by Greg Rucka
Jo launched herself left, up and through the wall, tearing paper and wood and flying into a private dining room. She sprawled onto a low table, sending California rolls and teacups flying. Patrons screamed, recoiling. It wasn’t until she’d made the move that Jo understood why she’d done it, why she’d gone left, instinctively moving in the direction the grenade had come.
The explosion came, tearing flame and shrapnel through the insubstantial walls, and she saw the first target then, a Caucasian male in gang colors, shotgun in hand. Jo fired once, still in motion, and the left Falcon put a bullet into the man’s ear. The screaming around her got louder.
Jo finished her slide, rolling off the edge of the table, turning as she came up, and now she could see three more of them, all in the same colors, all men, two of them with shotguns and the third packing a Liberator submachine gun. She hit the Liberator first, a double tap with the right Falcon, both shots to the high sternum, and the man dropped without firing a round. She took the first shotgun with the left Falcon, again double-tapping, this time both bullets hitting the target’s groin.
The second shotgun fired and Jo spun out of the blast just short of in time, felt the slap of buckshot as it peppered her right cheek, felt the sting and her own blood starting to spill. She came around fully to her feet, and the last one was tracking her as fast as he could, trying to get the shotgun around for a second blast, but he wasn’t anywhere near quick enough, and it felt like Jo had all the time in the world. She put both pistols on him, pulled the triggers, then pulled them again, and again, until the body hit the ground and didn’t move again.
Jo stopped, catching her breath, feeling all of her aches return, the slick heat of blood running from her cheek down the side of her neck. Behind her, she heard whimpering, the sounds of the frightened patrons.
Then she felt her head snap forward, the impact of something small and hard and sharp against the back of her skull, and the world flared white, then began to fill with red.
Oh shit, Joanna Dark thought. I’m dead.
The red-tinged world vibrated, shimmered, and vanished, abruptly replaced by a view of Daniel Carrington looking down at her with disapproval, holding on to the power cord he had just yanked from the wall.
“I think that’s enough of that,” he told her.
“I wasn’t finished.” Her voice was thin, hoarse from disuse, and she coughed to clear it.
“Yes, you are, Joanna.” Carrington frowned, the creases around his watery brown eyes etching deeper. She was unsure of his exact age, but guessed him to be in his early sixties. It was hard to tell; Carrington had the kind of weathered face that made gauging age difficult. Silver hair and a salt-and-pepper beard didn’t help the estimate much.
Jo pulled the visor from her face and tossed it aside harder than she’d meant to, immediately regretting it. The headset sailed across her room, hit the wall with an audible crack, then dropped to the carpet. She hoped it wasn’t broken. The DeathMatch virtual reality set was delicate equipment, despite the violence it faked, and not cheap to replace.
She got out of her chair, feeling her wet shirt peel free from the leather backrest. Her sweat soaked her clothes, as it had in the simulation, and the air-conditioned room turned the perspiration cold, making her shiver. She rubbed her arms, glaring at Carrington.
“I wasn’t finished,” she repeated.
“Admittedly, I don’t know as much about these things as you do,” Carrington said. “But my understanding is that a bullet to the back of the head leads to death, which, in almost every instance, translates to game over. You’re finished.”
He looked at the cable still held in his thick hand, as if offended by what it represented, then dropped it.
“It’s a dataDyne product, as well.” He looked back at her, scowling. “You don’t know what it’s doing to your mind.”
“Fine, I’ll go back to using HoloMan.”
“And is there a reason that you’re so eager to disappear into virtual realities, Joanna? A particular bloodlust you’re hoping to satisfy?”
She didn’t answer, glaring at him.
“I may be mistaken about this, as well,” Carrington said mildly. “But I would hazard a guess that there are more productive ways of dealing with grief.”
“I’m not grieving.”
Carrington opened his mouth to challenge her obvious lie, then seemed to think better of it, closing it again and, instead, shaking his head slightly.
“It’s midnight, Joanna. You’re exhausted, you haven’t taken food or drink or sleep in over a day and a half, and right now you’re looking for a fight anywhere you can find one. Denied an imaginary enemy, you’re making me one.”
“You’re not my friend.”
“I’ve told you that I am. I’ve told you that I’ll take care of you.”
Jo snorted, brushed her limp hair from where it clung to her forehead. “My father told me about you, Mister Carrington, you know that.”
“I do.”
“He told me not to trust you.”
“It’s probably good advice, Joanna. Your father was a very smart man.” Carrington smoothed his beard, then added, “But he wasn’t a terribly good judge of character.”
“Don’t insult—”
“It’s not an insult, Joanna. Your father was a police officer and then he was a bail enforcement agent, a bounty hunter. Neither profession encourages a very optimistic view of humanity, both focusing, as they do, on society’s dregs. I think it’s safe to say he had a small bias, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Jo said. “Do you think of yourself as one of society’s dregs?”
It was a good shot, and Jo thought for certain it would get a rise out of him—for a fraction of a second, she believed she was right. People didn’t talk this way to Daniel Carrington, she knew that, especially not a guest in his own home. Not to one of the richest men in the world, not to an acknowledged scientific genius, the man responsible for implementing portable anti-gravity and revolutionizing the way the world worked. Not to the founder of the Carrington Institute.
Something flashed across Carrington’s eyes, appearing for an instant from behind the grandfatherly façade, but then, to Jo’s disappointment, it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Carrington shook his head again, smiling. To her annoyance, he began to chuckle softly.
“Teenagers,” Carrington said. “I’d forgotten what they’re like.”
“I’m twenty,” Jo retorted, annoyed.
“Ah, a perfect lady, then. I stand corrected.” Carrington hefted the walking stick in his left hand, demonstrating the irony before switching it to his right and then planting it once more. He turned to the door. “If you’d like to join me for breakfast tomorrow in my office, you can even have an opportunity to prove it. Goodnight, Joanna.”
She watched him leave the room, then moved to shut and lock the door behind him, more as a declaration of privacy than anything else. She’d lived on the Institute grounds for six months already, she understood how the security here worked, even if she didn’t understand all the reasons for it.
She picked up the DeathMatch headset, running her thumb over the double-D diamond logo embossed on its side absently, examining the unit. Both of the projection lenses had cracks in them, and the basal sensor had snapped in two. Jo tossed it in the trash can beside the desk, then went into the bathroom and ran water at the sink. She drank several mouthfuls from her hands, splashed more of it on her face, and then found she was staring at herself in the mirror and not really recognizing who she was seeing at all.
Blue eyes that her father said she’d inherited from her mother, eyes like sapphires, he called them, granted by a woman Jo had never known. Roughly cut hair that burned like copper and that fell to her shoulders, currently limp and matted with dried sweat, with a blond forelock, some genetic quirk that no one could ever explain. Her father’s nose, straight and small, and again what he’d called her mother’s mouth. The only thing all her own tha
t she could see was her tattoo, a purple five-pointed star at the left side of her neck she’d had done in Hong Kong on her seventeenth birthday.
Her father had hated the tattoo. “It makes you look cheap,” he’d said when he’d first seen it. “You’re not cheap, Jo, you’re priceless.”
Joanna looked at herself, and saw water coming to her eyes.
She was going to be his partner, Dark & Dark Bail Retrieval, that was how it was supposed to have been. Hours and days and weeks and months and even years training on HoloMan VR, learning Jack Dark’s trade, waiting for the day and the chance when he would finally look at her and say, yes, all right, you’re ready, this time we do the job together.
And dataDyne had killed him, and Jo had found revenge, but no measure of peace. Then Daniel Carrington had come offering her a place to stay, to rest, to figure out what to do next. Six months along and it might as well have been six days for all that had changed, because she was now exactly where she was then.
Alone.
Miss you, Da, she thought. I miss you so much and I don’t know who I am without you, I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
Thoughts that wouldn’t give her peace.
And worst of all was her growing suspicion that, while she didn’t know the answers, Daniel Carrington did.
CHAPTER 3
Pacific Centre-Vancouver; British Columbia September 26th, 2020
Vancouver had fared better than most cities during the superflu, losing only a third of its population to the outbreak, and now, four years later, it appeared to most eyes to be well into its recovery. The streets downtown were no longer barren, the shops were once again open, people no longer barricaded themselves indoors. Even the economy was coming back, in part due to the efforts of the hypercorps, but even more to the efforts of the neighbor to the south. The United States had poured unprecedented billions into Canada in an attempt to stabilize its neighbor, a move seen in the US as alternatively charitable or foolish, depending on who you spoke to.
But the signs remained, with more shops and restaurants out of business than in it, and for that reason, when Benjamin Able took Kimiko Wu for a night on the town, they invariably started the evening at the Pacific Centre, though more often than not they ended it at either her apartment or, less frequently, his. Before the outbreak, the Centre had been downtown’s grand underground mall, a multi-level structure built for high-end shopping and entertainment. Post outbreak, the Centre had come back with a vengeance, as most of the survivors had been those with money, and now it was a shopping venue as fine as any to be found in Beverly Hills, Milan, or Hong Kong.
They moved through the Centre holding hands, windowshopping, with Ben waiting patiently as Kimiko first tried on shoes at Pegabo, then bought a new jacket at Danier Leather. At La Belle Femme, she found a white silk robe and matching lingerie, showing them to him with a twinkle in her eye.
“What do you think?” Kimiko asked.
“I think you’d make them look even better,” Ben told her.
Her smile in response was radiant, and she pecked his cheek gently with her lips, moving off to make her purchases and leaving him for the moment alone, surrounded by women’s underwear. He watched her at the register, chatting with the salesclerk, sharing a laugh, and tried to relax, but his nerves were taut and he couldn’t manage it, not really.
He ran a hand inside his coat, to the pocket beneath his left arm, felt the shape of his ID card, still resting where he’d placed it upon leaving work. The card that carried gold, solid gold intelligence that had been too good to pass up. After months of stealing into Kimiko’s computer, and through it into the pharmaDyne mainframe, he’d finally cracked the Director’s account, gaining access to Doctor Friedrich Murray’s personal files. To Ben—and more, to Carrington—it was the pharmaDyne holy grail.
And hidden, encrypted, in Doctor Murray’s computer, he had found a folder labeled, simply, Rose. It was that combination, the innocuous name coupled with the extreme security, that had made Ben certain it was important, that it was something worth stealing. It had been too good to be true.
It was only after he’d transferred the files to his ID card that he began to think he’d made a mistake. Steinberg had warned him often enough during training lectures: If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
The logical thing to do, then, would have been to dump the data as quickly as possible, to send it off to the Institute as soon as he could. But it was Friday, and he and Kimiko had made plans for after work, and Ben didn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself—or, for that matter, to her—by canceling. If he was being set up by CORPSEC, if one of Anita Velez’s ghosts was onto him and the access to Murray’s files had been the bait to a trap, then the only thing Benjamin Able could do for the time being was to play it cool, to play it as if everything was normal. He’d heard dozens of water-cooler fables about the dataDyne security chief, enough dark talk to convince him he never wanted to meet Anita Velez, under any circumstances.
Kimiko finished making her purchases, returning to him amidst the silk and lace, offering Ben her arm. He shifted his briefcase to his left hand to accommodate her, and they stepped out of the store and onto the second-floor walkway. A handful of well-dressed and heavily tattooed teens flooded past them as they took the escalator up to the third-story restaurants. An indoor waterfall cascaded noisily down from above, multi-colored lights shining on the streams as they plummeted to the pool below.
“You made reservations?” Kimiko asked, resting her head against his shoulder, as they arrived at the restaurant. Ahead of them in line, a young couple dressed in retro-punk were making out as they waited for their table. Ben thought the dye job on the woman’s Mohawk looked hurried, her hair hot pink, but still a bit brown at the tips.
“Of course,” he told Kimiko, and then kissed her forehead lightly to reassure her.
All of the restaurants on the third floor shared the same space, open plan, in what had once been a food court. Now the area was broken into separate venues, decor designed to match the offered cuisines: Japanese, nouveau Thai, French, and Italian. Restaurants brushed against one another in a kind of visual culture shock, red-checkered tablecloths and wine-bottle candlesticks surrounding wood-topped sushi bars. Waitresses in kimonos threaded their way past waiters in black tie. A glass ceiling arched above, revealing the lights of the surrounding high rises shining in the night.
They took a table in France, and Ben ordered a Californian Shiraz to start, and it was while their waiter was explaining the day’s specials that he made the surveillance. Four tables to his left, just on the border with Thailand, a man and a woman working on their entrées. They had been conversing, and had abruptly stopped, but that wasn’t the tell, just a part of it. It was the fact that, when they’d stopped speaking, each of them had almost imperceptibly, and almost at the exact same instant, inclined their heads. The whole thing was so subtle, in fact, that Ben wasn’t certain he’d seen it at all. They were good enough that they never moved their hands from their meals, never reached reflexively for the subcutaneous microphones in their ears.
They didn’t need to. Ben knew it for what it was, and it made his stomach suddenly cramp with apprehension.
“Monsieur?” the waiter asked.
He brought his attention back to his own table, saw Kimiko opposite him, her lovely brow furrowing with concern. He looked to the waiter, who was either trying to affect French disdain or was simply failing to hide his annoyance with Ben’s lack of attention.
“Are you ready to order?” the waiter repeated.
Ben ordered the duck, knowing that he wouldn’t touch a bite of it.
The waiter departed, and Kimiko moved her purse from where it rested at her elbow to hang by its strap over the back of the chair. Ben shifted his gaze past her, looking for more, the second team, his mind beginning to spin with questions. It was possible that the two sitting on the edge of Thailand weren’t
even here for him, part of the surveillance of another mark entirely. It was possible that they were here for him, but that they weren’t dataDyne; the word on the office grapevine lately was that Beck-Yama had grown increasingly aggressive in their recruitment practices. If that was the case, maybe they weren’t here for him: Ben was a low-value target, as was Kimiko.
Kimiko was asking him some question, leaning forward slightly, two of her long fingers toying with the stem of her wineglass, her other hand resting properly in her lap, out of sight. She wanted to know if they were still planning on heading up to Whistler in the morning, to try to catch some of the early-season skiing. Ben told her that it sounded like a great idea.
Over in Italy, a table of three men, all in business suits, all apparently straight from the office, were hunched over plates of pasta, briefcases and laptop cases resting beside their chairs near their feet. At first, Ben didn’t mind them, and the affected French waiter returned with salads, and he and Kimiko tucked into the food. He had a forkful of wilted spinach halfway to his mouth before he realized why they seemed off.
Three businessmen, Friday evening, out to dinner—and on the table, three glasses of water. Not wine, not scotch and soda, not martinis, but water.
Ben glanced back to the border with Thailand, saw that the couple he’d spotted earlier had paid and were now headed back to the escalators, past the line of people still waiting for a table. The two retro-punks were still waiting for a table, no longer wrestling tongues, no longer touching. Ben was certain that the woman with the hot-pink Mohawk said something to the other couple as they passed.
That clinched it for him. Seven of them that he could spot—it had to be a capture team, and his stomach clenched further, making him regret the two bites of salad he’d already managed. Seven of them, which meant at least two more on the ground, and then a third one, the operation controller, monitoring from someplace off site, probably from the extraction vehicle.
