“Yes,” said Hare.
“Good. Tell it where to go, then shut up.”
“What do you want? The car? It’s yours. Money? I don’t have much, but what I have is—”
“I didn’t tell you to ask questions,” said 8-ball. Hare closed his eyes, muttered, “Montlake Boulevard,” then shut up. The car pulled out of the parking lot, and the Jackrabbit parked next to his followed a moment later.
“Thanks for the offer,” said 8-ball, when they were two blocks away from Nero’s. “Yes, we will take the car, for a start. Most of all, though, we want information. Anything you can tell us about Tom Mather, the Hatter.”
Hare’s eyes widened. “What do you want with him?”
“Just a moment of his time. He killed some friends of mine.”
“If you’re planning on killing friends of his,” said Hare around a lump in his throat, “think again. He doesn’t have any. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”
“Not even you?”
“Well, not enough to risk his life. Or even his car. So if you’re thinking of asking him for a ransom for me, better not go over five figures.”
8-ball grinned. “Thanks for the tip. Now, we can do this one of two ways. Tell us what we need to know, and you wake up tomorrow morning. Fail to cooperate, and you never wake up again. What’s it to be?”
“I’ll cooperate,” gulped Hare. “What do you want to know?”
“How do we get into the Hatter’s apartment?”
“I don’t know. I mean, even if you can get into the Pyramid and get up to that floor ... I know there’s a credstick lock and a voiceprint lock, but I don’t know the password, and I don’t think he would have told anybody else. He probably has the same sort of sequence I do—it asks him a question that most people wouldn’t know the answer to, and it only accepts the answer in his voice. The same for his office, I think. I’m sorry if that’s not the answer you want, but it’s true.”
The dwarf grimaced. “Any overrides?”
“In theory, but the doors are controlled by a red-level system in a cold vault. You’re not a decker, are you?” “No. Could you do it?”
“Yes, but only from inside the system. Inside the Pyramid.”
8-ball shook his head. “I don’t think so, chummer. Is there anywhere else that the Hatter goes where we might meet up with him?”
20
Lankin was the first to arrive in the university’s car park, and he sat in the van until he saw Yoko and Mute climb out of the Americar. “My contact in the Pyramid has just sent me some interesting mail,” he told them by way of a greeting. “Aztechnology has a monthly unrestricted-pistol-shooting event. The Hatter just won for the third time in a row, beating members of the Leopard Guard as well as others in security.”
Unrestricted, Mute knew, meant that there were no limits on the contestants’ cyberware or their choice of pistol: unlike the Olympics and other games, unrestricted contests could be as much a test of new technology as they were of pure skill. She shrugged. “We didn’t think he’d be a pushover,” she said.
“He also says the Hatter’s applied for a job in the head office. If he gets it, he could be leaving by the end of the week. It looks like waiting for more information would have been a mistake, after all.” He sounded almost apologetic.
“Do you think he might be expecting us?”
“I suppose we’ll find out.”
“Do you trust your informant?”
“I think so. The Hatter could be trying to take control of the timetable, but the job is apparently real, and it pays better.”
Mute shook her head. “He wouldn’t leave unless he’s given up on GNX-IV. Do you think that’s likely?”
“He may not have given up,” said Yoko. “The container we found was addressed to their head office. If he knew that, then he may have decided to look there when he didn’t find it in the Crypt. In any case, now that we have Hare, we’re committed. It’s tonight or we give up.”
“We probably should be committed,” muttered Lankin. He looked around as more vehicles arrived—first 8-ball and Hare in Hare’s Jackrabbit, then Mish in another, and Magnusson in a third. Hare emerged from his car reluctantly, and 8-ball handcuffed him to a tree before joining his teammates.
“Here’s his retinal prints and a voice sample,” he said, handing a chip to Mute. “And everything else I could get out of the sorry sack of drek. I told him we wouldn’t kill him if he cooperated, and he sang like a bird. What should we do with him?”
“Get his clothes when Ratatosk arrives,” said Yoko. “It’s probably safest to knock him out and leave him in the van with Lankin and Pierce. We can release him when this is over, and let him decide whether he returns to Aztechnology or looks for work elsewhere. Did you get a description of the Hatter?”
8-ball nodded. Magnusson stepped out of the black Jackrabbit and donned his top hat. “How do I look?” he asked.
The Pyramid’s gates opened automatically as Hare’s car approached, and Ratatosk breathed a sigh of relief. The gate closed behind them again almost instantly, and he drove on until they were stopped by a boom gate. A security guard was watching a trideo in his booth, and looked away reluctantly. “ID?” he asked.
Magnusson, muttering softly in Aramaic, cast a physical mask spell on the decker. Ratatosk opened the window and leaned toward the camera and microphone. “Marc Herrera, computer security.”
The guard nodded, then glanced at the monitor. “I’m reading four bodies in the car.”
“Thomas Mather, resource co-ord for R & D,” came a male voice from the backseat, with the careful intonation of the mildly drunk, “and two visitors.”
“Okay. Have a good one.”
“Thank you.” Ratatosk raised the window, and Magnusson let the spell drop.
“What happens if they check and see that the Hatter hasn’t left the building?” asked the mage.
“We have to hope that they won’t,” replied Mute, still in Mather’s voice. “Someone with the Hatter’s job has to be free to come and go without needing to check in or out. It’s magical security that worries me.”
No one and nothing stopped them as they drove down to the lowest sublevel of the garage. Ratatosk, who knew the layout from the computerized model in the system, led the way to the elevators. Magnusson concentrated on maintaining the physical mask spell while still chanting quietly in Aramaic to reduce the drain. He was careful not to look at any of the cameras, hoping desperately that the hired top hat and new lined coat would be enough of a disguise to fool casual observers into mistaking him for the Hatter. As they approached the doors, a monitor between the elevators lit up, showing the face and shoulders of a man wearing the butternut-and-blaze-orange uniform of a security guard. “ID, please.”
“Marc Herrera, computer security; Thomas Mather, resource co-ord for R & D; and two visitors,” Ratatosk intoned. “Fifty-second floor.”
“Further ID required for visitor passes. Visitors please approach the monitor and stand on the red line, one at a time.”
Ratatosk stepped aside, slightly anxious but mildly relieved that the system hadn’t asked Magnusson to confirm that he was the Hatter. Mute stepped onto the line and looked at the monitor. “Name, please.”
She looked at the monitor, trying to guess whether the face was real or a computer simulation. “Devi,” she said, her voice modulator programmed with a synthesized voice borrowed from a Bollywood musical star.
“Full name, please.”
“Devi Khan.”
“Height one point six-six meters, voiceprint and facial scan registered. Temporary visitor pass issued for Devi Khan.” A plastic card emerged from a slot beneath the monitor. “Next, please.”
She took the card and stepped aside, and Yoko took her place. “Yumiko Arisake.”
“Height one point eight-nine meters, voiceprint and facial scan registered. Temporary visitor pass issued for Yumiko Arisake. Thank you.” The lift doors opened, and the four hu
rried inside.
“Fifty-second floor,” Ratatosk repeated, glancing at Magnusson. The mage was still muttering softly in Aramaic to minimize the drain of maintaining the physical mask spell. “You holding up okay?”
Magnusson nodded, and no one else spoke until the lift doors opened again.
Diaz gazed at the bank of monitors, yawned through clenched teeth, then turned and glared enviously at the fat wagemage lying on the couch behind him. Security mages could close their eyes for a couple of hours at a time, supposedly prowling the pyramid in astral form in search of intruders, but Diaz suspected that many of them were actually asleep; meanwhile, he sat between the door and their unconscious bodies while watching a dozen changing but eternally boring views of the corridors. Diaz looked back at the screens, caught a glimpse of a top hat and blinked.
Standing next to the top-hatted figure was an attractive human woman in leathers and a low-cut top. He looked at the entry register and grinned. So the Hatter and his pet decker had brought home a couple of women, had they? Diaz swiveled his chair back and looked at the two gorgeous women again, then called up that night’s roster. He’d never forgiven the Hatter for putting him on the graveyard shift in this dead-end post after Morales had escaped, and a chance to land him in the drek with his tasty blond squeeze was too good to pass up. “Station two, this is station four. Is Elena Vargas there?”
“Her body is; the rest of her should be back soon.”
“Great. Ask her to check out elevator B-nine when she does, can you?”
Ratatosk inserted Herrera’s credstick into the socket next to the door and waited. “Pawn to king four,” said the speaker.
“Pawn to king four,” Mute replied in Hare’s voice.
“Knight to king’s bishop three.”
Ratatosk tried to visualize a chessboard. “Knight to queen’s bishop three,” Magnusson murmured. “It’s Giuoco Piano.” Mute repeated this, and the door slid open. The four hurried in, and the door shut behind them, leaving them in darkness.
“No magical defenses,” said Magnusson, looking around the room astrally. He dropped the physical mask spell. “Lights.” He staggered over to the nearest chair, while Ratatosk ran toward the coffee table and grabbed Hare’s deck bag. As soon as the bag was opened, he whistled.
“What is it?”
“An Excalibur!”
“Valuable?”
“A million, easy, and that’s without the software, not to mention any Aztechnology codes it has in memory . . . Oh, man, this is—”
“Can you use it?” asked Yoko as she disappeared into the bedroom to make sure no one else was in the apartment.
“Can I?”
“Immediately?”
Reluctantly, Ratatosk closed the bag again, and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ll look at it later.” He glanced at the telecom in the corner near the door, examined the jackpoint, and opened his own deck bag. “Okay,” he said a few seconds later, “this is the secure system. Needs a retinal print—Mute, can you take care of that? Can’t find anything monitoring this room apart from the standard safety devices, none of which can ID us. I’ll see if I can override the Hatter’s lock.”
“Can you scrub our facial scans, first?” asked Mute, changing the retinal pattern of her cybereyes to match Hare’s. “And Yoko’s voiceprint?”
“Not yet, not if you’re going to be walking the corridors,” said Ratatosk, and thought for a moment. “I can write a logic bomb that’ll erase your records as soon as the Hatter’s car leaves the garage. Will that do?”
“How long will it take?”
“I’ll just have to change a few lines of code . . . two minutes? Another minute or two to set up an ID for 8-ball so he can drive the Nomad in. Then I’ll take care of the cameras in the garage, then the elevators, then the main door, and then I’ll get to work on that lock.”
Diaz snatched up the phone as soon as it rang. “Station Four.”
“This is Vargas. There’s nobody in B-nine.”
“You must have just missed them. They’ve gone into Herrera’s place.”
“Missed who?”
“Mather, Herrera and two female visitors.”
“Mather didn’t go out tonight.”
“He didn’t sign out, but according to the log, he came back in at three oh eight.”
“That’s . . . did you see him?”
“Not his face,” Diaz admitted. “He was looking down the . . . he was looking down.”
Vargas was silent. She could hear the malice in Diaz’s voice; she knew he had no reason to think there’d been any breach in the security and part of her wanted to give her lover the benefit of the doubt, but she’d learned to not trust too easily. “Did Herrera check out?”
“Yes, at ten fourteen, but he has to.”
Vargas nodded. She’d left the Hatter’s bed just before twelve to begin her shift. “I’ll look into it,” she said, and hung up. She sat there fuming for a moment, then lay back on her couch and sent her astral form down to the Hatter’s apartment. Unlike the Pyramid’s exterior, the inner walls had no magical security: in theory, the mages were supposed to respect employees’ privacy, but Vargas felt that until the Hatter revoked his invitation into his bedroom, she was free to check on him. To her relief, she found him fast asleep in the large bed. Her astral form hovered over him for a moment, then returned to her meatbody. The armed guard sitting between her and the door looked around as she sat up, and asked, “Everything okay?”
“I'm not sure,” she said quietly, and reached for her phone.
8-ball smiled as he closed the window of the Nomad. The guard hadn’t shown any surprise when he’d identified himself as Dr. Morales, nor had he questioned the IDs given to his passengers. They drove down to sublevel nine, stopping briefly so that Zurich, Mish and Leila could continue down the ramp to the bottom level where the Hatter’s Elite was parked, then headed for the bay assigned to them.
“What now?” asked Jinx, who was watching for magical security.
“We wait,” said 8-ball. He picked up his Ares launcher and checked that the grenades were loaded in the correct sequence.
The architecture of the security system was a stark arrangement of straight lines and right angles, mostly in shades of metallic gray. Colors were used sparingly, and only for identification purposes. The only icons that showed any hint of imagination were the IC programs—feathered serpents, skulls and the symbols of the more bloodthirsty Aztec gods. Ratatosk stared at the reactive IC around the slave node for the lock on the Hatter’s door, wondering whether to abandon subtlety and just blast it away with his attack utility, when he heard Magnusson swear. “Company!” he said.
Mute looked around, and listened, but the apartment was so well soundproofed that she couldn’t hear anything outside. “Where?”
“An astral form just went through the room. I think someone knows we’re—”
The door slid open, and the Hatter stepped in, his Ingram smartgun blazing. The burst hit Mute in the chest and the arm, knocking her backward and sending her pistol flying across the room before she could return fire. A second later, the beautiful blond woman behind the Hatter cast a stunball spell. Magnusson automatically reflected the spell back at her, and Elena Vargas staggered, seriously fatigued by the power of the spell combined with the drain of casting it. Moving with the superhuman speed of his wired reflexes, the Hatter grabbed the wagemage with his free hand and dragged her into the room behind him, then fired a burst at Magnusson. The door slammed shut.
Yoko came running out of the bedroom, but the Hatter had already jumped over Mute and grabbed the wire that connected Ratatosk to his deck. He pulled the plug out of his datajack, leaving Ratatosk reeling in dump shock, then slipped behind him and put his gun to the decker’s temple, using his long body as a shield.
“Drop your weapons, and don’t move!” he snapped. “Any of you!”
Yoko stopped in midstride and dropped to a crouch with her arms spread wide. “I’m no
t armed,” she said.
“She’s magically active,” said Elena, drawing a small pistol. “Some sort of quickened spell. Don’t trust her.”
“I wasn’t about to trust any of them,” replied the Hatter sourly. “Now, I know this must be the famous Ratatosk, but who are the rest of you? No, let me guess. You’re Yoko Aruki, the ninja who killed those yakuza bosses. Am I right?”
Yoko bowed slightly.
“And you,” he said, looking at Magnusson. “You don’t look like the photos I’ve seen of Boanerges, so you must be the other one. Magnusson.”
“Boanerges is dead,” said the mage. “That toxic shaman you sent in killed him.”
“And one of you killed the toxic. Seems fair to me. And the one with the sucking chest wounds is Mute. Am I right?”
Mute, fighting to breathe, didn’t answer. “And you’re Thomas Mather,” said Yoko. “The Mad Hatter.”
“Just the Hatter, please. I’m glad we meet at last. I thought I might have to come looking for you, but you’ve saved me the bother. I hope you brought the data with you?”
“Data?” asked Magnusson.
“On GNX-IV. You did find it, didn’t you?” He smiled. “Is it in this deck?”
Zurich whistled as he saw the cars: Toyota Elites, Mitsubishi Nightskys, Eurocar Westwinds, even a gleaming white Rolls-Royce Phaeton. “Ever get the feeling we’re in the wrong line of work?” he said, as he pulled out his mag-lock passkey.
“If Ratatosk hasn’t fixed those cameras, we’re going to be in the line of fire," said Mish uneasily.
“Ratatosk knows what he’s doing,” said the dwarf. “Technology’s not like magic. It always follows the rules . . . Frag,” he muttered as the Elite’s door failed to open. He braced himself, waiting for the car alarm to start blaring and the lights to start flashing. “Ah, keep an eye on the lift doors, will you? Just in case?”
“In that deck?” Yoko repeated and smiled. “Exactly how stupid do you think we are?”
“Some of it might be in his headware memory, though,” said Magnusson quickly. “I know he’s been reading the files.”
Shadowrun 46 - A Fistful of Data Page 27