Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  Strapp laced his fingers in front of him. “All the chips or nothing, huh?”

  “You’re not the only guy working against the clock,” Skater said.

  Strap gave a short nod. “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

  “Falkenhayne’s on the run from Fuchi,” Skater said. “Primarily from a guy named Kylar Luppas. Ring any bells?”

  Strapp held up the noteputer to the viewer and pressed a button. Luppas showed up on the miniature viewer in front and profile shots. The fed grinned without humor. “A truly orchestrated event.”

  “I was told you were here looking for a guy named Coleman January.”

  Strapp dug his little finger in his ear and acted distracted. “What you got going, Jack, that you can sit around and listen to drivel all day? Makes me wonder what I’m buying into.”

  “Coleman January had some side action working through the shadows. He was arranging extractions from different corps there in Seattle.”

  “There in Seattle?” Strapp cleared his throat. He twirled the noteputer with his fingers, then brushed at his tie. “You’re so far away from ground zero, I’m wondering if you got anything at all that I’m interested in.”

  “Are you always so abrasive?”

  Strapp grinned. “Jack, people I know who love me tell me I’m as abrasive as a lactose-intolerant troll mother-in-law two hormone shots behind in her menopausal therapy who’s just found out her daughter’s husband has got the rutting instincts of a bandersnatch in heat and is drowning her sorrows down at the local Cream O’ Confections. Trust me, you ain’t seen abrasive yet.”

  “Fine,” Skater replied, forcibly keeping his temper. “Tell me when I get to something you don’t understand.” At the rate this was going, the trace margin Skater had calculated on the call seemed to disappear faster with each passing second.

  “I’ll do that very little thing. And while I’m at it, Jack, let me tell you something else I understand. If you had any other good shot at getting your hoop out of the crack it’s in besides me, you’d take it.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Skater said. “I could walk away right now.” He saw Duran watching him, covering his position from only a few meters away.

  “Then tell me why you’re dealing with me and cut out all the bulldrek,” Strapp said.

  “You’ve got a rep. People tell me when you give your word, you keep it. And it’s not me that doesn’t have a place to go. It’s Falkenhayne.”

  “And you know that for a fact?”

  “If she did,” Skater said, “she’d already be gone.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Local,” Skater said. “Same as me. I could be on top of you inside fifteen minutes.”

  Strapp rubbed a hand over his chin. “The way I hear it, Falkenhayne’s maybe invented some kind of programming that wipes corp-encoded deltaware clean. Saves on reconstruction after an extraction. Why doesn’t she cut a deal with any of the megacorps located here in Seattle?”

  “Talk to her.” Skater could guess, but he didn’t want to do it with the fed. Strapp looked smart enough to pick it up even off the telecom screen.

  “I’ll do that too, should I get the opportunity. But tell me something else, Jack. Why—”

  “Why don’t I sell her out to Fuchi or someone else?” Skater asked.

  “We get down to the nut-cutting, yeah, that’s what I’d like to know. You’re a shadowrunner. This kind of goes against the grain from what I know about you jokers.”

  “Two reasons,” Skater answered. “The first being that the Johnson I accepted the run from ultimately was responsible for her. So the nuyen I’ve been paid—”

  “Came out of Falkenhayne’s pocket. Yeah, yeah. People I talked to said you had a rep for sticking to your word on how a deal would go down. What’s the second reason?”

  “Fuchi and the other megacorps wouldn’t give her a chance to survive,” Skater said. “They’d use her and lose her.”

  “True. But that’s also not your problem.”

  “I’m taking it on that way,” Skater said.

  “A soft spot, Jack?” Strapp grinned, genuinely amused. “Something like that can get a shadowrunner geeked in a heartbeat.”

  Skater knew that was true. But he was sure Falkenhayne was in way over her head. She was a citizen, a software programmer who’d somehow gotten lost in the maze of duplicities that existed between the megacorps and their battle for the bottom line. As close to an innocent in his world of shadows as there was. And the truth was also that he stuck when he took on a run. That fact kept him who he was in spite of all the lies he dealt with on a daily basis. “I’ve had Kylar Luppas breathing up my hoop for two days. I’m still here.”

  “So why deal with me?” Strapp asked. “Aside from the fact that you’ve got it in your brainbox that I’m trustworthy.”

  “Because you can move her on into the UCAS. I’m betting the UCAS would love to get their hands on software that would let them beat the megacorps’ own raiding headhunters searching through exec talent. The chance to spy on the megacorps would be worth the price of keeping her alive and happy in case someone finds a way to beat her programming. Frag, the racketeering divisions alone would probably geek their own mothers for the chance to put an agent deep inside Aztechnology or any of the others, knowing they could pull the agent out at any time without worrying about a cortex bomb or something equally nasty taking out the covert operator when they brought him or her in.”

  “You cover a lot of angles when you get started, don’t you, Jack?”

  “It’s the only way to play the game,” Skater replied.

  “And I only play the angles that are there. I don’t make them up.” Strapp nodded. “So where’s Coleman January?”

  “Dead. I’ve got his body.”

  Strapp’s eyes focused more intently. “Did you flatline him? Altruistic or not, I’d have a problem with that.”

  “No,” Skater said. “January died in a crash-and-dash at two a.m. two mornings ago out on I-5. It also turns out that his real name was Norris Caber, and he worked for Fuchi.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  Skater took the chips Archangel had made of the files Kestrel had sent, as well as ones she’d downloaded herself. “Before I disconnect, I’ll upload what I’ve got to you. Take a look.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t I know about it?”

  “Talk to DocWagon. Someone at Fuchi quashed the report that went out concerning the pickup one of their units made that morning. The body was delivered to Shastakovich’s Funeral Home. Everything that happened there wasn’t so easy to shut down or cover over, but I don’t know if they even knew who the body belonged to at the time.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Strapp said.

  “Now I need something from you,” Skater told the federal agent.

  “You can ask.”

  “What was your interest in Coleman January? The way I hear it, you’re investigating the presidential assassination. Where’s the connection?”

  “What do you know about the place where Falkenhayne worked?”

  “DulceTech,” Skater replied, vaguely remembering the name from the briefing he’d gotten from Archangel less than an hour ago. She was still pulling information in. “Developmental and research lab.”

  Strapp nodded. “What you might not know at first glance was that Dunkelzahn had invested heavily in DulceTech through holding companies. It’ll all come out in the next few days as the tridsnoops sift through his will, but it wasn’t readily known at the time. Or even now.”

  “That’s no real surprise,” Skater replied. “Judging from what I’ve heard on the trid today, Dunkelzahn had a hell of a stock portfolio. He might not even have known about the investment in DulceTech.”

  Strapp smiled. “Ah, Jack, but he did. In fact, he’d even earmarked it in his records. Especially the design work being done by Ripley Falkenhayne. They were made available to me. I think the dragon had someone close to
Falkenhayne who kept him informed. Can you imagine what Dunkelzahn would have done with the programming the woman came up with?”

  Skater could. And he couldn’t help thinking maybe it had been good that someone had assassinated the dragon. Because if Dunkelzahn had entered into the corporate scene able to freely pick and choose among the megacorporations in a headhunting spree, the raiding would probably have touched off an inter-corporate war the likes of which neither the Awakened world nor the one that had come before it had ever seen.

  Strapp went on. “I was told about Dunkelzahn’s holdings, and about the interest Fuchi was showing in DulceTech. Kylar Luppas’s name popped up all of a sudden when I discovered the woman had gone missing. Luppas has a rep for being able to deliver on wetwork. And come to find out, Miles Lanier was in for a large inheritance from Dunkelzahn’s will. It didn’t take me long to learn that Luppas worked for Fuchi, and possibly Lanier.” The agent shrugged. “When I caught the buzz about the program that could remove all the embedded passcoding in corp-assigned deltaware, that was frosting on the cake. Frag, at this point, I’m not above believing Villiers himself ordered Dunkelzahn whacked to get at that programming. So I came out here to check into it.”

  Skater absorbed that. The scenario had been more or less what he’d pieced together. He checked the retinal display, realizing he’d already exceeded the margin for safety he’d given himself by almost a full minute. A chummer could die in less. “Let’s cut to the chase.”

  “Tell me what you need,” Strapp said.

  “That easy?” Skater asked.

  Strapp grinned but it held only gallows humor. “Jack, let’s face it. You’re using me, I’m using you. Now I got no problems with that. In my view, you’re Seattle’s problem. The Star’s problem. Maybe Fuchi’s problem. But you’re not my problem. I’m looking for people who killed the UCAS president. I don’t give a frag about corpses that were stolen from a funeral home, especially when the Star helped close the book on the whole thing with Knight Errant and kept Fuchi from getting its linens soiled. You’re using me to hopefully get Falkenhayne out of the drek she’s in, and I’m using you as bait to get to Luppas and Lanier and Fuchi. I have questions, and they better damn well have some answers.”

  “After we drop Falkenhayne with you,” Skater said, “I want my team and myself to be able to walk away.”

  “Even if you’re successful, do you think Fuchi will let it go? You’re taking what they might view as property from them.”

  “Revenge doesn’t pay a percentage on the bottom line for the megacorps,” Skater said. “Villiers, above all else, is a businessman. If he isn’t, I’m no better off than I am now.”

  “Fine. Tell me when and where.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” Skater said.

  Strapp’s face hardened. “Did you just spend all this time yanking my chain for nothing, Jack?”

  “No,” Skater said. “I like the deal. But I’m going to have to sell Falkenhayne on it first. And I’ve got a feeling she’s going to be harder to convince than you were. I’ll be in touch. Leave a number with Nina.” He punched the Disconnect, uploaded the files and started moving, his mind clearing as he focused on the possibilities. He didn’t fully trust the UCAS man, but out of all the options available, Quentin Strapp was the lesser of all evils.

  Now he just had to get Ripley Falkenhayne to believe that.

  51

  Back at the safehouse by 15:31:47, Skater laid the situation out for the team, reviewing their options. They’d gathered in the kitchen, seated around the table again. Emma was with a couple of Elvis’s chummers, protected from any fallout that might reach the team even here. All of them were tense as the chron continued to click off the minutes.

  “It appears that we’ve come smack between a rock and a hard place,” Cullen Trey commented when Skater finished. “Or we could simply step out of the way and let Fuchi take Falkenhayne.”

  “I have trouble with that,” Skater said. “Falkenhayne doesn’t have options. If we don’t break her out of the sprawl, Luppas will have her. And if there’d been someone else she could have gone to, she’d have done it.”

  “We don’t owe her anything,” Archangel said flatly. “True.” Skater turned her. “Do you feel comfortable leaving her where she is, knowing we have a chance at pulling this off?” He didn’t know what to expect as a response. Since he’d been back at the safehouse, he was certain Archangel was consciously avoiding him. He was also sure that Duran had noticed her behavior as well.

  Archangel calmly returned his gaze. “No.”

  Skater raked his gaze over the rest of the team. “Ripley Falkenhayne didn’t set herself up with this situation.”

  And that was chip-truth. Archangel’s searches into the databases had revealed an interesting scenario. Less than three years ago, Falkenhayne had submitted a request for an investment on behalf of a Dunkelzahn holding company: development time and cost for software research that she would repay out of the proceeds of her work, over which she would maintain control after releasing it on the open market. The deal had been indicative of Dunkelzahn’s policy of investing in small businesses or corps, then taking his profit when those people turned one.

  Control hadn’t been a real issue with the dragon, which went against the grain of most of their kind Skater knew of. Dunkelzahn had been satisfied with enabling humans and metas to carve their own niches in the Awakened world. That had been one of his presidential platform promises, more or less.

  Falkenhayne’s research involved communication programming aimed at reconfiguring orbiting satellites with outdated databases without the expense of physically seeking each one down in a space shuttle and either bringing them up to spec with new hardware or replacing them. Both solutions were extremely expensive, as well as time consuming. If successful, her programming would have been worth millions of nuyen.

  Falkenhayne had exceeded her expectations. Skater had wondered if the dragon had known of the success before he was blown up. The money involved was certainly enough to support Strapp’s suspicion of Fuchi’s involvement in Dunkelzahn’s murder. Archangel’s research also revealed a handful of Dunkelzahn’s smaller corporations that had been buying up outdated satellites from other corps that had left them in orbit after taking them off-line, including RTG/LTG relay sub-stations. According to the contracts, those smaller corporations intended the satellites for salvage.

  But anyone who’d taken a look at the technology available at that time had figured that salvage meant physically stripping components from the satellites and selling them to electronics companies specializing in dog-brain driven construction equipment being exported and sold to third world countries.

  Falkenhayne’s coding was designed to break down the old machine language used by a satellite’s designers and convert it to a database that could have been overwritten with Dunkelzahn’s programs, with an enhanced memory management system also programmed in. Or converted to the programming of any other corp.

  Part of Dunkelzahn’s investment return was going to be the salvation of those satellites before anyone else knew they could be successfully upgraded at a minimum cost. With the known numbers Archangel had been able to crunch, the additional satellites would have increased the dragon’s holdings by twenty percent. Fuchi, with their own fleet of suborbitals, could have felt threatened enough by that perceived encroachment to launch a pre-emptive strike at Dunkelzahn.

  At that time three years ago, no one had known the corp deltaware was going to be passcode-protected, making it harder to accomplish extractions that were essentially corporate raiding.

  If Dunkelzahn had lived, if Norris Caber hadn’t found Falkenhayne out only days before through his corp espionage ferreting, the figures Archangel had come up with suggested Falkenhayne would have made a good profit on her work, probably even enough to retire and live well for the rest of her life. But the dragon had been assassinated, removing her only line of defense. Only Caber’s apparent gre
ed had kept Falkenhayne out of Fuchi’s hands.

  “It’s not just Falkenhayne’s hoop on the line here,” Elvis said. “If we stand back and let Fuchi take her, and take the body”—he jerked a thumb in the direction of the back bedroom—“we still know what she’s developed. Villiers would figure that knowledge would be worth something, and it would fragging sure hurt his opportunities for Fuchi recruitment if the other corps found out and managed to get into a position to stop some of the headhunting. Villiers might want us geeked as part of the damage control on this op.”

  “Quentin Strapp knows about Falkenhayne’s programming,” Wheeler said. “He told Jack that.”

  “Strapp said he’d heard about it,” Skater corrected. “He didn’t say that he knew it was for real.”

  “Wouldn’t be long before he did,” Wheeler said. “Especially when corp exec extractions suddenly ballooned, and all of them were going to Fuchi.”

  “Might be too late for us by that time,” Duran commented. “Granted, going after the woman at this point sounds risky, and sounds pretty damn fragged with no nuyen in sight for the effort. But if Strapp gets his mitts on her and turns her over to the UCAS, Villiers is going to know without a doubt that her software design is going to be in someone else’s hands. Flatlining us at that point would be useless.”

  And that, Skater knew, was the best argument he could offer for the run. He still didn’t like the idea of Falkenhayne being left hung out to dry.

  “What about turning the LTG and password we have over to Strapp and letting the UCAS handle her extraction from the area?” Cullen Trey asked. “Once they had her, it would be foolish for Fuchi to continue pursuit of us.”

  “A UCAS salvage?” Archangel shook her head. “How fast could something like that be set up?” She didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “And that’s assuming Strapp or the UCAS could authorize and organize an extraction without picking up major coverage on the news trid programs.” She shook her head. “They can’t do it.”

  “And that,” Skater said, “leaves us to cover our own hoops.” He paused, looking around at the others. “I’m willing to try for the extraction.”