by Chris Hepler
"You're gonna need me," says Olsen.
"Gonna be there," says al-Ibrahim.
"Giving some," says Yarborough.
"Good, then we're moving forward," I say. "Though, there is the matter of compensation. I've got a freelance contract written up. But if we know for certain there will be vipe contact, not just us hunting them but them coming after the building, armed and dangerous, we're going to need a significant amount of hazard pay."
"It so happens the Institute has recently increased its liquid holdings," says Kern. "I understand the technical term is a Foxtrot Lima."
54 - RANATH
December 8th
I pull up to the rowhouse well after the twilight is gone from the sky. I know it's a spectacularly bad idea. Not only is it night, but I have no hot van, no backup to distract police or onlookers. There are multiple vipes in there, and a four-shot pistol is simply not enough in case of a confrontation. But going back to my old house to grab the Kriss out of the fire safe is predictable and, therefore, likely to trigger some trap set by Breunig. Guessing the trap is a fool's game. They missed once. They will be careful a second time.
I'm not suited up, either; the heavy armor is at The Block—impossible to get. I have just a trench coat to keep me warm and a vest to keep me whole. I usually call the pistol my last resort and my stimweb the primary weapon. Today, my only real weapon is my mouth.
I scan the area for the hundredth time. Sitting behind the wheel of my car is the best spot to avoid attention, but it grates on my martial instincts to be sandwiched in with no place to move. Satisfied that no one is around, I dial up my stimweb for concealment and go over my fingertips and palms a final time with rubber cement. Ballistic cloth or gutting gloves are better, but they both block access to stimweb tacks, and I'm not relinquishing that advantage.
When the glue dries, I fiddle with the pistol in my right coat pocket and open the door. It will be a swift approach; I am parked half a block from Ulan's place. At least, it had better be Ulan's. The address I got from the Court was vacated, and I had to cramp the landlord to find this one.
My car buzzes.
I crouch, startled, then realize I have my burner phone in the cup holder. It rattles four times before I'm satisfied that no one's seen me, and I reenter the car to see who it is. It's one of my decoy accounts requesting voice-over-email. I set up mail on the burner but never shut this off in the default settings. Who would call me?
The answer is Parvati Kamath, my neighbor. I answer.
"Yes?" I say.
"Roland? I guess you're alive."
"I can't talk," I say.
"So why did you answer?"
I permit myself a smile. Parvati has mom-level perception. "Because I can't ever see you again, and I wanted to say goodbye."
"The police were here. They want to question you. I said I didn't have any idea who could have done it."
"You are a treasure."
"Roland… who are you?"
"That's a very fair question," I say, "but I'm afraid nobody will like the answer."
"Fix that."
"In progress," I say seriously. "Take care."
The call cuts out. She is the last vestige, the last person besides a bill collector who would notice that I am gone. With my new identity, I am no one and nothing.
I exit the car. I orient myself on Ulan's rowhouse porchlight and steal toward it, not too fast, not too slow.
The garage is sized for two, but its door has no windows, making it impossible to tell how many people are home. Cars line the street but are not stacked in the driveway, an encouraging sign. Were the place packed, I would have to lurk outside in the hopes of encountering the vipes singly, a bad state of affairs.
I ring the doorbell. Nothing.
I move out of street view, taking cover in between the houses. They have fences, which could mean dogs, but none are outside, not in this cold. I duck to look at a ground-level basement window, but everything is dark. I leave the window and approach the rear of the house.
Here, the lights are on inside. I creep onto the back porch, noting the stabbed-out cigarette butts on the rail. Whoever it was—Infinity and Ulan don't smoke—never bothered to get an ashtray and had something against grinding the butts under a shoe like every other smoker on the planet. A possibility: vipes often have no income. A nicotine addict will still pay for cigarettes, but ashtrays are optional.
I can see no one through the window, but that means little. I need to find out whether anyone is home and whether the house has an alarm. I take the simplest way to do both, by turning down my qi function and knocking on the back door.
The door is a cheap, solid plank of wood and has no peephole, yet still I instinctively move to its side to wait for a response. Some vipes answer doors by shooting through them.
No answer comes. I hear only the distant whir of a motorcycle driving by. I knock once more, wait and decide to risk the alarm. Concentrating and adjusting his function back up, I draw the burner phone and fire its lock-picking app. It goes to work on the smartlock, leaving only the most generic of access records behind.
I draw the pistol, and its laser sight flares on, a tiny, bluish-green dot. Targets recognize red dots from countless movies. A half-second of confusion could save my life.
I gently push the door open. At any moment, I'm expecting Infinity's Glock to ring out, but I see and hear no one. There are two approaches to clearing a house solo. One is to assume the shit's going down and make contact before the confusion wears off. The second is to creep in, eyes and ears ready, hoping to get tipped off by sound as to how many people are in the house.
I take the second approach, if for no other reason that unfamiliar houses have tripping dangers. I move in a crouch, trying to stay high enough that the fringes of my coat don't catch under my shoes. There's a reason no one wears overcoats in a SWAT team, but here I am.
Seeing stairs both up and down from this central level, I choose down. There tend to be more rooms upstairs, more angles to cover, and gun safes are often in basements. Better to cut off anyone inside now.
I open the nearest door a few steps down and see the garage. There's her car. Maybe she's home. Maybe she's not.
I enter a small, messy basement with a cheap futon-bed spread out for sleeping. That means space is at a premium upstairs—probably at least two bedrooms holding vipes.
The stairs disappear under my feet. I reach the upper landings and hold the pistol loosely. The laser sight's pressure sensor shuts it off. No sense letting everyone upstairs know where I'm aiming as I come around the corner.
First room clear. Second room clear. Third room is a fucking closet. Last room is a bathroom. I am ready to punch a hole in the drywall. My one potential ally in this world, the one I walked into the lion's den just to find, is simply gone again. Did I alert her somehow?
Coming back here is a poor plan. I quickly search the bathroom and strip black hairs off the hairbrush. I might still have a chance if I can find enough—
I stop, thinking. I hurry downstairs to the living room. There, aimed at the wall, is a TV projector, still running with a soft orange light indicating sleep mode. I touch it, and it wakes, flashing a password prompt.
MORGANLORENZ, I try. Nothing, of course. Infinity will have gone for a strong one.
It spits out its hint: Royal whore.
An insult? I try FENNEL. Nothing.
But this is Infinity. And she's told me of a princess, hasn't she? I go online and soon have a hypothesis. There are letters and numbers, but I know half of them, and when the cracking app comes up with the second half, I nod. The words are seared into Infinity's heart, the rebel who rejected Yahweh: 2KINGSJEZEBEL.
The TV projector wakes up and shows me a mess, the web of a funnel spider that craps out pixelated windows. Notepad programs label the photos and video, and spreadsheets of numbers fill the toolbar. At one end of many tabs is an oversize map labeled LOT 561 GREENBRIAR HEALTH, and on it are lettered th
umbtacks in dozens of colors. They are placed by the doors, desks, halls—security positions.
I page through it, stopping on a spreadsheet of just a few chilling numbers.
6:00—acquisition
7:00—shift change
8:15—insertion
8:20—exfiltration truck in position
8:30—contact with Lorenz, distraction
8:45—max departure time
I check my watch, sure that I've already missed it. I can wait here and hope to catch them unawares as they return, but I don't know if any of them will make it back. If Infinity is leading this charge, it will probably be as disorganized as her sock drawer. Vipes and criminal masterminds have little in common. That leaves one option.
I turn the lights off as I exit the house. It will save electricity, and before this night is over, they will know I'm after them anyway.
55 - INFINITY
December 8th
Between you and me, I don't think we're even going to get in the door, but here goes.
We followed two previous vehicles from Greenbriar Health but lost them as traffic thickened with witnesses. When they turned onto the highways, we let them go. This time, when we spot prey, the opportunity is there. Our unaware target is a scraped-up, black Umsung Shear, a low-end sedan. Probably owned by some intern or custodian looking forward to the end of the day when he pulls out of the lot. Deborah, at the wheel, follows the car as close as she dares as it makes its exit and rolls down the length of Central Avenue.
The Shear stops at a red light, and no other cars are nearby. Our truck's rear window is open, and Deborah shouts "Go!" to us in the back. Cass and I yank down ski masks and hit the pavement running. I'm at the driver's side door in an instant and have the muzzle of my pistol wedged against the glass.
The driver goes all in on the escape and stomps on the accelerator, but Cass has already got a grip far under the rear bumper and knows car makes like I know Scripture. The tires on the rear-wheel-drive Shear spin uselessly as he lifts it off the ground. I don't appreciate defiance, so I shatter the window with an elbow and flick the lock so I can rip open the door.
"On the ground!"
The driver reaches for his seat belt, and I nearly blow him away, but I channel my rage into helping him to the asphalt. The car crashes to the ground next to us as Cass lets it go.
"Wallet and phone," I say, before seeing the target has his access card on a retractable reel clipped to his belt. I strip it from him. As he's wondering what the hell that's for, Cass grabs his arms and forces them behind his back where I can cuff him with a plastic zip-strip.
"We're good. Trunk him."
Cass grabs him by the neck and frog-marches him to the trunk of his car. I get into the driver's seat and pop it, and thirty seconds later, I'm driving down a side street, followed by the truck. We leave the car there and are headed back to Greenbriar before five minutes are up.
The Greenbriar campus has nothing green, and the closest thing it has to briars are a dusting of broken glass by the side of the curb, courtesy of car accidents long past. East D.C. is an industrial park just a letter away from southeast D.C., which my personal safety app has filled with red X's. As such, the facility isn't so much a rural fortress as an urban one, all heavy doors, windows wired for alarms, and their own armed security constantly putting eyes-on.
When I scouted this place, I pronounced judgment on the storm of failure that was going to happen if we resorted to gunplay to get in. A half-dozen guards stood at the main entrance.
I thought at first they were all private security, but I IDed one as a liaison from D.C.'s finest—if any survived long enough to bark into a radio, they'd be getting backup. Cass related an anecdote about the time he had seen the D.C. police surround a house with five bank robber suspects inside, known to be armed. Sixty cops had shown up for the task, and the gang had surrendered without a fight. The size of our team, incidentally, is five.
My plan is to get in and out, no shooting required, before anyone finds the ditched Shear or the driver. He'll probably guess that his mugging has a purpose.
The truck pulls in to the parking garage. Ferrero and Cass stay in the cab while Jessica, Deborah, and I do one final check, trying to keep our hearts out of our throats. If we don't look and act unconcerned, our mission will be over in seconds. Deborah and I wear hospital scrubs under coats. Brunette wigs and colored contacts keep Jessica from looking like she did on the news and hopefully throw off any APB out for me.
Jessica holds the purloined access card. She leads the walk past the cops and into the lobby of the main building, talking the whole time.
"So, this week we're getting it all done," she prattles, "registry, florist, invitations."
"Did you find anything good?" I drift toward the front desk to sign in, but Ulan smoothly takes my arm with a look that says, if they don't ask, you don't do it. She directs us to the security gateway. Showtime.
"Telephones here, ladies, and devices in the scanner," says the guard brandishing a bin. Another mans the chemo/X-ray device. It's a good thing we found the place was phone-free before we tried the assault. It's no surprise that employees taking pictures is taboo, but how they manage to hold back that tide is beyond me. Everything has a camera attached these days.
Jessica goes first, putting a laptop bag into the scanner; our headsets are in the bag, but being paired with the computer, they arouse far less suspicion than if we were wearing them. Her phone goes into the plastic bin.
Jess trucks on. "Well, we can't do the invitations until we nail down a location, so we looked at hotels. But every hotel was too much like going to another medical conference. Now, we're thinking someplace more natural."
"So like, what? A botanical garden or something?" Trying to stay distracted and calm, I find myself wondering where Ulan's husband went. She mentioned she was married once, but no other details have escaped.
I put a phone into the bin as well. It's not mine, of course—our dummies were acquired from a pawn shop just for the occasion, wiped down as much as possible and dropped in with gloved fingers. They are bricks, never to be seen again.
After Jess, I step through the metal and plastic of the scanner, raise my arms and let the machine do its work.
"Smile for the recognizer," says the chemo guard, and I do my best DMV expression for the camera. We know it looks at images that match face, clothing, and hairstyle throughout the world, not just their private database.
Some bright security manager thought IDing strangers was a priority and weighted results by location and number of searches. That's why we took photos of ourselves in these clothes, whipped up social media profiles to match, and set bots to do a few million searches so the first image that pops up will say I'm Jill from Obstetrics, looking exactly like I do here.
Now, it's Deborah's turn. Time for the op. I snap my fingers and grab the bricked phone. "Crap—one second. I need to tell Aaron I'm in late." I meet the guard's skeptical eyes.
"If you want this back, you've got to go out and in again," the guard says.
"Seriously?" I say.
"Hon, don't make trouble—" warns Deborah.
"I'm just wondering. It's not like I have much of a line to hold up—"
"I'm sorry, ma'am. It's our procedure—"
"I mean, I know her, and she doesn't mind waiting a second—"
"Just do it," says Deborah.
"Right, right," I say and walk around the line to get my phone back as Ulan accepts a ticket for her device. Jessica tries to divert the guard with the bin, but the guard keeps her eyes on me whenever possible. Deborah pulls her phone out when it's her turn and promptly drops it.
"Oh—" she squeaks, coming back up brightly. She deposits it and is through the detector by the time I come around to retrieve my own. I take out the brick and pretend to dial.
"Aaron," I say into it, "it's me. I'm working late tonight, out until at least eleven. Don't wait up." A touch later, I frown at Ulan. "All that
, and he's not even home."
"Step inside," says the guard, tired of me. I assume the position in the detector's chamber again and go through.
I accept my ticket and peel off my gloves and coat, gathering them up in a natural motion that includes me scooping up a black fanny pack lying on the floor. A pack that slid past the detector by small, overlooked Deborah when she bent over.
"Wait," says the guard. She's dealing with Jess at the recognizer. "I can't get a match." Of course she can't. Jess's makeup includes dashes of glitter, a popular kind I know that looks like a tasteful fairy princess and scatters the near-infrared spectrum that security cameras love. You can't scan a face made out of a disco ball.
"So what do we do?" asks Jess innocently.
"Photo ID," the guard says, and Jess hands over her fake. This is the test. If the wig and the sparkles don't futz the guard's brain, or if she places Jess as the vipe on TV, this is going to go south real quick.
She hands the ID back. Not even a smile.
Jess is back in the game. "So we chose this mansion, like a castle. A virgish little place. You ever been upstate?" We walk on.
"I used to go," says Deborah. "Back when I was young and rich."
We use the stolen keycard, and a door soon clunks behind us. We're in a hallway, free and clear. Or, more honestly, we are the exact opposite.
"I thought we were lunch meat," mutters Jessica.
"Camera," says Deborah, and I spot a black hemisphere on the ceiling. "Do you think anyone caught the handoff?"
I walk on. My fingers zip open the fanny pack under my wadded coat. I feel two things inside—Deborah's actual phone and the grip of my pistol, sealed in plastic to hide residue from the chem-sniffer.
"I hope not," I say, "but I've been wrong before."
56 - KERN
This is a room like any other room, I tell myself, and I don't believe it for a moment.
The most obvious feature, the one with the wow factor, is the plasma drone, a three-meter-tall monstrosity somewhere between a forklift and Frankenstein. It has gripping hands and blast shields for dealing with its own kind of specialized workplace. Despite what its name suggests, it doesn't have a torch attached to its wrist like most models of its ilk—it doesn't need one. In the wall, a meter away, is the business end of a closed and locking plasma furnace, capable of heat in the thousands of degrees. It can reduce metal to slag and anything less than that to fine particulates. Since breathing in superheated garbage fumes makes for poor life expectancy, the drone is here to do all the close-up work and save the operator some back pain in the bargain.
