Freedom Incorporated (35 page)

Michele slapped a hand to
the phone and dialled Jackie Donald’s number.

“
What?”

Great, she
already sounds pissed.
“Hi Jackie, it’s
Michele.”

“
Oh hi
Michele.” Her tone transformed immediately, conveying the smile she
couldn’t deliver in person. “What can I do for you?”

“
We’ve got a
problem.” Michele didn’t know how else to put it and she was
desperate to contain the rumours that were already darting around
the company. “Can you come to the collection counter?”

“
Give me a
second.” She hung up.

Twenty seconds later
Jackie was marching to the crowded counter. “What’s going
on?”

Michele answered
reluctantly, “He’s come to collect for apprehending Paul Savage.”
She swallowed before continuing in a grave tone, “He says he was
working on a special assignment from me, but I didn’t tell him to
do this.”

No, I know
you wouldn’t.
Jackie enjoyed fucking her but
she knew Michele wasn’t smart enough to think of something like
that. “And this is all that’s left? Whatever’s in this
box?”

“
That’s him,”
Rena answered. “His chip
anyway.”

“
Where’s his
body?” Jackie demanded directly of the Raven.

“
In his office
where I left it.”

She raised an eyebrow.
“What’s your name?”

“
The Raven,”
he replied, trying not to gloat in superiority.

Jackie
outwardly groaned but was inwardly delighted.
Perfect! It’s the perfect way to remove Paul Savage and
appease the shareholders. It’s an explanation they’ll
understand.
Of course, she didn’t intended
to tell them a bounty hunter had murdered him, only that he’d
died.
Maybe I’ll cite a heart attack, or
tell them about his medical condition and allow them to draw their
own conclusions.
There were several ways to
die from inner ear bacteria: falling from a roof, falling in front
of a train or car, suicide… But there were two sides to any coin
and a shadowy frown crept onto Jackie’s face.
First, what am I going to do with
this freak
?

“
Shall I show
you the message I received,” the Raven asked, feeling the need to
defend himself. “The bounty was for one million
Credits.”

“
It’s true.”
James Ellerman had dragged himself to the counter, unnoticed by
everyone except the Raven, who observed everything. He was pressing
two fingers to his implant and the pain throbbing through his skull
had wired his left eye shut. He felt he might puke at any moment
but important developments were afoot and he had to explain his
hand in them.

“
You know
what’s going on here?” Jackie pierced James with an icy stare, her
initial pleasure at no longer having to deal with Paul Savage blown
away by the apparent complexity of the situation.

He nodded with effort.
“Yes.”

“
All right.”
Jackie swept a hand around the room. “All of you, to the conference
room.”

“
Me too
ma’am?” Rena was finishing her shift in fifteen minutes and hoped
Jackie wouldn’t expect her to join.

“
No.” She
saved her most threatening gaze for the collection clerk. “But if I
discover rumours circulating about this I’m going to hold you and
the other clerks responsible.” She paused to let the threat sink in
before adding, “Do you understand me?”

Rena nodded, hoping her
colleagues had also heard. “Yes ma’am. It’s our little
secret.”

The Raven snatched his
prize and returned it to his pocket before striding to the portals.
He wasn’t about to hand over his trophy free, it still represented
a million Credits. He permitted Michele to enter the code for the
conference room and he popped from the booth.

Jackie was last to portal
from the room, leaving Rena and the other clerks to gossip about
what had happened to their CEO. Jackie knew rumours would spread,
they already had. And the thirst for more information was only
imaginable by someone stranded without water in the
desert.

*

“
Mr Ellerman,”
Jackie said, turning on as much fake-charm as she could summon.
“Why don’t you shed some light on this little quandary for
us?”

He was cradling his head
between his hands, his elbows resting firmly on the conference
table. Even mumbling sent shockwaves of pain reverberating through
his head. A whisper was the best he could muster. “We had a network
breach.”

That explained a
lot.

“
How bad?”
Jackie asked, fear tingling her innards.
Echelon?

“
Pretty bad,”
James admitted. “They breached all seven layers of our
defence.”

“
Didn’t we
recently spend billions of Credits to make that impossible?”
Jackie’s irritation dripped thick on her words.

“
We did,”
James said, already ashamed of his failure. He didn’t need anybody
rubbing salt into his wounds. “But there are some people who have
the capability to bypass anything.” He shrugged. “The people who
designed the UG7 for instance.”

“
Are you
suggesting Global Integrated Systems did this?” It was incredulous
and Jackie’s tone mirrored her disbelief.

James shook
his head. “No. Just that, no matter how much money you spend, there
are always people with the expertise to break in.”
Reality sucks doesn’t it?
“I plugged the inner layer to address the immediate danger and
I have my team isolating the other breaches now.” His rasping
whisper betrayed how much it had cost. “There wasn’t any damage to
vital systems, Echelon’s fine. The only real mischief was an e-mail
from Michele’s account to the Raven, telling him to apprehend Paul
Savage.”

“
Mischief?
” Jackie scalded him. “I’d
say this is mischief enough.” She tapped a finger to the table,
drilling into their nerves before continuing. “In future I want the
message system locked down. Put alarms on it. Make it secure. Do
whatever you have to do to make sure this kind of foul up can never
happen again. Understood?”

James nodded.
“Yes.”

“
Good.” She
turned to the Raven. “And I’m to understand you want a million
Credits for apprehending a cripple who works in the same building
as our security forces?”

Put that way it sounded
ludicrous. But asking why UniForce selected targets wasn’t part of
the package. “Affirmative. One million.”

“
And it didn’t
seem at all strange to you?” Jackie was getting flustered; her icy
demeanour was having no effect on the bounty hunter. He looked like
a gorilla, sitting with a metal rod where his spine should have
been.

He turned to look her in
the eye, a feat of which James and Michele were incapable. Silently
he wondered why his vision had led him astray by permitting him to
kill an innocent man. “Many things UniForce requests appear strange
and inefficient.”

She bridled at the
unmasked insult but wisely decided not to pursue it. “Does anyone
have the faintest idea who launched the attack?” She motioned to
the Raven. “I don’t mean the weapon itself, I want the hand that’s
pulling the puppet’s strings.”

It was the Raven’s turn
to be offended, though his rigid cyborg mind stopped his human
desire to flay the bitch.

The deafening roar of
silence overwhelmed her.

“
Figures.”

“
I have a
suspect,” the Raven offered. He stepped out of character for long
enough to assist his trading partners. “I was close to securing an
apprehension in Australia when Dan Sutherland interfered. He
returned my target to her apartment where two of her friends were
waiting. I monitored their activity and detected a great deal of
network traffic. In hindsight, the timing matches the pattern of a
network hammer. They could have been hacking something.”

“
Dan
Sutherland?”

The Raven nodded, slowly,
precisely.

“
You’re
assuming the name Dan Sutherland means something to me.” She’d
never heard of him, Jackie didn’t get
that
involved in the clockwork of her
company.

“
He’s another
bounty-hunter,” Michele replied before the Raven could spoil her
private game. She hoped Jackie would assume the Raven and Dan
Sutherland weren’t top-level hunters and were therefore sharing a
list legitimately.

“
I see,”
Jackie said, not fooled. “Then why were two top-level hunters
competing for the same target?”

Nobody
answered.

“
It’s not the
first time,” the Raven said, shattering the conversation void. He
was just as annoyed as Dan at having to share his lists and he was
pleased he now had the opportunity to speak his mind.

“
But it will
be the last,” Jackie assured him. “We’ll sort that out
later.”
She
looked
piercingly at Michele, wondering whether she really was a brainless
bimbo. She knew it was possible that Michele had duped her with a
clever façade. “Who were the others?”

It was so fresh in the
Raven’s mind that he didn’t need to retrieve the data from
crystal-core. “Jennifer Margaret Cameron was the target. Her two
companions are unchipped and go by multiple aliases. I believe
their real names are Samantha Lee and David Coucke.”

James raised his head
from its protective cradle, immediately regretting it. “David
Coucke?”

The Raven
nodded.

“
You recognise
the name?” Jackie asked.

James groaned through his
pain. “Yeah, he’s a bit of a legend on the hacker
circuit.”

Jackie raised an
eyebrow.

“
I hang out
there because I need to know the latest tricks used on corporate
networks,” James said defensively. “Echelon doesn’t pick them up
because they’re not doing anything illegal. They play intellectual
games to evolve security sophistication.” He wasn’t the only system
administrator that hovered on the hacker circuit. According to a
recent poll, giga-corporations employed 90 percent of the
participants while the remainder were mostly trying to better their
employment opportunities. Still, it was difficult to build an
accurate picture when truthfully filling in the questionnaire could
lead to incarceration.

“
Are you
saying he could hack our network?” Jackie’s temper was quickly
boiling to crisis point.

James shook his head,
looking doubtful. “I wouldn’t have thought so, definitely not
alone. But he might’ve sourced help from others.”

“
Hmm…” Jackie
murmured, lost in thought. She needed a way out of the debacle.
There always was a way out, and she prided herself on finding
solutions that suited everyone… or at the very least, solutions
that suited her. She called it her ‘personal regression line’ and
today it would suit most parties. “Mr Raven, you shan’t see
a
single Credit for the
death of our beloved CEO.” She swallowed the bile rising to the
back of her throat. “But,” – she severed his protest by holding up
a warning finger – “I will personally double the kit to two million
Credits if you apprehend all four.” She ticked them off on her
fingers, “Sutherland, your original target, and her two
accomplices.”

Five-hundred
thousand apiece. Or, technically, four-hundred thousand apiece – I
apprehended Savage without pay.
The
temptation was too great for his cyborg brain. “I shall bring you
their spines on a platter.” He pushed his chair from the conference
table and stretched to his full height, towering over them. With
one cautionary sweep of his black eyes, he strode away, bursting
through the conference room doors with a flutter of his
cloak.

“
What
delightful charm,” Jackie drawled when they were alone. “Michele,”
she said, stabbing her underling with a killing look. “Get Esteban
in here. Now.”

She sat with James in
uncomfortable silence while Michele flapped about, looking for her
counterpart from the assassination branch.

Images of Paul
Savage’s grisly death were already haunting James. He’d tried
phoning immediately after regaining consciousness but UniForce’s
public figurehead had diverted all calls to voicemail – he didn’t
like interruptions while practicing a speech. So James had shambled
to the nearest portal as fast as his migraine would allow, but by
then the Raven was already washing flecks of blood from his skin in
the bathroom. James, hoping to avert a disaster, had burst into
Paul’s office unannounced. There, horrified by the gore splattered
across the room, he’d wondered whether things would have turned out
differently if he’d sent an e-mail instead of standing up and
damaging his implant. More terrifying was the prospect of arriving
a minute sooner and catching the Raven in the act.
Would he have killed me too? Would my head now be
resting on the floor next to Paul’s?
He’d
never appreciated his neck more than he did right then and his
thoughts turned to his beloved wife Susan and
his bundle of joy,
Lillian.
They’re more important than this UniForce
shit.
James Patrick Ellerman was therefore
moping in homesickness and considering his mortality when Michele
returned with Esteban in tow.