Harold cut her off. “Then you would have eaten that missile too. You think you would have caught it out of midair? You may be a top of the line combat doll but even you have limits.”
Nina sighed. “I would have checked out the black van that sat there for twenty minutes with no one entering or leaving.”
Hardin nodded. “Exactly. Why didn’t agent Abrams investigate that van?”
Nina tapped the armrest of her chair. “He should have called it in.”
“You’re right.” He nodded. “It was as much his fault as anything.”
Blaming the dead for their own demise, no wonder people call you hard-on. “Look, Sir. That whole operation was a complete mess from the start. Did anyone take it seriously? I.M. Boring? Basket Weaving? Floyd’s fucking bakery? Who comes up with this shit?” She calmed, voice dropping back to normal. “Still, you do have a point. Dale should have said something about the van.”
“Some of the logistics agents involved were operating under the misconception that it was a training exercise and had a little fun with it. They have since been disciplined. However, it is a fact that the aggressors involved in that action were not related to the objective.”
“You got something?” Nina’s stare flicked from the screens to Harold.
“Indeed.” He leaned forward, interlacing his fingers. “We traced the two shooters from the Imperial Hotel back through a known underground contractor to the WellTech Corporation. We think they targeted the individuals that left the hotel lobby shortly before the escalation to a fire event.”
Fire event was Hardin-speak for getting shot at. He could make it sound dry and uninteresting, as if real people were not hurt or killed.
She perked up. “Are we acting on that information?”
“Not at this time.”
“What?” Nina stood. “Dale is dead, Sir. We can’t let them…”
“Hold on, Lieutenant.” He raised a hand to her as if stopping oncoming traffic. “I have every intention of sending them a message. Once we know who ordered it, we will react accordingly.”
She sank back into her chair. Unlike Eddie Alvin, at least the staff here had the couth not to taunt her for losing a second partner. “Understood.”
“What have you got on our two European guests?” Bored with the crease, he picked at his sweater sleeve.
“We know they are both still in the city. We have had a few intermittent tags from sector cams, mostly in the southern third. Whenever the system red flags, we know about it, but the sightings are few and far between.” She turned to scowl at the thin slits of night peeking through the closed blinds. “I spoke to a ticket agent at the shuttle terminal who remembered seeing Itai, but no one remembered Nemsky.”
“I doubt anyone outside of the intelligence community knows who he is. People don’t pay attention to what goes on apart from their own little world anymore.” Hardin rubbed his chin. “I read your report about the incident and I remain unconvinced that Karl Warner is pulling the puppet strings here. He’s a corporate playboy with limited experience in politics or international diplomacy.”
He’s gotta be involved, I just can’t prove it. “I haven’t seen anything but a few holo-vid calls. The times are short and we have no proof of them ever meeting. The content of the communication scrubbed as soon as the calls ended. It is possible they attempted to make contact with him and something went wrong. Or maybe they want us to think that there’s no contact and they are keeping it off the grid.”
“I can have some tech-fours keep watch on Warner’s movements and raise an alert if he takes a shit sideways. I want you to focus on finding and eliminating the Korin and Nemsky problems. Both of these men are highly volatile and our information points to them acting as either mercenaries or idealists. We have nothing that indicates they are working on behalf of the ACC in any official capacity. Their intelligence value is low enough to where everyone will feel safer if you just send them to Miami.”
Harold and his euphemisms, why couldn’t he just say kill them? “There was nothing I could have…”
He held up his hand. “I’m not pulling you off the Imperial as a disciplinary action. It’s a waste of your talent. Agent Cole is capable of running Basket Weaver. You’re far too valuable an asset to have watching some German aristocrat pawing women in a hot tub.”
She stared at him, wondering if he meant it to be as patronizing as it sounded. Everything about the Imperial Hotel had gone tits up. Nina felt like a helpless bystander six feet away from a car wreck in slow motion. A faint chime drew her attention back to the terminal. The parse of the Silver logs stopped at a section that Nina did not remember. She leaned an elbow on the desk and swiped at the result page to make it larger.
“What is it?” Hardin got up and walked around.
Nina pointed. “A network trace. Scan found an IPv12 address fragment here that it missed before. Looks like the egress proxy on the Silver’s primary barrier node did capture the intruder’s deck upon disconnect.”
Her fingers flew through the virtual windows. Text and images scrolled by as she tried to trace the address fragment.
“I don’t understand how we could have missed that before. Division 9’s been looking at that data for months.”
Hardin squinted. “It’s possible that the log file had been masked and someone downstairs just decoded it. Maybe there was active code in the file that had been concealing it?”
“I don’t like it.” Nina’s eyes shifted to the cessation of movement in one of the sub screens. A swipe of her finger brought up a weary looking man in his later thirties with long curly hair prematurely grey. “DeWinter, please run an access validation on this file.” Nina sent him the link to the Silver logs. “Make sure it was not recently edited.”
“Yes Ma’am.” He nodded.
Another panel of shifting information stopped, border flashing. She tapped and it opened into a page of stats showing other network traces from the same source.
“Looks like a Teradyne systems silver series deck. Grade 3.”
“Grade 3 silver series, ironic.” Hardin chuckled.
DeWinter’s apparitional head looked up. “No damn way someone pulled off the Silver Hack with a noob board like that.”
“It has to be a falsified address tag.” Nina poked at the trace and Joey Dillon’s face appeared. “Probably has a Necromancer and wants to hide it. Look at that face, he’s smirking like he got away with something.”
“I doubt it.” DeWinter shook his head. “If he wanted to avoid notice, he wouldn’t fake it out to be such a shitty deck; he’d use something believable, maybe a grade six Alchemist or something. He’s bragging. Uhm… I can’t find any trace of edits, Lieutenant. Guess it was just a case of lazy eye.”
“Thanks.” She nodded at DeWinter, who hung up.
“Who is that?” Hardin leaned forward to read the information next to the picture.
“Joseph Dillon, 22. No listed address, but as white as he is, I’d have to say he’s from Mars. I think I…” A red line left that window and opened another as the system matched his facial features. “…saw that face before.”
“Whispercraft log.” Nina recognized the contents of the new window right away. “Son of a bitch. That’s one of the civilians from the Imperial!”
“That’s more than a coincidence.” Hardin nodded. “Go see what he knows.”
“On it.”
Harold went towards the door, looking back just as it hissed open. “You’re doing well for a new agent. I wouldn’t have given this to you if I didn’t think you could handle it.”
She stared at the shrinking rectangle of light as the door sank closed. It was unlike Hardin to be easy with praise, and it made her wonder if her body language called out for affirmation. Nina swiped her hand through the terminals, shutting down all the screens at once and pitching the room into darkness. A half a second later, the room formed in shades of green as her night-vision kicked on. She took her coat from the peg and put i
t on, staring at the sliver of light under the door. Dr. Khan’s voice asked her if she wanted to hide in the dark or go out into the world.
It took a moment to answer.
Gradient green flashed back to full color as she entered the well-illuminated corridor. The scent of technology, coffee, and Chinese food mixed with the din of dozens of people at work. A display screen opened in her field of view with the results of a search she had started an hour earlier. It got a match on Carl’s older son, Coe. He had a run in with Division 1 officers a few weeks ago, and their report connected him to a minor street gang―the South Fork Crew.
They made their hangout in an area of Sector 40 known as South Fork, named after the main road in that part of town. More time staring at Itai Korin and Anatoly Nemsky would not bring her any closer to figuring out what they were up to, but she had a deck jockey to find now.
At least she could do something for her soul on the way.
he black unmarked slipped out of the parking deck into the street. She still felt strange driving. For two years, she had always let Vincent do it―a techie just along for the ride waiting for her time to be up.
“Guess I should get used to it.”
Vincent’s voice echoed through the interior. “You’re not half bad at it.”
Nina almost sideswiped a parked car as she jumped, careening into an empty space about two blocks away from the police complex.
Nina glared. “Who the fuck was that?”
Eerie silence hung in the air, punctuated by the sound of her breaths. After five long minutes, she gave up and pulled out into traffic. She engaged hover mode and pulled back on the control stick. The street fell out of the view screen as the mechanical whine of the retracting ground drive halted with a solid thunk. An instant later, more whirring as protective doors closed over the wheel wells. She leveled off at fifty feet, banking around a pair of century towers before accelerating to two hundred and fifty miles an hour.
Vincent liked to drive as though he performed for a crowd at an air show. Nina was conscientious in her handling of the vehicle, and her trip south remained uneventful. She saw no reason to risk crashing just for some phantom thrill. She missed the impish face he would make after pulling off some ridiculous stunt; thinking of it put a lump in her throat that lasted most of the trip.
As she neared Sector 40, the inverted Y of the road that gave the area its name appeared as a dark line through the grey of the city. She landed among the steel and glass residence buildings, continuing through the area at a more modest speed. South Fork was home to working class people as well as those who teetered right at the tipping point between middle class and poor.
The armored door slid down and locked with a pneumatic hiss and a puff of coolant vapor. Her patrol craft was as unobtrusive as an unmarked police vehicle could be; however, there was no hiding that it was a hovercar. Bulky and wide, it had vents and bulges in places other cars did not. Most of the criminal element could spot it as a police vehicle with ease, but that at least reduced the odds of someone trying to steal it.
Nina walked until she spotted a group of four young men wearing bright yellow bandanas. Each had a dark green jacket of various design with yellow sleeves and loose fitting pants. They leaned on a metal fence surrounding a decaying athletic court occupied only by a few metal cans that raced each other in circles with the wind. The two young men in the middle had mixed features; the far left one looked white. A heavyset black man, about nineteen and short, stood at the other end.
Animations sprang up in her view, indicating pistols on all of them. The tall one towards the center had a submachine gun hanging over his shoulder on a strap.
She walked up as they chatted about the legal misfortunes of someone that went by the name of Darwin. Their conversation wound down one by one as each one in turn noticed her standing there.
The oldest, just right of center, glared. “You in the wrong part of town, Lily White.”
A crisp breeze tossed her hair about. “I’m looking for the South Fork Crew. You them?”
The four exchanged looks. The black kid spoke first. “Somethin’ ain’t right.”
The white one grinned. “She looks fine to me. Maybe she’s here to audition.”
“You got some balls. Comin’ here alone and gettin’ in our shit.” The second kid to the left pointed at her.
She thought his face looked younger than the rest of him.
“Look, you boys are all pretty young. I’m looking into some of your crew that got themselves killed… I’m not here to make more bodies.”
The white kid flapped his hands at her in mock fear. “Oh noes, she’s gonna kills us.”
Nina squinted at him, a look that made the fat kid take a step back.
“You best keep walking.” The eldest pointed at her. “Be glad there’s a lotta people around here or you’d be talkin’ out a couple new holes.”
“So you don’t care that someone offed two of your guys? What, are all you gang types brain dead idiots that keep acting tough until there’s a zipper over your face?”
“Yo… There somethin’ wrong wit dis skinny little bitch. Look at her, she ain’t even scared.” The heavyset kid held his shaking hands up, stepping backward.
“What happens wit da Crew stays wit da Crew.” Tall White flailed some kind of hand gesture in Nina’s face.
“If one of you is volunteering to be an example, that guy is really starting to get on my nerves.” Nina pointed at the white one. “Is he important? Would you miss him?”
“Dude, she callin’ you out, bro!” The younger of the two men in the center shoved him.
“Damn bitch.” He took a swing.
She caught his fist and held it with little effort. His face turned red as he struggled to force his punch through her grip. Nina lifted one eyebrow at him with an impatient smile.
“Are you done yet?”
The two in the middle edged for their weapons.
Nina flung Tall White into the fence with enough force to bend the bars and cause a cracked rib. He bounced away, landing sideways on the ground and moaning. She stepped forward, shoving the two in the middle onto their asses.
“What the fuck?” Tall White gurgled through a trickle of blood.
“You some kinda aug bounty hunter? We ain’t got shit.” The black kid edged further away with several rapid glances in a random direction.
“You should be so lucky.” She flashed her ID. “Division 9, UCF Police.”
The color drained out of all of them. Even street punks had heard stories about the cops that even other cops are afraid of; the ones that kill instead of arrest. The three on the ground froze; the last standing member of their group had the paradoxical reaction of calming down.
The heavyset black kid took a relaxed step towards her, lifting his arms to the sides. “Why you in our claim? You D9’s don’t do streets.”
“Dey also just fuckin’ kill motherfuckers.” The younger of the two in the middle blurted.
Nina used her NetMini to project an image of Coe and Arlon. “Their father wants to know what happened to them. I’m doing him a favor, off the books.”
“Word is they walked out on a buffet, Z Bone took objection to their rudeness.” The youngest answered.
“I’ll assume that you aren’t talking about food.” Nina folded her arms.
Tall White shook his head. “Naa. It was their initiation; couple of bitches came in.” He coughed up more blood. “But we wasn’t there.”
“Of course you four weren’t involved. What happened to the women?”
The oldest spoke up. “Naa we wasn’t, just a small thing. Z Bone and his dudes, a couple other guys, and the two you’re lookin’ for. The girls are okay… just had a little trouble walkin’ after.” He seemed amused.
Nina shuddered as a wave of revulsion fell through her. She did not feel right just leaving these four off the hook, but killing them would be an overreach. Div 1 is slacking off here. They should focus more on
this sector than they do. Nina made a note to herself to shake some trees once she got back to the office.
“Where can I find this Z Bone?”
All four remained quiet and exchanged looks.
“Trust me, when I’m done with him he won’t be ordering any revenge on anyone. In fact, I suggest you forget about this crew nonsense and get yourselves to a vocational aptitude assignment center. It’ll be better for your health.”
“Ain’t right to do him like that.” The heavy one shook his head. “We’re brothers.”
“Just like Coe and Arlon?”
“Man, it ain’t the same. They were prospects, not even in yet.” His arms enhanced every other word.
“Do you really believe that? What do you think would happen if Z Bone got the idea in his head that he can’t trust you? Do you think he’d come have a chat to calm his doubts or do to you what he did to them?”
They exchanged glances. The youngest one fidgeted.
“What if it was your brother that got killed?”
The oldest looked up. “This is our territory, Z rules here. If he catches us talking―”
“He uses you to catch bullets, catch shit from the cops, and to catch the heat for everything your so called crew does while he sits back and lives like a king. How do you have any loyalty for someone that exploits you like that?” She waved an arm at them. “Look at yourselves. Are any of you even twenty yet? Do you want to spend the rest of your life getting shot at so Z Bone can do whatever the hell he wants?”
The heavy one paced back and forth, shaking his head and staring at the ground.
The oldest sighed. “We been seen talkin’ wit you. They gonna find out who gave it up.”
“Who’s they?”
“Crowbar and Jules. Z Bone’s boys.”
“Are they with him now?” She looked at the fat one.
“Yeah.”
Nina smiled. “Then you shouldn’t worry about them. Where can I find him?”
“Prince Harrington Arms, tenth floor.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down.
Nina put a hand on his shoulder. “Go home to your family before you get yourself killed.” She looked at the others. “That goes for all of you.”
Virtual Immortality Page 26
