and said, ””Verrick—I really should just cook you alive. It’d take a long time. Maybe hours. I guess you’d probably get through the door. Or call someone to get you out. But maybe not. I’ve shut down the house’s wifi and cell output! The house doesn’t have landlines—so how are you going to call out?”
“Who are you?” Verrick demanded.
“I’m the guy who can turn the lights out on you...” Wolfe tapped the superimposed interface on the PearcePhone.
“Hey! The lights went out!” the Graywater yelled.
“I can see that, you moron!” Verrick snapped. “Go get some lanterns—there, in that storage room. And stop panicking! He’s just messing with your head!”
“But you can have the lights back on, if you want...” Wolfe said, as if it had just occurred to him.
He switched them back on.
“Hey now they’re on—!”
“I can see that too, you idiot!”
�
��But on second thought,” Wolfe said, “why not give you a dark room to chill out and think things over in...”
He switched the lights out again—just as Verrick growled, “That voice! I know that voice!”
“Do you know my voice, Verrick?” Wolfe asked. “You should! Before I’m done you’ll hear my voice plenty—loud and proud! It’ll be the last thing you ever hear!”
“Wolfe!”
“Bingo, Verrick! The guy you framed and left in federal prison for a year! Big mistake!”
“My mistake was not killing you!”
“It’s a mistake you can’t undo, Verrick! You’ll never get another chance!”
“Sir—he’s hearing you! But the cell phones aren’t on! He’s got to be listening in through speech recognition!”
“That means he’s been hearing us all along!”
“That’s right, Verrick. Now how about telling me about the Iceberg Project? And about Purity?”
“Wolfe—I’ll tell decadent socialist scum like you nothing! You go to hell!”
“Hell is all about heat, Verrick! How’s the temperature in there?”
“You, get that door open! There are tools in the maintenance room! Make it quick!”
“Yes sir!” the Graywater replied.
“You come outside,” Wolfe said, heading out from under the carport, “I’ll shoot you dead!”
He glanced up, saw the drone circling the house.
“Sir—I might be able to free up the GPS, sir!”
“Starling—shut up! He’s listening! How can anyone be so smart at some things and so stupid at others?”
“Sir, I don’t know, sir!”
“It was a rhetorical...never mind! Just...”
“Yes sir! I’m sorry! It’s this heat...this heat!”
“Stop whining!”
Wolfe had reached the front door, heard a hammering on the other side. But he had something else to deal with first...
He brought up the phone’s hack of the UAV, and made the drone change course, so it was heading for the front of the house...
The hammering became a strident clanging. The door beside the lock was starting to bulge outward...
“You ready to talk, Verrick?” Wolfe demanded. “Cooking alive’s going to be very unpleasant! I really think I’m going to have to shut the phone off pretty soon. The screaming of men baking to death is just something I don’t care to listen to. I’m too sensitive a guy...”
“You’re going to die slowly when I get my hands on you, Wolfe!”
“Come on, Verrick! You may as well tell me the facts! I know that you’re planning a—”
Suddenly the doorlock snapped and the door flew open.
Wolfe backpedaled quickly, keeping to the wall to the side of the door. “Stay back, Graywater!”
Bullets sprayed through the open door, more or less at random. None of them hit Wolfe.
“Get out there and kill him!” came Verrick’s command from inside.
The merc was sure to rush out at any moment. Wolfe could waylay him and shoot him down—but why not kill two birds with one stone? If he did this right he could block the door?
His fingers flicked over the phone. He sent the drone down fast and hard, screaming with speed into the front door, the last of its bullets firing as it dived down.
Wolfe ducked back around the corner—there was a yelp of fear from the front door—then the drone crashed.
The house shook. Smoke billowed up at its front.
Suddenly the steel shutters over the windows flickered up. Starling may have gotten control back.
Wolfe turned—and found himself looking straight at Verrick.
And Verrick was aiming an assault rifle at Wolfe.
Wolfe threw himself aside, a moment before Verrick fired. Shattered glass flew, bullets hissed, and then Wolfe was up, running around the corner of the house. He sprinted past the front door—another burst of bullets rattled after him, cutting through the flames and smoke.
Then Wolfe angled out, dodged behind the Chevy Silverado, and used his phone to unlock its doors. This was a late model, luxurious, plenty of electronics to hack into—he started the engine remotely, then ran to the driver’s side, opened it.
Bullets strafed up the driveway and clanged off the door. But he was already in the truck, putting it in reverse, stamping the accelerator. The truck roared backwards, and Wolfe spun it around. The back window exploded from gunfire.
Would be nice to go back and shoot it out with Verrick...
But he had information to get to Aiden Pearce. Vital information.
He drove the Silverado to the highway, got on the freeway fast as he could, and headed for Chicago.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Quinn!” Pearce exclaimed, when Wolfe told him what he’d heard over the smart house’s speech recognition system. “But I killed Quinn...”
“Is there only one Quinn? Not likely...”
Wolfe was back in the safehouse, sipping Scotch at the desk. Pearce’s face was gigantic on the monitor—Wolfe clicked the mouse to put his face in a smaller window. Pearce was intimidating enough as it was.
“There’s a Niall Quinn,” Pearce said. “One of the old mob boss’s sons. I did hear a rumor he was taking over the Club. But doing it quietly. Trying to keep his name out of it as long as possible. I couldn’t find any confirmation and I discounted it...”
“Could be you shouldn’t have discounted it. Son probably wanted to get revenge for his old man.”
“Yeah—but why didn’t he just send a Club hitman out?”
“Don’t know unless it’s in case the guy screwed up. Which he did. Quinn didn’t want the thing to lead back to him.”
Pearce grunted. “Could be. So Niall Quinn reached out to Verrick. Who got Tranter to set it up. And Tranter sent Grampus. Be my guess, anyway.”
“So this Quinn’s got close connections with Verrick—and Purity? Might be they’re doing something for Purity without knowing what it’s all about...some kind of dirty work...”
“Sounds about right to me...”
“And you heard something about a guy named Starling?”
“He was there. Thinking about it, I realized I’d heard of him. Might’ve even met him—back in North Africa. He was with Air Force special technical division, a drone specialist...There was a guy notorious for verbal OCD behavior...Yeah, that’d be him. Starling.”
“Where’d you dump that Silverado?”
“I know, I should’ve kept Verrick’s truck for, maybe, planting a tracer in it or something but...it was Verrick’s. I scuttled it. Ran it down a boat ramp into Lake Michigan.”
Pearce laughed. “Don’t blame you! You search the truck before you scuttled it?”
“Yeah, he didn’t leave any laptops in it or anything. So—what about that SystemsLeak file supposed to go up?”
“They’re reshuffling their people. But let me check on that...”
And suddenly Pearce vanished from the screen.
Wolfe lifted his glass to toast the screen. “Here’s to you, Pearce.”
He sipped his whiskey, thinking, The more I hang out around Pearce, in any sense, the better my chances are of getting killed...
Wolfe turned that thought over in his mind, and then realized he didn’t really mind, that much.
Did he, Mick Wolfe...have a deathwish?
He had a revenge wish. But under that, maybe...
He’d been Delta Force; he’d risked his life for his country many times. And when they’d kicked him out with a dishonorable discharge, he’d put on a stone face about it. He hadn’t shed one tear. But inside he’d been deeply wounded, and it was a wound that might never heal. You don’t get through training for special forces, and combat with Delta Force, without having a deep sense of commitment and belonging. And then suddenly, the belonging had been taken away from him.
They’d taken it all away from him. They’d smeared him. They’d shamed him.
And he’d been so willing to
die for Delta Force, so identified with it, somehow he didn’t feel like living, now, with his identity shattered...
“Fuck ‘em,” he said, to the empty glass.
And he poured himself another.
#
GlowWorm seemed quietly scared; his gaze kept darting around the park. “I shouldn’t be here in person...”
“You told me to get rid of my phone. You didn’t seem to want to talk via Instant Message through internet cafe so...”
“I just felt like it was too insecure. This park doesn’t have any working ctOS cameras. We should be okay here....”
They were standing together on a small footbridge over a branch of a park lake on the southeast side of Chicago. It was a cold but windless midmorning, with broken clouds letting intermittent shafts of winter sunlight through.
To the north was more tree lined park, and then the great expanse of Washington Park’s many youth baseball fields. There were maples, elms and other trees Seline couldn’t identify lining the small, curved lake. “Looks peaceful here,” she said. “Not the way people think of this part of Chicago.”
“Can be,” GlowWorm said. “There are all kinds of people in the Chicago ‘hoods. There are strong families, and neighborhoods where people take care of one another; where they tell the parents if they see a child snuck out late in bad company. There are street parties with great music and food, and everyone getting along. There are a lot of good people. But there are gangs, too. And they’re some of the toughest and best-armed in the USA. This bridge looks peaceful—but I know for a fact two Black Viceroys were killed here, a couple months ago, thugs hired by The Club. Turf fight.”
“On this bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“You know how to make a girl feel safe.”
“You don’t come across like a woman that scares easily.”
“I’m not,” Seline said. “But I’m worried about being tracked by ctOS—if it’s true that the company maintaining it’s got some bad guys mixed in...”