Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  I pulled a U-turn in the middle of the street, ignoring the horns that went off around me, and headed back to his condo. I parked the sedan illegally this time and pounded back up the stairs.

  Lau was gone.

  A dark stain on the carpeting showed where his head had been, but the flat was empty. He’d run. I stood staring for a few minutes, my thoughts scattered, wondering what I should do next.

  He wouldn’t be good at staying hidden, I felt sure. People used to being on the grid rarely were. He would use a credit card, or keep his cell phone, or feel the need to see his girlfriend. Or maybe he’d gone to the cops. Regardless, Checker would be able to find him eventually, if I asked him to, but I wasn’t sure it would be worth it. Tracking him down would take time, time I could use to find a way into Arkacite without him.

  I was a dumbass for letting him get away, though. I’d been too impulsive. Too emotional.

  A worse thought struck me. What if Lau went back to Arkacite? What if he warned them I was coming for Liliana? What if they moved her somewhere we couldn’t find, locked her away in a hole in the ground—or worse, cut their losses and destroyed the evidence? They had already somehow erased the paper trail of her existence; would they consider murder to be going too far?

  My stomach folded in on itself, and I leaned a forearm against the wall, feeling dizzy. I swallowed against a tight throat and fumbled my phone out of my pocket.

  I’m coming over. Find me a way into Arkacite tonight. I don’t care what it takes.

  I sent the message to Checker and found my way back down to the car. The math still felt too sharp, angry and distracting, making it hard to see straight.

  I drove to one of my storage units, where I exchanged my stolen ride for a clean one and packed the trunk full of any equipment I might need for the night. Then I headed to Miri’s. It was late in the evening by the time I arrived, the sun low on the horizon.

  I buzzed in at the gate, and Pilar met me at the door to the apartment. “Hi again,” she said. She seemed to have calmed down, though her makeup was still slightly smeared.

  “Hi,” I tossed over my shoulder as I pushed past her. “Checker? Give me…”

  I trailed off in the middle of demanding an update. The bright, cluttered apartment had been covered in printouts, as if someone had decided to play a practical joke by coating every object with paper.

  “Hey,” said Checker, lifting his head from a laptop. He gestured at the snowfall of paper. “We ran out of desktop space. Computer desktop space, I mean. I think I might owe Miri a new toner cartridge.”

  “Did you find a way in?” I asked. That was all I cared about. I’d brought in the reports from Lau’s briefcase but couldn’t force myself to look at them again; I added them to one of the stacks.

  Checker and Pilar exchanged glances. “Well—”

  “Tell me what’s going on!” I slammed home the security bar on the door behind me, too hard, and Pilar jumped.

  “Maybe you should sit down for this,” said Checker.

  “Checker, so help me God—”

  “We found out where they’re keeping her,” he blurted out. “Or rather, Pilar did—” He looked for her again, but she had edged away from me to hover in the kitchen doorway. “Cas, stop being scary for one second; this isn’t our fault! We’re on your side here!”

  “Then tell me what you found!”

  “They—they’ve got her in a lab!” He held my gaze, nervously, defiantly.

  “I know that,” I said. “What lab?”

  His jaw worked, and his expression would have been funny under other circumstances. “I—Zeus, we were so nervous about telling you, what with your thing about kids—”

  “Which lab?”

  “Rightly so, I guess,” he muttered to himself. “Pilar’s the one who deserves the credit, so stop making her think you’re going to eat her. She’s a real-life Super Temp—get out of the way, Donna Noble—and, uh, anyway, we found it; it’s in a sub-basement. There’s no other reason they’d be sending kids’ toys there.”

  “Show me.” I strode across the room to look over his shoulder, stepping between the piles of paper.

  He hit a couple of keys and the screen changed to a floor plan of Arkacite. The place was bigger than I’d thought when I’d visited. Instead of being the one large building I’d assumed, it was a cluster of several connected ones housing floor after floor of offices and labs.

  “How good is their security?” I might have managed to hop their perimeter for the offices, but turnstiles and metal detectors on the public-facing side were already a few orders of magnitude more paranoid than Swainson. The security they’d have on the labs…“Can you disable it?”

  “I think—hang on.” Checker’s phone had gone off with a tinny blast of lyrics about a monkey; he fished it out. “Hi, are you here? Yup, the code is one-zero-eight-five. And it’s apartment one-oh-nine.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Arthur. I called him; is that okay? I know this is your case, but I figured we could use the extra set of eyes—”

  I didn’t care. I’d put his fee on Warren’s tab. “Yeah, fine.”

  “And I figured if you went berserk on us about them abusing a kid, Arthur could use his ninja calming skills to dog-whisperer you,” he added hastily as a knock sounded.

  I went over and dragged the door open to reveal a tall, handsome black man in a leather jacket. “I’m going in tonight,” I said, before Arthur had a chance to greet me. “If you want to help, great. I’ll charge it to the client.”

  “Uh—okay,” he said. “I ain’t caught up. This have to do with the plutonium thing?”

  “No. Another case. Pilar will fill you in. Do it fast,” I ordered her.

  Pilar still hovered in the doorway to the kitchen. Arthur offered her a hand. “Arthur Tresting. Nice to meet you, Pilar.” I’d said her name more like “puh lar,” but he pronounced it with a crisp lilt.

  “Not the time for pleasantries,” I snapped, as I went back over to Checker and his laptop. “Get to work or get out.”

  “No es tan antipática como parece,” Arthur said to Pilar, with a sideways glance at me. “Te lo prometo.”

  He was definitely mocking me. Ass. “Fuck you,” I said. “I assume.”

  Arthur grinned.

  “Uh, I only speak LA Spanish, anyway,” Pilar said. “I can order a taco; that’s about it. Pilar was my grandmother’s name.”

  “Oh! Sorry. Rude of me,” said Arthur. “Got somewhere here we can step away so you can bring me up to speed before Cas takes our heads off?”

  They moved off down the hallway. Checker reached up and plucked at my sleeve. “Hey. For real. You okay?”

  “No.” Arthur’s brief moment of levity hadn’t done anything to dull the crush of sick anger that had been strangling me since Lau’s. “So let’s figure out a way to get her out of there. Talk to me about security.”

  He looked like he wanted to say more, but he hit a key on the laptop to zoom in instead. “This is the lab here—as far as we can tell, at least. The security’s mostly electronic, which I can help you with—though not as much as I’d like—but they’ve also got human security guards doing sweeps.”

  “Armed?”

  “Tasers and walkies.”

  “Child’s play,” I scoffed.

  “Maybe.” He didn’t sound as optimistic as I wanted. “Their security system is good. On this short notice, you have two choices. I can cut it entirely, but someone would notice within seconds.”

  “Not the best plan,” I said.

  “No. The other option is that I can take out pieces of it for you, but it’ll take longer. Every time you need to move through a new area it’ll be a few seconds’ delay for me to loop the cameras and get you through the doors. I’ve been trying to work out better estimates of exactly how long, but the point is, I’ll have to do everything manually.”

  “Then do that.”

  “You’ll be a sitting duck. And the guards�
��there are a lot of them, and they do regular sweeps and check in all the time—”

  “I can hide from guards and cameras,” I said. Four-dimensional vector analysis, not a problem. “That’s not hard. And I can get through doors myself if you’re too slow for me.”

  “You bust down a door, security will be on you in seconds. I’m telling you, on the lower levels they have things wrapped up tighter than an airport. And don’t forget, oh All-Powerful One, you’re going to have a kid with you on the way out, and she might not be—” He shut his mouth.

  “She might be hurt,” I finished.

  “Yeah. One thing that might help on the way back, though—being the ridiculously rich corporate headquarters these are, they do have a helipad on the roof you can get to through the executive elevators. I’ve got time estimates for access there, too—”

  “I can’t fly one.” Flying was just math, of course, but it helped to know all the variables first, and I didn’t have time to learn them. I wasn’t about to risk Liliana’s safety by experimenting live.

  “Wait, you can’t?” Checker’s mouth quirked. “And here I thought you could do anyth—”

  “I assume you have a list of their security protocols?” I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat.

  “Right, right. Uh, on the ottoman, I think.”

  I picked up the printouts and sat down where they’d been to start leafing through them, memorizing and extrapolating. “Give me a floor plan, too. And those time estimates for getting through doors.”

  By the time Arthur and Pilar came back, the lines of sight for the security cameras, the timing of the guards, the doors, the route through the complex, Checker’s estimates—factoring in a child on the way out—they all fell into equations in my head, expanding to matrices and reducing…

  …to rows of all zeroes.

  “Dammit!” I growled.

  Arthur crouched down next to me. “What can I do?”

  “We need another edge,” I said. “I can avoid all the security to a point, but the problem’s always reducing to no solution eventually. Somebody’ll catch me somewhere along the way. I need a faster way through the complex.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing about the front desk guard?” Pilar asked.

  We all turned to look at her, and she twitched a little.

  “Go ahead,” said Arthur, in a tone that could calm a skittish rhinoceros.

  “Um, after-hours the security guard at the desk checks everyone’s employee IDs manually, before they go swipe in,” she said nervously.

  “Really?” Checker tapped furiously at the laptop for a moment. “It’s not in the security guidelines…”

  She scrunched her shoulders. “I don’t know what to tell you. But they do it.”

  “So I’ll go in another way,” I said.

  “You think that’s possible?” said Checker. “You’re welcome to do your supernatural mathy thing and check it out, but their guard coverage—”

  By then I’d already run the numbers. “No. You’re right. Breaking in’s a no-go. It’s got to be the front.” I took out my phone and snapped my fingers at Pilar. “You. Did they take your ID card?”

  Her eyes got wide. “Oh! Uh, Mr. Lau told me to give it to him, but then I started crying and ran out of the office—” She hurried over to her purse and dug through it, pulling out handfuls of pens and makeup paraphernalia and other odds and ends. “Here!”

  The card was a photo ID, with a terrible blue-tinted close-up of Pilar’s face that made her look like an angry prison inmate. Instead of a magnetic stripe, under her name and employee ID number shone the tiny gold contact pad for an embedded circuit. I’d already dialed Tegan while she thrust it at me; I listened to the rings follow each other with agonizing slowness.

  “You calling Ari Tegan?” asked Arthur.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Checker took the card from me. “It’s an integrated circuit. You think even Tegan can do this by tonight?”

  “Tegan can do anything,” I said. “He’s gotten me a lot more in a lot less time than this.”

  “Didn’t hear that,” muttered Arthur.

  The ringing went to voicemail.

  I felt a deep worm of apprehension. The Mob guys had used Tegan’s name to get their meeting, and now I wasn’t able to reach him. Mama Lorenzo wouldn’t have approved taking action against him—not only was it not her style, but Tegan stayed strictly neutral in all disputes, was very well-liked, and was considered off-limits as a target by pretty much everyone—but my three less-than-intelligent friends from Grealy’s might have struck out on their own. They’d shot at the bar with Cheryl still in it, after all, and she was as well-regarded as Tegan was.

  I hung up the phone and bit my lip. “He’s not answering.”

  “Is this a guy who, like, makes fake IDs?” ventured Pilar.

  I shot her a withering look—Tegan was an artist, not a college kid with a laminator—but Arthur answered her. “Among other things. He’s a documents man.”

  “What about you?” Pilar asked Checker. “Aren’t you all computer-y? Could you make her one?”

  Checker coughed. “What? Um, no. I’m a hacker, not a forger.” He cocked his head to the side. “Although—I can almost definitely get the chip inside the ID better clearance than it has. You probably only had access to less-restricted office areas, right?”

  “I guess so,” said Pilar. “I never tried going anywhere else.”

  Checker’s fingers tap-danced across his keyboard. “Yup, I’ve got your employee ID number here. Actually, they’ve already deactivated you. But I can not only un-deactivate you if I want to, I can give you better security clearance than the CEO. How’s that for getting fired?”

  “I’d rather have a job,” admitted Pilar.

  I turned my phone over in my hand. Tegan still hadn’t returned the message I’d left a full day ago, and that was unheard of for him. I couldn’t wait and hope he’d appear; I’d need to find a new forger for tonight.

  I hated working with people I didn’t know. Tegan was going to hear it from me for not picking up his phone.

  Assuming he was all right. Fuck.

  Focus. Child in trouble. “Any suggestions for a different ID guy?” I asked Arthur and Checker.

  “Just use hers,” said Arthur. He’d plucked the card from Checker and was holding it up to the light. He tossed it to me. “You’ll pass.”

  “It’s a photo ID,” I pointed out, in the voice I reserved for explaining things to particularly dull people. “We look nothing alike.” Our bone structures and skin tones were entirely different, not to mention that Pilar was cute and curvy with long hair and an infectious smile, and I was built short and thick, more like a very angry tomboy gymnast.

  “Trust me, ain’t no one looks twice at photo IDs,” Arthur brushed me off. “People ain’t even look like their own photos. You ain’t white and you’re the right gender, and it’s a bad picture of her anyhow.”

  Checker moved next to me to peer at the ID in my hand. “You know, speaking as a white guy—if you straighten your hair, he could be right. If people question it, you can just tell them you cut your hair and lost some weight.”

  “Hey!” said Pilar.

  “Wait, what—no!” cried Checker, aghast. “I definitely didn’t mean that as a—you’re very—”

  “Shut up, you two,” I said.

  An ID to aid my way through would make the rest of my route faster as well, by a significant margin. I put in the new timing values and ran the numbers again. Nonsingular matrices reduced beautifully, the solutions played out with a healthy margin of error, and the whole endeavor became suddenly doable.

  I thought about Liliana, locked in a lab. Alone.

  In pain.

  If someone called me on the ID, I’d just put his face through a wall. He’d deserve it for working there.

  “Fine,” I said to Arthur. “I’ll use it, but if I get caught, it’s your fault.”

  “I got every faith
in the world’s unconscious racism,” he answered with confidence. “All brown people look alike. You might want to dress different, though.”

  I looked down at my usual ensemble of cargo pants and combat boots. “Good point.” I jabbed a finger at Pilar. “You have clothes that would work, don’t you?”

  “What? Um, sure. I mean, they’ll be too big, but I think you’ll pass.”

  “Good, that’s settled. You, come with me. Checker, be prepared for—” I did some more math in my head, charting guard shifts throughout the night. “1:24 a.m. That’s when I’m going in.”

  “Can I help at all?” said Arthur.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I need you to check on Tegan for me.”

  Arthur’s face tightened in a troubled frown. “Think there’s a reason he ain’t answering?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. Just check in on him. I’ll pay your rate.”

  He grunted. “Russell, I told you—you gotta stop trying to pay me for every little—”

  “Argue with me later,” I said. “Checker, are you good?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I’ll grab a quick nap and be in your ear by midnight; we can go over your route right before. Does that work for you?”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go rescue a kid.”

  Chapter 14

  When midnight struck, I was shifting uncomfortably in the driver’s seat as I sped back down toward Venice. Pilar had turned out to be an unexpected help—she’d not only provided me with clothes, but she’d given me a corporate makeup job and straightened my hair for me, after which she’d declared my usual sawed-off haircut “atrocious” and gone to work with scissors until the newly-flat hair lay in even layers above my ears.

  Of course, she’d also declared her only pantsuits looked “horrifying” on me, and insisted on taking in a skirt to make it fit. We’d had a vehement argument on practicality versus aesthetics, which she had won by virtue of it being too late to stop by a store and me not having any idea how bad it would be to present myself in a clearly ill-fitting wardrobe. Her dress shoes were also all too tight and almost exclusively tall heels, which I flat-out refused to agree to, but she finally found a pair of worn almost-flats in the back of her closet that my feet managed to squeeze into and which she dubiously declared would “do.”