by P. R. Adams
“No need.” Defensive. A quick glance I might have been meant to catch.
“You’ve got to fight it. We’ll be there for you.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it. You did good with that air limo. You said the defenses were tough?”
“Changing.” Avatar-Chan’s lips screwed up. “Not normal.”
“You handled it well.”
Avatar-Chan arrayed the icons close to the interface panels, then sighed. “Some rules.”
“Sure.” There were always rules.
“Rule one: No talking. Not during active hacking.”
“Done.”
“Rule two: Do what I say.”
“Done.”
Avatar-Chan pointed chrome nails at the black carpet close to the egg-shaped chair. “Rule three: Move your chair here.”
Virtual, I reminded myself. Plus Chan had just showered. Would the VR world reflect that? It depended what Chan wanted it to reflect.
I moved closer, caught the same scent—honey almond, I was sure.
The Grid glowed, revealing a path in the lattice to the first manila data store. There were six red security access cubes between us and the data store. Two were small, duller red in color. Three were a little more intensely red. The last was large and threatening.
“Older crypto keys,” Avatar-Chan said when pointing to the smaller cubes. Two of the throwing stars hovered in the air nearby. “Hacks already exist. Next three are tougher, fairly current.” Three more throwing stars spun in the air above the first two. “Good chance these hacks will work. No one knows for sure.”
“What’s a good chance? Eighty percent? Ninety?”
Avatar-Chan shrugged. “Fifty-fifty.”
My avatar’s nuts drew up into its body. “I like more favorable odds.”
The second row of throwing stars spun faster. “I’ve got backup plans.”
“Good. I doubt Huiyin wants to have to give up her hidey-hole if she doesn’t have to.” I jabbed a virtual finger at the final security cube. “What about that one? Looks pretty mean.”
“Heidi’s password. I’ve got that.”
“You’re sure?”
Avatar-Chan smirked. “She had four passwords.”
What else did Chan know about Heidi? About the rest of us? I leaned back in the chair. “Ready when you are.”
“We get into that data store, we have Heidi. Spending, tracking data. All of it.”
“She knows how to go off the Grid.”
Avatar-Chan leaned close, and the LED earrings flashed like lightning beneath magenta spikes. “You knew how to live off the Grid.” Taunting.
“Point taken.”
Avatar-Chan plucked the first two stars from the air and pushed into the metaphor Grid. With a flick, the first star flashed forward, and the first security point winked out. The second star flew, eliminating the second security point.
We pushed deeper in, a smile spreading on Avatar-Chan’s lips. Jacinto had been the same way, becoming cockier with each success, no matter how small.
The three stars were pulled down next and launched in rapid succession.
The first security point winked out, then the second.
But not the third.
Avatar-Chan frowned. “Security update. Not right. No one said anything about that.”
The swipes and taps began. Fast. The interface was set up to be VR-haptic, with resistance and clicking to map to real-world expectations.
Something caught my attention, and it took a second to realize what: One of the second-level security points had flickered back to life.
We hadn’t been detected by it, but it had been reset. That usually meant the method used to defeat it the first time was being watched for now.
Our access path was blocked.
“Chan—”
Avatar-Chan’s head shook. “Rule one.”
I let it go. There were backups and alternate routes. We weren’t trapped yet. Finally, Avatar-Chan had three more throwing stars spinning. They flew toward the stubborn second-level security access point; it winked out.
The cocky smile returned.
Until the red glow of the security access point returned.
Avatar-Chan leaned out of the chair. “How?”
“I tried to warn you. The same thing happened behind us.”
Avatar-Chan slammed back against the chair and squeezed the gold pillows tight. “Upgrading outdated security? In two layers?” Tapping and swiping, and a display popped up before us. Bright green text scrolled down a black window. “At the network layer and the operating system.” More tapping, more swiping, more text flowing by. “In the last two weeks.”
“Can I—?”
An irritated wave. “Yeah.”
“Could the Chinese have tried this and triggered alarms?”
The avatar’s head bobbed up and down slowly. “Sloppy, though.”
“And if we try to get out of here with the path back blocked?”
“Alarms. Trace it back to here. A day, maybe three.”
We needed some time to find another place. “You said you had some other ideas?”
Avatar-Chan’s bottom lip quivered. “Wasn’t expecting this.”
“But you have other ideas?”
Eyelids closed over troubled magenta eyes. “Yeah.”
Fingers traced across the interface, and more stars took shape. Screens popped up, filled with text that was copied into more windows that then collapsed into the stars, changing the forms.
After a minute, Avatar-Chan sighed and slumped in the chair. “Won’t work.”
“What do you mean it won’t work?”
“The security. Not just a patch. A change. Switched versions for one layer and protocols for the other. Won’t work, not without knowing the new protocol.”
“So contact someone. You’ve got networks you can work with, right?”
“Gone. The snowcrash.”
Of course. Trust didn’t come easy for someone like Chan, and the only people who had ever proven trustworthy were dead. Jacinto’s work. The AI’s work.
Stovall’s work.
We couldn’t give up now, though. “Can you reach out? Someone has to be reliable out there?”
Avatar-Chan’s head shook violently. “Trust isn’t…” Tears rolled from magenta eyes; fingers squeezed gold pillows.
“Could you try? For me?”
Avatar-Chan pushed a cat-shaped pillow tight against clenched lips to muffle a scream, then relaxed. “Okay.”
A display appeared from thin air, this one with a more familiar interface. Silvery fingernails flashed over a keyboard, and windows with sub-windows, links, and panes filled with scrolling data rushed by. Sub-windows popped to the front, then disappeared, replaced by other sub-windows. And before long, a new window appeared.
Avatar-Chan froze. Lips moved. A gasp escaped. A few swipes, and only that window remained. Text blinked on and off inside that window, but I couldn’t read it.
The complicated panel popped back up, and more stars appeared. Text was copied from the window into the stars, once again reshaping them.
With a sigh, Avatar-Chan leaned back in the chair. “New scripts. Vulnerabilities. Someone tried to hit this site last week, nearly got in. This should work.” The magenta eyes glowed from the depth of the chair. “Ready?”
“You heard what I told Huiyin. I trust you.”
The stars launched, and the security access points dropped.
Avatar-Chan laughed and pushed to the final security point. It fell with a fling of the final star. “Four passwords.” Triumphant. “Downloading.”
I smiled. Chan had found the strength to trust someone else. We had the data, and—
The security points flared back to life. Brilliant red lights rotated over them.
And in the air between us and our planned exit, in fiery orange text, letters slowly formed.
You will never escape me, Chan.
Chapter 11
Ni
ght had settled over Maryland like a soggy, mildewed blanket. Still water pooled in the parking lot we’d hidden in for the last four hours. When the occasional raindrop fell, lazy ripples distorted the lambent gold of the lights, and the warped reflection seemed to better reflect the real world. You could almost make out the fingerprint of economic malaise in the patterns. The place smelled vaguely like an open sewer, as if the rain had dredged up more than it had carried away. Steam whistled softly from a ruptured pipe running up the side of the old apartment building I’d been watching since our arrival. Dark stucco had peeled away in clumps, exposing cracks running through the underlying cinder block and concrete.
Huiyin sat cross-armed in the driver’s seat of a sports car she’d picked up after we’d abandoned the safe house. Her reinforced jacket was open over the sheer shirt, giving me a distracting eyeful of the milky butterscotch flesh of her chest. Her breathing was even, quiet, beer-tinged. When Chan and I had come out of the VR session to warn everyone that the house was now compromised, Huiyin’s slender frame had gone rigid with fury. That fury hadn’t diminished in the hours since.
“You said Chan was good.” The words were like spit coming from the small woman.
“I said I trusted Chan and I do. You won’t find a better Gridhound out there. I’ve worked with the best. Chan is one of those.”
“Then why did I have to abandon my house? You need to keep these Gridhounds under control. If you let them out of their bottle, they mess everything up.”
“Look, there’s someone better than Chan out there.”
Huiyin’s head cocked, once more bird-like. “What is it?”
What, not who. Did she have a problem with Gridhounds? “Nothing. Don’t worry. It’s just that we thought we’d gotten around it, but either it knows everything we’re doing or you’ve been compromised.”
“I haven’t been compromised.” Her eyelids were narrowed to the point it looked like they were closed.
Ichi’s mirror shades flashed gold in the car we had driven to the house. Her head was tilted toward me, more likely toward Huiyin. I didn’t pretend to know enough about the mind of a young woman like Ichi, but a boy—a man—her age would probably find Huiyin attractive enough to be distracted.
I sighed. “What do you know about my team?”
“You and Danny Chowla have a long history with the Agency. Former military. He’s an excellent sniper.”
“Yes. Both of us were recruited from the military. We started to work together very early on. We’re the only survivors from a mission that went wrong in—”
She nodded impatiently. “The Rhee assassination. I know. We had people observing.”
Observing. It was China’s operation, using NoKo operatives. “Ichi’s father died in that mess. Jacinto de Guzman—Chan’s…mentor—was there as well.”
“We tried to recruit him a few years back. He was deemed compromised.”
That sneer of hers—she didn’t have a place for impure people, apparently. Maybe that included people with cybernetic limbs. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure what happened with him, but I know what the Agency has today, and that’s what amounts to an AI built around Jacinto.”
Huiyin considered me from beneath a cocked brow. “An AI?”
“Not a real one, at least I don’t think so. It’s some sort of simulator. A simulacrum. Good enough to present a challenge for Chan. Good enough to nearly kill me several weeks ago.”
“You’re not so hard to kill, Mr. Mendoza.”
“Stefan, please. The people who call me Mr. Mendoza usually want me dead. I’d at least like the illusion we’re working together.”
After a few seconds, she said, “We are.”
“Great. Then do me a favor and stop with the value judgment of my team. We survived a pretty nasty double-cross.”
Huiyin stared at the apartment building. “Will you kill her?”
“Heidi? Not unless I have to. She’s not some Agency loyalist. She wouldn’t have been skimming money otherwise, would she?”
Her face hardened; she’d caught the dig at Dong. “When do we go?”
“When Danny’s aerial recon finishes.”
I checked the video feed Chan had set up from the drone. It was a modest system, but extravagant wasn’t an option for Huiyin on such short notice. Danny had rigged a simple pair of cameras—regular and night vision—on the drone undercarriage. The video showed lights twinkling in the gated communities surrounding the largely abandoned apartment complex. Unlike the West Virginia house we’d ditched after cleaning up, the western edge of Frederick had suffered in the ongoing economic troubles. A helicopter or the prototype cars we’d dealt with so far would have presented easily identifiable profiles for Chan’s image scans. We were clear for a few miles in all directions.
I whispered to Danny, “It’s nearly two. We a go?”
“Yeah. Sending the bird up higher…now.”
The images took on a different angle. The drone had gone into a steep climb. Ichi straightened in the other car; Chan must have said something about the drone changing its flight pattern and attitude.
Huiyin zipped her jacket up and pulled mirror shades of her own over her eyes. “This would be a bad place to get caught with our pants around our ankles.”
I tried not to react to that image. “Danny’s sending the drone higher. He’ll give the go signal.”
She slowly scanned the lot. “Ready.”
Enhanced optics. As good as my eyes? Better?
Danny huffed into the microphone over the sound of boots stomping on stairs. “Moving into overwatch.”
When the noise over the connection decreased, I said, “Waiting on your signal.”
More huffing, some scraping, then the clack of a rifle bipod extending. “Go.”
I keyed a signal to Ichi and popped my door. She shot across the lot, dancing along the edges of the pools. Her assignment was the back porch of Heidi’s third-story apartment; it would test even a skilled athlete. I fought back a whisper of caution, not wanting Ichi to think I was trying to diminish her in Huiyin’s eyes. Kids’ egos could be so fragile.
Huiyin took the lead as we dashed for the stairs. I slapped a camera into place at the bottom, then a second at the midpoint landing, and a third at the entry to the hallway. It would give Chan a clear view of the stairs and the doors on both sides of the third-floor hall.
Chan whispered, “Video signal clear. No obstacles.”
Huiyin telescoped a shock staff as she skidded to a stop shy of Heidi’s door. I slipped to the other side. In the past, I would have relied on reinforced gloves for an operation like we were pulling off, but with the cybernetics I could just eliminate fingerprints, and my fists would do anything gloves could.
When Huiyin nodded, I connected privately to Ichi. “We’re in position.”
She grunted, then said, “Almost. This wood is rotted.”
“Take your time.” But hurry. I smiled anxiously at my impatience. The shakes were coming. I was having a hard time making sense of Heidi playing both sides. When things didn’t make sense, I lost my center.
Huiyin leaned across the door. “Are we going in or not?”
Heidi climbing from a third-floor balcony wasn’t an option worth serious consideration, but I didn’t want to send Ichi a signal that she wasn’t contributing. I placed a small charge on the doorframe where the bolt would be and ducked down. Wood popped—a sound nearly as loud as the explosion—and I launched a shoulder into the center of the door, which flew inward.
Muzzle flash, the crack of a pistol, something burying itself in the concrete wall opposite, a shadow moving inside the shadows.
I switched to full thermographic and followed the heat image—small, thin, moving to an open area, a glass door…the kitchen and the porch!
The form banged off the glass door, wrestled with the handle.
A gun clattered to the floor, and the lock flicked open. The form squeezed through the open door, left shoulder first, right hand
not quite out yet.
I grabbed the wrist—small, frail—and hauled back on it.
Something snapped, and Heidi screamed. She banged off the sliding door as I pulled her back in, then slumped to the faux-wood vinyl floor. A light flicked on, and I switched back to normal optics in time to catch Ichi pulling herself over the porch’s low wall. Her lips were squeezed tight—betrayed—as she shoved her way through the small opening before sliding the door shut behind her.
Broken wrist or not, I kicked Heidi’s gun away. Ichi checked the safety, then set the weapon on a small, scuffed wooden table in the corner where doorless cabinets met the sliding glass door frame.
Heidi wore a dark nylon jogging suit over what looked like it might be a black T-shirt. Fine strands of hair hung out of a black wool watch cap. Wrinkles that had been mere hints some weeks back now seemed like deep gorges in pale flesh.
Huiyin squatted at Heidi’s side, shock staff resting on the material of the jogging pants. “We have some questions for you. Answer quick and honest, and we leave you alone. Give us any trouble, and…” She lifted the staff up an inch or so and keyed a modest charge, which popped and glowed. The air took on a smell like an overloaded circuit.
Heidi pulled the watch cap off and nodded. It wasn’t a look of pain or fear but acceptance. Resignation. “I want to—” Her voice faded, and she swallowed. “Save you some trouble. You don’t need to hurt me. I don’t know who, exactly—”
The staff popped again, this time melting a section of the pants into the flesh of her thigh. Her spine arched, her leg jerked, and the back of her head slammed against the wall.
I said in an even tone, “No need for that. She’s not lying.”
Huiyin tapped the staff further up the thigh. “We need to know who financed the assassination.”
Tears rolled down Heidi’s face and disappeared in the lifeless hair clinging to her cheeks. She hadn’t undergone Agency conditioning. If she knew something, she would break. Without the conditioning, everyone broke eventually. “I only knew Chambliss. And Wicker. And Dong, but I didn’t know that was his name or that he worked for—”
Another pop of power, another burned section of cloth and flesh. And now there was the smell of urine.
