The Courier (San Angeles) (4 page)

The building on Level 2 looked pretty much like all the others. A grimy gray block. It went up five stories, connecting directly to the ceiling above it. Its only distinctive feature was a yellow neon sign, still bright and clean as though it had been installed yesterday: Innotek, with some sort of swooshy thing under the name and a shuttle flying up and away. It looked like the swoosh was supposed to be the shuttle’s exhaust. I could see someone in a uniform standing just inside the door as I rode up to the building. Security. At least something was going right.

The bullshit client and the close call with the boarders had left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I had lost control of the bike and was just waiting for the bone-jarring impact. Feeling on edge, I rode up on the sidewalk and parked the bike parallel to the building just outside of the light coming from the front doors. I locked the bike up and walked back into the light, holding up my ID and the package.

The security guard took one look at me and grinned, showing a perfect set of white teeth. Some jerk that liked to think he could get the young girls. He let me in and radioed up to the office. His uniform looked like it had just come out of the wrapper, crease lines and all. It seemed Innotek was the new kid on the block, trying to look good for the fuckers on Level 4. He put his hand low on my back, pushing me to the elevator. I shuddered and walked faster.

The elevators were all Level 2: old and creaking, feeling like they were going to collapse and kill anyone inside. Man-made coffins. I really hated small, enclosed spaces. The thing finally stopped on the fifth floor and the old doors rattled open.

The hallway smelled of new paint with some sort of earthy metallic undertone. The smell clung to the back of my throat and I felt my gut clench. I stepped off the elevator and listened to the door close behind me, followed by the rattle of it returning to the first floor.

I looked at the package. Room 540. The arrows on the wall told me to turn left. I passed the exit leading to the stairs and turned the corner; 530, 532 . . . glued-on numbers on closed doors. The metallic smell got stronger. I raised my hand to my nose. What the hell were these guys working on anyway? Whatever it was, they should invest in some air fresheners. 540 was next. I shoved the package into my lid and slipped my arm through the visor, freeing my hands for the paperwork.

The door was open a crack, so I pushed it the rest of the way and stepped over the threshold, pulling out the paperwork for the signature. The smell hit me full force, sweet and coppery, grabbing at the back of my throat with a million tiny claws. I froze midstride, rooted to the floor as my brain tried to process what my eyes were seeing. The image burned into my retinas.

There was a man in a suit, or it looked like a suit anyway, laying on the floor only a couple of steps away. He had been split open from his groin to the base of his throat, and everything that should have been inside of him was on the ground. Standing by the suit was another man in plastic painter coveralls. His arms and chest were covered in blood, and strands of it still dripped off him into a puddle on the floor. He held a knife in his hand, long and curved with a serrated edge on the inside. It looked eager to cut again.

I stopped breathing.

He looked up, staring at my face with dark, bright eyes. He stepped over the body toward me.

I stumbled backward into the hallway. Some part of my brain still worked, telling me to put something between us. I reached for the office door and grabbed it. My fingers almost caught as it slammed shut. I ran down the hall. Back toward the elevator. I pressed the button and heard the creaking start below me. Fuck, the elevator had gone back down.

Stairs. I had passed stairs. I scurried back to the door and slammed full speed into the bar. The door flew open. The damn thing nearly smacked me in the face when the compressor arm stopped the door from slamming into the wall. I stumbled down the stairs, taking four or five at a time, grabbing onto the handrail to swing around the corners. Snatching the first floor door handle at full speed, I yanked it open, ignoring the feeling of my shoulder popping again.

Security was still in the same place, standing by the front doors as though his life depended on it. Maybe it did. The image of the suit five floors above crept back into my mind. Security turned his back on the front doors and walked toward me, a concerned look on his face.

I had trouble catching my breath, gasping out the words.

“The . . . guy . . . the guy on . . . the fifth floor . . .” I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “Dead . . . killed by . . .”

The guard reached out and grabbed me, spinning me around and slamming me face first against the wall. He moved in close, almost wrapping his body around mine.

“So, you met Quincy, eh? I’m surprised you got away, he’s usually much better than that.”

He spun me around again, pinning me back with a forearm
against my throat, looking straight at me. I clawed at his arm, still fighting to get my breath back. His other hand reached under my jacket, groping.

He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “We got a few minutes before you can meet him again.”

Memories washed over me:
the dirty white undershirt, the smell of alcohol and pizza, the tearing sound my shirt made when he ripped it off me.

My stomach heaved, pushing bile into my throat. I swallowed, the acid burning on its way back down. Anger and shame took over from the fear. I wasn’t some damn thirteen-year-old girl anymore. I jerked my knee up and found the sweet spot, feeling his balls crush under the force.

His breath hissed out, and his eyes widened in pain. He fell back. I was running for the front door before he had even fallen to the ground.

My hand shook as I thumbed the lock on the bike. My vision blurred. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket and jumped on, my arm still stuck through the lid’s visor with the package jammed in it. I couldn’t suck in a full breath. The keys fell from my hand, the gold figurine on the chain glinting in the light from the building’s sign as it bounced on the sidewalk. I lean over and swooped them up, jamming the key into the ignition. In my mirror I saw Quincy storm through the door. I gunned it, squealing the tire as I left the sidewalk and turned onto the street. He was holding something in his hand, pointing it at me. A gun? I swerved across the road and turned the corner.

D
EVON MCBRIDE REMEMBERED
the day, over a decade ago, when they moved him into this bland office between Levels 6 and 7. There were no windows, just a CFL floor lamp and a small LED light on his desk. Two of the walls were lined with bookcases, each filled to maximum capacity, the shelves bowed under the weight of books and file folders, looking as though they would collapse at any minute.

Most of the books had titles like
Cryptographic Systems
and
High Speed Wired and Wireless Communication Protocols
. Books were old-fashioned now, but to him they added a comforting smell to the room.

A large desk sat in the corner opposite the bookshelves. On the corner of the desk itself stood two wide flat-panel displays, each as thin as a sheet of glass. Beside the screens was Devon’s pride and joy,
a ten-centimeter glossy black cube with a single blue light on the front. The cube contained more computing power than some of the smaller terrestrial corporations had at their disposal.

The cube was obviously the most expensive item in the room, and the only one without a thin layer of dust on it. A single piece of comfort wedged itself between the left side of the desk and one wall of bookshelves: an old chair made out of curved plastic that rocked a bit when you sat in it, covered in books.

People like Devon were the reason couriers still existed. Just about every piece of information that went over the Net eventually went through his cube. Disparate hardware and software components tapped into the Net, collecting and resending the data they monitored. Occasionally, some of the components would be discovered, and a small portion of traffic would be lost for a period of time. If they were lucky, they already had a redundant system in place, and the data flow would continue on as normal. His little black box would flag the compromised device as lost, and enter a ticket for replacement.

Devon liked redundant systems. All data was important data, and once lost it was almost impossible to find.

The displays on his desk gave off a faint glow in the office’s dim light, washing Devon’s pasty face in an unhealthy blue shimmer. The right display showed columns of data, automatically sorted by his system into order of importance. The algorithm that sorted the data was his baby, the result of years of tweaking code and watching information flow across his screens. His algorithms were so tight that half the data was sorted before the decryption engines had completed their jobs. The left display varied with whatever he was working on. Right now, it showed lines of undecipherable code in multiple windows.

Devon flicked his ponytail across his chin, a habit he had
unconsciously formed when he was in deep concentration mode. He was working late today. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had discovered a flaw in the latest rolling 8192-bit Kolinski encryption algorithms, and he wanted to be sure his systems were able to exploit it.

Beside him on the table was a small red and white checked tablecloth topped by a bowl of split pea soup and an egg salad sandwich, both made and packed by his mom for dinner. The soup had gone cold and a crinkled green skin had formed on top. Devon sat hunched over his keyboard, his long legs stretched out under the desk, typing at a furious pace.

Movement and a change of colors on the right display drew him up from his deep concentration. The data in the table had shifted. Normally, the first couple of rows were fairly stationary, holding a few items of interest specified by the assistant director, stuff like corporate Black Ops team movements or the amount of activity from specific data centers. Of course, there were always a couple of extra items placed in there by Devon himself, just a little something to help him make better investment decisions. But now the rows were different. The computer had automatically inserted a new item and was slowly sorting it to the top of the list.

Devon touched the screen and flicked the new item to the left display. It ballooned into a full-size window, obscuring the latest code modifications he’d been working on, and started to fill with more detailed data. Displayed in red were the four items that had caught the computer’s attention.

1. A SoCal corporate hand scanner had just been activated inside a new Innotek office.

2. The last time that scanner had been used, it had been in the hands of a SoCal Black Ops agent.

3. The scanner, according to the accelerometers and GPS info, was pointing away from the building.

4. The data being read belonged to a courier, long after normal business hours.

New digs being scanned by the competition was to be expected, nothing there to flag. What was interesting was that the scanner was Black Ops, and it was aiming away from the new office space, though that needed to be taken with a grain of salt. The GPS repeaters on Level 2 and below were notoriously flaky. It still wasn’t a standard scan.

Why would a Black Ops guy make the effort to get into a competitor’s closed office building and then scan something outside of it? The fact that a courier was being scanned meant that SoCal figured this one was carrying valid info, something ninety-nine percent of them didn’t, and whatever was being carried was too important to send over the Net. The data was flagged at 7:58 p.m., late for a courier to be running. Four minor points the cube thought added up to something weird going on.

Devon touched the data line about the courier. Another window popped open and displayed a snapshot. The status indicator showed the system was still working on obtaining the courier’s information. That was always a problem with redundant and looped-back data paths all coming from places that didn’t want to release their data . . . not all the information arrived at the same time.

The picture of the courier showed him racing away. It looked like a small kid on a big bike. The courier’s helmet was still on his arm, which seemed strange. Devon zoomed in on the helmet. It was an old model, definitely well used, but the cube told him it had built-in access to the Net for road and traffic conditions, as well as communication and minimal night vision enhancement. Too bad he wasn’t
wearing it; the computer would have been able to backtrack the data feed and find the courier’s current location.

Devon looked closer. Inside the helmet was a standard letter-sized envelope. It didn’t look too thick, but then again, who said it had to be holding paper? The envelope itself was upside down, obscuring the sender’s and receiver’s addresses. He moved the zoom to the courier. No chance of an ID from there, all the camera got was the back of the courier’s head. The bike plates were completely covered by the sand and dust being thrown up by the rear tire. He knew the cube was already processing the image to try and clear it up.

Devon tagged the information and sent it to the director. Not that he’d be there right now anyway, not this late at night.

With his concentration broken, Devon decided to call it a night. The computer picked a random exit and assigned him an entrance for the morning. Devon saved his work, packed up his cold supper, and stood, stretching the kinks from his joints. The computer noticed his departure and locked the door behind him. It wouldn’t open again until his thermal and other signatures combined to create the key.