Perfect Dark: Second Front

by Greg Rucka

  Shuang’s look of delight shifted to one of frustration. “It’s hard! She eats, like, everything! Burgers and sushi and tofu and steak and, like, everything!”

  “Make it steaks, then. The really good ones, the Kobe ones, okay? I’ll call you when I’m done with the meeting. Love you.”

  “Love you, too!”

  Shuang’s face had vanished from the screen of the d-PAL, and Fan had tucked the tiny PDA back into the pocket of her jeans, then headed for Ted Reilly’s.

  Fan bought a bottle of bourbon from the barman, who didn’t seem to care that she was clearly underage, paying with her credit strip. Bottle in hand, she made her way to the rear of the bar, then flopped down opposite Leland Shaw in his booth.

  Without looking up from his drink, Shaw said, “Taken.”

  Fan tilted her head, bending until she was almost resting her ear on the tabletop, trying to meet the man’s eyes, and she had to hold it for half a second before he did, sparing her a glance. Fan grinned, and his expression didn’t change, but the look in his eyes was nakedly hostile.

  Straightening up, Fan wrestled with the wax seal at the top of her bottle, peeling it back to expose the stopper. She uncorked the bourbon, bent her head again to catch Shaw’s eyes a second time, and when their gazes met again, she proceeded to top off his glass. Then she set the bottle between it and Shaw’s half-filled ashtray and sat back.

  “Always sit with your back to the wall, Colonel?”

  “Find I live longer that way,” Shaw said. He spoke slowly, but his words were clear, and Fan thought that if the man was drunk, he was doing a good job of covering it. He spoke with a slight twang, his accent from someplace deep in the American South. “And before you try to threaten or seduce or whatever me, little girl, you should check beneath the table.”

  Fan leaned forward slightly, excited. “Do you have a gun on me?”

  Shaw blinked at her almost sleepily. “Couple ways you can find out. Being stupid is the quickest.”

  “Oh, no, that’s not me, Colonel. I’m not stupid.” Fan’s smile grew. “What about you?”

  Shaw’s expression didn’t change, but the hostility in his eyes flickered, then died of fatigue. After a moment, he brought up the hand he’d been holding beneath the tabletop, setting a P9P—the fancy tricked-out model with the titanium slide—beside his glass.

  “I’m not looking for company,” he said. “And you’re too young for me even if I was.”

  “Well, not company, no. But maybe a company, yes? Some nice corporate master to keep you and your Hawks on retainer, to let you ease into the future you so richly deserve?”

  The fatigue and boredom drained away, the hostility in Shaw’s expression returning.

  “But you blew-blew-blew it, didn’t you, Colonel Lee?” Fan rested her elbows on the table, put her chin in her hands. “You built the Hawk Teams as your meal ticket. Made a private army of specialized soldiers and then worked so super hard to erase their existence, to keep everything they did deniable. Perfect for a hypercorp in trouble, just call Shaw and the Hawks, they’ll take care of it with no muss, no fuss, no blowback, guaranteed rate of success, no failures, all that.”

  “That’s right,” Shaw said slowly.

  “How’s that been working out, Colonel? How’s that record looking these days? Offers for use of your services just rolling in, are they?”

  Shaw scowled, and Fan watched as his eyes moved to the pistol lying beside the ashtray on the table, then back to her.

  “You could,” Fan agreed. “But it’d be the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life if you did.”

  “Way you’re talking, little girl, I’m willing to take that chance.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not thinking about your future, Colonel, and that’s why I’m here, that’s why I’ve taken the trouble to track you down. C’mon, now, use that military mind. Girl walks into a bar just to find you, she’s got to have a reason, an offer, right?”

  “So far I’m hearing nothing but insults,” Shaw said. “If I wanted that, I’d remarry.”

  Fan laughed. “See? I knew I was right about you! I knew you were the one I wanted!”

  “For what?”

  She lifted her chin from her hands, gestured wide. “To help me run dataDyne, Colonel Shaw.”

  Now it was Colonel Leland Shaw’s turn to laugh.

  “Oh, that’s good,” he said. “That’s rich, that’s really … that’s really rich, little girl. You almost had me going there, the talk, the manner, you had it all. Right up to the punch line.”

  He stopped laughing, his expression turning to a snarl.

  “Now get the hell out of here before I do shoot you.”

  “And we’re back to the part where that would be stupid, and you’re not, right?” Fan lowered her arms, leaned back. “You’ve just had a run of bad luck, that’s all. That thing in the Solomon Islands, that wasn’t your fault. The job in Los Angeles, how could you know it would turn out so bad? Eleven of your men in the LA morgue, guess that kind of ruins the whole leave-no-traces thing, doesn’t it? And one of your guys gone rogue, then getting caught and locked away in a Carrington interrogation box? Rotten luck, that’s all.”

  “Rotten luck,” Shaw said. “But luck doesn’t wash with the hypercorps, good, bad, or otherwise, and especially not with dataDyne. They want results, and they want them made-to-order. Or they get someone else.”

  “But I want you.”

  “You’re not dataDyne.”

  “I will be. I’m going to be the next CEO of dataDyne, Colonel Shaw. I’m going to replace Cassandra DeVries by the end of the month, and you’re going to help me.”

  “No kidding? I’m going to retire to one of those private oil-rig communities in the North Sea.”

  “Those aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. One system failure in the stabilization drive and they sink like you wouldn’t believe.” Fan extended her hand to Shaw. “Zhang Fan, Colonel Shaw. Pleased to meet you.”

  He looked at the offered hand as if expecting it to hold a joy buzzer. “Nice name.”

  Fan exhaled, showing frustration for the first time, then lowered her hand. “I’m his daughter, Colonel.”

  “His daughter was Mai Hem.”

  “She wasn’t his only one. She was just the one he let the world know about.”

  “You really expect me to believe you?”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

  Shaw just shook his head, reached for his drink. He drained half of it, winced, then set the glass back on the table. “Get out of here.”

  “I know why you took the Hovoro job, Colonel Shaw, the job in the Solomons that you did for Cassandra DeVries.”

  “I did the job because dataDyne pays very well.”

  “You did the job because you were trying to buy your future,” Fan said. “You were hoping to make a good impression, perhaps such a good one that dataDyne would offer you a position. You looked at DeVries and you thought that yeah, maybe she would be the new CEO, and wouldn’t it be nice if she thought you were everything you said you were. Maybe you even thought that the new CEO would want a new director of CORPSEC, that you could end up in Anita Velez’s job. That would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? A dataDyne director’s salary and no more combat ops from the back of a dropship in the middle of nowhere.”

  Shaw’s mouth had turned sour. Fan watched as he took a second drink, drained his glass.

  “You’re fifty-four years old. You’ve got two ex-wives, and you’re carrying over three point eight million dollars in debt right now, just to cover back pay and equipment for the Hawks. That future you were eyeing is in shambles. You’re growing old, you’re growing tired, and worst of all, you’re getting slow. You need a way out. I’m offering you one.”

  Shaw looked into his empty glass, then set it back on the table. Without looking away from him, Fan refilled it from the bottle.

  “You have a d-PAL?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

&
nbsp; “Check your account at the Imperial Bank, Macao. Account number three-zero-zero-nine-four-nine-seven-two-eight-two-six—”

  “You know the account number, yeah, you’ve made your point,” Shaw snapped, shifting in his seat to pull his d-PAL from his back pocket. Fan listened to it as it chimed to life, waited while Shaw initiated the global connect, then IDed his way into his account at the Imperial Bank of Macao. He looked at the readout on the d-PAL’s tiny screen, then back to Fan. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Eight point six million dollars, Colonel,” Fan said. “I had the funds deposited on my order before I left China this morning. Eight point six million dollars is, incidentally, the annual salary for the dataDyne Director of CORPSEC. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  Shaw stared at the readout from the d-PAL for what, to Fan, seemed like a very long time. Then he shut the PDA off, resting it on the table beside his pistol, and shifted his stare to Fan.

  “What do I have to do?” he asked.

  “It’s so easy, Colonel, you’re going to love it.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “Cassandra DeVries is going to contact you within the next two to three days. She’s going to want a meeting, and she’s going to offer you a job. I want you to take the job.”

  “And what’s this job going to be, Miss Zhang?”

  “You’re going to be asked to kill someone, Colonel, a young woman by the name of Joanna. You’ve dealt with her twice already, I think. Once in Hovoro, once in Los Angeles.”

  Shaw’s eyes narrowed. “The redhead.”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “That girl’s a nightmare, Miss Zhang. That girl is responsible for taking my perfect record and throwing it in the crapper, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been properly briefed about how to handle her, Colonel.”

  “Killing her won’t be easy.”

  “I don’t want you to kill her. I want you to bring her to me.”

  “Simple as that?”

  “Simple as that, Colonel.”

  He shook his head. “You think it’ll be that easy? I’ve seen footage of this kid in action, even if you haven’t. She dropped eleven of my men—eleven of them. Hell, she blew one of our dropships out of the sky by manually planting a shaped charge on it. While it was still flying. There’s no way she’ll come quietly.”

  “I’m sure she will.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have something she desperately wants. You have a connection to her late father.”

  Shaw’s look turned from puzzled to curious.

  “Her father was Jack Dark,” Fan told him.

  The curiosity shifted, almost to wonder.

  “Son of a bitch,” Shaw said. “Jack Dark had a kid?”

  “It certainly appears that way.” Fan leaned forward once more, hopeful and genuine. “Now let’s talk about exactly what I want you to do, and how you’re going to go about doing it.”

  dataDyne Executive Safehouse

  37km ENE of Nelson, New Zealand

  January 24th, 2021

  The latest argument with Velez had begun on the previous morning, after Velez had given her an update on the attempt to locate and neutralize Carrington’s Joanna. Three dataDyne “elimination teams”—small squads composed of the most elite Shock Troopers at Velez’s disposal—were at perpetual readiness, one currently in Tokyo, one in Seattle, and one staged in Paris. The one in Paris, Velez explained, was there because she felt it was too risky to stage the team from London, so close to the Carrington Institute.

  That wasn’t the cause of the argument, however. The cause of the argument came from Cassandra’s discovery that Velez had refused to authorize a visit by DataFlow Special Projects Director Dr. Edward Ventura, on the grounds that it was a violation of security protocol.

  Even given the short time she had been CEO, the refusal had taken Cassandra by surprise, and she found it incomprehensible and annoying.

  “I’m the bloody CEO, if I want someone to come and visit me, I expect them to do just that,” she told Velez.

  “And in virtually every case, you would be correct in that expectation, Madame Director. But in matters of security, I must exercise my own judgment, and it is my judgment that a visit from anyone—no matter how trusted—to this safehouse is an unnecessary risk.”

  “I want Ventura here, Anita. I want a progress report on AirFlow 2, and I want it now.”

  “You can arrange that via video conference.”

  “I don’t want it by conference, obviously! I want it in person, and I want it first thing in the morning. Make it happen!”

  “Madame Director—” Velez started to say, but by then Cassandra had turned and was striding past the Shock Troopers posted on the door to her office, down the hall. Cassandra heard the other woman swear under her breath in German, heard her rushing to catch up. “Madame Director, please.”

  “I don’t want to have to argue about this, Anita! I’ve got three thousand things to do, this really shouldn’t be one that takes this much time!”

  Velez came alongside, interposing herself between Cassandra and the windows along the hall, blocking the exquisite view. Cassandra knew the move for what it was, an instinctive effort to protect her from any possible threat from outside, and in the past it wouldn’t have bothered her, would have, in fact, been flattering. But given that the house was surrounded by countersnipers, missile platforms, and Shock Troopers patrolling in jump rigs, it was, instead, all the more annoying.

  “May I say something?” Velez asked.

  “Oh, please.”

  Velez frowned, framing her words, and Cassandra wondered what she was going to be criticized for this time. They came off the hall into the kitchen, and the two Troopers posted there snapped to rigid attention even as the chef and her assistant reacted to the entrance. Cassandra ignored them all, moving to the coffeemaker, grabbing the nearest mug. Like every piece of glassware, silverware, and flatware in the house, the mug sported the dataDyne double-D diamond, in this case lain onto the porcelain in multifaceted paint. When the light caught it, the logo seemed to alternately glow in gold, platinum, and blue.

  “There’s no coffee,” Cassandra said, upon discovering the carafe empty. “There’s no bloody coffee. Would it be too much to ask that there be, please, some bloody damn coffee!”

  “Certainly, ma’am,” the chef said, coming forward and sending her assistant scurrying toward the nearest pantry with the wave of a hand. The chef was in her late forties, perhaps, a little matronly, and her response was both solicitous and apologetic. “We’ll have it brought to you right away.”

  “You don’t need to bring it to me, you just need to have it made when I want it,” Cassandra snapped, and it sounded remarkably catty to herself, and she caught it, caught the chef’s deferential avoiding of her eyes, and had a horrible moment where she could see herself as everyone else in the room no doubt could. She saw herself, and she was positive that she was acting like a grade-A bitch.

  She set the mug back down on the marble-topped counter, took a breath, then smiled at the chef. “I’m sorry. It’s just … been a day, and it’s hardly begun.”

  “No, that’s all right, ma’am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Elizabeth Green,” the chef said.

  “If you could have some coffee brought up to my office, Miss Green, I would be very grateful,” Cassandra said.

  Then she turned around and headed out of the kitchen the same way she had entered, Velez again at her side.

  “You were going to say something,” Cassandra said, after a moment.

  “I was, Madame Director, but I think, perhaps, you have just realized it yourself.”

  “That I’m acting like a bitch?”

  Velez shook her head, not hearing the joke, or perhaps not wanting to validate it with an acknowledgement. “You are overworked, and you are overstressed. Both are results of the job, of course
, but I am concerned that you are not helping yourself.”

  “Meaning what, Anita?”

  “Meaning, Madame Director, that you are still attempting to run dataDyne as you ran DataFlow. You are attempting micromanage the corporation, and you are clearly being overwhelmed.”

  “If you’re saying I’m not capable of—”

  Velez stopped abruptly, turning to Cassandra, looking sincere in both her concern and her care. “No, Madame Director, I would never say that. It is no shortcoming on your part, and, if I may be frank, if anyone could master it all, it would be you. But no one person could, not even Master Li. His gift was that he was brilliant at delegating duties, that he unerringly positioned the right person for the right job at every stage. And that, Madame Director, is a lesson you must learn, for your own sake as much as dataDyne’s.”

  “I do delegate,” Cassandra said. “I delegate all the time, Anita—you’re speaking nonsense.”

  “You delegate only in the most minor instances, yes. It is not enough. You must leave the running of Patmos to Miss Waterberg, Madame Director, and oversee the results. You must leave the running of Dun-Chow to Mr. Zefu. And you must leave the management of AirFlow 2 to Dr. Ventura, and trust that he will deliver what you have asked of him.”

  Cassandra tried to keep from scowling, resisted the urge to once again tell Velez that she was wrong, that she knew how to delegate responsibilities just fine. But gazing past her shoulder, out the hall windows and down toward the beach and the water, she found herself remembering the last beach she’d walked upon, the LuxeLife resort in Hawaii, where the board of directors had finally come to the conclusion that Zhang Li would have to be replaced. She’d hated being at the resort, had stayed in her room almost the entire time she’d been there, working as if she’d never even left her office in Paris.

  Right up to the moment she’d realized where she was and what she was doing, and had finally allowed herself to go swimming.

  Is this who I’m going to become? Cassandra wondered. An isolated, bitchy workaholic?

  “I take your point,” she said to Velez. “I take your point, Anita, and I am trying. But AirFlow 2 is important to me, it’s my legacy at DataFlow. Let Edward come here, please. Screen him however you like, how much you like, but I need to meet with him in person, just to see how it’s going.”