John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

“You better be careful with that cigarette,” Wolfe told him. “Look down at your feet.”

The guy blinked dazedly at Wolfe and then down at his shiny black shoes.

There was a spreading pool of gasoline around his feet. The Escalade’s fuel line had broken, was leaking fuel fast from under the car.

“See what I mean?” Wolfe said. “Just toss your gun away. Walk off with that cigarette. I do hate to see a man burn to death. Even a fucking dirt bag like you.”

“Who you callin’ a dirt bag?” the thug said.

As he said it, the cigarette waggled in his mouth… and fell out.

Wolfe sighed and turned away. He didn’t even see the pool of gas catch fire. But he heard the explosion, and felt the heat on the back of his neck.

He put the gun away, and strode off down the street, till he found a car that had a remote opening key. He used the phone to unlock it, and start it. He got in, just as the sirens started screaming toward the burning cars at the street corner, and drove back to the neighborhood of the safehouse.

I guess Pearce’s sweet little device does work after all…

“How do I know you’re from DedSec?”

GlowWorm shrugged. “How do I know you’re Seline Garnera?”

“I’ve got military I.D., a passport, a driver’s license.”

He smiled. “I.D. doesn’t mean much. The government prints whatever fake I.D. it needs.” He was a young black in an old, worn out leather motorcycle jacket, skinny jeans and snakeskin boots; he had short dyed-blue hair, a pierced lower lip; he wore one of those circular stretcher earrings, that stretched the hole way out, and within the circular earring was a silver skull and crossbones. He had a considerable paunch but was otherwise remarkably skinny.

They were meeting in a retro-punk bar, near the waterfront in North Chicago. They were standing in a corner of the bar, each of them with a drink in their hands; he was drinking his, she was ignoring hers. They had to talk with their heads fairly close together, because The Misfits were booming from the jukebox. The meeting place had been set up via a fairly mysterious text that had come to her from a “GlowWorm”, after she’d asked an old friend from high school to find DedSec—her friend, Sue-Louise Cushman; Seline knew Sue-Louise had married a Chicago hacker, “Grimmy”, who had a lot of internet-underground connections. Grimmy was associated with Anonymous, with Digital Gangsters and, Seline suspected, with the secretive hacker revolutionary group DedSec itself.

GlowWorm was probably a friend of Sue-Louise’s husband.

“I’m takin’ a big chance being here,” Seline said.

“You are, huh? You look like a federal agent to me.”

“A federal agent!”

“You’re a clean-cut lady. You got a slick bearing.”

“That’s a military bearing. I told you I’m just out of the Marines.”

He grinned. “Hard to picture you as a jarhead in boot camp.”

“It was a little different than what men go through, but it was tougher than you could’ve taken.”

“Ha! You’re probably right about that!”

“Okay, you’re Seline, and you’re not a federal agent. I didn’t think you were, because… our mutual friend set this up… But I came here without a mask. I mean, normally, if I met a stranger in anything relating to DedSec, I’d wear a mask to the meeting, someplace else out of the public eye, but out of respect for Grimmy… He bailed me out of jail, he did a lot for me… And since you insisted on no masks…”

“I’m not going to trust somebody who wears a mask to meet me.”

He shrugged. “Those are some of the only people I trust.”

“I don’t have the… the thing with me,” Seline said.

“I wouldn’t be here if I thought you did. You can put it on a flashdrive and get that to me later, if we decide to move ahead with this. So you told Grimmy’s wife you got this off a CIA agent?”

She glanced nervously around. “I did. She transferred it to my phone. It took me a while to figure out how it was… how it was coded into the jpeg.”

“She used a picture to code it? I’ve heard of that.”

“It’s an extensive file on her investigation into some military guys. She got the story from a soldier named Wolfe. A Delta Force guy. Wolfe ended up in military prison but… she always thought he was telling the truth. She couldn’t prove it well enough to protect herself and to get him out of jail. And then when she was getting close she started worrying that some Marine on board the ship was… stalking her. I mean—to kill her. A Sergeant named Callow.”

“This was on a ship?”

“I was stationed on the USS Don Roeser .”

“That’s a big flattop, isn’t it? An aircraft carrier?”

She nodded. The song was changing on the jukebox and they waited till the new song started—a song by Tool.

“A carrier,” she said, when the song was wailing and thundering along. She leaned close enough to talk into GlowWorm’s ear. “She disappeared off the ship. Someone spread rumors she was drunk and fell off the fantail. But I think someone hit her, knocked her out… and threw her overboard.”

“They find her body?”

“What was left of it, about five days later.”

GlowWorm grimaced. “I’ll do some fact checking on some of this stuff—I have to warn you about that. But it’ll be done with the utmost secrecy. Won’t be discussed in any chat rooms, nothing like that.”

“You mean—hack into some files?”

“Yeah.”

“A lot of it’s classified. You might not be able to get to it.”

“I can confirm you were on that ship. And probably that this woman who gave you the file was there… but not that she was in CIA. What was her name?”

“Ruth Medina.”

“Okay. You sure you want to leak these files?”

“Yes. It’s what I came here to do. Sue-Louise said I had to come in person and meet with somebody. I thought about sending it to you over the internet…”

He shook his head. “What with the new NSA programs, all that—no. We have our ways around that stuff but it’s safer to use a flashdrive to get it to us.”

“I don’t trust wikileaks anymore. You sure you can get this out on SystemLeaks?”

He nodded. “If we decide we want to do it. We don’t want anybody to make a fool of us…”

“This is for real. Ruth died for it.”

“Yeah. I’d hate to die for it myself.” He smiled crookedly. “But if you can risk your life, Seline… I guess I can risk mine too.”

Lou Kiskel was worried. He didn’t like this neighborhood, especially at almost nine-thirty at night. It was close to downtown but looked pretty shabby to him. He was more comfortable in Chicago’s “Gold Coast” neighborhood, on a street like Dearborn.

It was cold out here, too, despite his long two-thousand-dollar camel hair coat. Kiskel was almost sixty, getting fat, and regretted making this overture to Pearce. But he did owe Pearce a few favors and he did want to do the right thing. What would happen to Blume if things continued the way they’d been going?

Still—being out here on a teeth chattering night. Not desirable… And here came a wino, or a homeless person of some kind anyway, going to ask him for spare change.

“Kiskel?” said the deformed man in the floppy hat, in a gurgling growl.

Kiskel gaped at him. He looked around, then said, in a hoarse whisper. “You’re from… Pearce?”

“I am. See that big flowerpot in front of the old hotel across the street? There’s a phone in it. Phone’s not good for anything except this one call. After this call, it’ll melt. So don’t keep it in your hand after he hangs up.”