Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  When the client emailed him again a few months ago, something had changed. He was much more opaque. Now he worked through Nicolet, a notorious tech industry legal shark Chip had known for years. And the client refused to meet in person. Which was weird as hell, because on the creative side of Chip’s work, all the truly important business was done face-to-face. Who wants to leave a trail of bread crumbs?

  Instead the client sent some middle-aged broad named Sanchez to run interference, his executive secretary or something. She was at least fifty, flew into Lake Union on a goddamn floatplane wearing last year’s business casual, with dirt under her fingernails and skin like leather. He wanted to tell her to get a manicure and put on some sunscreen, but she was too far gone for that.

  Chip had to admit she was a serious ball-buster, smart as hell with a take-no-shit attitude. Maybe that was why the client had gone this route, the attorney and the personal rep. Maybe he’d realized he wasn’t tough enough for this kind of work. Either that or he’d gone even farther around the bend.

  Regardless, the client somehow had gotten access to Hazel Cassidy’s working notes. He hadn’t shared the notes with Chip, but Chip had used the backdoor he’d built into the client’s system years ago to get himself a copy. The notes were cryptic and brief, but Chip could read between the lines.

  The algorithm’s potential was crystal clear.

  He took the guy’s money—it was perfectly good money—and began planning the operation. But he’d already decided to keep the acquisition in-house. The algorithm was far too valuable to hand over to the fucking client.

  Besides, if the guy complained, there was always Shepard.

  Maybe even if the guy didn’t complain. Maybe even include the attorney, and the personal rep with dirt under her nails.

  This was going to be big.

  Chip didn’t like witnesses.

  As for Shepard, Chip would take care of him personally.

  Profit sharing was for suckers.

  • • •

  HE PUT HIS SUPERGEEKS on the project full-time for two months, and they got nowhere. The Cassidy woman made none of the usual mistakes. She actually used the fingerprint reader on her phone and her brand-new personal laptop, the one she took home with her. Her password wasn’t PASSWORD or her birthday or her daughter’s name backward or anything else that simple.

  As it turned out, she wasn’t just any professor. She was in fact a big-shot Stanford computer science star. She had real discipline and major skills and random long-string passwords. It was infuriating. Chip was actually impressed that the client had gotten her working notes, because Chip’s supergeeks couldn’t even get that far.

  So he went old-school. He planted infected USB drives in the parking lot, on the hallway floor outside her lab, in the backpacks and messenger bags of her staff, even in Cassidy’s own purse, all in the hopes that someone would plug a drive into a lab computer. He got a few takers for his virus and a lot of naked pictures of Stanford coeds, but no access to Cassidy’s systems.

  He’d already hired a dip to lift her personal access card, planning to make a duplicate and put it back into her purse, but before the dip did the deed, Cassidy went and added fucking retinal scanners to her lab doors, so unless he was going to pop her eyeballs out of their sockets, he wasn’t getting in that way. He sent a team to assess the physical security of the place, but she had multiple layers over Stanford’s already decent measures, and short of a sledgehammer and a very large crowbar, or quite possibly the jaws of life, the place was tight as a fucking drum.

  He was starting to consider the eyeball option.

  But first he thought he’d try the direct route, hiring Nicolet on Chip’s own nickel for the negotiations, to further insulate himself from both client and professor and thus ensure his own anonymity. Chip had known Nicolet for a half-dozen years, and the man had no problem with wheels-within-wheels, his personal ethics firmly firewalled from his business practice.

  Chip’s last two offers were far more than he could afford to pay, but by then it was more about her reaction, seeing who he was dealing with.

  Hazel Cassidy was a tough nut.

  When she stopped answering Nicolet’s emails, Chip decided there was only one way through. Cut the Gordian knot.

  Or more to the point, kill the professor.

  Then his operators could walk in with government credentials and a cutting torch and clean out her office. Which is exactly what happened.

  They’d taken boxes of paper files and stray hard drives. They’d taken an odd-looking aluminum crate the size of a dorm fridge, loaded with computer components and cooling fans. They couldn’t take the lab’s servers, a long row of liquid-cooled Crays too big for a pair of operators to physically remove in the middle of the night, and the credentials Chip provided wouldn’t stand up to loading a box truck in the light of day. So they’d uploaded Chip’s virus via flash drive and gotten the hell out of there.

  The supergeeks were very impressed with the aluminum crate, which they called a mini-supercomputer, something Cassidy had apparently designed and built herself. But it was an empty jar, completely wiped.

  The virus got them remote admin access to the servers, which were packed to the gills, but not with anything useful.

  They still couldn’t find Chip’s algorithm.

  The next obvious step was the daughter, but somehow Smitty’s team had screwed up taking her off the street. Chip never did get a good explanation out of them, and now they were dead in the fucking mountains. The mystery man, whoever he was, had taken out Chip’s top tactical team, and the daughter was in the wind. Chip was certain she had the algorithm.

  Soon enough, however, he’d have her. And the goddamn mystery man.

  That’s why he was heading back to his office.

  If traffic weren’t so fucking bad, he’d get there before the ball dropped. Watch the whole thing from the dashboard cameras. Bert had a helmet-cam, too.

  Chip really wanted that code. More than he’d wanted anything in his entire life.

  He deserved it. He’d worked so fucking hard to get here. Stepped over a lot of bodies.

  He was thinking about the next steps as he ran his card through the security reader and walked through the door to his private office suite.

  Where he saw Shepard sitting behind Chip’s handmade tropical hardwood desk, sitting in Chip’s own exquisitely tuned ergonomic chair.

  41

  SHEPARD

  Shepard watched the salesman open his office door and see his chair already occupied. It was a deliberate provocation on Shepard’s part, an information-gathering strategy.

  He had the big wall-hung monitor turned on and mirroring the desktop computer. The screen was split, each side showing a night view of a residential street from opposing viewpoints. This, too, was a provocation, and also a reminder. Shepard had bypassed four escalating levels of security to get into the office, and three password log-ins to access the video.

  The salesman’s reaction was impressive, Shepard had to admit. His enormous rage was only visible for the briefest moment before it was mastered and suppressed. The anger beneath the salesman’s slick veneer, thought Shepard, was the engine that powered him forward. It was not the first time Shepard had considered this.

  He could also see the salesman’s fear, but in a much smaller proportion. A far smaller proportion than it should have been, thought Shepard. This was useful information.

  “Nice of you to show up,” said Chip. Without removing his raincoat or appearing to glance at the big monitor, he dropped himself into one of the leather club chairs facing the desk. “Long day?”

  Shepard indicated the monitor. “You haven’t seen this, have you?”

  “No,” said Chip. “I was in a meeting. How’d you get in here?”

  “I told you to let me handle it,” said Shepard. And clicked Play.r />
  On the split screen, two vehicles were parked on opposite sides of the road, facing each other, perhaps eighty yards apart. Each vehicle was visible in the other’s dashboard camera. On both screens, trees swayed slightly in the wind. Raindrops accumulated on windshields.

  After fifteen seconds of this, the left screen abruptly flared white as the camera’s sensors were overwhelmed by a burst of brightness. On the right screen, the distant vehicle was lit up with muzzle flashes, silhouetting a dark figure beside the Explorer with a long gun spitting light through the windshield.

  Shepard had recognized the shape of the medical boot on his first viewing.

  The left camera feed went blank almost immediately, hit by a stray round. The right camera jolted as the driver stepped on the gas and the distant vehicle got quickly closer. The figure slipped around the front of the vehicle with the dead camera. Then, faster than should have been possible, the same figure appeared from behind the rear of the same vehicle, firing toward the oncoming Explorer in disciplined bursts. The windshield starred immediately, obscuring the view, but the muzzle flashes were still visible, closer and closer. Then the right camera flared white.

  When it dimmed again, it had acquired a pink tint.

  “Blood on the lens,” said Shepard. He’d seen the effect before.

  Through the fractured pink perspective of the broken windshield, they watched a new vehicle arrive and the black figure with the rifle and the medical boot slip inside the passenger door.

  “Fuck me with a hot poker,” said Chip. He looked at Shepard. “Where the hell were you during all this? I thought you were hot on her trail.”

  “I told you,” said Shepard, “to let me handle it. I had her locked down. Eight cameras at her house and a GPS beacon on the vehicle. I followed her on and off for most of the day trying to get a read on her security.”

  “Maybe I’d have known that,” said Chip, his tone deliberately reasonable, “if you weren’t playing this so goddamn close to the vest. If you’d answer your fucking phone, you’d be in the loop on operations.”

  Shepard hadn’t answered his phone because he was balancing his obligations to his other clients. There was a certain amount of overlap, conflicting requirements. Perhaps it was by design, he didn’t know. He didn’t have all the information. The primary client had always played a very deep game. Shepard rotated the possibilities in his mind as he waited for the salesman to get back to it.

  It took him a minute. Chip shoved himself to his feet, stalked to the little bar, and poured himself a short tumbler of brown liquor from a heavy crystal decanter. He made a point of not offering one to Shepard. Then he turned, as if the thought had just occurred to him.

  “If you had her locked,” Chip said, gesturing with his glass, “where the fuck were you when this shit went down?”

  Shepard wasn’t going to admit he’d watched the whole thing from a neighbor’s yard. He’d wanted to see the girl’s protector in action. And it didn’t hurt to thin the ranks of Chip’s men. Shepard thought of it as tidying up in advance. It would make things easier, when the time came to clean house.

  “I had other obligations,” he said. “With cameras on the house and the beacon on the car, I could pick her up any time I wanted. Until Bertram’s team got noticed. You can see it in the footage. Just one man. But a substantial threat.”

  “A substantial threat?” asked Chip, eyebrows high, the drink forgotten in his hand. “That’s your professional opinion? A substantial fucking threat? Bert’s team was armed and armored, four trained killers, and he went through them like a hot knife.”

  “Yes,” said Shepard. “Just like in California.”

  Chip looked at him. “What the fuck is going on with you? Something’s out of whack here. It’s not like you to hold back. I know you’re not scared, ’cause I’ve never known you to actually get scared. As far as I can tell you don’t actually feel anything at all. So what the fuck is different today?”

  Shepard didn’t want Chip to speculate about what might be different.

  The man was far more than a salesman. Yes, Chip’s primary attributes were self-interest and greed, but he wouldn’t have succeeded in Iraq and leveraged himself into his current business without a great deal of insight and mental acuity. Chip was quite capable of making an intuitive leap.

  So Shepard allowed Chip to see something else, something inside him that Shepard would ordinarily have kept hidden. It had the added credibility of partial truth.

  “Ohhh,” Chip said, smiling wide. “I get it now. It’s the guy. He’s different. He’s not just another simple civilian contract, an insulin overdose or hit-and-run. You think he’s worthy of your skills. You’re flirting with him.”

  Shepard didn’t respond. Configured his face in such a way as to allow the salesman to believe Shepard was annoyed. It served to reinforce the salesman’s conclusion.

  “I always suspected you might be human,” said Chip. He drained his drink and set the tumbler down on the bar. “So where the fuck are they now?”

  “The van stopped broadcasting twenty minutes ago,” said Shepard. “Last known location is south of downtown. Perhaps they found the beacon. Or parked the van in an underground structure. Or burned it to the frame like the Tahoe. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone.”

  “What a clusterfuck,” said Chip.

  The salesman wasn’t angry enough, thought Shepard. He had something planned.

  “The other teams,” said Shepard. “Where are they?”

  “On the way. They’ll be here day after tomorrow.” He waved Shepard out of his chair. “Move your ass,” he said. “Let me see what I can pull off these cameras. I still have some friends back East.”

  Chip sat behind his desk and ran his fingers across the keyboard like a concert pianist.

  Without taking his eyes off the screen, he said, “Go make yourself useful. See if you can find the van. And the next time you have a shot at this guy, you better fucking take it.”

  The salesman definitely had something planned, thought Shepard.

  He left Chip’s office, the door closing silently behind him.

  It wasn’t quite time for tomatoes, he thought.

  Not quite yet.

  42

  JUNE

  June’s phone alarm woke her in the half-light of early morning. A warm spring wind blew hard off Puget Sound, and giant raindrops rattled the tent fly. She closed her eyes and snuggled deeper into her sleeping bag, wishing for another hour of sleep.

  She’d been up half the night digging into Charles Dawes IV, also known as Chip.

  The other half she’d spent sexually harassing her bodyguard.

  He didn’t seem to mind.

  They were camped in a sheltered pocket on the edge of a bluff in Discovery Park, a five-hundred-acre natural area where Seattle met the ocean. It wasn’t exactly a suite at the Four Seasons, but she couldn’t ask Peter to sleep in a hotel, not now. Maybe never.

  She heard him unzip the tent to let in some fresh air, then the sound of the little backpacking stove firing in the tent’s vestibule. “Coffee in ten minutes,” he said quietly.

  “Let’s go out to breakfast,” she said, yawning. “Eggs Benedict, bacon, hash browns.”

  “That sounds nice,” he said. “I can offer you trail mix and a banana.”

  “I had your banana last night.” She smiled sweetly. “Twice, in fact.”

  “I regret to inform the young lady,” he said, bending to brush his lips against the side of her neck, “that was no banana.”

  The coffee water boiled over the top of the pan.

  • • •

  EVENTUALLY PETER stuffed the pack with their sleeping bags and the sodden tent, then followed her up the broken bluffs to the wide undulating plateau. The hard rain had diminished to a thin drizzle. A narrow trail led through high grass and wildflowers
to the parking lot, where a silver Escalade waited, idling silently.

  The driver’s window hummed down and the rear hatch floated up.

  “You hobos need a ride?”

  Meeting Lewis yesterday was interesting. He had a presence much larger than his physical body. In his black jeans, crisp white shirt, and black raincoat, he reminded her of nothing more than a sleek dark muscle car with the engine idling and the clutch engaged, all controlled combustion just waiting to be released. She should have been scared of him, but she liked him. He made her feel safe. That probably should have scared her, too.

  “Your Cadillac got an outlet for my laptop?” she asked him, climbing into the back seat. “My battery’s about dead.”

  “Hand me the plug,” Lewis said, reaching back. “I’ll take care of you.” He had the assault rifle barrel-down in the footwell, the stock rising up along his door. She felt her pulse picking up speed. Maybe she didn’t need another cup of coffee after all.

  Peter threw the pack into the cargo bay and closed the hatch. Now he hopped into the front passenger seat and dropped the bag of trail mix onto the center console. “Breakfast?”

  Lewis gave him an amused look. “I already ate. Salmon omelet, hash browns, two sides of bacon, and a quad mocha with extra whip.”

  “Jeez, I knew I should have stayed with you,” June told him. “All I got was a lousy banana. Okay, go straight out of this parking lot. You’ll follow the arterial left, then right again.”