“This is your part,” the fixer said. “Confirm the guys. That’s all you have to do.”
The fixer turned the screen of his palmtop toward Norton. It displayed the viewpoint of each bug.
They peered through air vents into offices piled with takeout boxes, soda cans, overflowing ashtrays. The hackers were not even divided into cubicles, but sat at workstations on long, cluttered tables along the walls. They were mostly male, not one of them over the age of thirty.
In the movies, they would have had punk haircuts and strange body piercings, but these guys had more of a rumpled business-casual look. They each sat back in their cheap office chairs, with black cups over their eyes, expensive Indian input sensors stretched over their fingertips like tiny yellow condoms. Each man was lost in his own world, swiveling his head, twitching his fingers in midair, muttering quietly.
“Is it them?” the fixer asked.
“It must be,” Norton said. “The unauthorized transactions were directed from here. I identified eight users—here there’s six, seven…eight.”
“Perfect,” the fixer said. He opened a panel inside his briefcase and slipped out a boxy machine pistol. He fed it an ammunition clip, then dropped more clips inside his jacket.
“Wait a minute--” Norton said.
“Keep the motor running,” the fixer said. “It’ll only take a second.”
“I can’t do this,” Norton said. “I told you, I’m not in the security department or anything like that—”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, you can sing a little Christmas carol while I’m gone.” The fixer got out and eased the door closed. He pointed a slender remote-control wand, the size of a black pencil, at Norton's car. Norton's radio cranked up until “The Little Drummer Boy” played at ear-splitting volume. The fixer smiled.
Norton watched the fixer cross the broken asphalt parking lot and try the door to 103. Locked. The fixer raised the machine pistol, blasted through the door handle, then walked inside.
Norton heard another shot five seconds later, followed by the sound of a woman screaming. Or it could have been a very frightened young man.
“Our finest gifts we bring, pah-rum-pum-pum-pum,” Norton sang with the radio. “To lay before the King, pah-rum-pum-pum-pum...” A rattling chain of shots thundered inside the building. A stray bullet burst through one window, and Norton's sideview mirror exploded. He gasped and scrunched down in his seat.
There was a lull, and then one kid who looked about eighteen, with shaggy hair and a scraggly beard, burst through the black front door clutching a briefcase to his chest. The fixer stepped out of the shattered door after him, raised the pistol, fired one shot. The briefcase ruptured, spilling thousands of silver data discs the size of nickels, as if the kid was a slot machine that had just paid off big.
The kid fell to his knees. The fixer grabbed him up and dragged him back into the office. The open briefcase still clutched in the kid's hand spilled the iridescent nickels across the black ice of the parking lot. These rolled along the snail trail of the kid's blood.
“I have no gift to bring, pah-rum-pum-pum-pum,” the radio sang. “That’s fit to give our King, pah-rum-pum-pum-pum…”
More shots thundered inside the building. There was a pause, and then two more shots.
The fixer emerged and strolled back to the car. He was empty-handed, which seemed wrong to Norton.
“Where’s your gun?” he asked whens the fixer dropped into the passenger seat.
“Thing’s a murder weapon now,” the fixer said. “I don’t want it. Do you?”
Norton shook his head.
“Drive.”
Norton drove.
The fixer raised his thin black wand and pressed an unmarked button on the side. The office park erupted into a column of fire that filled Norton’s rearview mirror.
“I played my best for Him,” the fixer sang along. “Pah-rum-pum-pum-pum, rum-pum-pum-pum, rum-pum-pum-pum…”
Norton parked at the airfield. His hands shook against the steering wheel. It had been a very quiet drive. The dark airfield lay deserted for the holidays, behind layers of electrified fences and coiled barbed wire, the grounds patrolled only by remote-controlled armored bots. All the windows in the hangars and the hospitality building were dark and empty.
“Here we are,” Norton said. He couldn’t wait for the man to get out of his car, as well as his life. “Merry Christmas. Very nice to meet you. Maybe we'll work together again sometime.”
The fixer touched his black data glasses.
“Home office,” the fixer said. “Wait here. He might want to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“Jacques bin Faisal.” The fixer climbed out of the car and slammed the door.
Norton sat back and tried to breath. He found his inhaler in his glove box and took a deep pull. Jacques bin Faisal, of the Saudi-French banking dynasty, was the current chairman of the HHK board in Jeddah. If the man decided Norton had done a good job, Norton could move into a very successful career. If not…Norton began to tremble.
He watched the airfield. After he'd waited a painfully long time, a sleek black V-shaped jet dropped from the sky, rolled a short length down the runway, then came to an abrupt halt. The black jet moved in a way that reminded Norton of a woolly spider that had fallen on him from the ceiling fan, the summer his parents had rented the condo on the Jersey shore.
The hangar door opened as the plane approached, but the interior of the hangar remained dark. That didn't stop the black plane from crawling on in.
The fixer appeared at Norton's window like a ghost. He waved for Norton to get out of the car.
“What is it?” Norton asked.
“Your lucky night,” the fixer said. “Jacques wants to see you immediately.”
“I have to go to Saudi Arabia?”
“Manhattan.”
“But I’m not prepared…” Norton looked down at his old, partially unraveled cardigan sweater. He didn’t have a change of clothes with him.
“You’ll be fine.”
“But it’s Christmas Eve—”
“He's Muslim. And an absurdo-atheist. That's the French half.”
Norton hesitated, but he didn’t see much of a choice. He locked up his car and followed the fixer to a gate in the inner fence surrounding the landing field.
“After you,” the fixer said. The gate beeped and slid aside. Norton glanced up at the cluster of smooth black spheres hung like grapes above the gate. At least one member of the security staff would be on duty, somewhere on the planet, watching them in realtime. Or at least automated realtime anomaly aggregates spit out by video content analysis software.
Norton stepped through the gate. The gravel lawn of the landing field crunched under his wide feet. It might have been the only sound for miles.
The fixer followed, and again, he moved like a cat on padded feet, making no sound. The man's complete silence unnerved Norton. The fixer could be on top of him in an instant, if he meant to kill Norton, too.
“Wait,” the fixer said. Norton turned back and saw him coughing into one gloved hand. The man looked a little paler than before, and somehow smaller. “Think I picked up a cold. Woke up in the desert this morning. Now I got Jack Frost up my ass.” He coughed again, louder, ringing out like a gunshot in the cold night.
“I think it’s colder in New York,” Norton said.
“I’ll just stay on the plane.”
Norton was disappointed when he saw their plane. The sleek black craft that had pounced in earlier wasn’t for them. Instead, they boarded a chubby-looking unmarked jet. Inside, the upholstery was threadbare, badly stained, and pockmarked with burns.
“Problem?” the fixer asked. He took a seat by a window and set his briefcase between his feet.
“It’s not what I was expecting,” Norton said.
“Still beats flying commercial.”
Norton shrugged. He picked a seat in one of the few rows without any of the big, dark s
tains.
After a minute, a screen at the front of the plane flickered, and then showed a man in a pilot’s cap who sported an overgrown handlebar mustache.
“Captain here. Looks like you’re my only passengers,” he said. “Buckle in and we’ll get moving. We’ve got a mostly clear night, a little snow around New York, but easy sailing ahead. Maybe you guys can enjoy a white Christmas.”
“Thanks,” Norton said. The screen blacked out.
He actually felt better once they were airborne. If the fixer intended to kill Norton, he could have done that on the ground. This seemed a little elaborate for one murder, considering the fixer's demonstrated murdering-sociopath skills. Norton turned to speak to the fixer, who sat several rows back.
“Do they have drinks on these planes?” Norton asked.
“Oh, yeah. Gorgeous stewardesses, too. But not for us, as you see.”
“Just drinks, then?”
“Check the galley up front.”
Norton unbuckled and walked up the aisle. He found a refrigerator cabinet stocked with large bottles of Macallan's Scotch and Suntory Yamazaki single-malt.
“You want one?” he called back to the fixer.
“Sure.”
“Yamazaki?”
“Anything’s fine.”
Norton poured two whiskeys. He didn't drink much, but this was clearly one of those times that called for it.
He carried them back to the fixer, who had a large, unsettling smile. Norton handed him the cup, but it tumbled right through the fixer’s fingers, then through his leg, and then splattered across the seat. Norton gaped.
“Sorry, friend,” the fixer said.
“What is this?” Norton passed his hand through the fixer’s head.
“Hologram,” the fixer said. “I’m still back at the airfield, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This plane is not going to New York,” the fixer said. “We’re going to fly out over the Atlantic for about a thousand miles. Then this plane will be lost in the ocean. So will you. It’s nothing personal.”
“But…” Norton looked out at the black sky with a rising sense of panic. “Does the pilot know? What’s he going to do?”
“You mean this guy?” The fixer nodded at the video screen, and the mustached pilot’s face appeared again.
“…a little snow around New York, but it’s no problem. Maybe you guys can enjoy a white Christmas.” The video froze on the pilot’s goofy grin.
Norton jumped to his feet and stumbled to the front of the plane. He opened the cockpit door, but the cockpit was shielded by a hard plastic wall. Both pilots' chairs were folded down into compartments in the floor.
Norton was alone on the plane.
He returned to the cabin, where the hologram of the fixer now stood in the aisle, watching him.
“Why are you doing this?” Norton asked.
“I told you, poke your head up, make enemies. Like you said, there had to be insiders to cover up that much missing cash. Sixty million, right? Or was it eighty? A hundred?”
“But I was just doing my job!”
“So am I,” the fixer said. “It’s when we step outside our little roles things get dangerous. You did that to yourself.”
Norton stared at the night outside. “But why waste an entire airplane on me?”
“Yeah, the plane. We’ve had some pretty intense off-the-book activities up here. More of an embarrassment at this point. We have to juggle it from city to city, make sure none of the board get a look at it. You can imagine how they’d react.”
“So you’re not with the board of directors. You weren’t talking to Jacques bin Faisal.”
“No, but I am a good friend of your regional manager. He intercepted your report.”
Norton slumped into a bloodstained seat. He noticed the whiskey in his hand and sipped it. He winced and clenched his teeth as the burn scoured its way down to his stomach, where it exploded in a ball of heat. Norton coughed and wheezed.
The fixer appeared in the seat beside him.
"They’re going to blame me, aren’t they?” Norton said. “Tell the board I was embezzling—”
"The heat came down, you panicked, stole a company plane…” the fixer said. “Crashed into the Atlantic. We planted a whole data wake behind you, flight simulator programs, crap like that. You put a down payment on a twenty-million-dollar house in Martinique. That's where you were trying to go. Only you're an idiot and got lost.”
Norton ran to the plastic wall of the cockpit. He couldn’t find any way to open it, so he just pounded it with his fists.
The fixer appeared beside him. “Oh, come on. Even if you could get in there, would you really know what to do? You’d only finish my job for me.”
“I could call someone.”
“Nope. Stripped the voice. There’s no flight recorder, no transponder, no emergency beacon, and definitely no parachutes, so don’t bother. You should really try to relax. Help yourself to the drinks. Good appetizers in the fridge, usually.”
“Thanks.”
Norton fidgeted. He paced the aisle. He sipped his drink and tried to swallow back the burn. He finished it off and set it into a cupholder on an aisle seat.
The fixer materialized beside him. “Want me to play Christmas music or anything?”
“Are you planning to hang around here until I die?” Norton looked at the fixer with what he really hoped was a fierce, intimidating glare.
“I have to see the job through.”
“That’s nice.” Norton continued pacing.
"Silver Bells" played over the airplane’s sound system.
Norton stopped pacing.
“There’s more money,” he said.
The hologram of the fixer turned back from the window, where he’d been looking out at the stars. “What?”
“They can’t pin down how much is missing. I’ve tracked sixty-one million for them. I know about seventeen million more that I never...I never reported.”
The fixer regarded him carefully, then a smile broke across his face.
“Don’t tell me you squirreled away all that money for yourself,” the fixer said. “I reviewed your profile. You’re not that proactive. 4Q personality. Submissive.”
“I didn’t do it,” Norton said. “It was the, it was those hacker guys you killed. Some of them were running an inside game against the others. I didn’t report it.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Most of the money was distributed around the Caribbean,” Norton said. “But some went into coded accounts in Asian banks.”
“And why did you fail to report this?” the fixer asked.
“I was still investigating how they arranged the transfers. Now I’m the only person left alive who knows how to access those accounts. You even blew their computers to hell.”
The fixer stared at him.
“We can split it,” Norton said. “A holiday bonus for both of us.”
“Wait a minute,” the fixer said. “Let me think this over.”
Norton waited. "Silver Bells" became “Blue Christmas,” as performed by Porky Pig.
The fixer finally spoke. “I should get eighty percent.”
“What?”
“I’d be disobeying orders,” the fixer said. “Could be my head on the slab real quick.”
“Okay,” Norton said.
"Give me the accounts first, so I know you're not lying.”
Norton thought it over. “I'll give you one. Royal Bank of Thailand—can you access from there?”
The fixer nodded. His fingers pointed in midair, at a menu Norton couldn’t see.
“0089314-34525,” Norton said. He'd memorized all of them. Just in case. “Password OMAHA7948.”
The fixer scratched his nose, then shook his head.
“There’s only six hundred thousand here,” he said.
“The smallest account,” Norton said.
“Give me more.”
“Not a
chance,” Norton said.
The fixer stared at him. Norton stared back.
“Just one second.” The fixer tapped his fingertips in the air. “We don’t want you landing at any HHK airfield. I’m bringing you down on a strip outside Tomahawk, Wisconsin. Wait for me on the plane. Do not get off. I’m flying over to meet you.”
“Good.” Norton buckled in.
When the plane landed, Norton walked past the hologram of the fixer, which sat inanimate as a discarded puppet in the seat by the door. The fixer himself was focused on flying his own craft, probably the black spidery plane. Norton had no intention of waiting here for the man.
He opened the exterior door, and watched the stairs automatically uncurl to the ground. Then he reconsidered. The fixer would track him down eventually. Norton had a strong suspicion that the fixer was the sort of man who would take him to a dark, underground place and torture him for weeks until he gave up the money.
Norton couldn't find any paper, but he found a black permanent marker clipped to the back of a passenger seat. He wrote account numbers and passwords on the stained, filthy wall just inside of the door, so the fixer couldn't miss them. They were from the People's Bank of Beijing, and banks scattered throughout the industrial cities along the coast of China. Norton wrote the names of the banks in Chinese ideograms. He saved back only one relatively small account for himself.
Then he added the words “Merry Christmas!” He underlined these words twice.
He sucked chemical mist from his inhaler, then stepped out into the winter night.
Bad Code
by JL Bryan
Before Donald Patello awoke, he traveled in endless loops through the shifting three-dimensional labyrinth of Triod Consolidated, LLC's financial structure.
Boxy icons representing assets, some of them as large as city blocks, depreciated slowly, melting like ice cubes on a cool autumn day. Revenue streams--sometimes a trickle, sometimes a torrent--circulated from one subsidiary to another. Small tributaries drained off into black tax holes wherever a revenue stream crossed a political boundary.
Self-awareness struck him suddenly and completely, as if he'd jolted awake from a long, bad dream. How long had he been plugged into Triod's central database, scrutinizing the multinational operations? Hours? Days?
Dark Tomorrows, Second Edition Page 13
