Out of the Black (34 page)

The second message had been sent about twenty minutes later. He played it. The face that filled the screen was controlled as ever, but subtly different- strained, perhaps. He was terse: "Call me. Carefully. Soon."

He opened the text message. Also terse: "No call. Come. Where we first met."

Gotcha.

Before he switched off his tablet, he linked it to his Uni and paid his bill. After an unsuccessful moment of impulse suppression, he left a five hundred thousand dollar tip. Under cover of the table, he snapped the tablet in half. Going underground.

He stacked the two pieces of the tablet in his concealed hands, and broke them again. He pulled the optical storage from the piece that had been the upper left quadrant of the ruined tablet, crushed it to powder between his fingers.

He left the untouched food on the table and got up from the booth. He took two steps toward the door before halting in mid-stride. He returned to the table and scooped up two spring rolls. Underground food usually stinks.

He paused again outside the restaurant's door. He stayed just long enough to hear the excited scream from inside.

To live is to fly, he thought, remembering the line from an old song. He was gone before Asuko bolted out the door looking for him.

***

The stolen microvan passed Mercy Memorial Hospital for the third time. Rae looked right and left, but didn't slow. It was a mid-sized building, maybe thirty floors, on the near north side of the city. Its stone was dark brown, its windows the deep gray of privacy glass, its overall impression was that of a twenty-first century castle. It seemed quiet, but for the moment, she was content to circle the block, attempting to wear a matching moat around the neo-baroque structure.

At a little before 2 AM, the only light was from the city itself. The light from below the sparse clouds gave the sky the color of a child's dream of the deep sea. Behind her, the mantra continued on one-minute intervals. "Seek medical attention."

"Stop naggin'!" When she'd left Jerry's, the idea of taking action was a relief- exciting even. Now, in orbit around the hospital, the end of her waiting seemed less to beckon and more to loom before her.

Finally, on her fourth circuit around the block, she turned right and headed down into the building's underground parking structure. Descending from night into artificial daylight, she guided the gray microvan to a halt in a small dead spot between two security cameras near the hospital's ambulance run. She gently unloaded the comatose bodies onto the sidewalk. After a few seconds spent resisting the mighty pull of common sense, her will won out over her fear and she closed the sliding door and got back into the driver's seat. A sob caught in her throat when she saw them lying abandoned in the rearview mirror, but then she rounded the corner and drove down through the levels of the parking garage. Though spaces were available on the second level down, she took the microvan all the way to the eighth, and lowest, level.

After winding through the whole level to find the most isolated spot, she settled on a parking space between two supports where a dim light left a few shadows.

She was about to see how much time her crazy plan would buy them.

She rummaged through the padded case Alex had brought from his apartment. After a few moments of tech archaeology, she located the item she sought. She removed the badge from her uniform and placed it on the interface pad of the item Alex had called the Hacktronic 3000. It was a little invention he'd been perfecting since his senior year in high school. It had been through many revisions, including four major rebuilds, but the machine's purpose had remained unchanged: to facilitate security mayhem.

Basically, it was a ROM rewriter.

Rae smiled at the memory of the first time Alex had introduced her to his little project. They had been together romantically for perhaps two months. Rae hadn't yet been told that she didn't live in the real world, so she was still shockable by illegal technology. She had been feigning interest in Alex's hobbies, so he had shown her his pride and joy. She hoped she could remember how to work it.

The HT3K (Alex's idea of a pet name, at least he'd stopped calling her 'girlfriend 1.0') rewrote the read-only Assisi chips like the ones in Unis and almost any other security system's hard keys. Alex might well be the only person in the world with the ability to do something so fundamentally dangerous to civilized society. With this machine and a few pieces of information, you could wire yourself to look like anyone digitally.

With her work tablet, she pulled up a local copy of an arrest report from three weeks ago. It had been a brawl at a downtown club that had been finally contained after eight officers had been called to the scene. From the report, she harvested the badge ID of Jeanette Woods, one of the two other female officers on the scene, and the only one of Rae's ethnicity. She transferred the number to the HT3K, and after a few false starts, wrote that number into the "unwritable" Assisi chip in her badge.

Of course, she had no idea if it would work, and no way to test it without exposing herself to a query. This was probably not going to work. Even if it did, macro security daemons would eventually notice the same key in use at two locations.

She used the HT3K to re-tag her tablet and Uni to seem like they were Jeanette's.

She attached the badge to her chest, grabbed the duffel and Jerry's plant, and stepped from the microvan.

***

"That was fast! You guys have them stacked up in the back of the ambulance?" Lynda's stylus was poised above her tablet.

"Two males, one with field-treated head wounds, the other comatose with no physical indications." the taller of the EMTs said, not looking up from his monitoring equipment.

"Just really sleepy, huh?" Lynda gave him a look of laconic amusement.

He nodded, "I think this medkit's been on for a while..."

Lynda interrupted, her stylus already moving. "I need their Uni keys."

"No ID."

"Why is this never easy?"

"Because it's life, not video."

Lynda summoned the triage doctor for a DNA ID authorization. "They stable?"

"They'll make it to the OR, but I don't have any prognosis."

"What happened?"

"No idea. We found them in the parking garage."

Lynda's stylus paused. "In
our
garage?"

The EMT nodded.

"You open a police incident yet?"

Both EMTs shook their heads. The shorter one hooked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the door. "We just stumbled over them a few seconds ago... just outside."

The doors from an internal hallway on the right of the ER reception opened. A uniformed patrol officer entered carrying a duffle bag over her shoulder and a potted plant that screamed 'hospital gift shop'. The alarm went off as she stepped through the scanner just inside the door, but everyone could clearly see the pistol on her hip.

Behind the security desk, Clint cleared the alarm and waved the woman through/p>

She nodded to the triage nurse and the EMTs. "Can anyone point me to the maternity ward?"

"Whoa. Speak of the devil!" the shorter EMT whispered.

"You on duty?" Lynda asked.

"I'm always on duty," the officer responded, "what's up?"

"These two were abandoned in the parking garage..."

The officer looked skeptical, "They look a little old for child abandonment... besides they look like they might work here." She smiled at the EMTs.

The EMTs exchanged glances. "I think she meant these guys." One said, gesturing to their unconscious charges.

The officer nodded. She set the plant down on the security desk and pulled out her tablet. "I'll open the incident... how long before visiting hours are over?"

"For our pals in blue? Never." Clint said with a smile.

"Well, okay then, lets get started!"

Lynda nodded, gesturing to the corner of the desk. The door to the ER opened, admitting a thin, kind-faced man in his forties. He wore the loose garb and requisite white coat of an ER doctor. "You rang, Lynda?"

"Yeah, I need authorization to do a medical ID on two John Doe types."

"Describe the scene when you found them..." The officer said to the EMTs, stylus poised over her tablet.

"Officer..." Lynda consulted her tablet, "...Woods will be handling the police report."

"Swell." The doctor turned to the two patients. After a few moments of rudimentary tests, he used his tablet to authorize the DNA ID. He sent the patient with the head wound to OR-1, and the sleeper to imaging for a deep scan.

The officer was finished getting info from the EMTs and was waiting patiently. "I'll need your incident key for the report, Doctor..."

"Wyler." He said as he transferred the hospital's incident key to the officer's tablet. "Anything else you need from me, Officer Woods?"

"What's up with them?" she said in an offhand manner that struck him as somewhat contrived. Maybe she was new on the job, nervous.

"The one with the head trauma is pretty straightforward... multiple blows to the head, concussion, some fractures patched by the kit on his head. We should have him out of surgery within an hour. Only weird thing was that the medkit's logs show that it's been on him for about two days. Now, the other one is deeply strange. My portable couldn't find anything wrong with him, but the IV in his arm's been there for two days too... Maybe the deep scanners or the neural mappers can pick up some clues. I'm having the scans forwarded to neurography for analysis. Hopefully we'll know more soon."

The officer looked thoughtful. "They were found in the ambulance run outside the ER. Any other weird stuff happen here recently?"

"Heavens yes!" The doctor chuckled. "We're Harm central around here. It doesn't get much weirder than that. You see someone try to eat their own fingers and pretty much everything else is boring as cold oatmeal."

The officer gave her head a knowing shake. "Yeah... when will that fad die out?"

"Yeah... I'm going to poke around the scene where..." The officer was interrupted by a woman's disoriented shriek from outside.

The doctor gestured toward the entrance. "And here's tonight's first Harm, no doubt. Care to stick around for the show?"

"There aren't enough donuts in the world... Thanks doctor."

The officer moved toward the interior doors, then turned back. "Where's your security post? I'll need to see the logs from the place where the victims were found."

"Straight ahead. Follow the signs... you can't miss it." The doctor turned away as the exterior doors burst open. Two EMTs wheeled in a gurney with a screaming woman strapped to it. Her platinum and red-tipped hair was disheveled, soaked in sweat. Her fancy black, holo-traced party clothes were ripped from her struggle against the restraints.

Rae rounded the corner and pushed the call button outside the hospital's security post. After a few seconds, the buzzer sounded and she pushed into the small room.

"What can I do for you officer?" The room's only occupant was a lanky surfer type. He sat before a panoramic display, reading a publication about really fast looking cars on his tablet. The display before him held multiple open windows, which monitored the entry points and key areas of the hospital. The room was dark; the smell of stale coffee colored the air.

"I need access to a security feed. Need to do some research on two John Does found in the ambulance run."

"Sure thing!" The guy leaned forward and made the necessary checks of Rae's credentials. Satisfied that she was in fact Jeanette Woods, faithful minion of the CPD, he authorized her for the access. Rae's tablet chirped as the interface opened to the hospital's security systems.

"Just camera logs?"

She nodded, "Yeah, thanks."

"No prob. They were actually found off camera, so I don't know how much this will help."

"Yeah. Maybe I'll find a clue or something." She gave him a wink.

"So, how's life in the big leagues?"

"Big leagues?"

"I've been thinking 'bout giving the academy a try for a while now."

"You should... it's a great job. Not like the videos though."

"What's the best part?"

"Pulling cats out of trees."

"I thought the fire department took care of that."

"Helping old ladies across the street?" She gave him a smile.

"You get to help old ladies a lot here... maybe we should switch."

"Too many Harms here. I couldn't stand all the action."

He beamed, sitting perhaps a little straighter in his chair. "Yeah, it's a rough and tumble job. Hospital security, it's not for everyone."

Behind him, on the wall, the doctor stalked the Harm on the gurney, waiting for the right moment to make his move with his syringe.

"Keep an eye on that." Rae gestured toward the screen and turned to go.

Minutes later, Rae found a private corner at the end of the hall where Alex had been taken. There was a small, uninhabited waiting area with vending machines and a few chairs. She sat with her back to the wall and used her tablet to open the interface to the security system. The surfer had given her access to the entire hospital's surveillance system. Cool.

She opened a window into Alex's room first. He had already been through the scanner, and now was on a gurney in a holding room awaiting the imaging specialist's recommendations. He was the only patient in the room.

Next, she opened a window into OR-1 where Ping was undergoing surgery. She couldn't tell how things were going. The camera showed two surgeons with their hands inside ports in a coffin-sized box. At the foot of the box, a tech monitored their progress. The soundtrack didn't help much either. When they weren't talking golf, they spoke largely in the mumbo dialect of jumbo. Sometimes Rae had trouble knowing which jargon was medical and which was golf... she understood neither.

She opened windows for each entrance to the building, looking for the arrival of more killers like those at the library. She opened another window showing the roof, just in case.