by John Bruni
“Including us?”
“Unfortunately. Tell me about your set up.”
Skank briefly told Randall their plan, and after, he flipped through the address book. “That narrows it down a bit. Bridges lives south of here, so your first sub-team probably trashed his place already.”
~
“What the fuck did he just say?” Edward asked.
Coppergate offered one of his weird smiles. “I believe he said that your mansion has been, to use the parlance, ‘trashed.’”
“Goddammit, Richard. I heard what he said.”
Coppergate fingered one of his teeth. “Temper, young Edward.”
The blood fell from Edward’s face as he realized that not only had he cursed, he’d also taken the name of the Lord in vain.
He turned away from Coppergate and accessed his mobile account. He dialed 911, hoping to get someone down to save his home.
~
“Also, your friend Necro Cock must have gotten O’Neill’s place. He’s way north of here, the first mansion.”
~
William grew pale, and he accessed his own mobile account. He wondered if he should call the authorities first, or home, to see if his wife had made it out.
George couldn’t breathe from the shock. Whoever had trashed their place probably found the stash of dirty pictures he’d drawn of the girl in his English class. They might have even read his diary, where he wrote about some of his darkest sexual fantasies. They might have even found his hidden porn files in the closet. His face turned red at the thought.
~
“That leaves Coppergate, Drake, Taylor and Wingate,” Randall said. “Drake’s place is the closest, then Taylor’s, then Wingate’s. Shall we?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Okay, then we’ll pick up some of your guys and then drive around to the others to tell them their new destinations. We’ll take one for ourselves. Which one do you want?”
“I like the sound of Coppergate,” Skank said. “It sounds really rich. Like that building downtown.”
“That one’s out of our way. Necro Cock’s got a better shot at it. I think we should try something closer. Tell you what, since we’re the only one with a car, let’s give Drake and Taylor to the rest of these guys. We’ll take the farthest that’s still on the southeast side. Wingate’s place.”
~
“Thank Christ your guards showed up,” Wingate said. “They’re the best, right?”
“Aside from the ones I have guarding my own home,” Coppergate said.
“That will definitely suit me.”
Coppergate steepled his decrepit fingers together. “I think things are about to become very interesting.”
~
“Wingate.” Skank tasted the word, rubbing it against the roof of her mouth. “I like that, too. It sounds English.”
She took a gun from the fallen, headless officer, and Randall laid down some cover fire for the surviving members of her team to make it to the limo. All that remained were four bashed and bloody punks, one of whom was Pisser. Blood stained his beard, running from his mouth, dotted with bits of his chipped teeth.
“I’m all right,” he said. Slobber drooled down his chin. “They were dentures, anyway.”
Chapter 13
1
Steve finished his story, and Jack leaned back in his chair, thinking. Finally, he said, “I have an idea. It might take a while, but I think I can get into your head and access your original LiveStream.”
“Uh, okay. That sounds kind of dangerous.”
“It’s not. Just don’t fight me, and you should be good.”
Steve didn’t like the sound of that. Still, Jimmy trusted this guy, and they didn’t have many options. They had to go ahead with this.
“You want a trank?” Jack asked. “It’ll just put you out for an hour, and I’ll be able to pick through your mind a lot quicker.”
That sounded like an excellent idea, but Steve knew he couldn’t risk being sedated. It would be better to suffer through it and still be conscious. “I’ll be all right.”
“Okay.” Jack sifted through a drawer until he came out with a pill bottle. He popped one and sat down next to Steve.
“What was that?”
“It’s going to help me leave my body and enter my wifi connection,” Jack said. “From there, I’ll be able to get into your head and take a look at things. I’m pretty sure I can clean up the images from your LiveStream, and if I can do that, we’ll at least know what we’re dealing with.”
Steve blinked, unable to understand what Jack had just told him. He’d been on the force for many years, and he knew all sorts of fucked up things people could do on drugs, but this one? He couldn’t get his head around it.
Jack must have seen his confusion. “Look, just don’t think about it. You’ll probably feel me rooting around in there, and your natural instinct will be to push me out. I’m just asking that you don’t fight me once I’m in, okay?”
“I don’t think I’d know how to fight you,” Steve said.
“You will. Like I said, instinct.”
Steve cleared his throat. “Okay, then. I’ll do my best.”
“Just relax. Don’t think about anything, if you can help it.”
“No problem.” Except as soon as Jack had said not to think of anything, Steve couldn’t help but think about everything. Clearing his mind became impossible, especially when he thought of a stranger rummaging around in his head. He didn’t like the idea of someone having access to his most intimate memories. He also felt repulsed by the idea that Jack might stumble upon memories of him jerking off or picking his nose and wiping his findings under the car seat.
Jack closed his eyes and settled back into his chair. The drug took hold of him, and he could feel himself rising from his dissolving body, and he suddenly became aware of all the energy flowing around him. Information streams zipped by him as he felt himself getting sucked into his wifi connection. Then, he had to force himself to take direction. He didn’t want to go to the virtual city, so he pushed himself toward Steve, hoping to be caught up in the web of Steve’s ‘net access.
2
Steve watched Jack, expecting some kind of rush to overcome himself. Nothing happened. He glanced over to Jimmy. “What now?”
Jimmy shrugged. “We wait.”
“I’m not feeling anything. Are you sure this is going to work?”
“Jack’s the best. Of course it will work.” Jimmy leaned back and lit up a cigarette, blowing SyntheSmoke up at the ceiling, where the vents sucked it away to be recycled somewhere into energy for Jack’s generator. Jimmy could never figure out how it worked, but it sure seemed to.
“I don’t know about you, but I could sure use a drink,” Steve said. “Jack have any here?”
“Sure. I’m sure he won’t mind.” Jimmy stood and started looking for Jack’s whiskey.
Steve felt slightly more relieved, knowing that booze would help him ease into his situation. He felt out of place in Jack’s basement. Nothing would make him happier than relaxing at Lenny’s, worrying only about his own money problems, not this crazy game. He—
Something tickled at his frontal lobe, but when he touched his forehead to soothe it, he couldn’t reach it. It irritated him, like whenever he got an itch behind his kneecap. He wanted nothing more than to eradicate the sensation when he remembered what probably caused it. He forced himself to stay calm and let Jack do his work.
3
As soon as Jack’s consciousness came close enough to Steve’s system, he felt himself tugged in, kind of like being too close to a black hole. A rush of memories vied for his attention, but he pushed them away because he didn’t want what the brain had to offer. He needed the artificial wiring instead.
A wall of flame erupted from Steve’s mind, almost too hot to bear. Jack felt the heat push him back, and he flinched. He cursed to himself and forced a message out to Steve: Stop fighting me. Let me do my work.
The
flames drew back instantly and snuffed out. Though telepathy at this point remained impossible, Jack felt certain that the power of suggestion could hold sway over a target. Maybe someday, he could actually plant instructions in someone’s head—and what a glorious day that would be!—but for now, that day was far off.
He accessed Steve’s social media and found most of it locked off. Whoever had done this knew what the fuck they were doing. Then again, these rich fucks could certainly afford the best. Jack gritted with no teeth and tried to force his way through the locks.
It took a lot of effort, but Jack also knew what the fuck he was doing. Instead of trying to go through the barriers, he sought out the backdoor and hacked his way through that. Once in, he started filtering through Steve’s social media, looking for the LiveStream. It didn’t take him long to find the part he needed: the observation room.
A lot had been cut out of the stream, or obscured, but Jack could fix the edits with no problem. He’d had a lot of experience repairing redacted government files, and finding the missing pieces wasn’t a problem.
Jack cleaned up the faces behind the glass, and he recognized a lot of them. Jimmy had been right about most of them. There they were: Richard Coppergate, Charles Wingate, Elizabeth Drake and Edward Bridges. He worked on the other faces and discovered that William O’Neill and his son George were also there. Odd. Kids weren’t usually involved. Unless this was Bring Your Kid to Murder Day.
Coppergate’s assistant proved to be a bit more difficult to figure out, but after a while, Jack found her. Cynthia Baker. Not a big name. No record. No connections. No military background. Just a person.
Then, Samuel Maxwell Barnabas, III, came through clearly. Jack should have known. He’d seen Barnabas on the news a lot, and he’d made quite a character out of himself. An intense hunter like that? Why wouldn’t he be involved?
The one that surprised him most, however, was Martin Taylor. As far as Jack knew, Taylor had a ton of money, but he kept to himself. No showboating like Barnabas. No cutthroat dealings like Coppergate. No society gatherings like O’Neill. No extravagant philanthropy like Wingate. No rags-to-riches story like Bridges. Hell, he didn’t even have sex appeal, like Drake. How could someone so bland be involved in this game?
Okay, now he had to find out everything he could on the contestants. He used the info Steve had given him on what he could remember first, knocking the easy ones out of the park. It took him a moment to work through the others, and when he finished, he just couldn’t believe it. These savages hadn’t just picked anyone this year; two of them had thrown their own sons into the mix. Randall Marsh was really Samuel Maxwell Barnabas, IV, and then there was poor, insane Barry Taylor.
Jack noted with some amusement that Martin still thought Barry was institutionalized. He’d definitely been paying the bills, but Barry had been out on the streets for quite some time. Some loony bins just didn’t have scruples.
The toughest one to find out about was Toby James Munger. He got a date of birth, a brief description, some insignificant details about his early life and not much else. The guy didn’t even have much of a social media network. Sure, he had the same implants everyone else did, but he didn’t seem to use them. In this day and age, everyone absolutely had to share every waking moment of their lives with anyone who might be watching them. The idea pervaded society so much that people just didn’t pay attention to their own LiveStreams; they just let them go. Toby never even turned his on. That implied a couple of things: either he had no interest in sharing himself with the world, or he had something to hide.
Given the choice between the two, Jack always suspected the latter.
Now that he knew the players, he needed to know the location. He used his own connection to access public records, looking for blueprints for each of these people’s mansions. Then, taking measure of the rooms he could see in Steve’s LiveStream, he compared it to all the blueprints. Automatically, it canceled out everyone except for Coppergate and Wingate. Getting down to the details, he managed to determine they were at Wingate’s mansion.
Perfect. Now he needed just a little more information. Still using his own connection, he accessed satellite footage and centered it down on Wingate’s address. Sure enough, there were guards. Lots of them. From the street view, he looked around and saw they had machine guns.
Not good. Still, he thought he had a good idea as to how to work their way around this. He drifted out of Steve’s mind and back toward his own body, waiting to reconnect with himself.
4
Jack’s eyes popped open. “I hope you motherfuckers like my whiskey.”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “Even poured you one.” He pointed to a glass with three fingers of booze in it.
“Well thanks, Jimmy. Thank you for giving me my own whiskey.” He downed it all in one go.
Steve ignored both of them. “What did you find out?”
Jack gave them a quick rundown of what he’d discovered, and he used the nearest computer to show them first hand. He introduced them to each of the contestants involved before he moved on to the rich people. He pulled up files on each of them and transferred them into Steve and Jimmy’s respective minds.
“There is one guy you should know more about, though,” Jack said to Steve. “Just so you know what, exactly, we’re up against.”
He pulled up a picture of a young man with a full head of dark hair slicked back, complete with baby blue eyes that could have made a woman’s panties drip down her legs. He had a narrow nose, and his lips stretched out in a roguish grin. The teeth behind them were straight and angel white. A well-manicured hand held a cigarette loosely between the index and middle fingers. “Handsome” just didn’t cover the power of his attractiveness. He could have been a movie star.
“Do you know this guy?” Jack asked.
Steve shook his head. The guy looked somewhat familiar to Jimmy, but he couldn’t place it.
“This picture was taken in the year 2000,” Jack said, “when this guy was thirty years old. You’ll probably recognize him more here.”
He flicked the image away, and another one replaced it. A decrepit old man in a wheelchair with milky white eyes and metallic piranha teeth. They couldn’t mistake this one.
“No way that’s the same guy,” Jimmy said.
“That’s impossible,” Steve said. “He’d have to be 230 years old. I’m not sure of the world record, but it’s not even close to that.”
“Actually, the record belongs to a guy from China,” Jack said. “Dude lived to be 186, but he’s been dead for fifty years. Coppergate has done his best to hide his background from everyone. He has some of the best computer guys in the world handling it for him. Not as good as me, of course.”
“I don’t believe that,” Jimmy said. “Even if he’s got guys hiding his past, the fact remains that no one can live to be 230 years old.”
“Given the right amount of knowledge and an astronomical bank account, a man could probably live forever,” Jack said. “You’re right, I find it hard to believe, myself. But I’ve researched this motherfucker for most of my life. All avenues lead back to the same information.”
“I’ve been after him for a few years myself,” Jimmy said. “How come I never found this?”
“Because you’re not as slick as me. I can show you my homework later, if you want, but if we’re going after this guy for real, we should know what made him the way he is, just so you know how ruthless he can be.”
Jimmy turned on his mental recorder and prepared himself to take notes for what might one day be a profile piece. His paper would never upload such a story, but it would be nice just to have this information.
“Coppergate was born into wealth. His father came from a long line of steel barons. His grandfather made the family money during World War II, although he got his start-up cash from bootlegging during the Great Depression. However, when Coppergate was a kid, his father made a lot of lousy investments. He lost a lot of money and wound u
p being investigated by the SEC. He went to jail for a long time, leaving his kid to fend for himself, since his mom was a lush.”
~
“Oh, come on, Richard,” William said. “Be a sport and turn the volume back up on McNeil’s feed.”
“No,” Coppergate said. He didn’t look at anyone else, and his tone reverberated throughout the room.
Edward wondered about what the black guy had said. Could Richard Coppergate actually be that old? It didn’t make any sense. He remembered from his childhood, when his parents made him read the Bible, that a lot of people back when time began lived a super-long time, almost a thousand years, but he knew it was probably symbolism. No, Coppergate couldn’t have lived for more than two centuries. That kind of thing just didn’t happen.
He wished he could hear more about Coppergate’s history, though.
“Are they going to reveal secrets?” William asked. “I don’t care about secrets. I just want to know what they’re saying.”
Coppergate whirled on him, his fangs bared. “I do not wish to hear what they have to say.”
William started, eyes wide. He quickly looked away from Coppergate, his mouth pursed shut.
Coppergate turned back to the screens, and for the first time in centuries, he felt his eyes start to burn. If he had tear ducts, he thought he might have cried. Through the conflicting waves of emotion in his guts, he still felt a cold objectivity showing through. He thought it an odd sensation, but he didn’t dare face the others. Not now.
~
“Coppergate and his mother lived in a tiny flat near what would eventually be called the Sleaze Strip,” Jack continued. “This infuriated the kid. He thought the Coppergates should be throwing extravagant parties, not eking out a shoddy living on the shitty side of town. When his father committed suicide in prison, Coppergate swore to himself that such a thing would never happen to him. He turned to a life of crime, just like his grandfather before him. When he had enough money, he went into the security business. Perfect timing, since 9/11 had just happened. Money poured into his firm, and he soon found himself on the forefront of the war on terror. He lucked out even more. About 2030, he invested in a company that eventually found a way to implant the ‘net into people’s heads. By 2035, he was the richest man in the world.