Lone Wolf (18 page)
Now Drummond sends Cat out to make the pickup. The order will certainly be logged somewhere, but just as certainly the assignment log won’t say anything about me. IrreleCorp, however, they’re smart; they know Cat knows me, and they figure out what her assignment actually is. They now issue an order, through the computer network, to an FRT team to set up on Montlake Boulevard near Roanoke and take out the Tsarina expected to be heading south sometime after 0255. The rationale's probably something like “magical terrorists, considered extremely dangerous, eliminate before they can get their first spell off.” In other words, ambush.
Despite the drek you see on the pirate trids, “shoot first, then question the remains” isn’t Lone Star SOP, and ambushes aren’t just another assignment. The FRT team leader would almost certainly have questioned the order, and checked it out through various channels. Unfortunately, those “various channels” would all have been electronic and computer-mediated, and IrreleCorp could have given the correct verifications and authorizations to set the team leader’s little mind at ease that the op was kosher. Off lumber the armed and armored troopers to do their bit to save Seattle.
Boom! Say farewell to Tsarina, Rick Larson, and Cat Ashburton. The next morning, of course, the drek’s going to hit the pot when it turns out the orders logged and verified as coming from Drummond’s office
didn’t
come from Drummond at all. Much chaos, but by that point I’m safely scragged—mission successfully accomplished.
Frag it, it holds together. It
could
have happened that way. With deep enough computer penetration, IrreleCorp could have turned a nice, clean pickup into an ambush. It didn’t have to be Drummond, Layton, McMartin, and the other suits at all. Frag, just when I thought I knew who to blame.
I shake my head again. I can run through all the paranoid options and alternatives and possibilities and probabilities till my ears bleed, but it’s not going to do any good without hard data to help me pick and choose between them. I need to know something—
anything
—about what’s going down. But how to go about it?
I've still got that bee in my fragging bonnet about the Tir corp-Cutters connection. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with
anything, but at the moment it feels like the only thing I can
follow up on. Everything else seems just too big, too overwhelming. (Like, how do I get some leverage on the fragging Star?) It’s like somebody told me years ago when I was at university: “If you don’t know what to do next, do what you can.” Good advice, I suppose. With a heartfelt sigh
I swing my feet to the floor and prepare myself to face the day.
* * *
I feel naked and exposed and incredibly vulnerable walking the streets of Tarislar. It’s not just the way the elves glare at me with undisguised hostility or simply pretend I don’t fragging exist—though that’s part of it. No, it’s the realization that I don’t have the wheels to bug out if trouble comes looking for me. My bike’s gone, and cruising in a stolen car is too much of a risk.
If anything, Tarislar by day looks even worse than Tarislar by night. You can’t see the bonfires and jury-rigged braziers burning in the vacant lots among the wreckage of collapsed buildings, but you can see the shanty-town huts and makeshift shelters on what used to be manicured lawns. There’s a sense of despair that hangs in the air like a bad smell. Not the smoldering, volatile anger you’d feel in an ork-dominated slum, but a kind of dull acceptance and fatalism. It makes me sad.
After ten or fifteen minutes of walking in the cold gray drizzle, I find the public phone I’m looking for. The hinges are too rusted or jammed to close the door, but at least the booth shelters me from the rain. I sit down on the metal ledge and punch in Cat’s LTG number.
Frag, I should have known it would hit me like this, seeing Cat’s recorded message. But I didn’t. When her face resolves on the screen—big eyes, copper hair, sensuous lips—I feel like someone’s slipped an ice-cold stiletto between my ribs under my heart. My eyes burn and my vision blurs, and I have to fight to get air into my lungs. For a few moments, I don’t think I can stand it. I want nothing more than to jump up and run. But then the rage reasserts itself, burning and churning in my belly. Somebody’s going to pay, oh yes, they’re going to pay—and then I know I
can
handle it. My emotions fade away, and I feei cold and hard and barely human as Cat’s outgoing message comes to an end. With fingers that don’t quite feel like mine, I key in the access code for the Special Favors file. My hands shake so much I almost can’t enter the Mayflower password, but somehow I manage it.
Cat’s little demons or smartframes or whatever the frag she called them have been busy little buggers. The five names—Crystalite, Griffin, and the rest—have become section headings, with paragraphs of text and blocks of numerical data after each one. Instead of a list, it’s starting to look like a biz report. I quickly scan through the file, but the only one thing that catches my eye is that one entry—the one for Telestrian Industries Corporation—is much bigger, two or three times bigger, than the others. Using the phone’s keyboard, I flag that section of the file for future attention.
Then, working quickly, I insert a blank datachip into the phone’s data port, and key in the instruction to download the file. A second or two later the machine beeps, I extract the chip, break the connection, and head back out into the rain.
For a few moments I consider finding a good overwatch position, hunkering down and observing the pay phone. I might learn something important. After all, IrreleCorp or whoever set up the ambush must know by now I survived. If I were them, I don’t think I’d miss the trick of putting a trace on Cat’s phone. (But then I’d probably have remotely nuked all data files on her telecom, if that’s possible. Again, I feel like I’m missing something.)
Then again, I know so little about what’s going on that spotting a team responding to my call—coming to do a drive-by on the phone, for example—wouldn’t help me much. More background information, that’s what I need. I turn and stride off back toward The Promise.
There are some advantages to dossing down at a fleabag like The Promise. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about maid service breezing in and disturbing your thought processes.
I’m sitting on the bed in an uncomfortable half-lotus, with a hot new pocket secretary on my lap. (“Hot” designating its origins, certainly not its performance.) My headware isn’t designed for poring over a textual data file like the drek I downloaded from Cat’s phone, and I seem to have misplaced my own palmtop computer somewhere along the way. Pretty careless. I really should keep better track of my toys. So anyway, I obviously needed something that could do the job, and just as obviously I wasn’t going to find a Radio Shack or a Fuchi distributor in the depths of the Tarislar ghetto.
Fortunately, ghettos and their ilk have their own channels of distribution, and a blind transfer of cred to a hard-bitten elf recommended to me by The Promise’s desk clerk—after another transfer of cred, of course—netted me an “almost-new” Yamaha PDA-5 that had “fallen off the back of a truck” elsewhere in the sprawl. The price was high—two-K, almost as much as I’d pay for a new one with a manual and warranty and such drek—but so was my level of need, and the elf fence knew it. We struck the deal and I hied myself off back “home” to get to work.
For the third time or so. I’m going over the file that Cat’s
demons put together on the five names, hoping that something will ring a bell. So far, no luck. The five names are all corps—Crystalite Environmental Research Corporation, Griffin Technologies Incorporated, Teiestrian Industries Corporation, Margaux Enterprises, and Starbright Advanced Synergetics (a good dandelion-eater corp name if I ever heard one)—all more or less significant players in the Tir and, in some cases, elsewhere in the world as well. As Cat herself told me, none has any official presence in Seattle or UCAS in general. Of the five, Telestrian Industries Corporation—generally known as TIC—is by far the biggest. A big, sprawling, aggressive conglomerate, with its fingers into a hundred different pies. Annual cash flow and assets both measured in the multibillions of nuyen with corporate headquarters in a fragging arcology in downtown Portland. Into everything from genetic engineering to cutting-edge software development, with a few really weird sidelines going on in parallel.
In contrast, the others are more moderate outfits. Not small—still up in the billion nuyen range—but much less diversified and pervasive than TIC. According to Cat’s demons, all of them have something in the way of “special security” forces—read “covert ops assets”—and hints that they’ve shown some kind of activity in the sprawl at one time or another.
And frag, why shouldn’t they? Seattle’s a major market, with a population density more than twice that of downtown Portland. There’s more megacorporate presence in Seattle than anywhere in the 'fir, and thus more biz opportunities for an ambitious, aggressive outfit trying to evade the restrictive “business practices” laws promulgated by the elven Council of Princes. Why would a corp from the Tir
not
want to diversify northward into the sprawl?
But why would all five of these corps be sending “special security” assets into the sprawl rather than doing things openly? I can think of several reasons off the top of my head. First, to avoid legal restrictions on their out-of-Tir activities (I don’t know the details of the Tir biz laws, but I hear they’re pretty fragging draconian). Second, because they don’t want their competitors back home to know they’re cozying up to Aztechnology, say, for a major joint venture. Third, because what they’re planning is against UCAS and Seattle metroplex law. And fourth, from what I’ve seen of the biz world, corps sometimes like this cloak-and-dagger drek for the sheer frag of it, just because it’s chill. Of those
possible reasons, it seems that only the third one might involve cutting some kind of deal with the Cutters.
Frag it, I’m getting more pieces to the puzzle, but they’re all fragging blank, with nothing at all to cue me as to how they go together. How can the espionage-counterespionage slots who do this on a daily basis keep from going round the fragging twist? I’d last a day or two—a week at most— before my brains started to pour out my ears . . .
Hold the fragging phone, what the frag’s that?
While I was mentally shuffling all the blank pieces around, my fingers were idly playing with the pocket secretary’s mini-trackball, scanning up and down through the text file. My eyes were on the display, but they weren’t really seeing it. Then suddenly I spotted something. Fragged if I know what it was; I’d scanned way past it before I could react. I don’t know what I saw. Not consciously—at the time, my conscious brain apparently wasn’t jacked into my eyes— but, equally apparently, whatever my eyes snagged on meant something to my subconscious. Meant enough to trigger an internal alarm sharp enough to jolt me fragging near off the bed.
Desperately, I try to re-exert control, willing my fingers to stop trembling. Carefully—oh so carefully—I put my thumb back on the mini-trackball and start scanning slowly and carefully through the text. I’m near the beginning of the TIC entry, and I’m pretty sure I was scanning backward when it happened, so I scroll slowly forward through the text. I’m not trying to read every word—that’d numb my mind out for sure—but I am trying to make sure my eyes pass over every line. If my subconscious jumped up and yelled, “Here, you dumb frag,” once before, maybe it’ll do it again. Where is it . . . where is it ... ?
There. I lock out the trackball so I can’t accidentally jog it, and take a deep, slow breath.
I’ve got you, you fraggers. The first lead—oh so tiny, but maybe oh so important—the first time you didn’t tie up all loose ends. (Why not? Were you in too much of a rush? Or is this all just a red herring you’re dragging across my path? No, zero that, I can’t let doubt in, not now.) I lean closer to the screen and read the text surrounding the words that
caught my eye.
It’s right in the middle of a long, long list of minor companies with which TIC has ongoing joint ventures, companies all across North America and around the world. All small, so small I’ve never heard of any of them before .. . except one.
Lightbringer Services Corporation. A small (as these things go) telecommunications provider, based in Honolulu, Kingdom of Hawaii. Offices in Tokyo, Macao, Singapore, Palembang, Quezon City, Sydney, Quito, Mexico City . . . and Seattle.
Lightbringer. The elf—Pietr Tal-something—who visited Nicholas Finnigan said he was with Lightbringer. At the time, we’d both assumed that was a cover. A logical guess, considering neither of us had heard of Lightbringer before, and there was no hint at a tie-in between that corp and anything else that was going down. Now? There’s a connection, all right, priyatel, a big fragging connection.
Or is there? Yet again, I feel like somebody’s poured cold water into my soul. Just like with blaming Drummond and squad for the Montlake ambush, there are some other twisty little complexities here. I don’t know that TIC’s the Tir corp hooking up with the Cutters. I don’t know that Pietr Taldrek’s actually a part of Lightbringer. Frag, maybe the elf who visited Finnigan just happened to pick Lightbringer as his cover, and Lightbringer just happens to be in bed with TIC, which just happpens to be one of several Tir corps interested in doing biz in Seattle. Does the Lightbringer-TIC connection mean, then, that Telestrian Industries Corporation is actually my so-called “IrreleCorp”? No, frag it. It could be pure chance, or it could be a really sly disinformation campaign designed to put me on the wrong track if I try to trace Finnigan’s visitor.