DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (8 page)

“No problem. We ain’t even yet, but it’s kind of nice knowing I can be useful somehow, in some way you can’t do yourself.”

I scooted the chair around to face him, my front still pressed against the chair’s back. He averted his eyes anyway.

“You’re a friend, Martin,” I told him. “You don’t have to be useful. Just being here is good.”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s...” He shrugged. “Jus’ pride I guess.”

“She knows how that goes.” I grinned.

He smiled, looked back. “So how the fuck you run into Bunny? You the one shot her?”

“No, no. See, it all started when someone shot at Dire in the garage...” I told him the events that had transpired after I’d left him at the restaurant, and his face got more worried the farther I got into the tale.

“Shit. Why the hell’s a Militia girl meeting a bunch of goons in a garage?”

“Don’t know. They definitely weren’t good at assassinations. Height of stupidity to pull that in a well-used garage during peak hours.”

“Might have done that so she didn’t suspect nothing,” Martin rubbed his chin. “Goes to meet someone, gets up there, lights go off, and there’s guys waiting for her in the dark...”

“But who?”

“Militia’s got enemies. Hell, I used to be one of them. I wouldn’t use dumbasses like the ones you described, though. Shit, cell phones on a hit? Stupid.”

“Yeah.” I yawned. “Well, Dire’s going to eat an MRE and hit the sack. You good to care for Bunny for a few hours?”

“I got her. Go, rest.” He stood, moved back to the main bedroom. I watched him go, and smiled.

Good friends are hard to find. I was glad to have him.

CHAPTER 5: SOMETHING FISHY

“Morgenstern Incorporated is one of the veterans of the nineties dotcom bubble and burst. It came out of that stressful time stronger for its competitors troubles, buying up many of them during their time of  crisis. The current CEO, Aegon Morgenstern, was a noted world-traveler and playboy in his youth, engaging in everything from big-game hunting to mountain climbing. No stranger to the vagaries of villains and criminals, he's survived assassination attempts, kidnapping, hostile takeover attempts, and disasters both natural and unnatural. Not bad for a man pushing sixty-three!”

--Documentary of a Master Mogul, an article by Davis Jaffees appearing in Gates Magazine

I wasn’t feeling so charitable when he shook me awake. “Mfuszavrz!” I insisted, rolling over and swiping a hand in his general direction. But he persisted.

“Your phone is blowing up.” He said, poking my shoulder as I snarled into the pillow.

“Frmbubl. Gr. Urg...” But he was right— I could hear the burner phone chiming repeatedly. I pulled myself together. “How long was Dire out?”

“Couple hours.” I blinked, looked at his face. He was looking a little ragged himself.

“All right.” I started to sit up, remembered his penchant for modesty. I was wearing a bra at the moment, but still it might upset him. “Actually, could you hand Dire the phone?”

“Sure, sure.”

He fetched it, I took it, and glanced at the number. One of the advantages my supergenius gave me was a mostly eidetic memory. I recognized the number as one of the pair I’d been given by the businessman. This, then, was one of my teammates to be.

And as it turned out, they were cranky.

“You did not call. We do not have much time to plan this thing.” Sounded female. College-age or older. A slight accent. European? Maybe.

“Dire was unsure of the etiquette in this situation,” I explained.

“Who?”

“She. Dire.”

A sigh. “Look, this is no time to fuck around.”

“We are agreed on that. So how do you wish to proceed?”

“We have a lot of things we can’t talk about over the phone, so—”

“Actually that’s incorrect,” I interrupted. “As soon as you called this phone, your transmission was quietly swapped to a circuit normally reserved for government personages wishing to talk off the record. No logs, no record it ever happened, no one listening in. Once Dire found the backdoors, it was pretty easy to hack.”

Silence for a minute. “Hello?” I asked.

“Still here. Not that I doubt your abilities, but we need a face-to-face. There is another in this team.”

“And Dire’s got one more. Non-combatant.”

Her voice got colder. “The client did not mention this.”

“He’s drawing payment from Dire’s share.”

“I do not like deviations from the deal this close to the mission.”

“We can discuss it at the meeting.” Her attitude was starting to grate.

“Very well.” She gave an address. “Twelve o’clock noon. Go around back and pass through the scratched door. Costumed if possible, masked if not.”

“Understood.” Come to think of it, I could offer a few useful devices for this task. “Would you want—”

Click. She’d hung up. I scowled at the phone, then glanced around. Martin had left the room, perhaps to give me some privacy. He need not have bothered, but I took the opportunity to dress in new clothing. Not a skirt this time, just a simple jeans and black t-shirt combo. I had work to do before noon rolled around.

I headed back to the main bedroom, and found Martin leaning on his hands, sitting at the edge of the lone scuffed easy chair in the room, watching Bunny breathe. She didn’t look any different to my eyes. That was good, I supposed.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Long day,” he said. “It’s... I’m still adjusting, too. When you’re in prison it’s a fixed schedule all day every day. Meals at a fixed time. Exercise at a fixed time. Lights-out at a fixed time. Wake up the same time every day. Your body gets used to it. Right now it’s telling me it’s time to go to sleep.”

“Mm.” I gnawed my lip. “Think you can hold out for another hour or so?”

“Yeah. You got coffee?”

“Yes, but we don’t have the luxury of sleeping in tomorrow.”

“Shit. It’s already midnight.” He mopped his face. “I’ll stay up. You going somewhere?”

“Going to steal another car. A van this time, she’s thinking.”

He just gave me a sour look.

I shrugged. “Got to costume up for the next part. Unless you want us to meet two unknown villains without an eight-hundred pound steel battlesuit between us and them.”

“Between
you
and them,” he clarified. “Wait. You want me there?”

“Yes. And it’s a long walk without a van.”

“Fair enough.” He sighed. “Guess I ain’t got room to gripe. Go on, I’ll be fine. Can’t promise the same for Bunny.”

“Hoping she pulls through,” I said. “But it’s up to Bunny, now.”

He didn’t respond. I grabbed my bug-out bag and headed out of the lair, into the night.

West of here were some seedy tenements. I’d seen the local gang, a group of shaven-headed tough-looking men in green jackets, entering and leaving while I was driving around the neighborhood. I’d also seen a white panel van parked around the side, that was still in reasonably good shape.

A little fiddling with the scanner to make sure there were no broadcast cameras nearby, a pulled-down balaclava over my face, a last glance around for watchers, and I crept up to the van and broke out my tools. This one wasn’t remote-enabled, another plus. I was inside it in about two minutes, and bypassing the ignition in three.

The neighborhood streets were pretty well deserted at this hour, so I kept the lights off as I drove away. Took all of five minutes to get back to the warehouse, pull it into the lair, and lock the gate behind me.

I’d planned for this contingency. Never can tell when you need to pull vehicles off the street, and life is infinitely easier if they leave your lair much different than their original shapes coming in. I decided to make this one a Chievy Hauler. A few commands tapped into the nearest terminal, and the automated arms swung around, started changing the shape of the van. Once they were done, another arm applied a coat of new paint and added weathering marks and a few new dents.

Another few taps hacked into a DMV across town, and registered it with plates and papers. To anyone looking it up, it would appear to belong to one Shaundi Saint, who’d bought and registered it six years ago. I decided on a generic mix of numbers and letters for the plate, and started running a pair off on the metal-grade three-dimensional printer. They’d need a little dirt and weathering too, but I could take care of that in the morning.

All that took perhaps twenty minutes to get moving. I headed upstairs, content to let the machines finish their duty. I’d made them, and programmed every bit of their code myself or through a compiler of my own design. They wouldn’t let me down.

Martin was pacing when I walked into the room. “It’s good,” I said. “Business is done.”

“Aight. Make sure you do the rag thing. Got broth on the stove, and rags soaking in a pot of water.”

“Understood. Go, sleep.”

He headed out, and I settled in to keep watch over Bunny.

I did pretty well for the first hour. Fed her twice, gave her water three times. Bunny sucked greedily at the rag whenever I pushed it into her mouth, so I assumed it was working. She still didn’t wake up enough to talk, and I didn’t want to try rousing her.

After the first hour, it was pretty boring. I brewed up some coffee, and that occupied five minutes, but soon I was counting the minutes.

One of the downsides to my power is that my mind needs things to work on. It needs constant stimulation, as much and as often as I can manage. Without it I get bored beyond any regular human’s understanding, and time stretches unbearably. It’s not exactly attention deficit disorder, more of a constant need to build and create mixed with an absolute loathing of wasted time. I’m pretty sure many other engineers would recognize some of the same symptoms.

I killed ten minutes by going back to the hacked DMV databases, and making up false licenses for Shaundi Saint and her boyfriend, Tommy Grand. Easy enough to transfer photos of one of my cover identities. After a pause to consider my work, I retrieved a good shot of Martin from my mask’s camera, and altered the details a bit to a look he’d be able to achieve with minor makeup.

I took longer then I needed to do this, but eventually it had to end. Then I got up and gave Bunny water again. This time she didn’t suck on the rag. I bent my head down, listened to her breath. It could be snoring. Maybe.

Wait. I did have something to do, didn’t I? I paced back to the front room. I remembered seeing the business suit here, tossed over a chair after Martin changed. Sure enough, it was there, and a search of its pockets turned up the memory stick that we’d gotten from our client.

I stared at the thing, and shut the laptop I’d used for the minor hacking required for the DMV record shuffling. Then I opened the secret panel in the back of the janitorial closet, to reveal the
real
computer.

I’d spent almost twenty thousand dollars, all told, for the various components that made this hardware up. And then, on top of that, I’d added some of my own improvements. It had taken five straight days to do up the custom code, and make sure everything played well together. The coolant it required to operate could probably double as a fire suppressant in a pinch.

I waved the stick at it, and the lights adorning the front of it flashed, as the scanners did their work, reading it without going through the trouble of slotting it in.

The lights went red. A virus? Hm. Not very sporting of our client.

“Quarantine stage one,” I commanded. “Oh, and activate holo-interface.”

A blue light sprang to life on the side, and painted the room in the glowing shape of my own customized operating system. I reached out and opened up the quarantine box, studied the raw code of the virus as it spooled by.

Clever little thing. A passive trojan, that would find its way through most firewalls without tripping alarms. Time-delayed, too, so there would be no warning until the time came and it activated. Maybe not even then, as it was designed to go after anti-viral software first.

But it wasn’t harmful to the host system. Instead, it looked like it was designed to find whatever transmitting capability its host computer had, and transmit a single packet of code. Just one. In computing terms, that was so tiny it was almost nothing.

Had it been put there as a tracking device? Possible. Maybe it was insurance against us keeping the cargo. Still, its very presence was a bad sign.

I’d been betrayed, once, and the results had been near-catastrophic. If not for a series of contingencies that I’d quietly put in place, I’d be dead or worse. Since that turncoat’s treachery, I was very cautious about who I trusted.

Virus aside, there were some actual datafiles on the memory stick, so I looked those over. Part of a shipping schedule, photos of a gray steel box, about the size of a dumpster. A few shots of trucks, taken through a chain-link fence. A few shots of security guards drilling, wearing riot gear. Two phone numbers, and an account number, for Pursuit Bank, one of the East Coast’s larger financial institutions.

Also one I’d thoroughly hacked a few months ago. In fact...

I moved out of the quarantine zone, and over to the exploits portal. Sure enough, my old backdoors were still there. Eventually they’d catch on to a few of the early ones and shift their security, but for now I was good.

I inspected the bank account number, started tracing it back, getting names and numbers and Grid Protocol addresses, and putting together the big picture. Several times I was almost tagged by intrusion prevention measures, other times the data stores I was investigating turned out to be honeypots, lures to sucker a hacker in while they were traced back.

But I was good at this, and I had both bleeding-edge equipment and patience. I took a break every twenty minutes to check on Bunny, repeating the water bit. The broth, eh... it had gotten cold so I poured it down the sink. I tried milk instead, and she took to that well enough.

Hm, there was something I hadn’t considered. There was enough food in the fridge for a couple of meals. I hadn’t planned a grocery run before my assault on the courthouse, and now we might have another sheltering here for a time. I made a mental note to replenish the food stocks accordingly. Sure, I had a couple of cases of MRE’s in the back, but those got tedious fast.

Finally, two hours later, I had cracked the chain, and found the origin of the money.

It was from Morgenstern Incorporated. Someone within Morgenstern Incorporated was paying me to steal cargo from one of their own trucks.

I thought back to the crime dramas I had watched to absorb and become familiar with popular culture. There were a few where a situation like this had occurred, and most of them didn’t end well for the patsies hired to commit the crime.