Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  Elvis and Trey had already flanked the mouth of the alley.

  Synthrubber shrilled out on the street, swinging wide around the corner. Headlights flared into the alley, stripping away the darkness.

  Skater brought up the Predator automatically, instinctively cutting out the infrared vision. A battered Landrover shrieked to a stop with its nose pointed into the alley, the headlights not lined up true any more. On the other side of the bug-spattered windshield, Wheeler sat behind the steering column.

  “Let’s go, chummers,” the dwarf called through the window. “Little bar down at the other end of the corner has already missed this piece of drek and probably launched a find-and-recover fee to the Star. It’s most likely a cheap bounty, but you never know.”

  Elvis pulled the side door open and piled inside, cramping up at once. Archangel and Trey took seats as well. Skater got in back and pulled the door closed as Duran took the shotgun seat.

  A mass of armed yabos boiled out into the alley. They opened fire at once, nearly obliterating the windshield and striking miniature comets from the metal.

  Wheeler yanked the vehicle into reverse and tromped the accelerator. His short arms fought the wheel, bringing the Landrover under his command.

  Seated near Trey, Skater still barely scanned the waves of shimmering force leaving the combat mage’s fingertips as Trey spoke a foreign language under his breath. The shimmering force stopped just short of the yabos, then exploded into a fiery wall that closed off the entire alley and rose nearly three meters from the ground.

  Even seated inside the Landrover, Skater felt the heat wash over them. Then Wheeler dropped the transmission into first gear and pinned the accelerator to the floor, rocketing them out of the area.

  Skater found a comfortable spot for his injured arm and watched the sprawl flash by outside the windows. If Vankler was right in what he had said, the stakes in the game they were playing were higher than he’d expected even after confirmation of Fuchi’s interest. And it was too late to cut and run. Too many people knew who they were.

  29

  “Norris Caber definitely worked for Fuchi,” Kossuth said. He sat across the inlaid table from Gunther Octavius in Luppas’s high-rise suite overlooking the Seattle sprawl, watching the sun sink into the lake waters only a few blocks away.

  Kylar Luppas broke the seal on the fresh bottle of Cuige Chonnact from his private wine cellar. He extracted the cork with a loud, explosive pop, then poured it over the ice in his glass. “In what capacity?”

  “Unknown, sir,” Kossuth answered. The elegant genuine glass and walnut breakfast table occupied the hexagonal-shaped dining room just off the apartment’s spacious kitchen.

  Luppas took his place at the table, favoring the side that overlooked the sprawl. The view was expensive but well within his wages from Fuchi—without ever having to touch the bonuses he received each year. His tastes usually weren’t all that extravagant unless he could afford them and they could be had. During the Desert Wars, he’d lived simply, putting the surplus nuyen away till he took time out for whatever civilization he chose to bivouac in.

  “Tell me again how you managed to turn this joker up?” Octavius said as he eased his considerable bulk into one of the chairs ringing the table. He flipped a coaster to one side of the stack of print-outs Kossuth had put together, then put a sweating domestic beer on top of the coaster.

  “Sec vid records,” Kossuth said, shifting papers. He spread out the holopics. “See? I have sec vid footage of Caber going into and out of Fuchi.”

  The vids still were grainy, showing the effort that had been made to recover them. Kossuth had said they were being destroyed even as he’d downloaded what he could of them.

  “Another interesting facet of the sec-vid log searches I pulled,” Kossuth said, “is that Caber turned up on none of the inner office vid logs.”

  Luppas watched Octavius absorb that, knowing the man immediately reached the same conclusions he’d drawn. Gunther Octavius was an independent thinker, which was why he held the position he did within the mercenary structure. When they agreed on something, it was generally because it was the only real answer that could be reached, given a particular set of circumstances.

  “Fuchi always keeps its people under surveillance,” Octavius said. “If not in the regular vid files, then in the private ones. Did you check there?”

  “Yes,” Kossuth said, “and found it to be as holey as Swiss cheese. Someone eviscerated those files. Holes so big you could never hope to patch them up again.”

  It had only taken Luppas a few months to work a back door into the Fuchi systems after he’d signed on with the corp. The link had come through a brief liaison with a female decker who’d been charmed by his looks and the charm he’d manufactured for her. Once he’d found her weakness—the fact that she was running a utility that diverted corporate scrip through the payroll by jinking with the shipping accounts to offset hospital expenses incurred by her young son and costing Fuchi another thirty thousand nuyen a year—Luppas had exploited it. He’d blackmailed the woman even though he was sure the Fuchi security systems had already discovered the graft and decided that the woman’s skills as a programmer were worth the extra pay. A few weeks after Kossuth had established a new back door into the system that was much more complex and more low-profile than hers, the woman had died in a fire at her doss. Luppas had made sure of it.

  As a tactician, information counted in lives. In business, it ruled the nuyen flow coursing through the sprawl. And now, it presented him at least with leverage, and maybe a buy-in on whatever dirty biz Fuchi was struggling to cover up. “You’ve formed a prelim,” Luppas said.

  Kossuth hesitated, unconsciously raking his fingertips over his datajack. He disliked giving suppositions about anything; information was his game, and he played it fiercely. “I believe the Nakatomi and Yamana infrastructures of Fuchi are reacting to the shift within the Villiers infrastructure. Not acting simply in kind.”

  “What do you base that on?”

  “As you know, sir,” the decker said, “our intel on those Fuchi infrastructures is restricted predominantly to our ties to Villiers’s systems that are in place.”

  Luppas nodded, encouraging the man. The infrastructures operated independently of each other, but they all had spies in the others’ camps. As an outgrowth, each faction of Fuchi had double-agents quietly placed within each of the other infrastructures.

  “The corporate intelligence arm within Villiers’s infrastructure has reported incursions into the Villiers’s holdings. Three deckers have been flatlined in the last four days trying to get into Villiers’s private files.”

  Luppas twisted the glass before him thoughtfully, gazing into the hot afternoon sunshine pouring down into the streets on the other side of the window. The change was taking place within Villiers’s sphere of influence. And he wasn’t the only one curious.

  “In the last three days, since this shift has begun, terminations of employment or changes in locations have been quietly issued to five employees that I’ve found out about.”

  The time frame fit neatly enough into the time that Luppas had been involved with the Caber situation. “Who?”

  Kossuth laid out five digitized pics on the table. Then he named them and gave their positions within Fuchi.

  Luppas studied the assembled faces. Only two of them were personally known to him, and those only superficially. “These two people,” he tapped the pics, “answer to Miles Lanier.”

  “Their employment has been terminated,” Kossuth replied. “In this one’s case, I found record of an immediate resignation less than twenty-four hours ago.”

  The statement caught Luppas’s interest at once. The woman and the position were both highly placed in Villiers’s Tokyo operation. Trained paranoia kicked into gear inside his mind, slipping greasily through the thorns of self-preservation. “Do these five people have a common denominator?”

  “Three of them, certainly,” Kossuth
said. “They worked for IntSec. More particularly, they were placed there by Miles Lanier. Hired and trained and supervised by him.”

  “The one whose resignation was turned in?”

  “She was a confirmed hire by Lanier.”

  Octavius leaned in and looked at the faces more studiously. “If you ask me, this looks like a fragging palace coup in the works, and Lanier may be the guiding hand at work. That would explain the change in security.”

  30

  Gunther Octavius’s announcement hung in the room.

  Luppas knew that the scenario with Lanier was possible. Villiers and Lanier had worked together for years, but that didn’t mean the relationship was anything more than mutually lucrative. If Lanier had an opportunity to better his own station in life, Luppas had no doubts the man would do just that.

  “Did you make a tie between Caber and Lanier?” he asked. “Not a definite one,” Kossuth said. “But for Caber to be employed there—”

  “Lanier would have had to do his background check.” Kossuth nodded.

  Luppas looked at the other two holopics on the table. “What about these two? What ties them to Lanier?”

  “Recommendations,” Kossuth said.

  “Not outright hires.”

  “No, sir. But, given the assumption that Lanier chose to leave and had the opportunity to take a hand-picked team with him, these are two probable candidates. They worked with Lanier directly.”

  Reaching a decision, Luppas swept the holopics of the five people from the center of the table over to an edge. “For the moment, we’ll consider this a tangential operation, one moving independently of the action we’ve been asked to take on regarding Norris Caber.”

  “Why?” Octavius asked. The man had learned to play devil’s advocate very well over the years.

  “Some of the on-site physical and magical security was provided at times by staff trained through Lanier’s IntSec crew who’d gone into business for themselves.”

  “That’s a really thin tie,” Octavius argued. “Guys who worked at IntSec got paid really well. Why would they leave?”

  “Jokers working like we work, like they worked,” Luppas said, “don’t always get along with the bureaucratic view of how an op should be performed. And with Fuchi being so big on the corp scene, a frequent target for shadowrunners and other corps, they had a really good chance of getting involved in a tangle they couldn’t get out of and getting their sticks slotted good and proper. Operating on your own, at smaller facilities, the nuyen might be a little thinner, but you’d live to get to spend it.”

  “So they get away from Fuchi,” Octavius said. “Why tell Lanier about anything they found out at Dulce Tech?” Luppas swirled his ice in his glass. “Why else? Lanier could put them in touch with Fuchi money.”

  “Okay, given that Lanier knew about the software being developed by Falkenhayne, why didn’t he do something about it sooner?”

  “Because then we’d have been hired to grease Lanier first. Villiers wouldn’t have wanted the joker walking around breathing. That’s macro betrayal, omae.”

  “So, assuming he has it, how do you think Lanier’s handling the information?”

  “Maybe he’s just sitting on it.”

  “That wouldn’t be an assumption I’d want to make,” Kossuth said.

  “For the moment, we’ll also assume that Lanier is unwilling to take any direct action against Villiers,” Luppas said, putting everything into perspective for himself and choosing to ignore Octavius’s comment. It was a nasty, convoluted tangle. “So he has to operate outside his normal boundaries.”

  “Bringing in a third party,” Octavius stated.

  Luppas nodded. “Probably the shadowrunning team that took Caber’s body.”

  “You think Lanier would hire a group of shadowrunners?” Octavius asked.

  “I received a call from Vankler only a few minutes before you arrived,” Luppas said, turning to face his second. “He says a team of shadowrunners came around asking questions about me. One of them was an ork named Quint Duran.” Octavius nodded slowly. “We know a guy named Duran. Not a guy to frag around with.”

  “True. Vankler also said Duran was running with two guys who matched the descriptions of the ones I saw at the funeral home.”

  “And they were asking about you?”

  “I think something got hosed with their Johnson,” Luppas said. “They weren’t expecting to walk into the firefight they had with us. They’re trying to find out more information, maybe only to bump the price up. But I’m betting they think their hoops are on the line.”

  “Can’t say that I blame them,” Octavius said.

  “If Lanier ultimately is the Johnson they’re working for,” Luppas said, “my guess is he’ll kill them rather than leave a link that might track back to him.”

  For a moment no one said anything. Then Kossuth spoke up. “And if we make the recovery for Villiers?”

  “I think he’s going to whack us,” Luppas said quietly. He let the words hang. “Villiers gave me the information on Ripley Falkenhayne today. Vankler told me there’s street buzz about someone who can make an extraction of a high-level passcoded corp exec and provide a turnaround of days instead of months to get the exec back on-line at another company. If that’s true, we’re talking about a corp being able to play merry hell with any other corp’s executive staff. That kind of power is worth killing over. And Richard Villiers is definitely one of the guys who’d do it without hesitation.”

  No one disagreed with his assessment.

  “So where do we go from here?” Octavius asked.

  “What it’s going to come down to,” Luppas said, “is whoever manages to get both the woman and the software package first. Us or those runners. The one who gets the prize also gets a shot at cutting a healthy chunk of maybe the biggest score to hit the shadows. The loser is going to have to run hard to keep from getting geeked in the fallout. Lanier and Villiers can’t afford to get too involved and risk exposure. Dunkelzahn’s people are mixed up in this too, and they’re beating the bushes looking for his assassins.” He’d learned that from reports Fishbein had forwarded. Evidently there were people in the great dragon’s hierarchy who knew about the grant Falkenhayne had gotten from the wyrm. According to Fishbein, though, none of Dunkelzahn’s investigators had tied Falkenhayne to either the Caber or the January name. “The last thing Villiers or Lanier would want is attention from Dunkelzahn’s people or the UCAS government.”

  “We haven’t got much field to maneuver in here,” Octavius said.

  “No,” Luppas agreed. “There’s a thin groove between living and dying, and we’re slotted directly into it. Just like those shadowrunners, and you can bet your hoop they’re working that out for themselves right now.”

  “It’s also possible,” Octavius said, “that if there is a mole inside Fuchi working this deal, that it’s not Lanier at all.” Luppas nodded. “I’d already thought about that.”

  “Figured you had. Just wanted to say it.”

  “With the way this ops is shaking out,” Luppas said, “there’s a good chance of us getting blindsided by Fuchi.” Octavius grinned. “Thinking about going solo?”

  “This corporate gig was wearing thin anyway,” Luppas said with a smile. “And if we get the woman and the software, we can name our own price. That’s a bottom line a chummer has to love.”

  31

  “He was a corp exec at one time,” Archangel announced. She used a keyboard deck on the kitchen table at the safe house to bring up the schematics. “Everything in him is top-of-the-line passcoded deltaware.”

  Skater watched the diagrams pop up and wash away the soft blue of the monitor. Emma slept on his shoulder, still restless even in slumber, her thumb tucked tightly in her mouth, her breath cloying with the scent of formula. He knew he should lay her down in her own bed; his arm was already partially numb from holding the weight of her. But he didn’t want to let go of his daughter because she felt so warm agai
nst him. It was 16:06:06 p.m. A mere fourteen hours since they’d all nearly gotten geeked at the funeral home. Skater felt he’d lived a lifetime in less than a day. And the chill from the narrow escape only a little more than an hour ago sill vibrated inside him, making him feel almost hollowed out. Emma’s presence took the edge off it.

  The rest of the team sat around the monitor and Archangel, where they could get a good view of her briefing. Duran and Elvis occupied the sofa, sharing a plate of fresh-nuked nachos and a bucket of barbecue chicken from the Stuffer Shack a few blocks away. Wheeler sat in reversed fashion on one of the chairs rescued from the kitchen, a can of processed synth ham open in his hands that he used to cover crackers, which he swallowed in single bites. Cullen Trey sat in lotus position on a large pillow he’d found in one of the bedrooms, quietly building a mound of pistachio shells in a disposable ashtray bearing the logo of the New Century Square Hotel. A defoliated grape vine continued to wilt on a saucer.

  “You say that because of the deltaware cyber enhancements in his body,” Wheeler said. “A joker running a hot deck and working the shadows could have built up enough nuyen to afford a system like that.”

  “Over time,” Archangel said, “perhaps. But the diagnostics I ran on the corpse tell me those additions were made at the same time. That narrows the guesswork down. A runner would want components installed as soon as the nuyen was there to afford it. Better operating systems usually mean a better bottom line.”

  Skater knew it went without saying that a shadowrunner’s bottom line was getting his or her next breath in the free and clear.

  “An invasive full-module makeover to remove the passcode-protected deltaware is expensive,” Elvis rumbled. “That’s why corps get real reluctant about pulling an exec from another corp. And it also takes a lot of time replacing all the hardware to get a joker back into gear for the new corp.”