by SL Huang
CHAPTER 20
I FIGURED as long as I was on the move, my mobile wouldn’t compromise me—I’d have to pick up a new one, again—so I put the phone back together on the way back from the meeting with Okuda. I had a promise to keep to Arthur, after all, and with so much going on, the sooner I got this taken care of the better. Time to dial up the Chief Executive Officer of one of the largest tech companies on the planet.
Imogene Grant answered right before the call went to voicemail, her voice slow and suspicious. “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said, yanking on the SUV’s wheel to get around a tractor-trailer—I was pretty sure the power steering was gone. “I’m the person who has Liliana.”
Grant inhaled sharply. “You’ve gone way too far this time. Did you think our message was exaggerating? We will destroy you for this, both publicly and privately!”
“I doubt that,” I said. “What message?”
She hesitated, and when she spoke again her voice was much less certain. “Whom do you represent?”
“Whom do you think I represent?”
She snapped back to harshness. “If you are attempting to become another player in this game, this will not go well for you. I promise you that.”
“What game?” I asked curiously.
She didn’t answer right away. I floored the accelerator on the SUV while I waited; it reluctantly dragged its way toward freeway speed. Grant finally found her voice. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one who’s got your tech,” I repeated. “I called to negotiate.”
Again she took a moment to respond. I was starting to think this conversation was confusing her just as much as it was confusing me. “Why would we negotiate with you?” she asked at last. “We have all of the legal standing.”
“Which you’re clearly not interested in using,” I pointed out. “You haven’t even reported what was stolen. You don’t want the details out there. Trust me, if you try to make this into a criminal case, we will make your technology very public very quickly. Not to mention that we have Liliana right now, so as far as I can figure, we have all the leverage.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Besides which,” I continued, “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but I really don’t care at all what’s legal and what’s not. If you don’t negotiate with us, your little foray into humanoid robotics disappears forever. Period. End of story.”
“What do you want?”
“To sit down and talk to you. Figure out a way to make everyone happy. I’m just a nice, accommodating person like that.” And someone who wanted to get a suddenly-pro bono case over and done with as fast and cheaply as possible.
“All right. We’ll…talk.” The words sounded like she dragged them out through gritted teeth. “On one condition—you tell me who you’re working for right now. Otherwise I call the nice detective and tell him we figured out exactly what was taken.”
I had to bring Warren to negotiate anyway, and if Grant started talking to the police, he was the first person they would look at. “Okay,” I said. “But be warned, if I catch one hint any of you are coming after my client, I will target you personally. Ask Albert Lau about that—he met me.”
“You!”
“Yup, that was me. And I work for Noah Warren.”
This time the silence was filled with disbelief and rage, before Imogene Grant exploded, “Him?”
♦ ♦ ♦
I DETOURED to swing by one of my storage lockers to pick up another sidearm, this one a heavy steel HK P7M10. Next stop was an electronics store to buy a new phone, as well as a few spares—the rate I was burning them on this job was outrageous, even for me. Equipped again, I drove back to Miri’s, mulling blackly about my Mafia problem.
I didn’t know where to go from here. My barely-begun blackmail plan had started feeling laughably flimsy, like going up against Mama Lorenzo with toothpicks and twine, but I didn’t have any other ideas. At least, not any good ones.
Maybe I could start kidnapping members of her family—I imagined holding Benito hostage; Mama Lorenzo would probably laugh and write him off as a loss. Or maybe I could confess to Checker how bad this had gotten—not my first choice—and enlist his help in finding a way to bust their financial rackets, hold them over a barrel economically. We’d need an impossible amount of intel to pull it off, but it wasn’t like we hadn’t succeeded at that sort of thing before.
Jesus. Checker. Should I tell him to go somewhere else, to disappear somewhere not connected with one of his friends? But where? What if Mama Lorenzo had eyes everywhere? What if she had enough people to put them all to work calling around to hotels and asking about a guy in a wheelchair?
And with a curdled feeling in my gut, I realized Checker probably wasn’t the one I actually had to worry about. Mama Lorenzo already knew going after him without taking me out first might make me stupidly brazen enough to finally damn the consequences and assassinate her. I’d told her that in so many words during our first meeting. But she could go after literally anybody else, holding over my head that she still had Checker to kill if I made a fuss about it.
Her voice rang in my head. I had not thought you so concerned with the lives of others. I’ll make use of that.
Fuck.
The irony was, I was the last person who’d be accused of caring too much about random people’s lives. But there was a difference between someone dying and that person dying because a Mob boss was using them as leverage against me, wasn’t there? I knew plenty of people I might not consider friends but still didn’t want to see in that category. Too many. Tegan had been a good first guess for Mama Lorenzo as someone who knew me—everyone knew Tegan—but what if she tracked down my regular clients? Harrington, or Yamamoto, or Dolzhikov? Not that most of my recurring clients weren’t awfully good at taking care of themselves, but…
At minimum, this would get very bad for business. I ignored the uncomfortable squirming that suggested the business aspect wasn’t what worried me most.
And what about Arthur? What about Tegan and Reese and Cheryl, whom I’d already tipped my hand about not wanting dead? What about Checker’s other friends—Miri, if Mama Lorenzo tracked us to her apartment, or anyone else Checker associated with when he wasn’t breaking digital laws?
What would be Mama Lorenzo’s next move? I couldn’t protect them all.
I amused myself for a moment by wishing she would try to go after Rio. He was my oldest acquaintance, after all. But even if she knew about our connection, Mama Lorenzo wasn’t that stupid.
Maybe I should call Rio for backup, in fact. But no—this was my mess; I wasn’t going to drag Rio away from his own shit because I couldn’t handle it.
I had to be smart about this. Outwit her. And there was only one person I knew of that I could threaten Mama Lorenzo with as much as she could potentially threaten me: Isabella.
I could kidnap Isabella.
Oh, geez, are you high? Mama Lorenzo will drop a nuclear missile on you from orbit for that! Not to mention that Arthur would probably disown me for such a plan—but, hey, he didn’t have to know. I could kidnap Isabella and threaten her until Mama Lorenzo made a deal.
It would be a fucking tightrope, of course. How to walk that line? And how to keep Mama Lorenzo from breaking all hell loose on me once she had her favorite niece back safely? I’d have to put some sort of fail-safe in place…
Shit. Talk about getting innocent people involved. Just because I didn’t care didn’t mean this was my preferred mode of action. It wasn’t my MO to shoot people who weren’t shooting at me—or, well, at least annoying me. And as far as I could tell, Isabella was just some college kid.
I’d sleep on it, I told myself, as I got out of the SUV at Miri’s and headed in. Make some plans. And meanwhile get Warren and Arkacite the hell off my plate and into a wrap-up phase.
“Cas Russell! How was your—oh, shit, are you all right?” Checker hurriedly slid his laptop over onto a side table and c
ame up to gaze at me clinically as I entered the apartment. “You look like someone blended you. In a blender. What happened?”
“I fell out a window.”
“Into a moat of piranhas?”
“Into the air,” I said. “A lot of air. The air was soft. The ground was not.” I surveyed the living room. Pilar had opened the door for me when I arrived, and Warren and Liliana were playing together in the corner. “What’s he doing here?”
“Oh, have a heart,” said Checker. “He wanted to play with his Tamagotchi daughter. It’s too sad not to let him.”
I pointed a finger in Checker’s face. “My case, my rules.”
“Those who depend on others to babysit can’t throw stones,” he said. “Uh, seriously though, are you all right? Miri might at least have some hydrogen peroxide or something—”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Hey. Warren. Get over here.”
He turned his head to look at me, then spoke very softly to Liliana before getting to his feet, his whole posture knotting up as he did so. As if my presence transformed him from a loving father into a soldier about to face a dressing-down.
He stepped over to us. “She’s my daughter.”
It took me a minute to place the non sequitur; I realized he must’ve thought I was about to kick him out. “Whatever,” I said. “We’ve got a meeting with Arkacite tomorrow. I need you there.”
“No!” The word tore out of him, low and ferocious. Frantic.
“No? No?” I exploded. “I am trying to handle this case for you despite you lying to me and despite you welching on me and that’s really what you want to say to me?”
His expression flickered. He glanced uncertainly at Checker.
“What’s going on tomorrow?” asked Checker, clearly trying to be the voice of reason. It was a terrible fit for him.
“What’s going on is that I’ve arranged a meeting with Arkacite, who are very pissed off that we stole their technology, but they agreed to talk things out and see if we could find a solution that works for everyone because I was kind enough to threaten them into it. I don’t even know why I’m helping you.” I got right in Warren’s face, craning my neck back to compensate for the fact that he was more than a foot taller. I might not have a solution for Mama Lorenzo yet, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to control the rest of my sorry life. “Now get. Out. And be at Arkacite tomorrow at nine a.m., or so help me, I will tell them it’s over and they win and fuck you.”
Every muscle in Warren’s face tightened, and to my surprise, his eyes suddenly gleamed with unshed tears. “I’m going to say goodnight to my daughter,” he whispered, and turned away.
“Hey, you didn’t punch him! Good on you,” said Checker.
I glared at him.
“Sorry, sorry, I have a highly inappropriate sense of humor. Speaking of which, I’ve never seen you try to negotiate. Are you sure that’s such a good idea?”
“I can still punch you,” I reminded him.
“Point. I’ll shut up now.”
“I need you at this thing tomorrow,” I said. “You’ve been going over the code; you know her specs. I need you to help me convince Arkacite to work out some kind of arrangement.”
“Yeah, uh, sure, of course.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You really are going to try to negotiate, aren’t you? This isn’t a Trojan horse where you blow up Arkacite once you’re there?”
I sank into one of the chairs at Miri’s table, suddenly feeling drained. “I’ve been spending too much time around Arthur. The nonviolent thing is contagious.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have a very severe case.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Still, isn’t all of us going to Arkacite sort of like, uh, walking into the lion’s den or something?” Checker asked. “Not to criticize, just—I like not being wanted for felony theft these days, you know?”
“Grant wouldn’t meet anywhere else,” I said. I’d tried to push her, but the woman was scared of me. She would have picked going back to the police over the prospect of meeting a violent unknown like me anywhere other than a building where she had her own security force. “But you don’t have to worry; they’re not going to turn us in to the cops. They’re involved in something a lot bigger here. That’s why they weren’t suspecting Warren.”
“Something bigger like what?” asked Pilar.
I jerked around—I’d forgotten she was in the room. She made one of her squishy, exaggerated faces, this one a mix between self-consciousness and anxiety, as if she was afraid I was going to tear her a new one for venturing the question.
I studied her, contemplating. “Grant wouldn’t tell me what. Do you have any idea?”
Her eyes popped wide. “No, I—I don’t think so. I mean, I was just an admin.” She bit her lip and thought for a minute. “They were always super paranoid about secrecy, though. Like, super paranoid. We weren’t even supposed to take anything out of the office with us—I’m pretty sure most people did, but they would’ve been in big trouble if anyone found out.”
I remembered the briefcase I’d stolen from Lau. He’d had more than one reason for being horrified at me opening it.
“And all the corporate espionage stuff,” continued Pilar. “I always got the feeling someone really was leaking, and that they couldn’t find the person or stop it. I mean, we were always getting memos about it, and it always sounded to me like they were reacting to actual bad stuff happening, not like they were just suspicious. And the whole atmosphere there—we were always being told to change our passwords, and getting asked if we’d seen anything, and the background information they wanted on me just to temp was kind of insane. Plus, look at the security we had to go through just to get to work each day, and every different project I did paperwork for I had to sign a different NDA.”
“And you talked to me when I came in?” I said. I was starting to have slightly more admiration for her gumption.
She shrugged, the rise and fall of her shoulders so extreme it was comical. “I didn’t say I had good judgment.”
Checker smothered a laugh. Well, I suppose I had walked into that one.
The dust and dried blood caked on my skin was starting to itch. Mulling over Pilar’s information, I dragged myself up and washed my hands and face, then raided Miri’s kitchen for some food. She had mostly unrecognizable organic things with unpronounceable names, but I succeeded in throwing some edible-looking piles together on a plate. Warren swept out in the meantime, shutting the door behind him almost too quietly, the way a man would if he was trying like hell to maintain his dignity.
I almost felt bad for him. Almost.
My eyes caught on Liliana, who had spread paper out on the floor and was intent on her crayons. Warren must have brought them—I thought it unlikely Miri had crayons lying around.
After a moment of hesitation, I took my plate over and sat down next to her. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she said. I managed not to flinch.
“What are you drawing?” I asked.
“I want to draw Mr. Mittens,” she said, pointing at the white-booted tabby, who was busy batting at the fronds of one of Miri’s many plants, “but he isn’t being still.”
“Why don’t you draw, uh, that one instead?” I asked, jabbing my fork at the white cat. It was snoozing on its back, its legs sprawled in a way that didn’t look like it could possibly be comfortable.
“I drawed him already.”
I blinked. The NLP shouldn’t have been tripped up by one irregular verb. Maybe Liliana’s programming threw in random errors to make her seem more natural.
She dug through the blank papers she had spread out and offered me a sheet festooned in color. “Do you want to see my picture?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
She raised it toward me with delicate reverence for her own creativity.
I stared. She’d drawn the room—or at least, the prominent shapes in it, the contours of every object. Behind the wax outline of the cat in the
foreground rose the couch, the table, the door—every line perfect, the mathematics of the perspective exact.
“I like drawing,” said Liliana, oblivious. “Do you like drawing?”
“Um,” I said. “I guess I never really thought about it.”
“Here.” She thrust a piece of blank paper and a fistful of crayons at me. “Draw with me.”
“I, uh, I don’t really have time,” I said.
Her lower lip trembled. “Please?”
When it comes to kids, I’m a sucker—apparently even when they aren’t real. I put down my plate and took the paper and crayons.
Liliana sprawled on her stomach and started a new picture, her crayons dragging across the page in precise lines. The new drawing looked almost exactly like the old one, only in different colors.
I hesitated with a red crayon poised over my sheet. I could do the same thing as Liliana, if I wanted: register every edge and corner before me with mathematical precision. The certainty of the result struck me as boring. Instead, I started to push the crayon in abstract shapes, letting my mind wander.
It didn’t make a difference what Liliana was or wasn’t, I reflected, or whether Warren was right in the head to want to stay with her. We’d sort it all out tomorrow and make everyone happy. Meanwhile, I’d called Okuda on the way home; I wanted to get the batteries to her tonight and then go straight to Cheryl’s and leave a deposit. I didn’t know how much the Grealy’s repairs and loss of income would amount to, but Okuda’s payment would at least be the right order of magnitude, conveniently saving me the time and effort needed to pick up large amounts of cash from my hidey-holes. I didn’t want to leave Cheryl massively in the red if something happened to me. Something like a Mob hit.
Speaking of which, after taking care of Cheryl, I had to prepare for the Arkacite meeting tomorrow, and while I was doing that…
“Hey, Checker,” I called. “Your girlfriend. When is she getting back?”
“I told you, Miri isn’t my—”
“Not her. Isabella.”
His face wrinkled with concern. “Are things getting—I mean, are you—?”
