Latency

by Blaze Ward

  Even Greyson felt the tug, like little fishies nibbling at his toes. He should have called Redhawk already and turned everything in. Photos. Lists. Databases. Bearer Instruments.

  Put the whole thing into evidence and let the chips fall where they might.

  Who was he protecting? Denise, but did she really need it?

  Hard to say. Really, what he had was a rendezvous with destiny in the form of Zielinski.

  “Greyson?” Rachel spoke again, like maybe he’d missed her the first time. Or somehow forgotten about the woman sitting across from him.

  “I don’t know, Rachel,” he finally replied, wondering how many heartbeats had passed.

  “So how are we going to play this?” she pursued.

  “I’d like to fill up on food,” Greyson said. “It’s about twenty-three hundred kilometers to Boston from here and I’d like to turn off our comms, turn on the robot, and let it drive us autonomously. Sleep in the car. Hit the occasional drive-through and rest stops between here and there, and we can slip in early afternoon tomorrow. Stop long enough to shower and change clothes, and then ask Redhawk to arrest Zielinski wherever he is, but only when we can land on him like a ton of bricks before he can do anything to wriggle free.”

  “How do we stop him from lawyering up and stone-walling everything?” Rachel asked, shifting now from Hunter to Boss mode.

  “The Official Secrets Act,” Greyson smiled viciously.

  “How’s that going to help?” She sat back with a look of confusion on her face and drank some more coffee.

  He joined her drinking as he ordered his thoughts.

  “Accusing him of being a spy means he gets dropped into a small box with very few rights, Rachel,” Greyson explained. “Doesn’t matter who he might be spying on or for. Spies are assumed to be flight risks and dangers to the community, so they get hard isolation immediately. It will take a while before anybody can prove anything to let him come back as far as normal criminal rights. I figure we can break him long before then, especially if it has my name on it.”

  “How much of his files are you likely to show Redhawk?” she smiled grimly now, understanding where he was headed. “He’ll have to know what’s going on.”

  “That’s what the long drive is for,” Greyson nodded. “We pull the files up into the back seat just before we leave and then spend our time reading and cataloging them, so we have a list of names when we get to Boston.”

  “We destroying everyone and everything?” Rachel’s eyes got dark.

  “Not if I can help it,” he replied.

  “Then what?” she asked.

  “I want to take Zielinski down,” Greyson said. “Hard and permanent. Then we’ll burn everything. I don’t expect that there is anyone we can trust with that evidence.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody.”

  27

  Rest Stop

  Partly to avoid major cities, and partly for the view itself, Greyson had programmed the car to take them up to Birmingham, Alabama, then loop northeast through Chattanooga and Knoxville. Places he’d never even done more than fly over. Through Roanoke, they were able to pass through Harrisburg and Allentown before dropping into New Jersey and circling New York City clockwise without ever entering.

  Then again north, instead of direct. They were outside Springfield, Mass right now, stretching their legs by walking all the way around a rest area and getting a cup of the volunteer-supplied coffee. It wasn’t even that nasty tasting, but Greyson had only catnapped in between reading files and hitting a chain burger joint for breakfast burritos a few hours ago.

  They hit the farthest back corner of the triangular shaped trees and grass and turned back. Nobody was within a hundred meters except a dog going madly after a ball someone had launched with a jai lai stick.

  “You suppose they know where we are?” Rachel asked innocently.

  She looked like hell from the lack of good sleep causing bags under her eyes. Not as bad as he felt, but she had youth to carry her. He just had bile.

  “Probably,” he said. “Redhawk will have tried to call when we didn’t call him back last night. It went straight to voice mail. After a couple of those, he probably turned on the highway scanner and typed our license plate into the system.”

  “So he knows we’re headed home, and what road we’re on,” Rachel said. “Why didn’t he have someone pull us over?”

  “If we’re coming home, why bother?” Greyson replied. “Quieter outcome, and fewer people involved all around. If he’s as good as everyone assumes, then he already knows we’ve likely found something so explosive that we can’t call him. Can’t call for backup in Florida. Don’t even trust other Hunter offices not to have been tainted by Zielinski along the way.”

  “SWAT teams going to arrest us at my place?” Rachel grinned.

  “Only if we stop there first,” Greyson grinned back. “More likely he’s looking at the schedule, having a nice lunch, and asking someone with a black bag to open my front door so he can be seated on the couch when we walk in.”

  “He take all the files at that point, or will you fight him on it?” Rachel asked.

  “If I trusted him, I’d let him have them,” Greyson said.

  “And thus, obviously, you don’t,” she nodded. “Who do we trust? Who do you trust to handle this?”

  “Quinton Laux,” Greyson smiled at her, watching her face drift into confusion like a small mudslide trying to escape a hillside.

  “Why him?” she stammered.

  “He’s not involved,” Greyson said. “Except that he is, because he wants to solve a mystery about that chip.”

  “And you’re going to hand him everything and hope he doesn’t make copies while we’re gone?” she pressed.

  “Not going to tell him what it is.” Greyson turned serious. “And I’m planning to make him a deal if he’ll play.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll get him access to the chip itself,” Greyson said. “If this represents that big of a technological jump, but one that he could replicate, he’s rich. How many people would willingly burn the chance to be fabulously wealthy?”

  “There’s about thirty million bucks in the back of the car over there,” Rachel pointed out. “Neither of us have actually listened to the evil fairy on our shoulder and slipped any of those certificates out and hidden them in the car.”

  “Oh, I’ve considered it,” he explained. “Thought long and hard about it while you were asleep, as I figure you did when I was napping.”

  “That’s fuck-you-money, Greyson,” she nodded as they continued to amble, watching the dog finally get to the ball, woof at it once, and then happily tear off with it in her mouth.

  “It is,” he agreed. “Untraceable. Uncatalogued even now, because I don’t want to know if you did slip one of them into your pocket. I’ve got enough pensions to get me where I need to go. You don’t yet, so you have a much greater argument to have with yourself.”

  “How do you get over those things?” Rachel asked. “How did you, when you were my age and had something similar come up?”

  “I was young and dumb,” he replied. “Let me tell you about this one place that might or might not exist, in a Central American country with a long history of antipathy to the old United States, going back way before I was born.”

  She glanced up at him and Greyson caught the nod in her eyes.

  “So this gentleman in question was what the more lurid news organizations might have called a drug lord in the old days,” Greyson said. “Once upon a time, back in the 1970s and 1980s, the US government went so far as to protect some of those folks, because their product was used to flood the black neighborhoods here with cheap crap, back at the time that the laws were changed to make the penalties for crack possession hundreds of times worse than cocaine. White people did coke. Blacks got hooked on crack, and racists like Olek Zielinski are not a new development in law enforcement by any stretch of imagination.”

  “Le
arned that in my ancient history class,” Rachel grinned.

  But he supposed it might be, to her. He’d been born in 2008. She didn’t come along until 2035. Shit from 1985 might be as far away as the Civil War, at least to her. Back in the bleak days of a War on Crime that was a thinly-veiled War on Black People that had started before 1618 and never really been forced to subside until aliens landed and threatened to crack heads together.

  “So I was sent in to remove said gentleman from his organization by whatever means I felt were most appropriate, as long as he was gone afterwards,” Greyson continued.

  “Extreme prejudice?” she asked tentatively.

  “Oh, I supposed I could have kidnapped him, hauled him off to Switzerland, and offered him a deal,” Greyson grinned now. “But that wasn’t why they’d send in someone like me, you know?”

  “Kill them all, make God sort them out?” she said knowingly.

  “Something like that,” Greyson said. “He was almost archetypal. Money arriving in suitcases and no bank would touch him, so he invested it in all sorts of tacky, expensive art. Or military grade hardware for his men. A string of houses and mistresses. The usual. And a bolt hole he would run to when trouble arrived. A panic room, if you will, except that it had a tunnel down and out the back, with a couple of guns, some body armor, and a briefcase filled with the same sorts of papers Zielinski had. There was a fast truck with armor plating at the other end of the tunnel, in a garage that didn’t have any external connection to the main house, being down in the slums below.”

  “How’d you kill him?” she asked.

  In the distance, the pup had gotten the ball back to the man with the stick, and was now madly racing after it again.

  “Wired a bomb to the ignition of the truck,” Greyson said. “Figured the armor would contain everything nicely so I wouldn’t hurt too many innocent neighbors. Local Special Forces staged a raid for me. Mostly just a lot of shooting to get everyone’s energy up. Sure enough, about five minutes later, a secondary explosion lit up the night.”

  “How much money was in that briefcase?” Rachel stopped and turned to him.

  “About half again as much as ours,” he said seriously. “And I burned it all. Mix of thermite and plastic explosives, with a claymore mine under the driver’s seat.”

  “Would you make the same decision today?” Rachel asked.

  He could tell she was having what a shrink might have called a crisis of conscience, but he didn’t have any good answers. Greyson’s entire life was really made up of secrets now.

  “I’m not the one to judge, Rachel,” he said. “Like I said, I was young and dumb then. And truly believed in what I was doing.”

  “Do you still?” she pressed.

  “I believe in the job,” he clarified. “It needs doing, just like you need someone to clean the streets and haul trash and recycling away. Zielinski and others let the job get away from them. They let themselves become more important than the laws they were supposed to enforce. When you do that, you start cutting corners, telling yourself whatever little lies comfort you, but eventually you either simply turn evil or you have to come clean. I never turned then. If I have secrets now, I’ll deal with them. You’ll do the same.”

  “Did any of what you just said have any value?” she asked after a second.

  “Maybe,” he laughed. “Vague pontifications from a tired cop can mean everything, or nothing. If you need to slip one or two into a pocket, I’m not going to stop you, as long as you leave me enough to burn Zielinski afterwards.”

  She started walking again and he followed. The only sound was that old pup woofing madly at the ball when she caught up with it, and then the sound of her claws whenever she crossed concrete getting back for another run.

  He really didn’t care what Rachel did. As long as he really could burn the man.

  Greyson hadn’t bothered telling her about a file he’d found clear at the back of one of the drawers while she’d been napping.

  Upkins, D.

  Just a small stack of photographs in it. He’d been in all of them.

  Greyson had pulled the name tab off and stuffed it into a pocket while claiming one of them for himself and stuffing it into his pocket.

  One photograph. Him and Denise, eating at that Ghanaian restaurant that had been one of their first dates.

  What he couldn’t tell was why Zielinski had kept it. Or what it meant. If that was all the man had, then Denise was probably safe. Or was it enough to suggest a much wider blackmail that didn’t need to be in there?

  Not something anybody needed to know about but him. And maybe Denise, when he saw her, but it would have to be someplace where it was just the two of them. Not even Redhawk got to know.

  Or Rachel.

  28

  Boston

  Greyson ignored the chirp of outstanding messages and unheard voice mails as he finally turned his comm’s access to the outside world back on. It would probably ring in a few minutes, too, but he wasn’t about to answer.

  Redhawk could wait.

  Instead, he typed a quick message to Laux and hit send.

  Available for a consult?

  There, leave it vague and hopefully entice the man. It was mid-afternoon now and the storms they had been driving through all day had more or less come to Boston with them. Traffic into town wasn’t all that bad, but Greyson marked that down to robots generally being better drivers than most of the humans he’d ever met.

  Greyson had learned to drive on an ancient Fiat stick built before he was born and rebuilt several times by a bunch of semi-hillbilly redneck racers. They had a race every year, where the rule was you weren’t supposed to spend more than $500 US on your car, back when that was a week’s wages for some folks. Junkyard heaps and end-of-life things welded back together long enough for a day.

  From there, the Army had taught him how to drive offensively as well as defensively.

  Today, he just continued to let the robot drive the rest of the way in. Its reflexes were better than his would be right now, as tired as he was, and its decision-making was good enough, since it would do the predictable thing that all the other robots could react to appropriately.

  Greyson wondered if he should take Rachel out to the west coast to meet the kids of those original weirdos, just so they could teach her what to do with two tons of steel in an emergency.

  Capital! ETA? - QL

  Greyson could almost see the smile on the man’s face.

  Newton, inbound, he typed.

  I shall start the water boiling.

  “What’s so funny?” Rachel asked, so he showed her the screen, closing the announcement that Edgar Redhawk was calling.

  “Gods, he’s an even worse dork than you are, isn’t he?” she rolled her eyes at him.

  “Maybe,” Greyson grinned and kept laughing.

  “We still parking below and walking back up with everything?” she asked.

  “Actually, my plan was to pay him to keep watch on the car after we put everything back in the trunk,” Greyson replied. “Figure that’s as safe as anything, and the rental system’s radio won’t be able to penetrate all the concrete and steel overhead, so they’ll know the rough neighborhood but not the exact address until they come looking. Redhawk can’t get any closer either, and then we walk out the front door of the grocery and catch a bus.”

  Her eyes got narrow.

  “How are you going to burn Zielinski?” she asked.

  “I have a couple of things in my pocket,” he said. “Will pick up a couple more at the store on the way in. Then we swing by my place and I can have a shower and clean clothes. Pretty sure Redhawk will be waiting for us when we get there, but there’s going to be an extra half-hour delay, so I’ll eventually turn my phone back on and let him track me.”

  “Got it all worked out?” she asked.

  “Not even remotely,” he admitted with a grin, lest she think he was some sort of genius mastermind here. “Just not playing this one a
nywhere close to the playbook that either Redhawk or Zielinski are expecting. Hopefully I can keep them off balance.”

  “So if Redhawk’s going to be there already, what are the chances I won’t get a shower after this?” Rachel asked sidelong. “Wondering if I should keep a change of clothes at your place for emergencies or something.”

  He could only hope the woman was kidding. Teasing him, because Emmy would have questions if another woman’s clothes showed up in the closet next to some of hers.

  Cop/Alien erotica did not leave him with a good taste in his mouth. Hopefully just a mental kink the woman was after, and nothing physical she sought.

  Please God, anything but that?

  “You could call him now and have him swing by your place to get something,” Greyson offered defensively, hoping everything here had mirth behind it.

  “Once we surface,” she decided from her tone. “Don’t want to show up to the grand finale with a funk of two days in a car going.”

  He nodded and started to program a new destination into the system, then changed his mind and took over driving. They were only a few minutes away, if traffic held, and he’d rather not leave more in the system than he needed to.

  Everything was going to be inspected by someone when this was all done. Greyson wanted to hang on to some of his secrets.

  They dropped off the freeway and got to the parking garage with a minimum of fuss. All the way down and into a quiet corner.

  It was quick work getting everything into the trunk, and then they walked back up a floor and got into the elevator.

  “Tea’s just steeping,” a voice announced as they went back down a level.

  Greyson took that as a good sign and they made their way back to the office where they’d met Laux twice before. Except that the room was dark and the office across the hallway was lit.

  That turned out to be a much more pleasant, living room kind of space, with a funky, green couch dominating one wall, mismatched, overstuffed chairs in brown and gray, and a kitchenette bigger and nicer than the one Zielinski had. Or Greyson.