The 88th Floor (4 page)

Vandum was there, or what was left of him
anyway. His severed limbs were nailed into the wall in some
haphazard geometric pattern, his entrails tracing a crooked circle
around them. Vandum’s head rested on the floor just a few feet away
from the rest of his remains. The eyes had been removed, leaving
nothing but empty, dead sockets behind.

Rees felt something cold in his hands. He
looked down to see the thin, fiberoptic cables dangling from each
of his closed fists. They glistened with blood.

Trust those eyes of yours…

***

“
Rees?”

He came around slowly, like his
consciousness had to traverse a vast gulf just to return to his
physical body. When Rees finally opened his eyes, Squibby was
standing over him, her hand resting on his shoulder. Somehow, she
looked older than when he first entered the room. Maybe it was a
trick of the light, but he didn’t recall ever seeing so many
wrinkles on her face before.

Once he was stirring, she stepped back and
slumped into her chair. She’d brewed another cup of tea and had
stuffed her arm elbow-deep into a bag of chips. The strain of the
direct neural datafeed was hard on the body. Squibby probably
burned off almost a thousand calories every time she plugged in, so
she always had a craving for something with a lot of fat and salt
whenever she disconnected.

“
How long was I out?” Rees
asked. Without any windows, the apartment seemed to exist in a tiny
pocket of space unaffected by time.

Squibby put just enough space between her
mouthfuls of chips to answer.

“
About four hours,” she
said.

He was more tired than he thought. If not
for the dreams, he might have actually felt refreshed after such a
long nap.

“
You just finish
up?”

“
Yeah,” Squibby said. She
crunched another handful of chips and washed it down with a gulp of
tea.

“
So what’d you
find?”

Squibby didn’t answer right away. She took a
deep breath and seemed ready to answer, but didn’t. The second try
failed as well.

Rees had never seen her at a loss for
words.

“
What is it?” he asked.
“What’s wrong?”

“
Rees, I think you need to
let this one go.”

“
What?”

She shook her head.

“
Well, let’s start with
what I know. Whoever this Kurush guy is, that can’t be his real
name. There’s no trace of anyone by that name prior to him showing
up and pitching the tower project to Sircotin. Somehow, though,
he’s got all kinds of references from various companies that don’t
seem to have any previous connection to him. There are pictures of
him floating around here and there over the last few years, but
they’re all slightly different enough that it’s impossible to
construct a verifiable image of the guy. It’s weird, almost like
every picture has been altered after the fact to make him hard to
pin down.”

“
You think someone’s
trying to cover his tracks?”

“
No,” Squibby said, “this
is something different. Far as I can tell, the problem is in the
photos themselves. I found a few raw images pulled straight from
camera feeds. No post-shot alterations or anything.”

“
Video
records?”

Squibby grunted.

“
Sucks. All of it. I’ve
never seen a messier video trail. Not a single clear shot of his
face. Either something passes through the frame just as he turns or
there’s a lens flare or the image integrity breaks
down.”

“
What about the DNA scan
Morgan ran?”

“
That was a tough one,”
she said. “There’s nothing like it on record in any public or
private database, secure or otherwise. But if you go back further,
back before DNA screening scans, you start to find some similar
cases. Nothing concrete, but circumstances that resemble this one:
disfigured body, strange amount of influence for a John Doe, some
politician, preacher or businessman always swooping in to make any
problems go away.”

“
How far back are we
talking?”

“
Last known case was back
in the twentieth century, but there are some that go back even
longer. I even found mention of cases from fifteenth century Spain
and tenth century Iraq.”

Rees doubted the extreme cases could be of
much use. They were probably coincidental matches anyway.

“
What about Sircotin
itself? Anything useful there?”

Squibby shook her head.

“
They transferred most of
their servers to the new building a few weeks back. I don’t know
what’s going on at that place, but it’s got security like I’ve
never seen before.”

“
AI?”

“
I… I don’t know,” Squibby
said. “I don’t think so. AI’s adaptive; most of the time it
responds to what you do or what it thinks you’re going to do. This
stuff, though, it’s like it doesn’t give a shit what you’re doing.
It comes at you in weird ways, does things I’ve never seen or heard
of before.”

“
So you can’t break
through?”

“
Not yet, leastways. I’ve
got some sweepers sizing it up now. It’ll take them a while to get
a clear picture, but once they’re finished I’ll have a better idea
of how to crack it.”

“
How long will that
take?”

Squibby shrugged.

“
A week or two? Maybe a
month at the most?”

That wasn’t going to be much help. Sircotin
would have scrubbed anything useful from its records by the time
Squibby got access to them.

“
Isn’t there any way to
speed that up?”

“
Not from here,” she said.
“If I was on-site or had a hardline tap into the system that I
could access remotely, then I could probably force my way in.
Trying to access it from the outside is tougher; kind of like
sizing up a perp through a window instead of standing in front of
him.”

Rees thought for a moment. The building’s
upper levels would be locked up tight now that Sicrotin’s lawyers
were undercutting the investigation.

“
What about Vandum?” he
asked. “Anything unusual there?”

Squibby bit her lip and sighed.

“
Dead.”

Rees blinked, dumbfounded.

“
What? How?”

“
Suicide. Sircotin put him
on house arrest in his apartment, but he threw himself out the
window just a few hours ago. Some pedestrians made off with pics of
the body before some security goons scraped him off the
pavement.”

“
Shit,” Rees said.
“Anybody file a report?”

“
Of course not,” Squibby
said. “Looked pretty messy, though. He hit the ground so hard that
his eyes popped out.”

“
Wait, his eyes were
missing?”

Squibby nodded.

“
The images weren’t the
best quality, but the eyes were definitely gone.”

Rees was still trying to digest that bit of
information when he phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and
checked the screen. There was a message waiting for him. The phone
didn’t recognize the number.

“
Squibby,” he said, “run a
number for me, will you?”

She punched the numbers in as he relayed
them.

“
Holy shit,” she
said.

“
What? Who is
it?”

“
That number’s registered
to George Vandum.”

Rees tapped the screen to open the
message.

Southeast elevator.
816-121-5225-318-1620
.
Trust those eyes of yours,
detective
.

***

The first three floors of the Sircotin
Technologies building were open to the public, with stores,
workshops, and med-clinics all hawking the latest gadgets and
goodies the corporation had to offer. There was still plenty of
security, of course. Armed guards were positioned near the exits on
each floor and the security checkpoint at the main entrance ran a
detailed risk assessment scan on everyone that walked through the
doors. Left to his own devices, Rees wouldn’t have made it two
steps inside before a security officer in riot gear met him to
confiscate his gun and assign an escort to take him wherever he
needed to go. If he wasn’t there to shop and didn’t have a warrant
on file, the guard might even show him outside then and there.

Fortunately for him, he had help from
Squibby. She’d fixed him up with a scrambler that intercepted every
external scan directed at him and bounced back a preprogrammed,
adaptive signal that left him looking as innocuous as a file clerk.
Security personnel still might have flagged him as suspicious, but
they were used to trusting whatever the scanners fed into their
optic implants. Short of walking through the door with a gun in
hand, Rees could do just about anything without drawing undue
attention.

He headed for the elevator at the southeast
corner of the building. It stood by itself, far from the cluster of
elevators used by the shopping public. He activated the keypad next
to the doors and punched in the number from his phone.

816-121-5225-318-1620
.

The doors hissed open and Rees stepped into
the elevator.

“
I’m in.”

Squibby guided him from there. She had a
copy of the building’s blueprints handy and knew where he needed to
go to tap into the main Sircotin network. It was a simple matter of
finding the right floor, opening the elevator door, and deploying
the splicer drone, which was small enough to fit in Rees’s pocket.
Once the device hit the floor, its spidery legs snapped into
position and it scurried along the floor almost too quickly for the
naked eye to follow. It would hunt down the closest network cable
and cut in, inserting itself into the connection and transmitting a
clean access point back to Squibby’s apartment. By the time
Sircotin hacked through the scrambler signal to find the drone,
Squibby would already have everything she needed and the drone’s
self-destruct trigger would melt down its nano-circuitry into a
puddle of toxic wax.

Rees waited in the elevator after deploying
the drone. He had another one just in case something went wrong.
Looking down at the elevator’s keypad, he scanned the numbers.

The numbers stopped at eighty-seven. The
button after it was blank.

“
Got it,” Squibby said
over the transmitter. “Signal’s clean.”

Rees stared at the blank button.

Had it been blank when he took the elevator
to the crime scene yesterday?

He couldn’t remember.

“
Rees?” Squibby asked.
“Are you still there?”

Trust those eyes of yours,
Detective
.

Rees pressed the blank button.

“
Hang tight, Squibby. I’m
going to have another look at the top floor.”

***

The elevator doors opened to darkness.

Rees pulled out his flashlight and switched
it on.

There should have been a night crew working
on the floor’s interior, but there was no sign of anyone.

Slowly, he stepped out of the elevator,
sweeping the flashlight toward every corner as he went. Not much
work had been done since the previous night. The crooked angles and
distended walls were still in place. He found that focusing on any
part of the building for too long gave him a headache, so he kept
his eyes moving, examining the various walls and half-finished
rooms quickly as he moved through the interior of the eighty-eighth
floor.

Squibby’s voice crackled over the
transmitter.

“…
es? Can… ear
me?”

There must have been some sort of
interference from the structure. That seemed odd, considering that
many of the walls were unfinished and the top floor was so
high.

“
You’re breaking up,
Squibby.”

“
Access… feeds. Somebod…
rased… eight… loor.”

“
Listen, I can’t hear shit
up here. Save it till I–”

“
Wha… uck?”

There was a tinge of panic in her voice,
something Rees wasn’t used to hearing from her.

“
Squibby? What is
it?”

“
Sec… ity!”

He thought back to what she said about the
building’s unusual security program. It shouldn’t have been able to
trace her so quickly.

“
Don’t try to–”

“
Shit!” Squibby said, her
voice finally coming through cleanly.

Then she screamed.

The signal erupted with shrill static and
Rees yanked the transmitter out of his ear. His ears felt like they
would keep ringing forever, but after a few seconds, he realized
they weren’t ringing at all. The sound was coming from all around
him, a faint hum that filled the air and made the hair on his arms
stand on end.

He knew that sound, remembered it from
somewhere.

Gripping his flashlight tightly, Rees
continued through the unfinished halls of the eighty-eighth floor.
The construction become more riotous as he went deeper. Sometimes
the angles of the walls and ceiling seemed to change when he swung
the light over them, reverting to a more bizarre form once the
darkness enveloped them again.

Stubbornly, he kept going until he came to a
large, open space along the tower’s outermost wall. Light should
have been pouring through the large windows there, the glow from
the surrounding buildings and slivers of moonlight that managed to
punch through the nighttime smog.