John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

That was some pretty damn quick advancement at the Blume Corporation, right out of the box. But then Verrick had inside connections through his family. And maybe he’d brought some military tech out with him to sweeten the deal. Had he smuggled out classified tech? It was possible. That possibility was something to remember.

If Verrick was the new head of Blume Security, he would be very aware of Aiden Pearce. Pearce didn’t have a big problem with the Blume Corporation—in fact, he relied on the company—but there had been Blume factions who had gotten on Pearce’s bad side; factions who had connections with the Club. Namely the Chicago South Club which was otherwise known as the Irish mob—formerly run by the late, not-so-lucky Lucky Quinn. Quinn’s son was rumored to be planning to take the Club over now…

Had this been a Club attack on him, today? Was Verrick connected with the Club? Could be that Verrick arranged the attempted hit through Mick Wolfe. Maybe Verrick had found out Wolfe had known Pearce and after making a deal with Wolfe, he’d gotten a thug from the Club to take a shot at him.

But if Wolfe had been setting up the hit, why warn the target that someone was about to shoot him down?

Maybe he’d had a change of heart at the last moment.

Pearce’s gut told him that Mick Wolfe hadn’t been involved in the attempted hit, though. There had been astonishment in that voice when Wolfe had warned him. Wolfe had seemed genuinely surprised by the assassination attempt…

But how had they known where he was going to be, if not through Wolfe? Could be that someone watching for “the vigilante” had spotted him driving through the area, and made a call. The tail had responded to the call, and started following him. That faint tingling in the back of his neck had warned Pearce; the van seen once too many times in the rearview mirror…

Before he’d parked and walked over to where he was to meet Wolfe, Pearce looked around for that van, and hadn’t seen it. He’d decided it was safe, but just to be sure he put his phone on camera scramble, once he got onto the block where the meeting was to be. He didn’t want ctOS to know exactly where he was.

He had known he was taking a chance—an unusual chance, going out there. But though the message’s sender hadn’t identified himself, Pearce had suspected that the code phrase had come from Mick Wolfe. He’d heard the kid was back in town—not such a kid, an ex-soldier in his mid-twenties now. And Wolfe was probably almost the last person alive who knew that code phrase.

Pearce felt he owed something to Mick Wolfe. Because the bomb blast that had taken Mick Wolfe’s father out of the picture was just another crime that had been, indirectly, Aiden Pearce’s fault. Back in the day, when Pearce was a teen in the South Yards gang, Colin Wolfe had warned Pearce that he was going to the police to give evidence. Colin had been his friend—and he’d given Pearce a chance to cover his tracks, move to another territory.

But a fellow gang thumper had warned the bosses that Colin was going to rat on one of their operations. Same guy who got the job of taking care of the “rat”.

And— boom. The whole top of Colin Wolfe’s house had been blown away, dissolving into a ball of fire and raining debris.

After that, Pearce had done what he could to befriend the kid. He’d come around, from time to time, talking to Mick for the sake of his father, trying to get him to agree to stay out of the gangs. He couldn’t be seen with the boy in public a lot but he’d taken him with him on a rented cabin cruiser, out on Lake Michigan, more than once—until Mick had moved to another ward, when his Ma remarried. Pearce had lost touch…

Maybe the kid knew that Aiden Pearce had inadvertently caused his father’s death. Not really Pearce’s fault, when you thought about it—but still: Maybe Mick Wolfe wanted to punish Pearce for it.

After what happened today, I shouldn’t trust Mick Wolfe…

But Pearce’s instincts told him that Mick Wolfe wasn’t his enemy. And the kid had managed to find him, when no one else had. Which meant that Wolfe was pretty damned effective.

If there was confirmation that Wolfe hadn’t set him up, then maybe Wolfe could do some work for Aiden Pearce.

Pearce was going to have to keep his grazed head down, keep it all on the extra down low awhile, until he found out who’d tried to assassinate him.

It occurred to him that it might not have been a case of someone just spotting Aiden Pearce and dropping a dime. It might’ve been one of his own people—someone he worked with, around town. There was a handful of people he trusted…

Had one of them found out where he was going that day?

If so—they’d gotten paid for turning over that information.

And it was up to Pearce to find out who was getting paid—and who was paying that bill…

Because now he had a payment to make of his own.

Or to be precise , payback —for someone creasing his skull with a bullet. And in Chicago, payback is a bitch.

“Tranter. Come in.”

“Mr. Verrick. Okay to talk about just anything in here?”

“Yeah. I just had the office swept.” He’d had the office checked for bugs that morning. Of course, there were guys like Aiden Pearce supposedly able to listen in on your office phone without putting a listening device directly in it… through some form of wireless hacking. But even Pearce would have to be close to get that done. And they were on the thirty-ninth floor.

It was a big, corner office in the new Blume building, with a view on the lake—anyhow, you could see a piece of Lake Michigan if you leaned over and peered past the John Hancock Center.

Major Roger Verrick, US Army retired, had a nice layout, here, and he reveled in it. He had a big mahogany desk, wall-windows that cornered together nicely, a Picasso lithograph over the leather sofa, a wet bar, and a top grade espresso machine.

Looking at Tranter standing just inside the closed office door, Verrick shifted in the expensive ergonomic chair—he’d hurt his back in an IED attack that’d flipped over the humvee, in Somalia, and it had never perfectly healed, despite the operations.

“You look a bit rattled, Tranter.”

“Yeah. The, uh, arrow missed its target, Mr. Verrick.”

“Did it? Which idiot did you hire? Never mind, don’t tell me. We had good intel—only a moron could blow it. Pearce is rarely out on the streets in plain sight these days. How’d our man manage to miss?”

“Someone on the street warned him.”

“He missed—so why didn’t he take another shot?”

“He took two, thought his second shot nailed Pearce right in the head. Only… he seems to have gotten up and walked away. We’re not sure how he got out of there. I guess he could be dead but until it’s confirmed… we got to assume a miss.”

“Who warned Pearce?”

“Some guy he was going to meet. I didn’t know about that. I mean, who it was…”

“Wait. That sounds like you had an encounter with this pain in the ass who warned Pearce.”

“Yes sir.” Tranter looked crestfallen. “We knew Pearce was planning to be in that neighborhood. We didn’t know why. This other guy was on the security camera. We didn’t think he was, you know, important. I didn’t want to just drag him in, make any more noise on the street than we already had. But we found out he was from the same neighborhood—I mean, the Yard. Grew up around Pearce. So… maybe he was more important than we thought…”

“So he was the one meeting with Pearce. And he was the one who warned him. And you were the one who talked to this loudmouth and… let him go.”