The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Boxed Set, page 60
part #1 of Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Series
“So you’re looking for unused resources and taking them offline?”
“Unprotected, yeah.”
“And you have the advantage right now?”
That quirky smile quivered along Avatar-Chan’s black-painted lips. “Maybe.”
“Just so you know, I hate that word.”
The smile spread, full-on. “The advantage for now.”
Once more, the appearance of the grid changed, now taking on a rose gold, almost pink glow.
The smile faded, and Avatar-Chan said, “Marlene.”
The icons resolved into intricate shapes—Japanese candles, Russian dolls, Chinese dragons. Everything was colorful, vibrant, realistic. And slower.
Avatar-Chan’s fingers flew across the interface faster than before. “She likes traps, complex scripts. Very smart. Skilled.”
“It’s just a simulacrum. Marlene’s dead.”
Avatar-Chan froze, nodded, then went back to typing, licking above the black-painted lips, as if searching for sweat that couldn’t be there. “Secret with any of this: Stay ahead. Like chess. Think deep instead of fast.”
This seemed like chess played across multiple dimensions. What would limit the number of moves, the number and types of pieces?
Something dark took shape over the grid—blocky, dark blue, with low-hanging wings. Yellow energy pulsed from a slightly more angular nose, along the length of it, to a small tail that bristled with quills.
“Amani,” Avatar-Chan said, head shaking. “Trying two at once. Typical Jacinto.”
The fear of the chimera was gone. Drugs? A realization that the advantage really did belong to us?
The dark shape launched, following along the grid, sweeping ahead of itself with yellow searchlights. The violet globe sped back toward us, lashing at Marlene’s dolls and candles with blinding bolts.
The dark shape slowed and reshaped, with the tail now toward us, the nose looking away.
Avatar-Chan tapped a key three times, and more globes formed. “Amani likes to punch, overpower. Big payload. Brute force. Denial of service. Good to tie up resources.”
The globes launched, quickly growing, taking on power. Electricity boiled and spat along the surfaces, warping the grid as if through superheating. Chan’s familiar colors and designs reappeared in the globes’ wake, and everywhere the electricity touched, Marlene’s designs crumbled, until only the dark shape remained. Then it began to fall apart.
It seemed too easy. “Is this all just testing you?”
“Probably meant to be.”
“But?”
“They’re out of resources.”
“Out of—”
Avatar-Chan leaned back in the chair. “No ambush this time. Time to plan. Listened to what you said.”
Lightning flashed far below the grid, like a storm in the deep.
And everything winked out, even Chan’s grid. Only the office remained.
Avatar-Chan stood, and backed away from the chair, spinning, searching. “He knows.”
I got up. “Jacinto? Knows what?”
“This trap. Figured it out.”
“Okay, that’s great, Chan, but I haven’t figured it out. What’s—”
The walls to the office became pale gray, then transformed into rusty iron bars. Some of the walls turned into rough stone, with manacles dangling down. Sweat, excrement, piss, moldy hay—the stench that said we were inside Jacinto’s little torture dungeon.
And then the master torturer appeared in his ridiculous torture fetish get-up: unzipped black leather jacket and pants covered with metal studs, with matching suspenders beneath. His head was still oversized, his black hair thinning, his chest bony, his flesh gold-brown.
I waved for Chan to get behind me. “Jacinto, in case you missed it, I’ve been handing you your ass lately, so you might—”
His laughter bounced off the walls. A dark metal stick appeared in his hand, and he twirled the thing over knuckles and between fingers with inhuman skill, adjusting effortlessly as the stick became a staff. “I don’t face the limits of the physical world inside this construct, Stefan. And I don’t face the limits Chan does with all the metaphor nonsense.”
Avatar-Chan edged over to me, drawing Jacinto’s attention. The outfit apparently worked as intended.
He licked his lips. “Swim the rivers with us, Chan. You’ll love it in here.”
“No.” Avatar-Chan’s fingernails dug into my back and whispered, “You can hurt him now. Part of the trap.”
Jacinto stepped toward me, staff still spinning. “It’s painless, Chan. You become immortal. Like vampires used to promise in the movies, remember? You liked watching those silly things, didn’t you?”
“No.”
Jacinto closed his eyes. “Dim the hills. Run the night. Swim the rivers of data. It used to mean something to you.”
“Not anymore.”
Jacinto brought the staff to a rest, then he came at me, swinging down with a two-handed blow. I caught the first strike with my hands, but the impact instantly numbed them. The second strike snapped my left arm at the elbow.
I collapsed to my knees, unable to block out the pain. “Chan!” It was a weak whimper instead of a warning.
Jacinto spun, and the staff cracked my hip. Loud. Firing pain through my body.
I fell onto my back. There was no hurting him. How? How could he be so much better? Where was my training, my experience?
He stepped over me, poking Avatar-Chan in the chest hard enough with the staff to force a step back, until there was nowhere else to fall back to. “You dressed nice for me. You didn’t have to do that. You know what I like. Think of all the fun we can have in here. Those videos reminded me of how much I enjoyed you. It can be like that again. No worries you might die here.”
I tried to get up. Failed. I couldn’t let him do what he’d done before. Couldn’t.
He used the staff to pin Avatar-Chan against the wall with one hand, then reached for the black top that now seemed so ill-advised. What had Chan been thinking?
Avatar-Chan’s hand shot out, grabbed Jacinto’s wrist. And snapped it. “No!”
Jacinto groaned. The staff drifted down between Avatar-Chan’s breasts and away.
Avatar-Chan grabbed the end of the staff, planted both feet wide, then slammed Jacinto into the rough stone wall. He slid down, head shaking groggily.
Then the staff was in Avatar-Chan’s hands completely, striking down, pulping Jacinto’s head, spraying brains and blood on the stones, tearing away flesh and leaving chunks of bone in the gore.
He fell onto his side, good hand searching. “Chan!” Agonized. Surprised.
Avatar-Chan dropped the bloody staff to the ground with a wet clattering, then strode over to me. “Sorry.”
“You…that easy?”
“Needed him fully committed.” Avatar-Chan leaned in, lips close to mine, then whispered, “Needed him in this place. Forever.”
This place? Where?
The VR goggles slipped away, and Chan—Avatar-Chan—smiled at me. We were in the data center. The VR data center. My hip ached, my arm felt…wrong. “What’s going on?”
“Wrapping up.” Avatar-Chan’s voice was dreamy, soft. A fountain pen poked up from the closest pants pocket. Real? Virtual?
“What do you mean you needed him in this place forever? Where are you putting him?”
“Genie in a bottle. All done,” Avatar-Chan said and waved a hand toward the display. The woman and two men who had been in Jacinto’s prison before smiled at us. Their eyelids had been restored, and there were eyes where there had been streaming data. “The snowcrash, being erased. Worms. Digging into their system. Archives. Little bombs hidden away. Takes time, but structure, the chimera—gone.”
“Gone?” Was that the bottle? “You got them? Jacinto and the others?”
“The others. Jacinto.” A shrug. “Don’t know. Harder to code for him. But, maybe.” That smile. Too casual, too confident, too dismissive.
Lying. “And the Cytek data? The trail on the Metacorporate Initiative?”
Avatar-Chan faded out, followed by the virtual world, and Chan leaned in close to me, my VR goggles in hand, and whispered, “Got it. All of it.”
And the look in those magenta eyes—glassy and distant—told me what I’d feared: Chan was deep in the drugs, under Huiyin’s influence.
Chapter 31
There were memories embedded in the stench of dead fish coming off the beach. Bad memories. Memories of fire and injury and pointless death. Those memories were intensified by the fire-scarred hulk of the data center looming before us, and by the ash floating on the warm, humid air. Someone had already fenced in a section of the parking lot to hold the first of the materials that would be used to restore the place. Otherwise, the lot was empty, reflecting every scuff of our steps off broken asphalt back at us in the still of midnight.
It was the perfect place for our rendezvous.
I unbuckled the backpack I had hauled down from the artificial hilltop where we had parked. It was the same place where we’d launched our intrusion effort days earlier. The backpack felt heavier than it should have, heavier than the contents actually were. How much weight could the Cytek computing device and several storage devices have between them? Maybe five pounds with padding.
I felt like I’d been carrying twice as much, if not the weight of the world.
I walked away from the others, to a spot near the encircling wall, and spat—gray as my outfit. But there was no getting rid of the ash that was in me again. Bitter. Gritty.
Danny tugged gloves on and nodded to the rooftop. “Taking position, like we agreed.”
He jogged away, quickly fading from even my thermographic sight in a darkness so complete that the most innocent heart would disappear.
Like the Agency.
It was just the chameleon gear he’d picked up with the auction money. Replacement, restocking—we all had reasons to spend that money and zero reason to keep it around.
Chan scratched at arms covered by a black hoodie, arms that no doubt shook with the same sick intensity as the darkly tattooed face hidden inside the hood.
The face of an addict fallen hard again.
My fault. All my fault. I pushed too hard, too soon. “Ichi, what do you think? Clear?”
Ichi considered the empty parking lot, the scorched building, as black as her outfit. “Clear.”
I nodded to Huiyin. “You?”
She twisted her neck—right, left. Moonlight reflected off her mirror lenses. She barely glanced toward the building. “No one’s here.
I powered on the radio I’d had turned off for the last hour and keyed the mic. “Miss Duvreau, this is Stefan Mendoza. Do you copy?”
Tick-tick-tick. Silence.
Then Duvreau’s voice. Impatient. “I copy, Mendoza. You have our coordinates?”
“I do. A familiar place. It’ll feel like home. The Baltimore facility you had the Agency strike for you. Need directions?”
“I know the way.” Irritated now.
“Remember—two vehicles. Anything more than that, and we scatter.”
“And I never get the data, yes. We’re en route. ETA, fifteen minutes.”
I turned the radio off again. Fifteen minutes. I had promised them it would be within an hour of a previously agreed upon meeting point. What was fifteen minutes when there were billions, maybe trillions of dollars at stake?
Huiyin pulled her machine pistol components from the pockets of her new jacket. She’d paid extra for the fitting, and it was worth it. She assembled the components, then worked fingers into a pocket sewn into the front near the collar, finally slipping out a magazine that she slapped into place. “You trust her?”
A too-familiar question. Do I trust her? “Duvreau?” I snorted. Loud. “It’s not like I slept with her.”
Huiyin arched a brow over her mirror shades: What does that mean?
We were really getting to know each other. “Nah. All that money at stake, powerful people looking at jail time, and you think I could trust her? They’re getting off easy at five million, but people like her, they prefer leaving corpses behind.”
“You think she’ll come with a large force?”
I pulled up my battered data device and showed the video feed from our original rendezvous point. “She landed with just two of those air limos and waited the whole time. No sign of reinforcements. No, my guess is she’s already got somebody here, watching us.” I waved at the rooftop, where Danny should be, invisible. “Danny, anything from up there?”
Danny whistled. “I, um, I can’t see anything just yet. Eyes are open.”
“ETA—” I checked my countdown timer. “Thirteen minutes, forty-two seconds.”
“Thanks. It feels like Hanoi all over again.”
Huiyin’s shoulders rose inside her black leather jacket. She rolled them, then rolled her head. The irritation was etched all over her face.
I whispered, “We talked about this.”
Danny groaned. “Sorry.”
I patted Huiyin on the back. “No worries.” I muted. “Danny gets excited. He can sometimes lose track of decorum and be a little insensitive. Did you have friends in that operation?”
Huiyin stared straight ahead. Cool and calm now. “Which operation?”
“Hanoi. Almost four years ago. Hoàng Oanh? She was a populist politician making big strides in the Vietnamese elections. She said a lot of things that scared the Chinese, so they kidnapped her. You never heard about it? I thought the MSS got caught between a rock and a hard place with the whole thing. The easy thing would’ve been to assassinate her, but the blowback…? They chose to try to scare her off.”
Huiyin shrugged. “Not everything has to be about killing.”
“Ideally, no. You didn’t answer—did you know anyone in that operation?”
“The MSS is a very large organization. I’m sure I’ve known people killed in one operation or another.”
“Sure. It’s just that would’ve been around the time you were starting out, right? A young kid, coming up through the ranks? Still under Dong’s supervision? If you were a high-potential candidate, maybe you were given a juicy operation to cut your teeth on?”
Clouds glowed in the reflection of her mirror shades. “I didn’t know anyone in the operation.” Icy.
“Makes sense. Like you said, it’s a big organization.” The timer showed ten minutes, thirty-four seconds. “Won’t be much longer. Fairly clear skies, decent lighting, a sliver of moon. Maybe this one finally works out our way.”
“You’ve thought through the angles, haven’t you?” Almost sarcastic.
“What? Did I miss something?”
Huiyin sighed. “It feels too easy. They buy the data from us for five million? That’s it? It’s data. It can be duplicated.”
“It’s a lot of data, and the implications stretch beyond just this one law. Politicians who were paid good money. Investors with a lot of exposure. Big. We’ve got the banking cartels—loans, guarantees, securities. It could bring a stop to their efforts to push everything into orbit. Five million’s a fair price. And if we duplicate the data, we undo our credibility. That would be dangerous.”
“But you still don’t think they’ll pay.”
Ichi cocked an eyebrow. Challenging? Supporting Huiyin?
I didn’t have time for whatever was going on between them. “Nope. Bullets are cheaper.”
Huiyin stuffed the gun into her front, right jacket pocket. “Then why sell? Turn it over to your government.”
“I don’t work for them, either. They don’t care enough to make it matter, and I want my payday. I’m a mercenary, remember? Anyway, it’d take years to amount to anything, and they’ve already fixed the election, so it’d just get swept away. Like you said, it’s not always about killing. Sometimes it’s about the money.”
Huiyin muttered beneath her breath, then said, “I need some space.” She strode away.
Ichi looked ready to follow after the MSS agent until I shook my head. We were all on edge.
Especially Chan. I wrapped my arms around shoulders that felt like they would fold the moment things turned bad and steered the Gridhound around until we were looking at the blasted data center. “If things go bad in any way, you run for the building, okay? That front door’s gone, but there were ten, twelve doors inside. You can hide; you can block yourself in. Just stay low.”
Chan looked away. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Getting back on. Falling for her…words.”
“Huiyin? Don’t worry. She’s a pro. It’s how she operates, and she’s good at it.”
“Messed up…” Chan waved a hand, as if to say everything.
I squeezed those narrow shoulders. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Get clean again. Promise.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard. We’ll get you there together.”
Chan hugged me. Warm, urgent. Needful. “Thanks.”
“I thought we were keeping a good eye on you. She do anything else with you? Take advantage of you?”
“I…” A choking sound. A head shake. “No.”
But those magenta eyes had looked over my shoulder. At Huiyin. “You know you can always talk to me.”
“Yeah. Trust you.” Chan’s voice cracked.
And then I did something that made my stomach turn—I held up a pill. The sort the Agency used to give us in the field to calm our nerves and focus our attention. Not addictive, but you always found yourself needing just one more. “Need something to get you through this?”
Black-metallic fingernails took one side of the pill, and a surprisingly strong thumb worked its way up my fingers to clamp the other side.
Then Chan pressed the pill against trembling black lips and swallowed.
We’ll get you off this again. When we aren’t desperately in need of you. Goddammit.
Ichi glared at me the way she had when I’d killed Jose. She didn’t need to say a word. I kept breaking her trust in me, and at some point, that trust might not be able to come back.
Danny called over the radio, “Incoming! Two. Airborne. From the southwest. Nothing else. Um. How many can those hold?”
