John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

“Uh—okay. Should I give you some money?”

“He already paid me. What—you think I’m a bum or something?” The man made a low cackling sound that might’ve been laughter as he walked away.

Kiskel looked around, saw no appreciable traffic, and jaywalked, making a beeline for the flowerpot in front of the funky old Wiggins Hotel.

It was one of those big antique hip-high pots, this one cracked and occupied only by a dusty artificial plant, cigarette butts crowding it. He couldn’t see a phone—wait, the cigarette butts were piled up in one place. He dug under them, found the phone, shoved it in his pocket and hurried on.

Kiskel went fast as he could without running, around the corner to his car. Before he got there he used his key control to tell the Jaguar to fire up its heaters. He got into the warm car, locked it, and, hands shaking from the cold, activated the phone.

A man’s face appeared on the screen. The man had a black kerchief bandit’s mask pulled up to cover much of his face under his leather billed cap, but Kiskel knew it was Aiden Pearce.

“Kiskel,” Pearce said. “I can’t stay on this frequency long. Let’s get this done. You really got something I should know?”

“It’s just… you asked about Verrick. If I had anything interesting on him.”

“And you acted like you didn’t want to help me.”

“Okay, well, I thought it through. He’s going to destroy the company if he isn’t stopped. And… he’s up to something else too. I don’t know what it is, but it feels shady. Could be illegal in a big way.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Nothing I can prove—it’s just the way Verrick’s covering things up. Where his investment money came from. I mean—I’m not Blume CFO anymore, I’m mostly just doing consulting for Blume, but Verrick was pretty mysterious about his investors and there were rumors of money laundering.”

“Rumors from where?”

“Not at liberty to say. I know he met with a cop named Tranter more than once, and I don’t know why, or anything about it, but he’s not talking to rest of us about these meetings. His secretary told mine, but…”

“I’m limited on what I can find out right now. Somebody’s been trying to shoot me in the head.”

“What? Right now?”

“No—they tried recently and they’re likely gonna try again. I’m saying, if you can find out anything more…”

“I do know one thing. He’s connected with a real estate investor from Idaho. Owns land all over the country—made his nut in Florida and Montana. I heard at the club this guy’s got serious connections to white imperialists.”

“And who’d that be?”

“His name’s Marlon Winters. Billionaire. He’s on the Iceberg Investments board of directors along with Verrick. So he knows your pal Verrick.”

“Marlon Winters. I’ve heard the name. Anything else?”

“Ally of mine in Blume has suspicions that Verrick is lining up money—from Winters amongst other people—to buy a whole hell of a lot more of Blume’’s shares. And he’s hinting that the price of those shares may ‘suddenly go down’. Verrick might be planning to take over Blume!”

“That’s interesting. Thanks, Kiskel. You’re one of the good ones. They keep trusting people like you at Blume. I may buy some shares myself. But not if Verrick takes over.”

Pearce chuckled—and cut the connection.

Kiskel stared at the blank screen, then remembered what the deformed man in the floppy man had said.

He just managed to get the driver’s side window down before smoke started to hiss from the seams of the cell phone.

He tossed it out the window—and watched it melt into slag on the sidewalk.

Lou Kiskel shuddered, closed the window, and drove hastily away.

Mick Wolfe was standing across the street from the old Elks Lodge on 77th. The Elks no longer owned it; they had sold the place, and taken their sign down, but it was a classic big city lodge building. Built in the mid 20th century, it was designed to be an auditorium as well as a meeting place. It was in the general style of an old Greek temple, but with concrete elk heads at the corners as spouts and chipped old columns holding up the big triangular gable.

If this was another lodge of some kind now, as Keeting had hinted, it was sure one that had its meetings late at night. Wolfe glanced at his watch—the time was nearly eleven-thirty.

The Hawk sheered and veered, chasing pieces of newspaper and fast-food wrappers ahead of it, as Wolfe crossed the street.

It had been Pearce, not Keeting, who’d gotten him here tonight.

“Wolfe? Wake up!”

Wolfe had been asleep, stretched out on the closed sofa bed. “What? Pearce? Couldn’t you just call me on the phone?”

“No.” Pearce was up on that television screen again. “Listen, I’ve been doing a search for people associated with Stan Grampus. Only one I could find who might be in Chicago is named Winters. Grampus used to work for Winters—but there’s no clear record of what Grampus did for him. Does seem though that Winters and Grampus have some obscure ideology in common… And tracing Winters, I find he’s in town. And he’s called for a limo to take him to a place on 77th… Here’s a picture of Winters…”

And now Wolfe, crossing the street, was trying to figure out how to get into that old lodge on 77th, which normally would’ve been easy. Only it wasn’t easy now. There were three guys out front in civilian coats, identical British macs—but Wolfe knew instantly they were military-trained. Chances were, judging from the comm earpieces and the fact that one of them had a G within an eagle tattoo on his neck, they were Graywater Security. Mercenaries. Some of these Graywaters were fumbling idiots, but some of them were good at their job, and all of them were heavily armed thugs with itchy trigger fingers. Which made all of them dangerous.

Wolfe had the .45 he’d appropriated from Keeting under his coat, and he’d bought extra ammo for it. He had the .38 as a backup pistol. But he had no desire to shoot it out with Graywater Security on the streets of Chicago. If he lived through it he’d end up shooting it out with cops and maybe a S.W.A.T. team.

No, time to use covert entry training…

Wolfe walked up to one of the Graywater Security men, looked at him with a vacant expression, then walked past. He just wanted to get close enough to get a sense of what weapons these guys might have under their coats. Wolfe thought he’d made out just enough of an outline under the guy’s left arm— a machine gun pistol, probably a Mack 10.

Wolfe walked away, muttering nonsense to himself so the merc would dismiss him as a homeless crackpot. “I told ’em don’t talk to me like my ma, my ma wouldn’t say that…” Wolfe said.

He heard the Graywaters laughing at him. And that was good.

Wolfe kept walking past the building, on past the next one, a closed-down Dollar Store, then cut into the narrow walkway between the empty Dollar Store and the SRO flophouse on the corner. He stepped over a shapeless pile of rain-mushed paper trash and went to an old garbage can lying on its side. He turned the can over and set it up, and climbed up on it, jumping from there to the lower rung of the fire escape’s hinged ladder. His weight pulled the ladder down on its spring till his boots touched the ground.

Wolfe climbed up the ladder, easing it back into place slowly from the first landing, so it wouldn’t clang, then he climbed the rest of the rusty old fire escape to the roof.

It was windy, cold and dark up here, outside the cones of light from the streetlights. He could see a handful of baleful stars through a temporary break in the clouds.