Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  The control tower still hadn’t responded. Brody glanced at the radio set into the Darter’s instrument panel. He muted his microphone from outside communication, so only Thorp could hear him. “That’s an awfully long pause. Maybe we should just get moving before they send their buddies up.”

  “It’s fine,” Thorp reassured. “But we’ll have to hop out when this thing is still moving. I have her programmed to head to the private airstrip at O’Hare, touch down there, and then immediately take off again before the recharge team gets to her. She’ll pick us up in fifteen minutes.”

  “And we can’t have any longer?” Brody said.

  “This is O’Hare International Airport,” a different voice called. “We do not have any scheduled landings at our private airstrip. Please return to your place of takeoff and reroute your destination accordingly.”

  Thorp took his microphone off mute. “Afraid I can’t do that, O’Hare. We’re running on E up here, and unless you want me to use the Dan Ryan as my emergency runway, I’d suggest you give us clearing for a quick recharge. We have approximately half an hour left in our tanks.”

  There was another lengthy silence.

  After Thorp switched his microphone on mute, Brody said, “We’re going to need more than fifteen minutes.”

  “Afraid that’s all we’re going to get. They see this thing is landing on autopilot, they’re going to be suspicious. If it touches down, that’s all the time we’ll have before the team can get to her on the strip. It’ll need to be airborne before that.”

  “What happens when it takes off without them getting a chance to refuel it? Won’t that look suspicious?” He saw in Thorp’s face a smear of realization forming.

  He turned forward, facing approximately in the direction of the control tower. “Change of plans, O’Hare. We’ll turn it back around. Instrument panel is a bit glitchy. We got plenty of go-juice after all. Making the circle and turning back to point of takeoff. Thank you. Have a nice night.” Thorp turned to the ordi plugged into the instrument panel of the Darter, lifting the Gizumoshingu’s lid. Brody watched as his fingers danced across the keyboard and a green cube of light jumped out and he pushed his hands into it, moving his fingers assiduously as a seasoned puppeteer, pulling cursors across the displayed map.

  “Make sure to actually have it land so we have time to get on board,” Brody suggested, watching the skyline.

  As he typed Thorp said, “She’s going to take a quick swing around the city. I’ll stay on the com as if I were still piloting to try and chat with them, to stall. She’ll be back in fifteen minutes to pick us up. But she’ll only set her feet down for ten seconds before dusting off for the house again.”

  “You do what you need to, and I’ll keep an eye on the time,” Brody said. The stopwatch on his phone was programmed for fifteen minutes. Brody held his finger over the start button as they crept in closer to the glowing white disk of the helipad.

  Thorp typed feverishly and swiped his fingers through the holo panel framework. He double tapped the floating cylinder that represented Hark Telecom within the map, then hit execute.

  Without delay, the vehicle charged forward, pitching Brody back into the copilot seat. Thorp’s hands were no longer on the controls. He undid his harness and grabbed his rucksack. He detached the ordi from the control panel, and the hologram map immediately winked out. He shoved it securely down into the mouth of the rucksack and cinched it closed tight.

  “Get ready,” Thorp said as the Darter rapidly narrowed the space between them and their destination.

  Brody unfastened his harness, pulled off his helmet. He patted himself down to make sure he had everything he’d need. He gave the knuckleduster a quick pat for good luck.

  His throat parched as the roof came into position. The Darter automatically descended, drawing in close as it was programmed. Thorp opened the hatch on his side of the Darter’s bulbous head, and Brody reluctantly did the same. The terrible screech of the engines, the steady thrum of the wings drowned everything else out. The distance that remained beneath the Darter after it finished its descent still looked like a lethal drop. From this height, it would be hard to miss the helipad directly beneath him, but Brody knew a sudden gust of wind could push a free-falling human body several meters off course.

  Framing the edges of the building on all sides was the vertigo-inducing fall to the street below. It looked like it would take an entire week to plummet the distance. He saw a silver snake dart along a black line, the “L” making its hourly pass around downtown.

  “On three or what?” He turned to see if Thorp was ready and instead glimpsed Thorp’s back as it cleared the open door of the cockpit.

  Brody let go of the seat restraints, kicked forward, and let gravity do the rest. Air thundered past his ears; his eyes were immediately blown dry. The helipad jumped to meet him. His boots struck, and his impetus pitched his body ahead. Brody rolled twice and stopped himself and surveyed his surroundings. Even though he was dizzy, he had the mind about him to press the button on his cell to begin the stopwatch.

  He heard the impact of something solid and plastic. He watched wordlessly as Thorp chased the scattering ordi. It broke free of the rucksack in the fall. The battered Gizumoshingu was swiftly ushered across the cement by the cleaving high winds. Thorp leapt for it, managing to snag it before the wind could coax it off the edge.

  The din of the Darter’s engines raised in pitch, the dragonfly turning and gliding away.

  They made their way into a labyrinth of air filtration units for cover and got securely concealed among the steam-belching units, their backs pressed against the warm sheet metal.

  Brody noticed Thorp cradled the Gizumoshingu as he traced the rim of the glass projector lens to clear away any shards. A jagged line ran across its face. Any holo the ordi would produce from now on would be smeary, inaccurate to gestures passing through it or unresponsive altogether.

  “Do not tell me that thing’s broken.”

  “It’s fine,” Thorp said, replacing it in the rucksack.

  Brody watched the distant Darter move out, beginning its wide pass to turn around. Its white and red lights flared in the night sky, the only indication it was still there, soaring pilotless. “Are they saying anything?”

  Wedging a finger against the bud in his ear, Thorp listened for a moment, eyes closed. “Nothing. They must be fine with letting her circle around.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  Thorp took out his Franklin-Johann and slid in a magazine of rubber bullets, advanced one into the chamber.

  Brody peeked over the unit throwing rancid chemical-treated steam in his face to get a glimpse at the security camera. It could be avoided by hugging the wall, but getting directly under it and picking the lock into the building would be another story. Already things were becoming more complicated than he had anticipated. “Camera.”

  When he turned back around, he saw Thorp, bent on one knee, tying a paisley bandanna behind his head, the front triangle obscuring most of his face. “Are we planning on robbing a train?”

  Thorp tossed a second bandanna to Brody. “We can’t avoid all of them, and they already got a face-map on me,” he said, gesturing ahead to a security camera.

  Brody put on the bandanna, tucking the loose end into the collar of his shirt. He charged around the row of air filtration units and approached the maintenance door. Once beneath it, he pushed the camera away on its pivoting neck so it angled toward the sky. Undoubtedly someone would notice, but he was too busy kicking at the door to dwell on the notion.

  The door opened and the men scrambled inside.

  They found narrow metal stairs that led down to an enclosure that seemed to be where the elevators were maintained. A storeroom set off to one side with its door hanging open and an old office chair before a dead monitor.

  Brody scanned the area. There were double wide doors off to the side by a row of long water pipes. “The cargo elevator. Probably no cameras in there.” />
  “And a great way to get boxed in,” Thorp said. “This way.” He turned before Brody could agree and briskly advanced toward the stairwell door.

  They went down two floors and decided to see where they had ended up. The bandanna did little to help his breathing, before long Brody’s nose and lips were wet from perspiration, but still he kept it on, even taking a moment to tighten the knot at the back of his neck. They slowly entered the office area, finding an expansive cubicle farm sprawled out before them. Tall, carpeted walls in the shade of sea-foam green and identical workstations, every monitor’s screen saver the Hark Telecom logo—a radio antenna with radiating thunderbolts set atop an exaggerated arrangement of the solar system in which all the planets were the same general size.

  Separate offices were set around the perimeter with glass walls and desks constructed with genuine wood. Great views of downtown.

  “This is probably just where the number crunchers work,” Brody said. “Let’s go down a few more floors.”

  Thorp kept his back to Brody, steadily walking forward with quick heel-toe steps. He stopped at the corner following a long wall of cubicles and stole a glimpse around it. “You never know. Engineers might do casual research and development shit in here. I mean, it’s not like the movies—there’s not going to be a lab with people in clean suits.”

  Brody looked out the windows. There were all kinds of aircraft lights slowly flashing along the horizon. It was impossible to tell which one was their Darter. He was afraid to see how much time they had already used, but he checked the phone’s stopwatch anyway. “Eleven and a half minutes. We need to get a move on.”

  “Down here,” Thorp said and advanced along a row of cubicles. He ducked into the first one and went to the monitor and tapped on its display to wake the machine up. The screen saver blinked away, Thorp selected the interoffice phone directory from the options, and the window fanned to all four corners of the screen. He touched the research and development tab and then the green icon of a phone to begin the call.

  Without a second’s hesitation, there was an answer. “If you’d like to make an appointment with Mr. Ward, please leave your name and number. If you want to schedule a meeting, please use the company’s scheduling program. If you want to make the appointment in person, please feel free to visit research and development located on the eighty-first floor. Thank you and have—”

  Thorp cut the prerecorded message off. “Eighty-one,” he said and they headed to the stairs.

  Unable to resist checking how much time they had remaining, Brody groaned when he saw they had already killed six minutes. “If we run out of time, is there any way you can call the Darter back?”

  Thorp was quiet for a moment. Brody already knew his answer even before he explained that once the Darter was programmed there was no way to remotely cancel the autopilot.

  They got to the landing and when they opened the door to the eighty-first floor, Brody’s expectations of a research and development department were proven to be just so.

  Everything, floor to ceiling, was a peerless white. Long, white tables with instruments and complicated machinery stood on every square inch. Monitors and hardwired ordis were everywhere. The lab was divided up by glass walls etched with Hark Telecom and the company’s symbol.

  “There,” Brody said, spotting a door on the far side of the lab. The plaque read: Hubert Ward, Department Director, Research and Development, Technological Innovation Division.

  The door was locked. Both men scoured the lab for something that would break down the sturdy-looking door. While Thorp was quick to give up and pound the door with his foot and then his shoulder, Brody continued looking. He lifted his bandanna to steal a quick breath of fresh air. “Give me a hand with this,” he said.

  The rolling stainless steel table, once cleared of the equipment piled upon it, made for a great battering ram, especially with four legs behind it propelling it forward. The far end of the table hit true, but the door held and both men nearly flew over the tabletop. They wheeled it back to the far side of the room, and when Brody ordered the charge, they ran a second salvo against the door with all they had. The door broke free, snapping off the dead bolt and one of the hinges.

  Inside, the modestly sized office was in severe contrast to the clean room aesthetic of the lab. Everything was wood grain—the walls, the parquet tiles on the ceiling. The only touches of modernity were the black lacquered desk and the ordi set atop it, which was equally new and shiny.

  Thorp connected the Gizumoshingu to Hubert’s desk unit and set to work immediately.

  Brody kept an eye on the time and repeatedly checked out the circular window set into the far door for any security guards or straggling workaholic Hark employees who might be coming into the lab. “Eight minutes.”

  Thorp said nothing. He tapped the function to pop the image out, and the projector wavered for a second, giving two false starts. When it cooperated, the holo came out tilted and folded. Thorp tried to navigate the image, trailing his fingers through the lines of light to physically scour the files of Hubert Ward’s computer. Again, the app he’d bought to break into Probitas was put to use.

  Brody looked away from the window overlooking the lab to inspect the walls of Hubert Ward’s office. Certificates issued from Hark for various money-saving deskbound heroism, one decreeing that Ward had single-handedly made Hark Telecom one of the most profitable companies in the world with some piece of circuitry Brody had never heard of.

  He studied the series of framed photos Hubert Ward had on his wall and sought a pattern until he found one man appeared in all of them. Ward looked like most professional men over the age of fifty. Confident, hands in pockets, smiling for the camera with that subtle expression that said he had better things to do than get his goddamn picture taken. Medium height, neatly parted silver hair. Strong cheekbones hilling the sunken cheeks beneath them. Gray eyes set behind a pair of rimless glasses. His skin leathery, as if he spent much of his free time outdoors. In every picture Ward was dressed in shades of gray or black—the only snatch of color ever found on the man was in his ties, and they arrayed blandly from gunmetal gray to a pastel green to one picture where he wore one of creamy white for a wedding.

  In the last photo Hubert was shaking hands with another man with silver hair and glasses, except this other man was dressed in camouflage and wore markings of a four-star general. He looked like every other career brass, except for a recessed purple scar running down the side of his face from the outside corner of his left eye to his chin.

  “Huh,” Thorp said softly.

  “You got something?” Brody asked, taking one final look into the lab before crossing the office. He glanced over Thorp’s shoulder and saw the display of files as Thorp thumbed through them, tabbed with the various projects that Hubert Ward was overseeing. At the end, the final tab was suspiciously placed out of alphabetical order with the others, labeled Project Silver Fox.

  “What is it?” Brody asked, unable to hide the hollowness in his voice.

  Thorp waved his hand through the tab to open the file. There, a slew of disorganized information fell into the room above the desk. The holo-projector had a hard time displaying it all with his freshly cracked lens, and Thorp had to scroll through it to project the information clearly from end to end. Its contents had familiar snippets, regarding wavelengths, frequencies, fleeting images of brain scans, CTs, magnetic resonance images.

  “This looks about right,” Brody said. There were image files of brain scans. Photos of walls broken open displaying thick tree trunk-sized columns of bound-together wires and cables.

  There was a small video clip of a diapered chimpanzee thrashing against its cage, rolling over onto its back, picking up a rock from the floor of its enclosure, and beating itself over the head with it.

  Thorp moved on. He got to the very back of the file and found a roster of names and numbers, tabulated amounts that the men immediately assumed were in the value of dollars. The fi
rst few dozen names were none they recognized. Another file was on display at the end, labeled contacts.

  Brody didn’t need to see its contents before saying, “Send that to me.” He took his phone from his pocket.

  Thorp told the Gizumoshingu to send to Brody Calhoun, and the contents of Project Silver Fox folded into an envelope shape and vanished.

  A second later, Brody’s cell beeped confirming the message had arrived in his in-box.

  Thorp scrolled down until reaching a name they were anxiously seeking: Shandorf, Titian H. Next to his name was: $100,000—consultant.

  “So there it is.” Thorp sighed. “Evidence that a known serial killer and rapist was under the employ of none other than Hark Telecom as a consultant of all things.”

  Brody opened the new e-mail just to double-check he had the same information, complete with the entry with Titian’s name. He slid his phone away and checked his stopwatch. Four minutes. He slapped Thorp on the shoulder. “Let’s get going.”

  “Wait,” Thorp said. “I want to know how they got him the money. Maybe they still have his jigsaw on file. Maybe we can get his jig number, look it up on your reverse directory thing on your phone—”

  “We’re going to miss our bird,” Brody said, using the military terminology in hopes it would grab his friend’s attention more effectively.

  It didn’t. Thorp continued to run his hands through the hologram to direct it through the project’s file. Brody could see the reverse of the hologram from across the room. Thorp was no longer even in the correct file anymore. He was going through Hubert Ward’s Rolodex of associates.

  “Just copy it to your drive and let’s go. We can look through all that later. We got what we came for. You sent it to me, and when you save it to your ordi’s drive, we’ll have it saved in two places. We’ve got them.”

  “Maybe there’s something deeper that won’t copy, hidden files or something—a location on Nectar, a place where Titian keeps people. I want to get through this shit tonight. I’ve waited long enough. We’re close. We’re close. We’re close…” With frantic, flitting eyes, Thorp stared into the hologram, rummaging through Hubert Ward’s files haphazardly and going through things at a breakneck pace that only a keenly trained eye could keep up with. All at once he stopped.