The only explanation was a local failure of some type—rats chewing through her cables perhaps. She needed to hurry home to figure it out, but first she wanted to check something.
She opened an app on her phone she’d created, a reporting tool that received a feed from the building’s only entrance: the front elevators. Opening the app, she checked the activity log. Someone had entered the building by scanning their thumbprint less than half an hour ago.
Running a cross-reference search, she discovered that the thumbprint belonged to the owner of a unit on the second floor who visited every few months. It had been three months since their last entry and it was the only activity all day. One of the perks of living in a storage unit was the infrequency of people coming and going.
She breathed a sigh of relief. Her apparent security outage was not connected to the person entering the building thirty minutes ago. If the information she’d just handed over had gone public already, she would have been more worried, but for now she felt secure.
It took another hour to walk the rest of the way home. Physical exercise was a treat for someone who spent three-quarters of their life staring at a monitor. She walked fast and took the steepest hills along the way. By the time she turned the corner and saw her huge, gray box of a building her legs were stiff and her heart beating hard.
Something strange caught her eye as she called the elevator—a strange purple residue, like a mist, around the biometric reader. Vagrants. Vandalizing the property was nothing new and the cleaner bots would be around soon. She had no idea what the substance could be but forgot about it when the doors to the elevator opened.
By the time she stepped in front of her unit’s door, she saw it again—the purple mist. In front of her, near her door’s thumbprint reader was a small smear of it.
Coincidences be damned. She bolted down the aisle and stopped at the end of the block, panting against the wall.
Had the targets of her investigation already found her? Impossible. No one knew where she lived. No one even knew who she was. Not no one, she argued with herself. Some people did. People she thought she could trust.
If only she could see inside her unit, she thought. Then she remembered the Arlo.
A paranoid former owner of her unit had installed a simple, low tech camera in one corner. The Arlo dated back to the early 2030s. Malina had never removed it because it still worked, but also because it was an antique according to tech standards. She respected antiques.
She whipped out her phone and found an app that she had used to test the Arlo soon after finding it. Tapping a few commands, she powered it on. Her screen turned a dull gray. Confused for a moment, she remembered the camera had been pointed at the wall. Using the in-app controls, she panned the little camera away from the wall.
A light hanging directly in front of the lens obscured the view for a moment until she panned a bit more and zoomed out to get the widest view of her unit.
There, on the sofa, sat a man. And without a doubt, he was asleep. His head tossed back, mouth agape, breathing steady and deep. She tapped a button on the app for the audio; he snored. Panning and zooming a bit more confirmed he was alone.
She shook her head in disbelief. She hesitated, undecided on what to do. He could have backup she didn’t know about. He could be fake sleeping, but then he’d either have to know she was looking at him or he had been like that for over an hour waiting for her. Neither seemed likely.
Malina reached into her bag and removed a short, thick black rod. Swinging the collapsed baton in a short, quick motion it shot out, extending to four times its former length. She pushed a button on the baton’s grip and blue sparks arced between two terminals in its tip.
She pushed her hood back and unshouldered her bag; she’d come back for it.
Malina held the baton tightly in her fist and walked with long steps toward the door of her unit.
* * *
Martin Aubrey’s eyes slammed open. Every muscle in his body convulsed until he thought his teeth would crack against each other and grind to dust. His arms were contracted against his chest and he couldn’t move.
Bright blue light blinded him. His vision cleared and he could see blue sparks blooming from the end of a black rod. It was a baton. Near him, the arcs of blue shot between two silver posts; at the other end stood a small woman with short hair. She raised the baton over her head ready to strike down Aubrey.
“Who the fuck are you, and how the fuck did you find me?” she shouted.
Aubrey curled, doubled over in pain on the strange woman’s couch. White hot pain shot through his back as she hit him with the baton again. His entire body contracted as if trying to collapse in on itself.
The woman stood over him shouting over and over again. The haze from his nap had vanished. He could fend her off, but she was furious and he didn’t want to make the situation worse. He did, however, want her to stop sending thousands of volts through his body.
She shouted into his ear, “I said, who the fuck are you and how the fuck did you find me here?”
Aubrey rolled back into a half-seated position and put his hands up in surrender as she thrusted with the baton toward his chest. In one motion, he batted the baton away and grabbed her wrist, pulling her toward him while raising his feet into a spring position. With her weight on the bottoms of his feet he shot them outward, sending her flying.
She crashed into the stack of books, scattering them in all directions.
Malina scrambled to her feet and dashed toward the open door.
“Wait, please, just wait,” Aubrey shouted, throwing the baton aside.
Malina didn’t leave the unit; instead she lunged for the kitchen cabinet. Flinging the cabinet door open, she reached inside.
Aubrey got to his feet. She spun around in a seated position, her legs spread wide in front of her, holding a small pistol. Her hood was down and her face dark with rage. She would shoot him, he had no doubt.
“Answer my fucking question.” She was panting, but focused.
Hands in the air, he said, “My name is Martin Aubrey. I’m a friend of Aaron Lewis. He told me where to find you.” He lowered his hands to the side, palms facing her. He tried to sound calm and unaggressive.
“You’re a cop?” she shouted.
“No … well, it’s complicated.”
“As complicated as breaking into my house to ambush me?”
“You were the one with the lightning rod, lady. And would you really call this a house? I mean …” Aubrey said, looking around with his hands still raised.
“Don’t get smart with me, mother fucker. I’ll blow your …”
“I worked with Lewis for a while,” he said, cutting her off after realizing the joke was a bad idea. “We worked on the Boarding School Syndrome case and the OFP bombings.”
“How did you break in here and how did you disable my security system and why the hell are you here?” Her voice was quieter with these questions, but still very angry.
“I can explain how I got in here. I’ll even share my gear with you, but we need to talk first.”
“Talk about what?”
“About BSS and the bombings. About One Front for the People.”
“What is there to talk about?” she said, getting more upset now as if this were another joke. “They caught the guys. It’s all over.”
“That’s why I’m here. It’s not over.” Aubrey locked eyes with Malina. Hers were large and dark, the lights reflecting off them. “I need your help, or more people are going to get hurt.”
* * *
Half a mile from the gray building, Jacira Barretto sat in the backseat of a large black sedan. The windows were darkened to the point of matching the car’s paint job, but it was necessary. Surveillance required privacy. She could adjust the level of tint on the glass at any time with the touch of a button, which she would do if she saw any cops.
An expensive car parked on a street like this with windows as dark as hers screamed that a n
efarious exchange of money for bodily fluids was taking place. She didn’t need the attention.
The backseat was her mobile operations center. The backs of both front seats held small monitors showing different angles of the view outside the strange building Martin Aubrey had entered not long ago. She worked on a laptop and three tablets. The cameras were mounted to the bellies of two micro drones perched on ledges of adjacent buildings.
She checked the power levels for each and was satisfied to see they each had several more hours of life left. She hoped it was enough to catch Aubrey when he left, if he left. The drone had been tracking Aubrey since he left the hospital with Jacira first watching from the comfort of her plush apartment, then from the car.
If Aubrey was mobile, she needed to be mobile as well.
She’d been on Aubrey’s tail ever since he left the hospital a few hours ago. Having only been on the job for a little over a week, this was her first opportunity to do anything other than wait for Aubrey to leave the hospital.
When Aubrey entered this building using his fancy toys, Jacira grew excited. Who goes to a storage unit other than to store something or remove something? Either way, she knew the unit wasn’t Aubrey’s or else he wouldn’t have to break in.
She had no idea what this case was about. She had no idea what this Aubrey person had done to piss off her employer, and she had no idea what the information she was gathering would be used for, but such was the case for most of her jobs.
She did what she was paid to do and asked only the questions that would enable her to do so. She observed and reported, as instructed, though she had a hunch that she would be asked to do more in the end. Surveillance was the first of her two special skills. Most of her jobs began with surveillance and led to her employer asking for her other skill. Very few asked for it up front even though most wanted the latter more than the former.
Jacira watched for a while longer, making a mental note to get inside the building and figure out what unit Aubrey was visiting when she saw a small-ish woman approach the elevator doors at the front of the building. The woman hesitated for a moment, bending close to examine the area around the print pad, apparently noticing the leftovers from Aubrey’s spray bottle.
Jacira saw Aubrey wipe the area down thoroughly, which meant this woman was incredibly observant. It didn’t stop her from entering, however. It also didn’t mean the two of them were connected as there were hundreds of units in the building.
Nothing happened for over an hour. When it did, it confirmed two things for Jacira.
Aubrey looked worse for wear coming out. In general, he was more disheveled than before and his shirt had scorch marks in several places on his chest. For Jacira, this confirmed that Aubrey and the woman were connected.
Second, it confirmed the encounter had not gone so well for Aubrey. She knew of only a handful of things that could cause those marks on Aubrey’s shirt and the only one the woman could have carried in a bag was some type of stun gun.
Of course, it could all be a coincidence. Aubrey could have entered the building to retrieve an old lamp from his dead mother’s storage unit, tested it to see if it still worked, and it blew up in his face causing the burn marks.
Coincidences were for cops, though. She worked on hunches and hearsay more than anything else most of the time. For this situation, her hunch was that these two were connected and more than that, they were working together.
She tapped a tablet and set one micro-drone to track Aubrey. The other she left to watch the building. If and when the woman left, Jacira would track her too.
Watching one screen change as the drone took off to hover high above while following Aubrey, she decided she’d better report in to her employer.
She picked up her phone and pulled up her contacts. Scrolling down the list, she found the name Mr. V. She tapped it and the phone started dialing.
Over the car speakers she heard the phone ringing. A man’s voice answered.
“Yes?”
“I have a report, sir.”
8
Ryan Grant
Detective Ryan Grant, still on light duty status and walking on carbon fiber braces, knew something was wrong the moment he opened the door to his apartment.
His building would not be considered luxurious by even the most liberal use of the word, but as a single man living on a police officer’s salary, he considered it nice enough.
The ten-year-old building was clean, close to the office, and occupied with people mostly his age. His actual apartment was a one bedroom that had no business being referred to as such—his room was more of a glorified closet which he used for storage. He slept on the couch most nights.
The building lacked decent security—no doorman, no facial recognition, and had only token cameras with enough blind spots to make them useless. The main entrance used a keypad for entry with a physical key for backup. Being a cop, Grant had cared little about the security situation. The other tenants welcomed him, and his gun, with open arms.
As lackluster as the security measures in the building were, he’d never known it to be non-functional. Which is why he found it odd to receive an email from building management that afternoon. The email stated that the main entry’s keypad was down, all tenants would have to use their physical keys, and the cameras throughout the building were inoperable. The management company was working on repairs and should have everything working before close of business the next day.
The news about the door and the cameras hadn’t bothered Grant until he opened the door to his home and found it dark. His lights were programmed to illuminate the second the front door opened and had never failed him.
He paused at the threshold. Just paranoid, he thought. Maybe it was just a bug affecting the entire building—the door, cameras, and now his lights.
He took a half step into the apartment and looked to the left, toward the kitchen. He saw the glow of his small grow light and the reflection of blue off the leaves of herbs in their square pots. The power to the apartment was on.
The faint glow from the kitchen painted the apartment in its eerie light. Basic shapes of things were distinguishable, but the place was dark otherwise.
“Lights,” he said, commanding his home’s AI.
Nothing happened.
“Glitchy ass apartment,” he said as he slid his pistol from its holster.
Stepping further in, he nudged the door with his elbow and waited for the sharp thud of the knob connecting with the wall. It didn’t come. Only a soft bump. Something soft behind the door.
In one motion, he whipped around the door, flinging it away, and drew his pistol, activating its light as he leveled it on the spot behind the door.
Nothing there. The white circle of light shined on the beige wall, reflecting off the nooks and crannies of the concrete blocks.
He lowered the pistol to the base of the wall. A shoe lay there, its toe curled from the door. It was one of his. He didn’t remember leaving it there, but no one had ever accused him of being tidy. Feeling foolish and overly paranoid, he holstered his pistol and slammed the door shut.
As he turned his back on the door, he saw a shape charging from the darkness. He reached for his holster, but there was no time; he threw his hands up and twisted. The assailant made a swift movement. The silver glint of a blade slashed through the air at him.
He threw up an arm, deflected the blow. An impact like the kick of a horse hit him in the upper thigh, collapsing his brace. Then another impact in the belly, doubling him over.
The darkness made it impossible to see the blows before they came. The rough outline of the attacker was all he could make out; the attacker moved with impossible speed.
The kicks came again, two more to his side and chest. The attacker was so fast, every time Grant reached for his pistol, he was hit, losing his grip.
Then he felt it. The sting in his side. He’d been stabbed before. He knew what it felt like.
Arms up, he jumped back, pre
paring for more knife slashes. And again, going for his pistol. He had it this time, withdrew it.
No more kicks came. No more punches. The shape of the attacker drifted backward into deep shadow.
“Quitter,” Grant yelled.
The shape laughed.
Coldness swept Grant’s body. A deep chill flowed through him, freezing him to his bones. It was followed by a feverish heat radiating from the inside out. His skin prickled, sweat formed under his clothes.
He leveled his pistol on the shape, but his hands shook. He couldn’t aim, couldn’t squeeze the trigger. His body quaked and then his fingers would no longer obey him. The pistol fell to the floor.
Grant’s back stiffened and contracted, throwing his head back in a violent swing. Flopping to the floor, Ryan Grant’s chest made a desperate rattling sound as he inhaled his last breath.
* * *
Balthazar Rhegus stood in the dark, watching the target writhe for a moment before falling still. He stared at the small man, cocking his head to the side. What had this poor man done, he wondered.
Shaking off the thought, Balthazar turned his hulking form toward the kitchen. He searched for a few seconds before finding what he needed.
He set the small dish on the counter then reached a gloved hand into his pants pocket. He withdrew a soft square of cloth and used it to wipe the end of his knife, ensuring he removed any residue of fluids from its surface.
Holding up the cloth square by one corner he turned to the stovetop. He clicked on a burner and touched the dangling end of the cloth to the flame. With a whoosh it caught fire.
Placing the burning rag onto the dish, the familiar smell filled his nose. Could the smoke itself be deadly? he wondered. He shrugged while he ran the blade in and out of the flame. He had to be sure all of the residue was burned away. An accidental slip could be deadly otherwise.
Still holding the knife in the flames, Balthazar pulled his phone from his pocket. He logged into the secure digital dead drop and left a note for his employer informing him the job was finished.
Executioner's Lament Page 6