This, Reynard knew, was a lie. What he really needed was altogether different. He considered this in silence. I really need you to finish the job we started at the party. Namely, the complete destruction of the old system of crime syndicates. We need it to look like it collapsed all by itself though. It needs to look like an implosion, like a failure of that business model and not a hostile takeover. Once all vestiges of the old system are dead, then the new one can be brought on line.
Wade was going to fail miserably in his attempt to take over all of New Boston’s gangs. The Brokerage had ensured this by implying that he would be well funded and supported in his efforts. However, once Manson started his war, that support would disappear at a moment selected for maximum disruptive potential.
At least he will die doing what he loves, Reynard’s internal monologue droned over Wade's nonsensical ramblings.
“I get that,” Wade had not noticed Reynard’s attention drifting inward, “The gangs won’t respect me if it looks like The Brokerage was doing the heavy lifting. You don’t have to worry about that. I like leading from the front.”
“Another reason we selected you, Wade,” Reynard crooned. “You are just the kind of person we need for this to work.”
“So I am good to go with phase two, then?”
“Absolutely! It will help to draw out The Widow, and the chaos will give us more opportunities to get Sid and Rodney, too. It’s time, all right.”
“Good. Expect movement on Malldown sometime in the next twenty-four hours.” Wade started to say something as he stood, but stopped before the words escaped. He paused and leveled a measured glare at the silver-haired man seated across the table. Reynard was certain he heard suspicion in Wade’s voice. A trace of those old mobster’s instincts asserting themselves just enough to make the man wary.
“Just make sure your friends at The Brokerage do their part. I don’t want to get left hanging in the breeze out there.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Wade. The Brokerage is heavily invested in this operation, and none of our assets will go unsupported. Just do your part.”
“Count on it,” Manson spat. Then, without further ceremony, he left the conference room.
Reynard waited for the door to hiss closed behind the wide silhouette of the gangster before leaning back in his chair and exhaling a long, cleansing breath. He pulled his DataPad from its bag and swiped through menus with practiced sweeps of a pudgy finger. He found the application he needed and keyed his code. The word ‘encrypting’ blinked seven times in crimson block letters before the image of Paulie’s face lit up the device.
“Yeah?” the mercenary’s face had an irritated twist which his voice reinforced.
“What happened out there?” Gone was the placating business partner. In its place was a very annoyed manager.
“You already know, Reynard. The Fixer was there. We didn’t have the right gear for that because walking Torvald down The Drag is the type of stupid that draws all the wrong kinds of attention. I can’t afford to have his armature impounded right now. Not while Tank is still on the board.”
“Fine. I figured as much, but Manson is getting suspicious.”
Paulie sneered, “Why the fuck do I care if he gets suspicious?”
“You don’t. But I do.” Reynard rubbed his face in frustration, “I’m cutting him loose on the other districts, so be aware that the action is going to heat up.”
“Works for me,” Paulie shrugged, “It’ll pull Police attention away from us.”
“I want you to loan him some of your equipment,” Reynard suggested.
“Why the fuck would I do that?”
The florid face bent into a sardonic smile, “Because the glorified street thugs he considers to be his 'soldiers' will get killed or caught, as often as not. If they have equipment connected to the Belham raid, well, who could blame NBPD for thinking that Wade Manson’s crew was the one who hit the Tower?”
Paulie nodded, “I got ya. Sure. We have some stuff he can ‘borrow.’ We’re team players like that.”
“One big happy family,” it was said with a smirk, but then he got back to business. “We will have to pull Rodney out of Dockside, and hopefully drag Tankowicz with him. We need enough room to manage Tankowicz without bringing down Gateways or the Police. What does Torvald need for space, and how can we keep a very loud battle quiet?”
“I was thinking about those tram lines,” Paulie replied. “If we had a building connected to the trams, like a building with a big cargo area? Then Torvald’s rig will have enough room, and the whole scrap will go down underground. If we pick a zone that ain’t near Uptown and also not near the docks, we can buy off the cops to leave us alone. We got anywhere like that around here?”
“Quinzy.” Reynard said it with finality. “The shipyards are all on the lines, and they have huge assembly warehouses. Police there are not quite so malleable as Dockside, but we should be able to get preferential treatment, all the same.”
The mercenary’s brow furrowed. “Shipyards would be perfect, but how do we get them all there?”
Reynard belabored the obvious, “We need bait.”
“Schedule a meet? Like a parlay or something?” Paulie had used that trick before. It was inelegant, but it worked as often as not.
“Tankowicz and the Ribiero woman will see through that. They know that this conflict is too undecided for any side to want to come to the table just yet.” Reynard shook his head, “No, it will need to be something irresistible.”
“Feed them Manson?” Paulie was not fond of the fat mobster.
Reynard considered that. It was not a terrible idea. “We need Manson to take the fall for the gang wars, though.”
Paulie shrugged, “He still can. Let him run his game for a week or so, and then find a reason to send him to Quinzy. We’ll set up a delivery of guns or some shit like that. We can leak the intel on that to Tank’s people through Sid’s people so he’ll trust it. Bingo. Puts everybody in the right place at once.”
Reynard finished the thought, “and you will be waiting for them when they arrive?”
“Right,” Paulie agreed. “I’ll take out Tank and Manson both. It will look like part of the gang war.”
“That will leave The Widow in play, but that can be handled any number of ways,” the silver-haired man mused out loud. “It’s not a terrible plan, Mr. Paulsen.”
“Almost like I’ve done this shit a time or two, eh?”
“The hard part will be convincing Manson to supervise the pick-up personally. But I suspect I know how to make that happen.” Reynard shook his head slowly. He knew exactly how to get Manson to show up.
“I bet you do,” Paulie chuckled. “Set ‘em up, Reynard. I’ll knock ‘em down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The streets of New Boston’s lower districts took on an entirely new character after dark. It was as if sunlight somehow drove the dirtier elements underground for the span of a few hours and allowed the normal operation of the city’s economic machinery to function unmolested. With the mundane processes of commerce and infrastructure completed come sundown, an entirely different species of urbanite could creep upward and infest the streets with the bustle of trades best plied under the cover of darkness.
Uptown was immune to this metamorphosis, but Dockside was most certainly not. Two shifts of dockworkers and freight haulers owned the dirty streets from first light to sunset. Solid, blue-collar workers spent those hours driving the wealth of a hundred star systems though twelve enormous docking towers while automated shuttles rode giant beams of anti-gravitons down from freighters in low orbit. Dockside had won the economic lottery with the towers, because the massive gravitic engines in each were dangerous things to have in a city, and Dockside had been so destitute at the time that no one cared. Coupled with its proximity to the Quinzy shipyards and the industrial might of The Sprawl, the dirty slum was an obvious choice for the multi-billion-credit investment in docking towers.
/> All day long, goods both legal and illegal moved up and down the towers and got loaded onto trucks and trams for distribution. When the sun went down, tens of thousands of workers went home, and thousands of spacers rode down those beams to take part in the delights of Dockside’s various entertainment options. It was a stark and dramatic transformation, and it always delighted Roland to watch it happen.
Manuel Richardson was fascinated by the change as well, but for entirely different reasons. Growing up under the colony domes on Venus, and later hopping from station to station to stay ahead of his former family, Manny had never really understood how regular sunrise and sunset changed the nature of a neighborhood. He had lived his whole life in cycles of cool artificial daylight and the dimness of off-hours emergency lighting. It was the transitions, he often opined, that made a real day so strange. First, the shadows would lengthen, a subtle warning that the daytime population was nearing the end of their designated time. Then the colors would begin to wash away under the fading light, in a process that still left the young scout wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The crisp clarity of bright whites morphed into burnt yellows and then blossomed into deep reds as if the sun itself had been keeping those surfaces clean and its retreat now soiled them. When those reds shifted to purples, the people on the streets changed as well. The dingy raiment of hard-working folks would slip from all those tired and stooped shoulders, and the bright colors and gaudy bangles of human peacocks would come out for the evening’s distractions. A sea of human plumage arrayed in caustic variety, all on display for the thrill of carnal delights and the profits of illicit trade. It was as if the distant star triggered some primal change in people, suppressing primordial urges left to run amok when its light eventually faded.
Less dramatic in this evening transformation was The Sprawl. That district had been an industrial zone long before the towers, and thus the personality of those sixty-five blocks had not changed too much with their arrival. Arranged in a meandering semicircle around the uptown districts, the quantity and density of companies and factories crammed into the space had exploded when the docks went up. But the borough was still just a factory town at heart, and more of the same did nothing to alter its complexion.
Still, from his perch atop a squat gray auto-factory, Manny was surprised at how much even this street changed after dark. The Sprawl had little to offer in the manner of entertainment, so when the last office worker or foreman clocked out, the streets went ghostly quiet. Instead of streams of crooks and thrill seekers, The Sprawl became an endless swamp of deep shadow, pock-marked with the illuminated circles of street lamps scattered like orange lily pads on some inky black pond.
Mindy broke the silence of his meditations, padding up next to him on whisper-quiet feet. “You ready for a little skullduggery, Manny-boy?” The woman was wearing her blue jumpsuit. Manuel now understood it was both armor and distraction, but that knowledge did little to blunt the effectiveness of the clingy garment. He was loath to give Mindy the satisfaction of seeing him ogle, but he was also a young man and the temptation was simply too much for him. He stole a small measure of victory from the woman by refusing to hide his looks or pretending he was embarrassed. He stared boldly and without shame. If she wanted him to stop, she could zip the damn thing up.
“This is the company that registered that APC. You got a plan for getting in?” He arched an eyebrow her way, curious as to how a famed assassin might attack the problem.
“I figured the ground level will be too tight, but if we can get to a window on one of the less secure floors, I can probably carve us an entrance.” She patted the dagger at home in its thigh sheath, “Then we can figure out how to get down to the sub-basement.”
“How are we supposed to get to an unsecured window?” The question was kept light, as if there was any prayer at all of Manny scaling the wall and leaping through a window.
“Normally I’d just climb it,” Mindy mused, catching on to his tone, “But I suppose I’d have to carry you up, huh? Shit.” A tiny foot tapped an impatient tattoo against the roof, “The ground floor will have too many cameras and scanners for me to carve through there, maybe I can get in from above and shut down the alarms?”
“Oh, just follow me,” the scout said, exasperated.
“What?” the blond trotted after the younger man as he stalked across the roof to the lift doors.
Inside the elevator, Mindy’s face turned grouchy, “Where are we going?”
“Into that building’s sub-basement.”
“But the scanners! Are we going to use the tram lines?”
“Nope.”
Mindy added a whining, pleading effect to her questions, “Maaaaaaannnnnnnnnnyyyyyy! What are we doiiiinnnng??”
“Holy crap, you are annoying.” It was an honest response, Manuel was beginning to understand why Roland was so short with the blond assassin.
“But I’m pretty!” She offered as the lift door opened and the pair crossed the lobby to exit onto the sidewalk. Their target building was across the street, dark and ominous in the pale yellow street light.
“Pretty annoying,” Manuel agreed. Then he walked across the street and right up to the front door of the office building. He made no effort to dodge the scanners, causing Mindy to squeak in disbelief. From his pocket, he retrieved Tim the engineer’s ID card and swiped it through the after hours key slot. Then he looked directly into the scanner and waited.
He affected an air of calm confidence during this phase, but inside he was nervous. Pocketing Tim’s credential was child’s play for anyone who grew up under the domes of Venusian colony complexes, but spoofing the biometrics was a far more complex bit of deception. The scanner would look for a specific set of biological parameters based upon the card swipe, and if Manny had guessed wrong as to what those might be he’d get nowhere. Even worse, an alarm might sound. He had rewritten the biometric card with his own details, so the scanner should see exactly what the card said it should, but if it authenticated against stored employee profiles, he might draw a fault.
But, as Manuel suspected it would, the card worked without issue. The indicator lights flashed green, and the door clicked open. He punched up the access screen on the door controls, and using his facility engineer’s access, disabled the biometric scanners for the whole site and put the alarms in standby.
With a cocky smirk and far too much swagger, he turned to see Mindy standing in front of the building they had just exited with her mouth open and her eyes wide. He winked at her and waved her across the street as if she was some sort of idiot for standing there. She paused, not quite trusting this miracle, but when Manny shrugged and turned to go inside, she quickly followed.
In the lobby she grabbed his shoulder and spun him to look her in the eyes, “How the hell did you do that?”
“Just a trick I learned back when I was... It’s a trick I learned on Venus. You rewrite the card with your own biometrics. Most scanners won’t check against a database, so it usually works.”
“You can’t just rewrite an ID card! How did you break the encryption?”
“I didn’t. It’s still encrypted. I just overwrote the biometrics. I got access when I was here earlier and saw the receptionist make a card for a visitor.”
“So you hacked into their human resources system and used the receptionist's PIN to make an ID card for yourself from one you swiped?”
He shrugged, “No, I hacked into their HR system and changed the biometrics for an existing card key to match me. Way easier. Works like, ninety percent of the time.”
She smiled a slow, predatory smile, “You and I are going to get along really well, Manny. I can feel it.”
“Why does that make me nervous?” he asked out loud.
“Because I kill people for money?” she offered.
“Oh yeah. That’s it.” He shook his head, “Anyway, HR says the building is empty, but it doesn’t give me access to the lower floor scanners. So there might be people in the basement levels. Th
ere is a secure access door from the alley, but the layers of security on that thing go far deeper than anything I could spoof, so we have to get down there some other way. I can get us to the reactor level, but what’s below my credentials don’t have clearance for.”
“What do you suggest, my little infiltrator extraordinaire?”
Manny scowled at her, “I figure we get to the reactor room and follow any large cable that goes down. Hopefully there will be chase that we can shimmy through. If not, we may have to circumvent the lift biometrics somehow.”
Mindy smiled, and it was sincere and sweet, “Get me to the reactor room, and I’ll get us below it.”
“Fair enough,” he shrugged and led her to the lifts. When they had descended to the reactor level, she followed him to the stenciled door, and they entered the reactor room. It took a few minutes of searching to locate a set of thick cables that had been run through the floor behind the reactor. It was the only set of cables that went down, so it seemed obvious that these must lead to the sub-basement.
“Damn.” Manny grumbled, “There’s no chase going down. Just a conduit.”
I can cut the cables, Mindy suggested. “Then it won’t charge.”
“They’ll just fix them, and then they’ll know we were here.” Manuel’s mind raced, “I have a plan for the armature, but we have to get to it without them knowing we got to it.”
Mindy squinted, and bionic eyes painted a picture of what was beneath their feet. A twisted map of wires and pipes showed up as faint variations in the infrared spectrum through the metal decking of the reactor room floor. “If I cut through the floor here,” she pointed to a spot in the corner, behind a service terminal, “I can get us down there without severing any pipes or wires, I think. Then we can return the cut piece when we are done. It’s in a hidden spot and everything!”
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