by Greg Rucka
What he got instead was a man he had never seen before, and an offer of an entirely different sort.
“I’m Jonathan,” the man had said. “I want to talk to you about the blog.”
Ben tried to close the door then, all of his worst fears flooding into him at once. Until that moment, he’d allowed himself to believe that what he’d written, what he’d posted, was beneath the notice of the hypercorps. In the seas of propaganda and controlled media, the islands of truth were few and far between. Ben had considered his own island to be minuscule, certainly nothing like the other sites that had inspired him, sites with names like CorpTruth and CorruptionNet. Those were the sites that had awoken him, where he’d first read about the dataDyne takeovers of Zimbabwe and Brazil, the Core-Mantis purchase of the Solomon Islands. Where he’d seen the photos of troops—honest-to-God troops—wearing corporate uniforms and fighting side by side with UN peacekeepers, or, worse, directing their activities.
Where he’d read the first-person accounts of the atrocities, and the cover-ups, and the purges, and the labor camps. All the things the media spun or obfuscated or outright ignored.
Which made it so very easy for everyone else to ignore it all, too. After all, ignorance wasn’t a crime; in fact, it was openly encouraged.
So Benjamin Able had tried to close the door on the man who called himself Jonathan, suddenly and acutely afraid for his life. But Jonathan stepped forward before he could act, blocking the exit and putting a hand out to catch the door. Ben stepped back, almost stumbling.
“It’s all right, Ben,” Jonathan said. “I’m on your side.”
Given the time and the place and the entrance, it was a hard statement to believe. When Jonathan stepped fully into the room, closing the door after him and giving Ben a lookingover, it became even harder. Jonathan didn’t look much past his mid-twenties, putting him perhaps five years ahead of Ben, but it was five years that seemed to carry a world of difference. He had four or five inches on Ben, and probably another thirty pounds or so, almost all of that in muscle. Already, Ben had a sense of purpose and focus from the man, down to the smallest gestures, everything done with precision and economy.
“Look,” Ben said. “Look, I’ll take it down, I’ll delete it, all of it.”
Jonathan nodded slightly, taking in the room. Not by moving his head, Ben noticed, but with his eyes alone. “Yes, you’ll have to do that. They’ve probably found you already. After all, we did.”
“I’ll take it down,” Ben assured him.
Jonathan settled his gaze on him again, and then his expression softened, a cockeyed, honest smile appearing. “You were sloppy. The other sites, the big ones, they know how to move around, how to stay hidden.”
The statement confused Ben. “I didn’t … I’m not a tech guy.”
“Yeah, neither am I, to be honest.” Jonathan tilted his head, as if listening for something, then straightened. “Look, Ben, I’m going to make this quick. Do you believe what you’ve been posting?”
The question confused Ben further, unleashing another wave of suspicion. “I—”
“Yes or no.”
“Yes,” Ben said. “Yes, I do. I know how it sounds, all right? I know people think I’m crazy, that I’m worked up about stuff that nobody else cares about, stuff that they don’t even think is real. But I do believe it.”
“You’re a junior,” Jonathan said. “Declared poli sci major. What’re you going to do with that? You thinking of teaching?”
Again, the question threw him off balance. If there was logic to the course of the conversation, Ben couldn’t see it. “I hadn’t … I don’t know.”
“Almost every school has been bought and paid for, you know that, right? From the primaries on up to this place, it’s how they keep recruitment up. They dump money in, they get to dictate the curriculum. They think of it as preparing the workforce.”
“I know, I—”
“What I’m saying is that you’re not going to be able to teach what you believe, Ben. You’ll be teaching the lie. Can you live with that?”
“No, I don’t—”
“So maybe you should consider a different line of work. Something where you can make a difference, a real difference. Something where you can fight these bastards.”
Jonathan fell silent, fixing him with an intent stare. Ben shook his head, bewildered. “Who the hell are you?”
“I told you, my name’s Jonathan.”
“But who do you work for? Who sent you? Are you government?”
Jonathan laughed. “No, not government.”
“Then who?”
“Who says I work for anybody?”
“Everyone works for someone,” Ben said.
“True enough. I work for a man in London, Ben.”
“There are a lot of men in London.”
“Not like this one there aren’t.” Jonathan shook his head. “I’d like to tell you more, but I can’t. Not yet.”
“You’re trying to recruit me for a fight, I don’t even know who I’ll be fighting for!”
“But you know it’s a war. And you know who the enemy is.”
“All right, how?” Ben asked. “How am I supposed to make a difference? How am I supposed to fight them?”
“There we go,” Jonathan said, softly. “That’s it. You want the fight? You’re willing to take them on, all of them?”
“Yes,” Ben said, quickly. “Hell yes, I—”
“No, don’t answer yet. These are organizations that destroy not just lives but whole countries, Ben. You hurt them badly enough, they won’t come after just you. They’ll come after everyone and everything around you, as well. Family, friends—even that little brunette you’ve been making eyes at in Lit class—they’ll all be targets.”
Ben started to answer, then stopped himself, taking in what Jonathan had just said.
“You need to think about it,” Jonathan said. “That’s good, we’d have been wrong about you if you’d just say yes blindly. You’d be a fool, and we don’t need fools. So that’s good, take some time.” He moved closer, lowering his head slightly to meet Ben’s eyes. “You decide you want to do this, change your major. Pre-law or pre-med, but pre-law would be better. We’ll be watching, we’ll see the sign.”
“Pre-law?” Ben asked.
“They always need lawyers, Ben.” Jonathan turned for the door, reached out to open it. “And take down the blog. Even if you don’t want in, take it down. For your own sake.”
And then he was gone, leaving Ben to stand at a crossroads in his tiny dormitory room, leaving him to decide his future.
Before he went to sleep that night, he killed his blog, and deleted all of the associated files.
Two days later, he went to the registrar’s office and changed his major to pre-law.
That was how it started, with Jonathan Steinberg recruiting him to the Carrington Institute’s nascent Operations Division, and together with the man himself, Daniel Carrington, they built Benjamin Able a legacy that would resist any but the most determined assault. He graduated fourth from the top of his law school class, interviewed with the dataDyne recruiter, had his background checked. He was offered a job with pharmaDyne in Vancouver, in the Rights and Properties division. He took it eagerly, underwent a second, more thorough check, and then joined the team of attorneys who spent their days in zealous defense of pharmaDyne’s intellectual property.
It was a stepping-stone position, and Ben worked among almost two dozen other young legal eagles, all of them trying to prove themselves. Distinction in the department would lead to upper-level promotion, perhaps even away from pharmaDyne to its parent company, a position with dataDyne in its Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Beijing offices.
If his cover had remained intact, that was where Benjamin Able might well have ended up, a mole planted at dataDyne’s highest levels, steadily feeding the Carrington Institute a stream of priceless information. He’d passed every check, he had placed himself beyond suspicion. He
was young, and hungry, and viciously good at his job—everything pharmaDyne could have wanted from him. He was the perfect double agent.
And if it hadn’t been for Kimiko Wu in Accounting, he would have stayed that way.
He struck up the relationship with her simply as a matter of asset acquisition, as Carrington termed it.
Like every other hypercorp, pharmaDyne was heavily compartmentalized. The beauty of his position in Legal was that it gave Ben wide access to all of the corporation’s departments, since he could almost always claim an interest in one division’s work or another on legal grounds. At the same time, however, his access was rarely very deep, and so Ben took steps to address the problem. To know what pharmaDyne was truly up to at any given moment, he had to know what it was doing with its money.
So targeting someone in accounting made sense, and when Ben first met Kimiko, the idea became all the more appealing. She was in her early twenties, new to the company, and graced with the kind of beauty that had men from four floors above and below her office taking regular detours just to catch sight of her. Ben met her in the course of his work, authorizing the payment on one of the few negligence settlements ever made against the company.
They became friends, and then the friendship turned into a couple of dates, and the dates became something more.
Whether he truly fell in love with her, Ben couldn’t say. Certainly, he enjoyed her company, and he enjoyed the sex, but to his mind, it was always toward a singular goal. He wanted access to her office, to her computers and her files and the endless spreadsheets that crossed her desk. If there was a problem in how he achieved these things, he didn’t acknowledge it. He was a spy in the enemy’s camp, he was a soldier in a cold war, and as far as he was concerned, that made everything fair game.
On alternate Fridays of each month, Accounting held a general staff meeting in the afternoons, and that was when Ben made a point of stopping by her office to drop off a bouquet of flowers. The first time she came back from a meeting to find the half-dozen roses sitting in a narrow glass vase beside her terminal, Kimiko had been surprised and touched. When he’d done it again, she’d been amused.
When he did it a third time, Ben turned the act into a ritual, and the flowers into an expectation. The flowers died, of course, normally after a couple of days, but once in a while they’d survive the duration, and he would have the pleasure of replacing them himself. On those few occasions, Ben would also surreptitiously remove the remote access transmitter he’d hidden amongst the petals. The transmitter was minuscule, developed by the Carrington Institute’s technicians, astronomically expensive to produce, and more often than not, ended up in the trash along with the dead flowers. It was a minor triumph whenever Ben could recover one of them intact.
It was, however, also worth the expense, because with the transmitter’s help, Ben could return to his office, boot up his own laptop, and safely behind his closed doors, reach into Kimiko’s computer and download everything he could get his cursor on. The intrusion—assisted in part by a heavily modified electronic device called a “data thief”—was almost entirely invisible, both on the inside and the outside. dataDyne’s CORPSEC, internal security division, regularly monitored employees, both visually and electronically. In the halls, even in the offices, employees were on camera at almost all times. When at their computers, the in-house network constantly scanned for aberrant and unauthorized access. Since the actual access to Kimiko’s terminal was coming from her terminal, the access was not only authorized, it was expected. Since Ben was on camera the entire time he was in the building, up to and including when he was delivering flowers to her office, nothing he was doing even began to raise suspicion.
That was how Benjamin Able acquired the data.
Getting it out of the building and into the Carrington Institute’s hands was another matter entirely, and one solved, ironically, by turning pharmaDyne’s own paranoia against itself. To gain access to the building, each and every employee—from the CEO on down to the custodial staff—had to pass through one of the five security stations in the lobby. The checks were comprised of three stages: an ID card login, a biometric match to confirm employee identity, and finally a physical search of any containers entering or leaving the building. The security surrounding the visitors to the building was even tighter.
Once through the lobby, though, the biometric matches and physical searches were abandoned, and CORPSEC relied on their surveillance cameras and the ID cards alone. The cards, in particular, were key, used to open the magnetic locks on the stairwells between the floors and all of the senior offices and labs. They were even tied to the computers, with readers affixed to every terminal, requiring the user to swipe their card before being able to access the in-house network. Each card carried a microchip imprinted with the user’s employee data, and a magnetic strip replicating the same information. That information took, perhaps, less than 1 percent of the data storage available on the card.
Again using Carrington technology, Ben would download data from Kimiko’s terminal to his laptop, and then, using the reader, upload the data again to the magnetic strip on his own ID card. At the end of each day, he would again pass through lobby security, repeating the entry process—ID card, biometric, physical search—and the guards focused almost exclusively on the physical search, checking briefcases and purses and backpacks, scanning each for smartdrives or other forms of data storage. And while they searched Benjamin Able’s briefcase, he would slip his ID card back into his wallet, and wait patiently until they were finished, whereupon he would make his way home.
Back in his apartment, he would use his own reader to upload the stolen data to a burst transmitter that sent the information back to the Institute headquarters in London. He would then delete the spent information from his card, careful not to alter his own ID signature, and the next day return to repeat the procedure.
The system was elegant, efficient, and suffered from only one drawback. Every three months or so, Ben had to requisition a new ID card. He kept burning out the magnetic strips.
That was how they caught him.
CHAPTER 2
Carrington Institute–London, England September 13th, 2020
Joanna Dark was tired of killing.
Her lungs burned for air, the muscles in her thighs, back, and arms ached, and her mouth felt filled with hot sand. Sweat stung her eyes, blurring her vision, perspiration running freely down her face and neck, soaking her shirt until it felt five pounds heavier in water weight alone. Blood and smoke burns peppered her skin. The stench of cordite and feces and rotting trash assailed her in concert, and she was half-deaf from the repeated sound of gunfire, both hers and that of her enemies. For the first time since her father had taught her to shoot, her hands felt clumsy and thick when she wrapped them around the butts of her pistols.
She crouched on her aching haunches in the alleyway, her back to the wet brick of the nightclub wall, trying to catch her breath. Neon flashed off puddles formed in the uneven asphalt, and overhead, barely audible beyond the ringing in her ears, she could discern the whine of the city traffic as it flew past, cars riding on their self-made pockets of anti-grav. She licked her lips, tasted salt, and hoped it was sweat and not blood, and that, if it was blood, it wasn’t her own.
Jo tried to tally her kills and realized she’d lost count, but she wasn’t certain when. Somewhere in the mid-sixties, she suspected, when the dataDyne recovery team had ambushed her outside the hotel. That had been a good fight—there’d been eight of them, all in body armor and armed to the teeth, laying down a spray of automatic-weapons fire that had drawn sparks like a string of firecrackers along the walls. She’d taken cover behind a Bowman Constellation, one of the new null-grav luxury models, just as it had landed, then rolled out and dropped three of them in quick order, all with single shots: two to the neck, one straight through his faceplate.
Then she’d used a grenade, blowing up the rest of them along with the car and half of
the windows on the first floor of the hotel.
Despite her fatigue, the memory made her grin. That had been a while ago, quite a while ago. Maybe in Rio.
She wasn’t certain where she was now. What she could see of the signage on the buildings around her looked Korean. Maybe Pyongyang? Maybe Los Angeles?
It didn’t matter.
Jo checked her pistols, the two Falcons she’d been working with almost exclusively, feeling the heat radiating from their barrels. Good guns, the Falcons. Her father had taught her to shoot on them. Eighteen-round semi-autos that could fire as fast she could squeeze their triggers, and sweetly accurate. When she worked with the Falcons, Jo could make the bullets go exactly where she wanted.
She pulled a last deep breath, filling her muscles with oxygen, then launched herself forward, at the rusted metal door planted in the wall opposite her. She took the impact on her left shoulder and the door gave way, and Jo pitched through, turning the move into a roll, tumbling through an instant of darkness, coming up again into a low crouch.
It was a Japanese restaurant, all tatami mats and ricepaper walls and soft white lighting, and Jo turned slowly in place, swinging each of the Falcons with her, covering her arcs. Silhouettes glided past, hidden by the walls around her, clad in kimonos and robes, and Jo held her fire, not wanting to kill anyone who didn’t have it coming to them.
Ahead of her, the hallway reached a T-junction, and just as she started to move, a black canister bounced into view, clattering to a halt on the floor fifteen feet away.
