by Greg Rucka
Ben drained the rest of his wineglass, then reached across the table for Kimiko’s hand, leaning forward and giving her his best mischievous smile. “You know what? Let’s go back to your place, order in.”
She raised her eyebrows, bewildered. “Ben! We just ordered.”
“What can I say, Kim?” He picked up his briefcase, moving it into his lap. “I want to see you in that new nightie.”
“Ben—”
He started to get up. “Seriously, let’s go.”
“Ben, sit down,” Kimiko said.
He’d been half out of the chair, already turning to see that the retro-punks had spotted his movement, were now moving to cover the elevators beyond Japan, when she spoke. It was her tone that did it, the command, and he froze for a moment as the realization cascaded down upon him.
Ben sat back down, resting his briefcase again on his lap, and looked levelly at Kimiko. Her smile was gone, as was the mirth in her eyes, and as he watched she brought the hand she’d kept in her lap up, onto the table, covered with her white linen napkin. Beneath the fabric, Ben could see the tiny muzzle—not much bigger than a .22—of a Tranq-7, a short range dermal injection device, nonlethal, if he remembered from Steinberg’s lectures, but at this range it was enough to put him down for the count with one shot.
“Put the briefcase back on the floor, Benjamin,” Kimiko said. “Then put your hands flat on the table.”
For a second, Ben thought about trying to feign innocence, incredulity, but realized as quickly that the moment for denials had passed. Kimiko knew, obviously she knew, she was probably a CORPSEC agent and had been all along. How long she had known, and exactly what she knew, those were other questions, and he didn’t think he’d be getting any answers from her, at least not here.
“Son of a bitch,” he said softly.
“Put it down.” She moved the Tranq-7 slightly, as if to remind him of its presence. “I don’t want to have to dope you here, Ben, but I will.”
“So you’re going to dope me later?”
“Not if you’re forthcoming.”
Past her, the three businessmen seated in Italy had stopped pretending they liked their pasta, were now looking their way. Two of them had their laptop cases in their laps, open just enough to allow them to reach inside for the weapons Ben was certain they’d stored there. He glanced around behind him, saw the retro-punks now fully in position, covering any attempt to escape via the escalator. The first couple he’d spotted, the man and the woman, were nowhere to be seen.
He looked back to Kimiko, sighed, and set his briefcase down beside the chair, sliding it forward beneath the table. “CORPSEC?” he asked her, struggling without much success to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “You’re one of Velez’s pet spooks, right?”
“pharmaDyne local, actually. Doctor Murray prefers us to handle breaches in-house, rather than bringing in Director Velez. We don’t want to appear unable to handle our own problems. Is it in the briefcase, Ben? What you’ve stolen, is it on your laptop?”
“Would you believe me if I said no?”
For a moment, the smile that he adored reappeared on her face, but only for a moment. “No.”
“So what now?”
Behind her, two of the three businessmen quickly transferred hands from their laptop cases to beneath their coats. Ben saw the glint of metal—MagSec gun barrels. In unison, all three got to their feet and began approaching the table.
“Now we’re going back to the office,” Kimiko said, sliding her own chair back from the table. “Don’t try to run, Ben, you’ll never make it.”
He nodded, slightly, agreeing with her assessment, and Kimiko freed her purse from the back of the chair, slung it over her shoulder, slipping the Tranq-7 back inside it. The retro-punks had reached them, now, and without taking her eyes off Ben, she told hot-pink Mohawk to take his briefcase, the other one to take her bag from La Belle Femme.
“And here I thought you’d bought them just for me,” Ben said.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Kimiko Wu told him.
He made his move when they reached the bottom of the escalator and the second floor.
The punks led the way down, followed by one of the businessmen, the other two walking just behind Ben at either flank, Kimiko taking up the rear. The only one who spoke was Kimiko, and Ben couldn’t make out her words as she whispered softly to the controller over her mike. Presumably she was arranging their pickup.
It wasn’t that Ben liked the location, or his chances; in fact, he liked neither. But once they had him out of the Centre and into their transport, he knew where and how it would all end. “Back to the office” meant back to pharmaDyne, yes, but not to any of the floors above ground. He’d end up in one of the sub-basements, locked away in an interrogation room where they’d go to work on him. He had no illusions about how that would go, either. At best, he might be able to hold out the better part of a day before they started in with the drugs. Once they used the drugs, though, he knew he’d tell them everything.
It wasn’t his best chance, then; it was his only one.
He waited until the businessman ahead of him had come off the escalator, close on the heels of the two punks who had taken point. As the step turned flat beneath him, Ben lurched backward, bracing himself and reaching into his coat pocket at the same time. He heard the businessmen cursing behind him, each of them backpedaling as well, trying to avoid the collision. He slammed back into them hard, and heard them fall as Kimiko shouted a warning, a moment too late. Ben lunged forward, hand still in his pocket, feeling for the strip of Velcro, feeling it tear free beneath his fingers.
The punks and the remaining businessman had already begun turning, all of them moving to block him and index their weapons at the same time. The one with the Mohawk dropped Able’s captured briefcase just as he’d hoped she would, sending it clattering down in front of her, and Ben brought his left arm up and across his eyes as he dove, squeezing the Velcro, pressing down hard on the thin button trapped beneath the fabric. There was an instant crack, and even with his eyes squeezed shut and shielded behind his forearm, he could swear he saw the magnesium flare as the briefcase exploded, the flash-bang sequence detonating.
The concussion was enormous, a thunderclap in a closet, and it rang throughout his skull. Even knowing it was coming, Ben found it disorienting, and for a miserable instant of darkness and noise he didn’t know where he was, what he was trying to do. Then he came back to himself, opening his eyes and discovering he was flat on the ground, and he scrabbled to his feet, the echo of the explosion still singing in his ears. He spun, saw that the businessmen and the punks were alternately on their knees or their backs, hands to their eyes or ears, and he saw their mouths working, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Kimiko was the only one on her feet, stumbling blindly.
Ben ran, his loafers sliding on the slick floors of the Pacific Centre, trying to formulate a new plan, a way to escape. Shoppers scattered around him, pointing, shouting things he couldn’t hear. He took the corner beside the Prada outlet too fast, lost his footing entirely, and came down hard on his side. A raindrop of yellow and green exploded on the floor beside his hand—the payload from the Tranq round—as he scrambled back to his feet, and he saw Kimiko with the Tranq-7 extended, lurching drunkenly in his direction. Two of the businessmen were following close on her heels, their MagSecs now brandished for all to see.
They weren’t firing, though, and Ben realized they wanted him alive, and thought that might give him a little more time.
He reached the railing to the stairs, half vaulted, half tumbled over it, and then dropped almost three meters into the pool at the base of the waterfall. A rusty spike of pain lanced from his right ankle to his hip, and Ben was certain he’d cried out, but he still couldn’t hear anything. He spun in place, soaked with water, then lunged for the edge of the pool. The two punks came around the corner ahead of him, perhaps twenty meters away, each of them brandishing weapons of
their own. Ben reversed, splashing back in the opposite direction. Above him, he caught sight of Kimiko and her three businessmen running along the upper walkway, moving to cut him off.
Ben realized he wasn’t going to make it. Kimiko must have called for reinforcements by now, which meant that all of the exits to the mall would be covered. Blowing the briefcase had expended his only weapon, and while Steinberg had trained him in both defensive pistolcraft and hand-to-hand combat, Ben had never been much of a fighter. He wasn’t going to be able to run, and he wasn’t going to make a stand.
They were going to catch him, it was just a matter of when.
It took him less than a second to realize all these things, and just as quickly, he made his decision and began moving again, this time cutting left, making toward the base of the waterfall. He skirted the edge, feeling the spray being thrown up, stinging his face, then pulled himself over the raised ledge and broke into a sprint. He didn’t look back, searching the mall ahead of him, weaving his way through stunned and gaping shoppers and feeling his contempt of them burn suddenly hot in his chest. These were the people he was fighting for, and here they stood, slack-jawed cattle, seeing and not understanding.
No one offered to help him.
Twenty meters away, wedged between a Banana Republic and a “We Care” Clinic, he spotted what he was looking for, a bank of ATM/Com terminals, and course-corrected toward them. There were five of them, two surcharge machines, one a Core-Mantis OmniGlobal, and the remaining two belonging to dataDyne. He had the ID card out of his pocket and in his hand before he reached the machine, and in almost one move, he slammed the ID into the slot.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard Kimiko’s voice, almost shrieking. “Stop him!”
The terminal sucked the card in greedily, and Ben allowed himself a moment of satisfaction at the irony. Just as he’d used pharmaDyne’s own network against itself when he accessed Kimiko’s terminal, he was about to do the same thing here.
The surcharge machines were for the general public and for general use—anyone with a credit card could use them to withdraw cash or to access the Net for a “modest” service charge. The sponsored machines were another beast entirely, dedicated to serving the employees of their corporate owners. To access them, one needed the appropriate corporate ID, but once that was inserted, employees could network with their offices, check email, video conference, essentially anything and everything they could do from their personal workstation. If one was so inclined, the user could even withdraw cash.
The terminal lit immediately, accepting Ben’s ID, and he was halfway through his twelve-digit PIN when he saw another yellow and green raindrop spatter on the screen. He heard Kimiko’s voice again, this time clearer, and he ignored it, ignored all the noises that were suddenly reaching him, as if some universal volume control was being steadily cranked higher and higher. He finished inputting his PIN, punched the CONNECT button, began scrolling down his list of options.
He managed to select home network before the sting came, the impact high in his back, a sliver of glass that buried itself between his shoulder blades. Almost immediately his vision went, blurring and fogging, and Ben felt his mouth fill with dry grass, his tongue swelling like a balloon. His fingers fumbled on the miniature keypad, and he prayed to God that he wasn’t misspelling the command, that he would get it right the first time. Five little letters, that was all he needed.
He’d managed the p and the a and the n when Mohawk reached him with her partner, and through his fading vision, he saw their reflections in the terminal, distorted and grotesque. One of them—he didn’t know which—grabbed at his arm, and he brought his elbow back, felt it connecting with something soft, and the grip was gone. He managed to punch the i and then was torn away from the terminal.
Two more sets of hands reached him, pulling his arms, and he ignored them, his whole world contracting to contain only the illuminated miniature keyboard and nothing else. The keys pulsed in his vision, and he strained desperately to reach them, heard himself screaming in outrage and fury. Something bit at his neck, another shot from the Tranq-7 finding its target, and Ben felt his legs melting like wax.
He screamed a final time, surged forward, and his index finger hit the c on the keyboard.
He managed a momentary howl of triumph, and then the velvet cloak of the tranquilizer crushed him to the ground.
CHAPTER 4
Luxe LiFe Resort—Kauai, Hawaii September 26th, 2020
Cassandra DeVries hadn’t had a vacation in sixteen years, ever since starting at DataFlow as an entry-level code monkey.
She’d come to the company straight out of Cambridge, and begun pursuing her graduate education via telecommunications admission, earning a masters, then the first of two doctorates. She was never late for work. She never took a sick day. She never asked for vacation time but once a year, and then it was only a day, and always the same day. June 16th, and if anyone had ever asked the significance of that—and they didn’t—she would have explained that June 16th was the day her seven-year-old brother had been killed by a drunk driver. Cassandra had been nine at the time.
She did all these things and more for DataFlow. She was driven, professional, committed, all the things that theoretically earned promotion. Yet promotion—at least, promotion that mattered—never came.
For the better part of ten years, Cassandra DeVries was shuffled laterally within the company, posted to one department or another, asked to work on this system or that design. Wherever she went within DataFlow, her work was consistently outstanding. Whenever she was shuffled to the next office, she left the last better than when she’d found it.
Which was precisely the problem, because in those days, DataFlow had been about as rigid and uncreative an organization as one could imagine. In the eyes of her supervisors, Cassandra DeVries was a threat. It wasn’t just that she always had a new idea, a better way, and that she was always willing to argue the point. It wasn’t just that she could spot the flaws in a programmer’s code in less time than it took most people to tie their own shoes. It wasn’t just that she was considered a maverick in a corporate culture that frowned on individualism and creativity.
It was that each and every time she submitted a proposal, or, worse, took it upon herself to fix a perceived error, she was right.
Thus Cassandra created a Catch-22 for herself. On no account could her supervisors acknowledge her brilliance, for fear of revealing their own shortcomings; at the same time, they couldn’t dare get rid of her, for precisely the same reason.
Then Daniel Carrington taught the cars of the world how to fly, and Cassandra DeVries wrote a program that made it safe for them to do it. AirFlow.Net, she called it, and suddenly not only did the corporate execs at DataFlow know who Cassandra DeVries was, but her name was being spoken throughout their parent company of dataDyne, as well.
A genius, they called her, not so much because AirFlow. Net all but eliminated anti-grav vehicular accidents practically overnight, but because it made dataDyne roughly thirty-seven billion dollars in the first quarter of its release alone.
Suddenly, the code monkey was an executive vice president overnight, and never mind that the night had lasted over ten years.
Two years after her promotion to Executive Vice President of Software Design, dataDyne’s CEO and founder, Zhang Li, appointed Cassandra DeVries to the position of Chief Executive Officer of DataFlow, a dataDyne subsidiary. Now the code monkey was called Director DeVries.
Still, she never took a vacation, not a real one, at least. In point of fact, Cassandra didn’t understand the other CEOs and Directors who did, the ones who had regular golf games on Wednesdays or took a month off to hike, or swim, or ski, or “recharge.” There was always too much that needed doing, always another program that needed tweaking, another idea that needed exploring. While Cassandra DeVries had hungered for recognition, that had never been the motivation behind the creation of AirFlow.Net. She had written the progr
am for one reason alone: to make the world a better place. More precisely, to make the world a place where little brothers didn’t have their lives stolen from them by drunk drivers.
While Cassandra enjoyed the perks and pleasures of her new position, unlike her fellow Directors in countless other dataDyne subsidiaries, she never viewed them as entitlements.
She was at Luxe Life because she didn’t have a choice in the matter. The dataDyne Board of Directors had “invited” all of the subsidiary heads to a “mandatory retreat,” to discuss the future of the parent corporation. The invitation made no mention of CEO Li’s disappearance, nor that of his daughter, Mai-Hem. The invitation most specifically did not say that the Board was convening to discuss the possibility of electing a new dataDyne CEO. Most important of all, it nowhere said that, in all likelihood, the new CEO would be named from one of the subsidiary Directors.
It said none of those things, and Cassandra DeVries knew it meant all of them. She had to go.
But it didn’t mean she had to enjoy it, and upon first arriving at the resort, she busied herself with work, confining herself to the presidential suite that Anita Velez, the Director of dataDyne Security Operations, had assigned her. Velez had arranged for all of the Directors’ accommodations personally, in keeping with the extraordinariness of the situation. The full Board of Directors and all of the key CEOs were gathered in one place, something that, to Cassandra’s knowledge, had never happened before in the history of dataDyne. If a competing hypercorp got wind of that, it was a no-brainer that they’d move for a hostile takeover. Cassandra could just imagine the executives at Core-Mantis OmniGlobal salivating at the chance, and the less said about the bastards at Beck-Yama, the better.
To say the security at the resort was tight, then, would be to say the Pacific Ocean was wet. A true enough statement, but one that lacked an appropriate sense of scale.
