Bobbi nodded her head. She had an idea of who that might be. “So Exley found out about it and had you ejected,” she said. “Right?”
Freida nodded. “I don’t know how he found out! I mean I’m just about the best tech op the Bureau has in this city, and he’s definitely no hack artist – I mean he was a field agent, combat augs and whatever, he wasn’t spec’d for data intrusion. I guess now it makes sense, with him being allied with Genefex and having their resources.”
“So this doesn’t explain why you’re looking so guilty,” Bobbi said lightly. “You could have told me that from the start and I would have worked with you.”
“Yeah,” said Freida, “But … ”
“Well?”
The redheaded transgene took a deep breath and closed her lovely eyes. “The problem is that I wanted back into the Bureau. That place is what I knew – I always wanted to be a government agent, you know? So I was building a case against Exley to get him removed, in exchange that I would get reinstated in kind.”
Bobbi frowned faintly at her. “And is that still what you want to do?”
There was more silence on Freida’s end. Her face fell, and she looked suddenly lost. “I don’t know what I want,” she said. “Now that I know everything he’s into, I know that getting him pulled out would cause me way more trouble than I would ever want – but then again, just knowing what I do now makes it impossible for me not to act. And then, just the other night, I get a message from someone in the Bureau … ”
“Wait.” Bobbi set her glass down. “You got what?”
“I got a message from someone at the Bureau. Internal security, encrypted messages only. Says that they want to investigate the circumstances behind my dismissal, and if I wanted to assist could I respond with what I know.” Freida shrugged. “That’s where things have been.”
Bobbi folded her arms over her chest, peering at Freida. This clearly wasn’t good. “And what did you say to them?” she asked carefully.
“Nothing,” Freida said with a shrug. “Well, that’s not true, I said that I would have liked to get my position back, at first. But then … I sent them another message last night saying that I would’ve been okay with it if they had asked me earlier, but that it had been long enough that I was happy to continue as I am. I mean, what is there to say? If I gave them information then an investigation starts up. That means that Exley would get involved, and if Exley gets involved I’m dead. Right?” She shook her head and sighed. “It’s definitely not in my interest to do it – nor yours, come to that. If they keep digging I’ll either end up in prison or like Brighton, coating the floor of some church or whatever.”
Bobbi took a deep breath. “That’s good thinking on your part,” she said, trying hard not to sound too relieved. “I mean, I know that’s hard, wanting to go back and knowing that you can’t. Believe me, I know what you’re feeling.”
“That’s what I was thinking, yeah. I just want to see this through, you know? And if you can do that without trying to go back to how things were, I can do the same.” Freida gave her a weak smile. “Hey, how about you pour me some of that?”
“Coming right up.” Bobbi poured her fellow cowgirl a quarter-glass and handed it across. Maybe Cagliostro was spooky, and maybe he/it/whatever was everywhere, but maybe he wasn’t turning her toward a bad corner after all.
They drank a little more before Bobbi decided that she could trust Freida a little more and told her what had happened since last they spoke. After all, Freida had been straight with her about her status and with the message, and frankly Bobbi needed more informed allies if she were going to continue with this whole thing. Come to that, had it really been someone in the Bureau that had sent her the message? Bobbi had the idea that Cagliostro, who had given her the warning about Freida around the same time she had gone dark, might have been the sort of creature to plot it out. He – and Bobbi chose the word specifically because of the voice chosen to address her – was one hell of a spider. She wanted to meet that person, shake their hand. And then maybe shoot them in the face in the name of public safety.
But first things first.
“So you’re going to go do it?” Freida sipped from her third quarter-glass of orzo, looking faintly pink in the cheeks. “I mean, what if it’s a proprietary format?”
“I wondered about that myself,” Bobbi said with a nod. “But I don’t think that it will be. Bound to be ridiculously hardened, though. So I think we should both take it down.”
Freida’s brows lifted in surprise. “What, you mean the two of us?”
Bobbi nodded. “Well, we took on an FBI mainframe, didn’t we? We’re both damned good, and we’ve worked together now, so why not? We know how each other approach things. I say we pull a Gemini and hit the system together.”
She thought about it a minute or so, and Bobbi thought that maybe Freida would refuse – but she didn’t think so. And, sure enough, Freida finally let out a whistle before downing the rest of her ouzo and giving Bobbi a winning smile. “God damn, you’re ambitious.” she said with a sigh. “I don’t suppose you like it with girls? Because I could eat you like an all-day buffet just now, no lie.”
It wasn’t what she expected at all, but Bobbi knew how to handle it. “Sorry sugar,” she said, giving Freida a grin. “I’m strictly an XY kind of girl, you know? But I’ll take it as a real top compliment.”
“You better,” Freida said with a laugh. “I mean every word of it. Jesus. Okay, well, I better get out of here. You have what you need to hit this place?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I think so. You meet with us tomorrow over here about three and we’ll go over the plan.”
“Sounds good.” Freida threw her another smile and got off her stool. “Oh, hey, question. How did you know that I was hiding something?”
Bobbi’s grin didn’t falter. “Women’s intuition,” she said. “You need to put yours to use, you got the full change now.”
“I’ll look into that.” Freida winked at her and took her leave, and Bobbi felt a pang of guilt sting her as the other woman disappeared through the front door. She didn’t tell Freida about the warning that Cagliostro gave her, and she wasn’t entirely certain why. Mostly because of the way it had happened, she supposed, too neat. Too tidy. The timing was too good, and that was probably Cagliostro’s doing and not Freida’s at all. She’d tell her another time, she resolved. But now, to check messages. And then to get some sleep.
When Bobbi woke, she felt refreshed – but also a bit tense, and with the distinct impression that she’d been dreaming something frightening. A week had passed since she and Freida had met at the Temple, and every night since then she had been roused from sleep the same way: sheets tangled, her skin cold with sweat, and yet full of energy and with no memory of what she had been dreaming. It was a bit like waking up after a hugely debauched party with the impression that you had taken center stage.
Bobbi lay entwined in her damp sheets, staring at Tom’s coat pinned up in its shadow box. Tonight, they would be hitting Data Nexus 231. Finding whatever it was that Cagliostro had said was stored there. The Truth, with a capital T and trademark. Into the jaws of Genefex.
The three of them had been planning the whole operation for the past week. According to Calgiostro, the facility would be empty; it was still running, of course, but it didn’t require anything but automated security. Just machines, he had said. No living beings at all. Scalli had decided this meant that there might be combat robots inside, or automated turrets – and so he had proceeded to turn himself into a miniature fortress thanks to the items that Bobbi had purchased for him from Pierre and his own private store. A combat rifle with silencer and suppressor, a mil-spec combat visor – she wasn’t a soldier of any kind, but she knew when a man was loading up for bear. Hopefully they’d never have to set foot inside.
This was the goal, after all; she and Freida would hack the place from the outside, and attempt to penetrate its systems like Bobbi had at Orleans Hospital.
Those had only been the systems native to the hospital itself, however, old tech that had been revived and repurposed. This facility would no doubt be different, and they had decided not to take the chance of trying to cut in through a standard net connection. Among the tools that Bobbi had managed to get from Pierre was a piece of surplus military gear from the European War, a CorEx Systems MT38. Modern hack artists called it a Grail, because it gave a user supernatural power as far as they were concerned. Connected to another network by direct wireless link, the Grail merged its own internal network presence with that of its target allowing complete and seamless interaction without fear of reprisal. Back during the war, military techs used to use it to take over enemy C&C and the like. Commandos hacked tanks and made them fire on their own units.
The Grail was extremely rare and very, very illegal; it had been classified as a military weapon and thus made illegal long before the European War was over, thus making sure that only state militaries and not corporate forces could make use of it. Recovering it was also the single greatest expense that Bobbi had ever made; a gross amount of money had vanished from her accounts as Pierre made it happen, citing his new connections as the reason behind its speedy procurement. The Grail was some real dark magic, and it was a life sentence in a federal cryopen if the ISB caught you with it.
Well, fuck them anyway; it’s not like they were doing her any favors.
Scalli had bought a hardened cargo van from a black market transport broker, and had another guy he knew give it a coat of electrosensitive bicolor paint; the cops were around, of course, so they’d want to switch the paint job once they’d succeeded in hacking the facility network. Electrical terminals were mounted in inconspicuous places on the van to give it the charge necessary to change the color, and the back license plate had a false layer of plastic made to look like a real one that would burn away when the change was made. It was a smart setup, Bobbi had to admit; she certainly wouldn’t have thought of it, and she was becoming happier and happier that she’d brought him into this thing after all.
Bobbi spent the afternoon getting things together. She had her medical bag, which had her portable terminal and a host of other electronic gear. Scalli had wanted to give her a pistol, but she’d refused – she hadn’t fired a gun since she was an Oldie, after all, back when one of her mother’s boyfriends tried to impress her by showing her how. And anyway, that’s what she had Scalli for. Freida, being a federal agent previously, had firearms training and so elected to pack as well.
For Bobbi, for whom any additional equipment other than her cowgirl tools diverted her attention, this seemed a dangerous distraction. What if she had a spasm while dealing with a counterprogram and dumped her bag off her legs, or otherwise jarred it? She’d know that the gun was there, that it could fall and go off. Maybe she was just too much of a worrier, but stranger things had happened – once she’d heard of a dude who kept an EM grenade in his bag, jostled it while pulling a job. Cooked him, the terminal, and everything else in a six-foot radius. None of that for her, oh no. She would focus much better not worrying if she was going to end up with a third nostril on accident.
And so it was that they convened that night in the barroom of the Temple, where Bobbi was waiting. She had given Tom’s coat one long look before she left, thought about kissing the glass but discarded the notion out of her desire not to bring too much sentiment along with her on the night’s sortie. Scalli came first, of course, dressed in a long coat that she could have used as a tent. No way in hell he was going to look like anything other than six kinds of trouble, but it couldn’t be helped. As long as he stayed in the van he’d just be this huge fucking guy, not this huge fucking guy geared up to lay siege to a small castle.
Freida followed after, in dark street clothes and heavy boots. She’d colored her hair black to match. She also carried a leather bag on her shoulder that looked a lot like an August Vitelli satchel, which made Bobbi wonder just what the girl had been up to since leaving the Bureau to pull in the cash necessary to score one. “Imitation,” Freida had told her with a wink. “Besides, they’re all made from printed tissue anyway so who’s to know?”
Something about that stuck with Bobbi, even after they had gotten into the truck and headed out for the far end of the Verge. She wasn’t sure what it was about the comment that bothered her – probably Cagliostro’s words again, ringing in her ears as if the ghost had said it moments ago. The city loomed around them as the van rumbled on, Scalli and Freida in the front seats, Bobbi in the back with the gear; she distracted herself by plugging her portal terminal into a router she’d brought along, which was in turn connected to the can-sized satellite antenna she’d stuck on the roof with a mag-mount. She set up a six-bounce relay link into the cement vat that was Freida’s slow-box, and looked for Cagliostro. Though she could not sense him, soon enough the rumbling voice rang like thunder into her ears.
More silence followed. Bobbi collected herself before speaking again.
“Nothing new from the spook,” Bobbi said as she closed the link and disconnected herself from the terminal. “Looks like we’re still on.”
It was about nine-thirty when they arrived. The facility was housed under a building in a crumbling office block in the heart of the reclaimed territory, so close to the security cordon that the lights of Civil Protection carriers could be seen in the near distance. The presence of armed police so close to the location made her nervous – but then again so did everything else about this whole thing.
“We’re here.”
Scalli pulled the car up into the parking structure attached to the office park, in the bottom level. From there she could see the building through the front windows: a typical example of turn-of-the-century concrete and glass, a box with one side terraced down to street level. Most of the windows had gone, leaving dark and gaping wounds in the side of a stained facade; Bobbi had the distinct impression of something rotting, like a dog’s skull found on the side of the road. Something frail and animal squirmed inside of her.
“Yeah,” Bobbi said softly, staring at the ruined structure. “All right. Freida, you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be, Brain Mother,” Freida said cheerfully from the front seat.
Bobbi looked between her two comrades. “Right,” she said, “Freida, you come back here. Scalli’s on watch until we’re done here.”
Scalli nodded. He didn’t look over his shoulder at her; he was already consulting the monitor set into the truck’s console, reading output from the sensors he had installed. “I got nothing on infrared,” he said. “Motion and EM are nil. You sure that building has power?”
“Only one way to find out, I guess,” Bobbi said with a shrug. She had taken the time to set up the Grail, which was a simple, olive-drab oblong with rubberized coating the size of a small lunchbox. Warning labels and military markings had been emblazoned on top, which Bobbi had cheerfully covered up with an enormous vinyl sticker of a cartoon snail. Bobbi plugged herself back into her terminal, which was connected to the router and the Grail by various cables; Freida came back to sit down next to her, and was still getting out her gear when Bobbi willed the machine to reach out with invisible fingers, half-Awake, probing for connection points …
And found one, very strong, in the near vicinity.
“Got something here,” she
said out loud. “Won’t need the satellite; got a standard wireless signal here, real strong. Must be right in front of us.”
“That would be the hope,” Scalli said dryly, still studying the display.
“Yeah. Well, we won’t need to use the satellite antenna. Freida, you ready?”
Freida nodded. Her face positively shone with excitement. “Absolutely,” she nearly crowed. “Bring on the mess.”
Bobbi gave her fellow cowgirl a final wary look before nodding, and engaged the terminal. Instantly the slow meat of the body and the material world gave way before the power of Awakening. Floating in the serene space that was her terminal’s native system, she reached out and found the Grail, which had already reached tendrils into her terminal’s presence and formed a homogenous region between the two. She felt herself slip easily into that space, into the Grail’s own system presence, shocked at how easily the systems merged. Then she felt the system change again as Freida powered on her own terminal; it was very subtle, still her country yet not, the natural merging of two land masses sped up by a geometric degree.
Freida signed surprise.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 12
