Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe)

by Hugo Huesca

  “Yes,” said John. “We’re telling the newspapers that it went haywire. Probably pay them a bit so they don’t draw the connection between this accident and the one with the quadcopter. Or the car crash.”

  David couldn’t care less about the expense of the cover-up. Something nagged him at the back of his mind. Something about those drones was very wrong.

  Well, something other than the fact they were easily hacked and used for evil.

  No way these things get popular after this goes public, he thought. They’re death traps.

  “Give me a second,” said John. Both his tablet and his smartphone were vibrating. “The boss is calling.” He walked a couple steps away from David and into the campus, speaking the whole time in a whisper.

  Here’s what bugged David: A drone’s network works differently than one in a normal computer. It has GPS connection, maps, and other tracking subsystems connected to the Internet. Rest of the software is off-line.

  Vicente’s impersonator had been using Tull’s car as his connection, implying he was inside of it the whole time. But, the car turned out to be a drone. When David and John’s Intel team shut the hacker’s connection off, the car had crashed, meaning it was empty —no human driver to simply press the brake pedal—.

  It didn’t make any sense. Had the hacker modified the car to work as a modem, to help him trick the CIA into thinking he was inside the car? Cars networks weren’t equipped to do that, at least as far as David knew. It would be a brutal security oversight. It would require a third-party hardware modification. Perhaps it would leave physical evidence on the crash site.

  But the police didn’t report anything weird with the car. It was just a normal drone, expensive and luxurious, without any modifications.

  David was stumped. The hacker had to be inside the car. The hacker couldn’t be inside the car.

  If he didn’t suspect that popping another PKD pill so quickly would probably fry his liver, he’d do it. His head was pulsating with the threat of a migraine. Thinking was much harder now than it was two hours before.

  Yes, stress definitely cut the effects of the medication off. Some metaphorical hand would start enveloping his brain into cellophane anytime soon. Leonor’s hallucinations would start in full force again. Perhaps he could stand them until he could go to bed. It was nighttime already.

  John Derry returned. His face was ashen, the unmistakable sign that David’s day wasn’t anywhere near over. “My boss is calling off the case.”

  “What?”

  “Dugall Tull appeared a minute or two ago. Your cyberbugs found activity on a social media network.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  John Derry shrugged again. “Depends on how you view it. He claimed responsibility for all the murders: Morrow, Phillips, Vicente. My team is trying to stop the post from making it into the public eye.” Pause. “It was a suicide note, Terrance. The CIA has the body.”

  “That’s…”

  David had enough of deaths and murders for an entire lifetime. He wanted to go home and sleep. He remembered he didn’t have a home anymore, and not enough cash to pay for a place to stay.

  On one hand, the case was suddenly over. The murderer was off the streets. Perhaps the CIA would keep their promise to him.

  On the other hand…

  “I don’t understand,” said David. “Dugall Tull was the hacker? How did he impersonate Vicente? How did he steal his credentials? And he had no motive to kill him. Why did he kill Wade before offing himself?”

  John Derry was thinking something similar. David knew it because he wasn’t telling him to shut the hell up. But, instead of agreeing with him, he simply said. “The CIA is satisfied with the motives of Dugall Tull for the three murders, but neither of us are going to hear them. They’re on a need-to-know basis.”

  “Well, I need to know.”

  Are you so brainwashed you’re going to let them just give you a bag of stinking shit as an explanation and call it quits?

  John shook his head. “Neither of us needs to know. The case is over, Terrance. Don’t you want to find out what happens with you, now?”

  Their gazes met. “I don’t know, Derry. What happens with me, now?”

  He had helped move the case forward, after all. But, in the end, according to John’s boss, the case had solved itself.

  “You’re free to go. The rest of your sentence was been lifted. Your record is expunged, which will help you find a job sometime soon.” John handed him a credit card out of his own wallet. “This is a CIA on-the-field expenses account. It’ll cover your living expenses for six months. Don’t over-use it, we’ll be monitoring it.”

  David may have had his doubts about the CIA’s motives, but he wasn’t one to turn down free money. He took the card. “What about my computer-ban? Is it still off?”

  His only marketable talent was working with computers. His only shot at a real job was in software.

  John sighed. “Sorry, Terrance. No dice with the higher ups. You’re still banned from accessing any computer, especially if it’s connected to the Internet. I’ll need that laptop of yours.”

  David did not fight it. He knew there was no point. He wasn’t the one making the rules, after all. He handed Orville’s battered laptop to John. “Fine.”

  “I’ll try to pull some strings, Terrance,” said John. “I can probably get you a desk job in a Government office. The pay is shit, but the benefits are great. Some of them still work in paper.”

  David suspected even the agent couldn’t help but feel guilty about the whole thing. And someone like John Derry would only feel guilty if he knew something wasn’t right with their deal.

  Not like he would do anything about it.

  “Sounds charming. Thanks.”

  There’s another lull in their conversation. The two men realized in silence that they had nothing else to say to each other.

  Pleasure working with you?

  Well, I barely know you. You’re a bit of an asshole, you know.

  Same.

  “Well, then,” said David, “that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  David nodded. “Goodbye, Derry.”

  They exchanged a cold handshake and John Derry walked towards his black van, which was already waiting for him at the campus’ street.

  David stood there, not sure what the hell had just happened.

  “Stop being so melodramatic,” her ex-wife hallucination told him, as she massaged his shoulders with vapor-like fingers. “You’re free. That’s all that matters. Go eat something and find a hotel. Forget about this stupid business.”

  She’s right, and that was a red flag. David’s hallucinations usually were happy with screaming at him, try and mess with his head, and generally make their best effort to drive him insane.

  They didn’t give him life advice.

  Perhaps it was the new tactic of the bunch. Reverse-psychology his subconscious into self-destruction.

  David shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can do that.”

  He was thinking of Wade Phillips. He was doing so because the paramedics were carrying the broken body out of the campus now, into a nearby ambulance —not that it would do him any good.

  “I have something to speak to the CIA about. It may be related to what happened to Xavier. It may not. But, I’ll definitely need someone to have my back afterward. There’s no coming back from this…”

  That’s what he had told him just a while ago. No coming back from this.

  David had convinced him —or perhaps, just encouraged him— to try and pacify his guilty conscience by speaking to the CIA. He had been murdered before he could do so. The secret had died with him.

  Why the hell would a journalist kill a college professor and a hacker on his side? Why would—

  “Stop,” Leonor begged him. “You’re making a mistake. There’s no reason to keep this charade going. You’re not a hero. Stay out of this. Forget all about it. Stay with m
e. I’m tired, David. I’m so… tired.”

  But, David had never been able to stay out of anything. If curiosity were a sin, he’d be in hell. He had become a hacker to find out the most obscure secrets of the rich and powerful. Sure, the money from those secrets was nice. But it was the knowing…

  David made his decision.

  “I’ll do my best to help you,” he had told Wade Phillips. He was at his best when he was uncovering secrets.

  Well then…

  “Please, love…” Leonor went on.

  David’s face was a mask. “Sorry, hun, but I can’t do this anymore. I’m leaving.” It’s like his heart was breaking all over again.

  His wife’s face contorted into a monstrous imitation. “You think you’re being brave? You’re your own wet dream, you pathetic—”

  The PKD bottle was in his hands already, before he even realized it. He popped another pill. To hell with his liver. He had work to do.

  It was nighttime and David Terrance stood alone in the campus, surrounded only by the light of the police cars and the ambulances.

  First order of business for David was to get the hell out of Skyline University and into somewhere as far away as possible from big groups of cops. Even if they’d been working for the same side, albeit briefly, he’d never trust civil servants completely.

  Perhaps, the feeling was mutual. In neither case was it without a motive.

  John Derry had made a small mistake before he left him there. He had taken Orville’s laptop, but he hadn’t taken David’s phone.

  In this day and age, a phone was just a smaller, prettier, slightly less useful computer. He had it in his hands. It was like giving an Olympic swimmer a puddle to practice in.

  It would be ugly. But, it would do in a pinch.

  He downloaded an app, added Derry’s card information and three minutes later David was in the back of a car driven by a talkative middle-aged lady. As the car zig-zagged slowly through the river of heavy traffic of after-hours office workers driving home, David composed an email.

  Hey, Orville. You guys still at K-Sec HQ? Shit went sideways with my former employers. They’re calling Case Closed on Vicente’s murder, but I don’t think it’s over yet.

  If we mix our noses with this, we could be shooting ourselves in the ass. But, I’m doing it and could use the help. They’re probably monitoring my Internet access, so I can only work through my phone.

  Are you game?

  -T

  He did not send the email through his phone’s data plan —which worked with prepaid cards, anyway— instead, he tells his driver to lend him her network for a second.

  “I’ve only a couple gigs left in my connection, but I really need to send this email,” he told her.

  No problem at all. A happy customer is a customer who leaves five-star reviews. She pressed two or three buttons and one minute later, David’s phone vibrated with Orville’s answer.

  K-Sec is game. We did some digging on our own. You didn’t tell us you’re CIA. Tut-tut, T.

  Jean says she wants to kill a motherfucker, so please let’s send her to the right guy, shall we?

  What do you need?

  -R.Orville

  David smiled. He more or less counted with K-Sec’s help. He’d be screwed without it, really. And, all in all, he may have been a lone wolf, but given the choice of working with people like John Derry or working with wannabe-corporate hackers like K-Sec… Well, it wasn’t much of a choice. Politicians did the same thing. Even if they hated their guts, they would always flock towards one another instead of a civilian.

  I need you to do some digging for me. Doctor Wade Phillips, Computer Science degree. Worked at Skyline U until he got flattened less than an hour ago. He was working on something. I need to know all about it. Perhaps look into SU servers?

  May be dangerous. Keep an eye open.

  -T

  There wasn’t much else, apart from his relationship with Morrow, that could explain Phillips’ murder. The killer had known exactly when Phillips had agreed to talk.

  Someone had been listening to their conversation, perhaps? Or spying on their movements. People could easily do that, nowadays. Pinning a small, rented satellite on your ass, for example, was a brute force method. A small, mosquito-sized spy drone would be a more refined approach.

  David looked around the car as if he could find said spy drone hanging on the empty seat next to him. He forced himself to breathe deeply. Paranoia would only dilute the pills effect and he needed to think clearly (and by now, his system was so filled with the PKD compound that stress could give him a heart attack).

  If someone is following me, there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m not a secret agent.

  On the net, that was a different story. He’d only need a keyboard and public WiFi and then he could maybe bite back.

  The car stopped in front of a cheap business motel somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Its OPEN FOR BUSINESS cartel was the strongest light in the sky. The sign included a crudely-drawn businessman sleeping on a cartoonish bed.

  Even the idea of a bed sounded like heaven to David. He added a five-star review to his driver’s page and walked tiredly towards reception.

  Registry went quickly: reception was a small room, the size of his former virtual cell. There was a machine on it with a card-reader where David registered his card’s information.

  Next part was crucial. For an extra fee, he selected the “pay on check-out” option from the machine. Normally, the option is only there for middle-management on business trip, doing some tax fuckery that escaped David completely.

  It worked for him because the CIA wouldn’t get a receipt for the place he’s sleeping at until at least tomorrow morning. He did not want anyone looking too closely at the site’s free WiFi, which it offered to every guest as a bonus feature.

  Was it a flawless plan? No. But nowadays there were no perfect plan. Anyone, with enough time, can dig out any information they may want, on anyone else —unless those persons can afford to pay premium amounts of dollars. Privacy was a privilege.

  David was making a bet on a second-handed kind of privacy. Being lost in background noise. Society is run by people and people can’t be everywhere at once. Not the Government, not the Corporations, not K-Sec.

  John Derry may have David’s phone network watched, but having him followed and then every WiFi in the area monitored for his activity, that was expensive. David was a humble man. He knew he wasn’t worth that kind of cash. Not anymore.

  Anyway… to be sure, he only planned on surfing the Internet for ten minutes or so.

  He found an old desktop PC in a corner of the lobby, right of the bathrooms and past the elevators into the rooms. The plastic feel of the keyboard (membrane-based, not mechanical, which felt like blasphemy to him) sent a tingling sensation through his fingers.

  That’s right. Computers had never lied to him. They were based in real, pragmatic rules that you could understand if you studied them long enough. They weren’t people.

  It’s all David Terrance needed to feel at home.

  There’s only so much he could do on a random public computer with free WiFi. Orville had software installed in his laptop already. Inside this new PC were only spreadsheet programs.

  Setting it up properly could’ve taken the entire night. But David didn’t plan on doing anything heavy-duty. No hacking into the CIA for him tonight. Instead, he found Xavier and Angelica Morrow’s apartment and tricked the home network of the whole building into thinking he’s inside it. That took him three minutes and the free download of a GPS address changer.

  David idly thought of how he was more or less retracing the steps the murderer had taken to hide the evidence inside the Morrow’s apartment. It wasn’t too hard.

  Once he was inside the home network, accessing security was only a matter of granting himself admin privileges. He stole the account of a random family two floors below the Morrows and got to work.

  Ten min
utes later, he’s inside security. Yesterday’s tapes at the Morrow’s place were already deleted.

  But, I didn’t need to see those again, did I? David smiled to himself. His memory was quite good, when it wasn’t besieged by hallucinations.

  There wasn’t anything in those tapes but what John Derry showed him in the first place. A terrified woman, an overachiever cleaning system, and a corpse.

  On the other hand, the tapes from the days before the murder, those were still there. They weren’t relevant to the investigation, yet, so there was no need to confiscate them.

  There was nothing interesting in the tapes, anyway. The Morrow’s led a busy yet boring —in David’s opinion— life. Their marriage was strained. They had screaming matches. She threw some glassware at him, one night.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  But, David wasn’t looking for something in the tapes. John Derry had refused to listen to one fact when he had terminated his work relationship with David. The murderer may have had a reason to only kill either Wade, or Morrow, or Vicente. No reason to kill the three, though. Vicente was an enemy of Morrow. Wade had been in love with the Senator. Wade and Vicente had no relation that David could see.

  So, he was looking for more information, starting with the easiest parts to disprove. Morrow and Phillip’s work.

  David had no access to Morrow’s office tapes, but some men brought work home.

  There were ten minutes of footage missing from the feed two weeks before the murder. Specifically, it was missing from the cameras in the Senator’s home office, where he used to spend the weekday mornings and some afternoons.

  Morrow had brought work home and whatever happened in those ten minutes was so important that he got killed for them, or so incriminating the hacker had gone out of his way to delete them. In other words… Bingo.

  “Found you,” whispered David as a jolt of adrenaline rushed through his veins. He copied the day’s video to his phone and logged out.

  “Yes. Found you,” said someone behind him.

  David’s heart beat skyrocketed and he could barely avoid screaming like a schoolgirl in a slasher movie. He turned around and found himself face to face with John Derry. Several suited men were covering the motel’s exits and they’re all looking straight at him. They must’ve floated through the air to be able to cover the building so fast, and so thoroughly, without making any noise.