Leverage

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  Winn was gone, and Puo had to help me pick myself up off the floor. Now three months later here we are. And I’m not sure I’m all the way picked up yet.

  But Puo’s right. Nix is trying to kill us with full knowledge of who we are. We’re not untouchable by any means, but we’ve had no interaction with Nix to warrant this kind of attention. Something is going on. And the last thing I need right now is a roller coaster of Winn-related emotions.

  “Dinner’s ready!” Winn calls up from the second floor kitchen, sending a spike of emotion through me at the sound of his voice. For all our issues, Winn really has taken charge of Puo’s health, including doing all the cooking and meal planning.

  I turn around and head downstairs, determined to be cordial, but still to make sure he knows what a scumbag move leaving was.

  The kitchen is along one wall in the middle of the second floor. It’s sleek, with shiny gray cabinets that have no visible handles, and clear glass countertops with embedded digital images provide plenty of workspace. Winn stands at the range in the long island, and two metal pots are tittering; he has the recipe brought up in the glass countertop to the side of him. The kitchen smells deliciously of baking chicken and Spanish rice.

  Three place settings are on the long island, so I come up to the bar and sit at the one farthest from Winn. “Where’s Puo?” I ask, for no other reason than I need something to say.

  I know where Puo is. He’s created his inner sanctum in one of the bedrooms on the third floor with all his new toys. He immediately claimed the bedroom with the fewest number of windows, which were easily blocked off, which was fine by me.

  “Upstairs, still working,” Winn says. Winn looks toward the floating stairs, a flit of worry crossing his face.

  “Is he all right?” I ask, wondering what that look was about.

  “He shouldn’t push himself too hard yet,” Winn says. “He needs rest. More than anything he needs to learn that he’s going to be okay.”

  I quirk an eyebrow at him.

  “The stress of almost having died,” Winn explains. “He needs to shed himself of that. It’s a lot to handle.”

  “Is it?” I ask dryly. After all, I nearly got blown up, almost froze to death, fought an assassin and gave two goons the slip yesterday, thank you very much.

  Winn snaps his gaze to me and realizes his error. “Sorry. How are you doing?”

  My heart speeds up. I can’t think of a noncombative answer other than, “Fine.” Before Winn can follow up, I ask, “What do we have to drink?”

  “Uh.” Winn thinks out loud, “Water, milk and tea.”

  “That’s it?” I ask in alarm at the sparse list.

  “Yeah.”

  “No coffee?” I nearly shout. I’m about to order him to the store again.

  “Oh, yeah, I got espresso for you too.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief.

  “I thought you meant for dinner,” Winn explains.

  Before I can respond, Puo comes down the floating stairs. Maybe moving a little slow for him, but I could be imagining that.

  “You okay?” I ask Puo as he turns off onto the second floor.

  “Yeah. Why?” he asks. “Both of you are staring at me like I’m a puppy about to be put down.”

  “Just want to make sure you get the rest you need,” I say.

  A beeper goes off in the kitchen, and Winn ducks down to take the chicken out of the oven.

  “I’ll be fine,” Puo says. “No rest for the weary, right? Not when someone is trying to kill the weary, at least.”

  I don’t say anything while Winn sets the chicken to the side of the range to rest and inspects the tittering pots—Spanish rice, as my nose informed me, and what looks like green beans in the other.

  “We’re pretty well hidden here,” I say. “You should rest when you need to.”

  Puo comes and sits down at the farthest chair from me—meaning Winn will have to sit between us—next to me. “I will.” Puo gives me a suspicious look. “What are we havin’?”

  Winn turns his back to us to dig around in the cabinets for something.

  I use the opportunity to motion to Puo to move over to sit in the middle.

  Puo infuriatingly gives me a confused look.

  I silently scream at him, MOVE OVER! while pointing at the empty chair. Then I jab a finger at Winn and make a puking face.

  Winn turns back around, and I whip my hands back under the island and erase my puking face.

  Puo nonchalantly moves to the middle seat in a well-disguised bid to get a better look at the food.

  Winn slides the plates of food to us. White steam curls up from the simple but delicious-looking plate. Cups of water are clinked down in front of us.

  Puo eyes the baked chicken. “I have a weak workaround for our CitID problem,” he says.

  “Weak?” I ask to clarify.

  “Yeah,” Puo explains. “I can make it look like it’s malfunctioning. Not exactly rare, but not exactly common. Should be more believable since we’re foreigners here and cross-country systems don’t always play well with each other.”

  It’s better than nothing, but that still means we’ll have to eventually buy two new CitIDs. Gah! “Fine, let’s do it after dinner.”

  Puo nods his assent.

  Winn walks over to one of the cabinets and retrieves something I can’t see. He comes back over and sets down two pills in front of Puo as he sits in the farthest seat from me.

  “Where’d you get those?” I ask Winn. Those pills are blue triangles; they’re not from the set of pills that came from the hospital. After the attempt on Puo’s life with malicious medication, I promptly memorized all of Puo’s pills.

  Winn glances at me over Puo’s place setting before recovering and starts to answer me.

  “Don’t,” Puo cuts in. “Don’t lie. Out with it.”

  Winn drops his mask. “I stopped by Dr. Yates’ practice—”

  “Idiot!” I swear.

  Winn continues in a huff, “I needed to reschedule my/his appointments, get medications—” Winn reaches into his pocket and sets a vial down, with a clack, of what looks suspiciously like pain killers for me. “—and it’s Saturday. No one was there.”

  When I don’t say anything, Winn adds, “I wasn’t followed—I checked.”

  Puo reaches out to take the vial and sets it in front of me, cutting off my response about Winn’s ability to check for a tail. “It seems he’s remembered you can be bribed.”

  Such atrocious lies do not deserve to be acknowledged. “What else do you have in there?” I ask Winn.

  Winn empties out the contents of his pockets: bandages, various pill vials, and a couple of auto-syringes.

  “Whadda ya need those for?” Puo asks nervously, eying the auto-syringes.

  Winn shrugs. “You never know.”

  “Have you learned anything?” I ask Puo to change the subject and get his mind off the auto-syringes. I pocket the pain pills and slice off a strip of chicken and wait for it to cool. To Winn I inject about going back to his practice, “Don’t do it again.”

  Puo shrugs while chewing on some green beans. He always did like his food hotter than I like mine. “Well,” he says through the food in his mouth, “it’s not like Nix keeps an online journal about all the dastardly things she’s planning.” He swallows his food and continues, “But I think I’ve teased out some of her higher-level goons, and where her base of operations is.”

  “So we’re going to have to run a game to get more information?” I ask.

  “A multi-stage one actually. And did you really think we wouldn’t have to?” Puo asks.

  “No,” I say. “But I was hoping.” I pop a thick piece of chicken in my mouth. Wow, that’s good. Warm, juicy, seasoned well. Mmmm. I swallow before saying, “Damn, Winn, where’d you learn to cook like this?”

  Winn shrugs while keeping his eyes on his plate. “What’s phase one?” he asks softly into his plate.

  “Shadow-op,” Puo sa
ys. “With a plant.”

  “Who’s the target?” I ask.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TAMARA VEGA IS a high-level goon Puo thinks is in charge of Nix’s gambling operations. Vega’s background is murky online, obscured—except for the fact that she likes to toy with the Mounties keeping her under surveillance, posting pictures on social media of her movements and the observation perches the Mounties use. She’s cocky.

  And Puo thinks she’s smart too. He was able to dig up matriculation records at the University of Toronto. She left after a year and a half, but not because of her grades.

  She knows she’s being watched, and she’s smart, which makes for a dangerous mark, particularly when Puo and I are probably being hunted by both sides: Nix and the cops. If Tamara is as high-level as we think, then she likely knows my face and Puo’s. But Tamara is not the mark.

  The Mounties watching her are.

  The Mounties have already done all our research for us on Nix, following Nix’s goons, developing an org chart for her operations, mapping out their locations. Everything we could possibly want to know, including specs on any hardware and encryption keys the Mounties have managed to gather or break.

  All we need to do is pick up a copy of it. And the agents currently on Tamara’s surveillance duty are going to kindly help us out with that.

  Tamara likes to hang out at Edge, a nightclub in the Gastown Revival District on the north shore of Vancouver’s main island, and this Saturday night is no different.

  It’s currently past midnight, and I’m loitering down the canal from Edge, waiting in a loose crowd around a food vendor with heat lamps set out, selling hot beverages and street fare. Even with a ‘malfunctioning’ CitID it’s best to keep a low profile when we’re out and about, which means staying on the cold street and out of any businesses that might log it.

  I stand under a heat lamp and wrap my fingers around a paper cup of hot tea, feeling the heat transfer through my thin black gloves. I’m bundled up for the horridly cold weather. My outfit is fittingly chic for the setting, but I’m still bundled up—including a thick winter hat and scarf to obscure my face. About half the women around me must belong to the polar bear club, considering how little they’re wearing in this weather. Bare-toed heels? Nuts.

  “How many drinks have you had?” I ask Winn on my comm-link. The crowd’s thick enough here that no one even turns around to see who I’m talking to. Actually, it’s probably the fact that I’m too bundled up to be of any interest to anyone.

  “Two,” Winn answers, “but I’m debating a third.” Winn is working the other side of the canal, equally bundled up.

  Drinks is code here for agents trailing Tamara. “I have two over here as well,” I tell him.

  The Mounties are not that hard to spot if you’re looking for them. But the signs can be subtle, hard to articulate. Generally it’s just a feeling that something’s off. The cops linger too long, their gaze keeps shifting to the same spot when they’re supposed to be doing something else. They’re not engaged with the people around them.

  If you think you’re being watched, one fun thing you can do, when you’re in their field of vision, is scratch your ear. Unless they’re really well trained, they’ll subconsciously reach up and pick at the comm-link in their ear connecting them to their comrades.

  Of course, Puo and I use comm-links but they’re only half-heartedly adopted by the general public, so the chances are, if you’ve already marked someone as a likely cop and get them to pick their ear: boom, you found yourself a cop.

  White, warm breaths from the crowd around me rise up into the yellow haze of the electric and lights and gas lamps that regularly dot the canals. Occasional string lights run across the canals, creating an electric-yellow halo over the area. The place is pretty and well designed. It looks like the kind of place I’d enjoy.

  When the mega-quake hit, plunging most of Vancouver under the rapidly rising English Bay, one of the many watery causalities was the original Gastown, which was the oldest part of Vancouver. It was once a thriving club and bar scene set amid a backdrop of historic brick buildings and aging lanes.

  Instead of ceding Gastown to the depths, some developers proposed building a Gastown Revival District on the North Shore, out over the water, a mini-Venice but with the architecture and flare of the original Gastown. They even recovered bits and pieces of the original.

  “What?” Winn asks confused over the comm-link.

  Before I can clarify, Winn continues, “Oh, no thank you. That’s very kind of you, but I’m waiting for my boyfriend.”

  Ugh. Someone’s hitting on him.

  It must’ve worked, because Winn doesn’t say anything after that.

  “Someone offer to keep you warm?” I can’t help myself from asking.

  “No,” Winn says. “Just a drink.”

  “Was he at least cute?” I needle.

  “Who said it was a him?” Winn says.

  I clench my teeth; I swear I hear smug in that.

  Puo breaks in, “Keep sharp, you two. The Disco looks like it’s packing up.” Tamara’s starting to leave the club with her entourage.

  Puo’s back in the floating house, holed up in his room with covered windows, keeping a digital eye on things.

  I squeeze my hot tea and flick my gaze at those around me to see if anyone is interested in hitting on me. Winn’s not the only one who can play that game. The crowd is broken up in twos and threes; almost all the men are with women. I try to make brief eye contact with a few. Nothing.

  It’s like I’m invisible all bundled up. Grrr. Stupid men. It doesn’t matter that it’s near freezing out. No. They want some play doll in a tight skirt and heels with her nipples about to pop through her top, while she fights off hypothermia.

  Where is Liáng when I need him? I feel a slight flutter at the thought of seeing Liáng again, the muscly (but regrettably tattooed) attractive Chinese guy that helped with the British Museum job. I bet that’d get Winn all hot and bothered.

  “The Disco is leaving,” Puo says, interrupting my thoughts. “Prepare to move.”

  I take a sip of the hot tea and use the motion to watch the two people I had marked as agents. They’re two women, dressed halfway between play-doll club attire and sensible it’s-freaking-cold-out clothes.

  The short Indian agent in a shiny mauve down coat breaks off and starts walking toward the club, her hands in her pockets, head down against the cold. The other woman, a white girl with thick legs, heads in the opposite direction.

  “The party’s out of the club,” Puo says. “Switching to street cams.”

  Once the Indian agent passes, I take off my gloves for the maneuver I need to pull and shove the gloves in a side pocket of my hip-length army-green belted winter coat.

  I turn to follow. “Short. Indian,” I whisper to Puo. “Fifteen paces ahead of me. White hat, long black hair. Mauve down coat. Black leggings with—”

  “Got her,” Puo says. “There’s a mini-drawbridge over a side canal up ahead.”

  “Roger, that,” I whisper. Winn and I both left our digi-scramblers at home for this one. Sometimes it’s best to hide in plain sight.

  “Falcon,” Puo says to Winn, “if Queen Bee’s successful, prepare to fly the coop.”

  “Understood,” Winn says. “There’s churn over here too.”

  I prepare in my pocket the fingertip-sized chip with adhesive on one side. Puo made what mods he could to the software on the commercial off-the-shelf chip, but without his workshop and more tools he couldn’t disguise it well, so he added the adhesive. Normally we’d try to make it look like normal everyday junk and slip it into someone’s pocket where they’d overlook it.

  “The party’s headed your way,” Puo says. “You should reach the side canal before contact though.”

  I keep silent now and increase my pace to close the distance to the Indian agent. Fortunately, the crowd is thick enough on a Saturday night just before midnight that it shouldn’t look o
ff for me to weave through the crowd in a way that puts me behind the mark.

  We’re approaching the side canal, a four-foot wide canal that cuts between the buildings.

  “Now!” Puo says.

  As the Indian agent walks up to the mini-drawbridge, it suddenly starts opening.

  There are girly screams from those on the metal bridge in heels (the lone girl in sensible boots leaps off easily), and then there’s the general commotion of people trying to flee and others trying to help.

  I slip my hands out of my pockets, keep my head down and accidentally slam into the Indian woman agent in front of me, slipping my fingertips under the edge of her coat. “Ow!” I say, extracting my hand, and putting it promptly back into my pocket.

  The short Indian woman agent briefly turns around to see what hit her.

  “Sorry!” I say. “What’s going on?” I look beyond her toward the drawbridge.

  “Drawbridge malfunctioned,” she says in a normal Canadian accent. She turns back to help.

  I pretend to linger a bit and visibly decide to go another way.

  Once I’m far enough away, looking back every once and in a while at the commotion, I whisper to Puo, “The plant is live and growing.”

  “Roger, that,” Puo says. After a few second delay he says, “I’m receiving its fruit. Killing its life support now. Falcon, fly the coop.”

  Puo temporarily killed power to the chip to keep it from being detected going through Mountie security. It’s a small chip and Puo did what he could—but you have to start somewhere.

  Winn acknowledges the command, and we scatter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE NEXT DAY I sleep in until midmorning. No alarm. No booze. No thoughts of Winn. Just deep, mostly undisturbed sleep (although my back is still bothering me, forcing me to readjust throughout the night).

  It was wonderful.

  I head downstairs in comfy black sweatpants and a navy-blue shirt with thick, fluffy gray socks—fluffy is my new favorite criterion for socks. I love the feel of new clothes: soft, clean, no wear. But between the clothes, computer equipment, food, rent for the floating house, and now having to buy two new CitIDs, this is turning out to be a huge financial shit-hole.