Stones (Data) (55 page)

M
att wakes with a start. He has the eerie sense that someone is watching. The aroma of bacon and eggs descends upon him.

Naganuma sits at the low table a few meters away, his face close to a plate about to take a bite.

“
Ohayou gozaimasu
,” he says. “I trust you slept well?”

“Like a baby.”

“Have breakfast. And then you will leave. Back to the shrine.”

Matt rubs the sleep out of his eyes and quickly sits down at the table. “Is that where you were last night?”

Naganuma keeps eating and doesn’t answer.

Reaching for his chopsticks, Matt suddenly feels acute hunger pains. “How do we get there?”

“The same way we got here.” Naganuma’s voice is even more irritable than usual. He finishes breakfast, stands up and begins to pace back and forth in the room as Matt eats.

“Is there anything else you need to tell me about the Stones before—”

“Before what?” Naganuma stops and stares down at Matt.

“Before I go after Jessica.”

“You mean Ryzaard?” Naganuma puts his hands on his hips and towers over Matt, his voice rising in volume until he is almost shouting. “You still do not understand. But you will soon.” Naganuma walks to the front door and slides it open, allowing bright sunlight to stream onto the table. “I will be waiting for you outside.”

Matt emerges onto the deck a minute later, his mouth still full of rice and pickled plum, and walks around two corners to the opposite side of the house. Naganuma stands in the grass with his back to Matt, not far from the foot of the steps. At the bottom, Matt’s shoes are neatly arranged, and he slips into them.

Walking through the grove past the giant trunks, Naganuma stays slightly ahead of Matt. Less than a hundred meters from the house, they encounter a heavy mist hanging like curtains between the trees. Neither of them speak for a time. An oblong object, round at each end and about three feet high, begins to take shape in the mist.

After a few more steps in silence, Matt recognizes the shape as the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, parked neatly next to a tree. Naganuma walks briskly to it and runs his hand along the leather seat and chrome handlebars. He looks up at Matt with bloodshot eyes, and then looks away.

“Get on. It will take you back.”

“What about—”

“No questions,” Naganuma says. “I’ll see you back at the shrine.” He backs away and makes room for Matt to mount the bike.

Without thinking, Matt feels for the Stone through the outside of his pocket, and then reaches out with his left hand to touch the black handle grip on the motorcycle.

The instant his fingers touch the grip, the air flashes white, forcing his eyes to slam shut, and all sound is sucked away.

When he opens his eyes, there’s a tatami floor under the soles of his shoes, and he is standing face to face with an Elvis Presley poster hanging on a wall.

Back at the shrine.

Off to the right, there’s movement in his peripheral vision. He turns and stares in disbelief.

“Hello, Matt. How have you been?” Ryzaard says.

T
his is good. Really good.

Kent stares into the screen of his slate, reading the transcripts from MX Global over and over, finding the words hard to believe. He’s even more sure now that he’s hit the jackpot.

Only a day and a half have passed since he started eavesdropping on the 175th floor of the MX Global building. It’s like walking into a theater near the end of a three hour movie. He doesn’t know all the details of the plot or all of the characters, but the ending is clear enough.

Ryzaard has a team of hotshot youngsters working on a complex project. They have nearly unlimited money and all the technology and intelligence resources of the MX Global corporate machine. And they aren’t concerned about breaking the law. MX Global has the power to make the law be whatever it wants the law to be.

The target of all this activity is an unfortunate young man they have never named, but who has some object, perhaps a rock, of such great value that Ryzaard is taking extraordinary steps to get it. Kent finds it hard to believe that any rock is worth the attention being lavished on this one, but that appears to be the upshot of all the conversations, and he has no idea why. Perhaps the young man has a rare type of crystal or diamond with industrial applications that MX Global can exploit.

But somehow that doesn’t fully make sense.

Whatever the reason, Ryzaard wants the young man captured. A special room has been prepared for the interrogation, which almost certainly includes torture. They have his girlfriend in custody, though she apparently knows nothing about the plot. Based on the transcripts, both of them are likely to be killed in the process. Ryzaard and his helpers don’t seem to care.

Kent closes his eyes and sees the image of his wife’s car, crushed beyond recognition, forever burnt into his mind.

Murder perpetrated in the name of corporate greed. MX Global is going to do it again.

He asks himself a question.

What are you going to do about it?

He could just stay in his rented office, continue the eavesdropping campaign and collect as much incriminating evidence as possible. In time, he could write it all up and publish it anonymously on the Mesh, including the actual voice recordings to make it authentic.

By then, the two young people might already be dead.

And would it be enough to bring Ryzaard and the MX Global corporate murder machine down? Not likely.

Kent could give it to the FBI or the CIA, but if the conversations he’s been listening to are real, it sounds like Ryzaard may already have them in his back pocket. And even if Kent manages to make the information public, MX Global has the resources to make it all appear as nothing more than a clever fabrication, just another conspiracy theory constructed along a worn-out theme, corporate power run amok. Kent has the feeling that anything he posts to the Mesh will be erased as fast as he can upload it, certainly before it attracts much attention. Even if the posted information does manage to survive, it will be banished to the Mesh’s lunatic fringe.

It’s time to take stock of his situation.

What can he really do? Call the police? Walk into the building and confront Dr. Ryzaard directly? Demand that he stop his evil plans? Not a chance. For starters, he’d have to pass through multiple high security barriers to get access to the 175th floor. But even then, what could he do?

He decides to go for a walk outside and think about it.

After a quick elevator ride, he gets to the front doors, puts on his sunglasses and steps out of the shade into the sun.

A young man in a red T-shirt lingers behind him in the lobby, the same lanky figure who tailed him two days ago on a trip to the store for fishing line. As soon as he hits the sidewalk, he makes a hard turn to the right and walks away from the MX Global building.

Three blocks and five minutes later, the aroma of Chinese food triggers irresistible hunger pains, and Kent remembers he hasn’t eaten since lunch the previous day. The smell drags him to a narrow opening on the bottom floor of a building just off the sidewalk. The restaurant has the appearance of a long dark cave with only enough room for one row of bar stools at a narrow counter. The clientele is all old folks, people that have probably been coming here for years.

He takes a step through the entrance and moves into the darkness until he comes to an empty seat at the counter. He turns to look outside just in time to see the young man in the red T-shirt walk by.

The steamed dumplings aren’t the best he’s ever had, but they are better than he expected. He takes his time to savor them and doesn’t mind making the kid in the red T-shirt wait outside.

When Kent returns to the sidewalk, the kid is standing inside the large window of a bookstore across the street. Kent decides that it’s time to get some exercise and take that young man on a wild-goose chase. He shifts into fast walking mode and goes for a hike. After an hour, he’s passed and doubled back through half a dozen high-rise malls.

The young man in the red T-shirt is still there, but this time it’s Kent tailing him, all the way back to the office building across the street from MX Global.

Once the young man disappears into the elevator in the lobby, Kent moves on to his next target, the one across the street.

He needs hard data to come up with a plan of attack.

It wouldn’t be easy to penetrate the MX Global building. The entrance at street level is crawling with private security forces, athletic-looking men and women in crisply pressed dark blue uniforms with the corporate logo prominently displayed. On the outside walls of the first ten stories of the building, there’s a prominent display of chemical and optical sensors, all on active duty. None of this is of much concern to Kent since it’s mostly for show. The intent is simple. Impress investors and project MX Global’s bulletproof image.

After a quick survey, Kent decides there are only three ways to break into the building. First, go in Hollywood style and drop onto the roof using a fixed-wing or heli-glider. He would need an advanced protocol on his slate to remotely subdue motion detectors and avoid detection by an army of surveillance cameras and sensors on top of the building. The entire maneuver is best performed at noon when the sun is straight up. And that’s just to get on the roof.

Getting down into the building is even harder. After the Chilean suicide attacks of 2035, most modern skyscrapers have more security personnel in the top floors than at street level. For a lone wolf like Kent, getting inside from the roof requires an amount of force that makes it not much of an option.

Another approach is to take the most direct and least expected route and simply walk in the front door. With the right security implants, he can get access to any floor in the building. But the codes are randomly updated and shuffled via Mesh downloads, making this a difficult option to execute without inside help.

That leaves one other option. Sneak in from the bottom, below street level. Most of the buildings in the City have deep roots, going down twenty or more floors. MX Global is no exception and even has its own subway stop. And security is notoriously lax at the lower levels, especially in the mornings and evenings during rush hour when thousands of office workers are coming and going at the same time. Even then, everyone has to walk single-file through a security portal equipped with scanners and sniffers designed for the military by a subsidiary of MX Global itself. Weapons, explosives or anything else with a suspicious chemical signature will be quickly detected.

Unless you have a burst jammer on your jax and a secret way in.

L
ittle John paces back and forth inside the tent. It’s already dark outside. “I knew it was just a cover. No one drives all the way to New York to set up an office for a temporary collections business.”

The tall man in the sunglasses nods. “Yes, no doubt about it. He’s carrying out surveillance on MX Global and Dr. Ryzaard.”

“How did you finally get into his office?”

“It wasn’t easy. He had a CVAC unit installed on the door with a bio-code that we couldn’t disable from the outside. So we did it from the inside.”