Taking the Highway (24 page)

“It certainly looks that way. It wouldn’t be difficult, but it would take some time to be sure you were following the right set of signals.”

“And you can’t just wander along the highways all day or someone might notice.” Andre was a little startled by the savage tone of his own voice. “You need a cover. So you apply for a fourthing badge.”

“No,” Honeywell said. “No, no, no. You two, you have to leave right now.” She hooked Elway’s arm and pushed on Andre’s back, propelling them toward the door. “I don’t care how you do it, but you were never here. I never saw you, I never spoke to you. Erase your logs, your car’s travel record, delete my name from every police database it’s in.”

“We can’t just—”

“I was an uncooperative witness. I missed our appointment. We never spoke. Figure it out.” She ushered them through the door and slammed it behind them.

They both stared at the closed door.

“Isn’t she something? Just like that.” Elway snapped his fingers three times. “Bing, bing, bing. She processes so fast.”

“She’s creepy,” Andre said. “Why did she throw us out?”

“Maybe because we ruined her entire study.” Elway rolled one shoulder and started toward the stairs. “If these guys were false fourths, how many others are? It calls all of her research into question.”

“I was trying to figure out how to stop her from contacting every spinner in Michigan.”

“That’s the last thing she’ll do. She’ll whitewash her whole paper. Deny she ever heard of those dead fourths.”

They burst through the building’s doors into sunlight, all the more harsh after the dim hallways of academia. They walked toward the pay lot that held Andre’s car, passing a few bleary-eyed students. Yesterday’s after-game parties must have been bigger than the football victory.

Andre kicked an empty beer can out of his way and contemplated how to get around Dr. Honeywell. “I need her data. Madison Zuchek won’t want a court order, but maybe if we put some higher pressure on Honeywell, she’ll fork it over.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Elway pulled a mini stick out of his pocket. “It’s right here. Three cubes worth.”

“Elway, you . . .” Andre whipped his head around to glance at the towering research building they just left. “There’s no way you hacked her head.”

“Can’t be done. Her chip is twenty years out of date. So is her encryption method. Honeywell was so busy talking down to me, she didn’t even notice the data slurp.”

“Take it to Mother Mad.” Andre wondered if he dared get on the highway. Either way, he was going to break some speed records getting back to Detroit. He rushed around the corner, pulling his datapad out of his pocket.

“Not Sergeant Gao?”

“I’ll call her on the way.” Sofia needed to know that the fourthing badges really could be tracked. It could break open their whole case. He dodged around two more students and swore under his breath. “Why did it have to be fourths? How quietly do you think we can contain this with everyone already half panicked about Overdrive, and spinners tagging us every other day? Next thing you know, it isn’t just a few fourths who did it. We all did.”

“But they weren’t fourths. It was just their cover so they could sabotage Overdrive.”

“Doesn’t matter. Once word gets out, all of us will be blamed. It will be open season on fourths.” Andre’s next thought made him stop dead.

Elway continued on for a few steps before shuffling back. “What is it?”

“Maybe it already is. Shit!” He took off toward the car. “Whoever killed these men, these saboteurs, already knows what they were doing. Whoever killed them is trying to stop them.”

T
he department of Technical
Services was never actually quiet. Too many automated systems hummed to themselves and the constant influx of cooled air whirred around, keeping the hardware happy and the techs fully clothed. It was never quiet, but there was a low tide between two and four in the morning when it was all but deserted.

Elway emerged from his virtual world, flipped up his datashades and pulled out one earbud. He rose, his scrawny shadow birdlike against the projected image as he pointed to the cubicle wall. “What about this guy?”

Andre looked, pulling at his lower lip. A faint blue line traced itself over a city map, stopping at several points along the way, but always ending up either in the city or in the Downriver suburbs. He sighed. “Normal.”

A red line. “How about this one?”

“Normal.”

“This one?”

Andre looked at the pattern, his heart pounding. A few trips there and back, a few decidedly not. He pointed to a line near an Overdrive node. “Anyone with him at this point?”

“No other fourths.”

He dropped his arm. “Then it’s not who we’re looking for.”

“Right.” Elway rearranged his datashades and ear pieces. He was gone again, as good as asleep to the casual observer. The rolling eyelids and twitching fingers might be no more than active dreaming, but Andre saw the regularity of the tiny movements and knew that in some interior world Elway was sifting through the huge influx of data.

Andre stood in front of the wall screen, which now showed an empty map. They’d been combing through Honeywell’s data all night, looking for patterns, trying to figure out which fourths were simply doing their jobs and which were not. The university had gathered the information, but hadn’t sorted it in any way that would be useful to the police. Where did fourths gather? For how long? Who didn’t fit the pattern? Elway had restructured the entire database, each iteration narrowing down possibilities. So far, no one fit the pattern. Were their saboteurs even out there, or was it another dead end?

Andre fidgeted in place, feeling less than useless as Elway disappeared into the e-verse. He stepped out of the cubicle so he could pace the short corridor in front of it. Sounds of keyboards and some faint music came from other offices, but most of the tech department was away. He checked the time. Four fifteen.

He saw the night janitor approaching and lifted a hand in greeting. “Kiya, you up here now? I thought you cleaned the first floor.”

Kiya touched her cleaning wand, turning off the suction. “Traded with Lou. He got a big hassle for throwing away someone’s candy wrapper. Turned out, it had important notes on it.”

“Techs know how to use pens?” Andre asked. Kiya smiled and the whisper of a dimple appeared on one cheek. Andre liked her smile, liked it even more that he’d put it there. He leaned against the doorframe. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll make the same mistake?”

Kiya spread her strong arms. “You see a waste barrel anywhere? Honey, I don’t throw away nothing. A tech’s got a mountain of garbage in his cube, I don’t touch it.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

“Easiest job I ever had. I sweep, clear a little dust, I’m done for the night.”

“Well, I’d best let you get back to it so you can get out on time.”

“You know it, hon. Take it slow—if that’s the way you like it.” Kiya sketched a wave and moved down the corridor, turning on the wand’s suction and aiming it at the floor. She turned one of the many corners and was gone.

“She never cleans in here.” Elway was sitting up in his chair, datashades in his hand, earbuds dangling.

“Have you asked her to?”

“No. She’s very—” He dipped his head. “No. I didn’t even know her name.”

“Kiya.”

“I know it
now
.”

“How’s the job going?” He pointed to Elway’s datapad. “Anything?”

“Waiting for the next data set. I’m trying to match pairs of fourths. People’s paths intersect all the time, so . . .” Elway levered himself out of the chair and reached for his sweating glass of sweet tea. He’d gone through liters of the stuff, but never seemed to need a bathroom break. He stood at the entrance to his cubicle, still looking down the corridor where Kiya had gone.

“You should to talk to her,” Andre said. “She’d like you. You have things in common.”

“Me? Her?”

“Do you know why she cleans at night? She goes to school during the day. Studying engineering.”

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

Elway sighed. “I see you with your fourthing badge sometimes, you forget to take it off when you come to work. You get in a different car every day and you talk to strangers and in three seconds they’re already your best friends.” He swallowed some tea. “You make it look easy.” Elway seemed to hunch further than usual, embarrassed to have said anything.

Andre remembered having this conversation with Oliver. From the other end. When he was in middle school. “I don’t know, Elway. I just talk to people. It’s not a big deal. You can talk to anyone. Talk to the person in the next cubicle.”

Elway lowered his voice. “The entire tech department hates me.”

“You’re in good company.”

Elway made a sound halfway between a grunt and throat-clearing. “I know why they hate you, but I never did anything to them.”

“Except be better than they are. They’re jealous because—”

Elway’s datapad beeped and he reached for it, sliding into his chair and flipping down his datashades in one fluid motion. “Yes! I’ve got it. Three of them, staking out an Overdrive node at Vernier and 94 three days ago.”

“There wasn’t any crash there.”

“Yet. They have to be onsite to set the virus, because a wholesale incursion is too easy to detect. So they hit one node at a time, from close range. We’ll still see it, but by then it’s too late.”

“Show me.”

A flick of Elway’s gauntlets brought the data onto the wallscreen. Bright red circles, marking their targets with bull’s eyes.

“You’re sure?” Andre asked.

“Positive. The men staking out this node are new fourths, badges acquired in the last month. See that? They cluster at the processing nodes two to three days before the Overdrive crash, and then again the morning of.”

“You said that. Once to set up the bomb, once to deliver it.”

“Virus, not bomb.”

“Might as well be a bomb.”

Andre thought of Nikhil, how he didn’t even know where to stand for a ride. Could this trio just be inexperienced? But his gut was screaming
yes
, these were the men they were looking for. The Overdrive node was nowhere near a residential area. Fourths would never be picked up—or dropped off—there.

He stared at the map, wishing for the thousandth time that Honeywell, Elway,
someone
would let him track individual badges. Just once, he’d like to see a privacy law that benefited someone other than a criminal. He’d tie himself up trying to get a court order while the saboteurs did whatever they wanted.

Unless he caught them in the act. He already knew where they’d be. If he staked out the Overdrive node, he could arrest whoever showed up and be done with it. He’d close the case, give the saboteurs to the DA, and flip Talic the bird on the way out.

“Vernier and 94,” he said. “When?”

Elway peered inside his datashades for answers. “They were there three days ago, between seven and eight in the morning.” He cleared his shades and looked at Andre through them, blinking wide, horrified eyes. “Which means they’re going to crash Overdrive—”

“Today.”

Andre maneuvered the Dodge Raven
to the on-ramp and dove down the slope onto 94. “Are you sure we’re going to the right place? The last crash was inside the city limits.”

“It’s the right place.” Elway sat beside him, fully geared—datashades over eyes, earbuds in ears, finger gauntlets to control his movements in the electronic universe. He wondered sometimes if Elway ate real food and slept in a real bed and had sex with real women, or if his off hours were all virtual all the time.

Overdrive sped up his car, but only slightly, as cars crowded around them, the thick traffic of Monday morning’s first rush.

“Where are we?” Elway asked.

“Take off your goggles and look.”

“Can’t. Collating.”

“Passing the Lodge in a quarter.”

“I thought we’d be closer by now.”

“Me too.” Andre shook tension out of his fingers and shifted his shoulders. What was with the traffic today? This kind of volume slowed everything down.

[
ATTENTION. ATTENTION.
]