The Courier (San Angeles) (11 page)

D
EVON WOKE TO
the enticing smell of frying bacon and eggs. Thick blue curtains kept his room dark, but he could see a faint outline of light around them. He had gotten home pretty late last night, spending most of it completing the Kolinski flaw exploitation. Not all the government databases used 8192 Kolinski, of course. It had taken them three years just to agree to talk about changing their database protection systems, never mind implementing it. The corporations were usually faster. He had just needed something to do while the computer scanned and tagged all the relevant data about the courier and shipped it upstream to the assistant director.

Hell, he didn’t even need to be there for that. But if the AD called back, Devon wanted to be there to answer the hard line. It
wasn’t because of the potential career advancement, since there was none; it was just what he felt compelled to do.

He got out of bed, put on his slippers and housecoat, and checked his comm unit for any messages before he headed downstairs to the kitchen.

“And how is my boy this morning?” Devon’s mother turned from the stove with a look of concern on her broad face.

“Great, Ma. Did you sleep good?”

“Who can sleep when their son doesn’t come home, eh? He doesn’t even call to tell his momma where he is. When did you come home last night, eh?” She looked at him sideways, hope in her eyes. “Was it a date?”

Devon winced. Damn he forgot to call. “No, Ma. I had to work late. A special project came up.”

“Work. Work is all you do. A young boy like you should be outside, looking at the girls. Not playing with your silly computers.”

Devon smiled. It was the same thing every time he worked late. “I wouldn’t call thirty a young boy anymore, Ma.”

“You are younger than me, no? You be nice to your momma, or I start calling you my little baby again.” She turned back to the stove, but not before he saw the smile on her face.

He hadn’t been her little baby in a long time, but she liked to tease him about it anyway. It was part of the pattern that made his life, and the “silly computers” he played with had gotten them this house on Level 6.

They could’ve gotten something on Level 7, but that would have freaked out his mom too much. A lifetime of living under a concrete ceiling could do that. Plus it would have added a new level of scrutiny to his daily affairs, scrutiny from the wrong people. Devon watched his mother’s back.

What if he was caught? If he ever did disappear, she’d be taken
care of. Well taken care of. Devon had made sure of that, and made sure that ACE wasn’t involved in it.

Devon’s mom put a plate of bacon and over-easy eggs in front of him, and he dug in with gusto. She sat down and ate her toast and yogurt, glancing through the morning paper. It was an expensive habit. He figured the only reason she subscribed to it was to keep her hands busy turning pages. You could get better news from a comm unit.

The comm unit in Quincy’s pocket vibrated. He took it out, glanced at the caller’s ID, and suppressed a chuckle. It was Jeremy, and if he was calling this soon after passing the problem off to Abby, it probably meant she had messed up. He answered the call.

“Quincy here,” he said.

“Get to the Internuncio depot.”

“And do what?” Quincy watched the steady flow of couriers entering and exiting the building. He had been sitting outside Internuncio most of the morning, hoping Kris would show up.

“I want this problem gone, Quincy. All of it. I don’t want to have a single byte of data, a scrap of paper, left in existence that shows a package was ever picked up or delivered.”

“I’ll get a team together,” Quincy said, “and we’ll get in tonight and clean up.”

“Tonight is not soon enough.”

Quincy paused, keeping his voice level. “What do you mean?”

“I mean tonight is not soon enough. How much clearer do I need to make it?”

“It won’t be clean.”

“Just get the job done.”

The connection went dead. Quincy looked through his windshield at the Internuncio sign on the building outside and sighed. There was no way Kris would show up here after this.

He’d also be losing a contact that had taken him a lot of work to cultivate. This one had been harder than most to crack. Though she’d started in the right place—with a deep void in her life, a void that needed true human contact to fill—her natural distrust had been the tough part. In the end, all he’d had to do to entrench himself in her life was hold her hand. But getting there had been quite the challenge. From that point, it was a simple step for him to convince her to
help
one of the couriers that was down on their luck, one with no family and few friends. There was a big heart under her ugly exterior. It was just luck for Quincy that the choice turned out to be a young girl.

Quincy had also known Abby wouldn’t get the job done. She just hadn’t had her “special prep” time. Hadn’t had the time to “discover the spirit” of her target. Quincy rolled his eyes, sighed again, and opened the door. He had everything he needed in the trunk. Always be prepared.

Quincy popped the trunk, grabbed a black briefcase, briefly checked its contents, and started toward the building. His heart started beating faster, pushing adrenaline through his system. The sound of car tires on the pavement behind him made him look back. He increased his pace. Corporate fleet vehicles. Lots of them. Life had just gotten more interesting.

He made it inside the building before the cars had a chance to park. He stopped at the counter and cleared his throat.

Dispatch looked up from her work, a smile spreading across her face. “Hi, Quincy.”

Devon sat in the assistant director’s office, with its overstuffed leather chairs, a huge fake mahogany desk, a series of worn Turkish rugs covering the floor, and an absolutely awful view. The AD’s corner windows were just below the concrete ceiling separating Level 6 from Level 7. Twentieth floor and the lowest rent in the building. At least the ceiling was painted blue. An office that even a small corporate executive would shun, which is exactly why it had been allocated to Nigel Wood.

The company Nigel worked for didn’t want, or need, expensive offices showing the world how much money they had. In fact, the less the corporations knew about them, the better. Nigel told anyone that would listen to him that if he could have had his way, his office, along with everybody else’s, would be down on Level 4.

The size, however, was a necessity. Some of the higher-level meetings that took place here had upward of fifteen people in attendance, most of them standing. Today’s meeting consisted of only Nigel and Devon.

The sign on Nigel’s office door read GeoTech Environmental Research. In reality, Nigel worked for the same people Devon did, ACE, the underground Anti-Corporation Enterprise. Most people thought of ACE as a small group of subversives that spray-painted slogans on corporate billboards and tagged their buildings with rude drawings. And that was just the way ACE wanted it. In reality, ACE had two arms. One fought the corporations, trying their best to play the corporate game of espionage and backstabbing. The other fought the corporations on a different front. As long as the corporations were making money, they didn’t care how they were destroying the
planet. ACE made the old-fashioned Greenpeace look like a bunch of kids at a petting zoo.

Devon watched Nigel pace back and forth across the rugs, wearing the heavily used path deeper into the worn fibers. Nigel was a short, fat, disgusting man. His face was constantly red from the exertion of moving his weight from point A to point B. Beads of sweat were already appearing on his forehead, and Devon knew he would eventually pull a soiled rag from his pocket and mop at it. When he spoke, it sounded like his mouth was full of marbles.

“Where are we at, Devon? What’s this situation all about?”

“As you know, sir—”

“Don’t tell me what I know,” Nigel interrupted. “Give me the new details.”

“Yes, sir.” Devon closed his eyes, recalling the latest information. “The package apparently originated from SoCal offices, Earthside, on Level 4. The delivery was to Innotek, a small, recently incorporated firm. The systems are still looking for any potential links to the Big Three, but it looks like some records have been inadvertently lost along the way.”

“Which means one of the Big Three had their hand in the pie.”

“It would seem like it.”

“Can we rule out SoCal?”

“I don’t think we can rule out any of them, sir. SoCal could have been sending a packet to itself, testing its internal systems and staff.”

“Has your system ruled them out?”

“Not yet, it’s still giving them a five percent chance.”

“Based on what?”

“I don’t know. I can have a report sent to you over the hard line when I get back to the office.”

Nigel waved his pudgy hand, dismissing the idea. “Let the system work on it a bit longer first. What else do we have?”

“From the timing of events, it looks like the SoCal Black Ops guys showed up at the delivery site before the courier. A cleanup crew was dispatched later that same evening, though no reports of missing people have been issued. More specifically, no one known to be employed in the building or living in a ten-kilometer radius. We’re scanning a wider area now and trying to find a potential victim.”

“How close are we to finding out what happened in there?”

“Not very. The building had been newly renovated and several of our taps were removed in the process. The building was, still is, a black hole in our network.”

“Damn. How long has it been that way?”

“Three weeks, sir.”

“Damn.”

“Yes, sir. Crews are waiting for an opportunity to get back in,” Devon continued. “Shortly after the courier arrived, we have a snapshot of her leaving. It was the snapshot and subsequent communication on a known Black Ops device that tipped us off to their presence.”

“Any chance of the device having been compromised?”

“Not that we know of, sir. The device is still in use, and seems to be feeding location information back to SoCal.”

“Location information? On who?”

“The courier, sir.”

“The courier?” Nigel made his way back to his paper-strewn desk and started fishing through documents. He grabbed one and started reading it. “You’re telling me a sixteen-year-old girl is managing to avoid a Black Ops team?”

“We’re not sure of that. It could be they’re just following her, keeping tabs on where she goes.”

Nigel looked at Devon and raised his eyebrows. “We’ve worked together a long time, Devon, I know there’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

“Yes, there is. Either the information coming from the unit is being delayed on purpose, or she really is managing to stay ahead of them.”

Nigel scanned the document in his hand again, his gaze resting on her image. “Is there any chance she’s been trained?”

“Not that we can tell. None of the telltale signs are visible. No lost records, no altered timelines. Nothing we can see.”

“Has she been altering or turning off her tracker?”

“Again, not that we can tell. We have had blackout situations, but always where we expect them. The systems just aren’t catching any anomalies.”

“Keep looking into it. Find out if we can nab her for ourselves or if someone’s already done that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What else have you got?”

“We have an actual body. A known freelancer dead on Level 1.”

“And this relates how?”

“Kris—the courier—entered Level 1 late last night. All we know for sure is that she turned north off the ramp. The body was found north of the ramp in an empty lot, the back of his head blasted off. A team was sent in and discovered at least one definite bullet impact point that looked new. From the angle, it could have been a sniper on the building across the lot. The computer gives it an eighty-two percent possibility of being related.”

“Any sign of the girl?”

“Nothing since she went down the ramp.”

“Okay. What about the package? What’s in there that SoCal wants so badly?”

“We couldn’t even begin to guess, sir. We can’t even figure out if the SoCal Black Ops team knew which package they wanted to track, or if they just got caught doing something they shouldn’t have
and want to eliminate the loose ends. If they knew the package, they probably have someone inside Internuncio, the courier company.”

“So basically we know the players, and nothing else.”

“Right.”

Nigel kept the paper in his hand and moved back behind his desk. “I want the girl and the package. Have the system run a position predictor on her. I’ll get a team ready for the grab.”

Devon stood and walked to the door.

“Time is of the essence here, Devon. If the girl dies and the package ends up back at SoCal, we could be losing a tremendous opportunity.”

“Yes,
sir.”