Latency

by Blaze Ward

  He’d already known that being a kept man wasn’t for him. He’d eventually get restless and cause trouble. Emmy understood that and didn’t press.

  Greyson wasn’t sure where Denise might fit into all that. But her tone suggested that she remembered that date, so many years ago. This place. Wistful, maybe?

  He smiled at her.

  “You let me know when we live in a world where your career would survive someone paying a journalist to dig into my distant past,” he said honestly. “Hell, even you being here in public with me and none of your aides might make this look like enough of a date that someone asks.”

  “You’re the lead detective on a specific portion of a political case,” she said, face turning serious even as her eyes continued to twinkle. “Of course, I need to occasionally be briefed by you. Not a euphemism, mind you.”

  He smiled and shook his head. She had kissed him. In public. But Denise was in rare form tonight. Feisty and quick-witted. The best kind of woman.

  “Well, if you’re feeling adventurous...” He just left that dangling out there and took another bite.

  Her eyes got big for a second, then turned shrewd. Like maybe she’d almost expected him to proposition her for old time’s sake, and then they got political.

  “What evil are you up to, Greyson?” she asked, much more subdued now.

  “I’m pursuing the alien tech aspect of the case,” he also dropped his voice. She nodded. “Had a meeting with a contact today who suggested that maybe it was bleeding edge chiptech, but something they might be able to replicate, just knowing that it had been done.”

  “Your contact human?” she pressed.

  He nodded.

  “You should probably keep your findings merely theoretical, then,” she said after a moment. “I was able to pull strings to get you involved, in spite of the fact that you’re a target here, because it might be an alien thing.”

  He nodded a second time. He had offered her a way to take him off the case. Or for him to get himself removed if he chose.

  Denise wanted him in the thick of it.

  “So who’s a target besides you?” she asked.

  “Captain Rutherford Parsons, for one,” he answered. “You might up her bodyguard detail for a while, but only with folks you and Edgar trust.”

  It was her turn to nod.

  “And two?” she asked, but the look in her eyes already had that answer.

  “The Honorable Denise Upkins, Metropolitan or the Eastern Metroplex,” he said quietly. “This keeps feeling to me like an inside job, and that means all sorts of payback is possible, maybe for things we don’t even know about. Owens, Kwan, and Zielinski are all at the top of my list right now, but I don’t have enough evidence to justify publicly rattling their cages right now.”

  “What would it take?” she asked, suddenly deadly serious where she’d been flirtatious a moment ago.

  Greyson leaned back now, food almost forgotten, and considered.

  Two years ago, he’d been slowly rolling up all sorts of scumballs with strange contacts inside the Bureau. At some point, someone had panicked, and he’d been set up as the fall guy, unceremoniously fired and ostracized.

  They’d taken his badge away from him. He’d burned all his ties.

  The Army pension and a partial Bureau-issued one had left him with enough money to survive on comfortably, once he’d downsized his life, getting Liz to sell off his nicer books and put him in contact with a few folks for the other bits.

  Smaller flat. Fewer monthly expenses.

  A man who has never really attached himself to life doesn't need much in the way of stuff. Too many years living out of a duffle bag or foot locker, and then later a police locker.

  Murphy bed with a fold-down table. Sofa and a pair of comfortable chairs. The only expensive thing he had kept was that coffee maker. A good coffee maker, capable of going all the way down to Turkish when you needed it, that was a prize worth keeping.

  Greyson supposed that Emmy might have stepped in after another six months or year and ordered him to do something with the rest of his life, but at that point he’d still been coasting along on a form of PTSD.

  And then Zielinski had walked out of that drizzle and offered him his old job back.

  “We have a leak in the Bureau,” he finally said, centering himself on her now. “Down in Records. Maybe nothing, maybe not. The picture that the perp had in his pocket was my new ID photo when I came back. Whoever accessed that file is part of a chain that leads to someone, however twisted and obscure it might get.”

  “Thin, Leigh,” she countered. “Any number of reasons why someone might have pulled that out of the records.”

  “It gives me a name,” he smiled a Hunter smile at her now, thin and cruel. “Maybe a victim to lean on. Happy to rattle little cages on the way to big ones. Especially now.”

  She recoiled a little from the sudden vehemence in his voice.

  Hell, he wanted to recoil, but he couldn’t. The job required that he go after someone like a terrier going into the woodpile after a rat.

  Someone had tried to kill him.

  Greyson Leigh felt that it was only polite to return the favor.

  10

  Records

  As the old saw went, Closed Circuit Television cameras did not prevent crime. They solved them afterwards.

  The crime happened. But angry cops like Greyson Leigh could track you forward and backward from that moment. Like a terrier on a rat.

  Greyson didn’t have a camera down in the records room. Hell, it wasn’t even a room anymore. At some point, enough money had come along to take all those personnel records and make them electronic. Store them in a massive server room somewhere. Probably Worcester or someplace where the real estate and power would be cheap.

  All you needed was fast, secured access and you could read them from anywhere with a positive signal.

  But that necessitated security around them. After all, these were the complete lives of Earth Police Special Missions. More importantly, the Hunter Bureau. The dangerous folks.

  So there was this little web angel sitting there listening and watching.

  Greyson didn’t think the thing was fully sentient. Even the aliens were a little twitchy about making an electronic life form advanced enough to eventually demand rights.

  But it didn’t miss by much. You walked electronically into the lobby where this thing sat, like the world’s meanest librarian, and asked for her to retrieve a file for you.

  In the old days of paper files stored down in the basement, the officer on duty might accompany you back to the cabinets, but more likely he’d just wave you through and go back to his book.

  All manner of mischief might result.

  The Librarian didn’t mind the exercise.

  Greyson finished reading the technical specs of the information retrieval system and felt pretty comfortable about pursuing his next set of requests. He didn’t want to leave his fingerprints in there, nor Rachel’s.

  Too easy to spook his rabbit.

  So last night Edgar Redhawk had instead requested a paper printout of all the times a half-dozen personnel files had been accessed in the last six months. Greyson didn’t figure that he needed to go back that far, but again, he and Denise were playing their own games of misdirection with whoever down in Records was still a little too bent.

  Doing odd little favors for folks that they shouldn’t. Not necessarily enough to be prosecuted, but probably enough to get you fired.

  And blackballed. Hunter Bureau would happily tell people that you were never allowed to be rehired into their Records Division for any reason. Most organizations and agencies would draw their own conclusions from that sort of language.

  He put the book reader down, still pretty sure that web angel wasn’t sentient, and looked across the shared desk at Rachel.

  The Bureau had evolved from local, state, and federal policing agencies originally, and that included the furniture. Two desks slid
together. If you needed to interview someone, you got a conference room, or a holding pen, so there weren’t chairs.

  Computer monitors were back to back. Old keyboards. Old mice. Old everything.

  Greyson preferred reading on an oversized tablet. His eyes were still good enough that he didn’t need any treatment or glasses, but that was a matter of time.

  Probably. He might still be able to retain perfect vision for a long time, if he wasn’t actually human under it all.

  Rachel was doing paperwork, mostly because he had pulled rank this morning and made her do it instead of him. He’d review it all before signing it, but he had no doubts that it would be perfect.

  Everything was a pop quiz with her, and she was always aiming for a perfect score.

  He hadn’t told his partner everything today. Partly, to keep her in the dark as a stalking horse. Greyson wanted to see who tracked on her, when she didn’t know to deflect them.

  She still wasn’t as automatically paranoid as he was.

  Yet.

  Her comm chirped with a message. Greyson checked the time.

  At least Redhawk was precise and predictable.

  “Messenger downstairs with a package for us?” she looked up and asked quietly.

  Greyson shrugged innocently enough and reached for his travel mug of coffee, hoping that it still had a few inches of sludge in the bottom to chew on.

  Rachel rose and slipped her homework reader automatically into a pocket as she headed for the door.

  Greyson sipped his empty mug like it had fluid and glanced around the room, noting who looked up at Rachel as she walked by and how many of them were just staring at her ass.

  She was twenty-three and something of a fitness nut. Jogging, lifting, stairs, yoga. It was a fantastic bottom and probably would continue to be for as long as he knew her.

  Greyson knew all the rumors about the two of them sleeping together and didn’t give two shits. For one, she was way too young for him. Two, she was too cop.

  Three, she knew the truth about him. At least he thought so.

  How do you confirm that someone knows your deepest, darkest, deadliest secret without actually asking them?

  Greyson found that he was still a coward on that front. He’d rather live with a hint of fear than come right out if she didn’t know and convince the woman that she needed to kill him.

  But not everyone was watching her ass as it wiggled out the door and into the corridor. He made a mental note of names and then cross-indexed them back to Zielinski and others.

  The game he was playing right now wasn’t black and white. Police work never was.

  Hunters generally had it easy that way. Your alien target is too dangerous, too sly, too slippery for the average cop to handle, so you brought in a killer to deal with them. Not every case ended in a termination, but every single case started with that as a possible outcome.

  Two years ago, he’d been slowly rolling up all those little fishies outside the Bureau that had seemed to be a little too in-the-know. Bribery. Kickbacks. Accidental data breaches that happened to warn a suspect with just enough time to disappear, or at least destroy all the records that a warrant might seize.

  Most of the big players had managed to get beyond his immediate reach, but that still left the little folk. Support staff with maybe too rich a lifestyle for their salary. People with interesting cousins who might be doing time in a federal prison for general naughtiness.

  All sorts of issues.

  Parsons hadn’t wanted to completely destroy the Boston office when she took over, but Greyson had gathered from hints Denise had dropped last night at dinner that it had been a close thing.

  Had he fallen on his sword and taken the promotion to Detective/Captain, Upkins might have fired everyone around here except Rachel and then temporarily transferred in folks from places like Houston or Miami until Greyson Leigh could reconstitute the Boston branch.

  As if he didn’t have enough enemies now.

  At least Dominguez was dead. He’d been the worst, after Owens and Zielinski. The rest tended to just be gray figures coming and going. Mostly, ex-special forces, so knuckleheads who liked to solve problems with extreme firepower.

  The exact opposite of Greyson Leigh along just about any axis you wanted to measure.

  So he made a list of names. Caught chagrined glances his way, getting caught staring at Rachel’s ass. Or maybe caught at other things.

  He rose and took his travel mug with him. The coffee robots in the break room were crap, but he wasn’t in charge of the budget to buy better ones.

  That was about the only thing that might convince him to accept a Captaincy around here.

  He washed out his mug and stuck it into the robot’s maw, pushing buttons until the beast began its esoteric incantations. Conjuring the coffee gods and offering them sacrifices for the magic bean.

  Greyson smiled at the image of himself as an old, Siberian shaman, out there on the steppes hunting demons.

  Not all that different from his current job.

  He grabbed his mug when it was done and wandered back to his desk.

  At least they were in the opposite corner from the main door. Everyone hated that corner because it tended to be too cold, but it got him away from casual traffic. There was nothing achieving a greater industrial ennui than having to keep track of which sports seasons was happening right now and what had happened in the most recent game.

  Yawn.

  Rachel appeared again a few minutes later with a bundle. Honest to goodness old fashioned manila envelope, stuffed about two centimeters thick and stamped with “Level Five Security Only” on the front and back.

  Rude, but he liked it. Rachel was a Two. Greyson only rated a Three.

  Hopefully it was just an old package, and he didn’t have to worry about the harridans in Records pitching a fit over him being in possession of it.

  Or maybe he should be a shit and have a judge swear out a warrant for the whole thing, so he could enter it into the case file under Seal?

  That would truly frost a few people.

  Rachel knew he was up to something. She had been left here with Redhawk when Denise came for him last night.

  Greyson wondered if Redhawk had delivered it himself. The man could be like that.

  Rachel dropped it on his desk with a perfectly arched eyebrow, darker black on rich brown skin. Puerto Rican extraction babe cop who was tougher than most of the men in here. Meaner, too, if you didn’t include Greyson Leigh on your list.

  He smiled silently and reached for the package, noting that someone had taken the time to seal it up, rather than just stuffing the paper in.

  Greyson paused and thought evil thoughts.

  “I need coffee,” he said, rising with a steaming mug in one hand.

  “You have coffee,” Rachel noted archly.

  “You need coffee,” he replied.

  “I need coffee,” she agreed with only the slightest eyeroll.

  At least she understood his game. Most of it.

  Better than the fools around them, trying really hard not to be obvious in their sidelong looks at the two of them and some new development in this case.

  Now things were going to start getting interesting.

  11

  Access

  Rachel didn’t get off on the mind games with people in the same way Greyson did.

  Sure, she got it. Understood what he was doing, but she had also realized that she was still a little too linear in her thought processes. Which was why she needed someone like Greyson Leigh as a teacher.

  As he’d said, there wasn’t anybody better at this sort of thing. Sneakiest bastard she’d ever met, that was for certain.

  But she was learning.

  He already had coffee. She needed coffee. Maybe tea. Maybe something flouffy in pink. Keep them guessing.

  Whoever they were. She got that part, too.

  Because this was all just a performance for the witnesses. That was why th
ey’d only walked as far out the front door as the corporate chain shop on the corner, instead of getting in a car and driving clear to the South End or North Shore and finding a dive where she’d feel safer with the palmstunner in her hand, maybe both tucked in a pocket.

  Maybe not.

  The sort of joint where they marked you as a cop when you were still parking the car out in back.

  She knew a few of those. Greyson had introduced her to a few more.

  Boston had only gentrified so far in the last seventy years.

  She went ahead and got herself a Bingo, just to be a shit. Chain had five little boxes printed down the side of the cup, where the person taking the order could specify things. Extra hot. Two pumps. Decaf. Coconut milk. No foam.

  Check all five and you had yourself a bingo. Why the hell not?

  All right, maybe she had her own games she played with strangers in coffee shops.

  Greyson hadn’t asked, so she hadn’t volunteered that Upkins’s personal aide, Redhawk, had been the one to hand her the package this morning. She’d thought that those two were headed home last night after the Metropolitan came back for the man at the office, but apparently they had stayed in town.

  Or he had.

  Bullet could get you to DC in a couple of hours if you needed, and it wasn’t like you would ever be out of touch with the world on that train.

  What had dinner been like with Leigh and Upkins? Rachel had never pried beyond what the man would volunteer. She knew that Leigh and Upkins had met outside of a professional context. Dated a few times several years ago. Still had an obvious chemistry if you watched them interact.

  Greyson was too much of a bad boy for a woman like her, though. At least until she retired from the spotlight.

  What would Emmy do on that day? Or would they share him?

  Flights to London were pretty cheap on a semi-ballistic, if you didn’t mind the shot of high-g getting there. Rachel figured from the way he was talking that retiring from Boston and heading east wasn’t just a joke.