John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

“Is there only one Quinn? Not likely…”

Wolfe was back in the safehouse, sipping Scotch at the desk. Pearce’s face was gigantic on the monitor—Wolfe clicked the mouse to put his face in a smaller window. Pearce was intimidating enough as it was.

“There’s a Niall Quinn,” Pearce said. “One of the old mob boss’s sons. I did hear a rumor he was taking over the Club. But doing it quietly. Trying to keep his name out of it as long as possible. I couldn’t find any confirmation and I discounted it…”

“Could be you shouldn’t have discounted it. Son probably wanted to get revenge for his old man.”

“Yeah—but why didn’t he just send a Club hitman out?”

“Don’t know unless it’s in case the guy screwed up. Which he did. Quinn didn’t want the thing to lead back to him.”

Pearce grunted. “Could be. So Niall Quinn reached out to Verrick. Who got Tranter to set it up. And Tranter sent Grampus. Be my guess, anyway.”

“So this Quinn’s got close connections with Verrick—and Purity? Might be they’re doing something for Purity without knowing what it’s all about… some kind of dirty work…”

“Sounds about right to me…”

“And you heard something about a guy named Starling?”

“He was there. Thinking about it, I realized I’d heard of him. Might’ve even met him—back in North Africa. He was with Air Force special technical division, a drone specialist… There was a guy notorious for verbal OCD behavior… Yeah, that’d be him. Starling.”

“Where’d you dump that Silverado?”

“I know, I should’ve kept Verrick’s truck for, maybe, planting a tracer in it or something but… it was Verrick’s. I scuttled it. Ran it down a boat ramp into Lake Michigan.”

Pearce laughed. “Don’t blame you! You search the truck before you scuttled it?”

“Yeah, he didn’t leave any laptops in it or anything. So—what about that SystemsLeak file supposed to go up?”

“They’re reshuffling their people. But let me check on that…”

And suddenly Pearce vanished from the screen.

Wolfe lifted his glass to toast the screen. “Here’s to you, Pearce.”

He sipped his whiskey, thinking, The more I hang out around Pearce, in any sense, the better my chances are of getting killed…

Wolfe turned that thought over in his mind, and then realized he didn’t really mind, that much.

Did he, Mick Wolfe… have a deathwish?

He had a revenge wish. But under that, maybe…

He’d been Delta Force; he’d risked his life for his country many times. And when they’d kicked him out with a dishonorable discharge, he’d put on a stone face about it. He hadn’t shed one tear. But inside he’d been deeply wounded, and it was a wound that might never heal. You don’t get through training for special forces, and combat with Delta Force, without having a deep sense of commitment and belonging. And then suddenly, the belonging had been taken away from him.

They’d taken it all away from him. They’d smeared him. They’d shamed him.

And he’d been so willing to die for Delta Force, so identified with it, somehow he didn’t feel like living, now, with his identity shattered…

“Fuck ’em,” he said, to the empty glass.

And he poured himself another.

GlowWorm seemed quietly scared; his gaze kept darting around the park. “I shouldn’t be here in person…”

“You told me to get rid of my phone. You didn’t seem to want to talk via Instant Message through internet cafe so…”

“I just felt like it was too insecure. This park doesn’t have any working ctOS cameras. We should be okay here…”

They were standing together on a small footbridge over a branch of a park lake on the southeast side of Chicago. It was a cold but windless midmorning, with broken clouds letting intermittent shafts of winter sunlight through.

To the north was more tree lined park, and then the great expanse of Washington Park’s many youth baseball fields. There were maples, elms and other trees Seline couldn’t identify lining the small, curved lake. “Looks peaceful here,” she said. “Not the way people think of this part of Chicago.”

“Can be,” GlowWorm said. “There are all kinds of people in the Chicago ‘hoods. There are strong families, and neighborhoods where people take care of one another; where they tell the parents if they see a child snuck out late in bad company. There are street parties with great music and food, and everyone getting along. There are a lot of good people. But there are gangs, too. And they’re some of the toughest and best-armed in the USA. This bridge looks peaceful—but I know for a fact two Black Viceroys were killed here, a couple months ago, thugs hired by The Club. Turf fight.”

“On this bridge?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how to make a girl feel safe.”

“You don’t come across like a woman that scares easily.”

“I’m not,” Seline said. “But I’m worried about being tracked by ctOS—if it’s true that the company maintaining it’s got some bad guys mixed in…”

“Blume’s a mixed bag. Most of them are okay for a corporation. But lately…” He looked her over, shook his head. “I don’t know about that disguise…”

She had on a big blowsy blond wig and enormous rhinestone sunglasses, and she’d exaggerated her makeup. She now wore a cheap, heavy bright-green overcoat with really large buttons on it.

Seline shrugged. “I’m just trying to confuse whoever’s using their cameras.”

“Don’t worry about the cameras in this spot. That’s why I picked it. This area, ctOS is behind on their maintenance—the cameras around here have been spray painted by kids working for the Black Viceroys. They’re all blanked out.”

“Comforting, I guess. If the gangs don’t come after us.”

“Not in broad daylight. And mostly the gangs go after one another.”

“So what’s the word on the upload of the file?”

“Positive. I’ve been pushing them to approve it and just do it because there’s word of some upload blackout coming down. Maybe because rumors of this file have gotten out. Here’s another flashdrive, with another contact, in case anything goes south between you and me. DedSec’s being even more careful than usual…”

She took the flashdrive. “They’re being pretty paranoid, aren’t they?”

“Maybe they are, maybe we’re completely safe. But there is something that I—”

Something he never got to tell her.

The top of GlowWorm’s head exploded with the impact of a sniper’s bullet. He crumpled, as if someone had cut through the tendons in the back of his knees.

Seline threw herself flat on the bridge. Another bullet slapped the air where she’d been a moment before. She found herself almost staring into GlowWorm’s dead, staring eyes.

She looked away. A bullet ricocheted from the metal rail of the footbridge.

She had no intention of being pinned down here. She pulled off the wig, tossed it in the air to distract the shooter, and jumped up, ran with her head below the railing level, to the bushes nearby. She dodged to the right, ran along the bank of the lake, putting tree trunks between her and the place she thought the shot had come from.

Her heart hammered in her chest; she could scarcely breathe as she ran, though she was in good shape.

Calm down, girl. They’re not going to chase you down. That was a sniper. They’re on their back way out of that position by now, heading out .

Her stomach lurched when she remembered GlowWorm’s head flying apart.

She stopped behind a thick maple bole, retching, not quite throwing up.

Maybe it really is time to leave town…