Under the Skyway (Skyway Series Book 1)

by James K. Douglas

  “The EMP disabled the vehicle, but how did they get inside of it?”

  “Hydraulic spreader, it seems.”

  “My goodness. They certainly came prepared. Was there any other security?”

  “The item itself should have been contained within a carbon steel case, triple locked with encrypted passwords.”

  Rossi closed his eyes as his brow wrinkled. He placed his glass upon the table.

  “Something wrong, sir?” I asked.

  When his eyes came back open, he said, “Jackson, as you know, I mostly deal in information. As such, I tend to keep a number of people in my employ who are very good at getting past locks. This fact came up in that meeting I hired you for last night. That meeting was with Amanda Tsai, head of the local Zhejiang Autonomous Combine.”

  I sighed with a growl. “What he means,” I offered to Ms. Nadee, “is that she’s the head of the local Chinese mafia.”

  “Now, now. There’s no need for such crass terms. She’s a businessperson, not unlike myself.”

  “I don’t recall you ever having someone’s arm repossessed for failing to make payments.”

  “Bionics aren’t my field, Jackson, but I can assure you that if they were, I’d be just as ruthless. I’ve seen what your arm can do. Against power like that, anyone who steps out of line must be put in their place, swiftly. Intimidation can be a powerful tool, but the point is that Ms. Tsai and I walk in similar circles, so when she asked for the number of my best code cracker, I gave it to her. She didn’t say why she needed him, and I didn’t ask. That’s the way the game is played.”

  “I’m familiar with the Z.A.C.,” Ms. Nadee said, “and Mr. Rossi, I understand the necessities of business. We’re certainly not here to criticize. It sounds like the next step is talking to this code cracker, if you don’t mind us contacting him, that is.”

  “I think that would likely be a good start for you.”

  “Is there anything else that may have come up? Anything regarding new bionic designs or any new business contacts Ms. Tsai might be contacting?”

  “I’m afraid not. It was a rather brief meeting, and the rest of it had nothing to do with her replica limb business.”

  Ms. Nadee stood, and I stood with her. “If you wouldn’t mind sharing your code cracker’s contact information, I’d like to get moving with this.”

  “He’s a little eccentric,” Rossi added, setting down his glass, “not easy to get ahold of. And, he’ll probably be even more on his guard since he was contacted just last night.” He gave a small nod to his assistant as he stood, buttoning his suit jacket. “I’ll have his number sent to you right away.”

  “We appreciate your help, Mr. Rossi.” She gave him a firm handshake.

  “It’s been my pleasure, Ms. Nadee, and I do hope Mr. Wright bears this in mind if I come knocking on his door one day.”

  Favors and information, those were Rossi’s stock and trade. He had built a small empire out of keeping some people’s secrets and sharing others. The problem with a favor based trade system is that you can never quite tell the price of something until the bill comes due.

  My phone chimed as we stepped back into the elevator. Rossi’s assistant had been quick with the information. I tapped the highlighted number in the text message, dialing the number, but it never rang. Instead, I only got a digitally generated voice telling me the number was disconnected.

  I was about to press the button to reopen the elevator doors when my phone chimed again. It was another text message, but from an unknown number. Opening it, a list of instructions came up regarding how to contact an intermediary working as a bouncer at a nightclub a few blocks away. Checking the club’s listing on the internet, I found that it wouldn’t be open for another hour, giving us just enough time for a decent dinner.

  “It was a birth defect,” Jennifer said, slicing into Stuffed Chicken Valentino. “I was in leg braces until I was twelve, but continued to struggle even after that. By eighteen, I decided I was done struggling. I did my research, spoke with my doctor, and here I am.”

  “I really wasn’t going to ask,” I responded, taking a bite of my steak. “I respect your right to privacy.” For clarification, I added, “As an individual and as your bodyguard.”

  “I know, but I’ve read your profile, so I figured, since we’re working together, you should know a bit about me.”

  “In that case, how’d you come to work for David Wright?”

  “My mother owns a number of chemistry labs, including a few that manufacture carbon nanotubes. They produce components for Wright’s bionic nerve interfaces. She wanted me to follow her into that business, but once I really got a look inside AlterBionics and saw all the good work they do, I knew I needed to be a part of it.”

  “Wait. Your mother has pull in the bionics industry and she didn’t just get you new legs when you were a kid?”

  “Thanks for the compliment, but I’m not that young. I was fifteen when Wright’s story first hit the papers, sixteen when his company got started. Before I was seventeen, my mother had struck up a business relationship with him and converted one of her chem labs into a carbon nanotube manufacturing facility. But, attitudes were different back then. Most people were afraid of bionics, afraid they might change how we see humanity, and I was caught in the middle. Had I gotten new legs at that age, the media would have had a field day speculating on whether or not my mother was using me as a human experiment, or if it should be considered child abuse. It could have ruined her business.”

  “It’s hard to believe any mother would have put her business before her own child.”

  “It wasn’t all her decision. I may have only been a teenager, but I agreed with her choices, and once I turned eighteen it was no longer an issue.”

  “So, what about David Wright? I mean, I have a lot of respect for him, but is he really doing that much good in the world? He’s got one of the tallest buildings in the city and probably the largest bank account. He’s not exactly running a charity.”

  “Unlike Dr. Marshall, Mr. Wright insists on producing quality bionics at affordable prices. The elitism that Marshall Engineering markets sickens him. Mr. Wright does his best to make sure anyone who needs it can afford his products.”

  “If that were as true as you seem to believe, I wouldn’t have had to build my own arm out of scrap.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could be doing more. We’re not going to be solving the world’s problems with better price points, but if people are having to turn to groups like the Z.A.C. to replace lost limbs, something is certainly not working. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me your story and how you managed to avoid getting entangled in all of that?”

  “You already read my file.”

  “Facts and figures don’t always tell a whole story. I want to hear you tell your story.”

  “Fair enough. Story time.” I used the last bite of my meal to ponder where to begin. “Four years ago, I was a front end security officer at Marshall Engineering. For the most part, it was boring work. I used my special little pass that allowed me on the Skyway to go to and from work, where I spent eight hours a day signing in and out guests and taking deliveries. And then, one delivery wasn’t like the others.”

  “The bomb?” she asked, placing her napkin on her plate.

  “The Humanity First movement had been growing more vocal. Protests were getting out of control, making it hard to get in and out of the Skyway. There were reports of violence, but up until then, the Uppers had been well insulated.

  “We had been on high alert for weeks, but in the end there’s only so much you can do. It was an expected package delivered through standard mail. It passed the chemical and metal scanners. And yet, as I reached into the scanner to take it out, it went off.

  “When I woke, I was in the hospital. They had already implanted the titanium bone anchors, but that’s where my insurance ended.”

  “You worked for a bionics company but didn’t have the actual
limb built into the insurance contract?”

  “Oh, I did, but Marshall Engineering terminated my employment just as quickly as they could fill out the paperwork. Standard company policy. Employees injured on the job are considered a danger to the company. Frankly, I was lucky the bombing happened after office hours.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, I sued, of course, but that didn’t go very far. I was broke and unemployed, and they had a team of top lawyers. I ended up staying with my aunt for a while, helping her out, and I started doing research, particularly into David Wright’s early designs. Soon enough, I realized that the nerve interface and bone anchors were the hardest part, and that I just might be capable of building the arm myself.

  “So, I started scrounging for all the parts I needed. I had to use an old x-ray to get the size and shape of the bones right, and it took me weeks to learn how to wind the fishing line correctly and months to make all the artificial muscles by hand. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but after about a year, I ended up with this.

  “Of course, it still didn’t work without the nerve implant. For that, I had to borrow a bit of money from my aunt.”

  “So you borrowed the money, got the nerve implant surgery, and once you healed, that’s when you got into bodyguarding, to pay her back?”

  “No, I paid her back by doing odd jobs, building things or repairing things. The body guarding, well that I more or less just fell into. New arm or not, there’s more people than jobs out there in the lower city, and the lawsuit basically blacklisted me with the Uppers. But one day, I saw some asshole slapping around his boyfriend, and I stepped in. I tried to handle it without violence, but the idiot pulled a knife on me and, uh, ended up in the hospital.”

  “You must have hit him pretty hard.”

  “The arm was still really new then. It mostly moves and works like my old arm, but it still took a while to stop breaking glasses. So, when I grabbed his arm to get the knife away from him…” I cleared my throat rather than finish the sentence. “Word must have gotten around, because the next day I started getting phone calls. It was little stuff at first, helping a woman get her kids back from an ex that’s on the run to Mexico, or spending a week watching the back of a landlord after he had to evict a drug dealer. Eventually, I started getting calls from people like Rossi. Those jobs, I had to be more selective with.”

  She sat quietly for a moment, sipping her drink and allowing her eyes to linger on mine. When she finally set the empty glass on the table, she checked her watch and said, “We should get going.”

  Chapter 5

  As we left the hotel, much of the city was just beginning to wake. The streets again grew thick with cars as people crowded the sidewalks, going about their busy evening. Neon signs advertising food and alcohol flickered to life, casting the world in a rainbow hue, offset by the red rays of sunset slipping between the gaps in the buildings.

  I took out my phone and double checked our instructions. It wasn’t a long list of directives, but they did seem a bit odd to me. Considering the nature of the work, I supposed a few extra layers of security made sense.

  A thick mist swirling through the buildings grew into a light drizzle, dimming what little daylight remained. I unzipped the hood from my jacket’s collar and pulled it over my head. Jennifer rearranged her scarf into a hood and shoulder wrap to fend off the heavy streams drizzling from the Skyway.

  A single block from our destination was our first stop. Outside of a corner grocery store sat three soda machines, two competing name brands and a third machine selling a store brand drink I had never heard of. The machine looked at least three decades old with a cracked front panel and not a single working light. I swiped my card and punched the button for the grape drink, half expecting it not to respond. To my surprise, a can ejected from the machine with such force that it jumped out of the tray in a spiraling arc and slammed into my shin, eliciting a hateful curse from deep inside me.

  When I finished rubbing the pain out of my shin, I picked up the drink, checking it for leaks before dropping it into my jacket pocket. “This may be the strangest bribe I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  “Bribe?” Jennifer asked as we continued toward the address we had been given.

  “I assume that’s what it is. I’m supposed to present this to the bouncer at The Lucky Leaf, along with a specific code phrase.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the end of the instructions.”

  Walking through the city in the rain can be a nuisance. There were ankle deep puddles on every corner and torrents from the alleys could sweep your feet from under you. Keeping my head down and my mind on my footing, we reached the club quickly. As expected, a line of impatient patrons stretched around the side of the building. Their mood was not improved by the way I casually wondered up to the front of the line.

  “Mind if I head on in?” I called out as I stepped under the awning and threw off my hood.

  “Back of the line,” came the heavy voice of the bouncer. That’s when I actually got a look at the man.

  He must have been three hundred pounds of muscle and bones, his arms thicker than my legs. I had to tilt my head back to see the lights from the club dancing off of his clean shaven head, dulled slightly by the rich, dark tone of his skin. My stomach dropped as I suddenly recalled the next part of the code phrase.

  I drew the can of grape soda from my pocket, holding it up to the light. “Will this get me in?” I asked, physically cringing at my own words.

  His eyes moved to the can, taking it in for a moment. His features visibly hardened as his eyes panned back to meet mine. I looked away and braced myself as he took me by the collar.

  The man was kind enough to only punch me in the stomach, and only once. It was still enough to drop me to the ground, gasping for breath as carbonated grape drink sprayed my face from the hole where my bionic thumb had punctured the can.

  Jennifer hooked an arm under mine and hefted me up. As she helped me walk away, she asked, “Is that how this was supposed to go?”

  Between a gasp and a cough, I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if this wasn’t a elaborate prank.”

  “Perhaps it was a lesson,” came a voice from the shadows, “something about how racism is still alive in the world today, or the importance of knowing when to question orders. You know, something super wise and insightful.”

  When he stepped out, he stood about four inches shorter than myself and wore a black leather coat that very nearly dragged the ground. His short, black hair was shaved and trimmed into a ridge extending from his forehead to the base of his skull, the twisted top of which gave him a slightly wild look. The straight lines and sharp angles of a circuit board tattoo decorated the skin above and behind his right ear. Standing out against his dark skin, the white ink of the design reflected flickering neon lights, creating a constantly shifting electric design.

  As I struggled to stand upright, Ms. Nadee said, “You must be the code cracker Rossi sent us to meet.”

  “Hacker, cracker, and VHS enthusiast,” he responded. “Depends on the day, and the pay, but I’m betting you’re not here for a copy of ExoSquad, the Complete Series. You can call me Cassdan.”

  “What’s ExoSquad?” she asked.

  Cassdan had halfway reached out to shake her hand, but thought better of it, sticking his hand back in his jacket pocket as he twisted up his mouth and lowered his right brow. “Is she cool?” he asked without taking his eyes off of her.

  “She’s alright,” I responded. “Maybe a little sheltered.”

  “A’right, well, let’s get somewhere we can talk.”

  We ended up a couple of blocks east outside of a run down garage squeezed under an onramp. There wasn’t a single window in the place left unbroken and the door was simply missing. The mechanic’s bay had long since collapsed in on itself, but the lobby remained mostly intact. Cassdan led us inside and flopped himself down on a couch.

&n
bsp; “Do you live here?” Jennifer asked, dusting off a chair.

  “What?” Cassdan asked, his voice peaking. “Are you kidding? No, I did not show a corporate investigator where I live. Fact is, I wouldn’t even be talking to you if Mr. R hadn’t told me it was important. That being said, confidentiality is key to my business, so I doubt I’ll be able to be of much help.”

  Jennifer took her seat. I stood beside her. This place made me uncomfortable. There were too many possible points of entry, and too many easy angles for snipers. Cassdan obviously counted on anonymity and layers of limited chaos to keep him safe. I preferred order and controlled environments.

  “To be honest with you, Mr. Cassdan,” Ms. Nadee began, “I think this situation may work very well with your preferred lifestyle.” She seemed to already have a pitch ready for this situation. No doubt she had dealt with a few hackers for hire before.

  “How’s that?” he asked, picking an invisible piece of lint from his jacket.

  “This is all about playing both sides against the center, corporate versus criminal. The other side got to you first. That’s fair. So, my employer needs to regain the upper hand, and he’s willing to pay appropriately.”

  Cassdan leaned forward, elbows propped on knees, steepled fingers concealing his mouth. “You have my attention, but I’m still limited in what I can do for you.”

  “I understand that. You’re limited in what you can tell us about your previous clients, but we can assume that with your level of talent, you likely made quick work of the code lock on the case. So what we need is for you to track that client and tell us who she plans to sell the item to.”

  His head cocked slightly to the right. “She?”

  “Amanda Tsai,” she said with furrowed brows. “She was the one who contacted you about the case?”

  “There was a case, with one hell of a lock, but the client was a man. He was Asian and had two bodyguards. We never exchanged names, and I never saw inside the case. All I know about him is that his check cleared.”