by J. D. Robb
“I’m not leaving you in here, and don’t waste your breath. Let me talk to them while you call in the troops.”
Before she could argue, he began to speak. He didn’t raise his voice. It was a good technique, Eve thought as she slipped out her communicator. A lot of people stopped yelling to try to hear what he was saying.
She could hear him fine, but she didn’t understand half the cyber-speak he was rattling off.
“Lieutenant Dallas. I have a situation at Cyber Perks, Fifth Avenue, and require immediate assistance.”
As she detailed the circumstances, she watched another portion of the mob quiet, slip back to tables. By her head count they were down to about fifty hard cases, spearheaded by the revolutionaries who were blathering about conspiracies and cyber-wars and communication terrorists.
It was time, she decided, to change tactics again. She zeroed in on one man. Black shirt, black jeans, black boots, with a shock of gilded, deliberately disordered hair.
Eve stepped up in his face. “Maybe you didn’t hear me tell you to go back to your table or station.”
“This is a public place. It’s my civil right to stand and speak.”
“And it’s within my authority to deny you that right when you use it to incite a riot. When you or anyone claiming that right is responsible for bodily harm or property damage.” She gestured to the young girl who sat up, still weeping quietly as a friend mopped at the blood on her face. “They look like terrorists to you? Or him?” She jerked a thumb back to where the boy she’d spoken to had his terrified white face pressed against the kiosk glass.
“Pawns are used and discarded.”
“Yeah, and kids get hurt because people like you want to masturbate your ego in public.”
“The NYPSD is nothing but a soiled tool used by the hands of the right-wing bureaucrats and demigods to crush the will and freedom of the common man.”
“Come on, stay on target. Is it communication terrorists and cyber-war or is it bureaucratic demigods? You can’t cover all the bases at one time. Tell you what. You go sit down and I’ll have somebody come over to listen to all your fascinating theories. But right now there are some people in here who require medical assistance. You’re hampering that, and my investigation of what transpired here tonight.”
He smirked at her. Always a mistake. “Why don’t you finish violating my civil rights and arrest me?”
“Okay.” She’d already planned her move, and had him cuffed before he could think to resist. “Next?” she asked, very pleasantly even as backup streamed in the door. He was shouting again as she passed him to a uniform.
“Not bad,” Roarke commented. “For the soiled tool of right-wing demigods.”
“Thanks. I need time to re-establish some order.” She scanned the faces. “He’s not here anymore.”
“No,” Roarke agreed. “He’s not here. I’d say he was out before your uniforms arrived. Why don’t I talk to the data crunchers? See what I can find out for you?”
“Appreciate it.”
She interviewed and released the injured first, then sprang the under-twenty and over-fifty crowd. Out-of-towners came next, then the remaining women. Even as she took data, formed impressions, listed names, she was certain her bird had flown.
Left with staff, she set them in the café and joined Roarke at a private cube. The monitor of the unit was, like every other she’d seen, swimming with chaotic colors and strange symbols. Beside it was a tall mug of some fancy coffee mixture.
“Is this the source?” she asked him.
“It is, yes. I’ll need to—”
“Don’t touch anything!” She grabbed his wrist. “Don’t—touch—anything,” she repeated, then signalled a uniform. “I need a CS kit.”
“We’ve only got minis in the patrols.”
“That’ll do. Then, Officer Rinksy,” she added scanning his nameplate, “you can inform the guy in charge around here that this joint is closed by order of the NYPSD until further notice.”
“Won’t that be fun?” With surprising cheer, Rinksy walked off to get the kit.
“I wasn’t,” Roarke said when she turned back to him, “going to touch anything. This is hardly my first day on the job, Lieutenant.”
“Don’t get pissy. And it’s my job, not yours. How do you know this is the source?”
He circled his fingers, examined his manicure. “I’m sorry.” He smiled absently. “Did you say something? I’m just biding time, waiting to take my lovely wife home when she finishes work.”
“Jeez. Okay, okay, sorry I jumped on you. I’m a little tense. Would you tell me, since you’re so brave and strong and smart, how you know this is the source?”
“That would’ve sounded better if you hadn’t had your lip curled, but it’ll do. I know this is the source because by tracking through the central system, I traced the virus to its starting point. This unit was the first infected, and the virus was programmed to self-clone and, I suspect, slither into central, spread to all interfaced units, then erupt in a nearly simultaneous burst. It’s very clever.”
“Great.”
Rinsky stepped up beside her again. “Your kit, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks.” She took the kit, opened it. She coated her hands with Seal-It first, then passed the can to Roarke. “Don’t touch anything yet.” She took out a wand, shined its pencil-thin beam and washed cool blue light over the coffee mug. “Gotta good thumbprint. Yeah, partial index finger. You got your palm unit on you?”
“Always.”
“Can you access the casefile? I need to compare these latents.”
While he did as she asked, Eve shined the light over the table surface. Too many prints, she mused, most of them smeared.
“Lieutenant?” Roarke held out a small printout of the casefile prints.
She grunted, then held the printed copy against the latent on the mug. “That’s our boy. Hold on.” Using the wand she picked up the mug, balanced it with a sealed finger on the base, then poured the coffee mixture into an evidence bag. “Why do people screw up perfectly good coffee with all that froth and flavors?” She sealed the bag, then tipped the cup into a second, sealed that. “Question.”
“Ask it.”
“How did he know we were coming? He had to know. That’s why he uploaded the virus. We were here minutes after notification, but he tagged us, dumped the germ and danced. How?”
“I have a theory, but I’d prefer exploring it a bit first.”
She shifted her weight. “Exploring how?”
“I need to open this unit.”
She debated. Strict procedure meant she could, and likely should, roust either Feeney or McNab and haul them over to check out the unit on site. Or she could call in another EDD tech.
But Roarke was here.
If he’d been a cop, he’d have been commanding EDD by this time.
“Consider yourself field drafted as an expert consultant, civilian.”
“I’ve always liked the ring of that.” He slid a small case out of his inside pocket, then wiggled his sealed fingers. “I’m touching things now.”
He used a microdrill and had the casing removed in seconds. Then he let out a little hmmm and began to probe. “There are three system levels in this club,” he said conversationally. “This is the highest level and costs from one to ten dollars a minute depending on the number of functions utilized.”
Her stomach sank. “Is this your club?”
“It is, yes.” He continued to work, hooking his PPC to the unit with a hair-thin cable. “But that’s neither here nor there. Unless you consider that you’ll have no bitching and moaning from the owner about tonight’s little adventure—or the impounding of this unit as evidence.” He glanced up once, just a sweep of her face with those amused blue eyes. “Less paperwork for you.”
“You know how those right-wing bureaucratic demigods are. They feed on paperwork.”
“You’ve a bruise gathering on your jaw.”
“Y
eah.” She rubbed her thumb over the ache. “Shit.”
“Hurt?”
“I bit my tongue. That hurts more. You?”
“Nothing major. This system is corrupted, and very thoroughly. Clever boy,” he reflected. “Clever, clever boy. You’ll need to run a full diagnostic, but it appears you have a top-level tech on your hands, and one who believes in being prepared. It isn’t a simple matter to rig a public unit to notify a user of a search on his account. He had a portable scanner, highly sensitive, I’d say, interfaced it. Very cautious, very smart.”
“Can you get around it?”
“Eventually. The units in this club are designed quite well to shut down and lock at any attempt at contamination. There’s an internal detector and filtering system as backup. Despite that, he managed to upload a virus that wiped this unit, and every other in here. And it did it in minutes, after detecting a shield notification.”
She leaned back. “You sound impressed.”
“Oh, I am. Considerably impressed. Your man has a brilliant talent. A pity, really, that he’s as corrupt and worthless as this unit.”
“Yeah. Breaks my heart.” She stood up. “I’m going to spring the staff, have the unit impounded and sent to EDD. Once we’re cleared out, I want a look at security. Let’s see what he looked like tonight.”
He looked, Eve decided, smug. She caught it in the way his eyes drifted over the crowd—dismissing, smirking even while he kept a pleasant, inoffensive smile on his face.
He walked through the crowd, kept himself removed from them. No contact, no casual greetings. And moved directly to the cube that put his back to the wall, and kept his view of the room unobstructed.
“He’s been here before,” Eve noted.
None of the staff had been able to confirm that. Then again, the manager had been so flustered—not by the police intervention, not even by the near-riot, but, she remembered, by the realization that Roarke was in the club—that he’d had a hard time sputtering out his own name.
The unit and cube had been reserved under the name R. W. Emerson. An alias, she had no doubt, and the name, she’d learned after a quick run, of a long-dead poet.
His hair was a smooth, warm brown mane tonight, and he wore square-framed glasses of tinted amber. She supposed his attire was casual trendy with the dark pegged pants, the ankle boots, the long, hip-swishing shirt in the same amber hue as his lenses. There was a gold cuff bracelet on his right wrist and a curve of winking studs along the shell of his ear.
He ordered the coffee first, made a call on his pocket ’link. Then he drank a little while he continued to watch the room.
“He’s making sure the environment’s stable,” Eve said. “And he’s hunting. Tracking the women, considering them. You can message to any other unit in the club, right? Isn’t that one of the deals why people go instead of just staying home and scoping the ’net in peace?”
“Another way of socializing,” Roarke confirmed. “Excitingly anonymous, even voyeuristic. You message a unit across the room, can watch their reaction, decide if you want to take it to the next step and make personal contact. Units are equipped with a standard privacy shield for those who don’t want to be disturbed. Or hit on.”
She watched her suspect log on, and choose manual instead of voice mode.
“There.” Roarke touched her arm, then ordered the screen to zoom in, to enlarge a sector. “The scanner.”
She saw what looked like a small, slim, silver business card case. He drew a thin, retractable cable out of the corner, plugged it into the side port of the unit.
“Oh, he is very, very good. I’ve never seen one that compact,” Roarke told her. “Odds are he made it himself. I wonder—”
“Think about your research-and-development potential later,” she ordered. “Bang. He’s made us.”
His body went rigid, his face slack. He didn’t look so smug and superior in that instant. He looked shocked, and he looked scared. The eyes behind the fashionable lenses were jittery as they darted around the room.
He pulled the scanner out, then curled over the keyboard with the earnest devotion and intensity of the classic compugeek.
“Coding in the virus,” Roarke said quietly. “He’s sweating, but he knows what he’s doing. Uploading it.”
He was shaking. He rubbed the back of his hand repeatedly over his lips. But he sat where he was, his gaze glued to the monitor. Then he was up, leaving his barely touched coffee, and hurrying for the door recklessly enough to run into tables, bump into people.
He was nearly running by the time he made the door. Eve saw him swing his body to the right before he disappeared and the door closed behind him.
“Out. Out and gone in what, under two minutes. Bolted a good minute before the uniforms responded and arrived on scene.”
“Ninety-eight seconds by the clock,” Roarke concurred. “He’s fast. He’s very fast.”
“Yeah, he’s fast, but he’s shook. He was heading uptown. And he was running scared—for home.”
Chapter 8
It took him nearly an hour to stop shaking. An hour, two whiskeys, and the calmer Lucias added to the second drink.
“It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been possible.”
“Pull yourself together, Kevin.” Lucias took out a cigarette he’d laced with just a whiff of Zoner. He lighted it, crossed his ankles. “And think. How did it happen?”
“They managed to dig under to the account name. The shielded account name.”
Irritably, Lucias pulled in smoke. “You told me that would take them weeks.”
“I underestimated them, obviously.” Annoyance shimmered over nerves. “It can’t be traced back to us in any case. But even having the account name, how could they trace me to that location, and so quickly? The police don’t have the facilities, the manpower, the equipment to surveil every cyber-club in the city, and every unit in them. Then there are the matters of the privacy blocks, the standard one and the ones I implemented.”
Lucias drew in smoke, then expelled it in a lazy stream. “What are the odds they just got lucky?”
“Nil,” Kevin said between his teeth. “They used both superior equipment and a superior tech.” He shook his head. “Why in God’s name would anybody with those skills settle for a cop’s salary? In the private sector, he or she could name any price.”
“It takes all kinds, doesn’t it? Well, this is exciting.”
“Exciting? I might have been caught. Arrested. Charged with murder.”
The Zoner, as always, was doing the job. “But you weren’t.” Willing to placate, Lucias leaned over, patted Kevin’s knee. “However smart and skilled they are, we’re more so. You’d anticipated this sort of possibility, and prepared for it. You infected an entire club. Very sweet. You’ll be headlined in the media again.” He sighed. “More points for you.”
“They’ll have me on security cam.” Kevin inhaled slowly, exhaled slowly. In many ways, Lucias was his drug of choice, and his approval smoothed over the worst of the nerves. “I might not have altered my look if I hadn’t been using a club so close by.”
“Fate.” Lucias began to laugh, and drew an answering grin from his friend. “It’s really just fate, isn’t it? And all on our side. Really, Kev, it just gets better and better. You’ll take care of the account? Generate another?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s no problem.” Kevin shrugged that off. There was nothing he couldn’t do with electronics. “They’ve made a great many details public, Lucias. The chat rooms, the setup. We may want to stop for a time.”
“Just when it’s getting interesting? I don’t think so. The higher the risk, the greater the thrill. Now, at least, we know we’ve pitted ourselves against an adversary or adversaries that are worthy of our efforts. It adds such a flavor. Savory.”
“I could keep the account open,” Kevin mused. “Send out some decoys.”
“Ah!” Lucias slapped a hand on the arm of his chair. “Now you’re in the gam
e. Just think of it. Think of when you have your rendezvous tomorrow night. Why, you and the lovely lady can discuss this recent horror over drinks. She shivers, delicately, over the fate of her doomed sisters. Never knowing she’s fated to join them. God, it’s delicious.”
“Yes.” The whiskey and the drug cruised inside him, turned the air he breathed into soft liquid. “It does add to the thrill.”
“One thing for certain, we’re not bored.”
Amused now, Kevin reached over to take a hit from the laced cigarette. “And unlikely to be for some time. I know just what I’ll wear tomorrow. Just how I’ll look. She’s so sexy. Moniqua. Even her name reeks of sex.” He hesitated, hating to disappoint. “I don’t know if I can go through to the end of it, Lucias. I don’t know if I can kill her.”
“You can. You will. One doesn’t drop back a level of achievement.” He smiled when he spoke. “Think of it, Kevin. You’ll know, the whole time you’re touching her naked body, while you bury yourself in her, that you’ll be the last one to do so. That your dick pumping inside her is the last thing she’ll ever know.”
Kevin went hard thinking of it. “I suppose there’s something to be said for the fact she’ll die happy.”
Lucias’s laughter bounced cold around the room.
Since she was always trying to lose weight, Peabody got off the subway six blocks down from the stop nearest Eve’s home. She was feeling pretty peppy about meeting at the home office site again, where the AutoChef was a treasure trove of wonders.
Another reason, she admitted, for the hike. Sort of penance before the sin. It was a solution that appealed to her Free-Ager’s sensibilities. Of course in the tenants of Free-Agism there was no sin and penance, but imbalance and balance.
But that was really just semantics.
She’d grown up in a big, unwieldy family who’d believed in self-expression, had a reverence for the earth and the arts and a responsibility to be true to oneself.
She had known, it seemed she’d almost always known, that to be true to herself she needed to be an urban cop who tried to maintain . . . well, balance, she supposed.
