Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

She slid one printout of the dossier out of the folder. It was about ten pages long and stapled together. She opened it in front of him.

“Our information about Zolcu comes from multiple sources,” she said. “The Romanian Intelligence Service, Interpol, and the data Quickdraw and Mike Carmody’s team gathered for us.”

He nodded. “Go ahead.”

“If you’ve read the file, you know Drajan Petrovik and Zolcu are numbers one and two at the top of the technologie vampiri ’s leadership hierarchy.” Morse lifted her coffee off the desk and sipped. “Petrovik’s a breed apart, of course. Smarter, more ambitious than the rest. When he won scholarships to study in London and Madrid, he became a kind of legendary figure on the dark web.”

“The Wolf.”

She nodded.

“Nobody else is on his level.”

“Except Kali Alcazar. She’s right there on the mountaintop. Shit, she is the mountain. Those vampiri assholes, Petrovik included, are still looking for a way up.”

“And thankfully she’s with us now,” Morse said.

Harris merely grunted and looked down at his tablet.

“Zolcu’s a coattail grabber,” he said. “Grew up on a beet farm. The same town as Petrovik and their partner Emil Vasile. Went to college with them for a couple years...”

“In Satu Mare,” Morse said. “After Petrovik left, he and Vasile held the fort and got into increasingly sophisticated computer crimes. Later on, Zolcu branched out into other rackets. Counterfeiting, vice, drugs...banned nootropics and biohacks.”

“He’s a big slug in a piss puddle,” Harris said. “And a whoring, gambling degenerate. Stays in his element, like an old-time mob boss who won’t leave the neighborhood. Except they liked good, tailored suits, and he dresses up in stupid fucking pirate costumes.”

“Cosplay,” she said. “It’s a thing.”

Harris shrugged.

“Everything’s a thing,” he said. “The world’s full of assholes.”

Morse looked at him.

“We’ve got to be careful with him, Leo,” she said. “Zolcu ran the fake bank-card operation that spread the Hekate bug. After the Wolf went to ground, he took over their syndicate’s operations, oversaw them for months until his capture. Most importantly, with Emil Vasile dead, and Vasile’s sister at large, he’s our best link to Petrovik. He almost certainly knows his whereabouts. If not specifically, then generally.”

Harris glanced up from the tablet. Something she’d said was getting his antennae up. The same as it had over the phone earlier.

“Why are we talking about it now?”

“Because Gustav Zolcu’s no slouch. He’s shrewd and confident. I just want to be sure we don’t underestimate him.”

“You think that’s a problem? For me?”

Morse shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Then what is it?”

She sat still for moment.

“After last November, I felt I had to take a hard look in the mirror,” she said. “We weren’t ready to move on the Wolf’s Lair. Even knowing Petrovik wasn’t there. As an organization, Net Force wasn’t yet the sum of its parts. We hadn’t integrated them. We weren’t fully together. We were rash. It was a mistake, and we paid dearly for it.”

Harris took a breath. It felt short, like he’d just climbed a flight of stairs. He could have used a hit of oxygen.

“You don’t think I can handle the interview myself,” he said. “That’s what you were getting at before. ‘Participate,’ my ass. Gone a few months, and I’m washed up in your eyes.”

“You’re personalizing things, Leo. And you shouldn’t be.”

“Bullshit.”

She was silent. Harris was looking straight into her eyes. She didn’t blink.

“I’m sorry you feel slighted,” she said. “I mean it. I’d hoped you would understand. But you’re going to have a partner in the interrogation room this morning. I think your skill sets can be complementary. Your separate knowledge bases. Especially with Zolcu.”

He sat there without saying a word for thirty long seconds. Then he turned off his tablet and put it back into his coat pocket and glared across the desk at her.

“Who?” he asked.

The door behind the desk opened to an old metal skybridge spanning almost two hundred feet from the north side of the Terminal to the south side of an old bronze-trimmed office building across West 51st Street. Once upon a time, the building had been the company headquarters of Hudson Maritime Storage Enterprises—the same outfit that ran the warehouse operation for over a century. Built so employees moving between the two could avoid the pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages four stories down, the skybridge—with its curlicue pressed-tin ceiling and broad crank windows—now provided cloistered access from the Fusion Center to the Net Force East adjunct—its top floor consisting of a block of secure interview and observation rooms, the lower stories housing administrative offices and specialized equipment facilities.

Harris stopped halfway across the span.

“Something wrong?” Carol said beside him.

“No,” he said.

“Leo,” she said, “what can I do—”

She read the look in his eyes and cut herself short.

“I’ll catch up,” he said.

Carol nodded silently and continued to the door.

Harris turned to look out the window at the traffic drifting below. His back to her, he listened to the advance of her footsteps. When he heard the door slide shut behind her, he got the rubber tubing out of the bag’s outer pocket and hooked it up to the oxygen machine. A couple of hits and he would be fine.

A few minutes later he was holding his biocard up at the door. It opened into a bright, wide, windowless corridor with smooth beige walls and a shiny beige-and-white tiled floor. The air was filtered and neither warm nor cool. Carol was waiting just inside the door with two buzz-cut guards wearing soft vests over black short-sleeved shirts. The letters FBI were printed across their chests in white. They both held MP5 submachine guns and carried Glock 17 pistols in sidearm holsters.

“The observation room is around the corner,” Carol said, nodding up the hall.

He shook his head no. “Take me right over to him,” he said. “I want to get started.”

She shrugged. “Your call,” she said.

They walked on with one guard leading the way and one behind them. The doors to the observation and interrogation rooms were closely side-by-side on the right. Another armed guard stood between them. Harris paused and slipped his carry bag off his shoulder.

“Think you can put this somewhere for a while?” he asked Carol.

She took it and nodded.

“Sure,” she said. “It’ll be safe.”

Harris jabbed a finger at the interrogation room door, and the guard held his card to the scanner and opened it for him.

The room was a small cubicle lit by overhead fluorescent panels. A one-way mirror ran across its left wall. In its center was a long metal table. There were three molded plastic chairs with metal legs, one in a corner of the room, another pushed under the table with its back to the door.

Gustav Zolcu sat in the third chair, facing the door from behind the table. He looked like his dossier photos, thin and dark-eyed with a black goatee. The only notable differences were his shaved head and orange prison coveralls.

Harris entered alone, waiting for the guard to shut the door from behind him in the corridor. After a second he took a step toward the table, stopped, and looked directly at Zolcu, who sat there looking straight back at him.

“Before we get started, I want to inform you of your rights to an attorney and to remain silent,” Harris said. “I also want you to know your answers are being recorded. Understood?”