by Wren Weston
At the mouth of the alley, a petite black woman with thick, natural curls, an electric-blue coat, and knee-high red boots strolled toward them. The young woman reminded her of Pax in movements and Jewel in beauty.
“Toxic, check for a security system,” Tristan barked when she stopped before the truck.
The woman scampered over to the side door of the building and pulled out her palm, passing it over the doorframe several times before punching furiously on the keypad. She twisted her ankles back and forth, clicking her heels, while she worked, and Lila heard the smack of bubblegum.
Tristan drifted away from the truck, stalking deeper into the alley toward a bundle of blankets. He squatted in the muck, and his murmurs echoed against the buildings on either side. Something changed hands. Dirty knit caps bobbed in agreement above the blanket, and Tristan drifted back to the truck.
“Spies?” she asked.
“No. Too young for it. Told them to run if more people showed up.”
“What’d you give them? Flyers?”
“The number for a shelter, not that they’ll go, and a little cash. I’ve seen them around. They’ll buy food with it.” He turned back to watch Toxic’s progress. “We’ve never actually given those fliers out—not that it hasn’t stopped Bullstow from asking everyone in the neighborhood about them. It’s making my people nervous.”
“It should make you nervous. They’re already looking into the nitro heist and the camera vandalism around Bullstow.”
Tristan raised an eyebrow. “How did you know about that?”
“It’s what I do,” Lila said, checking her Colt.
A muffled beep sounded inside the restaurant. Toxic turned, bowed to her little crowd, and added a flourish with her free hand.
“Faster than me,” Lila admitted, pitching her voice deeper. “Good job.”
Toxic gestured toward Lila with her palm and turned back to Tristan. “Finally, someone appreciates my work. Do you see how easy that is?”
Tristan ignored her. “Let’s get in before someone sees us.”
“No one will even know we opened the door. I’ve set the system to keep sending a locked signal.”
Lila straightened her mesh hood and crossed into Chaucer’s Ghost, crinkling her nose at the smell of mildew and mold and the twinge of something dead. The building still looked like a working restaurant, for the stainless steel sinks and counters and ovens had not been removed. A thin layer of dust coated every surface, including the floor. The group all left boot prints as they trudged through the kitchen. Spider webs stretched across the corners of the room, and Lila heard the sound of flapping wings through a pair of open double doors.
Tristan snapped a tube in his hands and shook it, bathing the room in an eerie green glow.
The group moved into the empty dining room. A dozen pigeons fluttered in place as they entered, offering cooing trills. The birds had left their mark upon the floor. Pockmarked with gray and white droppings as well as a smattering of fuzz and feathers, the large room still managed to drip with the memory of comfortable charm. Though the red brick walls had dulled somewhat, the stained cherry wood still shone in patches, especially on the bar in the back of the dining room. Something had been moved upon it recently, disturbing the dust.
On the wall, a sign had been left up. Chaucer’s Ghost glinted in twisted metal, still proclaiming its name for invisible guests. Every time Tristan moved, the green light shifted, creating shadows that retreated around the tables. Lila imagined ghostlike patrons pausing mid-bite, suspending birthday wishes, anniversary cakes, and nervous wedding proposals, all in order to watch the little group invade their space. They all existed just out of sight, hiding whenever she turned.
Lila shivered at the thought.
Dixon pointed up.
“Yes,” Lila said. “There’s an office upstairs. Hopefully it won’t be so messy.”
Lila followed the light up a familiar staircase. Alex had dragged her to the restaurant many times when they were younger. She’d even met the owner, Mr. Farthing, a man who had left the Wilson family years before by buying his mark from his matron. She remembered not being sure what to make of him, with his wispy sideburns, thin mustache, and ivory cane carved into the shape of a falcon’s head. The man was determined to own a business instead of staying with his family or marrying into a new one. He’d even proclaimed that one day he’d own enough restaurants to sit on the Low Council of Judges. When Lila had laughed and told him the council, even the lowborn council, was only for women, he had swiped the bottle of beer she’d been drinking and wandered off with it.
What had become of him after the business failed? Who had bought his mark? She couldn’t imagine such a proud man in the mines.
Tristan prodded her in the shoulder when they reached the top of the stairs. She retraced the route from memory and found Mr. Farthing’s office. The room was smaller than she remembered, even without the furniture. Several filing cabinets rusted against the wall, and a few open drawers revealed that they had been emptied. Scratches on the cherry wood floor betrayed the location of Mr. Farthing’s desk and liquor cabinet.
The rotting stench was absent. At least the birds had not ventured inside yet.
“Watch the truck and the back door, Frank,” Tristan ordered the man with the navy coat. “Whistle if you spot something off. We’ll do the same.”
Frank slipped away, shaking his own green light.
Dixon leaned against the office door, watching him go. He fingered the revolver in his holster, gaze locked on the hallway and staircase.
Lila sat down in the middle of the room, glad that Tristan had posted lookouts, glad that she only needed to focus on the hack. The first and relatively easy step involved shoving open the door to the Wilson-Kruger network. The password was not difficult to guess, not after logging on for so many years as Alex’s guest.
Toxic sat behind her as she worked, huddled in a corner, giving Lila her anonymity.
Lila pulled off her hood so that she could work freely, relieved that her identity and her work would not be compromised. As soon as she muttered the password, Toxic connected to the network, eager to assist. “Reaper was too busy for the Bullstow job. I coded the virus and uploaded it myself. I can help.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Lila soon she forgot about Toxic, though, too immersed in her task to care about anything but the Liberté. She prodded her way inside, exploiting the hole in the server’s operating system she had used over a decade before.
The entire system now belonged to her.
Lila opened her snoop programs in a small window and created a new employee account. She then logged in as the newest bank account manager for Liberté and looked up two accounts, pulling transaction histories for the past three years. She then saved them to her laptop and star drive. Though she had no intentions of reviewing the data before logging out, her eyes strayed over the second account and lingered on a familiar number.
Natalie Holguín. Lila sometimes bought Sangre de las Flores from her, with both women using cash or untraceable accounts so that their matrons would not catch wind of the trade. Acting quickly, she ventured to Natalie’s bank account and saved the transaction history. She then returned to the second account and scanned the list, picking three more Liberté accounts, two of which looked strangely familiar. She saved their transaction history and account information as well.
Time was running short.
She deleted her new employee account and erased all traces of it in the system.
The hack had taken less than fifteen minutes.
Her snoop program still burned with a green light.
“Done,” she said, opening the data while her programs deleted the evidence of her work. Tristan looked up from his post at the window, as did Dixon. Even Toxic peered over her shoulder.
“That quick?�
�� Tristan asked.
“Yes, that quick.” Lila scrolled through the information on her screen. “Edward Teach. It must be a workborn name. Toxic, see if you can find a record of him in the state registries.”
Dixon snorted at the door, and Toxic covered her mouth, a stray giggle escaping.
“Did you say Edward Teach?” Tristan asked, striding forward.
“Yes.” Lila shoved her hood back over her face and eyed them all warily. “Is he a friend of yours?”
Tristan peeked at the screen. “You could say that. What did he do?”
“He’s the owner of Chairwoman Wilson’s account, or at least the account you think belongs to her.”
Dixon chuckled again.
“What’s so damn amusing?”
No one said a word as Dixon scribbled on his notepad. Blackbeard.
“Blackbeard?”
Pirate.
“You can’t be serious. You mean pirate, as in the pirates who sailed the seven seas before the Declaration of Peace? The same pirates who almost single-handedly destroyed the alliance among the old countries with all their looting and plundering? The ones who claimed government mandates for the destruction they wrought?”
Tristan nodded. “I suppose they thought it funny. They weren’t fans of the alliance.”
“That alliance has kept the Romans at bay for several centuries. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Tristan shrugged.
“What does Blackbeard have to do with Edward Teach, anyway?”
“It was Blackbeard’s real name,” Toxic explained, before launching into a vulgar sea shanty.
Lila frowned. The only thing she knew about pirates had come from movies. “So Chairwoman Wilson is funneling money through an account named for some pirate who’s been dead for…”
“About three hundred years,” Tristan supplied.
“And she’s transferring that money into the accounts of two Bullstow militiamen as payment for her dirty work?”
“Looks like it.”
“Shiver me timbers.” Lila pushed her laptop away. “Lovely. This just gets sillier and sillier the longer it goes on. The woman can’t even be a dignified criminal.”
“What? It’s funny.”
“Being cute when you’re naming accounts like that can come back to bite you in the ass. It’s not funny. It’s sloppy.”
Toxic sat forward. “How much is in the account?”
“Millions. Nearly fifty million, to be exact.” It was stupid of Chairwoman Wilson to put that much in one account. A hacker could just spirit it away with the touch of a few buttons.
Lila could move it.
She could move it anywhere she wanted.
Her fingers twitched at the ready. She could almost see the look on Chairwoman Wilson’s face after finding her account empty.
She could almost feel her own arms being forced behind her back and cuffed. The cold seat in the back of a militia cruiser. The look on her father’s face. The surprise.
The disappointment.
She’d never actually stolen anything before, not without prior authorization from the owners, and only as a test of their security. Not even Serrano’s cigars really counted. He passed them out like candy, especially to heirs.
It wasn’t really stealing, was it?
Lila didn’t know anymore.
She took her hands away from the keyboard. Moving the chairwoman’s money, even if it would belong to her family soon, crossed a line.
“Why does Chairwoman Wilson need millions?” Tristan said, returning to his post at the window. “You don’t need that much to pay off a couple of dirty militiamen.”
“No, you don’t need millions,” Lila agreed. “Money not used to make money is money wasted. She’s up to something. Could be anything.”
“You already know what she’s up to.”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Bullshit. You know as well as I do what she’s doing.”
Toxic raised her hand. “I don’t.”
“She’s running. She’s selling that whole damn empire of hers. Probably been bleeding it dry for years, ever since her daughter lost her mark, squeezing her own family and the workborn around her just to get a few more credits before she flees.”
“We don’t know that,” Lila cautioned.
“Of course we do. She’s going to run to Burgundy and retire like all the other disgraced highborns, with or without her family. I suspect without, if you believe Simon is really in the dark about all this.”
“Don’t start with Simon. He’s just a boy.”
“Fine, perhaps she’ll send for him after he’s all used up from the vineyard. But she’s running. You know it as well as I do.”
“We don’t know anything of the sort.” It wasn’t that Chairwoman Wilson possessed too many scruples for such an act—Lila just wasn’t convinced that the woman had enough intelligence for it.
Then again, liquidating assets without an heir and transferring them out of the country was illegal and difficult to manage, unless one wanted a slave’s term. If Chairwoman Wilson was smart enough to hide her money without getting caught, then she could have recovered her family’s fortune after her mother’s idiocy, rather than fallen even lower.
It didn’t make sense.
Lila turned back to her laptop. She traced the deposits in Teach’s account to a bank inside Saxony, First New Bristol. Not only did Lila bank there, she owned controlling shares, purchased as a way to conceal some of her money from her mother. It definitely wasn’t the most honorable of banks, but that had been the point of purchasing it. Her funds would remain undisturbed, and it gave her a good way to spy on the funds of morally ambiguous highborns and lowborns in the city.
Chairwoman Wilson’s activity must have slipped through.
Lila did the hack herself, since she did not want Toxic near the bank that held part of her nest egg. She called out a few names, and Toxic searched through several public databases, both of them looking for a match.
After an hour, the pair had an answer. “Some of the money is coming to Teach’s account as a consultant’s salary from a lowborn business,” Lila explained. “That business is partnered with Wilson-Kruger, but you have to go back through a dozen layers to find it.”
“What does that mean?” Toxic asked.
“It means that the company is an empty shell within a shell within a shell.”
Toxic considered the implications. “Is that proof?”
“Not really. It doesn’t prove much at all. It just shows that the chairwoman sent money to a sketchy bank account, and that bank account sent—”
“Bribed,” Tristan interjected.
“—sent,” Lila said over him, “money to a few militiamen after they helped with a particularly difficult case on her property. That is how her lawyer will frame it, and she’ll never be charged.”
“It bothers me when you talk like them,” Tristan said.
“Then get over it, don’t listen, or don’t ask for my help.”
“What about the money in the account, though?” Toxic asked. “Can’t we turn her in? It’s illegal to hide money like that, isn’t it?”
“What reason could Bullstow give for peeking into her financials? The militia can’t just stroll up to the High Council of Judges with an anonymous tip and expect to see financial information for a multimillion credit empire. Besides, the money is set up to go somewhere else if that happens, mark my words. Burgundy protects their clients.”
Toxic’s eyes passed from Tristan to Lila’s hood and back to Tristan. “Well, if it helps, I did confirm that there’s no Edward Teach in the commonwealth and in Burgundy. There aren’t that many Teaches left, actually. I’ve been in every database I know of. I can’t believe that no one would name their kid after a pirate.”
&
nbsp; “Me neither,” said Tristan, nodding toward Dixon when he gave a thumbs-up and a grin.
“I can,” Lila added, already digging into the second account.
“You would.”
Lila ignored Tristan and scrolled through the transaction history of the other account. She needed more time to dig through the information, and she had a nagging feeling that she was missing something. “Look, I held up my end of the bargain. I found data linking Chairwoman Wilson to Slack & Roberts, even though it doesn’t prove much. I need to get home now, though. It’s late.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t prove much?” Tristan said. “It’s proof that money—”
“I already told you. It’s not illegal to give money to a few blackcoats for helping out an estate. Any decent lawyer can argue that away. Besides, if they tried to arrest Chairwoman Wilson for having a fake bank account in Burgundy, even if Liberté chose to assist them at their game, they’d have to arrest half the highborn and lowborn elites in the Allied Lands. It’s suspicious, but it’s nothing unusual.”
“So then we break into her compound. We search her office and find—”
“You mean we jump in feet first and hope for the best?”
Tristan balled his hands into fists.
“How about we do something else first?” she said.
“What?”
“Speak with—”
A whistle cut through the air downstairs.
Chapter 16
Lila slapped down the lid of her laptop, shoved it into her satchel, and joined Tristan at the window. Downstairs, a cruiser with the Wilson-Kruger coat of arms parked half on the street, half on the sidewalk. The militia lights gleamed on its roof, spinning white and gold, white and gold.
The driver cut the engine, and two blackcoats hopped out. The women put their hands on their hips, fingers grazing their revolvers. The pair stared up at Chaucer’s Ghost suspiciously.
“Shit,” Tristan said as one of them pointed to the office. “They’ve seen the glow stick. Toxic, get up. Move!”
Toxic shot up from the floor, not waiting for further instructions. She jammed her laptop into a bag, flung it over her shoulder, and hurtled past Dixon. Lila cringed as the young woman raced down the stairs, her boots clomping against the cherry wood.