by Piers Platt
Wait; is it the same data drive that he dropped into the envelope? If he was emptying his computer of evidence, why would he bring it back, instead of leaving it at the bank?
Beauceron had the computer compare the images of the two data drives, but the results were inconclusive. He opened up the evidence inventory and checked out the entry on Mehta’s personal computer – it had been wiped, erased completely using a rather sophisticated security program that was more typically used by large corporations and government agencies, the report noted.
Why do that after he goes to the bank?
He made another note on his pad.
He let the footage continue to roll, watching as Mehta sat down at the table and began drinking his first glass of liquor.
It looks like whiskey. Hard to tell, though.
He watched the journalist pick up his pen and what looked like a pad of tear-off paper used for grocery shopping lists, and begin to scribble his suicide note.
What did he say at the diner, when I took out my notepad? ‘No one uses real paper anymore?’ Something like that. Interesting that he would use it now, instead of posting the note to his blog or something like that.
Mehta crossed out the first note, crumpling up the paper. Then he poured another glass of whiskey, and leaned back in his chair, as if composing the letter in his head. The journalist twirled the pen in one hand, spinning it from his thumb to his pinky finger and back again, several times. Beauceron’s eyes went wide.
“Pause,” he told the computer, his voice strained. “Back up five seconds. Hold there. Cue up video from the carnival on Colony A31.”
The computer processed his request for a moment, searching for the relevant files, and then pulled up the footage from the older case.
“No, side-by-side, I want to see both videos,” he corrected it. “Good. Now fast forward the carnival video. Faster. Stop. Back up – there, stop. Now run them both at the same time.”
Beauceron watched as the journalist and the ride operator each twirled a pen in the exact same manner.
“Hello again,” he told the screen.
* * *
“Martin, you must come again next week,” Elisaveta insisted, standing to clear plates from the table.
“Thank you, I would like that,” Beauceron said, smiling. “Though I fear I’ve imposed enough already, dropping in unannounced like this.”
“Nonsense,” she shushed him. “You’re family, you’re always welcome here. And it’s been so long since we’ve seen you. Are you sure you’re finished?”
“Yes, thank you – it was delicious.”
She looked slightly disappointed, but disappeared into the kitchen.
“We’d better escape to the den before she finds some more food to force on you,” Rozhkov warned.
Beauceron laughed, “After you.”
Rozhkov led the way, gesturing for Beauceron to take a seat in the sofa next to his desk. He took a bottle of vodka out of a freezer hidden behind the desk, set two shot glasses down, and poured each to the brim. Beauceron clinked glasses with him, downed the shot, and then sat on the sofa.
“Ah,” Rozhkov sighed, sinking into his desk chair. “Another glass?”
“No,” Beauceron said. “Thank you.” He was already feeling uncomfortably full.
“It is good to see you here, Martin – she’s right. It makes it feel like old times, eh? The ladies in the kitchen, doing the washing up, the men talking shop over some vodka.”
“Mm,” Beauceron said. “Katia always loved her mother’s cooking.”
“Not so good at it herself, though,” Rozhkov pointed out.
“No,” Beauceron said. “She was not.”
Rozhkov studied Beauceron for a moment.
“She would have wanted you to move on, Martin,” he said, finally. “So many years – it is good to mourn and grieve, for a time. But then we must pick up our lives and start again.”
“I know,” Beauceron said. He stared at the empty shot glass, rotating it slowly in his hand. “I just don’t know how, Alexei.”
“Go out. Date. Meet someone else.”
“It’s … not that easy,” Beauceron said. He sighed, and shrugged. “Anyway, I did want to talk shop, if you don’t mind?”
Rozhkov nodded. “I suspected as much. What do you have?”
“Do you remember the journalist who sought me out to compare notes on the Guild? I sent you a report a few months back.”
“I remember,” Rozhkov said, warily. “I forwarded it to Organized Crime.”
“He’s dead – along with his wife and son,” Beauceron said. “I think they were murdered by the Guild.”
Rozhkov’s face paled. Beauceron continued: “And frankly, I feel responsible: I named Mehta in that report as the source. He warned me that we’ve been thoroughly penetrated by the Guild; I think one of their agents saw the report and passed it along.”
“In that case, I’m just as responsible as you,” Rozhkov said, recovering his composure. “Why do you think they were murdered?”
Beauceron pulled out his phone and tapped through several holographic displays. “I’m sending it to you now,” he said.
Rozhkov lit up the computer at his desk. Beauceron began talking, beaming Rozhkov files as he explained what he had found. When he was finished, he sat back on the couch. Rozhkov rubbed his chin, thinking.
“It’s thin, Martin,” he said.
“I know,” Beauceron agreed.
“I don’t know anyone on Juntland, I don’t think. If I send it to them, they might be able to get a warrant. But I don’t know. This gesture with a pen, and then a secret code in blood, it’s all a bit ….”
“… far-fetched,” Beauceron finished for him.
“I was going to say ‘desperate,’ to be honest,” Rozhkov said. “But I’ll give you this, Martin: you’re relentless. If this is how you courted Katia, it’s no wonder she finally gave in.”
“Will you send it to them?” Beauceron asked.
Rozhkov nodded. “Yes. I’ll call Juntland in the morning – or tomorrow sometime, whenever the time zones align. But I can’t guarantee they’ll do anything about it. And I’m going to leave you out of it, Martin … if this leads to anything, I’ll share it with you, but if I say this comes from your work, we lose credibility immediately.”
“Fine,” Beauceron said. “I don’t care who takes the credit. I just want someone to answer for what they did to that family. They didn’t deserve to die like that.”
“No,” Rozhkov said, quietly. He took the vodka bottle back out and filled up his shot glass. “They did not deserve that at all.”
26
“When does his shift start?”
“Twenty minutes ago,” Rath said, with some annoyance.
“M’kay. So I don’t have time to take a leak, then?”
“No,” Rath said.
“Just fucking with you, man, don’t worry.”
Rath acknowledged the joke with a grunt.
Hackers – can’t ever take anything seriously.
He sat in the easy chair of his hotel room, watching a mirror image of the hacker’s terminals on his room’s viewscreen. The hacker – who went by the online tag C4ble – was located somewhere in the same hemisphere as Rath, on the planet Scapa. But the fact that Rath could see his screens hadn’t stopped C4ble from continuing an online role-playing game and keeping a few windows of streaming porn open. Rath didn’t care, so long as his code worked as advertised.
It had taken Rath nearly a month to plan the mission, or at least, to figure out a plan that would not immediately result in his own death or capture. His own safety aside, figuring out a way to kill the target had proved just as challenging.
A one-hundred-and-ten-year-old man should be easier to kill.
“What’s up with your boy?” C4ble asked, moving a squadron of elf warriors in his game onto what looked like an oared galley.
“Give him time. I paid him well, he’ll deliver the code.�
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“If you say so,” C4ble said, unconvinced. He cursed as an enemy catapult set the galley on fire with a barrel of burning oil.
C4ble’s program had not come cheap, but the client had approved additional funds when Rath shared the details of his operational plan, so all that remained was for Rath to recruit an agent with access to the facility’s hardware. He had picked one of the janitors: a younger man, who was both excited by Rath’s corporate espionage cover story and eager to pad his wallet with a hefty bribe. More importantly, his janitorial duties required him to have access to all areas of the facility, including the central control room. That was the key: as C4ble had stressed a million times, his program was a “mimic” virus – once introduced, it remained in an inactive state, merely observing the host computer’s activity. Everything it observed, it gained access to, and the ability to manipulate – it just needed the user to access a program once, and then it was capable of using the same program. Rath had kept a copy of the program on his own data drive, just in case he needed it for his next mission.
You never know …
“So why go to all this trouble?” C4ble asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“I assume one of the man’s heirs is angry that he chose to go into suspended animation rather than simply die and pass on his wealth to them,” Rath said. “But my mission briefing never goes into details about who purchased the contract.”
“No, I get that – if I was in line to inherit that much money, I’d be pissed, too. I’m saying: why hire me, why not just go up there and off him yourself? Isn’t that what you’re trained for?”
“It is,” Rath agreed. This conversation was rapidly making him uncomfortable. “But it’s a secure orbital platform – I could probably get in, but how would I get out?”
“Ah,” C4ble said. “I take your point.”
Rath watched as C4ble opened a stock trading site and placed several orders.
“Are you shorting Suspensys stock?” he asked, incredulous.
“Of course!” C4ble laughed. “Got this idea from a buddy of mine – every time we hack a big corporation, we short their stock ahead of time. Shares always nose-dive when word gets out they’ve had a breach.”
“Aren’t you worried someone will trace those transactions back to you?”
C4ble snorted. “They’re welcome to try.” He launched into a long-winded explanation about proxy servers and the incompetence of government cyber-security – Rath tuned him out. He yawned; as usual, his night had been restless, short naps punctuated by the ever-present nightmares. He had drunk some coffee with breakfast, but caffeine no longer had much of an effect on him. Rath let his mind wander for a time, and found his fingers idly playing with the counter bracelet on his wrist.
Forty-eight. And for forty-nine, they give me this clusterfuck. I wonder if the control room techs are disappointed I’m not going up there myself. Contractor 621 goes out in a blaze of glory, gunned down by armed security at Suspensys’ orbital facility … one kill short of his fifty.
He resisted the urge to tap the bracelet’s button and see the glowing numbers appear.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty little thing?” C4ble asked.
Rath looked up at the viewscreen, expecting more porn, but all of C4ble’s windows had disappeared, replaced with a single terminal that looked remarkably boring.
“We’re live,” C4ble told him. “Looks like we’re in a scheduling program right now – I’m seeing staff names and shift times.”
Rath sat up straight. “Not what we need, but it’s a start.”
C4ble ignored him, flipping through multiple modules in the program. “This is part of a broader HR program – I’ve got access to employee information, payroll, feedback forms, scheduling … couple other things. Downloading the raw data now, in case you need it.”
“Okay,” Rath said.
An orange Caution symbol flashed on one of C4ble’s screens. “Hmmm …,” he said.
“What?” Rath asked.
“They’ve got a pretty robust watchdog program in place,” C4ble told him. “I think he sniffed the download.”
“No more downloads,” Rath said.
“Yeah,” C4ble agreed.
The computer’s user – whoever they were – soon exited out of the HR program and pulled up a kind of dashboard. Rath saw twelve concentric rings on the screen, all of them glowing a gentle green.
“Here we go,” C4ble said. “That looks like a system health status board.”
“There are twelve levels of pods inside the suspended animation area,” Rath agreed. “A circle for each row, green means ‘good’?”
“Mm-hmm,” C4ble was already scrolling through additional modules in the new program. “Found him – ‘Arthin Delacourt III. Tier five, pod thirty-two.’ Hold on … here’s a live video feed from inside the pod. Wrinkled old fuck, isn’t he?”
“That’s him,” Rath confirmed. “Does this program give you access to the pod controls or any of the station’s utilities?”
“Nope – it’s some kind of diagnostic program, just labeled ‘Patient Health Monitor.’ I can only observe right now.”
“Keep that video feed open,” Rath told him.
The computer’s user accessed a standard communications program after that, and a word processing suite. Rath watched through C4ble’s feed as the user typed up several memos and sent them out – he appeared to be a medical supervisor of some kind, overseeing the various doctors and nurses that were responsible for the health of all the customers at the facility, watching their vital signs and suspended animation state for signs of problems. He checked the Health Monitor dashboard from time to time, but otherwise continued with his memos. Nearly four hours later, the user’s activity stopped, and the feed went quiet. Arthin Delacourt slept peacefully in his pod.
“Lunch break?” Rath guessed.
“Could be,” C4ble said. “Maybe he went outside for a smoke. I’m getting antsy myself … their security program is bound to have a deep scan as part of its normal subroutines.”
Rath rubbed his forehead. “What does that mean?”
“It means the watchdog is going to take a walk through the yard sometime soon, and it’s going to find us. The clock’s ticking.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Can’t say. Could be happening right now, could be another few hours. But soon. Most companies do a deep scan every four to eight hours.”
“What are our options?”
“If you want to be safe, I would self-destruct the program and try again on a different computer.”
Rath grimaced. “Can’t do that. My agent is not going to have the stomach for placing another device.”
C4ble sighed loudly. “Well, that’s the only way to stay covert about this whole thing. I could take active control of the host computer and we’ll have access as long as the machine is on and the device is plugged in, but they’ll know they have a breach right away, and what computer it’s coming from. If I take active control, it’s the equivalent of pissing on the watchdog’s face.”
“Do you think you can access the right program before they cut off access?”
“Probably.”
Rath chewed on his thumb for a minute. He noticed a counter on C4ble’s terminal showing four hours and thirty-two minutes – the time since first gaining access.
“Do it,” Rath said.
“Fuck,” C4ble told him. “Okay, buckle up.”
He typed for a few seconds, and the user’s screen enlarged. A red Warning symbol appeared on C4ble’s screen immediately afterwards, flashing. Rath watched the hacker work – first accessing a list of installed programs, then scanning quickly through them.
“I don’t see anything that looks like a life support system,” C4ble noted. “Hold on – I do see a utility program – I’ve got air, water, and electrical for the whole station in this.”
“The pods have backup life support systems – you can cut off air supply and he
’ll be fine for weeks. What about electrical? Can you send a power surge to his pod?”
C4ble typed in silence for a minute. “Maybe.”
Rath checked the timer – the Warning symbol had been flashing for over a minute. “Anything yet?”
“Maybe, I said. I can control electrical, but it has safeguards built in – I need to override those protocols.”
Abruptly, the screen went blank, and a new pop-up window appeared with the words Connection Lost.
“Fuck,” C4ble said. “They cut us off.”
“That’s it?” Rath asked.
“That’s it. Suspensys is going to invest in a big security software upgrade, your janitor friend is probably going to jail, and security at their facility is going to be tighter than a nun’s cunt for the next few months. Let me know if you need me for another job, but this one is done.”
Not for me.
C4ble terminated the connection and Rath’s viewscreen went blank.
Not for me.
* * *
Rath drained his glass and glanced across the crowded bar again, watching as the two women laughed over a shared joke. He recognized both from the Suspensys personnel files C4ble had sent him following their hack attempt: the taller one was a member of the marketing team. He focused on the shorter woman.
Hello, nurse.
Rath signaled the bartender.
“Yes?”
“I’ll get a refill for this,” he tapped his empty glass. “And a fresh round for the two ladies at the other end of the bar, on my tab.”
“Of course.”
Rath took a sip from his new drink when it was delivered, and waited while the bartender carried the two drinks over to the women. They took them, frowning – the bartender leaned in and pointed to Rath, who smiled and saluted them with his own drink. The taller one saluted him back, while the shorter one waved, smiling. Rath stood up and headed toward them.
Time to do some more recruiting …
* * *
It was another hot day on Scapa, the dry desert winds whipping whirls of sand through the spaceport arrivals hall, an open-air atrium with a complex, tented roof. He had talked to the nurse – her name was Jaymy – over video chat during her week-long shift up at the Suspensys station, but he had not told her that he planned to meet her at the spaceport when her shuttle landed. Rath picked a shady spot to stand in, and chewed on the inside of his lip as he waited. But when Jaymy saw him, she smiled and waved. Rath waved back, and after she had pushed her way through the press of people, she reached up on tip-toe and gave him a peck on the cheek, before sliding her hand through his. Rath, whose previous kisses had all taken place in the simulator with Rebecca, felt a slight flutter in his stomach.