John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

It was important to find the bastard, fast. Sooner or later, the Graywater bunch was going to realize that one of their own was down… and that something was up.

Aiden Pearce was using the encrypted comm system to talk to Pussler on a computer monitor. And Pussler looked worried.

Pussler kept glancing over his shoulder at the door, then looking pensively back at the webcam. “Boss… I’m telling you I don’t feel safe here.”

“That’s one of my own safehouses. The idea is: a safe house is safe, Pussler. Right? No one knows about the place but you, me, Blank, and Merwiss. So if anyone’s made out you’re hiding out there, it’s because you stuck your dumb head outside and got noticed. I told you to lay low!”

“I did lay low, boss! Ever since you told me that one of those ambulance guys told Tranter who I was…”

“He wasn’t supposed to know who you were.”

“Well, see, that EMT recognized me! I used to ride those ambulances regular, when I was using that synthetic morph!” Pussler grimaced. “I swear that stuff gave me overdoses about every third time I used it…”

“So why’d you keep using it, Pussler?”

“Well, ‘cause it’s what I could get. Keepin’ it real, I’m a drug addict. Or I was… I’m trying to stay clean, boss, and all I got here is… ah, almost nothing.”

“That girlfriend of yours been coming around?”

“No! She don’t know where I am! Boss—you got other safehouses that Merwiss doesn’t know about, right?”

“Merwiss?” Was Pussler really worried about Merwiss? The programmer had seemed harmless enough… although there were recent indications of a gambling problem.

“Merwiss knows about two of the safehouses,” Pearce said. “The one you’re in and the one over on the waterfront.” Pearce was careful to keep some of his safehouses known only to himself. “There’s three more he doesn’t know about. Including the one that Wolfe is in.”

“You gotta let me move into one of those others! I don’t trust Merwiss!”

“Why?”

But Pearce himself had wondered if Merwiss might’ve been the one who’d tipped off Tranter and Grampus to the meeting the day they’d tried to kill him. Merwiss theoretically hadn’t known about the meeting. Even Pussler hadn’t known till minutes before attack. But Merwiss had helped set up the cryptography that Pearce had used that day to talk to Pussler. He could have monitored the call and decrypted it, if he was fishing for inside information.

And there was another reason to suspect Merwiss. That gambling addiction. That made him vulnerable to being bought off. Pearce had recently discovered that Merwiss was in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He hadn’t been in debt when Pearce had hired him. Apparently he’d been “clean” from gambling for years. But he’d had a relapse into throwing away his money in the casinos soon after starting work for Pearce. He claimed to be in therapy for it now. But maybe he’d sold Pearce out to pay off that debt…

“Why do you think someone’s onto you there, Pussler?” Pearce asked.

“I heard a weird noise in the hall outside the door. I looked through the peephole and there was some guy hustlin’ away. It was a fat guy so I thought it might’ve been Merwiss but I wasn’t sure.”

Could Merwiss be monitoring this line? Pearce wondered.

“Pussler,” Pearce said. “The mask is going up, right here and right there.”

“Uh—okay,” Pussler said. He cut the line and his face vanished from the screen.

The mask is going up was code for, “I’m going to deal with this myself”. Meaning that Pearce was coming over there in person.

Pearce wasn’t fully recovered from his concussion, but there was no one else he trusted besides Blank and Wolfe. Blank never got involved in anything violent. He was only a go-between. He couldn’t handle this. And Wolfe was on an assignment, up to his neck in it at that old lodge auditorium.

Pearce had to handle this himself. It might be that Pussler was just being paranoid…

Still, Pearce had to know for certain.

He strapped on his favorite pistol, put on his leather overcoat and his cap, and hurried out the door.

Wolfe decided to take his chances in the crowd.

Probably none of these people knew him. Lots of them were casually dressed; and lots of them were openly armed. Being militia types, some of them wore Army coats from Military Surplus. His own stripped-down Army coat would fit right in.

He’d found a crawl space that took him over the audience, and then over the balcony. From there he climbed down a maintenance ladder into another storeroom and, casually as he could, sauntered out to the balcony. The place was jam-packed, mostly with men, everyone staring raptly at the stage. Nearly every seat was taken. From the look of these chuckleheads, there must be some major militia types in here, including some the feds would like to know about. And who was that? It was the Dousch Brothers, sitting together like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, surrounded by obvious bodyguards. The fat, lumpy-faced brothers were oil industry tycoons notorious for their “astroturfing” anti-environmentalism and anti-liberalism. Rumor had them connected to neo fascist groups based in Switzerland.

There were two more Graywater mercs up in the balcony, weapons on straps over their shoulders. One had an Uzi, the other had a Mack 10. Both sentries were listening to Van Ness speak from the stage.

Van Ness . Wolfe struggled with an urge to take a shot at Van Ness from the shadows of the theater, just blow him away right here and now. The son of a bitch had ruined Mick Wolfe’s life. Van Ness had trashed his reputation and got him tossed in the brig for a year. And what a miserable year it had been. Only the exercise room, a couple of friends to play chess with, and the prison library had made the Army’s disciplinary barracks bearable.

Maybe just one squeezed-off burst at Van Ness with the suppressed Mack 10. He could go back up to that attic and shoot him from above, and then…

Wait, was that Stan Grampus over there, sitting toward the top of the balcony? The guy who’d tried to kill Pearce?

It was. His face was sharply recognizable to Wolfe after all that image enhancement.

Grampus was sitting in the back row of the balcony, right next to Winters. The hitman was frowning with concentration, trying to make out what Van Ness was saying, despite the mic feedback and echoes, and Winters, a white-haired man with a broad red face, was smiling with satisfaction at the gathering—like the cat that slowly tortured, eviscerated, and finally ate the canary.

Grampus was twitching in his chair, squirming about as he tried to pay attention to the speaker. Wolfe remembered that the police file said Grampus had an amphetamine habit. Looked like he’d popped some pills not long before the show.

Stan Grampus had swept-back black hair, his gaunt face decorated with a goatee. On the side of his neck was a clumsy blue tattoo of an iron cross. He was a small, wiry looking man wearing a brown leather jacket, a black shirt with a turquoise bolo tie. Somewhere under that coat he was sure to be armed, probably with a nine millimeter pistol.

Wolfe walked up the carpeted stairs along the aisle, trying to get above Grampus, to keep him in view.

The general plan, now that he had a sense of what this joyful little convocation of lunatics was about, was to follow Grampus and hopefully find out who he worked for. But maybe Grampus’s real boss was already apparent—sitting right next to him. Maybe it was Marlon Winters, and by extension, Verrick, since they were both on the board of directors of the mysterious Iceberg Investments.