Perfect Dark: Second Front

by Greg Rucka

  CONTINUITY =C.

  AM AWARE OF THEIR PARTICIPATION. CAN YOU CONFIRM C BEHIND CMO TAKEOVERS OF Z AND BYI? FURTHER, CAN YOU CONFIRM C RESPONSIBLE FOR IMPERSONATION OF YOU?

  FINALLY, CONFIRM FOLLOWING HYPOTHESIS— CMO DEALING WITH C RESULTS IN Z AND BYI TAKEOVERS. NOW CMO FEARS C WILL DO THE SAME TO THEM. USING YOU TO PRE-EMPT POSSIBLE C ACTION AS DESCRIBED?

  Jo nodded, not bothering to use her pad.

  Steinberg watched as Carrington scratched at his beard, thinking. Then he wrote again, this time much more quickly.

  WHY C INTEREST IN SINGLING YOU OUT? WHY C APPARENTLY TARGETTING DD?

  Jo shook her head, then bent her attention to the pad in her lap. While she wrote, Steinberg found his shirt and pulled it on.

  THINK C KNOWS I DID ZL AND DAUGHTER. THINK THEY WANT PAYBACK. DD—NO IDEA. NO INFORMATION FROM CMO ON THAT TOPIC.

  DIFFERENT PROBLEM—HOW TO GET TO ZL HOME WITHOUT DD PUTTING LOTS OF HOLES IN ME?

  She lowered her pad, shrugging again, and Steinberg couldn’t help but grin at her. Despite the new outfit—and he had to admit that he liked it on her, liked the maturity it projected, even the hint of sophistication—the gesture was pure, vintage Jo.

  Carrington was writing again, and when he showed the message to Jo, she looked surprised, and perhaps a little concerned. When Steinberg saw it, he understood why.

  NO ACTION AT PRESENT. CALL AGAIN +3 HOURS. FURTHER ORDERS THEN.

  Then Carrington reached out to the monitor and killed the connection.

  “You don’t want her going to China?” Steinberg asked.

  “No, it’s not that. Obviously the Continuity needs to be taken care of, one way or another, and I suspect telling Joanna that I’d rather she left them alone will have the same amount of success as my telling her that she was confined to the Institute grounds. Though this time I would mean it.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It still doesn’t make sense, Jon,” Carrington said, grumpily tossing the pad and the pen onto the desk. “The heart of it, the big picture, we’re still not seeing it. And I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s something very big, indeed.”

  “I’m not the planner, here, I’m not the idea guy,” Steinberg said, lacing up his boots. “But it seems to me that we’ve been ignoring the obvious question.”

  “Which would be?”

  “What’s dataDyne’s stake in all of this?”

  “They don’t have one, that’s the point.”

  “Sure they do. They always do, Daniel.”

  Carrington grumbled, then moved for the door, waiting for Steinberg. Steinberg finished lacing his other boot, grabbed his jacket, then joined him.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Ops,” Carrington said. “Maybe Grim’s turned something up.”

  Steinberg waited until they’d left the Residence and had started across the campus before speaking again, making the request he’d been preparing.

  “I want to go out to Ankara, back Jo up,” Steinberg said.

  “No, Jon, I need you here.”

  “She looks better, but it’s cosmetic, Daniel. CMO had her out of commission for over twenty-four hours, at least, and that wasn’t just to link her. She was in sorry shape before she left here, she’s in worse shape now, I guarantee it, even if it doesn’t look that way.”

  “I don’t disagree with your assessment, Jon, but I’m not letting you leave here, not until we can stand down.”

  “There’s been no attack, there’s been nothing. I think it’s time to lower our guard a bit.”

  Carrington looked at him, frowning. “DataDyne put a hit squad after her, Jon.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Not Shock Troopers, not CORPSEC—this wasn’t their defensive protocol, do you hear what I’m saying? Jo has been targeted for elimination. Think about that, and think about who gives that order, and why.”

  “It would have to come from DeVries.”

  “That’s right. Which means DeVries has determined that we are now such a threat as to authorize a full covert action. They’re going after Jo now. Do you think it’s likely they’re going to stop once they get her, if they get her?”

  “No,” Steinberg said, after a moment. “No, that wouldn’t make sense, would it. If she’s an enemy who needs to be removed, then so are we.”

  “Exactly. In my humble opinion, the only reason we’ve not had dataDyne at the gates already is that they’re too occupied with other things at the moment. They’re worried about CMO arriving in territory they previously shared only with BYI and Zentek, and they’re worried about the unveiling of AirFlow 2. But you can be certain—certain, Jon—that once they’ve got those ducks in order, they will be coming here, and they’ll be coming here in force.”

  “So we let Jo go after the Continuity alone, is that it?”

  “Can we get her into China without her being detected?”

  Steinberg considered for a moment, but not long. “Yeah, it can be done. It would have to be from the north—Jo would have to use Institute assets out of Russia. I could coordinate with Vaklav on the Moscow campus, make it happen.”

  “Then that’s what you should do. Put it together, and when she calls back, give her the details and tell her—or write to her, I suppose—that I am authorizing her to eliminate the Continuity at her discretion.”

  “Is that an order or simply permission?”

  They reached the Ops Center, stopping now outside its doors. Carrington planted his stick, looking at Steinberg with curiosity. “And the distinction would be what, exactly, Jon?”

  “If it’s permission, her sense of self-preservation might kick in,” Steinberg said. “If it’s an order, she’ll die to complete it.”

  Carrington chuckled, as if amused.

  “You can tell her it’s an order, Jonathan,” Carrington said.

  It took less than two hours to coordinate with the Moscow campus, Steinberg liaising with Vaklav Dugarova to arrange a location where the Russian could meet Jo and to come up with a means of insertion into China. It wasn’t by any means foolproof, but by the time they were done, Steinberg was confident that the plan had a reasonable chance of success. Jo would make it into China, and, if all went well, Vaklav would be there to get her out again.

  He went back to his room and sat at his desk, writing out the plan as neatly and carefully and clearly as he could manage. That took him close to another twenty minutes, which brought him right up to the edge of the allotted three hours. Steinberg reached out for his monitor, swinging it clear of the wall, and waited for Jo to call.

  She never called back.

  DataFlow Corporate Headquarters

  Presentation Hall A

  17 Rue de la Baume

  Paris, France

  January 27th, 2021

  Cassandra DeVries stood behind the podium on the stage of the enormous presentation hall, lit by the stage lights, and let herself be picked apart by the army of ants called the dataDyne media relations and public affairs division.

  “If you could turn your head to the left a little, please, ma’am.”

  “Like this?”

  “No, a little further … no, that’s too much, ma’am—there! Yes, like that.”

  There was murmuring from the audience, the flash of several d-PALs and laptops as they were switched on and updated. Most, if not all, of the lights on the stage seemed to be pointed directly into her eyes, and Cassandra had to squint to make out even the barest silhouettes. She resisted the urge to sigh. Of the many things she was discovering that she hated about being CEO, this was in danger of becoming the worst, and considering that she was living in fear for her life, that was saying something.

  According to the display built into the podium, it was two minutes to eleven o’clock at night, which meant Cassandra had been standing onstage in the presentation hall for just shy of four hours. That was in addition to the last day and a half that she’d spent in what Michael Long and his PR cronies co
ndescendingly referred to as “media preparation”: rehearsals and practice Q&As and mock interviews and—God help her—camera tests. Outside the building the media tents were being erected, the decorations were going up. The Parisian foot traffic along the avenue outside the DataFlow offices had been closed earlier that afternoon, diverted to neighboring streets in an attempt both to provide a security buffer and to allow the frenzy of work to continue more smoothly. A no-fly zone was also now in effect, covering a quarter-mile radius around the location. Construction workers, painters, and caterers from dataDyne subsidiaries around the world were toiling late into the night, preparing both building and grounds for the event.

  Attendance for the AirFlow 2 release was expected to top fifty thousand, with the media making up only a part of that number. There would be politicians and dignitaries and pop stars and directors from every one of dataDyne’s divisions. There would be not one, not two, but three separate rock concerts, two fireworks displays, and at least one formal black-tie dinner, all of which would commence tomorrow evening and conclude, finally, on Saturday night, the thirtieth, with Arthur’s unveiling to the world.

  It was a dog-and-pony show of a like and scope to make Cassandra DeVries’s stomach churn, and it gave her far greater insight into the thinking and personality of her predecessor than she’d have ever thought possible. Zhang Li had hated personal publicity, had eschewed the public life almost entirely with the sole exception of the DeathMatch broadcasts from his home in China, and even those featured his daughter far more than they had him. He had refused to make public appearances, to offer even the barest media comment, leaving such things to the media relations division.

  And no wonder, Cassandra thought. If this was what he was in for, no wonder he never went outside.

  The fact was that the whole display turned Cassandra’s stomach, from the garish demonstrations of dataDyne’s wealth and power to the snobbish condescension of the publicity people who could readily find fault in everything and everyone except themselves. She’d never in her life been so consistently and repeatedly subjected to passive-aggressive insults, and she was the bloody chief executive officer of dataDyne.

  That was the most infuriating thing to her, and the longer she stood uselessly on a stage being picked apart bit by bit, the more certain she became that the people in the audience who claimed to want to help her, to want to help dataDyne, wanted precisely the opposite. The media relations organization had once been run by Takahata Sato, now director of dataDyne’s ServAuto Robotics division. Sato, along with Friedrich Murray and Amanda Waterberg, had been in contention for the CEO position along with Cassandra. As far as Cassandra was concerned, that meant that media relations was run by Sato-loyalists, led by the man Sato had appointed to succeed him, a suntanned and arrogant American named Michael Long.

  Cassandra believed in running dataDyne as she had run DataFlow, as a meritocracy. The best would rise to positions of authority and responsibility as a result of their ingenuity, discipline, and hard work. Results would speak for themselves. It seemed the proper—if not the only—way to run any business, let alone dataDyne.

  It also seemed that she was in the minority on this point and that Zhang Li himself had disagreed with the thesis. Under his leadership, promotion in dataDyne was a matter of politicking and cronyism, accomplished less through what one did than through who one knew and what one could then offer them in exchange. It was a divisive, and in Cassandra’s opinion, ultimately destructive way to run a company, the technique of a king who wished his princes to squabble amongst themselves rather than to unite and, potentially, dethrone their regent.

  The more time she spent as CEO, the more Cassandra felt she was both discovering and understanding her predecessor. Like many of the decisions Zhang Li had made, it was one based on fear, a terror of losing control. Fear, it seemed, had been a huge factor in Zhang Li’s life.

  It also meant that her style of leadership was in opposition to the status quo. It meant that she threatened people like Takahata Sato and Michael Long.

  Four hours spent standing here, a day and a half lost to this nonsense, lost from the business of running dataDyne, and for what? To promote AirFlow 2?

  No, Cassandra thought. They don’t care about dataDyne, and they don’t care about Arthur.

  This is their revenge. Their petty, meaningless, selfish revenge. And I’ve had about enough of it.

  The murmured conversation from her hidden critics continued, with Cassandra the obvious topic of conversation. She took the opportunity to glance off toward stage left, where the newest of her personal assistants was standing by, a young woman by the name of Gabrielle Shephard. Cassandra caught her eye and mouthed the word “water,” and her assistant quickly came onstage with a bottle in one hand, d-PAL in the other.

  “I have a message from Colonel Shaw for you, Madame Director,” Gabrielle whispered as she handed the bottle over. “The message is, quote, have target located, en route to handle matter personally. Will report positive result before oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow, your local. End quote. I’m not quite sure what it means, ma’am.”

  Cassandra drained half the bottle before answering. “Don’t worry about it, Gabi. Thank you.”

  “Do you need anything else, ma’am? I have some aspirin, and I can have dinner brought for you as soon as you’d like.”

  “I’m all right for now, thank you.”

  The young woman looked pained. “There are … I’m afraid there are several other messages for you, if you have a moment. Director Waterberg at Patmos has been trying to reach you, as has Director Hesch at Ellison Electronic Security. Director Hesch has been calling hourly, ma’am, he’s very concerned about the collapse of Beck-Yama and CMO’s assumption of their holdings along the Pacific Rim.”

  Cassandra handed the bottle back, rubbed at her right temple with two fingers. “I’ll call him as soon as I get free.”

  From the audience, someone called out, “Excuse me! You! Get off the stage!”

  Gabrielle stiffened slightly, and Cassandra nodded to her, and the young woman backed away with a dignity that Cassandra wished she could find in herself at the moment.

  “You moved, ma’am,” someone else in the audience told Cassandra. “Please, lift your head, yes, like that. Just like you were before. Thank you. Please, please, Madame Director, just try to stand still, okay? We don’t want to be here all day.”

  “I don’t like that glare off her nose,” a woman said. “Look at her nose, it looks like a beak.”

  “We can powder it. What I don’t like is the wardrobe, it’s way too twenty-ten.”

  “I thought that was her thing, that she liked retro. How else can you explain what she’s been wearing?”

  “She can like retro all she wants, but this is the future, boys and girls, this is the bright new tomorrow, and she can’t present the future looking like she’s pining for the past.”

  “Excuse me,” Cassandra said.

  “What’s with the hair? Can we get extensions for her hair? Or a weave?”

  “You think it’s too short?”

  “Short? It looks positively butch, we have to fix that.”

  “Excuse me,” Cassandra repeated, louder.

  “Can we bring up four, seven, and fourteen? Just to do something about the shadows.”

  The lights on the stage intensified, and, as a result, Cassandra’s headache grew to keep pace.

  “Oh, good lord, that won’t work. Her chest is too flat. The way the lights are hitting it, throw in her hair, she looks like a boy. Is that what we want? We want the world to think that dataDyne is run by a little blond boy? I mean, really.”

  There were a couple of laughs from the darkness, hastily stifled.

  “Excuse—”

  “All right, ma’am, are you still with us here? Sorry about that. We’re going to have wardrobe come up with something else for you. What’s your bra size? You’re a thirty-four C?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Cas
sandra asked.

  “Dammit, Michael! You made her move her head!”

  Squinting against the lights, Cassandra could make out Michael Long, his d-PAL in hand, his earpiece glowing a gentle green. “Please, ma’am, don’t move your head, all right? You’ve got to stop fidgeting, you’re like a puppy, I swear, all right? We’re trying to make you beautiful, here. You’ve got to help us out.”

  “I think that is what I’m doing,” Cassandra said evenly.

  “Well, yes, I can see how you would think that’s what you’re doing, but every time you move you’re actually not doing that. We have to get this right, and we’re on a tight schedule here, and I think you’ll agree that you don’t want to unveil AirFlow 2 to the whole world while looking like you just tumbled out of a wrestling ring with half a dozen gorillas.”

  Cassandra nodded, barely, then said, “All right, bring up the lights.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, we’re not finish—”

  “Yes, we are. Bring up the lights, now.”

  There was a pause, an abrupt stillness from her hidden audience. Somewhere behind and above her she heard the reverberation of a switch being thrown, and the stage lights remained on, but the house lights joined them. In the audience, roughly clustered at the center of the second and third rows, the media affairs and public relations representatives stared back at her. Most of them were seated, but Long stood with three others at the center, two women and another man, and like the rest of the group, their expressions offered all manner of opinion about Cassandra, but nothing that remotely approached respect.

  I am the CEO and Director of dataDyne, Cassandra DeVries reminded herself. I am the head of the most powerful corporation the world has ever seen.

  “You’ve had how long to put this together, Director Long?” she asked, coming off the podium and toward the lip of the stage.