Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  It was worth considering, though Patrick wasn’t sure that he wanted to get close enough to one of the Ridden to find out one way or the other.

  As he walked along the sidewalk heading west on Albion, Patrick couldn’t help but feel as though there were eyes on him, watching his every move. He’d spent enough time working undercover to know better than to simply turn and look, so he paused in front of a storefront, pretending to window shop, but in reality, using the reflection in the glass window to check to see if there was anyone following him. Then at an intersection he paused, as if undecided about which way to turn, and scanned his surroundings out of the corner of his eye as he turned to look first one direction up the connecting street and then the other. But he could see no sign of anyone following him, and no one seemed to be in any of the cars parked along either side of the street.

  He kept on walking up the street, and was pleased to see that the taco truck was parked in its usual spot, and open for business.

  But as he got in line behind the other patrons waiting to place their orders, he felt anxiety itching at him again, and felt exposed and vulnerable, even in broad daylight.

  Twenty minutes later Patrick was walking back into the station house with a paper bag filled with tacos in one hand and a bottle of Mexican Coke in the other. The tumult in the intake area had subsided, and the prisoners had been transferred to holding cells.

  As he passed the intake desk, he held the paper bag against his chest with the hand holding the Coke bottle, and with his free hand reached in and pulled out a taco wrapped in aluminum foil.

  “For you, Anderson,” he said, holding the taco out to her. “With Carlos’s compliments. He said it was your usual.”

  “That old smoothie.” A blush rose on her cheek as she took the taco from him. “I swear he’s trying to fatten me up. Probably has a thing for big girls.”

  Patrick shrugged, a sly grin on his face. “I wish I had someone that can cook like that flirting with me.”

  “Don’t give up, Tevake,” she said around a mouthful of taco al pastor, as Patrick pushed the call button for the elevator. “There’s a taco truck out there for everyone.”

  “You’re a regular poet,” he called back to her as the elevator doors clanked open.

  Anderson was nearly finished with the taco already, chewing contentedly. “What can I say? I’m a romantic.”

  Patrick smiled at her as he stepped onto the elevator, but the smile quickly faded as soon as the doors shut behind him.

  “Damn it,” he said softly to himself.

  He couldn’t help feeling like he was putting his fellow officers at risk by not telling them about the Ridden. Uniforms routinely pulled in blots for public intoxication—it had been cops who had coined the term for users of Ink in the first place—but those encounters so far had not escalated to the point where the user had gone full-on Ridden. But assuming that the step between run-of-the-mill Ink user and full blown possession was as simple as Patrick and the others had theorized, then how long until a blot being processed at intake or just riding in the back of a squad car made that transition? How would the officers involved respond to a prisoner who couldn’t be subdued and was impervious to even the deadliest of force?

  He tried to tell himself that his theory about Tasers might pan out, in which case the officers could at least contain the situation. But what if he was wrong? What if one of the Ridden shrugged off a jolt from a Taser as easily as it could shrug off a bullet? Was Patrick then responsible for any casualties that resulted, because he failed to warn the others in time?

  Just three days before, Chavez, Harrison, and the others had watched the lifeless, Ridden form of Malcom Price get up off the pavement after a three-story fall, with three bullets already in his chest, and attack Izzie. And even seeing it with their own eyes, they hadn’t had any problem accepting that it was just a question of a man so out of his head on drugs that he didn’t feel any pain. If Patrick had tried to tell them what had really happened, what were the chances that they’d believe him?

  The elevator chimed as the doors opened on the second floor, followed by a grumbling from Patrick’s stomach.

  “Well, I function better on a full stomach,” he said to himself, savoring the smell of the tacos wafting up from the bag.

  Stopping by the squad room to grab his laptop computer, Patrick came back out and turned the corner toward the community room that was at the end of the corridor. Snagging the top of the paper bag with the fingers of the hand holding the Coke bottle, the laptop tucked under his elbow, he fished his keys out of his pocket with his other hand and unlocked the door.

  He flicked the light switch with his elbow as he stepped inside, and the fluorescents overhead flickered and buzzed as they warmed up, bathing the room in a wan, antiseptic light. The boxes that they had recovered from the Property and Evidence warehouse in the South Bay were still piled to one side of the room along with most of the furniture, and the table was stacked high with papers, books, maps, academic journals, and all of the other material evidence that had been taken from Nicholas Fuller’s apartment five years before. The dry erase board at the front of the room was covered with a constellation of names and places and facts, those associated with the Fuller murders on one side and those associated with Ink on the other, with a web of lines connecting one to another, the physical manifestation of the thought processes that he and Izzie had worked their way through in the previous days as they had tried to figure out how it all fit together.

  Patrick put the laptop down on one end of the long table, and booted it up while he sat down, taking a long sip from the bottle. By the time he got to the log-in screen, he was already halfway through the first of the tacos he’d pulled from the bag. He’d had better carne asada, but rarely from a street vendor.

  Punching in his password one handed, the other occupied with keeping the taco from falling apart before he could maneuver the rest of it into his mouth, Patrick glanced over at the dry erase board. He’d chosen to eat in the community room rather than at his desk so that he could spend some time going back over their work, seeing if there was any connection or angle that he and Izzie might have overlooked.

  That’s when he noticed something out of place. When he and Izzie had set up shop in the community room earlier that week, the first thing that they had done after bringing in all of the boxes of evidence had been to move almost all of the upholstered chairs that were normally positioned around the table over to the far side of the room, leaving just two in place at the table for them to use. And when he and Izzie had left the day before, that was still the case. But now there was a third chair that was parked right in front of the dry erase board, facing it, like someone had sat down and studied what was written on it for a while.

  Patrick looked around the room, slowly chewing a mouthful of grilled steak. Was anything else out of place? Who had been in there since they were last here? There was only one key to the community room available to check out, and Patrick had it with him the whole night. The only other people in the building with access in the meantime were the cleaning staff and the captain. But the cleaning staff had been instructed not to enter the room while it was being used to store evidence, and the captain always avoided the room like the plague because he said it reminded him of too many unpleasant memories of interminable meetings with disgruntled community members. Which was not to say that a member of the cleaning staff couldn’t have entered the room, or the captain too, for that matter, but that neither of them would have had a reason to. And if someone had been in here, which seemed to be the case, what had they made of the things that Patrick and Izzie had written on the dry erase board?

  Looking around the room, it didn’t appear that anything had been taken away, though he couldn’t be sure whether anything had been moved. The mountains of books on history, the occult, science, and mythology appeared no smaller than they had when he and Izzie had unpacked all of them three days before. And the boxes containing the rest
of the material evidence they’d requested from storage, including the murder weapon and silver-skull mask that Fuller had used in the killings, were still sitting where they’d left them at the far end of the table.

  Patrick got up and closed the door to the hallway outside before sitting back down and pulling the second taco out of the bag. He savored a bite of al pastor and tried not to worry about the chair. The worst-case scenario was that the captain had come in to check on their work, and had spent some time looking over what they’d written, in which case he had probably walked away mystified. But the fact that Patrick hadn’t been ordered to the Medical Unit to see one of the departmental psychologists suggested that he didn’t have much cause for concern.

  The one thing missing from the web of associations written on the dry erase board was the spider at the middle: Martin Zotovic. His software company, Parasol, was prominently represented, as was the Pinnacle Tower building where it was headquartered, and any number of its current and former employees who had been identified as being involved in the manufacture, distribution, or sale of Ink. But not Zotovic himself. Up until the night before, it had been impossible to imagine that such a high-profile figure could be involved in anything as sordid as trafficking in street drugs, and they hadn’t known that he had any connection to the Fuller murders. But his name belonged on the side of the board that listed all of the members of the Undersight team that had been the victims in the Reaper killings, even if the Reaper hadn’t lived long enough to get to him. And they now knew that the Ink trade was being directed by the highest levels of Zotovic’s company.

  But what did they know about Zotovic himself, beyond what appeared in the newspaper headlines?

  Tucking the last of his taco al pastor into his mouth and wiping his fingers on a paper napkin, Patrick brought up a browser window on the laptop and did an online search for “Martin Zotovic.” Then he pulled the third and final taco from the bag while the search results loaded.

  The top results were mostly links to news pieces about Zotovic’s various business dealings, or announcements about product launches from his company, Parasol. As he savored his grilled chicken taco, Patrick worked his way through the links, building a larger picture of the self-made millionaire’s business dealings.

  Zotovic had first started making headlines a few years before when he launched a photo-sharing app for smart phones that quickly became one of the most popular software applications of its kind. Free to download and driven by sponsored ads, it was also one of the most profitable. Flush with capital from the success of that first launch, Zotovic founded Parasol, which originally operated out of a small office block in a converted warehouse in the South Bay. But within a year Parasol had outgrown that space, with a steadily increasing workforce and an ever-widening catalog of new apps on offer, and the company continued to move to increasingly larger spaces over the course of the next two years. Zotovic founded a second company, a private equity firm called Znth, to handle the increasingly complex real estate dealings that those subsequent moves involved. And finally, the year before, Znth had closed a somewhat controversial deal to purchase the landmark Pinnacle Tower outright from the holding company that had owned the property since the eighties. All of the existing tenants, some of them long-established Recondito businesses and firms who had occupied their respective spaces in the building for decades, had been effectively evicted on the spot, with Znth refusing to extend or renew any of the existing leases when they expired at the end of their contractual terms. By the beginning of the current year, Parasol, Znth, and various other Zotovic-founded subsidiaries were the sole tenants of the Pinnacle Tower.

  The sale of the Pinnacle Tower to Znth had been controversial in part because the building was on the registry of Recondito historical landmarks, and the graceful art deco spire of the skyscraper had been widely viewed as a symbol for the city since the building was first completed in the early 1930s. The main elevator lobby with its ornate bas relief featuring symbolic depictions of the history of the city and the surrounding countryside was described on one website Patrick visited as “a timeless monument to Recondito’s rich cultural heritage and all that the Hidden City has meant to so many of its denizens.” Which, while perhaps a little flowery, pretty accurately summed up the esteem with which many in the city held the building and its fixtures.

  When it was first announced that Znth planned to purchase the building, however, it was discovered by the local press that Zotovic intended to substantially renovate the interior of the structure, but had no intention of letting the board of Recondito Historical Register review the plans. Outrage among local historical societies and concerned citizens groups put pressure on the mayor’s office to enforce the provision requiring that any substantial changes made to a historical landmark would first need to be approved by the board. And at the outset the mayor’s office signaled that it would indeed be requesting that be made a prerequisite for the sale. When at the last minute the mayor reversed course, and issued an executive order that the transfer of ownership to Znth could go ahead without impediment, and that the new owners would be free to make any alterations to the structure that they desired without the need for any official approvals, even going so far as to relax to standard permitting required of any large construction project, many in the local press believed that a backroom deal had been struck between the mayor’s office and Zotovic himself.

  There had been some simmering outrage in the editorial pages and community websites for several weeks, but when the lobby of the Pinnacle Tower was once again opened to the public after the renovations were completed, and the signature golden bas relief in the foyer was pristine and untouched, looking the same as it ever had, the controversy quickly died out.

  Otherwise, Zotovic’s brief career as a software mogul was largely free of controversy. Though he appeared regularly at tech conferences and charity events, he was rarely seen in public in social settings. In the photos that Patrick found online, Zotovic looked more like someone who would be working in a coffee shop or behind the counter of a comic book store than the head of a billion-dollar company, with a shaggy mop of dark hair and five o’clock shadow on his chin, favoring jeans and hoodies over suits and ties. There were no mentions in any of the articles Patrick could find of Zotovic being romantically involved, or of maintaining anything like a social life in general. There were no paparazzi photos of him at clubs with supermodels on each arm, or palling around with Hollywood stars, or carousing drunkenly with his friends. Zotovic kept a condominium in a City Center high rise and a veritable mansion way up on the hills of Northside, but seemed to spend the majority of his time inside the Pinnacle Tower, day and night.

  There was no mention anywhere of Zotovic’s involvement in Ross University’s Undersight research project years before, though it was a standard element in the puff piece write-ups to mention that he was a “college dropout.” It was a nice bit of mythologizing, Patrick thought, emphasizing the humble origins from which this mighty titan of industry had arisen, but it wasn’t entirely true. Zotovic had been a graduate student when he joined the Undersight team, and while he had left before completing his master’s degree, that made him a “college dropout” in only the loosest of definitions.

  Patrick was unable to find any major scandal or controversy, beyond the flap over the Pinnacle Building purchase and renovation. Even after logging in and searching various law enforcement databases resulting in nothing more serious than a few parking violations when Zotovic had been a teenager.

  But when he found a link to a video playlist entitled “Parasol’s Dark Secrets,” a lengthy series of YouTube postings that all appeared to revolve around some shady doings involving Zotovic and his software offerings, Patrick was certain for the moment that he had hit pay dirt.

  Five seconds into the first video in the playlist, that certainty began to falter.

  All of the videos in the playlist were the work of the same man, who identified himself only as “Bitstreame
r 9000” and wore a robot-like helmet that obscured his features, using electronic effects to disguise his voice. But as Patrick watched further past the first few seconds, he found that despite his outlandish look and cartoonish persona, the man gave the impression that he had some expertise. The first video began with a discussion of steganography—the art of hiding information and messages within images, audio, or video—and then went on to discuss spectrograms: graphic representations of the frequencies that make up a sound and how they change over time. These were illustrated throughout with graphics that appeared on the screen, showing textbook examples of each topic in regular usage. Patrick failed to see how any of it pertained to software applications that had been released by Zotovic’s companies, or what they might have to do with Parasol’s “dark secrets,” but he was learning things about the ways in which different kinds of data could be concealed, revealed, manipulated, or analyzed.

  The second video began to apply that kind of analysis to various Parasol products, beginning with the photo-sharing app that had made Zotovic his first fortune. “Bitstreamer 9000” claimed to have discovered that many of the filtering effects that users could apply to their uploaded photos altered the images in more ways than were immediately obvious. And he claimed, further, that what appeared at first glance to be nothing more than “noise,” like the visual equivalent of static, in fact contained encoded data that was effectively hidden from the user. He showed a few examples, with lots of red circles and arrows and lines indicating where on the images he felt that this data was hidden, but Patrick wasn’t exactly convinced.

  The next video in the playlist began with the suggestion that this additional encoded data, while not noticeable to the user, might be exerting some kind of subliminal effect. Even if people couldn’t consciously perceive what was hidden in the image, some part of their brain might be picking up on it. The analogy of sounds outside the range of human hearing being sometimes perceived as a kind of pressure on the ear drum or other disquieting effects made sense to Patrick, even if he wasn’t quite prepared to accept the premise.