Into Twilight (The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Book 1)

by P. R. Adams

  After she closed the door, I said, “We’re looking for physical items: papers, photographs, books. Anything that could reveal history they’ve eliminated electronically.”

  Ichi glided over the hardwood floor and started with the closet. She dug a palm-sized lamp out and attached it to her chest before brushing aside dresses and jackets. A few boxes were stacked on the far side of the closet. She opened the top one, revealing what looked like legal documents.

  I squinted unnecessarily. My cybernetic eyes already confirmed what I was seeing. “Stop. Scan those.”

  From the sides of her thighs, Ichi pulled two plastic sleeves and laid them flat. She pulled two slim bars from just above her ankles and attached one bar to each end of the sleeves. A faint green light kicked on from the bottom sleeve. She set the device on top of the open box, and the light grew brighter, then pulsed as it scanned deeper in the stack.

  She turned her attention to the drawers, which proved empty. Under the bed, she spotted an area where one of the throw rugs had more wear than anywhere else. She pulled it up.

  There was a square cut into the hardwood floor. She worked around the edges until something popped, and one side rose up enough to put her fingers beneath it. She pulled, revealing a safe embedded in the floor.

  A digital panel glowed aqua above a keypad with a thumb reader. It could be overcome, but we didn’t have time to play nice.

  I popped over to the call I’d made earlier and reconnected to Chan. “Chan?”

  Chan blinked rapidly. “You’re green.”

  “We’ve got a floor safe. Haas unit, keypad and biometrics.” I uploaded the video from Ichi’s discovery. “We’re going to need to brute force it.”

  Chan’s eyes darted around. “Keypad, bottom side. Should be an interface. Micro-GP. Cable into that on my signal.”

  “Ichi?”

  Ichi already had a cable out from the kit Abhishek had given me, black and slim. It ran from her belt to her hand, with a socket waiting for the appropriate interface. Four interfaces filled the palm of her other hand.

  “Which is Micro-GP?” Irritation strained her voice.

  “The rectangular one nearest your thumb, with the smooth edges. Hurry.” I immediately regretted pushing her to speed up.

  She slid the other interfaces back into the pouch before connecting the Micro-GP into the cable and set the cable flush with the keypad.

  I flipped my attention back to the connection with Chan. “She’s ready.”

  Chan leaned back slightly, revealing pursed lips and crossed arms. “This triggers security.”

  “How long?”

  “Security vehicles have a five-minute response time.”

  I flipped back to Ichi. “Can you get another box of documents scanned?”

  Ichi moved to the boxes, then set the first one aside and opened the second. She set the scanning device on top, and the green light pulses began anew.

  When she was back at the safe, I said, “Data gathering trumps discovery of intrusion. Safety trumps data gathering.”

  “Yes.”

  I brought up a timer and set it to five minutes. “Chan? We’re ready.”

  Chan tugged at a silver ball that glistened beneath black lips, then tapped and swiped. “Plug in.”

  Ichi plugged the cable in, and I started the timer. The digital readout glow flared as symbols flashed. At twelve seconds, an audible clank came over Ichi’s audio. She turned the latch and pulled the safe door open.

  Payday: ledgers, legal binders, and assorted folders.

  “Ichi, center your camera on them and just flip through. I’ll record what I see. Start with the top folder.”

  She pulled a dark blue folder out, set it on the floor, and opened it. Pockets on either side were stuffed with printed pages. She pulled the right-side papers out and flipped through them too fast for me to register what I was seeing. Between her camera and my eyes, we would be able to reconstruct some of what she found. She replaced the papers, pulled out the left side, and repeated the process, then moved on to the next folder.

  Chan whistled. “Hey! Something’s up.”

  I glanced at the timer. “We’ve got more than four minutes left.”

  “Not now. Activity on the Grid. Signals.”

  I focused on Ichi’s video. “Ichi, switch to a ledger. Flip through, then one of the legal binders.”

  Ichi set the papers back in the folder she’d been working on, then pulled a ledger out and flipped through it. She set that back and repeated with the top legal binder.

  “What next?” she asked.

  We needed more, but I didn’t like the feel of things. “Close it up.”

  She sealed the safe and covered it with the rug, then she moved to the scanning device, disassembled it, and moved the boxes back to the closet. She stepped back to examine the room for anything that looked out of place.

  “Signals,” Chan said. “Coming from the estate. Lots.”

  I stood and scanned the yard, jumping from IR to ultraviolet. Whatever was going on, it was inside the mansion. “Ichi, extract. Now.”

  Ichi slid the scanning device components back into place and stepped toward the door, then opened it. Something moved in the shadows to her left. Electricity arced along the wall, and she screamed, then fell back.

  Static filled her video feed.

  I forwarded the image on to Chan as I ran for the hedge. “Check this video! What is it?”

  “Uh…” Chan’s voice deepened. “Shit. Tracker. Robot. That’s a…” Gulping.

  I cleared the hedge and leapt for the wall, hitting about twelve feet up. My gloves gripped enough for me to find fingerholds and continue the climb. The bathroom window was too small for me. I angled for the window to the bedroom Ichi had checked first. I didn’t concern myself with finesse, instead shattering the glass with a strike that felt like hitting stone. I climbed in.

  Glass scraped beneath my feet as I ran for the door.

  Chan spoke again. “Reardon Universal Robotics. Military contractor. RUR-5.”

  I’d seen Reardon’s work in the field. Deadly.

  I shot through the door and pulled up short.

  Ichi was getting to her feet at the end of the hall: sluggish, woozy.

  Something clambered into view. Nearly my height, humanoid in shape, headless, skeletal in appearance, arms ending in three wide, flat fingers with narrow joints. Those fingers were hooked for gripping.

  I ran at it and leapt, feet first. The impact sent shivers along my back. I fell to the floor and the robot staggered back, off balance.

  Ichi groaned behind me.

  I got to my feet, felt clumsy and unbalanced, fought the sensation off.

  The robot brought one of its arms up—a brilliant blue flash.

  I ducked, but electricity rolled over my left shoulder and burned like fire.

  My left arm went limp.

  “Extract!” I shouted. My voice had to get through whatever Ichi was going through, or we were both dead.

  I closed with the robot, grabbed its other hand as it came up, and twisted it around just as the blue flash flared.

  Electricity coursed along its frame, and the smell of burning plastic filled the air. My right hand felt like I had plunged it into boiling water.

  I released the robot and fell back.

  It wobbled unsteadily, as if its sensors had been scrambled.

  I kicked it high, in the area of a human collarbone, knocking it away. I kicked again, ignoring the pain that told me my foot was broken. Another kick, and fire lanced up my leg. It was at the banister, righting itself, the shock from the electrical blast apparently gone.

  My foot couldn’t handle another kick. I pivoted on the other one, hit the thing mid-chest with an elbow. The blow numbed my arm but sent the robot over the banister, arms windmilling. It crashed onto the stairs below with a horrible clatter of plastic and shattered wood.

  I staggered down the hall. Ichi was gone. Sirens blared in the distance.
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  I hurried into the bedroom, then jumped out the window with all the grace of a drunk walrus. The impact brought new concepts of pain, but my legs held. Red and blue lights flared to the south. I hopped toward the hedge as quickly as I could and crashed into it, pushing through, trusting the suit to protect my human flesh from the clawing branches.

  I struggled to maintain my balance as I ran down the hill to the guesthouse. My left hand felt puffy and covered in an inch of rubber as I tried to retrieve the data device. On the third attempt, I managed to get a grip.

  Security vehicles were speeding toward the house when I reached the wall. My security system detection device was gone. I trusted Ichi had grabbed it.

  Climbing the wall proved the greatest challenge. There was enough functionality in my right arm to keep a grip on the wall at about waist height. By the time I reached the top of the wall, the worst of the tingling had gone out of my left hand.

  I rolled off the wall and crashed to the ground again, sure I was ruining Dr. Jernigan’s precious cybernetics. My clothing bag was gone, as was Ichi’s. I hopped through the woods, but the car was gone as well.

  Red and blue lights approached from the south.

  I turned back to the woods, hoping to find cover.

  The car backed out from behind another clump of trees farther north. The passenger door opened as the vehicle drew closer.

  I fell onto the seat with a groan and the car sped north.

  Ichi smiled at me from the driver’s seat. “You took a long time, Stefan-san. I was ready to abandon you.”

  I chuckled, then passed out.

  Chapter 11

  Heidi was waiting for me when we returned from Pennsylvania. Curled in the chair beneath the window, black outfit and pale skin lit only by computer glow and a sliver of light sneaking through the drapes, hands locked together like mechanical claws, she seemed drunk and focused on keeping her cool. Curry strangled her sweet cherry blossom perfume. Chan leaned back, arms resting against the cartoon cat pillows of the computer throne that had been a sofa, smirking. Until Heidi’s glare signaled that the adults needed some time alone.

  I settled into the chair across the coffee table from her and waited. Feeling had returned to my arms, but my hip joints and lower back ached and my ankle was shot. Cheerful music leaked from beneath Danny’s door, loud in the silence. It did nothing to ease the tension.

  Heidi’s lips parted. She hesitated, then breathed in softly. She trembled as she said, “Perhaps it makes sense if you explain it—a trip to Philadelphia, breaking into a very powerful family’s home, a high-speed chase with private security forces.” Her knuckles whitened.

  “It wasn’t a high-speed chase. We just used some aggressive maneuvers.” I tried to picture our rental getting above eighty. Not happening.

  “The break-in?”

  I waved that off. “Thieves foiled by a security robot.”

  “The unauthorized trip to Philadelphia?”

  “Unauthorized? I didn’t realize I needed authorization to run this operation.” I leaned forward. “You did hire me to run the operation, didn’t you?”

  The claws loosened, and she rubbed her brow with shaking hands. “I’m sure I don’t know why.”

  “You spent millions getting me out of that hellhole and onto my feet again, Heidi. You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t know I was your guy. Unless you were told you had to bring me onboard by someone else.”

  She leaned back, mouth agape, eyes just wide enough to give her away.

  “Not the Agency. I get it.” For the first time, I felt a sense of confidence about what was going on and that allowed me to relax. “Look, we weren’t identified. Chan had to have told you there was nothing on the Grid about us. And if we come away with anything from this break-in, we’re ahead of the game.”

  “What could you possibly gain from getting into that place?”

  “There are more gaps than data in Weaver’s history. Fill in even a few of those gaps, and maybe we can find a way inside her security. Why go to so much trouble to hide your past?”

  Heidi sighed dramatically. “Privacy is the domain of the wealthy. Let it go.”

  That was classic Stovall. Did he exert influence on her after all? “Not when it could be the difference between this operation succeeding and failing. We need to know who this woman is.”

  Heidi pushed out of the chair, for a moment steady and poised. “What happened to you, Stefan? Why this sudden pang of patriotism?”

  “It’s not patriotism. I just want my team to succeed.” I did, didn’t I? I couldn’t be sure.

  She trudged to the kitchenette, grabbing the back of chairs with bone-white talons. When she reached the sink, she leaned against it, hunched. “You know what’s wrong with you?” Her voice quavered.

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You think you know everything. You think you’re better than everyone else. You think that just because you push yourself that little bit extra, you deserve more. You think you can rail against the foolish and mediocre, you can rise above.” She twisted her head around on her scrawny neck to face me. “But it doesn’t work that way. We’re all born with ceilings, Stefan, and you reached yours long ago. You’ll never be anything more than a cold-blooded murderer, destined to die alone and on the run.”

  My mouth dried. It was another of Stovall’s classic tirades, canned and reprocessed, the dismissive commentary of someone born into just enough of a position to think he could rise above the plebes. It was my father’s words, spat out over a can of cheap beer.

  “I think we’re done here.” I got to my feet, hating the fragility of my body at that moment.

  I could feel Heidi’s eyes on me the entire way to the door. She hissed as my hand settled on the knob. “They want to meet with you. Tomorrow morning. Be ready by seven.”

  “They?”

  “The men funding this.” Men dripped with venom.

  I crossed the hall, still trying to figure that one out. Why meet with me now? Had I gotten too close to something? Had they been behind the assassin I stopped?

  The suite was silent and dark and once again smelled like the cleaning robots had just left. No light showed beneath Ichi’s door. She had talked about taking a walk when we’d pulled up to the hotel, but she’d looked ready to collapse.

  I stripped out of my outfit and stumbled into the bathroom. In the bright light, my ankle looked fine. As advanced as they were, the cybernetics might have something analogous to a healing mechanism.

  I tested the limits of the shower’s hot water. When I stepped out of the bathroom, Ichi was waiting, curled on the end of my bed, chin resting on knees, tracking me with bloodshot eyes. She was in shorts and tank top again. An angry, red welt stood out on her left forearm and another was visible just below her armpit, disappearing into the tank top. I dressed, trying not to let the pain and stiffness show through.

  Ichi wiped away a tear. “Danny said that Heidi yelled at you.”

  “He could hear over that music he had blaring?”

  “Is it because I failed?”

  I lowered myself next to the pillows at the head of the bed. “No. It’s because I didn’t ask for permission to run things the way I want to.”

  Ichi grunted, apparently surprised. Her lips ticked up in a smile. “The data we gathered, I have put it into your data device. There are a lot of good images. Maybe if we reviewed that, you would have your answers?”

  “I have to get up early—”

  Her head drooped.

  “All right. Sure. We have a little bit of time. Let’s take a look.” My head was pounding already, but she needed reassurances that she hadn’t failed, and half an hour wasn’t going to make 7 a.m. any less painful.

  She skipped back into the room with our data devices, handing mine to me and settling at my side. “Your eye recordings are the best.” She held up a black plastic lipstick case that bubbled at one end. The glass tip was smoky and deformed. “The electricity may have damage
d my camera.”

  I set the data device on my lap, powered it on, and tried to put my head into what we were doing. She powered hers on and brought up a video interface. I searched around and finally found what she was doing, but I could see her watching anxiously.

  She smiled, trying to seem patient. “Stefan-san, slave your system to mine. I will show you what I have done.”

  I passed command over to her and watched. Soon, she had images on one side of each display and reconstructed documents on the other side. She flipped through them, now smiling sincerely. “You see? Not just the scanning device, but also what was recorded from the safe. Here, this is the ledger. You see?”

  She flipped through a few pages, and I immediately got the sense of it. Dates going back fifty-two years, company names, debits and credits. It was handwritten, with nothing more than the vaguest of notations: a debit noted as “Galatea 20%” and “1.2m” as the amount. At the bottom, “1.42m. Profit.” The completed entries were like that: several lines showing money out in large sums, and a few lines showing larger sums coming back. In almost every case, there was a substantial profit.

  “These are investments,” I said. “Very substantial and successful ones going back decades. Why keep them in a ledger like this?”

  “In Japan, records are required for tax—”

  “These aren’t detailed enough for tax purposes. It’s numbers going out and in. No records of how that money was moving around. You’d need funds transfer information. This is—” I looked at the final complete ledger page. “I don’t know. Personal reference material? I doubt it’s legal. They’re clearly making money on investments, but this wouldn’t be good enough to file for tax purposes.”

  Ichi looked disappointed. “What about the papers taken from the folders?”

  My device displayed pages with dense legal type. Forms, contracts, digital signatures: letters of incorporation, liquidation of assets, transfer of rights. A few of the company names popped out.

  I stopped when I recognized the date and name of one of the corporations. “Go back to the ledgers.”

  She brought the ledgers up and flipped through them again.

  “Stop.” I tapped the screen. “Right there. See the date? December 17, 2098. The name? Fairfax Associated Shipping? Now check that last document we looked at.”