We’re only on round two of big red button-mashing, and Omar already looks like he’s about to pass out. But there is another button for that. The blue one. That’ll send a signal to stimulate his adrenals and wake him up with a jolt of white-hot terror.
“Where did you hide the evidence?” Rex asks, sounding far too reasonable.
Another mumble. A whistling rasp. “Water.”
“Sorry, scrigg. No can do. First the evidence. Then you get a reward.” Rex reaches into a pocket and produces a holonet terminal in his left palm. It’s a small, flat, silver disc with a black eye in the center, from which a bluish-white screen materializes. It’s blank but for a blinking cursor and a search bar.
Omar can interact with that screen mentally to find the files we need in the cloud and then delete them while we watch. Of course, it would be one gentleman’s word to another as to whether or not he actually deleted all of the copies. He could have others squirreled away in the cloud, or stored offline. That would be smart—and stupid, depending how you look at it.
With that in mind, I’m starting to wonder what the point of this charade is. Maybe it’s intended as a visceral warning, a reminder that there are fates worse than death. Or maybe it’s to get him to reveal whoever he gave the hard copy to. I’m assuming that Omar was smart enough to give the evidence to someone and tell them to make it public if anything happened to him.
But it’s also possible that he couldn’t find anyone suicidal enough to hold a physical copy of damning evidence against Rajesh Mohinari.
“Just kill me,” Omar whispers. His eyes flick up to mine, bloodshot, tear-streaked, and pleading. He’s identified me as the weak link. Is it because I’m not the one pushing the buttons? Or has he noticed the muscle twitching in my cheek? Maybe he has a black market add-on for his neuralink and he can read my thoughts directly. If so, then he’s seen me picturing all of the different ways that I can murder Rex. But, I have a few black market modifications of my own, and my thoughts cannot be read that easily.
“Kill you?” Rex glances back at me with one eyebrow raised above his lumpy cheek. I offer the requisite sneer to show my solidarity. Rex looks back to Omar. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to kill your little girl. What’s her name? Sienna, right? And then your pretty wife, Damaris. But I’ll have some fun with her first, oh yes. You can be sure of that.”
Another muscle starts twitching, this time in my left eye as I imagine delivering an elbow like a hammer to the back of Rex’s neck. Snap. I could say it was an accident. He tripped down the stairs outside the warehouse where we are currently torturing Omar. But I know Rajesh has both myself and Rex monitored 24/7 via our neuralinks. The imagery from our optic nerves is being recorded and uploaded to the holonet in real time, so there is no way I can lie about anything after the fact. I’m deep undercover for this job, and to intervene now would mean breaking that cover wide open.
I’m a professional. I’m not supposed to act on impulses. The job comes first. The problem is, I’m also bound by a code. My code. Most hunters have a personal code they follow that lets them sleep at night. Some won’t take kill contracts. They think that absolves them of whatever happens to a live target after they deliver it to their employer. As for me, I decided to keep it simple. I swore just two things to myself:
One, I would only ever go after people who deserved it.
And two, I would never turn a blind eye to injustice.
I had enough of that shit for dinner while serving as a Paladin for the Coalition. And this right here, standing by while an innocent cop gets tortured and threatened for trying to uphold the law, that’s the worst kind of shit sandwich.
If the honest cops have to fear for their lives, then they’ll be too scared to do their jobs, and all that will be left are the scumbags. That’s pretty much already what we’re dealing with in the Alliance, but guys like Omar are the exception that proves the rule.
“Please.” Omar makes a visible effort to work some moisture into his mouth. Must be like a desert in there. He’s lost a good four liters of water between sweat and urine over the past half an hour, which is impressive considering how cold it is out here. But given enough pain you can sweat even when you’re ice cold. The puddles on the floor are testament to that. And yet, this poor scrigg is still holding out.
Why?
Sure, he’s an honest cop, taking his stand. Good for him. But that’s not reason enough. Not after Rex threatened his family. A guy like this, noble, decent, trying to hold the line against corruption, seems to me like he’d be the family type, so threatening his wife and kid ought to make him crumble.
Unless...
Oh Deus. He really is a scrigg. He gave the hard copies to his wife. This is going to end badly. Really fucking badly.
Chapter 2
“One last chance, Omar...” Rex says. “You give me what I need and all of this goes away. You go back home to your wife and tell her all about your shitty day, and how you pissed yourself because some kook pulled a plasma lancer on you, and you thought he was going to blow off your itty-bitty dick. In that story, you look like the pissant you are, but everyone still wins, and you get to live happily ever after. So just tell me where you have the files, and we can wrap this up.”
Omar cracks a wincing smile. His lips are split from where Rex smashed his face when we picked him off the street in a blind alley on 42nd between the old Requiem Center and the new Holoplex. A cold gleam enters Omar’s eyes with that smile, and I realize that he’s been holding some of his cards in reserve until now.
“If you kill me, or even get within a hundred feet of my family, the logs with your boss in them go live on fourteen different news feeds, including CHN. And then Mohinari won’t just be on trial for bribery and domestic violence here in the Alliance. He’ll be on trial in the Coalition for black market arms dealing and stim smuggling.”
Rex’s blotchy face grows a shade or two paler than I’m used to seeing it, and his forehead furrows into fat, worm-like ridges. He takes a step back, glances at me, then once again at the cop.
It’s an interesting threat, but I wonder if it’s true. It’s one thing to threaten to leak damning evidence against Rajesh to Alliance news networks. It is quite another to leak it to networks like CHN in the Coalition. Coalition news nets are harder to get to and harder to threaten into silence. That, and Coalition brats see themselves as the champions of all things goodness and light, so they might actually risk life and limb to expose Rajesh.
“You’re bluffing,” Rex decides.
That’s my bet, too. It would be hard to get a journalist to sit on scandalous evidence and not do anything with it, especially a Coalition journalist, who would see it as their moral duty to expose a criminal like Mohinari. And that means that the news networks don’t have the evidence. Not yet. Someone still needs to send it to them. Which brings me back to Omar’s wife as the next link in this chain of misery.
“I’m not bluffing. It’s all ready to go. All it takes is one whisper of a thought from me, and your boss goes down,” Omar says.
“So why haven’t you pulled the trigger yet?” Rex asks.
“You’re jamming my access to the net.”
“And you’re the only one with access to the logs?”
“Yes.”
I don’t believe that for a second. His wife must have them, too. If something happens to Omar, he’d want her to have them. And vice versa.
Omar goes on, “I’ve scheduled hypercomms to send the evidence to all of the right people. If I die, or anything happens to my family, those comms get sent as scheduled. If I’m alive and well, I can still cancel them and reschedule for tomorrow, or some other future date.”
“You leak so much as a frame of those logs, and we’ll make you wish for something as peaceful as death.”
“And then your boss goes to prison for reconditioning. Nobody wins.”
Rex’s jaw zigzags for a few seconds, as if he’s literally chewing on Omar’s w
ords. I can see that he’s getting frustrated. His tiny little brain is overheating. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. He’s supposed to torture and threaten Omar, and then Omar gives in. Easy job. Maybe even fun. But Omar isn’t backing down.
A smile quirks onto my lips. I can’t help it. I’m starting to like this guy.
“Talk to your boss. Get him to plead out to the domestic violence charges, and I’ll make sure the rest of it goes away—until something happens to me or my family, in which case everything gets blown all over the net.”
Brilliant. Don’t go for the jugular, just kick him in the balls and keep the knife at his throat for insurance. Maybe Omar isn’t a scrigg, after all. There is just one problem. Mohinari isn’t the kind of guy you threaten. He’s the kind you kill. Or else.
“If he pleads to domestic battery, he’ll lose custody of his daughter,” Rex argues. “He’ll never go for that.”
“He doesn’t have a choice. It’s that, or he goes to prison for all of his other more grievous crimes.”
“You got guts, Trevos. I’ll give you that. Give me a second.”
Rex stalks by me with a scowl and plunks the remote for the torture spider in my hand. “Roman, if he so much as twitches, give him a zap, yeah?”
“You got it,” I say with a matching scowl. Roman is my cover name. I take a step toward Omar and he croaks at me, “Water. Please.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I stride over to an old, dusty wooden table and pluck one of the designated rewards off the counter. Water. Food. Stimsticks. Omar’s holoband. These are a few of the incentives we have to get him to cooperate. I’m breaking the rules by giving him a reward for bad behavior, but in my book, he’s earned it.
“Here you go.” His hands are bound with shockcuffs, so I hold the bottle to his lips. He gulps water, spilling at least half of it from split and swollen lips.
“Thank you,” Omar whispers.
I step back with a nod.
He regards me steadily. His eyes are clearer and less heavily laden now. “You don’t approve of this,” he whispers. It’s not a question. “You can stop him.”
“Which him?” I counter quietly. “Rex or Rajesh?” It’s an honest question. If I stop Rex, I can’t stop Rajesh, and Rex is just one small cog in a much bigger machine. I could stop this torture session, sure, at the expense of my actual mission, but the next goon that Rajesh sends to deal with Omar might skip straight to his wife or his daughter. “You need to give them what they want,” I say. “This is going to end badly.”
“I’m holding all the cards,” Omar argues. “They can’t touch me.”
“Maybe. For now. But what happens when they find a way to circumvent your little setup?”
Omar shrugs as much as he can without triggering a shock from the cuffs around his wrists. “The same thing that will happen to me if I give them all of the evidence now. Rajesh will kill me and my family. Our only hope for safety is to hold onto it as long as we can.”
“Then why push your luck?” I ask. “You’re trying to get him to plead guilty to a lesser charge and lose his daughter in a custody battle. Rex is right; he won’t do that.” I know, because I was hired by Mohinari’s wife to kill him, and she’s paying me handsomely to get it done. She knows her husband well enough by now to realize that she can’t simply threaten him and call it a day. Men like Rajesh never lose, and even if they do, they make sure you lose far more than them.
If Rajesh gives in to Omar’s demands now, it will be because he’s stalling for time while he finds a way around Omar’s digital dead-man’s switch.
Rex comes striding back over to us, smirking, the plasma lancer from the holster on his hip now in his hand. My gut gives a sickening twist at the sight of that. I can imagine how the conversation with Rajesh went, and for it to end with a weapon drawn means Omar miscalculated. Badly.
My prediction of how this was going to end is about to come true.
“It looks like you’re out of time, scriggface. Boss says it’s time to wrap this up.”
“What?” Omar looks genuinely shocked. “Does he realize what I’m going to do to him?”
“You won’t do anything. It turns out, we managed to solve the problem without you.”
Omar’s face is a horrified blank. He doesn’t know what to make of that. “How?”
“We cracked your password.”
“How...? It’s twenty-seven characters and requires a biometric scan to confirm.”
“A stream logger installed by one of your buddies at the precinct. After you told me how you planned to distribute the logs, we found the e-mails you scheduled and deleted them all.”
“But you still don’t know where the logs are,” Omar insists. “I could send them later.”
“You won’t be around later.”
“My wife—”
“Wouldn’t be that stupid after she finds out what happened to you. Not with your daughter’s life in the balance.” Rex makes a show of checking the charge on his lancer. “Any last words you want me to give to them when I pop by to give my condolences?”
Is he threatening Omar’s family again? I can’t tell. There is no need for it anymore, but a sadist like Rex doesn’t need a reason to be a twisted fuck.
Omar’s brave facade crumbled. “Please, just leave them out of it. You have what you wanted. It’s over. You win.”
“Omar! Buddy! That’s not how this works.” Rex puts on a convincing show of remorse. “I’m sorry. Really am. I thought for a second you had us. Really did. Turns out the boss was one step ahead. He usually is. Guess that’s what it takes to be on top. Last words?”
Omar is shaking all over, but I can’t tell if it’s from rage or fear.
“No?” Rex shrugs. “All right. I’ll say goodbye to them for ya, don’t worry.”
That’s it. I’m done.
“Hey, Rex. Hang on a sec.”
He looks at me, his forehead wrinkling into worms again.
My fist snaps into his throat with an audible crunch, and he staggers back a step, clutching his collapsed windpipe and wheezing for air. His weapon swings shakily into line with me, but I take a long step toward him, bat it casually aside before he can pull the trigger. The plasma lancer goes skittering across the dusty floor, and then I deliver a kick. Straight to the groin. He doubles over. Still can’t breathe.
With his head in easy reach, I grab a fistful of his sweaty black hair to hold his head, then smash my knee into his face. His nose goes smush, and I feel a few teeth give way. Blood sprays everywhere, making a mess. Leaving evidence on my clothes. I’ll deal with it later.
Rex is gurgling now. He drops to his knees. Looks up at me. Confusion is written all over his bloody, lumpy face. He thought we were buddies. Like-minded fucks.
“You have any family?” I ask him.
A gurgle for a reply. He’s just about to be lights out from hypoxia. Won’t be long after that.
“Well, I’ll find them if you do. Don’t worry, I’ll say goodbye for you.”
Rex falls over, face-first, with a thud. Not wasting any time, I shove a hand into my pocket to hit the release button on the remote for the spider that’s still wrapped around Omar’s head. I turn to him just as it’s clambering off and down from his chair. The legs fold up, leaving a compact black cylinder beside his feet. Omar is staring in horror at the brutal result of the attacks that just saved his life.
“You killed him,” Omar mumbles.
“He had it coming,” I say, then use my neuralink to unlock the shockcuffs that tie his hands to the back of the chair. The cuffs fall with a metallic thunk, and Omar stands up slowly, looking dazed. I grab him roughly by the arm and start dragging him toward the exit, moving fast.
“We need to hurry. It won’t be long before this place is teeming with Mohinari’s goons.”
Omar just nods stiffly. He’s lucky he’s still conscious after all the pain he’s been through.
I snag Omar’s holoband on the way ou
t and hand it to him. “You might need this,” I say.
“Thanks,” he replies as he slips it over his forehead.
Chapter 3
Before I set foot out of the packing center, I activate my holoband. A holoscreen shimmers to life in front of my face, projected directly from the band around my forehead. The faded edges of the display contain icons for various functions, a minimap in the top right with friend-foe-coded blips. Red for enemy. Green for friendly. Yellow for neutral. There is just one yellow blip at the moment—Omar—with a green one in the center to indicate my own position. Not that I expect the limited AI and sensors in my band to be able to see one of Mohinari’s goons coming and accurately code them as red.
Omar and I fly out the door and down the external staircase from the abandoned building. I use the cameras in the rim of my holoband to keep my eyes everywhere without having to turn my head. Our boots clang resoundingly on the metal stairs. An icy, whistling wind whips across the glacier, cutting through the thermal shield on my belt and searing my exposed skin.
As I lead the way down the stairs, I’m busy activating one of the black-market add-ons to my neuralink. It disables third-party monitoring even after I’ve legally bound myself to such an arrangement. Technically, Roman Arovitch is bound to that agreement, not Cade Korbin, so my employment contract is a sham, anyway. But most things I sign are. I never use my real name. Too much baggage. Too much risk.
We hit the bottom of the stairs. Snow flies away from my boots as I sprint across the glacier to my air car. One of Mohinari’s company cars, actually—a sleek, gleaming black Cavalier Courier with tinted, blast-shielded windows, four sliding doors, and a golden M on the front. Rajesh monograms all of his stuff, branding it like cattle from Earth in one of those ancient holovids about the wild west. This car can be tracked, which is a problem, but I have ways around that.
The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1) Page 2
