John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

Oh yes, Seline had known the CIA attaché—they’d been pretty good friends. She was civilian, a confident, sharp-eyed career CIA agent about forty years old: Ruth Medina, Italian-American like Seline. Ruth had been on the carrier, had transferred from the base on the island of Socotra, assigned to communications with North African classified troop activities. Agent Medina had done her job quietly, and sometimes she and Seline had eaten dinner together in the cafeteria, for mutual support. They’d talked about a lot of things, but since they were both sworn to secrecy about their work, they almost never spoke about it—and when they did they never broke the rules of classification.

One evening, as they ate in the cafeteria, Ruth had been unusually quiet. She kept glancing fretfully at her cell phone.

“Something wrong?” Seline had asked her, at last.

“Um… you have that app on your phone where stuff can be transferred to it just by touching it with another phone, if…”

“I do have that. Almost never get to use it.”

“’Kay. Is it alright if I test mine, transfer a jpeg to yours, maybe a couple of them?”

“Sure!”

They set it up and the two women touched their phones together. Then Ruth signaled her to wait—and she sent Seline a text.

The text said, Pretend to look at a jpeg. Don’t look at file. Just keep for me.

Seline nodded. She clicked on a photo she’d taken herself, off the fantail of the ship, pretended to study it, and smiled. “Nice!”

Soon after, Ruth smiled nervously at her, got up, and took her tray to clean it off…

And that was the last time Seline ever saw her.

Ruth disappeared from the ship the same night, somewhere off the coast of Yemen.

“Taxi, lady?”

Seline was jarred from her thoughts, and looked at the taxi driver, a smiling older black man.

“Sure. Michigan Shore Hotel.”

“I know the place. Let me take that duffel for you…”

“It’s okay. I’ll take it in back with me…”

She wasn’t letting that bag out of her hands. In it, along with her uniform and passport and souvenirs and discharge papers, was a flashdrive.

And on the flashdrive was something that Ruth Medina had died for.

Seline was going to make sure Ruth hadn’t died in vain.

Mick Wolfe sat down on the sofa in the safehouse, and unwrapped the package.

Inside the package was a black smartphone. One of the slightly larger types. It didn’t seem unusual…

He looked for a note in the package, found nothing except a charger and an extra battery extension. No, there was one other thing. It looked like a small hearing aid. He realized it was some kind of Bluetooth device, so he could listen to the phone without seeming to, when he wanted.

He switched the phone on and waited. It booted up quickly, and almost immediately a message appeared, text within a jpeg frame:

W: Touch on the icon in the corner. And learn…

There’s a program that will only exist on a temporary basis and that will teach you how to use this device.

I’m probably crazy to create another one with access to the new ctOS, and crazier to give it to you. Maybe this knock on the head has made me even crazier but you may as well take advantage of it. I still have some symptoms of a concussion, so I still have to stay off the streets to avoid getting worse. So here’s a way you can bust a move for me. And for you. You and I knew each other back when. Your father helped me, so… I’m helping you, with this. And maybe we’ll help each other…

Wolfe’s fingers trembled as he tapped the screen icon. The program came up with animated imagery showing the methodology for using what Wolfe thought of as the PearcePhone.

He read the directions excitedly, and then with increasing skepticism. For one thing, Pearce claimed the phone’s transmissions were totally untraceable; no one could listen in on it, or trace back its calls. Wolfe doubted that was totally possible.

But this other stuff… taking control of traffic lights? Remotely shorting out power boxes? Controlling trains?

This phone couldn’t possibly do all that…

Could it?

There was only one way to find out.

Southside Chicago, east 45th. Sleet was slanting through the dusk.

Wolfe had put a heavy dark blue hoodie on; he had the hood up, but his face was exposed. He hoped the improved facial scrambling app actually worked. The black market app transmitted a signal from the PearcePhone to nearby ctOS cameras, blurring his face in the camera itself.

But ordinary people on the street saw him as he really was, a lean white guy in a black neighborhood, an interloper with a two day growth of beard, just trucking along, hands in his pants’ pockets, as if he had no particular place to go.

He was walking with the sleety wind to his back. He had the .36 under his hoodie, and the phone in one hand.

He’d already used the PearcePhone before leaving the safehouse—to break into a police computer file on the various gang turfs in Chicago. According to the file, this street was being taken over by The Club, who had lately been trying to muscle in on Black Viceroy territory.

He might be confronted by any of them here—Club thugs or Viceroys. But he was pretty sure that the Club had taken over this block, through a group of ex-cons it had hired to move weight here.

Wolfe didn’t like drug dealers—not if they dealt in major drugs like crack or meth or heroin. He’d seen what they’d done to his own neighborhood.

On the right was a fast food place, Golden Fish and Chicken, with a white and blue awning. Across the street was a shaggy, fenced-in park, with steel piping exposed in muddy trenches. A sign on the fence said Change for Chicago At Work but it didn’t look like there’d been any work done there for a long time. Across the street three men hunched along in the sleet, one of them talking on a cell phone.

Wolfe thought , If I want, I can listen into that guy’s phone call… if this phone works.

But someone else had words for him. “Hey, you here for a reason, bub?” came a rough voice behind him.

He turned to see a red-haired man in a long black leather coat looking at him from the parking lot, half-sheltered in the back of the Golden Fish eatery. Probably from the Club.

“Thing is,” the Club thug continued, “you got to be a customer, a resident of this block—or you got to pay a toll. To me.” He patted his coat pocket. “Got a .45 here will back me up.”

“A toll? Sure.” Wolfe reached into his pocket, and walked timidly up to the thug, as if to pay him off. “Here…”

Then he flashed the .38 out instead and used its gun butt to knock the thug on his ass.

Wolfe bent over the stunned man, plucked the .45 from his coat, and stuck it in his own waist band. Straightening up, Wolfe drew out the PearcePhone with his left hand. With his thumb he activated the contiguous phone hack; it penetrated the nearest phone, the thug’s…

The system pulled up the man’s phone bill, first off. The bill provided the name Ken Brown, with an address a few blocks from here. Might be his real name but Wolfe suspected it wasn’t.

Wolfe took a phone picture of the sprawled thug with a quick flick of his fingers. He hacked ctOS recognition, cross referenced the phone photo with the population database. Came up with another name in the CPD case files: Buford Keeting . The red-haired Keeting’s face came up, along with his rap sheet. Buford “Duck” Keeting.

Keeting groaned as he sat up, holding his head. “Where’s muh gun… want muh gun…”

“Don’t worry about your gun, Keeting,” Wolfe said. “I’ll take good care of it.”