Remote Control (15 page)

Six was alarmed to see Chelsea Tridya on the list. She knew
too much about him, Kyntak, and the Deck. But his panic subsided when he saw that the grounds for her inclusion were slender. ChaoSonic suspected that Vanish was the one who had stolen the Lab’s supply of Tridya’s aging drug. To do this, he would have to have known it existed, and it was more palatable for ChaoSonic to assume that Tridya had told him about it than that there had been a leak within their organization.

Six didn’t recognize any of the other names. The next section was the shortest—known information about Vanish himself. Six looked at the picture first and recoiled in horror.

It was a black-and-white mug shot, taken in a ChaoSonic cell. The man in the photo was about thirty, bald, slightly chubby, and 174 centimeters tall, according to a text box in the corner. But it took Six a moment to notice any of this because his eyes were drawn to the scars on the man’s face.

Three broad gashes split the flesh, one from his right nostril to his chin, one from above his right eye to his cheekbone, and one from the left side of his forehead up to the top of his skull. A series of minor scratches latticed his left cheek, and there was a small triangular gouge under his left eye—it looked like mascara that had run.

The man’s eyes were closed. The background was an uneven grey-and-white gradient—a pillow, Six realized. He was asleep.

The wounds had been cleaned before the picture was taken, so there was no blood, but this only made it more horrific. Six thought he could see exposed bone in the gouge in the left cheek, and he looked away, heart pounding.

Six had once gone undercover in a ChaoSonic jail to break out an agent, and he’d seen plenty of brutality there. And vivid images of the prisoners at Earle Shuji’s factory still haunted him.

But he’d never seen wanton disfiguration like this. He started reading the caption.

This was the only known photo of Vanish. One of his soldiers had defected, informing ChaoSonic that Vanish was planning a raid on one of their satellite uplink stations. He said that Vanish wanted to use equipment which was integrated into the building, and would therefore have to be there in person. ChaoSonic left the facility minimally guarded, and ambushed Vanish’s fifteen-person team once they were inside. Thirteen of Vanish’s soldiers were killed. Only he and the defector were left alive.

The ChaoSonic troops put Vanish in an armored personnel carrier so he could be transported to a secret prison facility for processing. But when the APC arrived, he was rushed straight into the emergency room. Apparently Vanish had mutilated his own face with his fingernails.

According to the document, he didn’t speak a single word the entire time he was in their custody; but that wasn’t long. His troops broke into the emergency room less than three hours after his condition had been stabilized. It was unclear how they’d found it. The picture was taken ten minutes before their arrival.

During the rescue, Vanish’s team killed three doctors and nine guards, leaving one doctor and one guard alive. A week later, the defector’s body was found under the ChaoSonic security chief’s desk, with a high concentration of Syncal in his bloodstream—almost double the amount that had been injected into Six that morning.

Thaldurken drew special attention to the fact that twenty-six people had been killed: thirteen of Vanish’s and thirteen of ChaoSonic’s, including the defector. Thaldurken suggested that Vanish may have been trying to send a message to ChaoSonic—that
he had only reacted defensively, with force that was precisely equal to that used against him.

He also said that he didn’t believe Vanish had wounded himself just to get into the emergency room for an easier escape. With so much damage to his face, he couldn’t be identified by any witnesses to his crimes or by previously taken photographs—not that there were many of either. As long as Vanish maintained his silence in ChaoSonic custody, his real name would never be exposed.

But this seemed illogical to Six. By gouging out his own face, hadn’t Vanish made his appearance so distinctive that he would never be able to conceal his identity again?

Six recalled an old story about a criminal whose head had been shaved and who had shaved the heads of a dozen other men as they slept so he could not be identified the next morning. He imagined Vanish inflicting injuries identical to his own on the faces of thousands of innocent people so ChaoSonic would never find him.

He shook off the image with a shiver. Not only was that completely insane, it wouldn’t work. Presumably the doctors in the emergency room had taken a sample of Vanish’s blood and compared it to their DNA database.

He scrolled down. Yes, they had, but it hadn’t helped identify him. Vanish’s DNA wasn’t on file, and his blood was of the most common type, O positive. Six knew that trying to identify someone by blood type was nearly impossible. He could think of twenty people at the Deck who were O positive, including himself. He scrolled back up and kept reading.

Vanish hadn’t mutilated thousands of strangers to stay hidden. He had just disappeared. While his forces occasionally turned
up and wreaked havoc on ChaoSonic facilities, the man himself had not been seen again. And his capture had taken place…almost thirty years ago?

Six went over this again, just to make sure he hadn’t misread it. He hadn’t. Vanish had scarred himself and disappeared twenty-eight years, eight months, and three days ago.

He scrolled farther up, looking at the list of crimes Vanish was believed to be responsible for. The first one was eleven years earlier, and they got older as Six read. Abduction of a ChaoSonic official, twenty-two years ago. Bombing of the Gear munitions factory, thirty-eight years ago. Assassination of a security chief, forty-seven years ago. There were more events listed. ChaoSonic was the result of a small merger almost fifty years ago, so that was as far back as the records went.

In fact, the people who’d been kidnapped, set free, and then discovered working for Vanish were rarer than Six had thought. Each kidnapping only happened once the previous victim was dead. Because he usually picked people in such extreme positions of power within ChaoSonic, Vanish only seemed to need one at a time.

No wonder they suspect Chelsea Tridya
, Six thought. This implied that Vanish was at least seventy, in a city where most people were dead at sixty. The Lab’s supply of Tridya’s drug was stolen only a few months ago, and it couldn’t actually make someone younger. It couldn’t even keep their age at a complete standstill. The Lab was using an inverted formula anyway—they were making children age quickly. So ChaoSonic assumed that Vanish collaborated with Tridya, and had access to the drug in some form for at least a decade. Tridya hadn’t designed her formula back then, but maybe they didn’t know that.

Six held the theory in his mind, testing it, feeling its weight like a ball being tossed lightly from one hand to the other. Did he believe that there was a seventy-year-old, hideously scarred puppet-master behind today’s events?

No way. ChaoSonic had had the wool pulled over their eyes.

Vanish wasn’t a man at all.

Vanish was an organization.

It only took Six a few seconds to connect his spare mobile phone to the web page King had sent him. Soon the location of the teenage boy’s mobile was a blinking red dot on the screen, superimposed over a map of the City. There was a white line which showed where the phone had been since King set up the tracking program. It seemed that the monorail train had gone more or less straight from the Timeout to a warehouse thirteen kilometers west of it, and stopped.

It’s in my search area
, Six thought.
And it’s a warehouse, so it’d be a suitable base of operations for Vanish, particularly if there’s an underground area—that way ChaoSonic wouldn’t know how big it is. And there’s an airfield right next to it, so the troops can get all over the City quickly.

He stared at the screen of his phone intently, searching for anything that would contradict the signs. There was nothing.

I think I’ve just found Kyntak
, he thought.

It was 19:39:45. He needed to get going as soon as possible, but had to get some equipment first. Six walked into the training room and pressed his palm lightly against the wall. It slid aside, revealing four rows of weapons.

For Kyntak’s safety, he was going to have to enter the facility silently and invisibly. This meant lightweight equipment that could be used quietly—no shotguns, no automatic rifles. But he was going to have to get out as well—and once he had rescued Kyntak, he expected the alarm would be sounded quickly.

He picked out a quarterstaff, which could be separated into two halves for carrying, and an Owl semiautomatic pistol. He screwed a silencer to the gun, then took a nylon rope from the rack and started spooling it over his shoulder.

“I’m going on a suicidal rescue mission,” he said to Harry as he worked. “Want to come?”

“
No
,” Harry said. He didn’t turn his head to look at Six.

Of course not
, thought Six.
It’s not that he’s scared; it’s that he doesn’t want anything. He’s a robot.
“Do you want to stay here?”

“No.”

Six thought about it. He couldn’t use Harry to create a diversion for easier entry—any disturbance would be either too subtle to help or so obvious the alarm would be raised. And taking him inside wasn’t an option. One intruder would have a far better chance of staying hidden than two.

But when he and Kyntak were on their way out, possibly with the entire Vanish army behind them, they would be able to use his firepower.

“Harry, get out the motorbike,” he said. “I’m going to find an outfit for you.”

Harry walked out the door, and Six started sifting through his wardrobe.

Two minutes later, the house was locked up and he was outside, helping Harry get dressed. Six didn’t have a garage or a backyard. His bike was kept on the thin strip of concrete between
the back of his house and the wall separating his property from his neighbors’. He had built the motorcycle himself from parts of other bikes. He’d had to scan each piece for bugs as he went, because ChaoSonic made them all, and ChaoSonic often bugged their products. But it was worth it. Six’s bike was better quality than even the most expensive models; it had a six-cylinder engine, a carbon-fiber chassis, and a softail-style monoshock suspension. The fiberglass fairing was polished to an obsidian-like shine.

Six had chosen to dress Harry in one of his long black coats, a pair of grey jogging pants, and a thick woolen beanie. Harry was taller than Six, so the pants didn’t quite reach his ankles, but not enough plastic skin was exposed to look suspicious. His synthetic feet and hands could pass as shoes and gloves. Other than his fingertips and the soles of his feet, Harry’s plastic exoskeleton was coated in PTFE, an almost frictionless fluoropolymer, so Six had to attach the belt very tightly around Harry’s waist to keep his pants from falling down.

There was really nothing Six could put on Harry’s face—a ski mask or even sunglasses would be too suspicious. He resolved that Harry would sit behind him on the bike and they would go fast. Anyone who happened to look would be much more likely to think
mask
than
robot.

Six himself had changed into a black spandex catsuit—the clothes he’d borrowed from the teenage hoodlums were useless from a stealth point of view. He had the two halves of the quarterstaff strapped to his back, with the climbing rope looped over the straps and the silenced Owl in his belt.

“Do you know how to ride a motorbike?” Six asked Harry as he climbed on.

“No.”

“Fair enough,” Six said. Why would a robot that could run at sixty kilometers an hour need to know how to ride a motorbike? “Hang on tight.”

Plastic forearms crushed his abdomen. “Not that tight,” wheezed Six. “Just don’t fall off.” Harry’s grip loosened, Six revved the engine, and the motorbike thundered into the night.

Driving didn’t take much concentration, so Six was free to consider the facts as they traveled.
If Vanish is an organization rather than a man, this changes everything
, Six thought as the wind blasted past his face. It would explain the hundreds of highly trained troops, the half century of crimes attributed to one man, the deals with so many Code-breakers and the co-opting of so many officials. A single person couldn’t do all that, even assuming that he was able to live to the age of seventy. Sooner or later he’d be found out, or betrayed, or murdered by a rival.

It was like struggling to assemble a jigsaw puzzle and discovering halfway through that the wrong picture was on the box. An organization could achieve many things that a lone person could not—ChaoSonic had shown everyone that. Corporations were not subject to human ailments; they didn’t die naturally and were hard to kill. They didn’t have emotions, and their actions could affect many people, requiring just as many people to affect them back. And the value of extra manpower could never be underestimated.

But there was something that gave lone operatives an advantage—concealment.

ChaoSonic had never allowed another corporation to rise. It was clinging to its monopoly over the City with every white knuckle it had. There were thousands of ChaoSonic operatives whose sole purpose was to find fledgling corporations and crush them, eliminating competitors in advance. Finding the Deck was
not their top priority yet, partly because it was so well hidden, partly because it was a nonprofit organization, and partly because its interests so often overlapped with ChaoSonic’s own. ChaoSonic lost money to thieves, and employees to murderers, and the Deck was constantly shuffling them away. But anyone else who was a member of a non-ChaoSonic group had better be looking over his or her shoulder.

But now Six was picturing something new: a secret organization that had been established more than fifty years ago, before ChaoSonic had tightened its grip; that had stayed secret until now by attributing all its actions to a lone enigmatic man, recruiting more and more people, remaining invisible even as it grew, welling up towards ChaoSonic from beneath, like a volcano under the City that was slowly getting ready to explode.