by John Shirley
This phone couldn’t possibly do all that...
Could it?
There was only one way to find out.
#
Southside Chicago, east 45th. Sleet was slanting through the dusk.
Wolfe had put a heavy dark blue hoodie on; he had the hood up, but his face was exposed. He hoped the improved facial scrambling app actually worked. The black market app transmitted a signal from the PearcePhone to nearby ctOS cameras, blurring his face in the camera itself.
But ordinary people on the street saw him as he really was, a lean white guy in a black neighborhood, an interloper with a two day growth of beard, just trucking along, hands in his pants’ pockets, as if he had no particular place to go.
He was walking with the sleety wind to his back. He had the .36 under his hoodie, and the phone in one hand.
He’d already used the PearcePhone before leaving the safehouse—to break into a police computer file on the various gang turfs in Chicago. According to the file, this street was being taken over by The Club, who had lately been trying to muscle in on Black Viceroy territory.
He might be confronted by any of them here—Club thugs or Viceroys. But he was pretty sure that the Club had taken over this block, through a group of ex-cons it had hired to move weight here.
Wolfe didn’t like drug dealers—not if they dealt in major drugs like crack or meth or heroin. He’d seen what they’d done to his own neighborhood.
On the right was a fast food place, Golden Fish and Chicken, with a white and blue awning. Across the street was a shaggy, fenced-in park, with steel piping exposed in muddy trenches. A sign on the fence said Change for Chicago At Work but it didn’t look like there’d been any work done there for a long time. Across the street three men hunched along in the sleet, one of them talking on a cell phone.
Wolfe thought, If I want, I can listen into that guy’s phone call...if this phone works.
But someone else had words for him. “Hey, you here for a reason, bub?” came a rough voice behind him.
He turned to see a red-haired man in a long black leather coat looking at him from the parking lot, half-sheltered in the back of the Golden Fish eatery. Probably from the Club.
“Thing is,” the Club thug continued, “you got to be a customer, a resident of this block—or you got to pay a toll. To me.” He patted his coat pocket. “Got a .45 here will back me up.”
“A toll? Sure.” Wolfe reached into his pocket, and walked timidly up to the thug, as if to pay him off. “Here...”
Then he flashed the .38 out instead and used its gun butt to knock the thug on his ass.
Wolfe bent over the stunned man, plucked the .45 from his coat, and stuck it in his own waist band. Straightening up, Wolfe drew out the PearcePhone with his left hand. With his thumb he activated the contiguous phone hack; it penetrated the nearest phone, the thug’s...
The system pulled up the man’s phone bill, first off. The bill provided the name Ken Brown, with an address a few blocks from here. Might be his real name but Wolfe suspected it wasn’t.
Wolfe took a phone picture of the sprawled thug with a quick flick of his fingers. He hacked ctOS recognition, cross referenced the phone photo with the population database. Came up with another name in the CPD case files: Buford Keeting. The red-haired Keeting’s face came up, along with his rap sheet. Buford “Duck” Keeting.
Keeting groaned as he sat up, holding his head. “Where’s muh gun...want muh gun...”
“Don’t worry about your gun, Keeting,” Wolfe said. “I’ll take good care of it.”
“I know you? My name...How yuh know...?”
“Sure I know you, ‘Duck’,” Wolfe said, glancing around to see there wasn’t anybody else around going to interfere. He saw a group of school kids across the street, walking by a nineteenth-century brick building with a FOR RENT sign in it. The kids were careful not to look over Wolfe’s way. They knew trouble when they saw it and how to avoid it. Wolfe looked back at Duck Keeting—he was trying to get to his feet. Wolfe used a boot to shove Keeting back on his ass. “I know you’ve got two warrants out for you.”
“So you is a cop, huh? Go ahead, arrest me, the Club’ll have me out again in an hour!”
“I know they would. But I’m not a cop so it doesn’t matter. But hold on—one of those warrants is federal, I see. Yeah. Moving underage girls across a state border...for reasons of human trafficking!”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
“The feds do. They don’t care about the Club. Should I call them? I bet I can get an FBI over here really quick if I tell him who I’ve got right here...”
“Nah, what do you want? You want a pay off? I got maybe eight hundred bucks on me, that’s all.”
“I’ll take that, for starters.”
He pointed the .38 at Keeting’s head.
“Sure, sure, here it is...” Keeting offered a wallet from his pants’ pocket. “Won’t do you much good for long...”
“Take the money out slow. Hand me that carefully. Don’t get creative. I’ll just start firing. Couldn’t miss at this range.”
Keeting growled to himself, but dug out the cash and handed it over.
“Thanks, ‘Duck’,” Wolfe said, tucking the bills away in his coat. “I’m a little cash poor.” Have to use that ATM trick next, a little later. And why not see what Duck had in his bank account? “I need something else from you Keeting—you know a gunhand, name of Grampus? A hire, might do some work for the Club sometimes?”
“Grampus? I heard the name. Somebody pointed him out to me once. I don’t know him ‘cept from that. He might be with that 77th Street bunch. I saw him go in that old lodge hall, over on 77th , I think he was with Gary Klyde...”
“Who’s Klyde?”
“Some kinda fixer. Don’t know him much either.”
“A lodge—on 77th?”
“Used to be an Elks Lodge. You know, for charity shows and all that shit. They sold it to some other outfit. I don’t know what it is. Might be Alcoholics Fucking Anonymous for all I know.”
“Okay. Get up and get out of here. And stay out of this territory. This is Black Viceroy territory.”
“You don’t look like no Black Viceroy to me.”
“They know me, though. And I know them. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.”
“I get my gun back?”
“Hell no. Go on, fuck off.”
Wolfe stepped back and let Keeting get to his feet. He watched the thug stagger dizzily off. When Keeting was no longer in sight, Wolfe stepped up to the wall, sent a message through Pearce’s trace-proof system to the FBI agent mentioned in the file on Keeting. James Wyst. The Chicago FBI agent who was looking for him for trafficking underage girls.
Agent Wyst: Buford ‘Duck’ Keeting is staying at the Crest Inn on South 47th. He’s using the name Ken Brown. He’s working for the Club while he hides from the feds. Better send somebody over to get him tonight but make sure it’s feds. CPD is paid off to let him go. Your friend, Some Random Anonymous Tipster Who Knows What the Fuck He’s Talking About.
Wolfe didn’t like human traffickers, either.
It was getting darker out. The streetlights had come on. The sleet had let up but he went into the Golden Fish to get something to eat and wait for the Club to send some more thugs out. He knew they would.
Wolfe was absolutely sure that Keeting was on the phone to the Club right now.
The place was welcomingly warm, emanating a crude perfume of cooked fish and fowl. Wolfe waited in a line for the order window, and tapped the controls to check in on whatever the current phone call from “Ken Brown” might be.
“Hey, O’Mara? It’s Duck. Listen I just been jacked up by some guy. He almost cracked my damned head open! He kinda tried to put it on the Viceroys but that’s all hooey, the motherfucker’s gotta be some kinda independent operator—maybe a cop went independent, see...”
“What’s his name?”
“Dunno,
he got the drop on me. Took eight hundred bucks from me and my gun!”
“You pussy!”
“Hey shaddup, he got the jump on me, he snuck up and...never mind! Thing is, he’s in our new territory over there on 45th! We was in the parking lot of that Golden Fish place, just about two minutes ago! You can nail the guy, find out who he’s working for!”
“Yeah, I guess dat’s worth doing. But you’re still a pussy.”
Keeting gave a brief description of Wolfe, and hung up. Wolfe chuckled. It’d take a few minutes for them to organize some muscle to get over here. Just time for some fried fish and coffee...
It took almost half an hour. Wolfe had misgivings about what he was doing. If Pearce had exaggerated the PearcePhone’s capabilities, he could be cut to pieces here.
Better wait outside so none of the people eating in here get caught in the crossfire...
Wolfe waited out in the cold, listening in on chatter from the Club—none of it seemed relevant till he went to the number Keeting had called. O’Mara’s cell phone. “Yeah, Percy? You almost there? I’ll be there in a couple shakes...Yeah I see the place up on my left...You in that new metallic green Escalade?”
“That’s it, man. Brand new. Luxury car. Self-parking...”
“I still got that old Lincoln...”
“That Town Car you restored?”
“Yeah, but it’s lookin’ nice. New black and gold paint job.”
Here came the Lincoln, slowing to turn left so it could go into the parking lot; and here came the green Escalade, fast, with a greater sense of urgency.
Wolfe was ready. Just as the Lincoln was turning the corner, he used the PearcePhone, sent out a signal that took control of the car through the automatic parking’s electronic control units—ECUs are a luxury car’s point of vulnerability to remote hacking. At the same time the phone interfered with the pre-collision system, cutting off the Escalade’s brakes—which shut down completely. The Lincoln, having slowed for the turn was still partly in the intersection, just as Wolfe had hoped; the Escalade came roaring through, its brakes suddenly out of order.
The Escalade crashed into the Lincoln, not quite t-boning it, but hitting it at the rear so the Lincoln spun around, tires screeching, front end swinging to crack into the Escalade.
Both cars were badly damaged. The Escalade plumed gray smoke from its crumpled front end. There was a guy slumped in the passenger side of the Lincoln. Wolfe couldn’t see the driver from here.
His .38 down by his side, Wolfe walked to the corner, stopping just ten paces from the two crumpled cars. The driver of the Lincoln was getting out. He wore a blue suit, and horn rim glasses. He had a gun in his hand and blood on his forehead. He squinted at Wolfe, and raised the gun, a .45 automatic, pointing it toward Wolfe.
Wolfe turned sideways, aimed—the stunned driver fired, and Wolfe heard the bullet sizzle past his right ear. Wolfe returned fire, squeezing off two rounds, and “horn rims” went down.
Wolfe turned to see the driver of the other car was slumped over the steering wheel...Seemed like he hadn’t bothered to get an airbag in the car.
The passenger of the Escalade was getting out though; he was a heavy set man with greased-back blond hair and a cardigan sweater. “Blondie” climbed stiffly out of the car, a lit cigarette still dangling from the corner his froggish mouth. He seemed dazed as he spotted Wolfe, fumbling for his gun.
“You better be careful with that cigarette,” Wolfe told him. “Look down at your feet.”
The guy blinked dazedly at Wolfe and then down at his shiny black shoes.
There was a spreading pool of gasoline around his feet. The Escalade’s fuel line had broken, was leaking fuel fast from under the car.
“See what I mean?” Wolfe said. “Just toss your gun away. Walk off with that cigarette. I do hate to see a man burn to death. Even a fucking dirt bag like you.”
“Who you callin’ a dirt bag?” the thug said.
As he said it, the cigarette waggled in his mouth...and fell out.
Wolfe sighed and turned away. He didn’t even see the pool of gas catch fire. But he heard the explosion, and felt the heat on the back of his neck.
He put the gun away, and strode off down the street, till he found a car that had a remote opening key. He used the phone to unlock it, and start it. He got in, just as the sirens started screaming toward the burning cars at the street corner, and drove back to the neighborhood of the safehouse.
I guess Pearce’s sweet little device does work after all...
CHAPTER EIGHT
“How do I know you’re from DedSec?”
GlowWorm shrugged. “How do I know you’re Seline Garnera?”
“I’ve got military I.D., a passport, a driver’s license.”
He smiled. “I.D. doesn’t mean much. The government prints whatever fake I.D. it needs.” He was a young black in an old, worn out leather motorcycle jacket, skinny jeans and snakeskin boots; he had short dyed-blue hair, a pierced lower lip; he wore one of those circular stretcher earrings, that stretched the hole way out, and within the circular earring was a silver skull and crossbones. He had a considerable paunch but was otherwise remarkably skinny.
They were meeting in a retro-punk bar, near the waterfront in North Chicago. They were standing in a corner of the bar, each of them with a drink in their hands; he was drinking his, she was ignoring hers. They had to talk with their heads fairly close together, because The Misfits were booming from the jukebox. The meeting place had been set up via a fairly mysterious text that had come to her from a “GlowWorm”, after she’d asked an old friend from high school to find DedSec—her friend, Sue-Louise Cushman; Seline knew Sue-Louise had married a Chicago hacker, “Grimmy”, who had a lot of internet-underground connections. Grimmy was associated with Anonymous, with Digital Gangsters and, Seline suspected, with the secretive hacker revolutionary group DedSec itself.
GlowWorm was probably a friend of Sue-Louise’s husband.
“I’m takin’ a big chance being here,” Seline said.
“You are, huh? You look like a federal agent to me.”
“A federal agent!”
“You’re a clean-cut lady. You got a slick bearing.”
“That’s a military bearing. I told you I’m just out of the Marines.”
He grinned. “Hard to picture you as a jarhead in boot camp.”
“It was a little different than what men go through, but it was tougher than you could’ve taken.”
“Ha! You’re probably right about that!”
“Okay, you’re Seline, and you’re not a federal agent. I didn’t think you were, because...our mutual friend set this up...But I came here without a mask. I mean, normally, if I met a stranger in anything relating to DedSec, I’d wear a mask to the meeting, someplace else out of the public eye, but out of respect for Grimmy...He bailed me out of jail, he did a lot for me...And since you insisted on no masks...”
“I’m not going to trust somebody who wears a mask to meet me.”
He shrugged. “Those are some of the only people I trust.”
“I don’t have the...the thing with me,” Seline said.
“I wouldn’t be here if I thought you did. You can put it on a flashdrive and get that to me later, if we decide to move ahead with this. So you told Grimmy’s wife you got this off a CIA agent?”
She glanced nervously around. “I did. She transferred it to my phone. It took me a while to figure out how it was...how it was coded into the jpeg.”
“She used a picture to code it? I’ve heard of that.”
“It’s an extensive file on her investigation into some military guys. She got the story from a soldier named Wolfe. A Delta Force guy. Wolfe ended up in military prison but...she always thought he was telling the truth. She couldn’t prove it well enough to protect herself and to get him out of jail. And then when she was getting close she started worrying that some Marine on board the ship was...stalking her. I mean—to kill her. A Sergeant named Ca
llow.”
“This was on a ship?”
“I was stationed on the USS Don Roeser.”
“That’s a big flattop, isn’t it? An aircraft carrier?”
She nodded. The song was changing on the jukebox and they waited till the new song started—a song by Tool.
“A carrier,” she said, when the song was wailing and thundering along. She leaned close enough to talk into GlowWorm’s ear. “She disappeared off the ship. Someone spread rumors she was drunk and fell off the fantail. But I think someone hit her, knocked her out...and threw her overboard.”
“They find her body?”
“What was left of it, about five days later.”
GlowWorm grimaced. “I’ll do some fact checking on some of this stuff—I have to warn you about that. But it’ll be done with the utmost secrecy. Won’t be discussed in any chat rooms, nothing like that.”
“You mean—hack into some files?”
“Yeah.”
“A lot of it’s classified. You might not be able to get to it.”
“I can confirm you were on that ship. And probably that this woman who gave you the file was there...but not that she was in CIA. What was her name?”
“Ruth Medina.”
“Okay. You sure you want to leak these files?”
“Yes. It’s what I came here to do. Sue-Louise said I had to come in person and meet with somebody. I thought about sending it to you over the internet...”
He shook his head. “What with the new NSA programs, all that—no. We have our ways around that stuff but it’s safer to use a flashdrive to get it to us.”
“I don’t trust wikileaks anymore. You sure you can get this out on SystemLeaks?”
He nodded. “If we decide we want to do it. We don’t want anybody to make a fool of us...”
“This is for real. Ruth died for it.”
“Yeah. I’d hate to die for it myself.” He smiled crookedly. “But if you can risk your life, Seline...I guess I can risk mine too.”
#
Lou Kiskel was worried. He didn’t like this neighborhood, especially at almost nine-thirty at night. It was close to downtown but looked pretty shabby to him. He was more comfortable in Chicago’s “Gold Coast” neighborhood, on a street like Dearborn.
