by Mel Odom
But like with so much else that had gone down in the past few days, we didn’t have a choice.
Chapter 83
Inside Job
The sec guard standing in front of Jiang’s office looked like he wanted to stop us, but Jiang had evidently called him off. A second later, the office door slid open.
Trying to believe that I wasn’t leading my team into a trap, focusing on saving the old man, I stepped into the room.
Jiang stood at attention in front of his massive desk and smiled, but he looked a little nervous, too. He was middle-aged and balding, a short fringe clinging to the sides of his head. He looked like every corp drone I’d ever seen, except for that steady flicker of greed in his flat brown eyes. “Welcome to Prosperity Tower.”
I glanced at the sec guard standing within earshot of the door. “I thought this biz was private.”
“It is.” Jiang looked a little more nervous as he took out a remote control and thumbed it.
The door slid closed behind us. I felt better knowing all of us were now trapped in the office. From the loss of color in Jiang’s face, I guessed that he was feeling just the opposite.
“Just think of me as a…business partner.”
“Sure. We were told you could get us a keycard to the sec office on this floor.”
“I can. Of course I can.” Jiang fidgeted, his bald head gleaming under the lights. “But first you must do what I need done.” He looked at us. “Can I ask why you need the keycard?”
“Sure,” Duncan growled, folding his arms across his broad chest. “Ask all you want.”
Jiang didn’t, realizing at once that no answers would be forthcoming.
“Different biz,” I said. “Different partners.”
He swallowed, calmed his own fears, and started talking either because he was greedy or because he was hanging on at the corp by his fingertips. It didn’t matter which.
“Josephine Tsang is running the corporation into the ground,” Jiang said. “Much like the way you’re undermining her efforts here today, I trust that’s what is going on, because I can think of no other reason for you to be here.”
No one answered.
“I, too, am preparing to make a move against her.” Now that he was committed and had stated his betrayal out loud, Jiang stood a little straighter. “And therein lies the beauty of our situation—we’re in a position to help each other.”
“What do you need done?” I asked.
“It’s simple.” He smiled, and there was a bit more hope in his expression now.
I was feeling more relaxed as well, but I knew I wouldn’t have taken an run like this if it hadn’t been for the old man being in lockdown somewhere in this building. I tried to keep that in the back of my mind, but the thought of what he might even now be going through kept banging away inside my skull.
“I give you access to Tsang’s core system,” Jiang said, “and while inside it, you retrieve some data for me. It’s listed under ‘Foreign Accounts.’”
“Won’t the break-in from your terminal look bad on your access history?” Is0bel asked.
“A little trideo editing, and some creative violence on my guards’ part, and we’ll claim you assaulted us and entered the Matrix by force.” Jiang’s smile grew. “Your invasion of our direct system will only bolster our impending strike against Josephine.”
I let him dangle, giving the impression I was thinking it over. “Call your guard into the office.”
“Why?” Jiang asked.
“Because now he’s part of the plan.” I nodded to Duncan, who stepped to one side of the door.
Jiang did as he was told and summoned the guard into the office. The big man glanced around warily at us, then focused on Jiang as the door closed behind him.
Duncan slammed a big fist into the back of the guard’s skull, knocking him forward as Gobbet tripped him. As the big man came down, reaching for his pistol, I delivered a spinning back kick to his face that sprawled him unconscious on the floor with a dislocated jaw. Is0bel took out a trank gun and shot him in the throat, guaranteeing a few hours of unconsciousness.
“There,” Duncan said with a callous grin. “Looks like your guy has been assaulted.”
I looked at Jiang. “Now give me that keycard and access to the core system.”
Shaking, the executive produced the keycard and gave Is0bel access to his private terminal. I pocketed the card and watched as she jacked into the computer.
“I need you to contact your receptionist and tell her you’re going to be indisposed for a while,” I told Jiang.
“Indisposed?” Jiang hooked a finger inside his collar as if it had suddenly gotten tight.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Let her know you’ll be in touch when you’re available again.”
“Indisposed is a temporary thing,” Duncan said. “If we have to, we can dispose of you. That’s more permanent.”
Hesitation froze the man for a moment, then he called his receptionist and gave her the message. As he looked at me, smiling nervously, I hit him in the throat hard enough to prevent him from crying out, then grabbed the back of his head and smashed him facefirst into his desk.
Blood spurted from his broken nose and crushed lips. Unconscious, he sagged to the floor, falling down next to the guard. I rolled him onto his side so blood wouldn’t run down into his lungs, then tranked him.
I glanced up at Duncan. “He look indisposed to you?”
He laughed, and we waited on Is0bel to return to us, hoping Jiang didn’t have any appointments coming any time soon. And hoping our luck held long enough to see us clear of the building. With the old man.
Chapter 84
Shaken Faith
“Security was tight,” Is0bel said as she stood up from the terminal. “Lots of system trace software and destroyer ice. Definitely not for amateurs.”
“Did you get what Jiang wanted?” I asked.
She nodded. “I found the Foreign Accounts file. A bunch of recent transactions that looked pretty standard. Until I spotted a pattern. Some of the deals were encoded to prevent them from appearing in the corp’s standard financial logs. Most of them had to do with bribery.” She smiled. “There’s a chunk of clean nuyen no one will miss in there.” She looked at Jiang, still unconscious on the floor. “That’s what he wanted.”
“You got it?” Duncan asked.
“Yep.” Is0bel held up a datachip. “All on here. Along with the evidence against Josephine.”
Gobbet smiled. “Are we rich?”
Before Is0bel could reply, I shook my head. “We leave the datachip with Jiang. Put it in his computer. If he’s smart, he’ll pocket the cred and keep his word. If he tries to rat us out, he’ll still have dirt on his hands when they put him under the microscope.”
Gobbet sighed.
“We’re here for the old man,” I said.
“I know. It’s just a shame we can’t have it all.”
“Doing it this way gives us a layer of security,” Is0bel said.
“I know, I know.”
Is0bel turned to me and smiled bigger. “I also found something Kindly Cheng will be happy to have. I pushed the files on to your PDA. Take a look.”
“Later,” I said.
“Some of it has to do with Raymond Black.”
I knew we should be moving, but the chance to learn more about the old man and what we were facing was too important. We’d been operating in the dark for far too long.
I pulled up the files on my PDA, and Duncan peered over my shoulder. Tension radiated off him.
Document Cluster A01-WCP-003-Secure.11/Final
WALLED CITY LOW INCOME HOUSING PROJECT FINANCIAL RECORDS AND REPORTING—FINAL
MATERIAL CLASS 11—GRANTED ACCESS ONLY
I scanned the document. The Executive Council had brokered 950 million nuyen to Tsang Mechanical Services from other international corporations. Those monies were used to construct the Walled City.
“Josephine Tsang was embezzling
from the project?” I asked, barely understanding the accounting in the file.
Is0bel nodded. “About thirty-five percent of everything they took in. She was undercutting the construction, but she kept up appearances. When I eyeballed it, I could tell she was struggling to maintain the percentage.”
“But she was greedy,” Duncan said in disgust.
“Bingo. You’d have to be a forensic accountant to suss it all out, but I’m pretty good with stuff like this. Take a look at the utility allocations.”
I flipped through the screens till I found it. The organizational hierarchy forms and system charts were almost incomprehensible to me, but I saw a familiar name at the top.
“Edward Tsang,” Duncan breathed in my ear. “Vice President of Special Projects.” He shook his head. “No way. No way would Raymond be involved in something like this. Josephine Tsang did this behind his back. He found out about it. That’s why he left Hong Kong.”
I wanted to believe him, and that need to know that much about the old man surprised me. But people didn’t always turn out the way you wanted them to.
“There was a folder listing Prosperity in there, too,” Is0bel said. “It had been cleaned out.”
I closed the PDA.
Duncan put a hand on my shoulder. “Raymond wouldn’t have been involved in something like this.” His eyes met mine, and I could see he was struggling with his faith in the old man.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here to save him, and we’re going to do that. No matter what else happened. Kindly Cheng will use those files to hit Josephine Tsang where it hurts.”
I took the sec center keycard from my pocket. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 85
Passcodes
We walked to the back of the floor and found the security command center without a problem. The difficulty would be in handling the guards inside. They’d have to go down quick or we’d be up to our armpits in Tsang security.
“We do this fast,” I told the others. “Anybody still standing after Gobbet hits them, we dart until they fall. And we shoot the ones that go down, too.”
At my side, Gobbet nodded, gathered astral energy shimmering in her hands.
I swiped the keycard across the reader and the door opened. The second it did, Gobbet sent a wave of shimmering force into the room, then I swept her out of the way and took up a firing position.
The two guards in the back collapsed, but the big troll standing just inside the doorway just stumbled before planting his combat boots under himself again. He reached for his pistol and an alarm button on the wall at the same time.
I raced forward and caught his gun wrist in my left hand. It felt like trying to push a tree limb around. Throwing my shoulder in his gut to knock him backward, I shoved the trank gun up to the general location of his carotid artery and fired three times. Trolls were notoriously tough to put down, and I wasn’t taking any chances.
He fell hard, crashing into the floor as the others rushed into the room. Duncan closed the door while Is0bel streaked for the computer terminal.
“Back in a sec,” she said as she jacked in.
Duncan and I tranked the other two guards, too. Then we settled in to wait.
Is0bel took longer to come back this time, and she looked frazzled. “Raymond Black is locked in an area called Lab Twelve. That’s where the ASIST tech is.”
“Good,” Duncan said. “Let’s go get him.”
“We can’t,” Is0bel said. “Not yet. Getting to that lab takes two codes. I got one of them from this computer. They’ve compartmentalized security for that section of the building. The other number is on two separate floors.”
Duncan growled a curse.
I took a breath. I’d known this was going to be difficult. Josephine Tsang had been covering her tracks regarding Prosperity and the old man for decades.
“We only have to get through one of them,” I said. “One thing at a time.” I looked at Is0bel. “Which floors we can find the numbers on?”
“There’s a sub-basement and a magical research lab. Personally, I want to stay away from magic.”
I nodded. “Agreed.”
“Also, there are some job openings for maintenance crew on that sub-basement floor. Our security passes should get us that far.”
“All right.”
“While I was in there,” Is0bel went on, “I took the liberty of tripping security alarms on several different floors. Security’s gonna be chasing themselves for a while. If we move slow and if Kindly Cheng’s passes stand up to scrutiny, we should be fine.”
I checked the sec cam, found no one was standing in front of the door, then opened it and went through. The others followed. Is0bel took a moment longer to scramble the maglock, making it impossible to get in easily. The guards would be sleeping for more than an hour.
Either we’d be out by that time, or we’d be dead.
Chapter 86
System Malfunction
I was sweating by the time we reached the basement. We’d passed several sec guards trotting through the halls. Some of them even bothered to check our security passes. Most of them were swearing at the computer systems, convinced they were on the fritz because of the several false alarms sounding throughout the building. It would make security tighter on the mysterious Lab Twelve, but we’d deal with that when the time came.
Right now we just needed to keep moving.
A guard confronted us when we stepped out of the elevator on the basement level. He was anxious, and for a moment I thought maybe he’d made us.
“Halt,” he called out. “This area is off limits. Only select personnel are allowed in here. Do you have identification?”
I guessed he was new at his job, or at the position. Everything he said sounded rehearsed and unnatural. For a moment, I wondered if we’d walked in on another group of shadowrunners.
I showed him my ID. “Front desk sent me here for new employee orientation.”
While in the core terminal, Is0bel had also entered us as new hires.
The guard took our passes and checked them over, trying to look older and more experienced than he was. “Welcome aboard. I’m pretty new myself. Just finished up orientation a month ago. Go on ahead to the end of the room. Stay to your right, then take a left at the corner. Maintenance manager’s office is right there. You can’t miss it.”
I thanked him, and we continued on, following his directions. I couldn’t help feeling like we’d been swallowed by a snake, and were just waiting to be digested.
The manager’s door stood open when we got there. Inside, a dwarf sat in a chair with her feet on the desk as she leafed through an old paper book with a bare-chested man and a long-haired woman embracing on it. When she didn’t look up, I rapped my knuckles on the open door.
Not looking at me, she held a finger to her lips, read a little longer, and dog-eared her page. Then she glowered at me, obviously not pleased at the interruption.
Corporate efficiency. You had to love it.
“Yes?” She drummed her fingers on the desk to underscore her irritation. Just in case I’d missed the glower.
I smiled at her, turning on charm I definitely wasn’t feeling. “We’re new hires. HR assigned us to this department.”
Slightly mollified, she put her feet down and turned toward us. “Before you do anything around here, you’ve gotta change out of those street clothes. Hit the locker room and grab a uniform.”
She gave us the locker code, and off we went.
In the locker room, just past the locked security room we needed to get access to, we avoided the other employees and dug out mottled green maintenance uniforms. We had to be careful transferring our weapons to the new clothing.
Then we reported back to our “boss.”
“Much better,” she said. “Should I assume that this is your new sector?”
“That’s what they told us,” I said.
“About time I got some help down here.”
&n
bsp; Duncan snorted, but thankfully the little woman didn’t hear him.
“I’ve got a task to break you in fast,” the maintenance manager said. “The autocoupler on the main terminal is out. Flow regulators need a restart. Engage its airflow mixers, then report back to me.”
“Sure,” I said.
She gave us directions and we went back out into the main room. She didn’t ask why it would take all four of us to get the job done.
The maintenance terminal stood against one wall. We all stood back and watched as Is0bel worked the keyboard. She went through the protocol almost too fast for me to follow.
“I found a work order here,” Is0bel said. “Somebody wants that turbine fixed.”
In front of her, behind a thick wall of transplas, an inert turbine sat silent. The engine was at least ten meters across.
“You’re thinking of repairing it?” Gobbet asked in disbelief.
“On the contrary.” Is0bel grinned. “I’m thinking it could be a good diversion for us. Give us time to get into the security command center.”
“How big a diversion can you arrange?” I asked.
“You want fire and smoke? Some earthquake-like tremors?” Is0bel hit the keypad. “You want it to seem like the apocalypse is starting right here in this room? I can do that.”
“Get it done,” I said.
As soon as she hit the last key, a gout of flame twenty meters tall jetted up from the turbine. It would have gone higher, but it spread across the ceiling, like a gravity-defying pool of fire.
Alarm klaxons shrilled through the room and the dwarven maintenance manager galloped out of her office like she was the one on fire. She cursed a blue streak as she stared at the flaming turbine. “What did you do?”
“I’m not sure,” Is0bel said. “Isn’t it supposed to shoot fire?”
“Damn it!” Our “boss” threw herself at the keyboard and started entering commands. “Get your asses over to security. They’re going to want a statement. And you might want to hope another job comes through.”
