Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe)

by Hugo Huesca

  Really? Are we going there? thought David with dismay. You’re playing the gun card? But he was too deep in already to back off.

  “Don’t give me that shit. I’ve been following orders as best as I could since you came to fetch me. I’ve done my best to aid your investigation. I even saved your life!”

  “You saved your life,” pointed out John. “And by murdering Dugall Tull, you’ve done more damage to this investigation than everything else you’ve done to help it, put together. Yeah, even saving my life, smartass.”

  “How the fuck was I supposed to know they’d lose control of the car?” David was exclaiming loud enough for the other high-ranked officials in the scene to turn their heads towards them. “No one is that stupid!”

  The driver had been taking the sharp turns of the dirt road like a professional. Losing his Internet would’ve killed his GPS address, but he still had eyes, for christ-sake. No human driver would…

  Oh shit. David’s eyes went wide with shock and he forgot about John Derry and their fight in a single instant.

  We’re a pair of assholes. He concluded.

  He turned to John, ignoring the agent’s hand resting on his sidearm. “Dude. Derry. Stop to think for a second.”

  “I swear, Terrance, if you’re about to try and threaten me again—”

  “No. No. Stop. Look. They shut down our drone’s network with a DDOS and it fell down, right? If we’d had a human pilot with us, we could have easily avoided it. Right? But we didn’t. So we crashed.”

  “You’re saying it was a drone? Why would Tull let a drone drive itself with him on it?”

  He answered his own question a second later. “It was empty.”

  There was an easy way to check that. He called the paramedics and specifically instructed them to search for any human remains (no matter how small) inside the car. It would be a hard, perhaps futile attempt: The fire was an excellent destroyer of biological samples.

  “So,” began David Terrance as the paramedics scrambled around the burning car. “We forget about our argument?”

  “We’re not married,” pointed out John Derry. “We had no argument. Just exchanged a few words.”

  Then he turned around to the police car. The officer was still there, looking bored and waiting for new orders. “I’m going back to the city. If Tull is still around, we may have to put a search warrant on his ass.”

  That meant John wanted to call up the surveillance grid all across the city and set it on “search and destroy” mode. Every speed-trap, every camera in a busy intersection, every satellite pointed barely in the city’s direction, would receive a special missive with Tull’s face.

  John Derry reached the copilot’s seat and gestured at David to get in the back. The hacker shrugged and followed suit. They may not be married, but he guessed that gesture was the best he was going to get from the agent in the form of an apology.

  Minutes later, the entire investigation had splintered. The police and the paramedics stayed at the crash site, examining the burning remains of the sports car and looking for any piece of evidence the labs could analyze.

  “So, the suspect you’re looking for used a self-driven car to confuse us?” asked the policeman as he retraced the same road they had used to reach the mountaintop. It was even more dangerous now, since the descent slope could easily make the car’s tires slide on the treacherous dirt.

  “Yup,” confirmed David, “that’s what I think. Otherwise, it’d make zero sense.”

  He was secretly glad to have a moral escape. The alternative was thinking he had managed to kill two men by clogging their WiFi.

  “Those things are going to be a danger in a couple of years, I’m telling you,” said the officer. “They’re already beginning to appear everywhere.”

  “I hope that, by then, security measures are improved.”

  “Those are the last to improve, every time. I should know, man, I’m security.”

  “I guess you are.”

  John Derry grunted in his seat and fidgeted with his cracked tablet.

  On their way back to the city, they passed a news helicopter (human-piloted) and several news trailers on the highway, making haste to the crash site.

  “What are you going to tell them?” David’s curiosity got the better of him. After all, the murder of Senator Morrow was supposed to be a secret. At least for now. You can’t keep that kind of thing from the media forever. Someone always leaked, sooner or later.

  Not that I’d know when they don’t, thought David.

  “Just an accident, nothing to see here,” quoted the policeman. John shook his head no.

  “That would just make them more curious. We’ll tell them it was an unmanned car being tested on an empty road, and it malfunctioned. We’ll clear things up with the company later.”

  He talked about lying to the public with the practiced carelessness of someone who really thought he was acting in everyone’s best interest. David sighed and went back to his laptop.

  “You do that. Meanwhile, I’ll place cyberbugs in every social media outlet our journalist can access. Perhaps we’ll get lucky.”

  A cyberbug was the term of a special bot that checked a local (if you were short on resources) or global (if you were a Government) area of social media. It paid attention to some keywords and reported back when anyone used them. Ninety-nine percent of the time any matches were just background noise or a writer doing research for a murder in their book. With the other once percent though, you may have foiled a terrorist plot or a real murder.

  David was a firm believer in doing the least effort to obtain the greater result. Putting a ton of cyberbugs out there and having the CIA check on them for him was the least-effort initiative. Since he wasn’t the one actually looking at the thousand messages, well, results could take the backseat.

  They arrived again in the city and were driving through the financial sector when Derry told the policeman to drop him and David off. “We need to pay someone a visit.”

  “I guess you don’t need the help of an honest officer of the law,” the guy joked.

  “It’s not you, it’s us,” said David, with a shameful smile. “If you saw the amount of laws we broke in the last few hours, you’d get a heart-attack.”

  The officer laughed mirthlessly and then sped off after David had jumped out of the patrol car.

  “I don’t remember breaking any law, today,” puffed John.

  “I’m just having fun with the whole detective shtick.”

  John sighed and then pointed at the building behind them. It was a white skyscraper, too expensive to be an office building. A bank, perhaps?

  David had never set a single foot in the financial district, not in this city, nor in any other part of the States. He conducted business entirely online.

  Hell, if he could’ve worked for the CIA, sitting on his ass in the K-Sec hideout, he’d have jumped at the chance. Minimal exposure to assholes. Here, the exposure was greater.

  “Yeah. It’s a building. A big one. Pretty. What am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked John.

  “You’re a delight to talk to. Look at the name, Terrance. Ring any bells?”

  The company’s name had been forged in steel and copper on a heavy plate resting on the first floor. They were at Odin’s headquarters.

  “Let me guess, we are paying a visit to a certain CEO?” David had forgotten the name. No matter, he searched for it on his laptop. “Florian Dervaux, right?”

  “If you kept reading that page,” said John Derry, “you’d see that Mister Dervaux has been in a medical-induced coma for the last five years. We’re meeting with his wife and Odin’s temporal CEO, Madam Charli Dervaux.”

  He looked at David gravely, in the way an actor looks at a fellow actor in a movie after revealing a dramatic secret. David shrugged. “Never heard of her. She’s like a model or something?”

  “Well, don’t tell her that,” sighed John. “She just sent an email to my private address. She says
she has something to talk to us about.”

  Odin’s HQ was as friendly and inviting as anything else in the avenue. A continuous flow of suited-up employees and managers flowed across its entrance and out to the sparse entertainment down the street: several restaurants, a mall, a park.

  David eyed them all with suspicion, like any of them could run up to him and steal his wallet if he wasn’t careful.

  Inside, John and he were received like foreign kings visiting an empire, even if they were technically just lowly employees on the totem-pole of the CIA (with David Terrance at the very bottom). A smart move, sucking-up to the CIA. It was probably corporate policy.

  A blond receptionist led them to the upper levels of Odin, up in an elevator made entirely of glass —David Terrance looked around for any metal mechanism and somehow found nothing—, which revealed the entirety of the first floor down below. Since it was the HQ and not a simple corporate office building, no expense had been spared. If David had seen the place in a picture, he’d have thought it was in Vegas.

  Odin was no Vegas, but no one would say that to the investors and billionaire deal-makers chatting among themselves in the middle of the giant bar.

  David’s instincts salivated at the thought of that amount of wealth right underneath him, the billionaires becoming progressively smaller as the elevator’s floor monitor got into mid-triple digits. They were a bunch of ants dressed in expensive suits, when viewed from above.

  “Madam Dervaux will see them in a minute,” said the receptionist, when the elevator finally stopped at the very top and the doors opened. They stepped off into another, smaller, lobby with yet another blond receptionist staring intently at them. The first one stayed in the elevator.

  “You can wait at the conference table. Down the walkway to the left,” said this new receptionist. “Madam will be joining you shortly.”

  David nodded and tried to act unimpressed by the tasteful display of wealth all around him. Charli Dervaux had turned her floor into a mix of penthouse and office. Since most of her visitors didn’t need to be impressed by how rich she was, she had gone the other route. No expensive art, no custom-made statues, no fountains. Just some tables, and a couple big screens with Wall Street data and financial reports streaming down it.

  Of course, David didn’t miss the fact that those bare tables were more expensive than any car he’d ever owned.

  John led the way to the meeting room and closed the door behind them.

  “Any news on Tull?” asked David.

  “Not the best moment to be discussing anything sensitive,” said the agent, like a man chatting through a stroll in the park. “You don’t want any unauthorized to overhear us by accident, do you? We’d be forcing them to commit a crime.”

  What he was actually saying, with his eyes, was: “The walls are bugged. You probably have a mic shoved up your ass right now, haven’t even realized it. So, shut up.”

  David caught his meaning and looked around like he could see the mics and the cameras hidden in the furniture.

  “So, Odin was Senator Morrow’s partner with the Accountability Act?”

  “Brokered almost entirely by Charli Dervaux,” said John Derry. “She’s something of a big-shot in the financial circles, right now.”

  “You’re familiar with that?”

  “It’s my job to know these things. The CIA likes to keep tabs on any fortune that could destabilize an economy.”

  The door opened behind them. “Not even if I promise to try really hard not to?” sang a woman’s voice.

  David turned around and saw an angel looking down at him from above.

  Charli Dervaux had eyes of steel and perfect porcelain skin. She was dressed in a tailored, cream suit and had no jewelry on her. Her red hair parted her face in a loose curtain. Her smile was the kind of smile you would have if you were immensely rich and beautiful. She could probably get away with shooting a man in plain sight and the guy would thank her for the attention.

  “Not even then, Madam Dervaux,” said John without missing a beat. He got out of his leather-bound seat and offered her a seat.

  “Ah, a southern gentleman,” said Charli Dervaux with a delighted smile. She accepted the chair and made herself comfortable with the ease of someone who owns the place. “A dying breed these days, I’m afraid.”

  She turned to David. “And you must be the consultant, right? I heard you are giving the Intelligence guys a run for their money, and after only a few hours on the job.”

  “I’m properly motivated,” said David Terrance, crisply.

  He didn’t trust her, instinctively, beautiful angel or not. She was the head of the Accountability Act, wasn’t she? David may have been a freelancer, but he was still more in tune with Rufus and Jean and their little K-Sec game than in this place. If there was any kind of divide in society, then he and Charli Dervaux were on opposite teams.

  “And I’m going to assume you don’t have privileged information on a secret CIA investigation, madam,” said John Derry with a resigned shrug. “I suspect I don’t want to know how you got it.”

  Her smile was as bright as the sunrise. “Oh, why, you zealous agent, there’s no problem at all! Brandon Kelsov told me all I know, as a gesture of good faith. Morrow’s death was a terrible blow to our program, you know.”

  John’s ears perked at the casual namedrop of his boss. He raised his hands, as saying: “I told you I didn’t want to know.”

  David made a mental note of how she had referred to the Senator’s death. A blow to our program. A delay in the schedule.

  Charming.

  Would she take offense if he grabbed his laptop and zoned out?

  Like listening to his thoughts, Charli turned to look straight in David’s eyes. She smiled, slightly less than before.

  “Madam. You called for us and so, we’re here,” said John after a pause in the conversation. “Is there anything you want to share with us?”

  Charli Dervaux nodded and withdrew her attention from David. “Yes, I did. Shall we do away with the small talk, then?”

  She took out a tablet from her jacket’s pocket. “Senator Morrow was killed yesterday, but here at Odin, we feared for his safety long before. You know the FMA have resorted to terrorism before. So, we tried to give him a security detail. He refused. Tragically, of course.”

  In hindsight, Morrow’s denial may have been almost suicidal, but David could imagine, if he had been in the man’s shoes, he’d have refused to have a faceless corporation checking on his every move, listening to his every conversation day after day.

  On the other hand, it sure as hell was better than dying.

  “Other branches of government deemed it unnecessary to put him on a detail, as well,” added John. “That’s how the CIA got involved.”

  “You’re the ones they call to clean up after the mess?” said Charli in a tone that made it unclear if she was joking with John, or at his expense.

  “In a way.”

  Her smile vanished. Clouds hiding the sunrise. “You have one hell of a mess to clean, then. Morrow’s death has cost Wall Street billions. Some people, over whom I have little control, are very angry at this. They want someone to punish.”

  “Luckily for the American people, I work for them. Not for ‘some people,’ madam.” John’s eyes now mimicked the steel in hers.

  David followed the conversation like an amateur watching a pro tennis game. Not sure what was happening, only that it happened very fast.

  “My dear husband would’ve liked you, John Derry,” she said. “He always surrounded himself with patriots, believe it or not. Said he could trust them before anyone else. I disagree, of course.”

  John raised an eyebrow and said nothing, but Charli gave no signs of noticing it (or caring).

  “See, he mistook cause for effect. He thought he could trust a patriot because they were committed to an ideal bigger than themselves. Life for their country, and all. He thought that loyalty made them of a higher breed tha
n their mundane counterparts. More trustworthy. Oh, my husband despised bankers.”

  “You don’t?” asked David, who was incapable of ignoring the conversation any longer.

  “I don’t. Cause and effect. A patriot, like our friend John, here, is trustworthy because most of the time that’s how they serve their country, or their company, or whatever they feel patriotic towards. But times can come when they feel that to help their country’s best interests, they must act against that trust. They know better, after all, than the corrupt bureaucrats making up laws and selling their integrity to the highest bidder. You’ll tell me you’ve never felt that way, Mister Derry?”

  John’s eyebrow was still as raised as before and he persisted in his silence.

  “Very well. With a banker, Mister David Terrance, you know what you’re getting. Anyone propelled by their own self-interest is someone you can trust utterly, in so far as they’ll always take the action they feel benefits them the most. Just take that into account, and they’ll never, ever betray you. Learn to work with them, to further them in their own goals along with yours, and you’ll become a powerful man.”

  If there was any point to the conversation, it evaded him utterly. So David resorted to speaking his mind. “I think you are giving yourself too much credit, with all due respect. There’s no alliance with a purely self-interested person. You may think you know them, but the day may come when you’re weak and they smell blood in the water. At least, if someone thinks of you as a friend, they may forgive that moment of weakness.”

  “A person who forgives your moment of weakness may very well forgive the weakness of your enemies, too,” said Charli, cocking her head, studying David like a pathologist examining a corpse. “It seems we can’t trust anyone, then, Mister Terrance. That’s one solitary life you’re proposing.”

  “I can trust myself,” said David.

  To his surprise, Charli moved her head backward and laughed genuinely. “Of course! If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing yourself. Both of us have that in common, I believe, with my dear husband. Not like I can ask him what he thinks… But it can be a solitary life, only relying on yourself. And what happens if you can’t trust yourself, either? What do you do?”