“Aside from Tom and Travis, we don’t even know they were at the facility, Salvi,” Mitch sighed. “Even if they were, and they did manage to escape, their pictures are now on every wanted bulletin across the globe. They’ll never be able to show their faces again.”
“But they got away,” she said, clenching her jaw.
Mitch moved closer, slowly. “Salv, we’ve shut down MasterSlave. We’ve arrested a bunch of people who will hopefully give us information to track the others down. We’ve freed a lot of people. That’s huge. You, Bronte, Kara, you did good.”
His hand touched her arm again, and carefully he moved to sit on the bed beside her, running his hand around her back and hugging her. Salvi took a moment, her body shaking, but slowly she unclenched and softened into his hug.
There were a thousand things she wanted to say, but she couldn’t get her mouth to move. Eventually Mitch offered her some water then moved to take his seat by the bed again.
“Where were they keeping us?” she eventually asked him. “Where was the MasterSlave facility?”
“Just outside the city. As soon as Riverton picked up your signal, it diverted every drone in the nearest quadrant to your location.” Mitch gave her a funny look. “That wasn’t protocol but Riverton did it anyway. Analysts are looking into it. They’re not happy an AI used initiative outside of its standard parameters, even if it was on Ford’s orders.”
Salvi stared at him, not sure what to say, but a knock on the door saved her anyway. Ford entered, folded her arms, and gave Salvi a sympathetic smile.
“It’s good to see you, Brentt,” she said, her voice softer than normal.
She nodded. “And you.” Then her face crumpled into confusion. “How’d we get out of there?”
“The drones surrounded the place and held it until our high-speed chopper got there to haul you out,” Ford said. “Anyone left in that building was arrested. We need to get your statement about what happened.”
“We need to catch the ghosts,” Salvi said. “Them and their network. They’re still out there.”
“We will,” Ford said. “In time.” The detective lieutenant studied her carefully. “Have you seen the doctor yet?”
Mitch shook his head. “She just woke up.”
“So she doesn’t know?”
Salvi looked between them. “Know what?”
Mitch gazed at the ground, but Ford looked her in the eye.
“About the implants,” she said.
Salvi raised her hands to her face and felt the devices molded to her skin. She nodded. “When can they remove them?”
Ford sighed and looked to Mitch.
“They can’t,” he said quietly.
“No. They were lying,” Salvi said, shaking her head. “Someone put these on me, so someone can take them off, right?”
“They’re not on you, Brentt,” Ford said. “They’re in you. Wired into your brain. If they take them out, there’s a risk of–”
“Brain damage…” Salvi stared at her. “But they put them in, and I’m fine. So they can take them out again? Just like they did with people after The Crash.”
“It’s too risky, Brentt,” Ford said gently. “What they put in you is a more advanced model than what they had before The Crash. What they gave you was meant to be permanent. It was a one-way ticket. I’m sorry but there’s nothing we can do.”
Salvi stared at her. “No…” she said. “No, I want them removed!” Mitch reached out and grabbed her hand, but Salvi pulled it away. “No!” she said.
Another knock on the door diverted their attention. Chief Garrett entered.
“Chief,” Ford nodded, dropping her folded arms and stepping aside.
“Detective Lieutenant Ford. Grenville. Brentt...” He stepped closer to Salvi. “I just wanted to come by and personally thank you for what you did. My daughter is safe now, because of you.” His eyes studied the neural implant devices on the sides of her face. “I know it wasn’t easy, and that it came at a cost. A cost I can never repay.”
“But we still don’t know who was involved. Who really killed Caine?” she said, looking at Mitch. “Did we get access to the MasterSlave systems? Their database?”
“Riverton hacked the systems but most of it had corrupted by the time it got through,” Mitch said. “They’d planned for this. They’d planned for the day they got found out and raided. But we think the Ghost Network had Dancer steal the tech from Neuricle Corporation. We think they also stole the details for the Subjugates’ drugs too. There are similar elements to both.” Mitch ran his hand through his hair. “It seems Caine found out about MasterSlave and went there as a client. The Chief’s daughter told us he asked for her specifically, then he tried to leave with her, to break her out, but they stopped him. That’s what got him killed. It looks like they fed him to one of their more sadistic clients.”
“Did we manage to find who that client was before the system corrupted?”
Mitch shook his head.
“So we have a sadistic killer out there who now has nowhere to get their fix,” Salvi said.
“As soon as another body shows up, we’ll get ‘em,” Ford said confidently.
“But it will cost us a body to do that,” Salvi said.
“You did well, detective,” the Chief said. “MasterSlave has been shut down. My daughter and others like her have been released.”
“There was a whole network behind MasterSlave,” Salvi said. “If we don’t shut down the entire network, they’ll just set up another MasterSlave somewhere else.”
The Chief exhaled heavily and shrugged. “Sometimes that’s the way it goes.”
Salvi’s face tightened. “What do you mean, that’s the way it goes? We can’t just sit back and let that happen. We have to take them all down. All of them.”
“But you won’t,” he said, before his face took on a look of pity. “That’s the hardest thing to learn about policework, Brentt. You can cut off the head of an organization, a gang, but within minutes a new one will appear in its place. It is an endless cycle. We’ll win some of the battles, but the war itself is eternal.”
“You’re just going to accept that and walk away from the men who held your daughter captive, sir?”
He stared at her a moment, his eyes turning cold and hard. “Of course I won’t. If they show their faces, I will end them.” He took a moment before his eyes warmed again. “But I know that thinking like that is the pathway to hell. We do what we can within the constraints of the law, but while we fight with our bare hands, those with money and power will fight with grenades.” He glanced at Ford, then back at Salvi. “Be grateful we won the battle and that we’ll live to fight another day… Get well, detective.”
He nodded goodbye to her, then to Ford and Mitch, and left.
“How can he say that?” Salvi said after he’d gone.
“Brentt–” Ford began.
“He’s our Chief of Police and he’s admitting defeat?”
“He’s not admitting defeat, Brentt,” Ford said firmly. “He’s being a realist.” She shrugged. “And he’s right. We’ll do everything we can, but if a crooked judge or someone who can pay their way out of things can manipulate the system and override us, they will. That’s just a fact.” Ford looked her in the eye. “We won’t ever kill them, Brentt. History has proven that. But every now and then, if we can nick an artery or two, we can make them hurt. Bad. We can keep them in check. We can keep the balance of power from tipping their way. And that is what you did. You nicked their artery, Brentt. You shut down MasterSlave, and that will hurt them for a while.” She smiled. “We won this battle. And that, my friend, is the balance of power.” She looked at Mitch, then moved for the door. “Get some rest. I’ll see you soon.”
Salvi watched Ford leave. She looked back at Mitch.
“What about the names from Solme?” she said. “We need to get our hands on the membership list from Diabolique–”
“Salvi,” Mitch cut her off. “The Trident team has been wor
king on it, piecing it together. We think that the auto accessory guy, Mark Langford, somehow stole Flyte from either Diabolique or MasterSlave, and that he used that as a sweetener to go partners with Reeves Morgan from Bounce into their new club. The MasterSlave folks found out and had Langford killed. We think Reeves got scared and paid one of the MasterSlave guards to help protect him by stealing Fyte from MasterSlave. Reeves was trying to build his own little army to keep him safe. That’s what got him and the ex-security guard killed, but by then it was too late. The DJ at Bounce was cutting himself a piece of the action and selling the Fyte at Bounce. That’s what got him killed. And the cleaner who killed his boss in Kelto’s Diner, that was over money. The cleaner had bought some Fyte from the DJ to give him the courage to face his boss in that diner, but he lost control and they both got killed. And, of course, we now know that the Randy’s Retrotech owner was killed because he was selling some Dancer specials and the MasterSlave folks wanted to keep that tech to themselves. We think Dancer was in the store at the time, and that’s when they took him.”
Salvi thought of Dancer’s lifeless body falling against her.
“And Barker, the photographer?”
“He was paid to take promotional shots of the Ceiling for their exclusive clients, but he fucked up when he accidentally caught one of your ghosts in that shot of the women. We have no idea how he was allowed to take that shot of Caine with the other ghosts. Maybe they were just so confident of never being found out, they simply smiled and posed,” Mitch shrugged. “But then after they found out who Caine was, they erased him from the photo.”
“And Myki? Francis Mellon? John Dorant?”
“It looks like Dorant found out about the hit on Barker. Dorant warned Mellon, who begged the ghosts to have Myki spared. We think Mellon sent Calabri and his associates to the area the night the hit was taking place, just in case. He wanted them visible to the ghosts as maybe a warning to hold up their end of the bargain and spare Myki.”
“Spare Myki?” Salvi said.
Mitch shrugged. “We still don’t know whether Myki took the Flyte voluntarily in Diabolique, or if the killer intentionally gave it to her down there, to ensure she’d black out the murder later. She still won’t talk.”
“Mellon can’t keep her locked up in his house forever for her protection. Or keep himself locked up either.”
“Maybe,” Mitch said, “but I don’t think anyone is going to make a move on Mellon or Myki while we’re all over them.”
“So it was effectively a turf war,” Salvi said, nodding to herself. “Anything that encroached on MasterSlave, its offerings, its owners, its clients… people were erased. Just like that.”
He nodded. “Greed helped MasterSlave rise up, but greed took everyone down.”
“Greed,” Salvi said, staring off at nothing. “Money. Power… Control.”
She raised her hand and touched one of her neural devices. Mitch reached out and took her hand, moved it away from the device. She looked at him.
“Do you think the Chief knew what was going on?”
Mitch seemed to consider her question. “Maybe. Maybe not. But if he did, he didn’t stop us finding his daughter. He didn’t stop us shutting it down. Maybe he knew, but he was powerless to do anything about it because they had his daughter. But he knew that we weren’t.”
“I don’t know who to trust now,” Salvi whispered.
“You can trust me,” he said softly.
Her eyes blurred with tears and she looked away.
“Beggs?” she asked.
“He’s doing okay,” Mitch said. “He’s off life support.”
Salvi nodded, as tears rolled down her cheeks. She thought of Caine, tortured and murdered, of Beggs’ mangled body, of the neural devices she and Bronte would now bear for the rest of their lives. Hub 9 had taken many casualties. Far too many. The Ghost Network had gotten to them, and they were still out there. She thought of Travis holding that data pane and looked back to Mitch.
“The connectivity?” she said raising her hand to her devices again. “It’s not–”
“No,” Mitch said reassuringly. “They disabled that part.”
“How do we know that?”
“Riverton oversaw it,” he said. “Ford insisted. They plugged your devices in manually and Riverton took care of it. Only it knows the password to enable the connectivity again.”
“They can’t get to me?”
“No,” he said. “You’re safe.”
Salvi knocked softly on the door to Bronte’s room.
“Hey,” Kara said gently. She was sitting beside Bronte’s bed, dressed in a hospital gown, her arm bandaged and a drip rig hooked up beside her. “How you doing?”
Salvi nodded but said nothing as she stepped further into the room. She shifted her eyes to Bronte. He was asleep, his side bandaged. She studied the neural devices on the sides of his head. Part of her felt sorry that he’d been changed forever too, but part of her felt grateful she hadn’t been the only one; that she wasn’t alone in her torment. She looked back at Kara, whose face had now fallen.
“I’m sorry they did that to you both,” she said. “I owe you. You got me out of there before they got me too.”
Salvi managed a smile. “I’m glad we got out.”
Kara nodded. “We went in together, we came out together. Just like you said.”
Salvi’s smile faded as she thought of Dancer again, his limp body; his urgent pleading for her to remember the word Bacchus or Bacchanalia. She had no idea what it meant, but she knew she couldn’t tell another soul until she found out.
“And we saved those missing girls,” Kara said. “And everyone one else who was trapped there too.”
“We did,” Salvi nodded.
Kara looked at Bronte again, then back to her. “Are they letting you go?”
“Soon. I’m waiting for the doctor to clear me.”
Kara nodded, her face turning resolute. “We’ll get ‘em, Salv. We won’t let them get away with this.”
Salvi stared at Kara a moment, then nodded. “I hope you’re right.”
She turned and left Bronte’s room and made her way back down the corridor. She seemed to wander aimlessly for a while, but then somehow found herself standing outside the room of the Chief’s daughter. When she glanced inside, she saw that Clare was sleeping, and she too had the neural devices affixed to her skull. Salvi felt her stomach sink as she stared at the young woman, imagining what she must’ve gone through these past weeks at MasterSlave. Then she thought of the android-woman, and the other woman, more machine than human, and the young man with prosthetic arms and legs, and she wondered where they were now.
And despite how awful Salvi felt inside, looking at Clare she felt the slightest glimmer of hope. Salvi had indeed nicked the ghosts’ artery, and she had set the Chief’s daughter and all those others free. The war was still being waged, a fact that cut Salvi to her core, but the battle to save Clare had been won. Caine had not died in vain.
Salvi walked into her apartment with Mitch following. She hadn’t said a word all afternoon. Not when the doctor came to see her, not even when Mitch offered to drive her home, but her mind had been cycling endlessly over all that had happened.
She moved to her floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out onto the misty Golden Gate Bridge as rain sprinkled against the glass.
“You’re going to have to talk soon, Salvi,” Mitch said, coming to stand beside her.
She looked at him then back out the window. She saw her reflection in the glass; could see that despite the top layers of hair hanging down either side of her face, that underneath the silver neural devices sat pressed against her shaved skin.
“What’s there to say,” she said. “We closed half a case. The perpetrators, if they’re ever caught, will probably get away with it and then they’ll start over again.”
“And if that happens we’ll do what we can to stop them again. It’s an endless game of whack-a-mole.”
/> “The killer is still out there. You saw what he did to Caine and Chaney. You saw what he was capable of.”
Mitch nodded. “And Ford’s right. As soon as they appear on our radar again, we will hunt them down and stop them.”
“The Chief is going to sweep his daughter’s abduction under the rug, isn’t he?”
Mitch thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. He’s just not going to deal with it publicly. Yet.”
“Yet?” she looked back at him.
“The media got wind of the raid at MasterSlave. Except they don’t know it was MasterSlave. They think it was a fertilizer factory. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the truth.” Mitch sighed heavily. “Then there will be a lot of people asking a lot of questions, and a lot of answers will need to be given.” He looked at her. “And if we’re lucky, we might see some of those dominoes finally fall. I guess it depends on what names Riverton can scrape from the uncorrupted files and what those arrested will tell us.”
“And what internal affairs will do about it if they find badges on there.” She locked eyes with Mitch. “I want to know if any names match Attis Solme’s list too.”
“Riverton will soon tell us if they do.”
Salvi nodded, picturing Riverton’s golden androgynous form, unsure as to how she felt about it holding the key to controlling her neural implants. Cyber believed their AI could never be hacked, but could Salvi ever be sure of that?
Salvi looked back to her reflection in the glass, saw the silver neural tech against her skin, wired inside her brain.
Just like Subjugate-52.
Her eyes blurred with tears again.
“Don’t lose hope, Salvi,” Mitch said quietly. “You’re a good cop and we need you. The people out there need you to fight for them. They need you to not give up on their justice.”
“Is there justice, though?” she whispered, picturing her sister, Faith, hanging from the ceiling fan.
Mitch looked at her. “There is as long as people like us wear the badge and do the right thing, Salvi. As long as people like Ford, and Hernandez and Bronte, Beggs, Kara, Sorenson, Noble…”
Tears began to run down her cheeks. She wiped them away. Mitch tried to pull her into a hug, but she pushed him back.
The Sensation Page 30
