shadowrun 40 The Burning Time (5 page)

He was so lost in thought that he almost missed the movement on the monitor in front of him. He glanced at the grainy LCD display, which was wired up to tiny cameras placed outside the factory. There was definitely someone coming. A woman was making a beeline from the rusted fence toward the door that Rory guarded, like she knew exactly where she was going. He picked up his Ingram and checked its readout, making sure the gun was fully loaded and ready. Then he picked up the commlink next to the display screen and spoke into it.

"Nils, this is Rory. We’ve got company coming up to the front."

"Roger that, lad. We’re on our way over. Lie low."

Rory went to the door, but kept his eye on the monitor. The woman walked up to the door, bold as brass, and rapped on it three times. Rory checked the spy hole in the door and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw who was waiting outside. He quickly threw back the bolt and cracked open the door to peek around it.

"Geez, Bridget!" he said. "What are you thinkin’ coming here out in the open like that, woman? Get in here!"

Bridget stumbled in through the door, and Rory could smell the stench of liquor on her. Phew! She must be drunk as a skunk, he thought as she almost fell against him.

"Sorry," Bridget said, slurring her words slightly. "Got a little lost."

"I’ll say." Rory grinned knowingly. "Lost inside a bottle, eh?"

"Jus’ a few drinks to celebrate," she said, bleary-eyed, like she couldn’t quite focus on his face.

"Well, a couple people were wonderin’ where you nicked off to," Rory told her. He figured that a lass as good-looking as Bridget must have some fellow on the side. He wouldn’t have minded spending the evening at some pub himself.

"C’mon," he said, taking her by the arm. "Let’s get you to bed before the commander sees you. I swear, lass, one day somebody’s going to mess up, and there’s going to be hell to pay."

CHAPTER SIX

Dan Otabi slotted his credstick into the reader at the gate, confirming his authorized access to Cross Applied Technologies property, then drove to his designated parking space in the lot. He killed the engine and rested his hands on the steering wheel, letting his head fall back. He still hadn’t recovered from his meeting with the chip dealer last night. It had really shaken him up.

After leaving the Avalon, he’d gone by subway to where he’d left his car. He kept looking around the train, thinking that any minute an undercover cop would arrest him or that one of the dealer’s cronies would jump him. It had taken a couple of hours of simming to calm his nerves when he got home. By the time the chip shut down, it was very late, but Dan still had trouble getting to sleep. His head was filled with images of himself as a sim hero, but he was no Ethan Hunt in the encounter with the ork at the Avalon. He’d been nothing more than Dan Otabi, someone who could never take on a powerful, cyber-enhanced metahuman.

He’d had trouble waking up today when his internal alarm clock gently but relentlessly chipped away at his sleep, bringing him back to consciousness and the harsh realities of a cold Monday morning in December. For about the hundredth time, Dan wished there was a chip that would let his body go through the motions of getting up, eating, showering, driving, and working while his mind was off getting some rest and enjoying itself. Maybe that was the kind of chip Novatech or Truman Systems should come out with next. Dan would be first in line to buy one—assuming they weren’t outlawed like the California-hot chip he’d tried to score last night. Why was the best stuff always illegal?

He knew he couldn’t sit here all day, so he got out of the car. He slung the case he used to carry his chips and other work items over one shoulder. The bag also contained a few chips that weren’t work-related, just in case he found a few spare minutes around lunchtime for a short break.

He keyed the alarm system on his car. The company lot was secure enough, but he thought it was a good habit to keep up. He walked toward the entrance, slipping the lanyard of the laminated ID over his head with practiced ease. The imbedded chip in the ID spoke silently with the main computer system of the building, confirming Dan’s identity and his authorization to be in the facility at this time of day. Security cross-checks had taken place invisibly before he ever reached the front door, of course. The lobby was decorated for the Christmas season with fake plastic wreaths, holly boughs, blinking Christmas lights, and some red and green ribbon and shiny little ornaments. It all looked so fake to Dan, so flat compared to when he was simming. That looked real.

"Hey, Dan, how’s it goin’? Looks like you had a busy weekend!"

"Yeah, you could say that, Lou," Dan said to the security guard on duty. Most days, he liked Lou well enough, but today he wasn’t in the mood to chat. The old guy was getting near retirement age, and he liked to talk. Dan had heard all about how Lou had turned ork as a teenager back in the twenties. Apparently, people who’d goblinized into orks and trolls lived a lot longer than the ones who were actually born that way later on.

He knew that Lou had been married for more than thirty years to another ork. He was a great-grandfather already, and his kids were in their thirties, which for orks made them seem at least as old as Lou, if not older. Odds were halfway decent that Lou and his wife would outlive their grandchildren and become great-great-grandparents before they died. Dan wondered how Lou kept his sunny disposition day in and day out. It must be hard enough just being an ork, but the idea of outliving your kids and grandkids really seemed unfair to Dan.

"You kids and yer parties," Lou said. "Well, I hope you had fun."

"Not nearly enough," Dan said with a wan smile. Lou chuckled and shook his head as Dan took the hall down to the "gopher farm."

That was what his co-workers called the maze of cubicles that occupied most of the main floor where he worked. They were standard-issue corporate gray, set off by the slate blue carpeting. The cubes got their nickname from the way the workers would pop their heads up over the walls from time to time to talk or look around, like gophers poking their heads up from their holes.

Dan rounded the corner of the maze that led to his cube, chosen carefully because the location didn’t let passersby see in. That small measure of privacy turned out to be a disadvantage that morning, however. He stopped dead in his tracks in the doorway of his cubicle when he saw someone else sitting in his chair.

The man was human, probably about Dan’s age or a little younger. He was dressed in "corporate casual," an open-necked polo shirt of dark green and a pair of black synthdenim jeans over what looked like black, steel-toed boots. His red hair was long and carefully combed in front, but clipped short on the sides and in back. A slim fiber optic cable trailed from the chrome-lipped jack behind his ear, running down over his shoulder to the terminal on Dan’s desk.

The stranger glanced up at Dan from whatever he was doing, which Dan took to mean he couldn’t have been too deeply immersed in the virtual reality of the Matrix. The red-haired smiled, revealing perfect white teeth, and reached up to tug the cable from his datajack.

"Oh, hi," he said. "Your boss said it’d be okay to use your terminal for a while before you got here. I’m Roy Kilaro." He held up the ID tag that hung from a lanyard around his neck. "I’m with Information Systems from the main office in Montreal. You’re Dan"—he squinted at Dan’s ID tag—"Otabi, right?"

Dan nodded. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

If Kilaro took offense at Dan’s abruptness, he didn’t show it. "Routine maintenance check of the data-traffic systems," he said with a wave of his hand. "Nothing major, just some things the Powers That Be want checked out."

Dan felt a stab of fear, but he forced himself to sound calm. "What sort of things?".

"Sorry. Top secret." Kilaro winked as though the whole thing was some kind of joke, but Dan didn’t think so. Kilaro let the data cable reel smoothly back into its slot next to the terminal and pushed back from Dan’s desk. "I’m all done here, so you can have your cube back. Sorry to barge in unannounced."

"No problem," Dan murmured as Kilaro stood up and reached for the strap of a flat black case sitting on the floor at his feet. Dan could guess what it contained. Only serious computer systems specialists carried cyberdecks.

As Kilaro looped the strap over his shoulder, Dan noticed the tail end of a tattoo curling down toward his wrist. It looked like some kind of Asian dragon.

"That’s quite a tattoo," he said, trying to keep Kilaro talking to see if he could learn more about what he was looking for.

Kilaro smiled and pulled up his sleeve a little further. "A souvenir of my misspent youth. Tattoos were all the rage back then," he said. " But I don’t want to take up any more of your morning, Dan, and I’ve got a lot more to do so. . ."

"Oh! Of course," Dan said, stepping aside to let Kilaro pass.

"Have a good day," Kilaro said over his shoulder as he sauntered out of the cubicle.

"Yeah, you too," Dan called after him, watching him from the doorway and wondering what had really brought Kilaro down from Montreal. He was afraid he knew what it was.

He walked over to his terminal and sat down. He picked up the optical cable, then sat for a moment trying to calm himself. Then he reached up and slotted the cable into his datajack. He logged into the system and began to run a routine startup, still wondering what Kilaro had been up to.

Roy Kilaro reached the lobby, where he stopped at the security desk.

"All set there, Mr. Kilaro?" the ork security guard asked him.

"For now, Lou." Roy slid his ID through the card-reader to log himself out of the system. "I might be back to check up on a few things."

"So you’re gonna be in town for a few more days?"

"Maybe. Why?"

The old ork grinned. "There’s so much going on these days. People have been celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Awakening all year long. Salem’s been especially active. That’s where my granddaughter lives. Did I tell you she’s a witch? Must take after her grandmother there." Lou chuckled at his own joke.

Roy gave a short laugh in return. The anniversary didn’t mean that much to him, but he’d been following the mixture of hoopla and panic surrounding Halley’s comet with some interest. "Thanks for the tip, Lou. Maybe I’ll have some time when I’m done here. For now, there’s no rest for the wicked." He hefted his cyberdeck case to say that he had to go back to work.

The ork nodded. "I hear you. Have a good one."

"You too," Roy said, and went out through the building’s sliding doors. The sky had begun to darken over with clouds since he’d arrived this morning, and he wondered if it was going to snow.

He’d spent the morning poking around in the facility’s computer systems without turning up anything definite. Dan Otabi’s sudden appearance had been interesting, though. Roy could tell he was nervous, maybe even scared, and that was suspicious.

He reached his car and told his headware to send the coded unlocking signal via the tiny radio transmitter in his skull. The alarm system beeped twice, and the headlights flashed him a greeting as he popped open the door and slid behind the wheel of the rented Nissan-Chrysler Spirit. He dropped his case onto the passenger seat beside him.

Yeah, Otabi’s sudden appearance had been interesting. Roy had chosen his cubicle on purpose, of course. A talk with Otabi’s manager had clued Roy to the man’s reclusive, almost anti-social tendencies, which made him a prime candidate for whoever had doctored the facility’s telecom records. Plus, Otabi was a data-management specialist, and he had the skills to pull it off. Unfortunately, Otabi or not, the intruder hadn’t left any fingerprints behind in the system that Roy could find.

He thought again about the look on Otabi’s face when he saw Roy sitting at his terminal. He looked guilty, but nobody would accept that as proof of wrongdoing. If Roy was wrong, or if the guy simply decided to dig in his heels and deny everything, Roy would have problems of his own before this was all over. If he was going to score points with the big bosses in Québec, he needed to deliver the whole thing wrapped up like a present, showing how he’d taken care of a threat to CATco on his own.

He tapped in the ignition sequence onto the steering keypad. Let’s find out where Mr. Otabi lives, he thought, pulling out of the company lot. As he drove through the gate and onto the street, Roy called up the personnel files he’d downloaded into his headware.

He tapped Dan Otabi’s home address into the car’s onboard system, then headed for the highway that would take him there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Talon sipped his rapidly cooling soykaf from a paper cup, willing the bio-chemicals in it to kick-start his body. He was tired and listless after a night of restless sleep, and for once he was grateful even for the watery-gray light of an overcast day. The chill December wind had chased a fair number of people into the Java-Hut for a cup of something warm. Or lukewarm, as the case might be, Talon thought, swirling the soykaf around in his mouth before swallowing. There was something that made soykaf lose heat faster than any other substance known to man.

The door opened, bringing with it a blast of cold air and a new arrival in the form of Trouble, who Talon had been waiting for. Her real name was Ariel Tyson, of course, but the handle suited her. She and Talon had first met over the barrel of an Are Predator she’d been pointing at him. Someone had hired her to dig into his past, someone who wanted to lure him back to Boston from DeeCee, where he’d been shadowrunning with the team of Assets, Inc. Trouble was the bait, designed to help lure him in. When it was all over, Talon had decided to stay in Boston. Since then, he’d gotten to know Trouble better as both a friend and a teammate.

She was dressed in her usual leather jacket, close-fitting jeans, boots, and a T-shirt. Today, the shirt was dark blue. Her cyberdeck case hung by a strap over one shoulder, but Talon knew she carried a pistol in the shoulder holster concealed by her jacket.

Trouble was all business. She never wore jewelry and hid her green eyes behind dark sunglasses. Her long, dark hair was pulled back with a clasp in the shape of a silver Celtic knot. Silver also gleamed from the datajack behind one ear.