by D L Young
“Good evening, Mr. Thornbush,” the doorman greeted him, using the fake name Maddox had rented under. The old man politely dipped his chin and touched his hat. His glove was dingy and threadbare, matching the rest of his stained, well-worn uniform. Still, he wore the outfit proudly, with the same professionalism and sense of duty with which he performed his job. The old man seemed perfectly content, even happy, with his place in the universe as the longest-tenured doorman on Church Street.
Maddox smiled and nodded, then paused as the man opened the door for him.
“Cesar, where are your specs?” he asked.
The man looked to the ground, his lined face knotted with uncharacteristic worry. “I’ll find them.”
“Don’t tell me you lost another pair.”
“No, no,” the man protested, still looking down. “I just misplaced them, that’s all. I’ll find them, I’m sure of it.”
Maddox stood in the doorway. Building gossip had it old Cesar was about to get the boot. He was old and forgetful, and he was always losing his specs, making it impossible for him to call a taxi or perform other services for the building’s tenants. There was talk of petitioning the condo board to find a replacement.
Maddox backed out of the doorway and told the old man to close the door. He blinked through his specs’ menu, found the factory resets and activated them. A few moments later a confirmation window popped up. He removed the specs and handed them to the old man. He’d never really liked this pair, anyway.
“Here,” he said. “I got these free when I bought a timeshare.” It wasn’t the most believable lie, but it had been a long day and he was tired. He knew the proud old man would never accept anyone’s charity.
The doorman looked up at Maddox. “Sir, I can’t take your—”
“Give them back when you find your own.”
Shaking hands slowly reached out and took the specs. “I will, sir.” The man’s voice trembled with restrained emotion. “I can’t tell you how grateful…” His voice trailed away.
Maddox shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “It’s no problem,” he said, finally breaking the awkward silence. “Like I said, they were free.” He pulled the door open and stepped inside.
Minutes later, he sat on the tiny concrete outcrop of his tenth-story balcony, wearing boxer shorts and smoking. He never liked to sleep when he was whiskey buzzing, and he was still a cigarette or two away from sober. A breeze came off the Hudson River, three blocks to the west beyond the seawall, and cooled his skin. He’d left the TV on in the condo, and the muffled voice of a newsperson came through the glass door. He caught bits and pieces of stories. Something about a terrorist bombing in the financial district, then a corruption scandal in the City’s waste removal department, followed by the protests over a proposed cut to the dole, the subsistence income most of the City’s jobless residents relied on. Another day in the City.
He blew smoke rings into the air beyond the balcony. They floated away, twisting and folding and losing their shape as they dissipated in the softly pushing breeze. Specs, he reminded himself. He’d have to pick up a new pair in the morning.
3 - Lexington Avenue Raid
“I don’t want any upgrades,” Maddox repeated, his patience thinning. His head was foggy with too little sleep and the dull throb of a hangover. The vendor, hunched over the specs, hummed in disapproval. He was a little round fellow with a wiry mop of dark hair. Russian, maybe Ukrainian, from his accent. He made small adjustments to the specs’ temple arm with a tiny screwdriver. An elastic band around his head held a jeweler’s loupe against his left eye.
“I make good deal,” he said without looking up from the pair of refurbished Kwan Nouveaus. “Three apps for price of one. You not find better deal anywhere south of the park.”
“I’ve got my own wares,” Maddox said firmly.
Again came the hum of disapproval, but at least the man stopped trying to upsell him. Behind the counter, a row of holo displays flickered, rotating through scenes from the street outside. Security cams. Above them, on a larger display, a pair of youths with model good looks argued passionately in Russian. Some serial drama. Maddox only understood bits and pieces—his Russian was sketchy even when he wasn’t hungover—but the bad acting needed no translation. The camera zoomed slowly as the argument cooled and the youths drew closer to one another, their disagreement forgotten as they pressed their mouths together in a sudden fit of passion.
“Sorry,” the vendor said sheepishly, looking over to the display. He flicked his wrist at the holo, flipping over to a news feed. “My daughter’s program,” he said, then added, a bit too defensively, “I never watch such silly things.”
After a few final tweaks, the man handed Maddox the specs. “You try for fit now.”
The specs rested on Maddox’s face comfortably. He blinked a sequence, and a config menu appeared, superimposed on the lens. He tested the eyetracking and the blink and subvocalization sensitivity and checked the logs to make sure the pair had been wiped as clean as the vendor had claimed. His eyes flitted and twitched as he rushed through the menus and reset the defaults to his liking.
“You’re very fast with eyes,” the vendor observed. “You’re datajacker, yes?”
“Pastry chef,” Maddox said, finishing his checks. He removed the specs, nodded. “These are good.”
As he handed the vendor a small stack of bills, something on the news feed caught Maddox’s attention. The financial district terrorist bombing. Same story he’d caught a piece of last night on his balcony. BREAKING NEWS scrolled across the display in flashing red letters as the newswoman spoke.
We’ve got an update on yesterday’s bomb attack at Takaki-Chen Engineering’s headquarters in the financial district. The death toll now numbers fourteen. A spokesperson for the company said the global firm’s employees were shocked and devastated by the senseless act—
“Bah,” the vendor said, gesturing the feed away from the story to a soccer match.
“Change it back,” Maddox said.
“Why you want to see such terrible things?”
“Change it back!” Maddox barked.
The vendor looked at him sourly, then turned and gestured at the holo. The news feed returned.
…the detonation occurred at four p.m. local time. Police say the bomb was an improvised device, detonated remotely, and they’re reviewing public camera footage for suspicious activity.
Maddox swallowed. Four p.m. Takaki-Chen Engineering. He’d been datajacking that very company at that very hour, poking around its digital insides while someone was blowing up its offices in the real world. This was not good, he thought grimly. He turned and left quickly, the bell on the jamb tinkling as he pulled open the door and stepped out onto the noisy, crowded walkway.
Not good at all.
***
The zoom on his new specs was good. Even at 50x magnification, the scene outside Maddox’s office building was clear and crisp and didn’t wobble. He watched from a fifteenth-floor fire escape several blocks away, looking for…he wasn’t really sure what for, actually.
The scene in front of the entrance looked like any other weekday morning. Busy, congested, people hurrying the way they only seem to do in the morning. Coffee cups in hand. Long, purposeful strides, destination bound.
Maddox paid a handsome rent for his tiny cramped office in one of the City’s nicer domed neighborhoods. Most of his professional counterparts normally worked out of run-down tenements on abandoned streets. The City’s empty nooks and crannies, places the police had long since stopped monitoring with cams and drones. But after his stint in the corporate world, Maddox found he could no longer stand such filthy, dilapidated conditions. He’d grown accustomed to a clean, well-lighted working space, so he’d donned the fake identity of a business consultant and rented a small-but-pricey office in the heart of a busy commercial district. The neighborhood also had some of the best noodle joints in the City, which had been an added bonus.
>
Maddox watched, hoping the sinking feeling he’d had after watching the news feed was nothing. Hoping his datajacking gig and the bombing hitting the same target—on the same day—was just a bad coincidence. A minute later he realized it wasn’t.
A dozen police hovers converged on the building, blue and red lights flashing. Two ground cars and a paddy wagon skidded to a stop in front of the entrance. Ten cops clad in full rhino armor poured out of the wagon and hustled into the building, brandishing stubby automatic rifles. The cops in the ground cars jumped out and cleared the walkway in front of the building, damming the flow of pedestrian traffic.
Lifting his view from the street to the tenth floor, Maddox found his office’s window. Nothing happened for a long moment as Maddox watched and held his breath. Then a white flash flared and the window shattered outward. In the next instant Maddox heard the telltale thud of a stun grenade.
He stared in disbelief at the raid on his office. The hovers floated around the building like angry hornets, lights blaring. Through the broken window, he caught glimpses of rhino cops moving through his office.
What the hell was happening?
He blinked up the call menu in his specs and dialed the only person who might be able to tell him.
4 - Market Street Meetup
“Meet you there in half an hour,” Maddox said. “And don’t forget the gear.”
He ended the lens call as he climbed down the last rung of the fire escape. Heading down the alley and turning south on First Avenue, he merged with the flow of foot traffic on the crowded walkway. His mind raced, pulse quickened. He had to calm down, had to think. Removing a cigarette from his pocket case, he lit it and took a slow deep drag. He held it in for a long moment, trying to calm the whirling storm inside his head.
Sanchez. What dirty business had that corporati been mixed up in? He was connected to the bombing. Had to be. The timing was too coincidental.
How had the cops managed to find his office? But more than that, how did they know about him at all? Even if they’d picked up Sanchez and beat a full confession out of him, the client had never known Maddox’s name, much less his place of business. Their only meetings had been on two occasions: both in secured, untraceable locations in VS. And for those, Maddox had physically plugged in from a public grid down in the Bowery, a safe distance from his Upper East Side office.
He went over everything again and again, retracing his few dealings with Sanchez, recalling nothing unusual. He’d taken no shortcuts, hadn’t said or done anything that might have compromised his anonymity. So, then, how? None of it made any sense.
A bumblebee drone flitted overhead, skimming a few meters above the pedestrians’ heads. A tiny glow on its belly alternated red and blue, identifying it as a police drone. Maddox’s neck muscles stiffened. He tried not to break stride or make any other suspicious moves the device’s motion algorithms would pick up on. He swallowed, kept walking. When the drone buzzed past, ignoring him, Maddox let out a breath. He gave a silent thanks for the one upgrade he’d bought with his new specs—a twenty-pack of stolen IDs that fooled most street cams and police scans. The upgrade had just paid for itself and then some.
Never skimp on wares. It was something Rooney—his late mentor and business partner, a man who’d been famously tightfisted in every other area of his life—had often preached. Top-grade wares could be the difference between getting pinched and walking away. Maddox blew smoke, silently agreeing. True words.
Half an hour later, Maddox found Jack in the abandoned lot where the southernmost end of Market Street dead-ended into the FDR Seawall. Jack wore white-framed specs and sat on an upended crate at the edge of the lot’s weedy overgrowth. The seawall loomed large behind the fighter, backdropped by an overcast sky of low gray clouds. As Maddox approached, he noticed the satchel in the fighter’s hand.
“Have any problems?” Maddox asked.
Jack shook his head. “Not finding the gear. But this hangover’s hitting me harder than Shinji did last night.” He smiled. “And I had to kick a couple new friends out of bed earlier than I would have liked to.”
“Sorry about that.” Maddox took the satchel, looked through it. The deck was a used Tani-Yakashima, but the trodes were new, still in their shrink wrap. He then gave Jack a code for a rented locker in a Battery Park storage facility, one of several stashes of hard cash he maintained throughout the City. It had more than enough to cover the deck and trodes.
“Thanks,” Maddox said. “And keep the change.”
“Don’t I always?” Jack said with a wink.
The fighter removed his specs, hung them over the neck of his shirt collar. It was a gesture of trust and intimacy, normally followed by words or actions you didn’t want recorded in your specs’ feed archive. Maddox returned the gesture, removing his own pair.
“So what’s going on, amigo?” Jack asked.
“Wish I knew.” Maddox removed his bag of tobacco, began to roll a cigarette. “You find out anything?”
Maddox had asked the fighter to make a few discreet calls, see what he could find out. Jack had friends on the police force. He had friends pretty much everywhere. It was one of the advantages of being the smiling, handsome life of the party. Cops were especially fond of him, despite his outlaw status. Natural Jack, the proud warrior who never took fabbed steroids or modded his body to beef up his fight game. A tough bastard who made a living with his fists and smiled while doing it. A man’s man who lived by his own code. Cops were suckers for all that macho bullshit.
Jack shook his head. “Not much. None of my friends on the force are working on this one.”
Maddox lit a cigarette, felt a stab of disappointment. Without a direct contact on the investigation, whatever Jack might gather from his cop friends would be second- or thirdhand. And cop gossip was like any other gossip, the facts becoming distorted and less reliable with each retelling.
“Any mention of Sanchez?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“They hadn’t even heard of him. Or at least my friends on vice hadn’t heard of him.”
That struck Maddox as strange. He turned his thoughts back to the botched T-Chen job. He hadn’t actually seen Sanchez taken into custody in the real world, of course. All he’d witnessed was the man’s avatar getting frozen and geotagged, then disappearing. The arrest Maddox had inferred, a conclusion based on similar arrests he’d seen—sometimes closer than he would have liked—a dozen or so times over the years.
Had Sanchez managed to get away, somehow evade capture? He hadn’t struck Maddox as terribly clever. Or at least not that clever. But anything was possible. Cops screwed up sometimes. Kicked down the wrong door. Slapped handcuffs around the wrong wrists. Shot the wrong people in the face.
He told himself not to overthink it. Jack had only made a couple calls. It wasn’t exactly a comprehensive inquiry of the entire police force. It was still possible—even probable, now that he rethought it—that Sanchez was sitting in a jail cell now and Jack’s contacts on the vice squad simply hadn’t heard about it yet.
“They tell you anything about the bombing?”
“They brought in some gang for questioning,” Jack said.
Maddox blew smoke. “Gang?”
“Yeah, some biker outfit. Call themselves the Anarchy Boyz.”
Maddox’s cigarette froze halfway to his lips. “Oh, shit.”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Kind of.”
He’d more than heard of the Anarchy Boyz. He’d committed felonies with them. Near the end of his short stint as a salaryman with Latour-Fisher biotech, he’d crossed paths with the motorbiker delinquents. His first impression had them pegged as nothing special. Teen thugs. Wannabe gangsters. But later, when they’d helped him elude a killer AI, his opinion had changed. They were kids, yes. Pimply-faced and hyperactive. Crude and loud. Their lives were gaming and motorbikes and fart jokes. But at the same time, they were stone-cold pros. Cle
ver thieves and deadly dangerous. As lethal as any mercenary crew he’d ever known.
But terrorist bombers? No, that didn’t fit. Not even close.
Until Jack had mentioned the Anarchy Boyz, Maddox had held on to the hope this was all some bad coincidence. That whoever had bombed the T-Chen building had simply picked the worst possible time to do it: while he was datajacking the company’s digital assets. But now, with the young bikers implicated in the bombing, he abandoned that notion. Two coincidences was one too many.
He felt as if he were standing on a frozen lake and the ice had begun to break beneath him. In a handful of hours, his entire world had flipped sideways. What the hell was happening? What kind of nightmare had he been pulled into?
He took a long, contemplative draw on his cigarette. The kid, he thought. Maybe the kid would know something.
“So what’s the next move, Blackburn?” Jack asked.
Maddox blew smoke, looked at his friend. “I’m going up to Fabbertown.”
5 - Fabbertown
Visiting the Bronx unarmed wasn’t generally advisable, and Maddox wasn’t packing. But at least he had a bodyguard. Jack had insisted on coming along with Maddox to Fabbertown. Maddox had tried to dissuade him, insisting it was best the fighter stay out of it. Jack wouldn’t hear any of it, though, refusing to let Maddox wander Fabbertown alone.
