John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

She was sitting in a coffee shop, just finishing breakfast, when the text came in. It made her feel glad she was facing the door.

Hey. We’re feeling very positive about document but someone else feeling negative. Seems like they’re trying to find you. They got worried she gave you something. Am hiding out. Grimmy too. You better. Use special key I gave you. Send inquiries from internet cafés. Never same one twice. Destroy this phone. Watch back. Trying to arrange definitive DS action on this.

Seline felt the hair rising on the back of her neck.

She glanced up at the windows of the busy café. They were steamed from coffee pots and a bit grimy. She could see only blurry outlines of people passing on the sidewalk—which looked pretty sinister.

If she read this text right, GlowWorm was saying that whoever had killed her friend Ruth Medina was now looking for Seline Garnera. And they probably weren’t looking for Seline so they could make friends.

There were more delays on DedSec uploading the material. Maybe because they’d gotten word that Seline was being hunted, and GlowWorm too. So they were being extra careful to cover their asses before uploading.

Roger Verrick and General Van Ness would be behind this. They probably wondered if Ruth Medina had shared anything from her files on the rip off of all that money in Somalia. And the set-up of a certain Mick Wolfe.

So they asked themselves, who would it have been?

“Oh, Ruth Medina? She had only one real friend on the ship…”

They were looking to clean house, it seemed, by sweeping away Seline Garnera.

Better get rid of this phone, fast. Apparently she could be traced through it… traced in person.

Seline got up, put on her coat, grabbed her purse, put some money on the table and hurried to the lady’s room. There she smashed her cell phone between the seat and rim of a toilet, as if the hinged seat were a nutcracker. She took the circuit board out, tossed the rest in the trash. She took the circuit board with her, and left the coffee shop, hurrying out into the sunny but cold November morning. She bought a cigarette lighter in a tobacco shop, and went behind the building. She put the phone’s circuit board on the edge of a trash can, and used the lighter to burn it, holding the flame on it till it melted. Then she tossed it in the trashcan.

She still had a way to get in touch with GlowWorm. He’d given her a flashdrive to use for contacting him, in exchange for the one she’d made of the Medina files.

Later. She had to get her luggage and…

No. She had everything she really needed with her. Three hundred dollars in cash, passport, a small pistol—all in her purse. She’d have to abandon that bag, at least for now. She’d buy new clothes. And maybe a wig. Change her appearance as much as she could.

Seline walked quickly out of the alley, and onto the street. Now where?

She just started walking. Random movement seemed best, for now.

Was the organization hinted at in the file really planning to hunt her down, and kill her?

She didn’t have any doubt they were capable of it. The file had made it clear they were murderers, completely ruthless, and highly secretive.

The more she thought about it, the more her stomach tightened.

They might be watching her right now—through ctOS.

She saw a store with wigs in the display window. That’d be a start. She’d need new clothes, after that, and dark glasses…

And then what? She could leave town. But GlowWorm hadn’t recommended that. Maybe for a reason.

And how would she rent a car, or take a plane or train, without the organization being able to trace her?

For now, she would stay put in “the city of big shoulders”. Chicago was a big town. And she just might find some more allies here…

Wolfe could see his own breath shining in the sunlight.

The sky was blue—ice blue. The sun was in its winter declination, pale and low in the sky, though its light glinted on patches of snow in the meadow.

He had his hoodie on under his coat, the hood up, but it didn’t do much for the cold stinging his ears.

Mostly, Wolfe was concentrating on staying alert, watching the sky, and looking for cameras. While they were too far from town for ctOS cameras, the property could well have its own…

His boots crunched frozen stalks of grass as he skirted the meadow, staying under cover of the trees as much as he could. There wasn’t much foliage in those barren branches to hide him—and when he saw the UAV he had to duck into a denser stand where several trees overlapped.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—a model similar to those Wolfe had controlled in Somalia—hummed by overhead, a few yards above the treetops, like some runaway from an extraterrestrial mothership. But he knew exactly what model of drone it was—a new, delta-shaped prototype he’d seen being tested on a secret base in Pakistan—and what it was capable of doing. It was smaller than most attack drones, and didn’’t have the elongated, missile-like shape of the Predator. This one was for specialized surveillance and targeting. It was only about twelve feet from snout to tail.

Were those gun muzzles, projecting at a thirty degree angle from the bottom of the drone? Could be. Wolfe wasn’t certain at this distance.

Wolfe pressed against the bole of a tree, and waited. Soon enough the drone moved on. That would seem to indicate it hadn’t spotted him…

But it would see him, when it returned this way, if he weren’t careful.

Keep moving. Keep watchful.

Wolfe emerged from the woods into the clearing, but keeping close to the trees—and then he saw the dead deer. It was sprawled awkwardly, with only a few gnaw-marks on it where something had tried to feed in the night and a couple of bullet wounds on its flank and upper spine. Judging from the placement of the wounds, Wolfe figured the thing had been shot from above. From directly overhead.

He shuddered, imagining himself sighted by the UAV. Followed. Hunted. Shot down that way.

He hurried to the treeline, and on toward Blume’’s prototype smart house. Wolfe hoped he was going the right direction. The presence of the drone suggested that he wasn’t far away…

He emerged from a stand of sugar maples, and saw he was just about fifty yards from the edge of a house; it was a spread-out, glassy, angular place, modern architectural-style, one-story. It was exactly where it should be—the smart house—it used a distributed control system, an intelligent network to govern all the devices in the house, right down to door locks, window shutters, lighting, voice activation systems. There were satellite dishes on the roof, and another control antenna, which rotated as Wolfe watched. It was probably there to control the drone.

A brawny, heavy bellied man in a blue parka walked around the corner of the building, a Mack 10 over one shoulder. He was looking at his cell phone as he walked along. Probably reading a text from someone. The text might be business but more likely he was just doing a shitty job of being a sentry. A Graywater.

Wolfe waited. The sentry wandered to a corner of the yard and sat down on a wooden bench, still looking into the screen of his phone. Still Wolfe waited.

Minutes passed. No other sentry showed up.

Just one sentry outside? Good. Overconfidence, maybe because of the drone. And those security cameras on the corners of the building.

The presence of a Graywater made Wolfe suspect that Pearce’s info was right—that Verrick or Van Ness or both might well be in that building, right now.

Tempting to go in there, gun blazing, and kill the sons of bitches, right now. Kill that sentry first, take his Mack 10…