Tails You Lose (8 page)
At the far end of the boardroom table sat Herbert Lali, president of Pacific Cybernetics Industries. A heavyset man in his early sixties, he was dressed in a white buckskin suit that brought out his dark skin tones. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the table and fingers steepled together. On his left little finger was a heavy gold PCI ring, set with microprocessor crystals. A fiberoptic cable that snaked up from the table was plugged into one of three gold-plated datajacks that studded his right temple. The right side of his scalp was shaved, but on the left hung a long black braid that was streaked with gray.
In the chair to his left sat Salvador Hu, head of security for PCI and Alma's boss. Hu had close-cropped black hair and a blocky build, and he sat with the relaxed confidence of a man who could handle anything or anyone. He was wearing casual clothes: jeans, cowboy boots, and a short-sleeved dress shirt that showed off his arms, which looked natural but were heavily cybered. At least three weapons that Alma knew about—and probably several she didn't—were concealed under their precisely tone-matched skin.
Alma
bowed a greeting to both men. Hu nodded, but Mr. Lali remained silent. His eyes were impassive chips of black stone. Alma had expected Mr. Lali to be as saddened by Gray Squirrel's death as she was, but she hadn't anticipated this cold, angry silence. A reprimand wasn't required—she'd already chastised herself a thousand times since yesterday for not finding the missing researcher sooner. Turning to the shadowrunner had been a mistake—his information was accurate, but the wait for it had cost Gray Squirrel his life.
Mr. Lali shifted in his seat as Alma closed the door behind her. A frown creased his high forehead, puckering the skin around his softlink ports. "Sit down," he said, indicating a chair halfway down the table.
Alma
settled into the leather chair, eyes flicking back and forth between the two men. She wondered why Hu had insisted on her coming to the PCI complex this morning. She'd already encrypted a full report of yesterday's events and sent it to a secure mailbox on his telecom. She decided that Mr. Lali must have wanted to hear the report in real time and ask questions. The REM inducer was PCI's pet project, after all. Gray Squirrel had been within a week or two, at most, of running the final diagnostics on the beta-test models. With its project leader dead, the REM inducer's release could be set back several months.
Mr. Lali cleared his throat, and Alma took it as an invitation to speak. She pushed the gruesome image of Gray Squirrel from her mind and spoke in as professional a voice as she could muster.
"Mr. Lali, I must apologize for my failure. As you must have seen from my report, Gray Squirrel was killed at approximately the time that he was placed in the stabilization unit. Perhaps if I had made better use of our corporate resources, I could have reached him before—"
Hu held up a finger, and Alma immediately fell silent. She knew his favorite admonition by rote: there are no excuses, only reasons. Hu didn't want to hear excuses. That wasn't why she had been called into the office.
She waited for Hu to ask her a question, but instead it was Mr. Lali who spoke. His words surprised her.
"How are you sleeping?" He said it in a casual tone, but Alma's instincts told her the question was anything but offhand.
"Quite well, thank you," she answered. She glanced at Hu, but the head of security gave her no clues as to whether she'd answered correctly. Hu seemed to be studying her carefully, weighing each word she said. She suspected that he was using his voice-stress analyzer.
"Have you activated your REM inducer during the past week? Skipped any nights of sleep?" Mr. Lali's attitude appeared to be that of a concerned parent, but Alma could hear the edge in his voice.
"No," she answered. It had been one hundred and eighty-seven days since PCI's physicians had implanted the beta-test version of the inducer inside her brainstem. The tiny cybernetic device lay deep inside her pons, waiting for her mental command to trigger an increase in serotonin, acetycholine, and other sleep-inducing neurotransmitters. By activating it, she could cause her body to enter a highly accelerated version of its normal sleep cycle, one that would compress an entire night's sleep into fifteen minutes.
"The beta-test model is working well," she added. "I'm still following the schedule that Gray Squirrel laid out, despite his . . . extraction: for the past twelve days I've left it in passive mode. I haven't experienced any ill effects that can be directly attributed to the inducer—no insomnia, sudden loss of muscle tone, drowsiness, or any of the other glitches reported by the alpha-test subjects."
As she spoke, she suddenly felt the urge to yawn. She wasn't tired—the yawn was probably triggered by her nervousness, and by talking about the REM inducer and its side effects. She stifled it, but a moment later, she felt something that couldn't be attributed to the power of suggestion: a slight tremble that coursed through her left hand. She tightened her grip on the arm of her chair, and it stopped.
Hu leaned forward. "Where were you between the hours of ten-thirty and midnight, five evenings ago?" It was Alma's turn to frown. "The night that Gray Squirrel was extracted?" she asked. "At my apartment, in bed. Asleep."
Mr. Lali coughed softly and touched an icon, activating the table's cyberdeck. Flush-mounted monitors illuminated in front of himself, Hu and Alma. "I'd like us to review the recordings that were captured on the night of the extraction. Hu thinks there may be something we missed."
Alma
saw Hu tense and braced herself. Watching the vidclips of Gray Squirrel's extraction hadn't been easy, even when she still believed that her friend was alive. Now that she knew he was dead, they stung even more. She was ashamed to have failed Gray Squirrel, and to have let PCI down—and now Hu was going to rub salt in that wound.
The monitor in the tabletop glowed a solid blue and then flashed a series of codes as it loaded the vidclips they were to view. A long string of numbers appeared briefly—81, 64, 49, 36, 25, 16, 9, 4, 1—and then a date/ time sequence that flashed by so quickly Alma was unable to read it. Then the monitor checkerboarded into a dozen squares, each showing a freeze-framed vidclip of the PCI parking garage from a different angle. Some showed rows of parked cars, while others were aimed at exit doors. Still others showed the stairwells and ramps. One of the split-screen images had been shot by a remote-piloted drone and was currently freeze-framed at an angle that showed an empty access ramp.
Alma and Hu had been over the security cameras' recordings dozens of times already, in second-by-second, image-enhanced slow play. She didn't think another byte of information could possibly be wrung out of them.
Hu touched an icon on the monitor screen in front of him, and all of the vidclips began to play.
Alma
watched a vidclip near the center of the screen—one that showed Gray Squirrel entering the garage through a secure door that led to the elevators. According to the clock superimposed on the vidclip, it was 11:05:02 p.m.—the same time, plus or minus one minute, that the overly punctual Gray Squirrel always left the building. The researcher walked to his car—a four-door Toyota Elite—and activated its door locks by voice command. Settling into the cushioned leather seat, he reached for the car's control cable. He was just about to plug it into his datajack when the intruders appeared.
There were four of them, and they came out of nowhere, emerging from behind a concrete pillar into the vidclip that showed Gray Squirrel's car. How they had gotten into the garage was a mystery that PCI security had not yet solved.
First to appear was the man Tiger Cat had put a name to yesterday morning. Wharf Rat was an Asian male, recognizable by his oversized, protruding incisors and his mange of black hair. One of his eyes was brown, the other gold. He jittered as if he was on kamikaze or some other combat drug.
Wharf Rat was followed by two Caucasian males, one dressed in Native buckskins and sporting what looked like animal paws woven into the ends of his dirty blond dreadlocks, the other a dwarf wearing an Okanagan Ogopogos combat biker T-shirt and black leather chaps. The dwarf carried an HK227 submachine gun, while Dreadlocks held what looked like an oversized grenade launcher with an enormous barrel.
The faces of all three had been captured by the securicams at a number of different angles. They'd been wearing nylon stockings that squashed their noses flat against their faces and distorted the rest of their features, but it had been easy enough to program the computers to account for the tensile strength of the nylon and produce a true rendering of each face. Alma had stored these digital mug shots in the headware memory that was hardwired into her brain and could call up profiles or full-face visuals on any of them at will. By now, she knew their faces better than the Superkids she'd grown up with.
The fourth person, however, was more careful—or more professional—than the other three. Judging by the height and weight, this one was probably female, but that was about all the data they had on her. She wore a dark blue balaclava that seemed to have been padded to distort the features underneath; the composite faces that the securicam's Ident program had created were as smooth and featureless as animated cartoons. The only details the program had been able to define with any certainty included her ear shape, which was rounded, like a human's, and the fact that her eyelids had been painted with bright red makeup.
Judging by the woman's cautious movements, Alma had at first flagged her as the team's leader, but it had soon become clear from Wharf Rat's shouts and gestures that the shadowrunner was leading this group. Alma had later decided that the woman must be the team's technical-support member—a little smarter than the rest, and not willing to rely on a thin nylon mask for disguise.
Gray Squirrel was just starting to notice that something was wrong when the dwarf shouted and pointed the submachine gun at him. Gray Squirrel's eyes widened. For a moment it looked as though he was going to try to plug in the jack and drive away. Then he let the control cable fall into his lap.
Just as she had done when she first saw the vidclip, Alma let out a sigh. This time, however, it wasn't one of relief, but regret. Gray Squirrel's caution should have helped him survive.
Gray Squirrel made a show of surrendering to the intruders, but Alma could guess what had been running through his mind. Although the intruders had somehow breached the parking lot's security system, he must have known that help would be on the way soon. Alma watched him cock his head as he stepped out of his car, obviously listening for the hissing jets of a takedown drone.
Elsewhere on the monitor screen, one of the vidclips appeared to be in fast motion—cars slid past in a blur and the image wove and dodged as the drone on which the camera was mounted whipped through the parking garage. Two seconds later, the drone appeared on the vidclip that showed Gray Squirrel and his extractors, and the researcher's face broke into a nervous, anticipatory grin.
He wasn't the only one who'd been expecting the drone, however. Dreadlocks raised the launcher to his shoulder and fired, and what looked like a crumpled ball of silver cloth shot into the air. The fine metal mesh fluttered open just before striking the drone and wrapped itself completely around the drone as if magnetized. A second later the mesh crackled with tiny sparks as its electric discharge unit activated.
The vidclip that had been taken by the drone's camera was now nothing more than a blur, but the other securicam showed what was happening. Hot spots glowed on the mesh where it covered the drone's jets. Two seconds later, the drone fired its takedown weapon: hollow, feather-tipped needle darts loaded with gamma scopolamine. The darts didn't go far, however—the feathered tips were caught and held by the mesh.
The drone, looking like a pincushion and bereft of its guidance camera, crashed into one of the garage's concrete support pillars and slammed into the floor. The vidclip shot by its securicam rolled through a few dizzy gyrations and came to rest pointed up at a bright white circle that must have been one of the halogen lights in the parking garage's ceiling.
On the split screen near the center of the monitor, Gray Squirrel was shoved into the back of his car. The dwarf climbed into the driver's seat and jacked in, and the others piled inside. Wharf Rat took the front seat, and Dreadlocks sat in the back with Gray Squirrel.
The female member of the team leaned over the downed drone, taking a last look at it, and then turned and ran for the vehicle. She clambered into the back, and the door slammed.
The car squealed backward out of its parking space, changed gears, and roared up the ramp. It flashed across several of the split screens on the monitor as it squealed around corners, at times narrowly missing the few parked cars that were still in the garage so late at night. The dwarf seemed to know exactly where he was going—he took the most direct route to the garage's
The first time Alma had seen the vidclips of the extraction, she'd expected the car to be trapped at the exit. PCI's security teams had obviously been alerted to an extraction in progress—they'd already sent a drone to deal with it. By this point, the entire garage was on lockdown. The vidclips showed steel containment doors and ballistic-composite shutters blocking every exit, and secguards moving in on foot.
The barrier across the