Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (33 page)

“Brian Forget,” she says. “My husband’s name is Brian Forget.”

In my personal office, deep within Burroughs Oversight, Nancy Forget accepts a chair but declines coffee. She smoothes the front of her dress as she sits, holding her purse in her lap as though to keep something between herself and the world. I can smell her hand lotion—patchouli, I think. She seems like a good match to her husband: nervous, pleasant, ordinary.

I sit down.

“So, what did Brian tell you about the case?”

“Well, obviously he couldn’t say much—you said he wasn’t allowed to.” I hadn’t said anything of the kind. “But he said that you needed information from his job, from Body Works. It was the key to an important case and he helped you solve it—you and the police—even though he wasn’t really supposed to give you information without permission. He gave it to you anyway and it helped save that guy’s life. A sim star. I think it was one of the AI ones?”

It wasn’t, it was an all-too-human Max Prince, but I nod anyway.

“Anything else?”

I’m curious just how far Forget took his exaggerations. He 
had
 given us important information, but only because Felon had threatened him.

“Well, that was about it mostly. You said how it was good working with him and that he should call you if he ever needed anything because you owed him a favor. Well, now I’m asking 
for
 him.”

She thrusts her jaw out a little as though expecting me to challenge her right to call in a favor that I never actually promised to her husband, whose role in the case was far smaller and more passive than he’d made out. Correcting her seems cruel, though.

“What kind of favor did you have in mind Mrs. Forget?”

Which is when she starts crying. She pulls some tissue from her purse and I give her a moment to get her tears under control.

“Sorry,” she says, blinking eyes rimmed with pink.

“Don’t worry about it.”

There’s no point pressing her, so I let things take their course. She misses some spots with her tissue and two teardrops fall onto the front of her dress, leaving small, dark dots.

“Brian’s having an affair.”

I almost laugh. It’s not nice, but it’s automatic. I get it under control before she can notice.

“He didn’t strike me as the sort of man who would do that.”

“He is, though. He must be. He sneaks around—he thinks he’s fooling me, but he’s not.”

“You want me to repay the favor I owe him by spying on him?”

She sighs a shuddery kind of sigh.

“Look, I know he seems confident and all that when you see him at work, but outside of his job he’s actually kind of naive. This is hurting me, but it’s going to end up hurting him too—later when it goes bad. He doesn’t see that part coming. He doesn’t know that he needs help, but he does and I’m here to get it. I know I’m not exactly glamorous, I can see how he could get infatuated, but I want it to stop before things get to the point where—you know? Where you can’t go back.”

I almost never take domestic cases, they’re emotional and messy, plus cuckolded spouses are not the best payers. They have others things on their minds and sometimes their assets get frozen by the courts pending the outcome of a divorce. Still, I can feel myself leaning toward taking the case. Mrs. Forget seems nice, with her rag of a dress and her face all blotchy from crying. Besides, we had to give her husband a pretty hard time during the Max Prince case and I still feel a little guilty.

“Well, that’s a very practical approach,” I say. “I hope you’ll understand that I have to be practical as well. 
As a favor
 I can take the case even though we have a policy of not doing domestics, but I can’t work for free.”

She shakes her head.

“I didn’t expect you to do it for free. I borrowed some money from my dad.”

“All right. And with any new client my policy is to be paid a retainer in advance. Like a lawyer, you know?”

“Look that’s fine, I don’t care about this stuff. I just want my husband back.”

She seems headed for more tears, and frankly my last excuses for not taking the case are pretty much gone, so I steer us in a different direction.

“Okay. Look, let’s do some of the easy parts of this, all right?”

She nods.

“Okay, let’s get your ID done. You want a moment?”

She nods and wipes at her eyes and nose with her tissue, then faces me.

“Is that okay?”

She still looks a bit of a wreck, but it doesn’t matter.

“Sure, that’s fine.”

I take out my kaikki and get a quick image of her face, flicking a copy to the civilian branch of ID. She comes up green—the name is right, her husband is Brian Forget. She digs out her own kaiiki and transfers me the retainer. I get a few details about her husband that I didn’t have before: hobbies, hangouts, friends. Half an hour later Mrs. Forget is looking—not exactly cheerful, but less likely to start crying—as she heads out the door.

As a licensed security specialist I have access to the Panopticon, although not the level of access that the police or the Security Corps have. I sign onto the system and input Brian Forget’s kaikki ID.

All those flash notices that you get on your kaikki—telling you about a sale around the corner from where you’re shopping at the moment, or announcing complimentary hors d’oeuvres at a restaurant near where your car is parked—require it to track your whereabouts. The truth is, though, that the consent form you click to allow it to follow your movements doesn’t mean much. California issued a mandatory On Switch Order by covert executive fiat years ago, so your kaikki knows where you are whether you want it to or not.

The LAPD use tracking information a lot, as do the Security Corps, the civilian and military branches of ID, and other bureaucracies. They get some information I can’t, but I can engage a simple location program and then access public camera records to get a pretty complete video record of a person’s recent movements, at least on public streets and in quasi-public places that require a city license, like bars and stores. The system’s not perfect—it follows the device, not the person’s body, and you can’t force people to have their kaikki with them at all times—but it’s extremely useful for simple retroactive surveillance.

I let the system run for a while and roll my chair over to an editing bay, where I spend some time pulling images and video clips from a surveillance video that Jessie shot on the Parker case. There are some instances where the P-Con just won’t do what we need, where a subject spends too much time in unmonitored areas, or where the rules of evidence for court require you to maintain a continuous recording. Parker is one of those, an employee theft and fraud ring that involves tracking stolen goods, so Jessie went into the field to get a custom recording. Still, even when the client needs uninterrupted video, they don’t want to sort through the whole recording themselves—they just want to have it on file for the police and for lawyers. All they want to look at is a few key stills and video clips.

Twenty minutes later a low chime issues from the P-Con station, signaling that the records have been compiled. I go back and queue up the video, starting a week ago. I always experience a little vertigo watching these files. It’s not like the field surveillance Jessie did, where the camera tracks a specific subject. In the P-Con video, Forget’s car slips in and out of traffic, tracked by immobile traffic cameras with panoramic lenses that distort everything a little. Plus the image isn’t very high-res, so using it too much can strain your eyes. The recordings aren’t even volumetric, like a sim would be—instead they’re shot using a parallax lens. The image looks three dimensional at a glance, but you can’t circle around it and see it from different perspectives because it’s shot with a single camera.

I use a set of personalized gestures I’ve developed over the years, barely thinking about what I’m doing. I point to my right or left to speed or slow the image, fast forwarding through the irrelevant parts and looking more carefully at the parts that might be important. Eventually Forget emerges from his car and wanders into a mall in Gramercy Park. When I get a good angle I hold my hand up, palm forward, to halt the video and snap my fingers to take a snapshot. I roll the video again and Forget wanders through the mall, the Panopticon stitching together images from multiple cameras that cover his movements as he wanders through stores and gets a hot dog in the food court.

The cameras aren’t aimed at anyone in particular—when the images were recorded no one knew which person within the camera’s field would turn out to be important, and while I’m tracking Forget today, tomorrow it might be the woman walking past him that’s under surveillance. But the P-Con system automatically forces the image to center on the person you’re tracking, which means the background moves around in an uncontrolled way, giving the video has a jerky, shaky quality that makes me irritable.

I watch Forget buy shoes, eat in a restaurant, drive to work, and drive home at the end of the day. I watch him go to a friend’s apartment and leave again. I watch him go to work again, and again, and again, and return home each time. My back starts to get stiff and I shift positions once, twice, three times. This is how it works, the boring part of the job, the part they leave out of the sim shows.

And then, all at once, it stops being boring. The last vestiges of my earlier dreamy state disappear, and I suddenly find myself very alert and focused.

Forget isn’t meeting a lover, he’s meeting Rahn Van Der Veen at Diamond Jack’s. A thousand alarms would have gone off within the P-Con system at the prospect of someone in a sensitive industry, like Forget, meeting a foreign national, if only the system had been monitoring Van Der Veen. But he isn’t just a foreigner, he’s a senior staff member at the Temporary Texas Legation, which means he has diplomatic immunity. Technically, immunity only prevents arrest and prosecution, not surveillance, but as a matter of good manners diplomats aren’t routinely surveilled.

Sacramento holds few very laws truly sacrosanct, but it treasures the ones regarding immunity because they’re reciprocal—only by strictly enforcing the law within its own territory can it expect its staff in Texas to receive the same courtesy. The government knows that this means Texas will get away with some espionage, but by the same token so will California, and on balance that makes the trade worthwhile.

With respect to Forget, though, the rules are clear and unforgiving. No matter what protections Van Der Veen may enjoy from criminal prosecution, they don’t extend to a California citizen who aids and abets him. I’m legally bound to report that Forget, who has access to the latest and most sensitive shell technology, has met with a foreign agent in what appears to be an illicit encounter. If he’s passing Van Der Veen information, that’s treason, and that means the death penalty.

Technically I’m required to report to the Security Corps “forthwith,” but as any lawyer can tell you that doesn’t quite mean “instantaneously.” It means something like “as soon as reasonably practicable.” So I figure I’m allowed to at least call his wife first and let her know that things are both better and worse than she thought. At least he’s not having an affair.

I chirp her kaikki, but get a message saying that no such ID exists. I re-enter it with the same result. There’s an uneasy feeling growing inside me. I run her image through civilian ID again. Last time it came up green, meaning that according to the biometric data held by the Nation of California she was, in fact, Nancy Forget, wife of Brian Forget. Now the system fails to show any result at all. In the brief time since I first ran her picture all record of her has disappeared. Officially she now never existed.

I grab my helmet and head to the garage.

In the Empire of the Monkey King will be available on Amazon and Kobo soon.

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TJ is dying and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it.  I’ve dragged him backward, away from the stairs, but we’re still caught in the stairwell and shots are coming from the landing above us.  I can also hear footsteps coming up from several floors below, headed our way, and I know damned well that it isn’t the cavalry coming to save us.  We’ve been out-maneuvered, trapped.  I look down at TJ, crumpled on the floor.  He’ll die there if I don’t make some kind of move.  I pray that my reflexes are fast enough and charge forward, up the stairs, toward the gunfire.  In the moment that I act, my mind suddenly becomes calm.

I know from their firing pattern that there are two bandits on the landing, so I opt for my flechettes, firing from both wrist units at once.  One guy gets off a shot that zings past my cheek, then he goes down with a grunt.  The flechettes’ nerve agent works before he can fire again.  First he’s doubled over, then kneeling, then curled up on his side, convulsing.  The other is hit in the face.  There isn’t even time for the drug to go to work – the right half of his head simply explodes from the impact of the miniature metal arrows, with their deadly-sharp stabilizing fins, and his body rockets back against the wall behind him, then slumps into a sitting position, brains and blood making a grisly pattern on cement blocks behind him.  As soon as the bandits are down, though, my calm deserts me and fear washes over me again.