The alarm sounded.
“I told you you were a lousy spy.”
“That’s not me,” she said. “It’s downtown Wall Street. This place is always getting robbed. It’s an island of money surrounded by an ocean of homelessness, poverty, and despair.”
“Why don’t they relocate?”
“It’s cheaper to get robbed. The furnishings and artworks are all cheap mockups. Anything valuable is hidden in rooms like this where no one would care to look.”
Adrian took the sheet out of her hands, gazed at it. “Even if they did, it’s lawyer-ese and math only an accountant could translate. What is this? Insider trading secrets? The government so desperate for tax revenue they’ve taken to playing the market for extra capital?”
“Adrian! How the hell…! Just forget you had that bright idea, okay? Otherwise I have to come back and kill you.”
“In that case I think it only fair to tell you I don’t just date spies. My other girlfriend is a Ninja Assassin.”
“Well then, I’d have to kill her too, and honestly, I have nothing against her. Anyone who could put up with you has my sincerest sympathy.”
The alarm was really getting on his nerves. “You couldn’t kill the alarm? The guards you didn’t mind putting down.”
“The alarm is good for us. It rattles people, makes it hard for them to think straight. We’re professionals. We can keep our cool under fire. Trust me, it’s the best thing to happen to us in years.”
“I’ll overlook that cheap shot for now. Where are we headed? I should tell you the elevators are likely to be down; it’s the first thing I would have thought of and I’m not even a spy. And the stairwell is likely out of commission as well. Easy enough to disable the keycards on each floor. Maybe you thought I was joking when I said not even a rat could get out of here.”
“We’re not taking the elevator or the stairwell.”
“Well, I’m not jumping off the roof, I’ll tell you that right now. I want to BASE jump, I watch NAVY SEALS training films on the military channel, like every other sane person.”
“We’re not taking the roof.”
“If you were alive when Houdini was around, he’d have retired.”
“Follow me,” she said.
She fast-footed it to the windows facing the city, unhinged her backpack from her shoulders, took out the glass cutting tools. First the big circular magnet. Then the stretch-line around the magnet to trace the much bigger circle. Then she pulled back on the glass. “A little help,” she said, straining.
“I’m not part of this interactive generation. I prefer to watch.”
She dropped the glass and rolled it away from her, not particularly caring where it landed or what it crashed into. She was entirely focused by then on firing her harpoon gun at the helicopter with the sharpshooter trying to line up a shot.
Before he could get one off, she was slack rope walking the wire over to the helicopter, and shooting the guy with the assault rifle with her Glock 26 Gen 3 9MM. The guy balanced precariously at the edge of the helicopter. When she made it to the helicopter, she helped him to fall the rest of the way out.
The panicked pilot, with his helicopter floundering at the end of the line, looked all the more agitated at seeing her enter his craft. She reached into her satchel again, pulled out another harpoon gun, fired back Adrian’s way. Set one of those railway carts on it, albeit a miniature one that looked like it might have additional modifications as well. It shot its way to Adrian using its rocketry as a propellant. With the thing still trying to barrel inside the building, he caught it, pivoted the top tray, situated himself on the cart, chest down, and shot back towards the helicopter.
She had a gun on the pilot the whole time, instructing him to keep the line taught, would be his guess.
Once Adrian was in the helicopter, she disengaged the lines and told the pilot, “Just set us down on the street and you can be on your way.”
The pilot didn’t give her any argument.
Seconds later, he released his human cargo on the street, and took off, more or less as the cops, the firetrucks, and the ambulances were arriving.
Monique struck her pose and froze like a statue. And suddenly it dawned on Adrian what the silver paint was for. He followed suit.
As the firemen came running up to the building one of them shouted, “Hey, get to hell out of here, you two.”
The other one said, “Ah, leave them alone. These guys are the highlight of my day.” He took Adrian’s fedora off, dropped a twenty in it. He was going to set it down when he realized the wind was gusting and it would just blow away. So he emptied all the change from his pocket on top the twenty before setting the hat down, to pin them both to the sidewalk. “There you go, pal.”
The two firemen continued on into the building.
Between the office workers fleeing the building with the alarms going off and the emergency personnel swarming the building, going the opposite direction, the island of calm that was Adrian and Monique proved placating enough for both parties that they got more coins tossed their way. Of course, that was in between the hysterical screaming, the tears from the civilians, and the agitated remarks coming from the emergency personnel.
“That’s Wall Street for you. God forbid someone lights a fire during trading hours.” The fireman checked his watch in the dawn light, making the most of its glowing scuba-diving features before heading into the building.
With the hubbub at its height, Adrian and Monique slipped away before the circling helicopter and the gesturing pilot screaming into his headset could get anyone to pay attention among all the pandemonium. Adrian tossed the coins in the fountain adorning the plaza before donning his hat. He wasn’t sure if he got a wish for each coin, but he only had one in mind: to survive another day as a free man.
Then it dawned on him. He started stripping his clothes and setting them at the rim of the fountain. She stared at him briefly as if he was mad, but she was a spy and mental gear changes come pretty quickly to these guys. So she aped his actions.
They washed the silver off them in the fountain and carried on like a pair of frolicking teen lovers. Soon they were getting more coins tossed at them. Perhaps people figured this was their latest performance piece to help calm shattered nerves in the vicinity. The alarms still sounding in the background, and the high-pitched screams of the sopranos in the crowd fleeing the scene were definitely doing a number on his nerves.
“For the record, Adrian, I didn’t shoot those security guards. I just put them to sleep for a good long while. I said that to fuck with you.”
“Like a day in your life isn’t enough of a mind fuck.”
He grabbed his clothes. She, still following his lead, grabbed hers and they did a comic quick-dress standing on the rim of the fountain that earned them a few more coins. Charlie Chaplin would have been impressed, but then he would have only been pretending to get stuck on his leggings and trying feebly to keep balance hopping on one leg.
The helicopter pilot circling them the whole time, ranting and gesturing, got appreciative waves, blown kisses, and claps from the crowd who were grateful for the pointer to the de-stressor of the drama in the fountain in the middle of what was likely coming across to many of them as the latest terrorist incident.
On the move again, past the appreciative crowd, which they were polite enough to wave to, Adrian and Monique switched from power-walking to a jog. They continued to pick up speed the further away they got from the crime scene and any chance of calling extra attention to themselves by running.
They were halfway inside Central Park before they’d run and power-walked off the adrenaline. As they slowed, Adrian said, “You think you can help me with my problem now?”
“What do you think we were doing?” She handed him the paper she’d stolen from the Wall Street trading center.
“I thought we agreed this was just the government funding its latest covert operation.”
“It is, but I could have
stolen anyone’s insider secrets for that,” she said, squatting down and reaching into her duffel again and pulling out the pieces of a high-velocity rifle, which she was assembling. The rest of the bag was filled with nothing but shells.
“You can’t fire a sniper rifle in central park. Forget it’s against the law; it’s in bad taste.”
“I put my problem on hold for you. The least you could do is not give me lip about it.”
Adrian stared at the paper in his hand. “So what am I looking at, really?”
“It’s an IPO. The business hasn’t gone public yet, but when it does, it’s expected to value out at close to a trillion dollars.”
Adrian whistled. “What do they do?”
Ignoring him, she brought her wrist watch to her mouth and talked into it. “We good to go?”
“Yeah.”
“Potential civilian casualties?”
There was dead air on the line, which she interpreted just fine. “I’ll give you a minute to finish clearing them out.”
She loaded the first of the shells, waited for the call back.
“Yeah, we’re good,” came the voice over her wristwatch.
Using the assembled rifle, she fired off the first shot at one of the apartment buildings surrounding the park, the San Remo. The modified shell made it all the way to a high-rise window before incinerating the apartment to hell. As miniature explosives with a calculated blast radius went, Adrian thought it was safe to say it qualified as next generation.
Adrian hit her with another of his “What the fuck?” faces. “Is this your spy job, or do you moonlight repossessing apartments?”
She ignored him, taking out another apartment, in the adjacent twin tower of the San Remo, on the same floor. Adrian stared hang-jawed at apartment two going up in flames. “You certainly make urban terrorists look damn uninspired.”
He grabbed his scalp and squeezed. The gesture made no sense, since if he couldn’t get his brain to work, applying a hand-made vice to it certainly wasn’t going to rectify the situation. “I read somewhere there are apartments in that building that go for fifty-nine million. Please tell me you blew up one of those. If anyone deserves to take a hit it’s one of those bastards.”
She spoke into her watch as if she was deaf to his die-for adlib. “We good?”
About a minute later she got back, “Yeah, we’re good.”
Monique relaxed so much it was like watching her morph into one of her other personas she used often in her spy work.
Finally, the dawning. “Ah, I get it now,” Adrian said. “You’re taking out terrorist cells that have been activated in advance of the Tribeca Film Festival. Someone airing a film that doesn’t set right with our many enemies in the Mideast?”
“Two for two, Adrian. If you ever get tired fending off the future, we could use you in the present.”
“No thanks. I could use all the lead time I can get. I’m slowing down in my old age.”
“You’re not old, Adrian, you’re thirty-eight. And you’re making a better show of it than Klepsky is making of forty-three. Though with four girlfriends, I could see you feeling old.”
“What happened to ‘I only kill if I have to’?” Adrian said, watching the black smoke billowing out of the combusted apartments in the distance.
“Ordinarily, it would make more sense for us to capture, detain, and question. But we had all the intel on them we needed. Figured it would play better. This way it looks like they were sabotaged by someone in their own ranks. By sewing derision we can play divide and conquer from a distance. Especially since it’s going to be next to impossible to get close to their comrades in the Mideast.”
“They could have had the bombs with them and decided to do what damage they could when someone walked in on them.”
“Only they didn’t.”
“And when your agency gets the bill for the damage?”
“We won’t. We don’t exist. Though that part was more for you. Know how you feel about the one percent paying their share. Maybe if they get the idea they’ll pay one way or the other…”
Adrian snorted. “That’s more Klepsky’s axe to grind than mine. He hates them with a passion. Me, I don’t see much difference in being in first class instead of second or third class, when the Titanic is going to the bottom. Dead is dead.”
“I’m guessing that logic might register a little more after today.”
He glanced around at the park. Most of the hysterical civilians had fled and taken their screaming with them. Some hung back in the shadows of the trees filming with their cell phones, probably posting live to youtube. “And the public outcry when it hits the news, as I’m sure it already has? Not like we’re wearing disguises exactly.”
“We were never here, Adrian, no matter what comes out. Anything hitting the internet live is already being erased, and not just from the internet but from the cell phones broadcasting the live feeds, the cameras around the park hidden in the trees. Sometimes it’s nice to be part of the one percent, or at least working for them.”
He shook his head. He hated being left speechless. “You still haven’t told me what I’m looking at,” he said, flicking the paper in his hand at her.
She started breaking down the weapon and stowing it back in her bag, talking to him absently as she did so, and with her eyes and attention focused elsewhere.
“Based on all the criteria you gave me, that’s the company most likely to be funding Golem Guy.”
“And why, pray tell, is your intelligence any better than ours?” Tired pretending he could ever make sense of the paper no matter how long he stared at it, he shoved it in a pocket inside his trench coat.
“You’ve heard of money-laundering businesses? Money-laundering banks? Well, this is a money-laundering conglomerate. As far as we can tell, every hi-tech business that falls under their umbrella is a legitimate business, carving out a very viable niche for itself in biotech. Each one of the hundred and fifty plus individual corporations probably sits atop a multibillion dollar portfolio of products inside of a couple years.”
“And yet it’s all smoke screen?”
“So it appears.”
“For what?”
She picked up the bag with her stowed equipment, or what was left of it. As she stood her face was close enough to his to warrant a kiss. But stalwart professionals that they both were, they kept their minds on topic. Or at least she did.
“Altreman, the oligarch behind it all, is pushing a hundred, a former Nazi and Stalinist, or rather, he and his family money helped back both enterprises. Back then he was happy to fund Hitler’s forays into the supernatural, because he knew this day would come sooner or later. Far be it from him to turn his nose up at the supernatural, or let anything get in the way of his quest for immortality.”
She broke from their mirror-pose formation, putting an end to his fantasy about a pending kiss, and walked alongside him across the grass in the direction of the path and the trees.
The sight of the anonymous apartments still in flames and smoking as if two small planes had crashed into them was what put the idea in his head. No one would think there was any connection between those two apartments either. “So, by breaking the quest up into a hundred and fifty plus individual searches, no one was likely to see the synergy he was seeking from all of them?”
“That’s how we read it. Of course, like you, we were plenty motivated to read in. We don’t mind big money yanking our strings and making us do a jig for them, providing it’s a dance we wanted to do all along.”
“I thought all of biotech was focused on life-extension in one way or another. How hard could it have been to make a connection?” Adrian said. Looking a gift horse in the mouth was a bit of a forte of his.
“We’re still not entirely sure how all these businesses fit together into a cohesive whole pushing Altreman towards his inevitable goal. Maybe some of them are there just to keep us from connecting all the dots. Or maybe…”
“…he
doesn’t much care what immortality solution someone comes up with for him, as happy to occupy a robot’s body as a hybrid’s as a genetically enhanced human’s,” Adrian said, finishing her thought for her.
“That would explain the pieces that don’t fit. Some of the businesses are devoted to engineering new materials, for anything from spaceships…”
“To bodies that can last a million years.”
“But then that would mean uploading his consciousness for later transfer to a robotic body,” Monique said. “And that’s the one business he doesn’t own.”
“Not under the name Altreman, he doesn’t, or not as part of the conglomerate. You can bet that’s where the money’s being funneled. The scanning technologies capable of doing that are probably harder to procure in his timeframe than all the other puzzle pieces, explaining why he’d need to bleed the other businesses dry to meet his timeline.”
“I suspect you’re right,” she said, “being as he’s a major investor in all the cutting edge Chinese and Japanese robotics firms, and numerous medical firms specializing in growing organs and other body parts. He’d be well ahead of the learning curve in those areas.”
“I can’t believe we’re finally at the root of this thing!” He could hear the relief in his voice, even if he couldn’t fully surrender to it.
She smiled at him. “You’re happy because this saves you from an ugly twist of fate, having to become a serial killer, just to catch the bad guy.”
“Forgive me for being elated at dodging that bullet. Altreman is the only clear mastermind who could have pulled this off, not just because he has the right outlook, the right future-leaning bent, but because he’s the only one with the right resources.”
“I haven’t heard you this excited in a while. Something tells me there’s more to it than not having to stick a knife in someone.”
“You could say that.” He flicked the paper at her. “The key you’ve given me… It doesn’t just close the door on the worst future imaginable, it opens the door on the best of all possible worlds.”
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 18