“I completely understand Mr....” Manny raised an eyebrow.
“Wilson.”
“... Wilson, yes. Thank you. I totally understand your concerns. I have no idea why my 45D forms haven’t come through, but I am expected. If you want to call facilities? I am supposed to be doing the monthly inspection on the reactors, per NBLA ordinance 34-7?”
“Sir,” Wilson would not be bluffed, it seemed, "not only are your 45D forms not in order, but the monthly inspection was completed two weeks ago. There has been an error with your office.”
Manny gave his head a rueful shake, “Not surprising. You know how badly we screw this stuff up all the time.”
He was playing this soft on purpose. His thoughts were calm and strategic: Let him have a victory. Let him feel like he is winning. It will make him magnanimous.
The scout pushed on, "Is there any way I can get a copy of the last inspection report? Also, if someone from facilities can sign off that I actually showed up it would be great. If I don’t get sign-off, they’ll accuse me of making this all up to get out of the inspection. I’ll have to report that I was denied access to avoid disciplinary action. You know how they are over there.”
This was a gambit Manny used often. The receptionist, feeling comfortable with his successful defense of the lobby, would now be more willing to give Manny what he wanted to make him go away. Denying an inspector would cause increased scrutiny from the borough, and that meant more inspections and paperwork. Wilson would try to avoid that outcome, but Manuel had intentionally placed the poor man in an unwinnable situation by asking for something he couldn’t have, leaving the receptionist scrambling. The young man had been in enough large buildings to bet there was no way anyone from facilities was going to sign anything. It was the weekend, so no senior building engineer would be available. Whichever junior janitor was left watching the facility would not be willing to sign anything because signing off meant taking responsibility for something.
“I uh, hold on,” Wilson stammered. He punched some buttons on the desk and picked up a handheld. Manny waited with a patient smile on his face, the very picture of relaxed resignation.
“Facilities?” Wilson blurted when someone picked up, “Yes. It’s Wilson. It looks like Muni screwed up and sent another inspector. Yes, I know. I know, Tim. The 45D is missing, but he has the correct credentials.”
There was a pause, and Manny could imagine the man on the other end of the conversation griping about bureaucratic incompetence and the travesty that was the life of a hardworking building engineer.
“That’s all well and good, Tim. He says all he needs is for you to sign that he was here and made the attempt, you don’t have to let him in.”
Another pause, and Manny suppressed his mounting glee. This was an old trick. Having been stonewalled by a competent gatekeeper, Manny had simply transferred responsibility for the decision to let him in to some other (hopefully weaker) individual. A clever infiltrator could keep this process moving until someone caved, or he ran out of people to try. It was not a question of anyone really caring whether or not a poorly paid municipal inspector walked around their building or not. It was just that no one wanted to take responsibility for letting him do it. The barrier to entry was almost never a matter of commitment to security concerns, but a question of who would get in trouble if it went wrong. Penetrating dedicated, competent security personnel was daunting and nigh-impossible because they actively worked to prevent your entry. Shuffling your way past mealy mouthed salarymen was a far easier task if approached with the proper mentality. Wilson was totally indifferent to the prospect of Manny walking around the building, he just didn’t want to be the one who made the call.
He sounded annoyed, “Listen, Tim, all you have to do is sign off that he showed up. You don’t have to actually do anything.” Wilson threw Manny a pained look, as if to apologize for the recalcitrance of the engineer, then continued, “I can call Mr. Peterson and have him come in to do it, if you want...”
Another lengthy break. Mr. Wilson drummed his fingers on the desktop with a brisk, impatient rhythm. Manny kept the apologetic smile on his face and waited patiently.
Wilson’s face slid into a relaxed smile, “Thank you, Tim. I’ll let him know.” He put the handheld down and turned back to Manny, “Tim is coming up. He’ll take you down to the reactor room and you can do whatever you need to do there.”
Manny wanted to laugh and gave himself an unspoken pat on the back. I make this shit look easy. All Wilson got to hear was his polite reply, “I really appreciate it, man.”
Tim looked exactly like every facilities guy Manny had ever seen. Tired, disheveled, and irritated, Tim was not happy to have his cushy weekend overtime shift interrupted by actual work. He made sure Manuel received that particular message by greeting the scout with a meandering monologue of invective beginning with the general stupidity of municipal employees and ending with some imaginative speculation as to the parentage of those who had screwed up the inspection schedule. Manny took it in stride and even commiserated with him about the injustices heaped upon the working man by indifferent city bureaucracies.
The pair moved to a bank of elevators and Manny made his mental inventory of the main floor and memorized the layout. Inside the elevator, he saw the terminal indicating the building had fourteen floors, with the last two requiring biometric authorization to be unlocked. This was not uncommon. Penthouse and mezzanine floors were often the most secure. More interesting than this, was that the subbasement level was similarly restricted. Sub-basements were where the machinery and personnel maintaining the environment were kept, and excessive security on these levels merely added layers of complication to the job of keeping the tenants comfortable and happy.
The engineer keyed a basement level and let the scanner get a good look at his face. Manny noted that he had not selected the lowest level. Though young, Manny had been an urban scout long enough to determine two key pieces of information right away. First, the lowest level was exactly where Roland and Lucia were going to want to go. It was too secure, too strangely placed, and too obviously important to not prioritize access. This brought up the second thing he knew for sure: There was no way Tim the facilities guy was going to let him down there.
Part of scouting was knowing when to cut your losses. Manny did not need to know exactly what was in there to know it was important. Breaching that level was a job best left for Roland, anyway. If they found themselves committed to a stealth approach, he and Mindy could come back after dark and sneak in the old-fashioned way. For now he would content himself to assess the building’s security and get the layout. He could not resist prying just a little about the secure sub-basement, though.
When the lift doors opened with a hiss, Manny and Tim stepped out into a dim gray tunnel. Pipes and conduits ran along the walls, and the faint hum of machinery lent a subtle vibration to the floor perceptible even through shoes. It was an office building sub-level exactly like any other, and Manny had been in quite a few.
“This way,” Tim grumbled, and led Manny down the hall to a door with a dozen warnings stenciled onto its surface.
“What’s below this level?” Manny asked with professional detachment. “Does the reactor extend beneath this deck?” It was a reasonable question though it would peg him as an inexperienced inspector.
“Of course not,” Tim opened the door and ushered his charge through it. “Sub-basement is research space. No access for anybody.”
“Research?” Tim feigned incredulity, “under street level? I hope their permits are in order...”
“Not my job, and not your job, either,” Tim responded with no small quantity of irritation. “You want to inspect that, come back with the right forms. I’ll be in enough shit just for letting you in here. Now go do your damn inspection.”
The main reactor room was surprisingly clean. No dust had settled, no equipment was out of place. Since a reactor required almost no maintenance and very little atten
tion, reactor rooms were often used by building managers as extra storage space. This was a code violation, but most folks didn’t care. Neither did most inspectors for that matter. But this reactor room was kept more than merely ‘tidy.’ It was immaculate. Everything was in perfect order, and Manny did not need to actually look at anything to know this room was entirely shipshape. His brief interaction with Tim the engineer had made it quite clear this was not a symptom of the facility staff’s dedication to their jobs or reputations, either. The reason was transparent to Richardson as he went through the motions of reactor core inspection report.
These guys don’t want any citations or safety violations. They want inspectors to go in and out and never look twice. I bet all their paperwork and equipment is in perfect order so they never have to sweat municipal interference.
But they had made a mistake in executing this strategy. It was a mistake that may as well have been a flashing hologram fifty feet tall broadcasting ‘illegal activity going on in here!’
It was all just too damn perfect.
Nobody would invest the time, effort, or manpower it would take to keep a smaller office building in The Sprawl this clean and up to date. The reactor itself was a dead giveaway. It was brand new and an expensive model. The large metal cylinder was placed on a raised footing exactly as high as regulations required, and it had precisely one-point-five times as much clearance on every side as code dictated.
Every connection was box-wired and mounted with both heat-resistant and seismically rated brackets, and there were heat sinks at all the prescribed distances with plasma conduits for recycling dumped energy in the case of thermal runaway. Installing this reactor and assembling this reactor room probably cost as much as the building was worth. Most buildings cut corners here and there to bring those costs down. The fines for screw ups were nominal and it was often cheaper to bribe an inspector than it was to keep a reactor entirely in compliance.
Not so, here. Even the most vindictive inspector would have to break something personally to find anything out of place. It all conspired to paint a painfully transparent picture about the weird things this facility had going on in the sub-basement. Given the time and inclination, Manny could get down there and find out what those things might be. But thanks to the information gleaned from the transit net hack, he had as good an idea as he needed about that. If Roland wanted to get in there and check it out? Well, it was exactly the sort of thing he had been built to do, according to Mindy.
Manny noticed something else strange. He was no engineer, and his understanding of building systems was just good enough to convince people he was a real inspector. His knowledge did not extend to the realm of actual competence. But as he stood in the surgically clean room and looked at the large reactor and its tech station, a thought occurred to him.
That is a really big reactor for a building this size.
It had to be ten feet across and stretched from the regulation footing to the ten-foot ceiling. Manny walked over to the silver monolith and punched up the status screens. His brow furrowed in confusion, and he turned to the engineer for guidance.
“Seven-hundred-and-fifty K? For this little building?”
Tim shrugged, “It’s what they ordered. Not my call.”
Manny swiped through a few more screens. The consumption profile was all wrong for an office. Late night peaks marred the usage graphs. Big spikes in current after midnight that trailed off in graceful arcs by morning and the arrival of first-shift workers.
The curve was too smooth to be caused by office equipment, and Manny’s experience as an infiltrator gave him the answer. Somebody is powering something up at night.
On a hunch, he pulled the usage charts back to the night of the hit on The Widow’s party. As he suspected, the draw and subsequent bleed-off was larger on that night than the others.
Well just look at that, he stifled a smirk. I think I just found the armature.
Roland would be pleased. Taking the machine down when it was on the charger would be far easier than fighting it out in the streets.
“Hey Tim,” he called over his shoulder, “does this building have cargo tram access?”
“Yeah,” Tim said, “Only building on this street with access to the cargo lines. Commuter tram station is at the end of the block.” Tim’s voice suddenly changed, “What the hell does that have to do with the reactor inspection?”
“Damned if I know.” Manny turned back to the man with a smile, “but this building is weird as hell, and somebody down at the office is going to expect me to know why. Just trying to figure it all out. Hell, your strange usage profile and the size of that beast,” he jerked a thumb at the oversized reactor, “are probably why the inspections got screwed up in the first place.”
It was a good lie, and it came easily to his lips. Any lie catering to a man’s pre-packaged biases would often be effective. This was no exception.
“Great,” Tim groaned, “more bullshit from muni.”
“I’m guessing whatever it is going on downstairs is causing the suits to get nervous. Those spikes probably make it look like containment issues in the overnight hours getting bled off by the safety systems.” Manny had absolutely no idea what any of those words meant, but he had learned to say them in that order to scare people who did understand them. “No one wants an overload on a busy street like this. But don’t worry. The reactor looks fine and I’ll tell the boys downtown that nothing is going to blow up here any time soon.”
Manny was sure this was a lie, too. If his hunches were right, and to be honest, he was certain they were, then things would be blowing up here sooner rather than later. But he smiled, got his forged forms signed, and left the building without incident. As soon as he was in the clear and moving down the street, he pulled out his comm and keyed up Mindy.
“What’s the story, Manny?” came the irrepressibly chipper squeaking.
“I know where they are.”
“OOOOOOH, goody!” The little assassin purred at the news. “The boss is going to be thrilled. Did you find the armature, too?”
“Oh yes. It’s definitely here.”
“Well, get back here and polish your sneakin’ boots, Manny. You and I are going to get into trouble tonight!”
Another man may have been excited at the thought of a whole evening alone with Mindy, but Manuel was long past that point. Instead, his stomach lurched as he considered all the horrible consequences a night spent skulking through secure buildings with a famous assassin might bring.
He winced into the comm, but tried to summon some enthusiasm, “Looking forward to it, Mindy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Lucia moved without hesitation. In a quarter second her pistol was out and she was hustling Billy to the deepest corner of The Dwarf’s office. Rodney was not so quick, but in short order he was barking orders to his men and calling for reinforcements.
Roland grabbed the desk with one hand and dragged it to block the door with a screeching hiss.
“Hold the line,” he called back to her, “I’ll handle this. Rodney, tell your goons not to shoot me.”
The Dwarf had pulled the claw off his arm and was replacing it with some kind of weapon. It had a thick barrel and a large power supply. From the elbow down, Rodney’s prosthesis was now some kind of enormous gun. A rotating cylinder loaded with ten six-inch long and pointed spikes spun freely around the part of the limb that would have been his forearm, it gave the whole apparatus away as a rail-driver of some sort.
Roland smiled to himself, So that’s why he kept the ugly thing! It’s modular.
“I’m comin’ out wit’ ye, shite-stain.” The stocky little man looked deadly serious, “It’s a bold fooker what comes to my house with a whole squad to fook wit’ me. I aim to look him in the eye before I kill him.”
“Have it your way,” Roland grunted. “Stay behind me, though. You’ll last longer.”
“Figured that much out all by meself, ye great metal bastard,” Rodn
ey grumbled back.
There was the sound of an explosion and shouting from the main bar. The enemy was at the gates.
“Let’s go, then” Roland sighed and ran down the short hall to where the action was. He careened into the main bar and found The Dwarf’s crew engaging (with far more enthusiasm than skill) a squad of men dressed in the same gray armor and tac harnesses as the raiders from Belham Tower. Roland burned a quarter second to assess their armaments, briefly concerned they might have brought more railguns or other heavy weapons. But these men were armed with mag-rifles, bead rifles, and anti-personnel flechette weapons.
They weren’t expecting me to be here, Roland realized. Then he charged.
The first man Roland encountered dumped a full fifty-round bead magazine into his chest, ruining yet another expensive tailored shirt. The rifleman was obviously augmented because he ducked Roland’s killing blow and reloaded his weapon with superhuman speed and grace. Like many of his opponents, the man mistook Roland’s size to mean he was slow. As fast as he was, the doomed rifleman never got back on target. A follow-up strike delivered by a wrecking-ball fist turned ribs to splinters and he fell screaming to the floor to die.
Roland spun to address another target, beads and flechettes tearing his clothes to shreds. He picked another man, engrossed in the furious hurling of flechettes, to be his next victim.
The Dwarf beat him to the literal and metaphorical punch, however. The mercenary’s torso exploded with a floor-shaking boom, and the falling corpse erupted blood and gore from a softball sized chest wound like a fleshy volcano. The big cyborg whirled to see what had happened and found Rodney McDowell gurgling a sadistic laugh as the cylinder of his arm weapon rotated and charged another spike. Then, still cackling, he aimed the heavy-barreled cannon at another hapless enemy. The walls shook with the report, and a massive gout of orange fire traced a path from Rodney’s weapon across the room to where it blasted another armored killer into two pieces with a gut shot. The Dwarf laughed even louder as the dead man’s legs stayed upright for a few seconds before collapsing into a sodden heap.
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