by SL Huang
“It’s a photo ID,” I pointed out, in the voice I reserved for explaining things to particularly dull people. “We look nothing alike.” Our bone structures and skin tones were entirely different, not to mention that Pilar was cute and curvy with long hair and an infectious smile, and I was built short and thick, more like a very angry tomboy gymnast.
“Trust me, ain’t no one looks twice at photo IDs,” Arthur brushed me off. “People ain’t even look like their own photos. You ain’t white and you’re the right gender, and it’s a bad picture of her anyhow.”
Checker moved next to me to peer at the ID in my hand. “You know, speaking as a white guy—if you straighten your hair, he could be right. If people question it, you can just tell them you cut your hair and lost some weight.”
“Hey!” said Pilar.
“Wait, what—no!” cried Checker, aghast. “I definitely didn’t mean that as a—you’re very—”
“Shut up, you two,” I said.
An ID to aid my way through would make the rest of my route faster as well, by a significant margin. I put in the new timing values and ran the numbers again. Nonsingular matrices reduced beautifully, the solutions played out with a healthy margin of error, and the whole endeavor became suddenly doable.
I thought about Liliana, locked in a lab. Alone.
In pain.
If someone called me on the ID, I’d just put his face through a wall. He’d deserve it for working there.
“Fine,” I said to Arthur. “I’ll use it, but if I get caught, it’s your fault.”
“I got every faith in the world’s unconscious racism,” he answered with confidence. “All brown people look alike. You might want to dress different, though.”
I looked down at my usual ensemble of cargo pants and combat boots. “Good point.” I jabbed a finger at Pilar. “You have clothes that would work, don’t you?”
“What? Um, sure. I mean, they’ll be too big, but I think you’ll pass.”
“Good, that’s settled. You, come with me. Checker, be prepared for—” I did some more math in my head, charting guard shifts throughout the night. “1:24 a.m. That’s when I’m going in.”
“Can I help at all?” said Arthur.
“Yeah,” I said. “I need you to check on Tegan for me.”
Arthur’s face tightened in a troubled frown. “Think there’s a reason he ain’t answering?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. Just check in on him. I’ll pay your rate.”
He grunted. “Russell, I told you—you gotta stop trying to pay me for every little—”
“Argue with me later,” I said. “Checker, are you good?”
“I think so,” he said. “I’ll grab a quick nap and be in your ear by midnight; we can go over your route right before. Does that work for you?”
“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go rescue a kid.”
CHAPTER 14
WHEN MIDNIGHT struck, I was shifting uncomfortably in the driver’s seat as I sped back down toward Venice. Pilar had turned out to be an unexpected help—she’d not only provided me with clothes, but she’d given me a corporate makeup job and straightened my hair for me, after which she’d declared my usual sawed-off haircut “atrocious” and gone to work with scissors until the newly-flat hair lay in even layers above my ears.
Of course, she’d also declared her only pantsuits looked “horrifying” on me, and insisted on taking in a skirt to make it fit. We’d had a vehement argument on practicality versus aesthetics, which she had won by virtue of it being too late to stop by a store and me not having any idea how bad it would be to present myself in a clearly ill-fitting wardrobe. Her dress shoes were also all too tight and almost exclusively tall heels, which I flat-out refused to agree to, but she finally found a pair of worn almost-flats in the back of her closet that my feet managed to squeeze into and which she dubiously declared would “do.”
On the plus side, the oversized clothing had allowed me to conceal a small arsenal under the suit jacket.
Checker rang in exactly at the stroke of twelve. “Hi there,” he said in my ear—the tiny, flesh-colored earpiece wouldn’t be visible to the casual observer. “Get some sleep?”
“I was too busy arguing with Pilar about fashion and memorizing the floor plan,” I said.
“Fashion? What, did she put you in an evening gown?”
“Skirt and heels,” I answered.
He choked back a laugh. “I want a picture.”
“Shut up.”
“Well, I didn’t sleep either, if that makes you feel any better. Too hyped. I’m wired on coffee and Red Bull right now.”
“If you get me killed because you need a bathroom break, I will come back and haunt your hard drives.”
“Ouch. Uh, hey, I did find something interesting while I was going over everything. I didn’t want to call with it right away, because I didn’t know if you’d decided to grab a nap…”
“Spit it out.”
“Arkacite’s got some atomic batteries.”
“What? The plutonium ones?” I hadn’t thought about the plutonium job at all since I’d found out what Arkacite was doing to Liliana. I dragged my mind back around to it with an effort.
“Yup. A dozen of ’em. They’re being stored in one of the labs.”
“You’re kidding. What for?”
“Well, Arkacite’s got their fingers in everything electronic—heck, they probably do make pacemakers and space probes. If anyone’s got ’em, it’s not that big of a surprise it would be Arkacite.”
Hmm. I hadn’t heard back from Harrington yet, and I didn’t usually work on spec, but places to steal plutonium from weren’t exactly thick on the ground. If it wouldn’t delay me too much…
“Tell me where.”
“I figured you’d say that.”
He named another sub-basement lab across the building from Liliana. Grateful I’d memorized the entire floor plan and guard rotation, I sent the equations ticking and clattering through my brain with the new variables. The batteries would have to be first, as Liliana’s condition and stamina were unknowns that needed a maximum error margin…and I might have to adjust the start time…the possibilities brute-forced their way through, and a pleasantly constraint-satisfying string of numbers fell out. Excellent. I could pick up the batteries and still zigzag through the guard rotation, still get Liliana out from under their noses without a single eyewitness or a flash of our faces on the security cameras. As long as Checker stayed in my ear and helped hide us.
“I’m adding it in,” I said. “Optimum time of entry is now 1:20.”
“Remember to act tired when you go in,” said Checker. “World-weary. You don’t want to be coming in that late, but your dick of a boss is making you burn the midnight oil just to meet a project deadline. Don’t march in there like you own the place; people don’t do that in real life.”
“Like you know anything about working in an office,” I scoffed.
“Oh, I did my time as a cubicle monkey,” said Checker, surprising me. “I have a dark and dangerous past, Cas Russell. Mwa-ha-ha.”
“Well, I’m glad Arthur saved you from such a terrible life.”
By this time, I was pulling up around the block from Arkacite. I waited in the car as the hour ticked later, using the time to go over the details of my revised route with Checker, and at twelve minutes after one I restarted the car and nosed it closer. I cruised past the dark stone plaza and cut down an alley one building away from Arkacite’s headquarters, which curved into a small but well-groomed parking lot that served the back entrances of several smaller businesses. My pre-planned parking spot was at the far end behind an independent hairdresser’s shop, just across a strip of grass from Arkacite’s looming walls.
I checked that the concealed utility belt around my waist had everything I might need—ceramic knives, plastic and liquid explosives, Tech line, a few other things that wouldn’t set off the metal detectors—double-checked that Pilar’s ID card was
clipped to my lapel, and got out of the car, wincing at my pinched feet. Then, with a grimace, I ducked back in to retrieve the purse Pilar had insisted I bring (“No woman would come in without a purse; it’s downright weird”).
At least the purse had been a good place to stash a few things that might’ve set off the metal detector—like detonators. I just hoped nobody manning the x-ray machine would know what they were. I shifted the thing from one shoulder to the other, then to my elbow, trying to figure out where it would balance in a way that wouldn’t interfere with a leap into action, and settled for dangling it in my left hand, where I could drop it.
I straightened up, did a mental check of my gear one more time, and then walked around to the front of the building.
“Remember, your name is Pilar Velasquez,” Checker reminded me, speaking a little too fast. “If they ask why you’re there, I’ll give you a line. If they engage you in small talk, just say ‘yes’ or something. Less is better.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” I said.
“Yes, and you’re horrible undercover. You always end up punching people instead.”
He wasn’t wrong.
At exactly 1:20 a.m., I pushed open the glass front door of Arkacite and stepped inside. It felt different at night. The vast, shiny lobby loomed cavernous, like I was entering a crypt. I walked up to the front desk with Pilar’s ID already in hand and held it out to the front desk guard, a light-skinned African-American woman.
She barely glanced at me as she took it.
I thought nervously about Arthur’s “unconscious racism” comment. Would a black woman be more astute? She stuck the ID into a scanner, typed something on the computer, and then raised the card back up toward me without ever looking back up.
Somehow I didn’t think this was unconscious racism. More like extreme boredom.
I took the ID back and walked over to swipe through the turnstiles, heading for the metal detectors. A security guard stood here, too, just like in the morning—an older, grizzled South Asian man. I curled the ID card in my hand, the picture against my palm. He wouldn’t want to look at it, would he?
“Purse on the conveyor,” he said in a disinterested monotone as I walked up.
Oh. Right. The purse. I stepped over and stuck it on the x-ray machine’s conveyor belt, then stepped through the metal detector.
It went off, the repeated high-pitched beeps echoing through the lobby like gunfire.
I whirled and froze, the mathematics crystallizing, but neither of the security guards had moved. The one at the desk hadn’t even looked up.
“Any keys, coins, or phones in your pockets?” said the security guard next to me, with the same bored disinterest. He held out a tray.
Adrenaline coursing through me, I slowly took my phone out of my pocket and put it on the tray. I’d forgotten about it.
“Walk through and back again,” prompted the guard when I hadn’t moved.
I did as he said. The lobby remained silent.
The guard held out the tray with my phone and I took it back. I felt as if my hand should be shaking, but it was steady. I almost forgot to pick up the purse from the other side of the conveyor belt as I stalked off toward the elevators.
Checker laughed in my ear. “Holy Christ, you suck at undercover!”
“Shut up,” I muttered.
“Don’t worry, I’m erasing the footage now. No one will ever bear witness to the great Cas Russell forgetting about a cell phone. Except me, of course.”
I ignored him. I was sixteen seconds behind schedule.
I took the elevator up to the second floor.
“Hold on,” said Checker.
I stopped, one hand against the elevator doors to keep them open.
“I’m looping the security cams just ahead of you…you’re good to go.”
I swiped out of the elevator banks into a darkened hallway filled with locked doors. The floors here were linoleum instead of carpeted, and Pilar’s shoes clacked against them, echoing off the dimly lit walls. I’d forgotten to take the sound of her shoes into consideration in my calculations—they wouldn’t matter now, but later, in the more restricted areas, when I couldn’t afford to be seen or heard…
I kicked them off, stuck them in the purse, and continued barefoot down the hallway, loping quickly to make up the time.
I ghosted through the maze of corridors, Pilar’s expanded access card letting me through all the internal doors between sections, the guards always just missing my presence by a hallway or three. Checker halted me every so often to hex the cameras ahead of me, but I still managed to make up enough time that I reached the first lab exactly on schedule.
Pilar’s access card lit up green here, too, but the light on a keypad nestled next to the door remained red, and the door didn’t open. “Checker? I need an access code.”
“One second.”
It was more like nine seconds before he came back with, “Five-six-oh-nine-seven-five-star,” and I slipped into the lab just before the next security guard rounded the corner.
The door behind me was thick and solid, leaving the room pitch black, but I’d put a few LED flashlights in Pilar’s purse on the theory that they weren’t suspicious and might have set off the metal detector if I’d stuck them in the utility belt. I pulled one out now and shined it around the room. Edges and corners of strange equipment leapt to life in the beam like grotesque abstract metal sculptures.
“Any idea where I should look?” I asked Checker.
“None, sorry. Somewhere locked up, I would imagine.”
I’d had the same thought. I found my way to the walls and slipped along the edges of the room until I found a bank of four solid metal drawers that looked more like vaults for a bank than depositories for lab equipment.
“I think I’m on the money,” I said. “If I start breaking things in here, is it going to set off an alarm?”
Checker paused, then came back with, “Not anymore.”
I inspected the drawers. They had key locks rather than combinations, probably with disc tumblers at this level of security. I could still pick them, but a proper application of force would be easier and faster.
I put the flashlight between my teeth and drew out a small bottle of acid, which I poured in a thin stream just around the top of each drawer. As soon as it hit the metal it began hissing and smoking. I coughed around the flashlight as the acrid stench hit.
Then I packed in the tiniest chunks of C-4 into the cracks, calculating decibel levels as I did so, stuck det cord in between, and pressed a detonator in above the top drawer. The detonators I’d brought were small, but the wires were still long enough to let me move all the way across the room and crouch behind a solid lab bench. I checked my watch, and the second I had the largest possible radius from any of the security guards, I pushed the button.
The bang and crash were loud and startling in the quiet lab.
Checker yelped. “A little warning! Everything okay?”
“Did anyone react to that?” They would’ve needed supernatural hearing from where the guard rotation had been, but it was always best to double check.
“Uh—no, no, you’re good, none of the security people seem to have heard it.”
I’d crossed back to the drawers during the exchange with Checker, stowing the detonator and donning a heavy pair of protective gloves. The doors of several of the drawers had fallen to the floor. One still hung crazily by its right side, the metal bent backward on itself. I stuck the flashlight back between my teeth again and reached inside.
Two of the drawers were empty. The other two were heavily padded with some kind of dense foam, and nestled into each one at intervals were six cutouts for six tiny flat rectangles in small plastic cases. At least, one of them had six—the other had five, with one cutout indentation in the foam empty.
I wondered briefly if the batteries were fragile. See, this was another reason I didn’t work on spec—usually the client could tell me if something needed
to be transported in a certain way. Well, presumably if I damaged them, the plutonium inside would still be good. I scooped out all eleven in their plastic cases and slid them into the empty pouches in my belt. I wasn’t worried about radiation; alpha particles couldn’t make it through a sheet of paper.
I took the flashlight out of my mouth and moved back to the door. “Is the hallway clear?”
“Yes. But two of the guards have stopped to chat down the way you’re going.”
“Roger that. Tell me when they move.” Shit. This might mess up my timing.
When Checker gave me the all-clear, I slipped back out the door—the air in the hallway felt blessedly cool and clear after the astringent fumes I’d clogged the lab with—and continued on. I was twenty-three seconds behind schedule, which meant I’d have to delay again coming up to avoid the next guard circuit, and I’d lose another fourteen or fifteen seconds. But these areas were too restricted to risk letting them see me before I got to Liliana, even with an ID they might buy.
My schedule backed up on itself twice more when I had to wait to make it past guard routes. I tried to make up the time, but I reached the lab where they’d locked Liliana almost fifty-four seconds behind. This lab had a keypad as well; I slid in Pilar’s ID and entered the code Checker passed me. Both lights flashed green, and I pushed the door open.
I found myself in a large area filled with cubicles and computers, like an office space. But the wall across from where I’d entered was made up entirely of large panes of glass, with five cameras set up tripods in front of it, all recording video. Behind the glass was a well-lit playroom, colorful children’s toys scattered across the floor.
And in the corner of the playroom hunched a girl.
She looked a lot like Denise Rayal. Her skin and hair could have been a perfect match for her mother’s; her father’s genetics weren’t evident anywhere. She wore a sky blue party dress that was so frilly it edged toward absurd and black patent leather shoes, with a matching ribbon twined in her dark brown hair. It struck me as an outfit someone might imagine a five-year-old girl as wearing—I wasn’t sure I had ever seen an actual five-year-old girl dressed that way. But then, I didn’t know much about children.