The Solid-State Shuffle (Sunken City Capers Book 1)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  "Winn," I say, "hand me the squeegee."

  Winn fishes in his bag for the squeegee, a heavy-duty, waterproof, custom, hand-held electronic device, and hands it to me.

  "Get ready on the cables," I tell him.

  Winn fishes out a portable dry dock (which is currently flooded) and clips the thick, hand-length cylinder over the cable.

  Once in position, the dry dock clamps down on the cable and starts pumping out the seawater. Light from the LEDs in the cylinder bleeds out into the water from the clear glass viewing port in the center.

  I attach waterproof wire leads to the top of the squeegee, turn it on and get into position.

  "Ready?" I ask Winn.

  "Ready," he responds. Winn grabs the small controls for the wire cutter and splicer on the outside of the dry dock—it's like operating through a hermetically-sealed barrier.

  "On my count of three. One. Two. Three."

  Winn strips the cable smoothly and slices into a smaller silver cable running inside. He has quick, smooth, confident strokes—that surgeon training continues to pay dividends.

  I clip the silver lead onto the first port outside of the dry dock.

  Winn is already extracting the black cable and is splicing into it.

  I clip the black lead onto the second port.

  Winn backs off now to let me work the squeegee. The device has pinged and read the system we're hooked into, and it throws up a readout of what we're dealing with.

  Mid-level smart house technology. Fortunately, the Cleaner we conned the Cleaning software off of was one of the better ones and already has a preprogrammed response in place.

  I like cons, long games, short games, flimflams, anything that lets you use your God-given brains to divest people who think they're smarter than you of their wealth. But those games are exponentially more enjoyable when the mark is a monumental dick. I love using the squeegee and thinking of the Cleaner's, Ham's, rotund face in a piggish expression of arrogance.

  The squeegee's palm-sized screen turns green. We're good to go. The software will remove any digital footprints, erase our images from videos, open all the doors, turn off security, and then return everything back to normal so the owners are none the wiser. You can start to see why the Cleaner software is so valuable that it's controlled by the Cleaners Guild—which, of course, we're not members of.

  All Cleaners are dicks with delicate artist syndrome. It's increasingly difficult for me to be around any of them without kicking them in the balls. Which is why skimming the Cleaners Guild's code was so damn satisfying.

  Twelve minutes ahead of schedule.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS THE squiddies behavior that tipped us off in the first place to the allegedly abandoned and dilapidated bank. One of the first things we did once we set up shop was put the squiddies in Elliott Bay under constant tracking. It's not hard if you know their carrier frequencies, which aren't hard to get with any sonar in the proper frequency range. They're not meant to be stealthy—quite the opposite. The government wants you to know they're there as a deterrent.

  Every first Friday of the month, the squiddies would deviate in their patrol pattern, steering clear of the area around Pacific View Bank. The first month we noticed it, it was peculiar. The second month, we monitored the bay and saw an unescorted yacht linger in the area.

  Two things were immediately clear. Whoever was using that space had a powerful fix in place with the authorities to alter the squiddies patrol patterns and to get the surface and air traffic to ignore them. Whoever it was, was plugged in. Second, whoever would go through that much trouble and amount of bribes was protecting something worth re-appropriating.

  After that, it wasn't hard to connect the yacht to Valle and his personal stash.

  Now Winn and I wait below street level in the sewer, all of which is beneath a hundred feet of salt water, waiting for Puo to tell us it's the optimum time for the squiddies to be at their maximum distance in their patrol, so we can swim out to Pacific View Bank thirty feet away.

  The twelve minutes we're ahead of schedule of feel like an eternity. I hate waiting. It's why most of our jobs are counted in seconds. In. Out. Bam! I'm richer. Some dick is poorer. Everybody wins.

  I take my fin and nudge it into Winn's sensitive area, sliding it up and down.

  "Isa, stop." Winn swats my fin away.

  "Just trying to warm him up," I say with a grin. "It's cold down here."

  "I'm plenty warm, thank you," Winn says.

  I can tell he's a little annoyed, but perhaps a bit amused as well.

  "Lovers," Puo says, "you're all clear."

  I think it's a measure of my progress that Puo's use of "lovers" doesn't even bother me anymore.

  Winn pushes my fin away and pulls himself up to the underside of the round manhole cover, his left hand making a brief detour on the way.

  "Don't start something you can't finish," I warn him.

  "Said the pot to the kettle," Winn replies. But now I can hear a smile in his reply.

  "Uh," Puo says, "I hate to pull rank here, but both of you need to shut up with the pillow talk. You're about to go out—"

  "Puo," I interrupt.

  "Yeah?" Puo asks.

  "Shut up."

  "Shutting up, boss."

  Winn retrieves the automatic manhole cover remover or, as I like to call it, Puo's man repeller. It's a homegrown device that looks like a full set of headgear braces, with loose bars, clips and actuators. Winn attaches it to the cement underside around the manhole cover, locking the bars into place.

  "Don't drag it, or scrape it on the pavement," I helpfully tell him.

  "Still shutting up here, boss," Puo says, "but duh."

  Winn doesn't reply to either of our insightful comments and as soon as he finishes attaching the repeller, he activates it. The actuators slowly start to rotate, pushing the manhole cover up.

  I douse my helmet lights; Winn does the same.

  It takes what feels like forever before I can see a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree crack around the rim.

  Darkening blue light from the August evening twilight filters down from the surface. There's the silt and mud you expect at the bottom of the ocean, but the slow motion of the repeller keeps the kick-up from being too bad.

  I can hear familiar ocean noises, surface waves overhead, boat engines at various distances. I exhale. The noises make me feel better—in more familiar territory.

  Winn activates a different actuator once the manhole cover is two or three inches above the pavement, and it starts to slide sideways, revealing the scene above more clearly.

  Western Avenue was once part of a chic revitalization of the downtown waterfront area when the mega-quake hit reshaping the earth's coastlines. History records that everyone felt the mega-quake that day. What they weren't prepared for were the tsunamis and the brand new volcanic mountain range birthed in a matter of days and continuing to grow even now. The ocean doesn't mind; it makes room where it can—goodbye thousands of miles of coastland, goodbye hundreds of major cities, goodbye entire states.

  I poke my head and shoulders up through the manhole and look around, with my helmet overlaying the holomap and enhancing the low-level natural light. Any trees or foliage on the street have long since deteriorated away. But there are still cars along the street, complete with old-school tires and rust and ocean detritus slowly reclaiming them. Small schools of fish dart around. "Clear," I say.

  The buildings on Western Avenue are mostly built in mid-twenty-first-century modernism. There are three- to-ten story condominiums with what were likely trendy stores and restaurants on the street level, with office space sprinkled throughout. A few of the buildings are tall enough to poke up out of the ocean surface.

  I glide the rest of the way up, careful not to disturb the silt around the manhole. Winn is close behind.

  I rise to ten feet above the bottom and follow the green arrows from my heads-up display overlain on the ocean floor toward the a
utomatic glass doors of Pacific View Bank. The bank's name and business hours are stenciled on in white and are spottily covered in a green algae that melts downward.

  The door is intact, which may be coincidence or may not be. But the fact that several broken windows on the building have been boarded up is suspicious. Why board up an underwater building? Why, only if the insides hold a delicious peppermint treat that is.

  The doors don't open as I approach. Not surprising, but disappointing all the same—nothing worth doing is ever easy. More importantly, the growth around the door suggests that this isn't how Valle normally accesses the bank. And now that we're back on schedule, I don't have the time to fart around trying to find it—it's likely an upper-level broken window or rooftop access of some kind.

  The presence of the Cleaners' code in place doing its job erasing any images of us and unlocking any doors makes me less worried about entering this way, but we still slide the door open only as far as we absolutely need to and pass through carefully so as not to disturb much of the silt.

  Once inside, we turn our helmet lights back on.

  The bank lobby is a mess. There is an ugly, thin red carpet that is tattered and barely clinging to existence. Algae covers one big-screen, old-school flat television on the upper wall across from the door. The rest of the retro televisions lay broken on the ragged carpet, no doubt leeching out delicious chemicals for the local flora and fauna. Ceiling tiles are missing in places. The bank self-help desk is on its side.

  "Moving to the teller area," I whisper to Puo. The holomap helpfully paints the floor and walls with moving green arrows.

  I use very light kicks of my fins, barely to the point that I feel any resistance in the water from them, and glide over the bank debris to the teller counter that stretches wall to wall. The vault is behind the counter and the most natural place to start.

  Once over the teller counter, we move over some cubical space. The vault is to the right, a big, heavy-looking round steel door with what looks like a metal ship's wheel at the center, and a rectangular-type hinge bigger than me on one side.

  "We're at the vault," I tell Puo.

  "What kind is it?" Puo asks—a kid in a candy store. Safecracking, vault penetration, that Puo's shtick. Except he hates being anywhere but dry and holed up in a safe house.

  "A big one," I say.

  "Aww, Isa, c'mon! Let me live vicariously."

  "A big round one," I say. I couldn't help him even if I wanted to. I never had the patience for safecracking. I start out fine, but get bored in the middle and then rush it. Besides, why learn all that crap when I have Puo?

  Winn takes mercy on Puo and starts to describe it for him in fairly accurate detail.

  But we don't need Puo to open this one—that's what the Cleaners' code is for.

  I ease up to the vault and give the handle a spin. Locked.

  "Locked?" Puo asks.

  "Yeah, Puo," I say, annoyed that I spoke without realizing it. "Locked."

  "Well, well, well," Puo says in a self-satisfied tone. "Looks like you do need me after all."

  "Nah," I say, annoyed with his superior tone. "There's got to be another way in." Which has got to be true with all the ocean crud ensconced in the area around the vault door.

  This building doesn't poke up above the surface, but it's close. Valle probably enters the building from above somewhere. "We should go up," I say.

  Winn starts swimming away, looking up through the dilapidated ceiling with missing tiles.

  I stay put, thinking, trying to figure where a stairwell would be, or if we have to go back outside and try to find if there's a general lobby for the building.

  "Found it," Winn says. He's to the left of the vault in a bank manager's office. His upper body dips out of sight in a hole in the floor. "Whoa, Isa. You gotta see this."

  * * *

  Winn wasn't kidding. Down through the rabbit hole is the basement of the building, which looks exactly how you would expect a basement to look like. Brown cement walls, random storage that gives the creepy feeling that there could be a serial killer around the corner.

  What's not normal basement behavior, though, are the streams of light slicing down in the middle of the room from above—right under the vault.

  The vault is an air pocket.

  I can see past the shimmery still surface to the metal walls and lockboxes of the vault beyond.

  Creating an air pocket down here is no easy feat. The only reason I can think to do it is if there's something down here that doesn't do well in seawater. And if that's true, then its value would have to surpass the pain-in-the-assness of creating an air pocket.

  I'm now itching to get into the vault and poke around, but I force myself to slow down, be methodical. I look around for other entry points but only see the one through the bank manager’s office Winn and I had slipped through—it must be how Valle gets in.

  I do see some underwater cameras in the corners and feel a tinge of nervousness even with my helmet on. The Cleaners' code is taking care of it, but not letting the authorities or anyone get a digital image of your face in connection to a crime is so ingrained in a reclamation specialist's life that it's hard to overcome the initial reaction.

  I tell Puo what I see.

  "Roger, that," he responds. "Don't take off your helmets in the air pocket. Let me know as soon as you're back in the water."

  "Got it," I say. Even though it's an air pocket, it's at the same pressure as the water around it (a hundred feet below the surface). We're in closed-circuit scuba suits. That'd be quite a rapid pressure change to adjust to. Plus, our comms won't work in the air pocket, surrounded by water like that—we need to either be in the water or on land to be able to talk to Puo.

  I sidle up to the air pocket entrance but stay off to the side and motion for Winn to do the same. The entrance isn't much larger than a person—Winn will have to take his backpack off to squeeze through.

  I take off one exterior fin and slowly push it up through the water and into the vault. Nothing.

  Then I take the fin and shove it up and down as fast as I can, making all kinds of splashing noise and movement. Nothing.

  You can never be too careful with these people.

  I push the fin up into the vault and drop it to the side of the air-pocket entrance and slowly bring my head into the vault to look around.

  Two really bright, standalone floodlights stand in the middle of a perfectly square room that isn't that large, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet. I suspect the Cleaners' code turned on the lights for us—how kind. Each wall, except where the vault door is, is covered in floor-to-ceiling metal-lockboxes, and there's an empty metal table pushed off to the side.

  I pull myself into the room, and take off my remaining fin.

  Whatever is here, it's in one or more of those lockboxes. Of which, there's got to be more than eight hundred.

  Fortunately, this isn't our first rodeo. I take Winn's backpack that he's holding up through the tight air-pocket entrance and set it to the side on the ground. A small puddle forms around the backpack as I rifle through it.

  Even more water rushes over the ground as Winn pulls his six-foot-one frame out of the water with muscled ease, and slips off his fins.

  "Winn," I say, "Figure out how to kill the flood lights." Not only are they bright, but they're warm, pumping out BTUs in the small room. It's getting humid in my dry-suit with little wisps of condensation at the edges of my helmet visor.

  I remove an underwater blacklight flashlight, and an invention of mine and Puo's: a pressurized ardrox-solution sponge. It's a device that looks like a steel bottle with a sponge on the top of it. It allows me to smear ardrox on stuff in an underwater environment for the blacklight to find fingerprints. It doesn't last long, but it doesn't need to. Seawater bleeds into the bottle every use, diluting the solution, but it's damn useful. It should work even better in air.

  A moment later the first floodlight cuts out. "Ready?" Winn asks, as he sta
nds near the second one.

  I pick up the flashlight. "Ready."

  He kills the last floodlight, and I snap the bluish glow of the blacklight on. Our helmets have UV protection, but I still make sure to point it away from Winn and I.

  I hand the ardrox sponge to Winn.

  "Where should we start?" he asks.

  I look around, trying to imagine that I was a ferret trying to hide my delicious peppermint treat.

  "There." I point to the wall to the right of the metal table. Valle is right-handed (like me) and that's where I would be most drawn to. It's a thin guess, but we have to start somewhere, and after doing this for a lifetime, you develop certain instincts.

  Winn smears the area quickly.

  Nothing.

  Well, so much for instincts.

  I direct Winn to the mirror location on the opposite wall.

  Nothing.

  Well, shit.

  It's not that we're hurting for time. But I don't like looking stupid in front of Winn—Puo I don't care about.

  I tell Winn, "Smear the table."

  Winn complies.

  Nothing.

  Now that's odd.

  "What's odd?" Winn asks.

  I'm too deep in thought to be annoyed with myself for talking without realizing it again. "There're no residual marks on the table. Either they wipe this place down every time—" Which would not be good for us. "—or ..."

  "Or what?" Winn asks, hanging on my words.

  "Smear the lock boxes under the table," I order him. "Try not to move it." Then I answer his question, "Or they don't use it."

  Bingo! Lockbox number 341 is covered in glowing fluorescent finger oil smears.

  "Grab it," I say to Winn, who can see it as clearly as I can.

  While he does that, I walk back to the backpack, retrieve an airtight bag and unpack the electronic tumbler, a long thin wire attached to a thumb-sized dull gray casing.