Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (26 page)

She drew in another breath at the bottom of the stairs before going through the door onto the middle floor. The gas had probably not got down there, but she was pleased to note that nothing seemed to be affecting her. And this floor was more enclosed: corridors and properly partitioned offices. Sandoval’s heat signature was just past midway down the middle of three corridors. Fox closed on the location wondering whether she was being paranoid… Then again, if she was right, was Sandoval going to try the same trick again?

Only one way to find out. She stopped outside the office with the heat signature in it. He was sitting some way from the door, which was a bad sign. Fox took her visor off; if she was right about Sandoval, then the visor was about to become a liability. Checking her position with her pistol’s sight, she aimed her foot at the door, kicked it hard, and then threw herself backwards. There was a bright flare of light and a sharp bang, and all Fox’s in-vision displays vanished as her implanted computer crashed.

‘Damn clever of you, Fox.’ Sandoval’s voice came through the open door. ‘Figured it out, didn’t you?’

Fox shuffled around into a crouch, aiming her pistol at the doorway and praying that she would see him in the near-darkness if he came through. ‘Most of it. Remen was involved in the Dallas op. She’s doing this for revenge, but she can’t be the only one, and you were never with UA.’

‘No. No way. How did you get past her gas?’

‘Damn, you guys need to do better research. Standard Army biomods–’

‘Shit! Enhanced muscles, boosted reflexes, and enhanced blood.’

‘Uh-huh. They re-engineer our bone marrow to produce more effective immune system cells and blood that’s more efficient at carrying and storing oxygen. Hurts like fuck when they introduce the viral agents, but now I can hold my breath for ten minutes, even in combat. Oh, and the only people who know those details are military, or NIX.’ She heard something, one careful step. He was moving. Would he be stupid enough to speak again and give his position away? ‘There’s that crap you put in my wine last night too. Jackson wasn’t able to identify if, but it’s a lot like a date-rape drug the sprawlers call “Cupie.”’

‘The lab boys have a fancy name for it. Increases the libido and suppresses inhibitions, critical thinking, and memory uptake. Makes it
way
easier to get someone in bed. I wanted you sympathetic, obviously, but mostly I just wanted to fuck you.’

Fox leaned to her right, bringing her gun around the doorframe. ‘Hope you enjoyed it.’ She pulled the trigger, not sure exactly where he was, but spreading her fire across an arc which covered the near part of the room. Without waiting to see whether she had hit him, she moved on past the door, hitting the magazine eject on her pistol as she went.

She heard him round the corner into the corridor as she continued down, pulling a fresh magazine from her pocket. Three loud bangs slammed into her ears as he fired into the dark space randomly, and she barely heard his voice for the ringing. ‘Clever, but you’re out, right?’ A pencil beam of light stabbed out into the darkness. ‘You’re out and I’ve–’

Fox pushed back against the door behind her, almost falling into the room and then rolling sideways. Three more rounds blasted out in the direction of the sound. Plaster exploded and rained down. Fox slammed the magazine into her gun and watched as an ammo counter appeared in-vision, followed by a sighting camera: her implant was back up. Sandoval stepped into the doorway, his torch beam scanning rapidly to locate her. Fox raised her gun and fired. She had time to watch the blood splattering the wall behind him, a spray of heat in the infrared display from her sight. The torch and then the pistol fell from his hands, clattering to the floor, followed by the thud of his body.

She checked: there was no pulse, but if the EMTs managed to get to the place fast enough… Frowning, she headed for the stairs. If she got to a network and managed to connect, and could get a message through with an urgent tag, and the response was first rate… Chances were the bastard would still be dead, or alive and severely brain-damaged. Canard was going to throw a fit, and she had
very
limited evidence to prove that Sandoval had been after her. There was the drugged wine, but chain-of-evidence was gone on that. Canard might argue the drug was ‘just’ sexual, which would be just the kind of thing to muddy the waters. This was going to get nasty.

And then she got a connection to the network and things just got worse. Kit’s image was not animated due to the low bandwidth, but her voice certainly was. ‘Fox. I am glad you are back online. Miss Martins’ vertol transport to the spaceport fell off the flight control radar five minutes ago and is not responding to communications.’

Fox closed her eyes and took in one, long breath. When she let it out, she used it to express her exact feelings on the current situation. ‘Fuck!’

Part Seven: Striking Out

New York Metro, 2
^nd
February 2060.

‘You left a UA terrorist alive and a good cop dead.’ The words stung, even if they were being spoken by Canard and were balls. They had been at it for hours, him accusing Fox of murdering Sandoval and colluding with United Anarchy, and Fox repeating the same story over and over again.

‘She was wearing body armour or she’d be dead too, and he wasn’t a good cop. He may have been a good agent, but he wasn’t a good cop. He was probably a traitor and definitely a rapist.’

‘So you say.’

Fox looked across the interview room table at him, anger rising. ‘Yes. I do say that. I’ve been saying that for several hours while a friend of mine is in the hands of UA kidnappers. You’ve got the video from my pistol. You know he was hunting me. You’ve got the rather convenient coincidence of EMP bombs being used in this and the Bucksbridge killing. Which, by the way, you reviewed and agreed with Sandoval after a thirty-minute interview.’

Canard’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you–’

‘When I found out Sandoval was drugging my drink, I had Kit run over all the records NAPA holds on him. That included the investigation into his shooting of Bucksbridge, which I had access to because it was on one of my cases. By the way, Bucksbridge’s fingerprints weren’t found on the gun and there was no evidence of propellant residue on him, and you ignored that too.’

‘I’m not the one who shot a cop.’

‘No, you’re the one who investigated the cop I shot. Do you want me to specifically go on record and say I find your investigation suspect?’

Canard’s mouth opened and Fox watched emotions flicker over his face. He knew he had screwed up, and he knew the accusation was there now, on the interview recording, even if she had not made it official. If she did, how would the investigation go? What would the review team find? How would the simple accusation affect his voting delegations? She almost smiled: there was every probability that the last question was the one which was causing him the most grief.

‘Interview suspended, zero-nine-two-three. Stop recording.’ He gave it a beat before adding, ‘Go home and get some rest. You’re off both cases until this is resolved. I suggest you consider exactly where your loyalties, and future, lie, Inspector.’

‘Yeah,’ Fox replied, getting up from her chair and heading for the door. ‘I’m going to do that.’

~~~

‘Mister Martins has left several messages for you,’ Kit said as Fox stumbled around the kitchen pouring herself coffee.

‘Yeah, I’d imagine he has. Send him a message, please. I just got out of interview. I’ve been suspended while Canard is investigating Sandoval’s death. And I need some sleep or I’ll be no use to anyone.’

‘Message dispatched. Fox, what are we going to do? If you’re suspended, you can’t investigate either case. How will we find Miss Martins?’

Fox managed a smile. ‘I’m glad you’re invested in this too. Right now, we can’t. And I really do need some sleep.’

‘Then, perhaps, the coffee was not a good idea.’

Fox put the mug of coffee down on the nearest surface and headed for the bedroom. ‘For someone who’s only a few months old, you’re a surprisingly wise girl.’

Kit smirked at Fox’s retreating back. Age was something of a relative consideration for an AI, and it was also rather nice that Fox was treating her as a person rather than a thing… And then, because she was an AI and not a human, she became aware of some data records in her internal memory which she had not placed there. The existence of those records, which appeared to be data from video sources, troubled Kit considerably and she decided to run a full internal diagnostic before talking to Fox about them. Besides, Fox needed to sleep, and if the metadata on those records was correct, she was going to need all the sleep she could get.

~~~

‘I got their demands at midday,’ Jackson said. His voice was calm, steady, but Fox had only ever seen him look the same way in Dallas when he had been there for the briefing the last time his daughter had been taken captive. ‘They want all the data on the research being done at Jenner, and they want you to deliver it.’

‘Have you told NAPA about this?’ Fox asked, knowing what his answer was going to be. She had managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep before her VA had awoken her, quite urgently, at Kit’s insistence. The AI had explained that Jackson needed to see her, and also stated that there was new evidence which could wait until Fox was securely situated in Jackson’s office.

‘I haven’t. After I got your message earlier, I did some checking on the situation regarding NAPA and Canard. He was… less than helpful. He made it quite clear that you were not available for work on this case, but that NAPA was busy locating Teresa and the situation would be resolved quickly and efficiently.’ Jackson frowned at her. ‘Has your captain always been an asshole?’

‘He’s heavily into law and order politics. I think he’s hoping to push into a full-time advocacy role at some point, but he’ll be pressing for divisional captain and commander before then.’

‘No sights on the directorship?’

‘Too difficult to get up there. You just about have to assassinate the incumbent, and Canard’s too much of a wimp to go there.’

‘But perfectly capable of keeping you tied up while Teresa–’ His ashen colouring had reddened as the anger began to rise, but he forced it back down, gritting his teeth until he could speak again. ‘Kit has… obtained some interesting information. She requested external verification of her memory, security, and storage after she found this, and–’

‘Hold up. Why would she do that?’

‘Because,’ Kit said appearing beside them, ‘I do not know how the data arrived in my system. Someone apparently bypassed my security and was able to implant data records, large ones, without me being aware of it.’

‘I’ve checked her entire system. I can’t find any viruses or Trojans. There is just the anomalous data, and
that
has been validated against the sources the metadata points to. Someone has located camera feed data which NAPA has apparently
not
found, and they have given that data to Kit, anonymously.’

‘You’re both being obscure and I’m tired,’ Fox pointed out. There was a nagging pain in her head, between her eyes and clamping down around her skull. She was running on too little sleep and not enough coffee, and she was going to need a stimulant to keep her going if everyone kept avoiding the point.

Kit clearly recognised that. Turning, the AI looked at the large wall screen behind her and maybe a dozen video loops began playing on it. One showed a vertol landing, people rushing toward it. Fox saw Terri being rushed off the transport and out of sight, but a second feed picked her up being hustled into a ground vehicle.

‘Do we have the identification plate on that car?’

‘I scraped it from the video,’ Kit replied, ‘but the vehicle is not in any official records. However, one of these feeds shows it entering the Perth Amboy area.’

‘That’s… interestingly coincidental.’

‘It gets more interesting.’

Several of the other feeds showed Bucksbridge meeting with Killian and Caravel. It seemed like he had been kept away from the other UA members, but having found them it seemed it had been easy enough to locate the others. Remen was there with Killian, there were shots of Caravel, Remen, and Prentice, and Caravel had met with Sandoval, which was even more interesting. There was another man seen with Caravel and Sandoval, and in the footage taken from the kidnapping. Fox frowned at the unknown. There was something about him…

‘Do we know who the big guy is?’ Fox asked. He
was
big, heavily muscled and tall, his shape somewhat masked by the heavy coat he wore in every shot. He had long, dark hair with a white fringe which helped to hide his face, but there was something familiar about him.

‘We never get any really good views of his face,’ Jackson said, ‘but I ran a composite match on the best angles from a couple of frames. The system came up with this.’

The image changed to a still of a man Fox did recognise. The picture was from a UNTPP personnel file and the hair was different, shorter and without the white fringe. Her memory flashed over the man she had known and compared it to the images she was seeing on the screen. ‘It can’t be him, Jackson. He was big, but that bulk around the shoulders–’

‘Could be the result of cybernetic replacement.’

‘I watched him take half a dozen rounds to the chest. Gavin Marshall died in the bunker in Dallas. I blew the damn bunker up before I got out!’

‘Which may well be an explanation for the cybernetics. We know Prentice and Caravel were handling that operation for UA. We know a number of bodies were never found in the wreckage. Marshall’s body was one of those. I checked. One possibility concerning his actions on that day was a deliberate desire to sabotage the rescue.’

Fox frowned, biting her lips closed and staring at the floor. ‘So, Caravel was NIX, and he was working with Sandoval. Both were down around Dallas when the UA incident happened. Maybe they were there to push the UA cell into acting. Maybe they
formed
the cell. It wouldn’t be the first time an intelligence agency has set up what seems like a terrorist group to accomplish its aims.’